Before the Devil Breaks You

by Libba Bray

  Memphis understood, all right. He was being used. Just like when Papa Charles had had him heal Mrs. Carrington during the sleeping sickness. Memphis had foolishly thought that would be a onetime deal. His pride made him want to refuse. But maybe this could work to his advantage. Hadn’t Sister Walker wanted them all to work on strengthening their gifts? This was practice. At least that was what he was telling himself. Still, in Memphis’s mind, healing somebody who was sick wasn’t the same as healing some fool who’d gone and gotten himself shot up, probably while trying to kill somebody else.

  A man wearing a holster let them in and showed them to a small room off the kitchen. “Wait here,” he instructed. Through the walls, Memphis could hear Duke Ellington’s band going to town. Memphis wasn’t allowed to come and see the show, but he was allowed to come through a back door in order to heal? His anger burned bright. To hell with Owney Madden and his color line! And to hell with Papa Charles, too.

  The gangster returned. “This way.”

  He led them to Owney Madden’s office. It was twice as big as Papa Charles’s, with expensive rugs and giant ferns and lamps that looked as if they belonged in a museum. For all Memphis knew, they’d been stolen from one. Owney’s man lay on a cot, moaning. His leg was propped up on a stack of pillows soaked with blood. A bloody towel had been wrapped around the bullet wounds in his thigh. He was pale and sweating; his breathing was shallow.

  “Gonna need to take that off,” Memphis said, gesturing to the towel. The gangster nodded and Memphis carefully removed the blood-soaked towel. The man’s leg was a mess, and he was losing blood fast. Memphis needed to act quickly. He was nervous, though. This wasn’t a small healing, like after Isaiah’s seizures. This was big, like when he’d healed Mrs. Carrington, and that had cost him dearly. This would take a lot of energy; it would exhaust him. He might even be too tired to meet up with Theta later, and that bitterness lodged in his heart.

  But what if the healing didn’t come on? If it didn’t, he and Papa Charles were unprotected here in a back room in enemy territory with guns and gangsters all around. They might not get out alive if Memphis couldn’t deliver. Memphis was angry with Papa Charles for putting him in this position. He was angry that he had to work on this man who, on a regular day, would probably spit at Memphis in the street. He had to put that aside to do the work, and he was angry that he had to put aside his anger, too.

  “All right, then,” he whispered, and placed his hands on the man’s leg. The man moaned in sharp agony and the guns came out then.

  Memphis raised his hands. “Can’t do any work with those pointed at me.”

  “Gentlemen, it’s all right,” Papa Charles soothed. “Part of the healing. Trust us.”

  And in that, Memphis heard, I’m trusting you, Memphis. Better not let me down.

  Memphis closed his eyes. Come on, please, he prayed silently. The electric itch traveled along the tips of his fingers, then caught, crawling up his arms, faster and faster, until his whole body hummed with energy and he felt as if he were floating. Pressure followed—the soft weight of many hands pressed against him, receiving him, holding him in the land of spirits. And then the hands were gone. Memphis stood in a dark wood of denuded, ashen trees whose twisted limbs reached up and around, a cage of brambles and spindly, multi-tiered branches. The cracked earth was dry; nothing could grow here. The air was unnaturally still. Above, the starless sky groaned in turmoil. A diseased moon leaked its sickly glow, streaking the edges of the roiling, dusky clouds with jaundice while strange blue threads of static pulsed here and there, disturbing the clouds into further discord. When Memphis traced the origin of the clouds, he saw that they were manufactured—curling plumes of choking smoke pumped from the open mouths atop a row of ghostly smokestacks in the distance.

  Something moved deep in the trees. A voice swirled around his head: “Memphis. My son, my son.”

  The branches quivered and became the beating of wings. And then, his mother was walking toward him in her blue-black feathered cape. Her blinking eyes were all pupil, captured night; her movements were quick as a heartbeat.

  “Mama?” Memphis tried to run toward her but found he couldn’t move.

  “Memphis. Son. I must be brief. It doesn’t take him long to find me.”

  “Who?”

  “The King of Crows. I belong to him now. You must stop him, Memphis! Heal the breach.”

  “How do we heal it?”

  “More than this, I’m forbidden to tell you. He has a million eyes.”

