The Book of the Unwinding

by J. D. Horn

Alice, too, accompanied them in body if not in spirit, floating alongside them, buoyed by magic drawn from the relics Fleur had pilfered from the Demagnan Mortuary. She had employed a low-power variant of Hugo’s stealth mode to gain entrance to both the Doll House and the adjacent mortuary, whispering a soothing chant as she approached the officers stationed outside the crime scene, acknowledging that while she might be unauthorized, she was harmless. Nothing more than a shadow, a trick of the light on their tired eyes. Noticing her would lead to more trouble than not, so they should simply turn away. And they had. The spell hadn’t even taxed the modicum of magic she’d felt safe deflecting from Lucy.

  The detectives had picked the Doll House clean, but in the funeral home itself, Fleur had discovered a hiding place they’d missed. In an alcove hidden behind a framed conté portrait labeled “Minnie Wallace,” she’d found a coffer filled with dried hearts. Thirteen, in fact. Daniel had insisted on taking inventory. Eli walked beside Fleur, helping steady her with his right arm and clutching the handle of an overnight bag holding the coffer and its relics in his left hand. Fleur would commit the bag to flame before she’d ever use it again.

  Daniel brought up the rear, clutching his copy of The Lesser Key—wrapped in his self-blessed kitchen towel and sealed in a plastic slider bag—to his chest, refusing to entrust it to any hand except his own. He’d pored over that dreadful book, wearing ridiculous pink rubber gloves he’d baptized in holy water of his own making, run straight from the tap and blended with wishful thinking. But Fleur felt sure it wasn’t the sanctified latex or the towel that prevented the book’s darkness from creeping into him. If anything, it was his own innate goodness that kept him untainted, though he seemed no longer to believe in that goodness. He’d learned he was a creature of The Lesser Key, created to allow the wicked to descend into death and return unscathed. If he had been born out of darkness, he questioned, how could he be innocent? The same question had been dogging Fleur for years, though it had grown more acute of late.

  When Fleur and Eli had last come to Grunch Road, the lane had still been accessible from the highway, via the crossbow-shaped exit. Now the pavement petered out, leaving Grunch Road cut off from the main artery, a mostly forgotten vestige hidden by trees and tall, lush grass. They’d driven as close to the old road as possible, leaving them with only a hundred yards or so to travel by foot.

  Fleur struggled to remember that last night she and Eli had found themselves here, but it was little more than a vague and blurry recollection. Their first pilgrimage to Grunch Road was a different matter. That memory had haunted Fleur on the lonely, loveless nights of her marriage.

  They’d spent the afternoon at the old amusement park that lay only a stone’s throw from here, then left behind the noise and flashing lights to come to this deserted lane. They’d come on a dare—one made to each other. Each thought the other would stop things before they went too far. Neither had. A frisson at the memory of those first touches brought hot blood to her cheeks. First. First. First. Eli had been her first. Her first love and her first lover. She wondered if Eli, too, remembered the heat. Fleur leaned into his hard shoulder, contemplating the life they might have had together if she’d mustered the courage to stand up to her father.

  No, that wasn’t true. She was tired of that same pathetic lie.

  Coming home to New Orleans, learning about the extent of Celestin’s insatiable hunger for power, had forced Fleur to face one uncomfortable fact—the proverbial apple hadn’t fallen far from the perverse tree. She had made a conscious choice to marry Warren. She’d never loved him—love hadn’t been part of the equation—but she had loved what he represented. Celestin had wanted his daughter to be First Lady, and Fleur . . . well, the idea had seduced her in ways sapless, bloodless Warren never could. Warren had been poised to realize his dream, too, but then the world had gone mad, and political savvy and experience were now seen as detriments. It seemed the electorate had lost their taste for adults . . .

  She caught herself. Her mind was drifting, trying to relieve her conscience of an essential though unpalatable truth—that she had chosen to break Eli’s heart. She’d chosen power and prestige over love. If that didn’t make her Celestin’s daughter, she didn’t know what did.

