by J. D. Horn
Evangeline jerked back, like Fleur had slapped her. Her eyes went wide as if she were reliving the horror of that night.
Fleur reminded herself that she owed Evangeline a debt of gratitude. Without her, Hugo would have been one of the fallen. Fleur’s own eyes moistened. “I’m sorry,” she said, forcing herself to regain composure. She wiped away her tears with two quick swipes. This wasn’t like her. Years as a politician’s wife had taught her how to function above her emotions, but here she was striking out at someone whose help she needed—worse, crying over it. “Really, I am.”
A silence fell over them. Fleur felt the psychic net Evangeline had woven around her wither away.
“We’ve both drawn blood,” Evangeline replied. Not a formal armistice, but the best Fleur could hope for. Evangeline’s shoulders relaxed; her gaze seemed fixed on an invisible point floating somewhere between them. “Any sign of Celestin?” Evangeline shuddered at her own use of the name, then crossed her arms and rubbed at the gooseflesh.
Evangeline was clearly horrified by the thought of Celestin, but the question still struck Fleur as casual, as if she’d asked only because she could tell it was expected. Fleur envied the younger witch her ability to see behind false fronts with such ease.
“No,” Fleur said, focusing on the facts she knew, trying to keep this new apprehension from shading her aura. “He’s been lying low since the massacre.” Those who remained had been left to piece together an explanation for Celestin’s murderous activities from the bits of information they’d gleaned from a ghost, a servitor spirit, and a cat. Incomplete evidence, no doubt, but at least the sources were trustworthy. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Fleur said, “I’m happy Lisette and Soulange succeeded in checking Celestin that night, but it seems he burned through a lot of lives for nothing, and we can’t assume he’s done.”
Evangeline’s eyes darted to hers. “Whatever Celestin and Astrid are up to, it’s related to that damned book. Marceline and her sister witches, my ‘aunties’ as you call them,” she added, a fine coat of resentment varnishing her words, “are all about getting hold of it.”
“Yes, I know.” Until a few months ago, Fleur had always believed The Book of the Unwinding to be nothing more than witch folklore. Then, mixed in with Astrid’s belongings, Daniel had uncovered a copy of The Lesser Key of Darkness. The mad monk Theodosius was credited as the author of both. The Lesser Key, Fleur now understood, was a primer or even a catechism for those who would make use of Theodosius’s greater work. Fleur had scoured every reference she could find to The Book of the Unwinding with the fervor of a new convert. There were a thousand conflicting accounts of what the book actually contained, but each agreed on a single point. If Celestin’s goal was to become the King of Bones and Ashes, the master of magic described in The Lesser Key, he’d have to sacrifice his entire line. He was well on his way. He’d murdered Vincent, taking over his identity and performing a flawless impersonation. And her nephew Luc. They’d long believed he’d taken his own life, but he, too, had died at Celestin’s hand. Then there was Alice, wiling away in a closed-off, artificial world . . .
Celestin would have killed Fleur, too, maybe even kicked off the carnage the night of the ball by spilling her blood, had she not surprised him with an act of defiance. She’d spat in the face of Gabriel Prosper, the man who’d tried to wrest control of the Chanticleer Coven from Marin hands. She couldn’t have suspected that her own father was masquerading behind Gabriel’s features. Even so, she knew the stay of execution he’d granted was a reprieve, not a pardon. He would come for her again when it suited him. Fleur could never let it come to that. She was all that stood between him and her daughter, Lucy. And Hugo, too.
“I’m rebuilding the coven.” She repeated herself to give her time to regain her nerve. “I want you to join us.”
“Never,” Evangeline said, shaking her head, rising to her feet. “I will never join Nicholas’s coven.”