  And then Memphis saw the phosphorescent, sharp-toothed things rising from the charred ground, their mouths open in hungry growls. They shrieked their insatiable need into the night. Memphis took a step back. His heel came down with a squish on a three-headed slug covered in ghastly tumors. “What is this place?”

  “It’s his place.”

  There were eyes in the trees. Watching. “I can’t leave you here with those things—”

  “I told you, I belong to him now. But I am also with you. Keeping close. Go, Memphis.”

  “I’m going to free you, Mama.”

  “You can’t bring back what’s gone, Memphis.” His mother coughed violently, spitting out two slimy feathers. They dropped to the ground and slithered into snakes. Her skin rippled with change that was too fast for Memphis’s eyes to register. He heard the flapping of wings and the echo of his mother’s voice. “Go to Seraphina. The time is now. Wake, my son!”

  The shrieking of the dead increased, a storm building, and then, like a fast-moving train, the sounds of the nightclub rushed him: jazz, dancing feet, people talking. Just like that, Memphis was back in Owney Madden’s private room in the Cotton Club, everybody looking at him as he blinked and swallowed and tried to return to normal.

  “What… how’s the patient?” Memphis croaked.

  “Sleeping. Without a scratch on him,” the man with the matchstick in his mouth said, pointing to the gangster’s healed leg. He clapped Memphis on the back. “Congratulations, kid. You get to live.”

  On the way out, Papa Charles handed Memphis a crisp twenty-dollar bill, pocketing the other one. “You earned it. And Owney’s backing us against Dutch. We shouldn’t have any more trouble with rabbits in our garden.”

  “Yes, sir,” Memphis said, but he had the idea that trouble was just getting started.

  Memphis was so tired he slept through most of his date with Theta at the lighthouse. “Come on, Poet. We better get you home,” she said after he’d nodded off a third time, and even though Memphis protested that he was fine, not tired at all, Theta insisted on putting him in a taxi.

  Blind Bill was waiting up in the living room when Memphis let himself in. The old man sat on the sofa, still and quiet, in the dark. Memphis turned on the lamp. He was bone-tired and his mouth tasted of hot metal. “Evenin’, Mr. Johnson.”

  “Told you—it’s Bill. You sound wore out.”

  Memphis suppressed a yawn. “Suppose I am. Everything good tonight? Isaiah all right?”

  “Fine. Fine. Octavia made a cake. Even put a little rum in it.”

  “She did? What for?”

  “For my birthday.”

  “Gee, I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t make no announcement.”

  “Well, happy birthday. You make a wish?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Bill said without a hint of a smile.

  “So, how old are you now, Mr. Johnson?”

  Blind Bill’s shoulders shook with a silent laugh. “Feel old as Methuselah till a pretty girl walk by. Then I’m young as any man. And ’fore you ask, yes, I can tell when a pretty girl pass by even without seeing her. Go on. Get yourself some cake.”

  Bill waited. He was good at waiting. When the boy returned, Bill listened to the scrape of his fork across the plate and sucked in a breath. “Been meaning t’ask you—you seen any more of that Walker woman?”

  The fork stopped for a second. “No.”

  “That the truth?”

  “Why
you asking?”

  “Well,” Bill said with a heavy sigh, “little man been acting nervous. And then he said her name in his sleep. Had the feeling he mighta seen her, maybe she got him all upset again. I know we don’t want him having more fits.”

  “We haven’t seen her,” Memphis said.

  Bill could hear the guilt and worry lurking in the lie. Good. Let the boy chew on it along with his cake. He grunted as he pushed himself off the settee and reached for his cane. “Now I’m a whole year older, reckon I best turn in. You rest easy, now.”

  Bill tapped his way to his small room off the kitchen. He undressed down to his long underwear and felt his way over to the cot, easing his aching joints down onto it. He wondered what his face looked like now. Wrinkled, definitely. Bill could feel the veins popped up on the backs of his hands. Could feel the cold and damp in his bones. That was what happened over the long years of birthdays. For Bill, though, it had happened much quicker; with every life he’d taken for the Shadow Men, another year had been sucked away from him, stooping, bending, and, finally, blinding him. Margaret Walker had let those men take Bill away. And now she wanted to mess with the Campbell brothers? Not if he could help it. Bill had made his birthday wish: First, a healing. And then, revenge.

