The Final Days of Magic

by J. D. Horn

“Still, it seems you have another reason to be walking among your fellow maléfiques,” Polly pressed.

  “Curiosity,” she said, the response automatic. Alice considered this a somewhat true, if incomplete, answer.

  “Really, Alice,” Art said. “Are you that lacking in self-awareness, or do you believe we’re too simple to see through your transparent ruse?”

  Three tour buses, prowling metal behemoths, traveled along North Peters Street toward the river, each slowing, it seemed, so their passengers could get a better look at Alice’s group. Each bus appeared to be completely full, scores of ogling faces pointed toward them. Alice sensed none of the passengers were witches. Still they were all headed out to the End of the World.

  “Nicholas,” Alice began, giving voice to a truth that was only now dawning on her, “makes a habit of practicing distraction, shifting everyone’s attention from his true aim to something shiny. He’s owning up to a horrific-enough plan—”

  “So imagine what he’s really up to,” Art said, the sardonic humor her voice usually held failing her as she spoke. “I . . . we,” she said with a nod at Polly, “have been thinking along similar lines.”

  “I think,” Alice said, casting a glance at an out-of-place white van deserted on the concrete pad of the wharf, “I came in case Nicholas has to be stopped. In case I’m the only one who can stop him.”

  “Intriguing,” Art said, her expression hidden by her mask, but her sincere appreciation curled around that single word.

  They arrived at the bonfire site as quickly as the shuffling gait of the elders allowed them. The small stretch of land by the river was packed with people. Alice froze at the sight of the khaki-clad men and women, more than a hundred of them, lined up in perfect semicircles, seven rows deep, before the wicker man. They stood at a respectful distance from the witches already gathered there.

  “I had no idea,” Alice said, scanning the crowd, “he’d already collected so many of them. What could he have told them to pull them in? What could they possibly expect in return for turning their lives over to Nicholas?”

  “They probably don’t understand what he’s planning to do to them, maybe already doing to them,” Polly said. “Not really. They couldn’t possibly be okay with him draining their life essence.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Art said. “Nicholas has offered these people the chance to be part of something greater than themselves without actually having to do a damned thing other than believe in him.”

  “But there has to be more to it than that,” Alice said, incredulous. “They’re offering up their lives, their freedom.” Alice’s freedom had been taken from her, twice, and each day she’d spent on the Dreaming Road had drained her life force. She would die before she allowed either to be taken from her again.

  “I’d bet the one thing they share in common is they feel powerless, threatened,” Art said. “Their free will is a small thing to sacrifice for security. Their great leader, I am sure, is offering them a mind-numbing cocktail of easy answers to complex questions, simple decisions in a complicated world, and complete absolution from the responsibility for making their own moral decisions.” She surveyed those arrayed before the wicker man. “Most of all, he makes them feel special.”

  A cold hand caught Alice’s forearm. “Who are these people, dear?” one of the elders asked in a much louder voice than necessary.

  “They’re Nicholas’s attendants,” Alice responded, patting the woman’s hand. The woman tilted her head toward her, probably in an effort to hear more clearly, and the feather on her plastic half mask tickled Alice’s cheek.

  “It looks,” Polly said, leaning in toward Alice and his sister, “like the 1950s vomited.”

  The woman turned to Polly. “They’ve come to help us?”

  “Perhaps not us,” Art said, answering the question for him. “But they have come to help Nicholas. There’s no reason to fear them,” she said, then added under her breath, “probably.”

  “What exactly is it your father is up to?” Another elder, a man leaning against an ornate, bejeweled walking stick, his face hidden behind a jester mask, stumbled forward, bumping into her.

  “He isn’t her father,” the woman with the loud voice announced with enough gusto to catch the attention of Nicholas’s followers. The khaki-clad devotees turned in a cascading wave, the rear row first, their movement alerting those in front of them. Faces lit up in expectation, then dimmed with disappointment, then rebuilt themselves into polite smiles. They had been hoping for Nicholas. Alice could feel the waves of love, some desperate, some mad, rippling out from them. The crowd parted down the center, the members falling back to create a wide aisle for the newly arrived witches, and a smattering of applause rose up from the crowd. A voice called out over the applause, and the congregants shifted and began lowering themselves, some with more agility than others, to their knees.

