by J. D. Horn
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“No, sweetie, you’re good,” the taller woman said, misinterpreting Evangeline’s question for an apology and stepping down off the curb to make way for Evangeline. “You please excuse us two hicks.”
“Merry Christmas,” her friend called back to Evangeline.
“Merry Christmas.” Evangeline gave the rote response without even considering the meaning of the phrase. She walked through her own words, growing angrier with each pounding step until she arrived at Bonnes Nouvelles.
Lincoln had managed to scrape most of the tag off the window glass, but the muntin strips holding the individual panes in place still bore the scarlet paint. Enough of the scrawl remained for Evangeline to see the women she’d passed had guessed correctly. Someone had sprayed the word “Babylon” across the front of the club.
There was no question in her mind as to who’d done it. For five years Reverend Bill had made a habit of camping out in front of Bonnes Nouvelles, preaching against her and predicting her imminent downfall, though of late, Evangeline found herself missing his contemptuous harangues. A couple of months earlier, the good reverend had lost what little alcohol-drenched mind he’d had left. Oh, sure, he still called her “the Great Whore,” but the term had changed somehow from an affront to a veneration.
“I’m sorry, coeur,” Lincoln said, lowering his scrub brush and offering her a wan smile. “I’d hoped to get this taken care of before you woke up. But it looks like it’s going to take some paint. Maybe some primer first, too.” He dropped the brush into the bucket, then set the bucket down on the sidewalk. “On the bright side, it seems I still have a bit of magic left in me. I had a premonition something was wrong around here. I didn’t see the details like I used to, but—”
“You would have told me?” Evangeline said, her anger at the vandal shifting onto the closest target. “You weren’t just going to fix things for the little woman?”
“No,” he said with an uneasy laugh. He approached her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I wouldn’t have kept you in the dark, though I’d hoped to clean it up before you had to see it. That’s what people who love each other do, you know. They take care of each other.”
Her face flushed hot, and she felt her pulse in her neck. There she stood, staring up into the face of the only man who’d ever loved her enough to put her first, and still she wanted to strike out. Her dream of Luc crept back into her thoughts, bringing six suitcases of guilt along with it.
She was angry. There was no two ways about it. She was angry with the sanctimonious son of a bitch who’d defaced her club, and she was angry with herself for what felt like an emotional infidelity. But she wasn’t angry with Lincoln. “No,” she said, “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
She leaned into his chest, and he tightened his arms around her. “I know,” he whispered into her ear, “you can take care of yourself. God knows you always have. All I’m asking is for you to let me in. To let me help.” He kissed her temple before relaxing his embrace. “Okay?” he said, first nodding his own head, then, with a sly smile, catching her chin between his thumb and index finger and nodding her head as well.
She reached up and took his hand in hers. It felt rough and strong and sticky from the soapy water he’d been using to remove the paint. It was real. Not the phantom limb of some ghost her subconscious had manufactured and trotted out to punish her for being happy. And she was, she realized, happy, for the first time in her whole dang life. She kissed his hand, and he laughed when she made a face, tasting the cleaner.
“That’s how romance works in the real world. Here, share some of that with me,” he said and tugged her in for a kiss on the lips.
She let herself relax into him, felt his heart beat an inch or two above her own. “Don’t worry about fixing this. I’ll call the owner. It’s about time they paid for a little maintenance on this place.”
She felt Lincoln stiffen. “I don’t think that’s necessary. It’ll get done quicker if I take care of it.”
She took a step back and studied first his cautious expression and then his darkening aura. “You’re keeping something from me.”
He took a deep breath and shrugged. “Why, yes. Yes, I am, but right now you have a more pressing problem.” He nodded toward the window. “I got your friend the parson locked up in the storage cage, and you need to decide what we’re going to do with him.”
Evangeline felt her ire rise once more. She shook her head at Lincoln, but bit her tongue as she pushed past him.
