by J. D. Horn
Her hand landed on Celestin’s head. Fleur could sense the spark of magic it still held, and rather than push it away in repulsion, she caught hold of it by its gray mane. A pale, citron-yellow luminescence shone through his eyes, though both the light and the magic it betrayed were rapidly dimming.
Another thud, then another, one from each side of the passage. The message was clear. Fleur was trapped. Terror bound her to the center of the passage; she was unable to bring herself to move even an inch in either direction. She found herself thinking of a butterfly fluttering its wings for the final time as a pin fixed it to a board.
The thudding stopped even as Fleur’s ears began to throb. The air in the passage grew thick, damp, its scent muddy like the Mississippi. Her lungs began to burn.
“Always so resilient. Always so clever.” Lucy’s voice swam to her, though the atmosphere changed it. The timbre seemed deeper, her enunciation more polished. A moment of silence, then the voice came from the oval salon. “You could always find a way to skirt any rule.” The voice was Lucy’s, but the condescending reminiscence was not.
Her mother had at last found a way to haunt her.
“It’s taken quite some time, ma puce, but I’ve managed to evict your little urchin from her shell.” Ma puce—my flea. Fleur had always despised that endearment, but no matter how vehemently she’d protested, her mother had insisted on using it. “Au fur et à mesure. Little by little, as she weakened, I strengthened my hold. It was her father’s thoughtful flowers that finally broke her, by the way. I can’t wait to thank dear Warren in person.”
For a while Fleur heard only the sound of pacing, then of nails being drawn down the false wall that opened into the passageway. “You figured it out, didn’t you?” Fleur heard her mother’s cool thought spoken in Lucy’s voice. “You realized the sigils preventing the use of magic on Sinclair only worked on a witch who was physically present. But you never did need to be physically present to work your mischief, did you?”
She was right. Fleur had figured out how to circumvent the charms—one Christmas Eve, back when she was still in college. The discovery had been innocent enough, prompted by remorse, not ill-will. She turned twenty-one only a few weeks before returning home for winter break, and she and Vincent had planned to go out barhopping. Instead, they’d stayed home, together, alone, and baked sugar cookies. They worked hard, the two of them, to conjure up happy memories of Christmases past, resurrecting only a few, but enough to make Fleur sentimental, foolishly so.
That night, shortly after midnight, as she lay awake in her childhood room, still decorated in ridiculous pink-princess style, she’d begun to feel guilty, thinking of her mother, locked up in an asylum on Sinclair Isle, the very institution where Nicholas would later confine Alice. Nicholas had accompanied Celestin to the island to ensure their mother was properly seen to. “Seen to.” Those had been Nicholas’s exact words as he explained the setup to her. Magic was made inaccessible to the patients through wards linked to occult symbols. Sigils decorated various points in the halls and rooms, from the walls and ceilings to patterns on the floor. Some patients, the madder and more powerful ones who would never leave the island, wore personalized sigils tattooed on their skin.
Had Fleur visited the island in the flesh, she would have been unable to use her magic there. But warm and safe and filled with . . . not nostalgia, exactly, but a longing for what could have been, she’d allowed herself to drift, and in the next instant she stood looking down on her mother.
She occupied a private room—Celestin’s pride wouldn’t have allowed anything less. There was just enough light for Fleur to see they had tethered her mother to the bed with tight five-point restraints and covered every inch of her flesh in ancient symbols and contemporary sigils.
Her mother lay there murmuring, eyes closed. Fleur leaned forward to listen, trying to make out her mother’s words. The once formidable Laure Marin raged on in whispers, half pleading, half cursing, trying to summon enough magic to break free of the mad dream into which her own misdeeds had plunged her. Suddenly her eyes popped open and fixed on Fleur, startling her. Fleur stumbled back and bumped into a small metal side table. It made a loud clang as it fell on its side. Without thinking, she righted it and slipped away, the sound of her mother’s tortured screams ringing in her ears as she slammed back into her body two thousand miles away.