  “You,” Alice said in amazement, “have got to be kidding me.”

  The elders, their energy renewed and mood lightened by this show of adoration, pushed past Alice and the Twins. Backs that had been bent for the last mile straightened. Slumped shoulders pulled back. They were, it seemed to Alice, eating this up. She suspected any doubt they’d held about Nicholas’s scheme had been crushed with a single blow. The woman with the booming voice slowed, then glanced back over her shoulder at Alice. The wide smile on her lips told Alice her former charge, unsettled and uneasy the entire trek, was now drunk with pleasure.

  “Shall we?” Art said, addressing Alice but taking her brother’s arm.

  “You two go ahead.” Alice shook her head. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Aren’t we all, ma chère?” Polly said, then led his sister through the worshipful congregants and toward the wicker man.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Evangeline sat cross-legged in the god-awful green club chair she’d agreed to hold for one of her former dancers. Seven years had passed since Evangeline had taken the chair in, and still the eyesore remained unclaimed. She stared down at the miraculously untasted tumbler of vodka on the table before her.

  Sugar wove her way through the room and rose up on her hind legs, placing her front paws on the edge of the chair. The cat trilled and fixed Evangeline with her saucer-like eyes. Evangeline leaned forward and touched the top of the cat’s head, twirling her finger around the cat’s ear, an action that never failed to please Sugar.

  “Hello, baby,” she said, and Sugar dropped down and fell back, only to leap forward onto Evangeline’s lap. She pawed her way up Evangeline’s chest, purring emphatically. The cat began kneading her shirt, her needlelike claws piercing the cloth, though not scratching any skin. Evangeline was familiar with the act—it was how Sugar declared ownership. A gentle reminder. “Yes, Mama knows she belongs to you.”

  Odd, incomplete images avalanched into Evangeline’s mind. The cat was building a case for some argument, but as practiced as Evangeline was at interpreting her pet’s efforts at communication, she couldn’t grasp the whole picture.

  Sugar was concerned—stronger than concerned, worried—that much was clear. If anything, it was this overriding feeling of uneasiness that blurred the other images together into an indecipherable warble. “A little slower, sweetie,” Evangeline said, catching the cat up in her right arm and running her left pinky from the cat’s dot of a nose over her tiny head and along her spine. As far as Evangeline could make out, the cat’s confused messaging boiled down to her not wanting Evangeline to set foot out of the house tonight.

  “Don’t worry, pretty girl,” Evangeline said, “Mama isn’t going anywhere.” She’d already decided as much. Someone from the club had called a thousand times, but she’d turned off the ringer on her phone. Bonnes Nouvelles could survive a night without her. If the dancers left the door wide open, if the fill-in bartenders robbed her blind, so be it. It had taken learning she was a devil’s—if not the Devil’s—daughter, and that the man with whom she’d been sharing her be
d might be out to kill, sorry, to execute her, but Evangeline had finally reached her limit.

  Sugar rubbed her cheek against Evangeline’s finger, then slipped down off her lap. She stared for a moment longer, as if to drive her message home, before padding from the room.

  Perhaps Sugar was right, and she ought to be careful. But what she’d learned had changed her. It had certainly changed her perception of herself.

  She had not a single drop of the sanctimonious storefront preacher’s blood in her; she would no longer struggle beneath the weight of his name. Her sire, a cold, dark fire with many faces, had innumerable names, but the only name that mattered to her did not belong to the fire.

  Evangeline Longeac. She tried on the name, surprised by how well it fit.

  Evangeline Longeac was fatherless.

  She was the daughter of Mireille Longeac, niece of Marceline Longeac. Two innocents who, starving and dispossessed, had wandered together into the dark forest to offer all they were to any force that would save them. Two innocents who were deceived, blinded to the truth.