Fleur scooted forward, realizing only after she moved that her subconscious was readying her to give chase if necessary. “But it isn’t Nicholas’s coven anymore.” She steadied herself, trying to quash the desperation pushing her to irrationality. Cool heads, not rash actions, win the day. “It isn’t even Nicholas’s city anymore.” Fleur dangled the sentence like bait, hoping Evangeline might be interested in news of him. But the woman didn’t bite. “He’s gone off, out west. Maybe he’s trying to find new ways to access magic like he claims to be doing, or maybe he’s looking to find himself.” Fleur hoped it was the former. She was counting on it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Evangeline said, and Fleur witnessed the last glint of feeling for Nicholas fade from Evangeline’s eyes. “It’s a fool’s errand either way.”
“You’re right.” Fleur had a flash of Nicholas as the fool of the tarot, a bindle and stick on his shoulder, one foot perched on the edge of a precipice. If he did fail . . . No, she couldn’t let herself go there. She needed to focus on her own efforts. She needed Evangeline to see her as an ally. If that meant besmirching Nicholas, so be it. In her shoes, Nicholas wouldn’t hesitate to do the same. “The peregrinations of a self-absorbed man are of no importance.”
Fleur searched her heart for a flicker of affection for her brother. She found gratitude with ease, but what little love she uncovered had nearly been starved to death. She suspected that Vincent was the only one of the three of them who’d ever really been worth a damn. “What does matter is we witches, real witches, seem to be a dying breed. You’re one of the few witches left in New Orleans who’s retained any kind of real power. I need you . . .”
“To help you keep Celestin from picking the rest of you off like beer cans on a fence.”
Fleur didn’t understand Evangeline’s simile, but she decided to let it pass. “Yes, in part to combat Celestin, but I have other . . . concerns.” She paused, debating the best tack to take. She decided to start by revisiting familiar territory. “Magic is fading—”
“Magic is fading. Magic is dying.” Evangeline sang the words as if she were composing an extemporaneous lullaby. “Do you think I could’ve been with your brother as long as I was without learning that tune?”
Fleur nodded. “Fair enough. I know witches first raised the alarm long ago, and frankly, I’m pretty damned tired of thinking about it, too, but that doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real. Some witches are saying the waning of magic is natural. That it has happened in the past, and the pendulum will swing back. I find the slim evidence they offer unconvincing. More wishful thinking and blind faith than fact. No, I don’t believe this decline is temporary, and I have no faith in magic’s anticipated resurgence. However, I do believe that together, we can make the decline easier for one another . . .”
“Then your selfish motives come in an altruistic wrapper.”
“In this circumstance, I believe the greater good aligns with my own desires. Perhaps, together, we can stave off the end. Perhaps we might even discover a method to reverse the course. Push the damned pendulum back.”
“Maybe,” Evangeline said, “it’s good that we’re going extinct. Maybe magic should die with us.”
“Oh, but to you, death seems theoretical. You’re still young and healthy, but there are some out there whose continued existence hangs on magic.”
“I’m sorry for them, but too many of us have held on to life long past the ordinary—”
“My Lucy died in utero. She stopped moving at around six and a half months. The doctors wanted to induce early labor . . .” Fleur’s voice faltered, but she’d waded halfway into the Rubicon. She had to press on. “You hear such horror stories about resurrection spells backfiring, but I couldn’t let her go. I restarted her heart, and my magic has regulated its every beat since. But my power is falling away. More and more quickly each day. I told you I’d be honest with you, and I warned you my motives were selfish. I want you to join the Chanticleers—my coven—because I need your power, and I need to be able to control it.”
SIX
Lisette regretted her decision to pick up a newspaper when she stopped at the gas station for a coffee.
Forget Celestin Marin. Forget forbidden magic books and the mad monks who write them. There was enough going on in the everyday world to scare a body to death.
She sat behind the counter at Vèvè, perusing the journal, wondering what in the hell was wrong with people.
People with guns in their hands. People without love in their hearts. People who still—honest to God—thought their damned race made them innately superior to others. People who cared more about winning than even their own best interests, happy to follow red-faced religious hypocrites and fat, lying politicians through the gates of hell itself, if it meant they got to brag about beating everyone else there.
She folded the paper and set it aside.