Fleur had never spoken of her misadventure, not to Vincent or Nicholas, and certainly not to Celestin. And she had never again attempted to project herself into the institution that held her mother. Until, that was, she’d needed a sacrifice. A witch’s life in exchange for restarting the heart of her own unborn child. It had seemed almost a mercy to will the bedsheet to snake around her mother’s neck, to will it to wind tighter and tighter, until her mother’s eyes began to bulge and the face beneath the intricate and sometimes overlapping sigils turned purple.
“This is how it felt, ma puce.” The voice that was and at the same time was not Lucy’s pulled Fleur back to the present. The space around her seemed to be shrinking and filling at the same time, the walls coming in closer even as the air took on the viscosity of water. “This is how it felt, when you murdered me.”
The panel that opened onto Celestin’s study began to rattle, then the iron locks that held it in place groaned and snapped. The panel wrenched free of its casing to the cry of twisting lath and crumbling plaster.
“The last face I saw as I died was my daughter’s”—Laure Marin looked at her through her Lucy’s eyes—“and the last face you see will be that of yours. This time I’ll make sure of it.”
“It may be Lucy’s face,” Fleur said, “but it isn’t her. Unlike you, you wretched bitch, my daughter loved me.”
Lucy’s lovely features twisted with a searing rage, and she lunged forward, determined, it seemed, to tear Fleur limb from limb with bare hands.
Fleur raised Celestin’s head and, calling on every atom of love she had for her own beloved daughter whose form this demon had defiled, every shred of her animal desire to survive, and every miserable jot of anger she still carried in her breast for the monster before her, she let loose the last scintilla of the relic’s magic and sent Laure Marin’s spirit shrieking straight back to the hell where it belonged.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lisette couldn’t have walked farther than a hundred feet from the Perrault Landscaping pickup she’d left behind at the weed-choked entry of Grunch Road. Still she had entered another world—a world that had killed her once before.
One moment she was walking along within earshot of the semis passing by on Highway 10, the glow of the city in the western sky. The next she was crossing a narrow land bridge that disappeared behind her as she walked, an inky black sea pushing her forward, washing away any possibility of return.
Pairs of watching, incandescent ruby lights bobbed up and down within that sea. The cold, dim light of their eyes reached out through the line of sickly cypress trees, incandescent enough to reveal the swishing movement of long tails as they moved through the blackness.
A reedy whine and a beating drum that seemed to determine the rate of her own pulse filtered into her awareness. They were the only sounds. Even the black sea held its silence, the reptilian slithering of ruby-eyed demons—for that was what they were; Lisette was beyond trying to kid herself—noiseless. It wasn’t a true sea, of course—it had nothing to do with water. It was a living entity, capable of reaching out across worlds, staining the one and changing it into the other.
Acrid smoke, with its familiar, repugnant scent of burning flesh, rose up around her. The last time she was brought here, she’d carried the stench of this place back with her to the common world. Her doctor had called it “phantosmia,” an olfactory hallucination related to her stroke. Her doctor had been wrong.
A shrill drone reached out from beyond the trees like tendrils. As if her hearing could sense cold, the sound touched her, stroked her cheek, pressed against her pulse, slid over her b
reast and down her thigh. The spirit who reigned over this hell had tasted her before, but then she had held little interest for it. Now, she could sense it savoring her.
The sound of the drum seemed to shatter, the single throbbing heartbeat breaking into the thundering of thousands, their cadences spinning off in a pattern Lisette Perrault felt she should recognize—one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, building, building—though to her ears it was a disjointed cacophony.
At the tree line sat the source of the keening, a gargantuan infant with bluish, almost moon-colored skin, sitting cross-legged, swaying. It had no eyes; the skin where eyelids should have been ran unbroken. It didn’t so much play the stone flute it held as breathe through it.
