The Final Days of Magic

by J. D. Horn

  The boy screamed as a shrieking Rose gained on him, then she swung the sharp blade of her ax low, silencing him. Rose snatched the head up by its curls and sniffed the wind. “Here, girly, girly,” Rose called out. “Your boyfriend has a kiss for you.” She laughed, a cackle really. Dark magic—and the Book had revealed to Astrid that all magic is, at its root, dark—could steal the warmth from a witch’s laughter, leaving it nothing but a screech to send shivers down a lesser being’s spine.

  Listening through Babau Jean’s sensitive ears, Astrid heard the laughter have this exact effect on the young woman, who had, like a fool, hidden rather than attempt to circle back to the car. The terrified girl failed to suppress a sound that fell somewhere between a gasp and moan. Rose bounded forward, making a beeline toward the source of the noise, rising a foot off the ground as she did.

  Another scream. Another silence.

  Murder was the first act of magic.

  Murder will be the last.

  Every time.

  Every time. Two most revelatory words. This had all happened before—the fall of the King of Bones and Ashes, the rise of the Queen of Heaven. The agonized union of opposites. A dissonance that conveyed magic, a stream of pure potential, into the common world.

  The inconsolable maiden who weeps at the gate

  for her missing bridegroom

  Is the whore who coupled with the groom for silver,

  And the huntress who ensnared and devoured him, who rent him from limb to limb.

  Kiss her bloody lips, surrender to her noxious seduction,

  for She is Holy.

  She is Magic.

  Once Astrid had dreamed of becoming the Queen, but the Book would not have her. It offered her instead the role of mater dolorosa. In the end—and this was the end—she’d proved nothing more than a blind midwife.

  Evangeline Caissy, the swamp witch, would be Queen. Preposterous, but Astrid sensed Evangeline had been born, perhaps even bred, to play the role. Evangeline’s mother, Mireille, had carried the spark of The Book of the Unwinding inside her to these shores, much as she had later carried Evangeline in her womb. The Book had been present at Evangeline’s conception, perhaps had even had a hand in molding her. Certainly, an affinity existed between the Book and the Caissy girl, well, really woman now.

  Myrrha finds in the night what Psyche loses in the light.

  The goring beast, the glory of the King of Bones and Ashes.

  He who steals his father’s fire,

  to light the heavens and set the world ablaze.

  Rose trudged backward, dragging the girl’s remains along with her, and dropped the body alongside that of the boy. She scanned their surroundings until she spotted a tree stump, upon which she then sat. Resting the ax’s blade between her knees and its handle between her chin and shoulder, she began pushing an implement she’d called a “bastard file” along the bit of the blade. The instrument made a whisking sound like Babau Jean’s teeth as it sharpened the edge.

  Astrid knew this wasn’t an act of maintenance. It was foreplay.

  Eventually, the scraping stopped, and the witch stood and cast a glance at Astrid before meandering off in the direction of the thin, crooked finger of lagoon that bisected the dirt lane known as Grunch Road. Sacrifice was, after all, thirsty work.

  Psyche’s dim torch lights Infinity in fear,

  Her blade poised to carve the boundless into chaos.

  Chaos is Potentiality fleeing Reason.

  When Astrid first read The Book of the Unwinding, its message had been inked by the mist of Eli Landry’s blood. Astrid recognized what she was now witnessing was an illusion, an afterimage, of the text she’d been blessed to receive. For all the lies told and conjectures made over the centuries about the Book, she’d found one to be true: the Book could only be read once.

  Yes, she’d sacrificed everything for a book that could be read once.

  That single reading merited each and every forfeit.

  Madness is never blinded by reality.

  Astrid repeated the thought aloud, the word “never” a tickle on the tongue.

  The utterance acted like a charm, revealing a man who stood silent, observing, on the clearing’s periphery. The light of the waxing moon seemed to melt around him rather than illuminate his features, but Astrid didn’t need to see his face to recognize him. She knew Him. For whom He pretended to be. For what He was—and for what hid behind that. He had placed her foot on the first step of her descent. It seemed only fitting He should witness the end of her journey.