  Evangeline could sense Lincoln getting closer. She’d been picking up random thoughts and flashes from him as he drove with his little brother back from Natchitoches in his beat-up blue pickup. He was circling now, looking for a place to park. She no longer sensed Wiley; Lincoln must have dropped him off along the way. She wanted to call Hugo, to text him, to warn him Wiley wasn’t necessarily the guy he presented himself to be, but the little son of a bitch refused to carry a phone, and since there weren’t any owls around to carry the message, it would have to wait till she saw him face-to-face. Better that way, anyway.

  Lincoln circled once, twice, then Evangeline sensed he’d pulled over. A few minutes passed as he made his way from his parking spot. The images flashing in her mind told her he’d left his truck on Esplanade.

  She followed along with Lincoln as he approached. He was tired, exhausted from the drive and a high-drama visit with the rest of the Boudreau clan. That much she picked up on as he fished in his pocket for the key.

  She had given him that key. Maybe too soon.

  It turned in the lock, and Lincoln stumbled in, his oversize duffel bag leading the way. He froze at the sight of her. “Oh, hey. Thought you would’ve already gone with Hugo. You got my text, right?” He dropped his bag by the door, almost like he expected to be sent packing with it at any moment.

  She nodded.

  He mistook her resignation for anger. Still, he risked leaning in to place a kiss on her forehead.

  Maybe she should be angry with him, but she couldn’t be. He was as much a product of his DNA as it seemed she was of hers. “We drove straight through,” he said, a defense for being late. His aura shifted to a dark, muddy blue. He was tired. He could turn angry soon if she didn’t toss him a lifeline. “Can we start with how sorry I am for whatever it is I’ve done . . . or not done?”

  “It isn’t you,” she said, “not really. And I’m not her.”

  “Her who?”

  “The woman who’d make you guess if she was pissed at you and why.”

  “No, I reckon you aren’t. But are you mad at me?”

  She looked up, studying his face, trying to separate the kind, gentle man she knew from the cold-blooded killer Marceline claimed him to be. “Why are you here?”

  He took a step back. “Shouldn’t I be?” His shoulders straightened, his spine stiffened.

  “Why are you here?” She repeated herself. “In New Orleans, in my life?” This was it. This was his one and only chance to tell her the truth. She opened herself up to his energy; if he lied, she would know it.

  Lincoln looked away. She knew he was calculating, weighing what he wanted to tell her against what he thought he should. Finally, he turned back to her, his jaw tightening. He knelt before her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. He looked her up and down, then ran the rejected hand over his two-day stubble.

  “I was sent here,” he said. “Wiley and me both. That’s why we came to New Orleans.”

  “Sent by whom?”

  “By my family, of course.”

  “They sent you to kill me.”

  “The seers could only tell us a big storm was brewing. They sent us to take out the threat to our kind, but we didn’t know who or what the threat was.”

  “And you think you know now?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We think we do.”

  Without reflection, she folded her arms over her chest and pushed deeper into the chair’s backrest. “You’re ready to take that threat out.”

  “If we have to, but I think there’s another way to handle it. I don’t think she’s lost. Not all the way. Not yet.”

  “Alice,” Evangeline said, picking up on an image of her in his mind.

  He nodded. “Wiley and I know how important she is to you and Hugo. That’s why we had to meet with the family.” He placed his hand on her knee. “They’ve given us permission to try to diffuse the situation before taking more drastic measures.”

  “What does Nathalie think about you and your more drastic measures?” She considered removing his hand from her knee, but it proved unnecessary.

  He released her and rose to his feet. “Nathalie doesn’t know anything about this.”

  “Then why was she invited to the big Boudreau confab?”

  Lincoln’s forehead scrunched up, his jaw jutting forward. “She wasn’t invited. She wasn’t there.” He wasn’t lying. He was confused by Evangeline’s belief Nathalie had been with them.

  Maybe Nathalie had gone to try to intervene on Alice’s behalf. Maybe Nathalie was banging someone else. Either way, Evangeline had bigger questions. “Could you do it?” She gripped the chair’s arms. “Could you kill Alice?”

  “You have to understand—”

  “Could you do it?” Evangeline screamed at him. He bolted back, his eyes opening wide.

