The Final Days of Magic

by J. D. Horn

  Nathalie pulled into the parking lot of one of the smaller industrial buildings on Sams Avenue, her headlights revealing a tan box dominated on one side by a tall gray roller door illuminated by a security light, and on the other by a forest-green canopy sheltering the main entrance. Two green-and-white heavy-duty pickups had been stationed within view of the blinking red light of a security camera. Another camera pointed down at the main door.

  Whatever Lisette had gotten herself into here tonight, there could be evidence of it on those cameras if the footage wasn’t deleted. And maybe even if it was—an inquiring mind might notice the gap carved into the recording. Nathalie killed her engine and dug beneath her seat, fishing out an old baseball cap she kept on hand for when it rained. She put the cap on and pulled the bill down to shield her face from the camera. She slipped out of the vehicle and eased the door almost closed, then leaned against it so the latch caught with a quiet click. Only then did it strike her that she was trying to sneak into a place to which she’d been summoned.

  She pulled the cap’s bill a bit farther down to cover more of her face, then noticed a third security camera pointing straight at her vehicle, privileged with a full-frontal view of her license plate.

  “Well, double damn,” she muttered under her breath, and glared directly at the camera. A shower of white sparks rained down in unison from each of the three devices. “So, we’re gonna start up with that again,” she said, angry at herself, at Lisette Perrault, and at her own once dormant, now capricious power, jarred loose by her first encounter with Lisette and her mother—yet another spirit.

  She slipped under the green canopy and tugged on the door handle. The door rattled but remained closed. She noticed a button to the side of the door and pushed it. A moment later she heard a quick buzz followed by a click.

  A disheartening sense of déjà vu told her she might not ought to open the door, but she was here, and she was needed. She grasped the handle again and, overestimating the strength it would take to open the door, swung it wide.

  Nathalie had seen things before, real bad things, especially in the last five months or so. The tableau that greeted her, she decided in a flash, landed squarely at number two, right after watching the reanimated corpse of her former boss crabwalk across the floor on limbs first severed and then reattached the wrong way, left to right and forward to back.

  No, Nathalie told herself, trying to siphon a grain of optimism from the situation, compared to that, the sight of Lisette Perrault on her knees, covered in blood spatter and struggling with one arm to drag a corpse onto an uncooperative blue plastic tarp was a cakewalk.

  Lisette broke off from her efforts and looked up at Nathalie with an ashen face and haunted eyes. “He wasn’t a good man,” she said, the pronouncement ringing with the finality of a full explanation, then renewed her labors.

  Hell, maybe it was explanation enough.

  “No, ma’am,” Nathalie said, choking back the bile rising in her throat. “I’m guessing he wasn’t or we wouldn’t be here.” Nathalie drew closer to the body, too close. She could see a good portion of the man’s head had been blown off, and the stench of murder gripped her stomach and gave it a good shake. Nathalie’s attention glided up from the floor to a blood-coated workbench, then to a fake Christmas tree topped by an angel whose face had been painted with an eternally alarmed expression that probably mirrored her own.

  “Help me,” Lisette said, a desperate keening in her voice as she fought to gain traction in an oval of congealing blood.

  Nathalie noticed Lisette’s left arm, wrapped in silver duct tape and tied off with a length of rubber. Blood was seeping out of each end of the metallic bandage and in a spiral along its winding seam. Nathalie rushed forward, her new sneaker pressing a flawless imprint of its tread into the gore, triggering memories of every single police procedural she’d ever read or watched.

  “You’re hurt,” she said, taking a step back. Only then did she realize she’d managed to leave a textbook-perfect blood transfer print on what had, a second before, been a patch of clean floor. Hell, if she was implicated, the quality of the evidence she was creating against herself would probably be perfect enough to convince any sane juror she’d been framed. She shook the thought off and focused on the only person in the room who seemed more terrified than she was.

  Nathalie approached Lisette the way she would a frightened child. “He hurt you,” she said. She squatted beside her and slipped an arm around her waist, then rose and stepped back, bringing Lisette with her. The body slipped to the floor. “This was self-defense,” she said, easing Lisette onto a stool beside the bloodied workbench.