  The darkest heart rejoices at its own bereavement.

  The darkest heart, unflinching, sees Truth.

  As a restorer of magical texts, Astrid had encountered hundreds of grimoires, preserved dozens, and returned many one-of-a-kind works to functionality, if not their original condition. Even now, she carried in her mind a catalog of all extant, lost, and legendary grimoires.

  She had once included The Book of the Unwinding in this last category.

  Astrid was on the cusp of finishing her apprenticeship at the Atelier Magnusson when a down-at-the-heels old man swept into the workshop with the presumptuousness of royalty in exile. He wore a threadbare brown wool jacket with cream pinstripes, its elbows shiny from long and—as evinced by the musk it exuded—constant wear, and too-large pants of maroon polyester. In his mottled hand, he clutched a battered, leather-bound, and, Astrid could spot from ten paces, counterfeit copy of The Lesser Key. The poor fool, she surmised, had squandered the last of his resources on the shoddy forgery.

  Astrid had encountered The Lesser Key twice before, once protected by wards and unbreakable glass during her studies, and again while taking inventory of her deceased aunt’s collection. Astrid had acquired her love for books, of both the arcane and common variety, from her aunt.

  The Lesser Key exuded an undeniable magnetism, one strong enough to capture the imagination of the credulous, and to bend the will of the weak. Potent enough even to ensnare many otherwise astute witches. Sensing The Lesser Key’s allure, Astrid had dared to take hold of her aunt’s copy and witness firsthand the tiny cilia-like shadows reaching out to test and seduce those it might. But she had not been seduced by the book’s prickling overture. If anything, its predatory approach and trickster energy had repulsed her. She’d included her aunt’s edition of the work among the texts to be turned over to the occult library in Blåkulla.

  After experiencing The Lesser Key herself, she conjectured the tract had been created as a kind of insidious hoax. Its purpose was most likely to collect magic from beguiled witches, or perhaps, crueler even, it had been created for no other reason than to ensnare the dupable.

  Desolate and deceived, the witches who’d fallen prey to The Lesser Key held on to the delusion that the time and effort put into obtaining and studying this thin volume must be worth something. Like many other fanatics disappointed by a doomsday prophet, these witches maintained hope by assuring themselves the great revelation for which they’d been striving lay just around the bend. If the payout couldn’t be found in the pages of The Lesser Key, those pages must point to a greater mystery. The tract’s very title hinted a greater key existed. This attempt to keep hope alive, she’d once believed, was the origin of the legend of The Book of the Unwinding.

  A mercurial fairy tale, she had long believed The Book of the Unwinding to be, as slippery and ever-changing as the myth of the golden city of El Dorado, and as gratifying as the stories of the land of milk and honey, Cockaigne. Astrid had laughed at the witches who scoured every historical source: diaries and court records, correspondences—both personal letters and Church encyclicals—even bills of lading and ship manifests. Regarded warily those who’d unearthed graves, some ancient, many fresh. Scorned those who’d attempted true sortilege, offering up their very essence as reward to any entity powerful enough to act as guide. She’d held all those who tried to pick up on the Book’s trail in contempt—albeit a quiet contempt, as many of the Atelier’
s most eminent clients fell into one or more of these camps.

  All revelation is betrayal.

  Apostasy. Abandon. Abnegation. Annihilation.

  The four pillars of Revelation.

  And so she believed the tatty old man who’d come to her with the imposter tucked beneath his arm was one of the legion who’d been ensnared by a cheap bit of flash. He ignored her male colleague, who’d approached him with a guarded offer of assistance—an offer that cloaked his intention to maneuver the threadbare visitor back toward the exit for ease of ejection—and addressed Astrid. “I’d like to know your opinion of this. It seems to be very old, and perhaps of some value, cultural if not pecuniary,” he said in perfect, though oddly accented, Swedish.