Yeah, there were a hell of a lot of things in the world to be afraid of, but today, she wasn’t going to focus on that.
Today, Lisette would be grateful.
Grateful for Isadore, her husband, her rock.
Grateful for his landscaping company and her shop. Grateful for the sufficient income the businesses generated.
Grateful for their children, Manon and Remy, both good, responsible young adults, though neither of them had made it home last night, and neither of them had been considerate enough to check in to say where they’d be.
Lisette felt her lips pursing and realized she was veering off course. She forced her thoughts back to her list.
Grateful for the Tremé neighborhood galleried cottage her family shared. Grateful for its beautiful Eastlake trim and its graceful, rounded steps. Grateful for Isadore’s roofer-friend’s estimate that its composite roof with overlapping tile joints should last another ten years, Bondye and both named and unnamed storms permitting.
Grateful that her father would soon catch hold of himself and get back to being the man she knew, loved, and respected.
Well, okay, that last one might be more wishful thinking than gratitude, but maybe the universe wouldn’t be paying close attention, and she could slip in a suggestion while it was otherwise occupied.
The damnedest thing was that even though she hated his behavior and despised what he was doing to himself, she couldn’t say her father was wrong. After his visit yesterday, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he might have a point about history trying to repeat itself. It wasn’t only Fleur Marin showing up on her doorstep all the time, going on about The Book of the Unwinding and the past, trying to be her best friend, it was also Remy getting all caught up with Fleur’s daughter.
A rapping sound startled Lisette out of her thoughts.
A bent old man in a worn straw hat stood outside Vèvè, tapping one windowpane with his cane and holding a garish cartoon tourist map up against another. He held a pipe clenched between his teeth. There was something familiar about him, and even though she couldn’t place his face among her father’s friends, she felt certain she’d encountered him wandering around the Quarter. Then again, maybe she was wrong about that. It’d be odd for someone who lived here to carry around a map of the area.
Their eyes met, and in that moment she knew him. Oh, of course. She grasped the hem of a slippery epiphany. The vèvès not only symbolized the loa, they summoned them . . . which meant this was Papa Legba incarnate, not a mere spectral impression. Before she could finish processing the realization—at the same time completely logical and, to her stubbornly skeptical nature, utterly absurd—he was gone.
She rushed to the window, then out the door, looking up and down the street to see if she could spot him. The old man, though deep down she knew he wasn’t a man at all, had vanished. The map he’d been holding lay on the sidewalk like a silent witness to his visit. Lisette bent over and picked the map up, flipping it from side to side, looking for . . . what? A scrawled line of communication? An X to reveal a treasure or to lead her to a rendezvous? She saw nothing of the sort.
Still, Lisette couldn’t shake the feeling that the map itself had been the message—or at least part of it—even if it looked like nothing special. It was the kind of map hotels handed out at check-in: the French Quarter front and center, the rest of the city be damned, with numbered dots denoting points of interest, the whole thing bordered by coupons promising BOGO drinks and free desserts with the purchase of any entree. She’d encountered various iterations of it a million or two times over the years, sweat-dampened copies clutched in tourists’ hands, others tossed into the trash or blowing down Chartres Street.
She tried to fold the map, but it didn’t seem to want to follow its creases. She managed to quarter the page, leaving Armstrong Park and Congo Square at the top and Jackson Square beneath her thumb, the crosshairs of the bull’s-eye pattern of its paths lined up with the center of her own thumbprint. Still, the layout was deceiving—Congo Square wasn’t true north, and Jackson Square, the oldest public grounds in the city, lay much more southeast than south in relation to Armstrong Park.
She was shaking her head, half thinking the man had been a hallucination, when the vèvè in the window caught her eye. She focused her full attention on it, certain it was the key to the spark of insight that was struggling to life inside her. Her eyes traced the lines in the order she had painted them: the bold vertical line at the exact center of the pane, the horizontal line that crossed it at a perfect ninety-degree angle to form the center cross, then bisected Legba’s hooked cane—his poteau-mitan—that connected worlds together, and the freer curving lines beyond.