  The sound of a leather sole slapping the concrete spun Nathalie around.

  “Yes, young lady,” came a man’s weary voice from a patch of shadow at the far end of the floor. “It was. Everything you say is true, although not in the way you think.”

  The voice belonged to Lisette’s father. Alcide Simeon—his name came to her. Mr. Simeon stepped forward into the light, though to Nathalie it seemed a finger of the shadow followed him like gum stuck to the heel of his shoe. He still held the pistol that Nathalie assumed had done the damage.

  Nathalie offered one opportunity to ambush her per customer. If Mr. Simeon was here, like in her vision, then the elderly man in the fedora was more than likely lurking somewhere, too. She glanced around the space, scanning for the missing man. “Where’s your friend?” she addressed Mr. Simeon. “Is he still here?”

  The silver-haired man’s head tilted back, a line creasing his forehead as he, too, began to survey the push and riding lawn mowers stowed along the room’s perimeter. “Friend? What friend?”

  “The old guy. No offense,” she added with the same breath. “In the hat.”

  A look passed between father and daughter.

  “Only been two men here tonight. Him”—he nodded down at the body—“and me.”

  The way he’d lingered on the word “men” told her she wasn’t the only one good at deflecting direct questions. Nathalie was, she reckoned, witnessing karma in action.

  “We owe her more than equivocation.” Lisette addressed the words to her father, then turned her face to Nathalie. “What you perceived as a man,” she said, “is anything but. I won’t skimp on clarification once we’ve dealt with this situation, but now I’ve got more pressing issues.”

  “You talk some sense to my girl. She’s thinking she can clean all this,” he said, brandishing the pistol in a wide sweep encompassing half the room, “up. Make it like nothing happened. But sooner or later, and it’s gonna be sooner, truth’ll out.”

  “You should probably put that down, sir,” Nathalie said with a nod toward the gun.

  He looked down at it with surprise, as if he’d forgotten he held it in his grip. He bent down with some effort, bracing himself by placing his free hand on his left knee, and laid the gun on a clean stretch of the concrete floor. Hand on knee, he pushed himself up. “If it isn’t the police who come for me”—he planted his gaze on Nathalie—“it’s gonna be one of you.” He studied her face and then shook his head. “Don’t be coy with me, young lady. You know what I mean.”

  “Well, no, sir, I—”

  “Witches.” He shouted the word at her, then his lips curled up like he’d tasted something bitter. “One of you witches.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said, rattled less by the unexpected novelty of being called a witch than by the sense of rightness with which the label struck her. “You have nothing to worry about from me,” she said, trying to reassure herself as much as to convince Mr. Simeon. “Mrs. Perrault trusted me enough to call me . . .” Her words trailed off as the single part of her mind that wasn’t reeling picked that precise moment to raise a pertinent question. She turned her focus to Lisette. “Why did you call me?”

  Lisette regarded her with a cautious look. “Because you saw much worse than this the night you helped my mama and me. You’ve kept quiet about that. I’m hoping you’ll do
the same now.”

  Her memories from the night Nathalie had agreed to serve as Mrs. Simeon’s chwal remained a bit dim, at least those made while Mrs. Simeon had controlled Nathalie’s body. Still, enough of what she had witnessed the night of the witches’ ball burst into her consciousness to kick even the sight of Frank’s tortured corpse to second place on her list of horrors. The scene before her now ranked a distant third.

  “I did this.” Mr. Simeon’s voice pulled Nathalie back. “I will take responsibility for it. I need you,” he began, crossing the room till he stood beside his daughter, “to see to my girl.”

  Nathalie caught sight of a swirling movement on the far side of the shop floor. She craned her neck and focused on the area. The finger of shadow that had attached to Mr. Simeon resolved itself as an arm. Like one bubble breaking free of another, an outline of a man pulled itself up and out of the surrounding darkness, falling forward onto its hands and feet. The smell of sulfur rose up all around them.