  Many witches remained capable of magic-enabled polyglottery, and others of projecting meaning so their native words would be understood by their interlocutor, even though the commonality of these gifts was fading along with the magic that made them possible. The visitor was using neither of these powers. Astrid decided he had learned her language through study and practice. A witch who did things the hard way all along would, no doubt, fare better than most in the final days of magic.

  Enlightenment is the absolute betrayal,

  for which the serpent’s head is crushed.

  He held the book out, offering it to her. When she didn’t move to accept it, he said, “I’m sure you’ll find it of interest. It isn’t the hoax you believe it to be.”

  She caught her breath, divining the elderly witch had not just picked up on her current snap judgment as to his book’s authenticity, but rather her broader suspicions about The Lesser Key.

  “Perhaps our young friend would like to take a break.” He turned to her colleague. “It’s a fine day. Quite warm,” the old man said, using, no doubt, the tone the serpent had used when seducing Eve. Astrid cast an eye out the window, expecting to see the same drizzle that had been falling all morning long, and was surprised to see a patch of blue sky. “The kind of day”—the visitor’s voice brought her attention back to him—“that causes one’s sap to rise, no?” He patted her coworker on the back, the gentle force proving to be the final push her colleague needed.

  They waited in an unplanned conspiratorial silence until they were alone, the old man beaming at her, and she doing her best to keep her expression impassive. He introduced himself, an odd name that might have been either his given or family. It slipped through her memory almost the moment she heard it.

  He proffered the book once more, urging her on with an impatient nod. She held back, uncertain. Surely, she had better things to do during her final days at the atelier than disabusing an old fool of his fantasies. She attempted to stare him down, hoping he’d take the clue and excuse himself, but he didn’t flinch.

  She decided to make quick work of the task—perform a perfunctory examination, pronounce it a fake, and offer the old man a 200-krona note, enough to purchase his dinner, perhaps even breakfast, too, if he dined frugally. With a quick sigh, she accepted the book from him.

  The moment she touched its leather cover—the moment it touched her—she knew there was something different about this book.

  It had a pulse.

  The idea that this was the actual work and every other edition of The Lesser Key known to the world was a forgery flooded through her. The old man regarded her with a knowing smile and a devilish twinkle in his eye, but he remained as silent and as still as stone. The book reclaimed her attention.

  Astrid drew a breath and opened it, discovering inside vellum pages, cut in a manner that told her this work had begun as a scroll; it was a codex rather than a traditional book. The pages were hand-scripted in what she first took to be carmine ink, then recognized as blood. She looked up with surprise. One heard of such things in folklore, but in reality, even in her line of work, such a thing was rare. Rarer still, the blood was not stagnant. Rather, it coursed through the written words. This circulation gave the book its pulse.

  The Lesser Key’s pages fanned apart without a touch, the book falling open to its center, its beating heart. Images of Inanna and Damuzi danced around each other, their circling movement creating a downward spiral, leading her—or rather inviting her—down into an abyss. The old man snatched the book from her grasp and closed it.

  She gaped at him in wonder and envy, advancing on him, ready to murder him on the spot to take ownership of it. He placed it—pleased, it seemed—into her clutching hands. “It looks like The Key has found the one it sought,” he said, giving what seemed to her a mocking bow before fading into nothingness.

  His odd exit should have given her pause, but she felt only relief. It was hers. She wrapped her arms around the gift and held it to her heart. The rhythm of its pulse fell in sync with her own, or perhaps her heartbeat had taken on the cadence of the book.

  She never saw the old man again. Until now, though she recognized He had always been near. In the common world. On the Dreaming Road. With invisible, boundless strings, He had led her, His puppet, here to this very clearing, to this very moment.

  The proud river is enslaved, shackled,

  silenced by the silt it has swallowed.

  The savage is tamed, and the earth crumbles

  beneath its masters.