  Now, with the benefit of two decades of hindsight, Fleur realized she’d failed her daughter on two counts. First for selling her soul for position, and second for not setting her sights on a higher return. She should have held out for Madame President rather than First Lady, though the great Celestin Marin would’ve never entertained such an idea. He would’ve voted with great zeal to abolish the Nineteenth Amendment—and believed he was performing a service to all of womanhood in doing so.

  Fleur glanced over at her daughter, navigating the rough terrain in a pair of thousand-dollar velvet platform sandals she’d worn on a single prior occasion and would never wear again. Lucy would complain that this trek had ruined them, and she’d probably be right. God forbid she change them before making the trip. Fleur was torn between annoyance at Lucy’s sense of entitlement—a sense Fleur had to admit she’d sown in her—and pride that rough terrain or no, Lucy was making her own way, not relying on a man even as Fleur herself continued to do. Her daughter would always make her own way. Not just over this stretch of earth, but through the mess Fleur and Warren had made of her life, and whatever lay beyond that. More and more now, Fleur could spot the strong young woman Lucy was becoming, as it poked out from behind the visage of a spoiled teenager. Fleur admired that woman, wished she could be more like her.

  No, I didn’t make a mistake, Fleur reminded herself for the thousandth time. She’d done the right thing when she’d saved this child, regardless of the cost.

  She returned her focus to Eli, studying his profile washed in blue by the night. She’d known he would come at her bidding. Without any explanation from her. If she were honest with him about her feelings, she knew he’d give them another shot, but Fleur couldn’t put any energy toward a relationship. Not now. Not until she’d secured a strong enough source of magic to keep Lucy’s heart beating. Eli looked down at her, and even in the darkness, she could make out the questions in his eyes. “Soon,” the word escaped her lips, fleeing like a caged prisoner.

  “I would hope so,” Lucy said, looking back over her shoulder at Fleur. “This gross place is—”

  “Ruining my shoes,” Fleur finished the thought for her.

  “Yeah, that too, Our Lady of Interruptus, but what I was going to say is . . . well, I’m not really sure. ‘Wrong,’ I guess. This place is just wrong.”

  No, the abandoned road was curious, weird even, but it was Lucy’s sixth sense that was wrong. It should have died along with the rest of her magic when Lucy herself had died in Fleur’s womb, not even leaving enough to serve as a relic. Fleur shuddered at the thought. In Lucy’s presence, Fleur always disparaged her extrasensory perception as simple intuition or insight. Fleur couldn’t afford to have Lucy asking too many questions, or looking into her lack of magic with any real scrutiny.

  “Yes, indeed it is,” Daniel said, his voice coming from behind them. “But it’s perfect for the work we have before us.”

  Fleur felt the weight of a searching stare. She glanced back to find Nathalie focusing intently on her. The realization struck Fleur like a hard slap. Nathalie knows. She knows. There was no denying it. Somehow the newcomer had divined the truth.

  Fleur would have to speak to her. Explain. She seemed a kindhearted and sensible woman, the type of person who would keep her own counsel. Still, it wouldn’t do to have Lucy spending too much time around Nathalie. The witch didn’t appear to have a spiteful bone in her body, but she seemed incapable of guile. Between Nathalie’s open nature and Lucy’s laser-precise insights, unfortunate truths might be discovered.

  Fleur had set a glamour on Lucy to divert the attention of anyone who might pick up on anything odd about her daughter. Fleur’s main concern wasn’t that Nathalie would tell. Fleur was worried
others might begin to take notice as well. She’d ask Nathalie what had alerted her.

  Fleur couldn’t dwell on the fact that if the glamour had weakened to the point where Nathalie could see through it, then the magic keeping Lucy alive was growing thin as well. She had to stay focused and have faith that Nicholas would find a source of magic that would allow Lucy to live a full, normal life.

  Fleur hated that Lucy viewed her uncle in such a negative light. He might not have been a good father, hell, not even a passable father, but he had always looked out for his niece. Once it became clear that Nicholas had lost control of the coven, that he couldn’t in secret continue to skim off a portion of the coven’s combined magic to protect Lucy’s well-being, he set out on his own to find another solution. There was no way Fleur could share the truth of Nicholas’s wanderings, and without that knowledge, there was no way Lucy could see his desertion as anything other than selfish.