  This, Nathalie realized, was the bigger and badder thing her regular spirits were avoiding. A demon. And it didn’t count as her first. Her mind flashed to the night of the conjuring at Grunch Road, when she’d narrowly succeeded in preventing a shadow demon from dragging Alice down into the crumbling earth.

  She stumbled backward, pointing at the entity, first mouthing and then yelling “there, there,” once her wind caught up with her panic.

  A second entity broke free from the shadow, this one screeching and squealing as a third demon forced its way around it. They lumbered forward, their humanoid shapes fading into an amorphous mist that joined together as one and crept across the floor, covering the body.

  Lisette jumped up, knocking over the stool she’d been sitting on. Mr. Simeon caught hold of his daughter. “You’re doing this,” he called to Nathalie, as he dragged Lisette back. His accusation held more hope than rancor.

  Better the devil you know . . . Nathalie thought as the unified shadow creature grew, lengthening, spuming till it swallowed not only the body, but also the gore-covered workbench. “We should go,” she said, already in retreat toward the entrance. She glanced back at the front entrance to see another dark mist roiling there behind them.

  Nathalie spun toward the rear door, which, for the moment, stood clear. “Move,” she yelled as she bounded over to Lisette and her father, bowling into them and pushing them in the direction of the exit even as she reached out to right them. She sent a burst of energy ahead, a solid punch that blew the rear exit door off its hinges, leaving their path wide open. “Now that,” she spoke directly into Mr. Simeon’s ear, “I did do.” She steered them toward the opening.

  A force reached out and slammed them to the floor, knocking the wind out of her. She felt a hand grab her ankle, its grip a burning cold like dry ice. She pushed up onto her hands and knees and tried to pull away, but the hand yanked her back, pulling her a good twenty feet from the door.

  She looked up to discover the creeping shadow had swallowed the workbench and was working its way up the artificial tree. As she watched, helpless, it climbed to the highest bough and cascaded over the plastic angel. It then slid down the other side of the tree and along the floor until it rested within an arm’s length of Lisette and her dad. Then Nathalie saw the elderly man from her vision circle the two, tracing a barrier around them with his cane. He turned to the shadow, holding his cane high, and advanced on it.

  The shadow pulled back in a sudden great wave, taking with it all it had touched. The blood-spattered tree and its unfortunate angel, the gory workbench, the body, the blood that had pooled around it. These things diffused and became part of the mist that continued to recede until it had begun to pass through the building’s solid walls. Nathalie felt the grip around her ankle loosen, and she jumped up and bolted forward. Her uneven stride caused her to glance down as she ran, only to realize her shoe, the one she’d trailed through the blood, was missing.

  In the moment before the shadow completely disappeared through the wall, something shot out from within it and fell with a hollow sound to the floor. The object bounced up and came down again about a yard from Nathalie’s unshod foot.

  The plastic angel gazed up at her in wonder.

  THREE

  Alice Marin stood on the fourth-floor balcony, looking down at the view. From one angle, a view of St. Louis Cathedral’s steeples—rising above the neighboring building’s duo HVAC units—and from the other, the twin spans of the Crescent City Connection cantilever bridge straddling the Mississippi. She grasped the window’s casing and closed her eyes, leaning forward and breathing in the river’s muddy scent on the breeze, trying to convince herself she was finally home. She opened her eyes and turned away from the window. One plain truth could not be ignored: if she were home, she wouldn’t have agreed to pay an astronomically high rent so she could lease a partially furnished apartment on a month-to-month basis.

  She needed to keep her options open, a sense of possibility alive, even if that meant having one foot out the door. She couldn’t bear to be confined again—not in an asylum, not on the Dreaming Road, not even in her once-upon-a-time hometown.

  The apartment was dark except for the French Quarter’s ambient, all-night glow, and a short strand of battery-powered lights that coiled in a sloppy spiral around a miniature rosemary Christmas tree—a sweet gift from the ever-prudent Nathalie. Nathalie, tense and voluble, had been tentative about offering her the gift, shifting it from hand to hand. Before Alice could even speak, she’d provided her with a hundred excuses not to accept it, even grumbling that she hated the holidays herself, so she didn’t know what had possessed her to buy it. Still, Nathalie had glowed with pleasure when Alice took the plant from her, then leaned in and kissed her.

