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With the ritual completed, Atabei would begin her night. This would consist of her usual tasks of checking her inventory and stock to see what she was short on, hunting for the ingredients by scavenging the soil of the earth, or tracking down two and four legged creatures. Another task was to get the blood of a vampire; and until recently the woman hadn’t any problems with that. The woman from Hispaniola had an arrangement with a local vampire that was an outcast, he had told her. Which was perfect for her. So a bargain had been made. He would give her some blood and in return, she would do a variety of rituals. Not necessarily those that were known to the vampires in the America’s or in village she currently lived near. Some of those rituals and spells went back to her childhood and the things she learned from watching and being taught from her aunt. One of the most revered Mambos in Les Cayes.

The woman grabbed a small filet knife from a stand of tools, along with a small piece of bark that was tossed on a pile of other pieces of barks all sizes and shapes, and began inscribing her list in a set of lines and what appeared to be pluses on the inside wall of the bark. The various pluses meant something to her, but to those in this part of the world? It would mean nothing to the white men. Except for the white man she gifted the dark walk of life to sometime after the winter, the year prior. He was a quick learner and was a good choice.

The list consisted of getting some more hides, since she had used her last one on the ritual tonight. Eyes of Dolls (white Baneberry), and some fangs from the bears that hung near the outer rim of the village. If she happened to come across some other things used for rituals, Atabei wouldn’t pass those up though. “First t’ng be first.”

The list was placed on her altar, next to the small filet knife she used, while the woman moved away from the altar the vampires used for their rituals, to a basket woven by old, dried reeds and dug around to find two ingredients she used on the nights she went searching for any and all ritual ingredients. An old tobacco can with a yellow wrapper around it housed the cornmeal the hispaniola woman would need, and the ash of burned wood from a house in the village was kept safely in some old flour sack that could hold more than what Atebai actually had.

The woman grabbed an old copper and brass tea kettle she used for mixing things-both wet and dry, tipped it upside down to make sure it was dry and then added a handful of flour and a handful of cornmeal inside it, grabbed a dented spoon and merged the two together. Once that was done, the spoon was cast aside on the sandy surface of the crypt she took refuge in for the last half year or so (moving to a new one every so often to not draw too much attention to any particular crypt), and dipped her finger in the cornmeal and flour mix. The woman found her way to both knees and began to draw. The first thing drawn was a straight line, followed by another line intersecting the previously made line, at the top. What appeared to be the letter ‘V’ came next, each ‘leg’ of the letter shot out from that first drawn line, only Atabei didn’t know it to be that way. Below that ‘V’ was an upside down ‘M’, the bottom lines connecting to the recently made ‘V.’ Next came two serpents with forked tongues, touching the first line, followed by a triangle of sorts below the first line ever made.

She would fill in other shapes, like basic star shape any modern day six year old could make, an upside down ‘V’ connecting to a right side up ‘V’ and three circles and arrow points. Atabei took a minute to remind herself of the image she learned well over a decade ago, add in a few other things and then nod her head. “Thur we be.” She whispered, pleased with her drawing to one of the most important loa’s; The Sky Father, or Great Master. She left him a couple fish she had taken from a villager the night before and tossed it next to the drawing, offering it as a sort of offering to the Sky Father before find her way back up from her knees. “‘Elp me ‘dis ev’n’in, Great Master. ‘Elp me find ‘wat I be look’n 'or.” Atabei took the finger that had been dipped multiple times in the tea kettle and wiped it what remained of her buckskin skirt and recollected both her list and filet knife.

As Atabei left the crypt, her eyes swerved from left to right, making sure no one was working this late at night from a funeral earlier in the day. With the coast clear and free of any nosy eyes, the woman with the skin the color of chestnut left the graveyard in search of the creatures in the thicket of trees.