  A suspicion crept up on her. A question she felt ashamed to pose, even to herself. Could it be that Nicholas only offered his assistance for selfish purposes? It allowed him to feel both magnanimous and avuncular. It kept Fleur dependent on him, forever in his debt. She pushed the thought away. His motivations, even in this cynical light, didn’t matter. She would’ve made a deal with the devil himself to save Lucy. To be indebted to her brother was no great burden for what she received in return.

  Fleur’s eyes sought out Nathalie in the night. She was a bit behind them, beside Hugo. The Twins followed them, silent as always. She’d never heard their voices except when they sang with the Chanticleer Coven as it wove its spells. When the Marin family control of the coven was challenged, the taciturn siblings had shown themselves loyal. It was that loyalty that had saved the pair from Celestin’s murder spree. Daniel had entrusted the Twins with carrying his portrait, though he followed the pair like a single shadow, refusing to be more than a few feet from it lest he be yanked away at this critical juncture.

  The servitor spirit was preoccupied and—for Daniel—surly. He didn’t want to waste any of the power they’d brought with and in them, but he had capitulated to using just enough magic to provide Alice a safe escort to the site of the working.

  “Best to think ahead and be prepared,” he’d said earlier as he slipped Lucy’s Animalier backpack over his shoulders. His broad back strained the bag’s straps. The contents he’d forced inside it stretched the bag almost to the point of zipper failure. Daniel had stuffed it with crystals and magic tools the likes of which Fleur suspected hadn’t been used for generations. Fleur hadn’t failed to notice the ruby-encrusted handle of the large athame Daniel had slipped into the sack, the knife’s handle protruding from the red velvet in which its blade had been swathed. A blade like that spoke of sacrifice.

  “We’re here,” Daniel announced without ceremony. With only a nod, he requested that the Twins prop his portrait against a nearby tree. He took The Lesser Key in his left hand and sloughed off the backpack, letting it drop at his feet. “We need to cut a pentagram into the earth.”

  “Pentagram. Old school. I like it,” Lucy said, approaching Daniel and patting him on the back.

  “Older school than you think.” Daniel’s cryptic response came with no explanation. “It has to be large enough to hold Alice at its center.”

  The Twins paced out a circle and, standing opposite each other, held their hands out, palms turned toward the earth. A harmony of voices rose, and sparks shot from their fingertips.

  “Hold it,” Daniel said. “Let’s don’t waste magic on the things we can do by hand. The pentagram is why we brought the shovels.”

  “On it,” Nathalie said, handing one shovel to Hugo and setting about scratching a large star into the ground to serve as a guide. Hugo stared at his shovel as if he’d never seen one before, then fell to his seat, dropping the shovel by his side.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Lucy said, turning a full circle. “What’s so special about this particular spot?” That was her girl, always cutting to the chase.

  Daniel knelt beside her and, setting The Lesser Key by his knee, unzipped the backpack. “The astral and the common world share a wall here.” He pulled the athame from the bag and unwrapped the cloth that had served as its sheath. After spreading the cloth on the ground, he laid the athame on it. The knife was without a doubt worth a small fortune in financial terms, but it was clear Daniel valued it only for its intended use. If that use was sacrifice, what sacrifice, Fleur wondered, was he planning to make? “If the Dreaming Road were a house, I’d say that immediately beyond this point lies the foyer, and right here where you’re standing is the front porch. Of course, there are many porches, and many foyers, too, but the separation is nothing more than illusion. That’s true both here in the common world,” he wagged a finger at Lucy, “and in the astral realm, too. The many are, in actuality, one.”

  “E pluribus unum,” Hugo called out, raising his fist to the sky and then looking up at his own hand like he’d witnessed a UFO.

  “Yes, indeed. The founding fathers had knowledge of the astral and the Dreaming Road. Franklin in particular. But let’s not go there. There are already enough conspiracy theories in the world for fascists to twist into propaganda. Let’s not hand them another one gift-wrapped.” He looked up at Eli, nodding at the bag he held. “If you could . . .” His words trailed off as Eli began to carry the bag to him. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” Eli responded, setting the bag on the ground.

  Daniel, for a moment his old self, beamed up at Eli. “Why Miss Fleur, I do believe you have found yourself a keeper . . . again. This time, keep him.”

