The Book of the Unwinding

by J. D. Horn

  “Yes, Mama’s dead because of Laure Marin. Because Laure Marin wanted you for herself.”

  Lisette’s father barked out a laugh. “Gossip from the devil’s own lips passed secondhand by the bitch’s bitch daughter to your ears. Oh, yes,” he said nodding, “I know you’ve been cozying up to Fleur Marin whatever-the-hell-name-she-married-into.” He glowered at her, as if he were daring her to defend Fleur. Lisette refused to take the bait. “Even if it were true,” he continued, though he seemed deflated by her silence, “I never led that woman on.” He slapped his hand down on the counter. “Never.” A cruel glint, the spark of a long-nurtured resentment, formed in his eye. “And she could’ve never gotten to your mama if it weren’t for the little passade between you and her boy. I hadn’t given her a thought in years.”

  “What we shared wasn’t a passing fancy. Vincent and I were going to marry,” Lisette said, surprised to find herself defending a relationship that had ended more than two decades ago.

  “I don’t care. You were the one who opened your mother to Laure Marin’s influence. All that making nice. Family getting to know family. Building trust.” He turned his head and spat, like the words had tasted bitter in his mouth. “Though I can see you haven’t learned a damned thing, ’cause it isn’t only your son who’s been blinded. I thought it would be over once the river washed away Vincent’s ashes. That you’d be done with the Marins. But I was wrong. You’re nursing that viper Fleur in your bosom, and it won’t be long before you feel her fangs.”

  Lisette couldn’t deny that she had been seeing a lot of Fleur since Vincent’s memorial. It seemed natural, if only because Fleur’s father was a common enemy, one who would no doubt return and need to be vanquished. They shared knowledge with each other—Fleur about her type of magic, and, although Lisette still felt strange acknowledging it, she was teaching Fleur about her kind of magic, too. Fleur had even joked that they should form a coven, though she acknowledged it would be like trying to pair alternating current with direct. “Fleur isn’t her mother.”

  “And you,” her father said, his eyes narrowing, his jaw jutting forward, “aren’t yours.”

  In spite of her newfound devotion, his words hit her hard. She caved in on herself, her shoulders slumping forward, a bite of pain in the left one as they did. “No, Daddy, I am not.” A sense of resignation outweighed her anger.

  He turned away from her and crossed to the altar, contemplating, Lisette knew, the image Remy had created of her mother. His shoulders heaved once, then again. A loud sob escaped him. He looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyes red and wet. Lisette now understood what her mother had meant when she’d said she was the only woman who could’ve saved Alcide Simeon from himself. He was lost and determined to self-destruct without her.

  Lisette had hoped that she would help him find peace by telling him what had happened the night of the witches’ ball. How even though Lisette had at first resisted the idea, letting that Nathalie girl offer herself, she and her mother had joined together, Lisette serving as her mother’s chwal, to prevent Celestin from achieving his goal of acquiring The Book of the Unwinding. How she’d later watched Soulange step into a beam that shone like light but felt like pure bliss.

  “What isn’t fair,” he said, returning to an earlier theme, “is that your mama lived for these spirits. Maybe if she’d lived just a little more for me, she wouldn’t have been so willing to lay down her life.” He turned away with a loud cry. “They took her from me. Now they’re gonna take you, too.” His hands shot out and grasped the edge of the altar cloth. He yanked it back, ripping it off the table, sending the candles and figurines, flowers and herbs and incense, Florida water and rum flying into the air, where they seemed to hover a moment longer than gravity should allow. Then everything came crashing down.

  He seemed as shocked by his actions as Lisette felt. Their eyes locked as each struggled to find words.

  “So,” Lisette said, unlucky enough to win the race, “you intend to keep on then, till you drink yourself to death.”

  He dropped the altar cloth to the floor, melted candle wax seeping into the fabric.

  “That seems to be the plan,” he said, his voice quiet, his eyes cold.

  Lisette turned away, her own eyes brimming with tears.

  The bell over the door clanged, and her father was gone.