She passed through the curtain of cypresses to find neither drums nor drummers. Still, Lisette noticed movement farther on, in the center of the clearing. Pale creatures who might once have been human followed one after another, hand in hand, writhing like a single serpent as they spiraled in toward the source of the beating—a dark fire Lisette had only caught glimpses of before. Now she could see it all, a sentient void so resplendent, so complete it stirred a yearning in her heart. It was absolute finality, and beyond it lay peace. Beyond it lay perfect light. Lisette felt a gravity willing her forward, willing her to join the dance.
A waiflike girl, her blonde hair almost silver in the unwholesome half glow, approached her, reaching up. “Don’t fear the darkness,” she said, clasping hold of Lisette’s hand. The spell was broken, and Lisette trembled at the power of the dark light’s seduction. “Don’t fear the light.” She tugged Lisette down and whispered in her ear. “The terror lies in its perfection.”
Lisette leaned back to study the child. “I know you. I recognize you.” It was impossible, though that particular word no longer stood for much. This sickly little girl was one of the trio of weird sisters who’d invaded her shop, the ones who had sought to murder her.
The girl shook her head slowly. “You may know me for what I was, but I no longer recognize myself.”
Even knowing what this broken child had done in a different form, Lisette almost felt the stirring of compassion. In almost any other circumstance, she might have even felt a spark of sympathy for the witch. In this circumstance, that didn’t have a single chance in hell of happening. “Where is my granddaughter? What have you done to my granddaughter?”
“They won’t hurt your baby,” the false child said, “not if you offer yourself up willingly to Him.”
Lisette didn’t need to ask who “they” were, for she knew who “He” was. He was the dark fire, the legion that was also one. “Why should I believe you?”
“The Master Himself told me so.”
“Why should you believe Him?” The girl startled as if only then realizing she might have been played the fool. Her wary expression told Lisette it wouldn’t be the first time.
A shrieking laughter pealed down from the sky.
Lisette wrenched her head up to see a nude female figure circling overhead, then spiraling down, counterclockwise, each turn in her descent revealing another aspect of the witch—a wailing banshee announcing death, a screeching harpy guarding the underworld, the strawberry blonde horror who had taken her grandchild.
The creature landed and turned, advancing on Lisette and the girl, her arms folded over her breasts, her head jerking alternately left and right with each step. The witch continued until she stood perhaps only ten or fifteen feet away. She stopped and offered Lisette a glimpse of a blanket, then slowly slid her arms open to reveal the back of the baby’s head. Lisette lunged forward, her arms already outstretched to take the child.
As Lisette dove at her, the witch hissed and slid backward, clutching the child with her left hand and flinging up the right, its fingers contorted to the point they resembled talons. Lisette’s thwarted momentum drove her to her knees. “Is she alive?” Lisette cried out, pleading—not caring she was pleading. She would plead. She would beg. She would do whatever it took to save Joy.
“Show her,” commanded a voice that sounded like branches scraping against each other in a winter storm. A figure she recognized from an earlier living nightmare floated up behind the witch. Impossibly tall, razor-thin, razor-clawed, with a face she could never forget, the animated porcelain mask of Babau Jean.
“Celestin?” Lisette said, provoking a gale of laughter from the witch.
“Not Celestin, my pet,” the witch shrieked. “Same vehicle, different driver.” Babau Jean pressed a sharp fingernail against the witch’s throat, and she blanched, falling instantly silent. “I told you to show it to her.”
The witch took the tiny infant in both hands and turned her around. Joy’s face was passive, still, tinged blue by the hellish light of this place. Lisette watched, unable to breathe until she noticed the tiniest twitch of a finger in the baby’s upheld fist.
Relief nearly made her go limp.
“Satisfied?” the witch hissed, then turned Joy around, once again clutching the painfully small girl to her bare breasts.
“What,” Lisette addressed Babau Jean, “do you want from me?”
“I want nothing.” The creature pointed the same sharp nail it had used to threaten the witch at the pillar of dark fire burning at the center of the nightmare field. “But He . . . He wants all.”
“You must make a pact with him,” the little girl spoke up, “to offer what He wants in exchange for what you desire. Be careful,” she cautioned, “be clear, be explicit in your demands.”
