The Final Days of Magic

by J. D. Horn

  “What do you believe?”

  “I believe,” he said, releasing her hand, “some of the far-fetched campfire tales about the final days of magic might not be complete fantasies. I believe it may actually come down to a final witch who will catch magic’s dying breath and either bring magic back to the world or preside over its—or rather our—extinction. I believe, my dear sister-aunt, that you might end up being that witch, and I believe Nicholas—having arrived at that same conclusion—will say and do anything to slither back from your bad side. Oh, and I believe I’m over calling you ‘sister-aunt.’” He shrugged. “It’s been fun, but now it’s done.”

  “Well, there’s one bit of good news.”

  “I realize now I lied to you about something,” he said, strumming his fingers on the tabletop. “We had crap for parents.” He leaned forward and clasped his hands together, staring down at them. “Not surprising, since it seems they had crap for parents, too. Astrid was gone. Whether Celestin took her, or Nicholas trapped her, or she merrily deserted us all on her own, she was gone. And Nicholas, it felt like he was never there either. I mean, after Astrid left, I was afraid my hand would pass right through him if I tried to touch him.” His gaze rose and landed on the portrait she’d done of Daniel. “But I lied about magic never bringing me happiness. It did once.”

  “Daniel,” she said, realizing he had been their only true parent, acting as both mother and father to them.

  “I miss him, and it hurts like a mother—” he stopped himself. A sad smile rose to his lips.

  They both knew Daniel had not approved of profanity. “Simple, ugly words for simple, ugly minds,” he’d say before marching the offender to a thesaurus to make them find a more precise, less vulgar word. As a little girl, Alice had added the word “infernal” to her vocabulary as the Daniel-approved substitute for “damned.” That she’d heard Nicholas saying “damned” had proved a far less incontrovertible defense than she’d expected it would.

  “It hurts . . . a lot. He was more than a conjure. I keep hoping he’ll pop back up, nattering on about how I can’t even put away the laundry he’s washed and folded for me. Before, when he was gone, I could still sense him, flitting around the periphery. I even caught sight of him every so often. But this time there’s nothing.” He rocked back and forth a bit, his regard hardening as his mouth pulled into a tight pucker. “I think I need to say goodbye to him.”

  Alice reached around the mound of narcotics and placed her hand over his. “We should hold a memorial for him.”

  A spark returned to Hugo’s eyes. “No,” he said, “not a memorial. A wake.”

  TWELVE

  Nathalie heard an insect-like whirring, punctuated by a metallic rattling that seemed to be synchronized to an almost imperceptible fluctuation in the brightness of the faint light beyond her closed eyelids. The air around her felt stifling and dank at the same time. Swampy. At regular intervals, a weak breeze slithered over her skin.

  Nathalie stitched the various impressions together into a reasonable explanation. There was a fan, oscillating, causing aluminum blinds to tap against a window frame.

  A flash of her SUV cruising along 10. Heading east, out to Grunch Road.

  Why had she been headed there?

  Alice. Something about Alice.

  She remembered finding Mrs. Perrault looking like a writhing Pietà, struggling to drag a corpse onto a plastic tarp. A creeping black mist that devoured everything, the corpse, the tarp, the blood, and—Nathalie remembered as she wiggled the toes on her bare right foot—her shoe.

  Then it hit her. The creeping black mist. The demon that had tried to drag Alice into the pit. They had felt the same. Nathalie was heading out to Grunch Road to look for evidence before worrying Alice. But she hadn’t made it there.

  Hitting an invisible barrier at fifty miles an hour and flipping ass over latchkey. The windshield shattering into a million tiny prisms.

  Nathalie felt for the earth around her, still halfway expecting asphalt, but she was lying on an uncovered mattress, low enough her hand draped over its side and touched a wooden floor. Her skin felt damp and sticky, clammy, like waking after a fever has broken.

  Her SUV skidding along on its roof, spinning three-sixties as it did so.

  She felt weighed down, pinned in place not so much by gravity as by a heavy scent, at once earthy and spicy, musty but laced with incongruous sweet notes of honey and citrus.