  “Happy birthday, Guillaume,” Bill whispered to himself.

  He was thirty-seven years old.

  In the back bedroom they shared, Memphis watched his sleeping brother’s narrow chest rise and fall. Memphis was worried now: What if the testing was wearing his little brother out and making him worse instead of better? Isaiah had kicked his quilt to the bottom of the bed. Memphis tucked it neatly around Isaiah again. Then, unable to keep his eyes open another minute, he crawled into his own bed.

  He fell into rough dreams. Dark storm clouds stampeded across the electric sky. The wind roared, rent leaves from the trees. Memphis needed to take shelter immediately, but Isaiah was nowhere to be found. The dread overflowed the dream, and Memphis whimpered in his sleep. A stroke of strange blue light cracked the roiling sky, and Memphis saw Isaiah standing at the top of a hill, lost.

  “Isaiah!” Memphis shouted into the howling wind.

  Lightning clawed at the clouds’ rounded gray bellies with animal ferocity. The sky slashed open. The hungry dead spilled out from the rip, their ragged edges flickering with a radium glow—an army of the dead on the march.

  And there was Isaiah on the hill, shivering like a lamb, unaware.

  “Isaiah! Isaiah!” Memphis shouted, wild with fear. His feet would not move. It was as if he’d been nailed to the spot.

  “Brother…”

  The familiar voice whispered up Memphis’s neck and made his skin crawl. He whipped his head to the right.

  “Gabe,” Memphis said, for his murdered best friend was beside him, glowing just like the things that had emerged from the ruptured sky. Gabe’s eyes were gone. Flies collected in the empty sockets. The embalmer’s thread still stretched across the brutal wound of Gabe’s mouth where John Hobbes’s knife had done its demonic work. Beetles pushed their shiny heads against the frayed crisscrossed hatching at his lips and crawled out from the darkness inside, down Gabe’s gray neck.

  Gabe’s raspy whisper seeped between the Xs of thread. “We are coming for you, brother. For you—and your friends. He is here. His work has begun. We will never let you stop us.”

  The last of the funereal thread popped free. The ragged hole in Gabriel’s face opened. Inside were two rows of serrated teeth. Gabe screamed into the storm.

  The hungry dead answered in kind.

  DEAD DAISIES

  The next morning, Jericho woke before dawn. He packed a small suitcase—a few clothes, more than a few books, and his leather pouch—and left a note for Will on the kitchen table beside the war figurines Jericho had painted the past several years. The note read:

  DEAR WILL,

  THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. I AM SORRY THAT I HAVE TO LEAVE. SOMEDAY I WILL EXPLAIN. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MAY HEAR, PLEASE KNOW THAT I WILL ALWAYS HOLD YOU IN THE HIGHEST ESTEEM.

  REGARDS,

  JERICHO JONES

  He stood in the old Bennington flat with its grandmotherly furniture, the slightly leaky kitchen faucet, and the hat rack by the front door where Will hung his trusty umbrella, and tried to memorize every smudge on the walls, every play of light across the floor. This was the place he had lived ever since Will brought him home from the hospital and the failed Daedalus program under Jake’s orders. Jericho had been abandoned. Now he was the one abandoning Will.

  He left before he could change his mind.

  Theta also woke before dawn. It had been a bad dream that had stolen her sleep. She scarcely remembered it now, something about fire. She padded past Henry’s empty room. He hadn’t come home yet, and she remembered that he and David were staying up late to work on new music. An envelope addressed to Theta had been shoved under her door. She rarely got mail at home. When you were an orphan, there were no newsy letters or complaints from relatives. She tore open the envelope. Tucked inside was a photograph of Theta and Mrs. Bowers in front of the Novelty Vaudeville Theater in Topeka. On the back, someone had written, The truth has found you out, Betty. Meet me Thursday. Midnight. Come alone.

  There was a Bowery address printed at the bottom.