  Sugar ran into the room, positioning herself between them, staring up at Lincoln and chirruping.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice coming out low. “If I have to. If that’s what it takes to protect others.”

  Evangeline nodded slowly, focusing on the floor between Lincoln and the cat. “What if you’re wrong? What if this danger you’re trying to quell isn’t Alice?” She looked up, her eyes fixing on his. She recognized a glint of fear dawning in them. “What if it’s me? Could you do it then?”

  His faced flushed. Fear was stoking anger. “But it isn’t—”

  “Could you do it then?” she said, nearly growling out the words. She needed an answer. She had to know.

  He blinked and fell silent. His inner debate lasted a full minute, then he spoke. “No,” he said, his voice firm, sure, and honest. “I could not.”

  Evangeline closed her eyes, digging her nails into the arms of the chair. “Then you need to go,” she said, her voice coming out in a near whisper. She opened her eyes and glared at him. “I said you need to go.”

  His shoulders fell. His jaw dropped open. He was hurt. Shocked. “Evangeline . . . ,” he said, his voice pleading.

  She jumped up from the chair and advanced on him, getting right up into his face. “You need to go, and you need to find someone who can, ’cause I don’t think it’s Alice. I think it’s me.”

  A knock sounded on the door. Lincoln turned, making a move toward the door, but Evangeline’s hand shot out and caught hold of him.

  “Wait,” she said. “I’ll get it.” She knew who was knocking. She also knew that if Lincoln answered the knock, it would mean his death. “If you love me,” she said, “if you really love me, you will find a way to stop me.” She sent a pulse of energy through her hand into him. He slumped and fell to the floor.

  Sugar scooted away from his falling form, looking up at her. The cat shot another cascade of images at her, demanding explanations, trying to convince her to ignore the knock and stay home where it was safe. A second, more insistent rap on the door shattered her pet’s desperate attempt to hold on to he
r. “Mama’s sorry, baby.”

  Evangeline crossed to the door and opened it. Her father, her true father, stood on her doorstep, holding out his hand to her. Evangeline didn’t want to take it, but her hand no longer seemed in her control. As if by magnetism, it reached out to take his. Then, like an electric fence latching on to the careless hand that grasped it, she was caught. He tugged her over the threshold and down to the street.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The blood of Ouranos gleams eternally

  on the blade held to Kronos’s thigh.

  They circled each other, Astrid and her eldest son, taking the other’s measure.

  He was magnificent. His hate for her was so perfect, so complete. “My son,” she said. “My masterpiece.”

  Tonight, the Beast would rise and claim his crown as the King of Bones and Ashes, the greatest and perhaps the last. Never before had magic known a Queen of Heaven born of the Dark Man’s seed. This Queen could reign forever, and should she do so, it would be with Astrid’s son at her side.

  Luc laid hands on her and maneuvered her to the center of the clearing. He presented her to the cold fire, and the Dark Man agreed to accept Astrid as the first sacrifice. This was an honor beyond anything she could have wished.

  It came to her as an odd revelation that although Luc loathed her, his dark heart harbored an affection for Babau Jean. Though Astrid had promised the creature to remain forever with him, she would go alone into the fire. The vow she’d made was of no import, as Babau Jean no longer desired her company. He’d been trying to throw her ever since The Book of the Unwinding unfurled on Eli Landry’s skin. She savored its wisdom, but it wasn’t to his liking.

  Hers was the darkest heart.

  As the cold fire reached out to draw her in, she felt nothing but happiness. After all, she would remain a part of Luc, even if he reigned for all of eternity. It was, by her estimation, a perfect mother’s revenge.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  A cold, low-lying fog was creeping in off the river, chilling the air as it erased the edges of the ominously named End of the World, a stubby, unremarkable peninsula that jutted out into the Industrial Canal and pointed toward Holy Cross. The fog was a natural enough phenomenon, though the timing struck Alice as contrived. She suspected its entrance was a bit of Hollywood Nicholas was employing to make an impression on his khaki-clad acolytes.