  After their meal that afternoon, Nathalie walked her home from their cafe. Yes, in spite of herself, Alice had begun to think of the coffee shop on the edge of the Marigny as theirs. When they reached Alice’s door, Nathalie fished a pack of miniature lights out of her pocket. “Maybe these are stupid,” she said, pressing the lights into Alice’s free hand. “I couldn’t decide.” She hesitated, then dared another quick peck on Alice’s lips before startling at the sound of the cathedral’s bells and darting away, calling back over her shoulder that she was late to a meeting with her boss, with Evangeline. Nathalie had left Alice—plant and possibly stupid lights in hand—on her doorstep, laughing. Alice realized that since she’d returned from the Dreaming Road, she’d only laughed, at least with sincerity, twice. Both times were because of Nathalie.

  She approached the plant and gently rubbed a few of its leaves between her thumb and forefinger. She lifted her hand to her nose to savor the fragrance.

  Rosemary.

  Alice suspected Nathalie had perceived its magical properties as a ward against evil spirits and nightmares, just as Nathalie had intuited how to draw closer to her without making her feel cornered. Alice would set the pace, if there was a pace to be set. This was Nathalie’s real gift to her.

  The lights on the plant flickered, and the air grew heavier, denser, the sensation erasing the smile she’d felt lingering on her lips. Though she had not seen him since before her years-long imprisonment on the Dreaming Road, Alice needed no visual confirmation of his presence. She sensed him staring up at her window, the intensity of his gaze enough to affect her apartment’s ambiance.

  Rosemary, effective against evil spirits and nightmares, but not against a callous, prideful ass like Nicholas Marin.

  Alice crossed the room and snatched up a key ring with a hand trembling not from fear, but from fury. She leaned out the window and flung the keys, aiming for Nicholas’s face, her smug target lit by the glow of a lamppost lantern. Her aim was true, but he stepped back, leaving them to land at his feet.

  Offering him the keys, even as a missile, was nothing more than a symbolic gesture. If he wanted to enter, he needed neither her permission nor her keys. Nicholas was renowned for coaxing locks open. He bent down and picked
them up, then looked back up at her, shaking his head. The ever-patient father disappointed by a little girl’s tantrum.

  Only he wasn’t her father. He was her half brother. Still, that knowledge couldn’t undo the years of history between them. Regardless of their true relationship, a part of her would always see him as the father who’d abandoned her. And Nicholas, she understood, would always use the ambiguity of their relationship to keep her off-kilter.

  Alice flipped on a lamp, and Daniel’s crooked, self-conscious smile greeted her. No photos of Daniel existed; servitor spirits couldn’t be photographed. His image was always blurred, as if the camera’s shutter couldn’t blink fast enough. She’d been working on this painting of him for weeks, determined to catch his essence before his image slipped from her memory.

  Alice was wearing the shorty pajamas that Lucy, her self-appointed personal shopper, had purchased on her behalf. She tugged the oversize gray sweatshirt that her cousin Lucy had advised her to burn over the pajamas. Alice told herself she donned the sweatshirt because she felt a chill, but there was no denying the extra layer, a polyester-cotton blend breastplate, made her feel less vulnerable.

  She stood there, facing the door, waiting for the sound of the key in the lock. Then, feeling foolish, she advanced and swung the door open at the same moment Nicholas reached it.

  They stood there, silent, glaring at each other, waiting . . . but for what? For the other to blink first? Everything she wanted to say to him, every word she had rehearsed in anticipation of this moment failed her. Alice felt her anger begin to turn to tears. That she would not allow to happen. She spun on her heel and strode back into her apartment. Her apartment. She drew a feeble courage from the knowledge she was the mistress of this shabby, threadbare domain.

  She heard the clack of the closing door, followed by the sound of footsteps that signaled he was drawing near. Alice turned back to find his eyes weren’t focused on her but darting around her quarters.