  The Twins began snapping their fingers in approval.

  Fleur felt her cheeks flush as Eli returned to her. She hoped the night would hide the redness of her face from him. He stopped squarely before her. “What he said.” He snapped his fingers and returned to her side.

  “Please,” Lucy addressed Eli in a petulant tone. Fleur knew her daughter well enough to know the annoyance was counterfeit. “Get her out of my hair.” Fleur smiled, knowing that this was Lucy’s way of giving them her blessing—the closest they’d ever come to receiving an official sanction. “Okay, we’re on the porch,” Lucy said, returning to the previous subject in an attempt, Fleur knew, to save her from further embarrassment. “What do we do, knock?”

  “That would be the polite thing to do.” Daniel grabbed Lucy’s backpack and upturned it, tugging it even further out of shape and dumping its entire contents onto the ground. Fleur expected a protest from Lucy, but she didn’t make a squeak. “However, sometimes politeness can get one killed.” He began sorting through the items before him, setting packets of herbs to one side and crystals to the other. “Babau Jean has claimed the foyer as his own, and Celestin has claimed Babau Jean. You all got a glimpse of the foyer the night of the ball. Celestin bent it in so that it could share a temporary connection to the interior of the building where the ball was held.”

  He picked up a sandwich bag full of herbs and examined it. “I believe,” he said, addressing Hugo, “this one belongs to you.” He tossed the bag to Hugo, who managed to catch it despite his current condition. “To build upon my simile, it isn’t too difficult to move back and forth between the foyer and the front porch. Especially at this precise geographical point,” he pointed at the ground, “the door is always open, at least a crack. But beyond the foyer lie an ever-growing number of chambers, entire worlds, really, from which there is no exit. A new chamber is created every time someone drifts too far into the astral to find their way back.” He picked his blessed rose rubber gloves out of the items he’d carried with them and slipped them on. “Again, there are innumerable chambers beyond, but they are all one. Any sense of separation is an illusion.”

  “Thank you, Mr. One Hand Clapping.” Lucy’s snark told Fleur that she was more anxious than she was letting on.

  Daniel shrugged her sarcasm off. Not surprising, since he’d been created to have a strong sense of
empathy. He must sense her unease, too. “You’re welcome,” he said without irony. “Sometimes,” he continued, “it’s an addict who floats a wee bit too high. Sometimes it’s a witch who goes there on purpose.” His face fell. “No witch would ever choose to take to the Dreaming Road if she knew what awaited her at the end of the dream. I used to suppose they eventually died in spirit, their physical bodies already long gone. But no. It’s much worse. When a star goes supernova, it creates a black hole. When a witch burns through the last of her magic, a dark spirit is created. A kind of vampiric demon that wanders through the astral plane devouring any light it encounters.”

  “Charming.”

  He opened the plastic bag that held the cloth-enveloped grimoire. He unwound the dish towel and let it drop to the ground. “That’s why there’s no time to squander.” He examined The Lesser Key, his face strangely emotionless as he did. “Last I saw Alice,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper, “she was fading away, slipping into that darkness.” He opened The Key to its center pages and placed it on the red cloth, next to the athame. “I tried to alert her to the precariousness of her situation. We can only hope she took my warning to heart.” Before he bent back over the cloth, he paused and turned his face to the sky, searching the stars. Then he adjusted the cloth, aligning it, it seemed, with the constellations above. Once satisfied, he adjusted the placement of the book and the knife, then reached out and grabbed a small votive candle in a glass holder. Fleur’s dark-adapted eyes judged that particular shade of gray to be yellow. He placed it on the cloth’s right side, repeating the step by placing a red one on the bottom of the cloth, a blue votive on the left, and a green at the top. He’d aligned the cloth with the cardinal directions and placed each candle according to the element associated with its color. He was, Fleur realized, building an ersatz altar, relying on magical correspondences. Witches, real witches, had long ago dropped this practice, but it seemed Daniel was not taking any chances. “We must hope she listened.” He rose, removing his rubber gloves and tossing them aside, not even watching to see where they might land. Fleur surmised that he didn’t expect to need them again, but she wasn’t ready to consider what that might mean.