  Magic wasn’t dying. Magic wasn’t fading. Reality floated in the sea of infinite possibility, closed off for the most part. This undiluted, malleable potential trickling into the common world had become known as “magic.” A person capable of sensing this flow and molding it to their own purposes, a “witch.” Only the means of conveyance, the rent in the fabric of reality that allowed seepage of undiluted potentiality from beyond, was closing, healing, forcing the flow of magic into an ever-constricting channel. And witches were to blame, at least those witches not willing to make sacrifices to keep the gash wide.

  The time for sacrifice had come once again.

  Astrid heard a rustling and looked up to find the old man gone, having once again disappeared as he had the day he’d given her the Key. Of course, Evangeline. The realization came to Astrid as her mind turned from thoughts of her son, the King of Bones and Ashes, to Evangeline Caissy, the bayou Queen of Heaven. In a flash, the old man’s choice became clear.

  The old man and Evangeline.

  Only now did she recognize a family resemblance.

  DECEMBER 20

  FIVE

  Evangeline Caissy awoke with the sun on her face, a resolute beam finding the sole angle that allowed it to reach over the rooftop of the neighboring building and down through her private garden to pierce a pane of her bedroom’s French doors. The warmth, the golden glow, should have been pleasant, but like at the Newgrange burial mound on winter solstice morning, it tickled the back of the grave and called forth an uneasy awareness.

  In the night, as Lincoln lay beside her, Evangeline had dreamed of her dead lover.

  She couldn’t remember how it had begun. It felt almost as if Luc had insinuated himself into the progression of a mundane dream. With a flash of his blue-black eyes, he drew closer, and closer yet, and then became the night sky, lit only by a sprinkling of stars. Through the omniscience of dream, she knew there were seven stars, even though the dream defied the waking logic required for counting. One by one they fell, leaving behind a void that was not empty, but rather a realm of eternal potential. Nothing had yet been created, and all was possible.

  Transcendent. That was the word.

  In the dream, Evangeline had accepted Luc for what he’d become. Perhaps even loved him for it. As the details returned to her, her pulse rose, and a cold finger traced down her spine. She spun over to find her cat once again staring at her from Lincoln’s empty pillow.

  Sugar regarded her with contemptuous, knowing, peridot-green eyes.

  Man you will keep.

  Sugar had taken to Lincoln with the same degree of ferocity with which she had rejected Nicholas. “Man you will keep” was how Sugar’s name for Lincoln presented itself in Evangeline�
�s mind, though the phrase could either be a prediction based on the cat’s longtime, intimate knowledge of Evangeline’s psyche or, more likely, given Sugar’s affection for Lincoln combined with her imperious nature, a simple command. Man you will keep.

  Evangeline reached over to run her hand down the cat’s back. Sugar accepted the show of affection with an air of noblesse oblige, then, with a cool meow, rose and slunk away. Evangeline hadn’t yet earned a pardon for temporarily turning the cat over to Hugo and Daniel’s care.

  Daniel. Poor fellow. Odd fellow. Not really a fellow at all.

  Daniel had started out as nothing more than conjured energy, a servitor spirit created to act as nanny to the Marin children. He’d raised Luc. And Hugo. He would’ve raised Alice, too, if she hadn’t been taken from him. Several weeks had now passed since he’d given himself to free Alice from the Dreaming Road.

  Evangeline rose and dressed, tugging on some jeans and Lincoln’s gray hoodie. His scent, trapped in the fabric, comforted her, pushing away the dream and the feelings of guilt attached to it. A pair of shoes and she was out the door, making her way to Bourbon Street, following behind a street washer that left the fragrance of dish soap–scented urine in its wake.

  She noticed something amiss the moment she set foot on the bawdy end of Bourbon Street. Bonnes Nouvelles was still blocks away, but the club was close enough for her to spot Lincoln outside, grasping the handle of a bucket with his left hand and scrubbing the windows with a brush.

  A pair of women came up behind him and paused. One shrugged and shook her head, causing the elf hat she wore to jingle. They carried on toward Evangeline. The taller of the two nodded a tinkling greeting at the same moment her friend spoke a word that stopped Evangeline in her tracks. “Babylon.”