The storeroom was dark. One of the two overhead lamps, the one directly over the cage, had burned out, and the other was dimming as if the light was being drained from it.
She smelled the old man before she picked out his crumpled form from the shadows. He was lying on the floor on his back, his arms stretched out to his sides, his legs crossed so one foot rested on the other. Reverend Bill noticed her arrival within seconds and rolled over, pushing up onto his knees.
“‘And upon her forehead,’” he called out, his voice ringing through the storeroom, “‘was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.’”
Evangeline recognized his words. They came from the book of Revelation, the source of many of her father’s favorite sermons and her earliest night terrors. Reverend Bill’s fevered mind had upgraded her from a common Jezebel to the mistress of the Armageddon, the woman who rode the scarlet seven-headed beast.
“‘They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked,’” he said, his eyes widening as his mouth pulled up into a tight, toothy smile. “‘. . . they will eat her flesh . . .’” He licked his lips, running his tongue a full circle. “‘. . . and burn her with fire.’”
Lincoln, who’d followed her in, slammed the cage. “My fist is gonna write a few things on your forehead if you don’t shut the hell up.”
The old man ignored Lincoln and gazed up at Evangeline with a ferocity of adoration that could only come with madness. “‘The inconsolable maiden,’” he began, his voice softening to a near whisper, “‘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.’” This did not come from Revelation. Evangeline knew the words didn’t come from the Bible at all. She couldn’t pinpoint their source; still, they were strangely familiar to her, more resonant to her than John the Revelator’s eschatology. “‘Kiss her bloody lips, surrender to her noxious seduction, for She is Holy. She is Magic.’”
Reverend Bill raised his eyes, and Evangeline recognized the strange fire burning in them. It was the same light that used to play in her father’s eyes when drink combined with religious fervor.
“This couillon is not your father,” Lincoln said. The idea that he might have picked up on her thoughts from her expression, from knowing her, scared her more than the notion that he might have read her thoughts.
“Open the cage,” she said.
“We can’t just turn him loose.”
“We can’t keep him locked up in here either.”
Lincoln pulled the key out from the pocket of his jeans. He stood there for a moment, not moving, gazing down at it.
“Lincoln.”
Evangeline held her hand out for the key, but he didn’t offer it to her. In fact, he gripped it even tighter. She fixed him with her gaze. Lincoln’s jaw worked side to side like he was chewing his pride into small enough bites to swallow. It took another several seconds of silent challenge, but finally he reached out and dropped the key into her still-upturned palm.
She turned to the door and opened the lock. “Get up, Bill.” She swung the door open, but the old man didn’t budge. “I said get up.” The old man pushed up to his feet.
“We could call the police,” Lincoln said. “Turn him over to them.”
She ignored Lincoln’s plea and positioned herself before the door. She began to pull Lincoln’s borrowe
d shirt up over her head.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lincoln said, though she felt sure he had already guessed.
She kicked off her sneakers and, balancing first on one leg, then on the other, tugged off her pants. Her thin cotton panties were the only thing protecting the man from the thing he hated most. She pulled them down, then kicked them to the side.
She stood naked before the old man.
The old hypocrite regarded her with a savage yet fearful expression, at once disgusted and lustful. A woman was to remain covered or be undressed by force. A small, indignant cry escaped him.
“Is this what you’re so afraid of, Bill? Is a woman’s body, is my body, so repulsive, so tempting? Can I cause all of mankind to fall into sin?” She lunged forward, and Reverend Bill scampered back into the cage until his back bumped into the shelves of alcohol. “Am I a whore because I’m not ashamed? Because let me tell you, Bill, if this body frightens you, then let’s see how you like this.”
Her head snapped back, and her arms bent behind her, her fingers twisting, reshaping themselves. Thick black feathers began to push out through her skin.
“Two bottles, Bill,” she said as her human form began to fall away. “Any two you want. Even the good stuff.” Her field of vision widened, and she wasn’t so sure her last words had come out in human language. She flapped her wings and rose up into the air.