  FOUR

  Evangeline Caissy stumbled through her bedroom’s open French doors to the bijoux garden, tumbling forward onto the patio’s rough brickwork. The fall skinned her hands and knees, an irritation to gild an already breathtaking agony. Every bone in her was bending, cracking, breaking at once. The pressure squeezed in from every direction, as if she were sinking deeper and deeper beneath the sea. Her body was growing smaller, denser, even as it was being reshaped. A detached witness in her mind, a part of herself that had somehow managed to take shelter behind a breakwater, wondered whether knowing to expect the agony made the transition easier or even more hellish. But no seawall could resist the crashing waves. Soon the detached witness would be washed away, too.

  Dark of the moon.

  Ever since the slaughter at the witches’ ball, on the nights between the waning and waxing crescents, Evangeline’s will was no longer her own. They had taken to playing with her, her mother’s sister witches and Celestin, twisting and mangling her body into the bastardized form of a crow. But it was more than a game, she was sure of that. They’d set out to teach her. Teach her who she was, what she was capable of.

  Celestin had waded through the blood of family and friends to claim The Book of the Unwinding, but Marceline had made it clear that she believed she and her sister witches were the rightful inheritors of its magic. Neither party had any real intention of sharing. The only way Evangeline could fathom the alliance was to imagine that the sisters saw Celestin as a useful, though ultimately disposable, tool—and without a doubt, vice versa. For now, they shared a common goal. And a common need.

  They all needed the darkness Evangeline carried in her. This she sensed in the pit of her stomach, though she had yet to discern the role they intended her to play. Perhaps nothing more than to walk in her mother’s footsteps, thereby increasing, or perhaps balancing, their power. They couldn’t force her to act. But they could try torturing her until she acted willingly, if only to stop the pain.

  She’d been horrified the first time Marceline had called this form forth, a meshing of crow with a raptor’s sharp beak and claws. Repulsed to realize this thing had been lurking inside her, hidden within her all along, tangible proof that the evil her mother had sought to leave behind had been passed on to her by blood.

  That night, the night of the slaughter, Marceline had enticed Evangeline to join her and her sister witches Margot and Mathilde, all in their shifted forms, in the carnage. She’d almost given in to the staggering urge to rip apart Hugo Marin. Though she’d devoted the last several years to keeping Hugo alive, in that moment, it had seemed to her that piercing him with beak and claw was the sole remedy for her suffering. Only her own shock at the sudden transformation had allowed her to resist. To ignore the voice shrieking Murder, Murder in her mind, and instead carry Hugo to safety, dropping him outside the cursed ballroom to his feet from six feet in the air before she tore off in search of . . .

  A rush of jumbled half memories, the vague impressions of her human psyche peeking out from behind a wall of avian instinct. The two sides, the human and the animal, were at odds, her avian mind filled with impulses her human mind refused to process.

  She felt—or was it feared?—the memories would return if she let them.

  If she allowed herself, she might even relish them.

  That last thought hadn’t been born in her own mind. It had crept in from beyond, seeking to sink its tendrils into her soul and bring her down, like Japanese honeysuckle—pretty and sweet-smelling, but capable of toppling even a deep-rooted tree.

  She’d expected the transformation to occur again tonight, even t
ried to prevent it by knocking herself out with a cocktail of booze and sleeping pills that might’ve killed an ordinary woman, but there seemed to be no way to resist. The pain ripped her from a near coma to wide awake. The first time, the change had taken place in mere moments. Over these last three months, the process had slowed down, growing even more agonizing with each iteration. Celestin and the sisters wanted to make a point.

  Excruciating. Maddening. Warping.

  A sound met her ears, her own scream, but she didn’t recognize it. The cry was not a noise a human voice would make.

  Struggle begets pain, a cool, inhuman voice whispered in her burning mind, the words like velvet wrapped around barbed wire. In life, Celestin’s voice had a rich, polished timbre, a condescending tone, and an accent he’d cultivated as a student at the Sorbonne. Those qualities were all lost now. The voice she heard in her mind sounded of dry branches clacking together in the night breeze.