Babau Jean lunged at the girl, one razor-sharp nail slicing into the child’s skin from her temple to her chin. The girl fell back, placing her hand on her cheek. She didn’t cry out. She didn’t cry.
“You promise . . .” Lisette Perrault’s eyes turned to focus on the dark fire. “He promises my granddaughter won’t be harmed? That she’ll be returned safely to her mother?” Babau Jean’s hollow black eyes turned to the entity in the dim icy fire—no, the entity that was the fire. The two seemed to be communing in silence.
Babau Jean faced Lisette. “You have His word, and mine.”
“What does he want?”
“The Gates of Guinee. The gates. He wants to open them.”
“But how?”
In a blink, Babau Jean was on her. He snatched up her left arm. “This is how. You’ve accepted the gates into yourself.” He gazed down at the gad, then leaned forward and pressed his cold, smooth lips to it. Lisette shuddered from his touch, sickened by the intimacy of his kiss. “But you have a choice. You can die here, tonight, or . . .” He released her arm and stepped back, looking once more at the pillar of dark fire. “You can do as He wishes.”
Before Lisette had heard nothing as Babau Jean communicated with the fire. Now she could hear them whispering, and though the words were unintelligible, they still conjured furtive images in her mind. Flash followed brief flash, until the pieces seemed to sew themselves together into a full vision. She witnessed herself dressed in robes of scarlet and sapphire, a shining diadem of emeralds and diamonds on her brow, standing before a great and glorious light, aware she was the conduit through which all light must pass. She was . . . a goddess.
“Yes,” the winter-wind voice of Babau Jean hissed. “This is what He wants for you. He wants you to become the guardian of the gates. He wants you to control the flow of magic.”
Lisette felt her consciousness drift from where she stood into that transcendent version of herself. All doubt faded, all fear was vanquished. She felt a bliss she knew it would break her heart to lose.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Lisette replied, the ecstasy she felt redrawing the lines between friend and enemy, between safety and danger. She could almost love the dark fire.
“You can have this, from this very moment onward. Forever. There’s only the tiniest of prices to pay.”
Through her rapture, another image seeped into her awareness—a vision of laying the baby on a stone. Of raising her hand high abo
ve her granddaughter and driving a blade through the infant’s heart.
“No,” Lisette said, at first in a whisper. “No,” she repeated in a scream. But the beguiling dream refused to relinquish its grasp. It tried to pull her back into it. “No,” she said. “Never.” Lisette came to on the ground, clawing what passed for earth in this sickened world.
Lisette lifted her face, looking up at Babau Jean and the witch behind him, who still clung to Joy. She forced herself up to her knees, then to her feet. She began walking toward the pillar of dark fire, too angry at first to feel fear, though the closer she came, the more hesitant she grew.
The pale dancers falling into the beast’s black heart wove around her, mad glee in their eyes as they burned away. Lisette came to a stop opposite that black heart, listening to its jagged beat. She could feel her pulse racing in her neck. Her arms at her side, her hand balled into tight fists, she touched the spark at her very source. Then she smiled. This thing, demon, god, whatever it was, had overshot. It could kill her a thousand times over, but she would never betray her children. Neither from fear nor for glory.
“No,” she said, a simple, single-word incantation that caused the foundation of this dark world to tremble. The chain of dancers snapped apart. Those on the near end of the broken link dove into the fire, while those on the other end were flung backward, disappearing from this plane altogether.
In the next heartbeat, Lisette stood once more before Babau Jean. The creature had begun quivering, twitching faster than her eyes could follow. It appeared to bend in opposite directions at once, almost like it was breaking in two.
The witch behind him was shrieking with rage and terror. She held up Joy before her like a shield. “I will kill it,” she screamed at Lisette. “I will dash its head against a stone.”
It struck Lisette the witch believed she was the cause of Babau Jean’s distress. For all Lisette knew, she might be. She held up her hands in surrender, even as the childlike witch rushed the strawberry blonde, screaming with a righteous rage.