Suddenly, she saw it. The crossroads of Legba’s vèvè matched the crossing of the paths in the park where the statue of Jackson stood.
This time the map cooperated as she folded it into a tight square. She held the page up to the window, positioning it with St. Ann Street running a perfect horizontal across the top, so that the park’s crosshairs were in line with those on the symbol. The bells of the cathedral began to chime, and she glanced up Chartres Street toward the church, deep in thought. As the bells tolled, she turned back to the map, rotating it one hundred eighty degrees so that the Cabildo, the cathedral, and the Presbytère were shown on the right.
“That’s it. That’s it,” she heard herself saying. The three buildings now lined up with the triplet five-pointed stars arrayed on the vèvè’s right-hand side. The pedestrian walkway before the three buildings even suggested Legba’s cane, the curve of where Chartres Street met St. Peter Street an allusion to the cane’s hooked handle.
St. Peter, indeed.
Over the years, the loa had come to be syncretized with the Catholic saints. Some claimed it had been done so the loa could be venerated right under the eyes of those who would have otherwise forbidden it. Others held that the connection went deeper than that. That on some level the different personalities were the same—one spirit wearing different masks. The various aspects of Papa Legba had been equated to St. Peter, St. Lazarus, and St. Anthony. It struck her there was another geographical correspondence—St. Anthony’s Garden sat behind the cathedral. She gazed at the map and vèvè side by side, trying to call the Lazarus connection forth. The beep of a car horn caused her to look up. She lowered the map and turned to face the square. A part of her protested leaving the shop unattended, but she still found herself walking down Chartres toward Jackson Square.
She felt a tiny spark go off in her mind. A correspondence to St. Lazarus seemed at first to be unaccounted for in her theory, but St. Ann Street, once the home of Marie Laveau herself, ran along the opposite side of the square. If Lisette remembered the legend correctly, it was St. Lazarus who’d carried St. Ann’s bones to their final resting place.
She followed along the pedestrian stretch of the street and took note of the Pontalba Buildings flanking the square on either side, their position echoing the placement of identical leaves on the top and bottom of Legba’s vèvè—further proof that the connection was real. Quick steps carried her into the center of the square dominated by the statue of J
ackson, his horse forever rearing up like Pegasus about to take to the sky. An intentional insinuation or not, the image of a literal rider and horse sure called to mind the metaphorical relationship of loa to chwal.
She carried on toward the river until the path spilled her onto Decatur Street. She stopped on the sidewalk that lay beyond the gates, noticing that even the layout of Washington Artillery Park and the steps leading up to it seemed to mimic the curve of the bow and serpent that separated a single five-pointed star from the rest of the symbol. Glancing at the map, Lisette decided the solo star’s position would match the rough coordinates of the park’s cannon.
She turned a full circle, taking it all in as if through new eyes, this ancient field of execution where she’d played when she was a small girl, this former military drilling ground where she’d taken her own babies to play.
Her mama had always told her that a person didn’t need to scratch too deep into New Orleans’s surface to uncover hidden magic, but spotting vèvès woven into the borders of the rugs of the Hotel Monteleone’s lobby or making half-joking conjectures about the location of the seven Gates of Guinee was one thing. This was another. The symbols that matched up with Papa Legba’s vèvè spanned commerce, religion, government, military, and judicial power. It made sense that in the early New Orleans, these institutions would find themselves located cheek to jowl with each other, but it was a real awakening to realize that the very layout of the original city corresponded to the symbol of the guardian of gates and crossroads.
Either New Orleans had been built to serve as a crossroads or the land itself had demanded it, influencing the powers that be to cast the city in a mold that would leave it as such.
She heard a whistle and turned toward its source. A small black dog, the same wiry-haired mutt she’d encountered the night she and her mother had walked into the middle of Celestin Marin’s massacre of witches, shot through the square, catching up to its master. The old man doffed his straw hat, and in a blink the two were gone.