  I am the balm to ease your suffering. The very source of her torture presented himself as her salvation.

  She might go mad. She might die. But she would never turn to Celestin as savior. Nor, despite the similarities in their magic, would she accept the sisters as kin of any kind.

  Her eyes locked on her hands before her, each digit snapping, but the dim light spilling from her bedroom onto the patio grew blinding. Dazzling violet hues confused her as her field of vision stretched, her eyes seeming to work independently of one another.

  Dizzying. Disorienting. She began retching, but there was nothing in her stomach to come up but dissolving benzos and vodka.

  A hot sting like a flaying whip as her skin began to shred. The last shards of consciousness began to slip away, and a merciful darkness reached out to embrace her.

  But he stopped it from touching her. He held her there, awake, aware, and in pain.

  Give yourself to me. Your agony will be nothing more than a forgotten dream.

  But it was too late. Words no longer held meaning.

  When Evangeline surfaced, she came to in human form. Naked. The skin of her arm sticking to her side. Walking. The frenetic pounding of drums sounded somewhere in the distance. She followed it blindly. Her eyelids seemed gummed together. It took some effort to separate them. A fire burned in the distance, a raging inferno that seemed to further chill rather than warm her skin, and that gave but little light. It burned in a clearing at the center of a thick clump of cypresses.

  It promised her absolute indulgence, if not pardon.

  Murder was the first act of magic. An old witch’s saw she’d heard a million times sent a shiver down her spine. She realized she could no longer tell where Celestin’s thoughts ended and her own began.

  Her eyes adapted to the darkness, and she realized that she was making her way along a land bridge, a thin stretch of earth bisecting a bayou’s waters. Red lights shone everywhere around her. They floated on the water’s surface, tiny paired fifolets leading her deeper, deeper into the inky stand of cypress. A pair of the lights dashed toward her, proximity revealing them to be an alligator’s gleaming eyes.

  Her heart pounded, certain it would soon be on her, but the creature stopped a yard or two before her, lowering its head as if in greeting. It turned away and strode across the thin strip of land, its scaly body dripping water, before slipping back beneath the bayou’s surface. Maybe it was magic that had protected her, or perhaps the temperature had dropped enough that the crawling terrors had stopped feeding.

  Come, ma chère, the thought projected into her mind. She recognized its source as Margot. They’re curious, but they won’t harm you. Think of it as a professional courtesy. They recognize a fellow predator when they see one.

  Evangeline looked back over her shoulder, considering turning around, running away, but the land she’d crossed by foot was now lost beneath a rising tide. All that remained was a sea of glowing red eyes. A mad thought hit her, and she tried to will herself to change, to sprout the wings that might carry her away.

  “Oh, no.” Margot’s voice blew over her like an icy wind, causing goose bumps to rise on her sticky skin. “You haven’t paid the price for the ability to transform at will . . . yet. Though eventually you will. Sooner or later we’re all his children. The wise witch knows to bargain for something in return.”

  The water behind her continued to rise, an unnatural tide spilling up over her feet. She caught her breath and pushed forward, not exhaling till she once again touched dry ground. As she did, a high-pitched whining sound added itself to the thumping of the drums. Three discordant notes, repeating themselves in a rhythm that shared nothing with the drumbeats.

  A crow swept down just inches from her face, near enough that Evangeline could feel the wind its wing beat back as it climbed once more. The wing fanned the reek of charred flesh into her nostrils.

  Sacrifice. Mathilde’s feverish mind shouted out a single-word explanation, the thought dipped in bloodlust, trimmed with a sick glee.

  Still, she moved forward.

  The dark fire at the center of the clearing exerted its own bewitching gravity.

  The dark fire was alive.

  Evangeline passed through the cypress curtain, catching hold of the innermost tree to keep from being pulled into the flames.

  The din of a thousand drums assaulted her ears. She scanned the surroundings, but there were no drummers. The frenzied pounding was the beating of the pyre’s heart.

  The flames held on to their light with a miser’s grip, but gave off what seemed a scorching cold in abundance. Evangeline felt her skin reddening.