  She opened her eyes.

  Dull gray light. Dusk? White ceiling.

  Mold growing overhead formed an image, like one of those inkblot things, a Rorschach. To Nathalie’s confused mind, desperate to impose meaning on her disorientation, the shape the mold formed was at once the all-seeing eye, the eye of Horus, and the ichthus pendant she’d received as a confirmation gift.

  Thinking she might die. Wondering if she might already be dead. Praying she wouldn’t end up a ghost of December.

  Nathalie tried to rise, but nausea washed over her and knocked her back. Hard. The room didn’t so much spin as rock. She became consciously aware of an eyeball-busting headache.

  Darkness. Waking with a gasp, the breath too painful to push back out as a scream.

  She pushed back against the pain, trying to reconstruct the sequence of events that would explain where she was and how she’d gotten here.

  Hanging upside down, restrained by her safety belt.

  Beyond that, Nathalie had floated in darkness, not the safe sea of the womb, but a cold, airless nothing. Despite the surfeit of light, she’d witnessed silver, glitter-like flecks falling all around her, giving her the sensation of being trapped in an ink-filled snow globe.

  She’d reached out—not with her hand, but with her mind—and caught hold of one of the glints. Nathalie had found herself looking in at a teary teenage boy looking out. The glint was both a mirror and a window. In that singular moment, Nathalie could feel the energy of the boy’s raw, red-faced self-loathing flowing through the mirror into her, burning and bitter, yet as fortifying as her morning coffee.

  Nathalie had startled as terrifying memories from her childhood surged in. Babau Jean scratching—clawing—at the wrong side of her bedroom mirror.

  The glass had cracked and splintered in her grasp, sending a shock through her. That shock was what had first made her aware of this place.

  She heard a shuffling—leather-soled shoes on creaking, rotting wood. The scent of honeyed citrus and, it dawned on her, bay leaves, grew stronger. A shadow fell over her. It put her in mind of another shadow, so Nathalie tried to rise again, this time with more grit, but she only succeeded in forcing herself up on her elbows and pushing back an inch or two. The room reeled around her, and she collapsed back onto the thin, musky mattress. She tried to speak. She tried to scream, but nothing came out beyond panicked, meeping gasps.

  “Mais, ma fillette,” a patronizing voice said, stretching the final syllables into a slow, husky glissando, “t’souviens-toi pas de ton tonton Emil?”

  A man with a deeply tanned, deeply lined face bent over her. His hair was a thick, steel gray mass of untamed cowlicks, his eyes as blue and bright and unnerving as police car lights in a rearview mirror. He looked far too happy, his expression exaggerated like the face you’d make when playing peekaboo with a baby.

  This man on his knees, peering in at her, grinning.

  She saw the glint of a ruby ring as a pale hand reached over her. Felt his palm over her forehead. Cool. Calming. Still, Nathalie’s mind protested she wasn’t a little girl, not by anyone’s standards, and although there was something familiar about his face, she’d never heard of an Uncle Emil on either side of her family.

  She got another whiff of his cloying aftershave. The perfume was strong, kind of like he’d bathed in it, but it failed to mask his close-up scent of sour sweat and menace. Her eyes traveled from his strong, calloused hand up his thick forearm to a rounded, solid bicep. He wore a tight, graying T-shirt. His hair might be gray, and his face we
athered, but the rippling beneath that shirt showed his muscles were still wound as tight as rubber bands inside a golf ball.

  “I’m very sorry, sir. I’m sure it’s my fault,” Nathalie said, slipping into the politeness she reserved for passengers who made her uncomfortable enough to begin calculating the minimum force it would require to fight them off, should the need arrive. “But I don’t know you.”

  He shook his head as his mouth pulled into a sad, or perhaps disapproving, pucker. “’Course you don’t, sha. But it ain’t your fault. That’s your bitch mother’s doing. Took you away from your family. Took you and your papa, both. Never got around to sending either of you back, neither.” He seemed to study the space around her, scanning it from left to right like he was reading a text printed in the air. “Shame she didn’t hang herself years before she finally got around to it.”