The old man turned back and, with no deliberation, snatched the closest bottles. But he didn’t flee as Evangeline had expected him to. Instead, he stepped from the cage and bowed his head. “My Queen,” he said.
Behind the madness, through the debauched reverence, Evangeline recognized the spark of triumph.
SIX
The hidden passage running between Celestin’s former study and the delicate, oval ladies’ card room had become Fleur Marin’s personal chamber of horrors. It served as a safe place to store anything she didn’t want her daughter, Lucy, to see. An open secret, the passage held no intrigue for Lucy, who’d grown up aware of its presence. She’d inspected it at her leisure, found it boring, and that was that.
Still, Fleur took the precaution of setting a simple ward in place to turn Lucy’s attention away. Not so much a manipulation of her daughter as an offering of something shiny to catch her attention whenever she hesitated near the passage’s entrance.
Fleur had decided to take up dress design once more, an aspiration discouraged decades ago by her own mother. She leaned several bolts of fabric, the props for her “second act,” as she’d begun to speak of it, against the wall to create a secondary barrier should her ward fail.
Lucy rarely went out any more. She spent a lot of time online, poring over her D.C. friends’ social media. She spent a lot of time standing mere feet from this room, complaining to Fleur about everything she was missing at “home.”
Fleur had at first labored under the foolish fantasy Lucy would want to enroll at Fleur’s own alma mater here in New Orleans. Maybe the problem was that the school was girls only. Or perhaps Lucy’s resistance was for sartorial reasons, be it the plaid uniform students had to wear, or the tradition of wearing pink dresses to graduation—Fleur suspected it had been a fatal mistake to share the photo of herself done up in full delicate Southern belle fashion. But mostly, Fleur realized, Lucy simply hadn’t wanted to be the new girl, certainly not in her final year. In the end, she’d given in to her daughter’s insistence on a private tutor.
Lucy’s world seemed to be growing smaller each day, but, at least for now, that might be for the best.
Fleur had long ago placed a spell on her daughter, one that would keep anyone with psychic abilities from picking up on the truth. But she’d been scraping the bottom of the barrel for months when it came to power. Even with the bump she’d gained from holding her father’s head as a relic, Fleur had been forced to direct most of her dwindling magic to the act of keeping her daughter’s heart beating, and less and less to maintaining the mask.
Alice’s friend, Nathalie, had zeroed in on Lucy’s condition the night they’d come together to bring Alice back from the Dreaming Road. Later, Fleur had questioned—no, interrogated—the woman about what she’d seen, what had given them away. “It started out as a feeling,” Nathalie confessed, “but when I took the time to look, really look, I could see her energy didn’t square up right. It was too loose, too messy. Kind of like those fitted sheets. You know, they come folded just so, but once you take them out of the packaging, you can spend all day trying, but you ain’t never gonna get them back to the way they started.”
Alice, too, had intuited a disconnect, though her description was more succinct. “It feels,” Alice had told her, “like Lucy is haunting her body rather than living in it.”
Perhaps it was, in part, because she was currently sharing the small space with her nephew Hugo, but the narrow hall felt close, stifling, a claustrophobic hell of Fleur’s own making. She looked at the pedestal table that held her father’s severed head. The dazzling beam of the portable LED lamp Hugo had strung from the ceiling cast the head’s silhouette, larger than life, larger than death, on the wall behind it. Fleur had a moment of déjà vu, flashing back to an elementary school art project in which she’d traced the outline of her father’s profile on white construction paper, then cut it out and pasted it on a black sheet of paper.
Fleur had justified claiming Celestin’s head by thinking of him as a monster, but remembering him in a tender moment made her feel less like a monster’s daughter and more like a monster in her own right.