  Her dark-adapted eyes discerned movement. Pale figures, seemingly locked in orbit, circled the conflagration with raw, thrashing motions that could have been either a kind of dance or a desperate attempt at escape. As they jerked and squirmed in passing, Evangeline saw their pallor was limited to the sides facing away from the fire. The sides facing the conflagration were grotesque: features melting, charring, burning away to blackened bone. The icy blaze was consuming them. Varying degrees of devastation indicated some had joined the dance later than others. A skeletal dancer fell away to ash, and a fresh new figure, this one a young man, his skin as snowy as if he’d never seen the sun, his movements graceful, his limbs lithe, drifted toward the circle and was caught in the pyre’s gravity. Steam began to rise from his body, then smoke, and he drifted away from Evangeline’s field of vision, circling to the distant, darkest side of the fire.

  The sharp, whining notes crept back into her consciousness, making her aware that they had never been silenced. They were enchanting her, weakening her, even now. She startled as she realized their source sat beside her. Glowing the cold silver blue of moonlight, a male—a naked, bald mound of luminous fat that looked less like a man than a massive, eyeless baby—sat cross-legged at her side, a red stone flute pressed to his lips.

  Carnelian, the name of the stone came to her, as if that fact held some importance.

  The three notes repeated, each one sonorous with meaning. Oblivion. Sweet. Eternal. She felt a tug, a hunger, willing her forward.

  Her hand fell away from the tree. Oblivion. Sweet. Eternal. She took a step forward.

  “No, ma chère fille,” Margot said, her now-human form materializing between Evangeline and the dim, searing flames. “That fate is not for you.” She pressed a blue stone flask to Evangeline’s lips. “It will never be for you,” she said, tilting the flask.

  Sweet, honeyed wine poured past Evangeline’s lips. She tasted a trace of licorice. The scent of mothballs reached her nose. Her throat constricted, and she tried to spit the liquid out. Margot caught her by the chin, her clammy touch forcing Evangeline’s mouth to close.

  “You must swallow,” Margot said. “It’s nothing that will harm you. A taste of Le Mort’s elixir, that’s all. It will help you resist the temptation.” Evangeline struggled, but Margot’s will proved stronger. Evangeline surrendered, allowing the sweet, foul tincture to trickle down her throat.

  In an insta
nt, Evangeline’s senses both sharpened and dulled, leaving the sound of the stone flute now muted, as if it were being played a world away, but augmenting her night vision so that she could discern the entity that hung at the center of the dancers’ orbit. She perceived the entity as masculine, though it seemed nonsensical to hang a gender on such a being. It was older than time ever would or could be, a dark star feeding on light. “Where are we? What is that thing?” she said, her words hushed, even though she sensed the creature heard all. Saw all.

  “We,” Margot said, “are at the center of all madness. Madness may not be the source of magic, but it is a gateway.” Margot plugged the lapis lazuli flask with a stopper made of the same carnelian as the man-baby’s flute, then knelt on the ground, prostrating herself and kissing the earth that lay between her and the being of darkness in the blaze. She pushed herself into a squatting position, then held up a hand, a wordless request for Evangeline’s assistance.

  Evangeline hesitated, despising Margot’s touch, but the older witch, impatient and entitled, flapped her hand, the wordless request turning into a silent command. Evangeline took Margot’s hand and helped her rise, releasing her grip as soon as Margot had found her footing. Evangeline despised her mother’s sister witch—a feeling that was perhaps returned, judging from the look of contempt in Margot’s eyes. “That thing,” she said, her acerbic parroting of Evangeline’s words conveying a greater sense of disapproval than outright censure ever could have, “has been known by many names, though the one that has always resonated with me is ‘the Dark Man.’”

  Mathilde spiraled in from overhead, a writhing rodent caught in her claws. She seemed unaware of Evangeline’s presence, one eye fixed on her prey, the other missing. The night of the ball, Margot had pecked the eye out in an attempt to keep Mathilde’s bloodlust from claiming Marceline as victim.