  Nathalie couldn’t find words. Yes. Her mother had hanged herself. In Corpus Christi. After Katrina. In Nathalie’s mother’s sister’s attic—her mother’s sister, not her aunt. Nathalie had sensed the passing but might never have known the details if a note from the sister hadn’t arrived two years later, after having followed her to Natchitoches, back to New Orleans, and through three different apartment moves around the city. The thin, worn envelope had carried a dozen forwarding stamps on its face. Inside was a news clipping and a yellow sticky note with the words “This is on you” printed in red felt-tip.

  “You weren’t right. Never were.” Her mother’s flat, sour-breathed lamentation sounded anew from this man’s mouth. “I knew it from the second they put you in my arms.”

  Somehow, this man had zeroed in on the single most painful memory Nathalie held of her mother. This was the day her mama had sent Nathalie to live on the streets. Nathalie had been fourteen.

  She found herself reliving the moment in a visceral way that went beyond mere memory. Her mama had met her on the front steps of their house that day. She could still see the faded floral cotton shift dress her mama had worn beneath a threadbare maroon cardigan—despite the steam rising up after the rain from the late July sidewalk. “I should’ve grabbed you up by the ankles when I could still swing you and bashed your brains against a wall.”

  The memory cut off, but Nathalie felt her own lips moving, silently mouthing the words that remained burned into her. “If I’d known what you’d grow into, I would’ve. It would have been a kindness.”

  Her mother hadn’t been talking about magic.

  Emil laughed. “Your maman had the ideal neck for hanging. Scrawny, pale, too long. Bet it snapped”—he said, snapping the fingers of his free hand as he spoke the word—“like a twig.”

  “Stop it,” Nathalie said, her shocked rage pushing her upright, doing what fear and willpower could not. Nathalie held her hand out toward him; sizzling red sparks danced along her fingertips.

  “Regarde,” he said with a derisive snort, “la chatonne sait sortir ses griffes.” He focused on her hand, and it began to tremble. “You aren’t like your spindly little maman, though, you got a sturdy Boudreau neck, and a sensible Boudreau head riding on it. That’s why you aren’t going to try any more of your nonsense on Tonton Emil again, you hear?” Her hand spasmed into a painful cramp. “I asked you if you heard me.”

  She felt like her fingers were being crushed and pulled apart at the same time. The agony came over her so fast and strong, it took Nathalie a moment to realize that Emil was causing it, that he was punishing her. “Yes. Yes.”

  “Yes what, sha?”

  “I heard you,” she gasped out and the pain fell away.

  He sat on his haunches and gazed into her eyes. “Ah, fillette, you couldn’t know no better,” he said, his tone a parody of tenderness, conciliatory to the point of saccharine. “I should have sought you out sooner, but before . . .” He shrugged. “Well, it’s only that you bloomed so late I figured you might be too much your maman, and not enough Boudreau. At least the part of Boudreau that matters.”

  She closed her eyes and drew in one deep breath after another, letting them out slowly, doing her best to calm her pulse, to calm her mind, to regain control of her faculties. But then a realization hit her. “You crashed my car.” Her eyes popped open, and she was too danged mad to care about the way her whole head felt like it might pop open, too. “You could’ve killed me.”

  “Mais non, sha. Jamais. Just needed to get your attention.” His voice was calm, but Nathalie could hear the patience draining from it as he spoke, like he was answering the umpteenth question from an overly curious child. “Now you sit still for a moment.” Before she could pull back, his hands shot out and grasped the sides of her head. At first, she felt only panic, but then the thundering in her head gave way, and her vision righted itself. The head-to-toe soreness she felt eased away and was replaced by a sense of vitality. Nathalie hadn’t felt this good since she was a teenager.