She turned away, moving her focus back to the source of the light. The lamp dangled halfway between floor and ceiling, its cord curled around a strong hook that had, no doubt, held lanterns before the house was hooked up to the electrical grid. Once Hugo finished his project, he would take down the lamp, leaving the passage, and Celestin, once again in darkness.
“I need to know you’re sure about this,” she said, turning her gaze back to Hugo, working shirtless, his torso glistening in the bright white light. “There’ll be no turning back, not once you pass your magic on to me.”
Hugo lowered the brush he was using on the plaster wall and twisted to face her. “Right now, I’m only sure of two things, and one of them is I want to do anything I can to help you protect that over-indulged imp you call a daughter. As an old friend was fond of saying, ‘A good nemesis is hard to come by.’”
Fleur teared up at Hugo’s generosity, even as she smiled at his allusion to Daniel. Or, who knew? Maybe it was the other way around.
“Besides, I’m not giving you all of it. I’m keeping one last trick up my sleeve for an old friend I owe a good turn.” A bead of sweat trickled down Hugo’s forehead, and he wiped it away with the back of the hand that held the brush. He bent and dipped the brush into the quart of red paint at his feet, then rose and made three quick slashes across the intricate symbol he’d composed by painting one letter over another. “There, that should do it.” He stepped back from his design to study it, then reached for the lamp. He snatched the light down from the hook and held it closer to the shimmering symbol. “Not magic, just the paint,” he said, moving the light in and out to highlight the sparkle. “Scarlet glitter.” He turned the beam on Celestin’s profile. “He yelled at me once because I let a friend paint my nails with red glitter polish. Yelled at my friend, too.”
Fleur shook her head. “He yelled at you because he perceived it as a slight to his own precious masculinity. It would’ve never occurred to him to let children be children. Was your little girlfriend terribly upset?”
“Who said I was a child? Who said it was a girl?” Hugo winked at her.
Fleur laughed in spite of herself. “I should’ve guessed as much. On both counts.” She approached him and claimed the lamp. “What exactly have you created here?”
“It’s a contract,” Hugo said, “between you and me.”
“This . . .” Fleur searched for a neutral term for “monstrosity.” Points and curls
sticking out in all directions, the symbol struck her as a graceless, ugly thing, despite its shimmer.
“Sigil. It’s a sigil, chère Tatie. Written in the ‘alphabet of desire’—not as sexy as it sounds. It’s chaos magic, which is not as end-of-the-worldy as it sounds. At least not yet. Something I picked up while visiting Alice in the nuthouse on the Island of Misfit Toys. There are sigils all over Sinclair.”
Of course, Fleur knew of Austin Osman Spare and the method of magic he’d engineered. She was also aware of its use in the shrinking system of witch-only hospitals and sanitariums such as the recently abandoned one on Sinclair Isle. She’d intended to ask for specifics on what he’d built into the symbol, but all men, even the more enlightened ones like Hugo, shared the deep-seated need to explain; doing so gave them the sense of imposing order on chaos. As the wife of a politician, Fleur had long ago become inured to humoring this frailty. Besides, she had another reason to play dumb. She kept her expression and her tone neutral. “Okay, the sigil is finished, then?”
Hugo nodded. “All that’s left is the forgetting.”
“I’m sorry—”
“A conscious focus will keep it from working. It’s a watched-kettle kind of thing. After the sigil passes into our subconscious minds, into our dreams, the effects of our contract will then manifest in the common world. Except for the one thimble’s worth of power I’m holding back, you’ll own the dregs of my magic, and you’re welcome to them. If it does any good for you and the blonde devilkin you hatched, then that’ll be the only happiness it ever brought me.” He began examining the flecks of red paint on his hand.
“May I ask what you intend to use it for? Your ‘thimble’s worth’?”
“A farewell gift. For an old friend.” He looked up, smiling. “A friend who’d slap me if she heard me call her ‘old.’”
Fleur glanced back at Celestin’s head, looking like a marble bust, the white light accentuating the pallor of the skin. “Am I evil? A ghoul?”