  The edges of the photograph smoked between her fingers, and Theta dropped it quickly. She felt dizzy with panic. Whoever was sending these threatening notes knew where she lived! And now they wanted to meet with her. Alone. Theta wished Henry were home. She needed to talk to somebody, but who? Evie would listen, but when Evie got blotto, she had a habit of blurting out secrets. No, not Evie. If she told Memphis, he’d surely want to go with her—Henry, too. She couldn’t risk it. Besides, it was four thirty in the morning. She’d have to wait. Oh, she’d lose her mind before then. She had to get out, go for a walk. But now even that seemed nerve-racking. It wasn’t just the gossip reporters paying doormen and neighbors to keep tabs on Theta and reveal her every, possibly scandalous, move. Clearly, somebody far more sinister was watching her, too. She wasn’t even safe in her own home.

  But they were all looking for Theta Knight, Follies star. What if she didn’t look anything like that? After all, what good was being an actress if you couldn’t play a character? Quickly, Theta went to Henry’s closet, riffling through his clothes till she found what she was after. She slipped into a pair of his trousers and one of his pullover sweaters. Last, she snugged a hat down low on her head so she’d look less like prey. Less like a girl.

  “Thanks for the loaner, Hen,” she said to the empty room.

  Out on the rain-slicked streets, Theta shoved her hands in her pockets, hunched her shoulders forward, and adjusted her gait. She slipped right past the hungry gossip jackals yawning in their parked cars with their cameras resting beside thermoses of coffee. They barely even glanced her way, and for a minute, she let herself enjoy the ease of that. It was like having a pocket full of money to spend any way she liked. Right now she could do things she never could as Theta, like walk confidently down a nighttime street, alone and unbothered. What freedom in that. Theta crossed the bumpy street and headed into the sheltering park to think.

  There was a sharpness to this time of day, just before the city woke up and lurched into its frantic pace. Like the world was holding its breath. It helped her make a plan: She’d go meet her blackmailer and, hopefully, talk her way out of this mess. She’d pretend she didn’t know what they were talking about. Betty Sue Who? You must have me mistaken for someone else; I’m Theta Knight. I only came because I was curious! Honestly, I figured it was a prank played by one of my pals. Yes. She’d talk—and act—her way out of it. She could do that. Theta Knight could do that.

  Theta breathed in the early-morning air. The earthen footpath welcomed her. A couple of thin squirrels skittered across the grass, no doubt in search of whatever acorns they’d buried months before. She imagined that they welcomed her, too. She came to the old wooden
bridge that spanned the lake. The bridge welcomed her. This was her park, her town. The lake, littered with new petals, welcomed her. The air welcomed her. The sky welcomed her.

  The ghost welcomed her.

  There it was, at the base of the bridge, a see-through figure in an old-fashioned suit; he was like the tail of a departing dream. Theta’s breath caught in her throat. Carefully, she stepped backward. The bridge’s old boards creaked. The ghost turned to her, and then, quick as a finger snap, it was right in front of her!

  Theta cried out. She turned and ran across the bridge, back through the park. But at the curve of the path, the ghost was there, waiting for her. Theta skidded to a stop. Panicked, she whirled around to run back toward the bridge.

  “Wait…” the ghost commanded. And then, very softly: “Please.”

  Slowly, Theta turned. She recognized the spirit. Dark, wavy hair. Graying beard and mustache. It was Reginald Bennington.

  “Wh-what do you w-want?” Theta asked, trembling.

  “Go… back. She needs”—the ghost of Mr. Bennington took a shuddering breath—“you.”

  “Who needs me?”

  “The guardian of the Bennington. The old witch.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “In… the basement.” Already, Mr. Bennington was wearing thin at the edges, an erasure.

  “Please. Please leave me alone.”

  “She is in… grave danger. Help her. Help…” Mr. Bennington said, his voice lingering for a few seconds on the wind, though he had gone.

  In the dark of the Bennington basement, Adelaide Proctor worked quickly. There was no time to waste. Her hands, bent by arthritis, were not as nimble as they once were. It was harder to wield the knife, but she managed a cut, hissing as the blood pooled in her palm. She let the cut drip into the bowl. Next she mixed in her herbs. She wrinkled her nose. There was a smell, sickly sweet. Not the herbs. More like a rotted bouquet left in stagnant water. Her weak heart thundered in her chest. She started her incantation, a spell for protection from evil. The smell grew stronger. Addie could not finish her spell for gagging. The lights cut out suddenly, plunging the basement into darkness. In the dark was a voice she had not heard in many years.