  “There you are.” He pulled his hands away and beamed down at her. “Your tonton added a few years back to make up for . . . the in-con-ven-i-en-ce,” he said, lingering on the word, morphing each and every vowel he could into its nasal French cousin, even managing to add two extra syllables.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you wakin’ up tomorrow younger than you did today . . . provided, that is, you wake up at all.” He held up a cautioning hand. “Not a threat. At least not from me. Just telling you something that, deep down, you already know.”

  Without even trying, Nathalie could pick up precise details about the near future of any random stranger, but it was rare for her to get an insight into what was coming her own way.

  This time Nathalie thought maybe this guy was right.

  She could feel a premonition brewing; she had ever since she’d dropped Mrs. Perrault off at her house late last night. Her mind applauded itself as it put this missing piece of the puzzle back into place, then stopped as it dawned on her she had no idea how long she’d been out. Might have been last night, might have been last year.

  It was this sense of an approaching crisis, a big one involving Alice, that had sent her out to Grunch Road.

  “Those demons you came across with the Voodoo woman,” he began, then wagged a finger in her face. “No use trying to lie to me. I’ve always been able to see through you,” he said, “and through you, too.” He held up his hand and turned it so she could see the gleam of the ruby he wore on his ring finger. “I can see through anyone’s . . . well, most anyone’s eyes, thanks to this.” He drew closer and held his hand out so she could examine it. “C’est un joli truc, non?”

  No. The stone wasn’t the least bit pretty. It took an act of will for Nathalie to look at it at all. “It’s like some kind of enchanted ruby?” She’d said “enchanted,” although she was thinking “cursed.”

  “Can’t really say it’s enchanted. Hell, it ain’t even a ruby. It’s the eyeball of one of those shadow demons. Not easy to come by. You gotta catch the thing as it’s slipping from le Chemin . . . or as you city folk say, the Dreaming Road, into this world.”

  “You killed one of them?” Nathalie added this variable to her calculation of the man’s strength.

  “’Course not. No need. I cut out the eye and let it loose. When its buddies saw the damned thing had been wounded, they took care of the killing for me.” He lifted the ring to his lips and kissed the stone. “Nasty little couillons, but then they’ve been refined to be.”

  “Refined?”

  “’Course, sha. Your Dreaming Road, that’s what it does. Story goes when a witch takes to the Road, it’s the magic that gets burned away.” He pursed his lips in disapproval and shook his head. “Ain’t the magic. It’s the humanity that gets smelted away. The impurities of conscience and compassion”—he clapped his hands together, then held them out to her, empty palms up—“poof. Gone. Road leaves nothing behind except the magic and an empty, angry, controllable”—he paused on this word—“spirit. Ten of those, and you can take on an army. A hundred, you could take down t
he world.”

  “But I thought the witches who went there could never return.”

  “Oh, sha. They don’t. Not really. What does slip back in ain’t the same as what went out.”

  “Alice came back,” Nathalie thought aloud, regretting having spoken Alice’s name the second the words were out.

  Emil cocked an eyebrow. “Did she really now?”

  Nathalie cautioned her fool mouth to keep shut, but she felt compelled to explain about Alice, to defend her. To wipe the sneer off his face. “We rescued her. Her family and I.”

  Emil remained silent, though his eyes began glistening with humor.

  “We brought her back from the Dreaming Road.”

  “No one’s ever been pulled back from the Dreaming Road, unless the Road wanted them to be pulled.”

  “That’s not true. We used ‘the gravity of rightful destiny.’” Nathalie could nearly hear Daniel’s voice as she spoke the words. “My destiny, our destiny, Alice and mine.”

  He smirked at her. “Now, who put such nonsense in your head?”

  “Daniel . . .” She hesitated, wondering how best to explain who Daniel was, what he was. “Our friend Daniel.” It felt weird calling Daniel a friend. In the short time Nathalie had known the guy, she’d felt unnerved by him. But he’d given himself to rescue Alice, and that was enough for her. They might not have been friends while Daniel was still alive, but, Nathalie made up her mind right there on the fly, they were friends now.

  “Your friend Daniel?” Emil said, shaking his head, his eyes narrowing in contempt. “You mean the servitor spirit, the one created by your Alice’s maman?”