Physically, Lance appeared fine now, but that was only half of the story. Despite spending more time together working, we were talking less than ever. It was frustrating. He had cut himself off and it hurt. My reflex, for better or worse, had been to fixate on Lucian as an escape. I found myself replaying our most recent encounter over and over like it was a song I couldn’t get enough of. Even so, I kept trying with Lance and managed to convince him to come along for Max’s birthday celebration—the whole house was going. Max happened to be universally adored and, besides, we all needed to rally around something normal amid the madness for a few short hours.
We crowded around weathered wooden tables and benches at a down-home Cajun hot spot Dante had suggested. Tulane pennants hung on the wall, a brass band played at the back, and the tables were littered with vats of barbecued foods, sinful side dishes, and plenty of fried fare served family style. The hurricanes—virgin, for us—arrived by the pitcherful. And best of all: the restaurant wasn’t anywhere we had ever spotted the Krewe.
When we had finished feasting and settled the bill, a cake was brought out—a surprise orchestrated by Dante, which made Max blush—and the group sang “Happy Birthday,” as a few of our neighboring tables looked on smiling and clapping.
We had just dug into our cake when the music stopped.
“Is there a Dante here?” a rich bass voice boomed into the microphone. “A Dante Dennis, by chance?” Dante’s eyes bugged as Max stood up, pointing at Dante beside him.
“What? It’s not my birthday!” Dante laughed, smacking him on the arm. He was so used to being the party planner that to see him on the receiving end of such celebration made me smile.
“No, but it’s mine and you’re my favorite birthday present.” Max said it matter-of-factly, not saccharine at all, as if this were an everyday occurrence and people always professed their love with a brass band. I looked at Lance from the corner of my eye and couldn’t help but feel a pang of longing. He smiled as we all cheered and whooped for Dante and Max, but I could tell his mind was far away. “By the way,” Max went on, “this is for you.” He handed over a simple blue gift bag. Dante looked confused but took it and peeked inside.
“You’re kidding me,” he said, without even pulling anything out.
“What is it?” I had to ask, leaning to peer into the bag.
Dante reached in and pulled out the gris-gris bag he had made and stashed among Max’s possessions, which Max had apparently discovered, and a voodoo doll made to look like Dante. “Dude, you did a good job on this!” He held the doll, which was the size of his hand, up beside his face.
“It’s cute, Dan!” I smiled.
The trombone player quickly drowned me out, launching the band into the first few notes of “Happy Birthday,” then instantly morphed into a spirited “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And march they did, right over to our table. One of the restaurant hosts placed plastic crowns on Dante’s and Max’s heads and made them stand up; our waiter stepped out waving two green parasols in the air and handed them to the guys. The whole place clapped along, and suddenly everyone at our table was on their feet.
“C’mon!” Connor gestured with a huge wave. “It’s a second line!”
“What?” I asked, over the music.
“That’s what they call it. Ya gotta follow! C’mon!”
Lance looked like he had no intention of going anywhere, but I waved him along. “Gotta follow!” I repeated, tugging on his arm. Led by the band, we all filed out of the restaurant, along with many of the other patrons, and right into the street. As the music blared, everyone in our general vicinity paused to take note of our celebration and several joined in.
“I can’t believe you did all this!” I shouted my praise to Max.
“You only live once!” Max called back with a smile. Dante grabbed his hand, waving it in the air. In their other hands, they bobbed the parasols up and down to the rhythm. We danced along the streets, trailing the brass quintet and picking up more and more revelers as we went. Somehow, as the crowd surged forward, I ended up toward the back of the pack. The group grew so large, with so much jostling and elbowing, that Dante, Lance, and I got separated, like three pieces of driftwood carried off by a river’s current. There was something energizing about being caught in the upheaval and good times. I decided to just soak it all in, the joyfulness, the thrill of this impromptu street party. I couldn’t help but smile.
But then I felt the sting.
I couldn’t place it at first, couldn’t imagine what I must have bumped into. It wasn’t that familiar sensation of my scars flaring up—I had had only a second of that feeling and then it was something much more intense. It felt as if a spot on my back had been sliced through, like a patch of skin had been sharply unzipped and now it was open and crying out to be soothed. I had to stop in my tracks as the crowd flowed around me and moved ahead. I put my hand to my back, feeling blindly for it, and found the wound—blood, sticky and thick, saturating my thin sweater. I felt the scene melting: the muffled music, the falling voices. I drifted, consciousness slipping, slipping, slipping, until darkness descended. But I was still moving, or something, someone, was moving me, pulling me along with it. Everything went dark and numb.
I was out.
A group of faces flashed above me, each more beautiful and terrifying than the one before it. They huddled together, closing in on me. They ranged from the perilously familiar heavies—Wylie and the formidable Clio—to ones more recently indoctrinated but equally feared: that tall brunette Lance and I had watched from the jewelry shop, the blond creature that Jimmy had morphed into. And on the outskirts I made out a pair of leggy blond girls, a couple of buff, brutish athletic guys, and perhaps a dozen of the perfectly symmetrical faces, with their chiseled cheekbones and enviable physiques, I had seen at that bar and, more notably, during the ritual in the cemetery.
I was numb, lying with my cheek to the ground in an alleyway, my body against a brick building. All around me I could still hear the sound of revelry, of that party in the streets. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t even summon the strength to open my mouth or gather enough air in my lungs. Even more horrifically, it dawned on me that because of those blaring horns and that pulsing drumbeat filling every inch of the air, and the roar of the crowd, no one would be able to hear me. The only sensation that registered at all came from my three sets of scars. Especially my right shoulder—that throbbed and raged as though something were trying to rip through my skin and escape.
The faces above me smiled.
“Hiiiii, Haven, we’re so glad to have you joining us tonight. You’ve no idea how we’ve been waiting for this,” Wylie said to me in an eerily sugary voice. “In fact, some of us have been so impatient that we almost took you too soon.” He looked at Clio. She just shrugged, a wild grin taking over her face.
“Can’t blame a girl for tryin’. I just knew we’d have so much fun.” She kneeled down, cooing at me, her cowboy boots in direct line with my eyes.
“I’m sure you remember our dear Clio from your encounters in the cemetery.”
That had been her, locking me in that one evening, trying to pry me off the gate, attacking me from out of nowhere.
“Ahhh, don’t worry. You’re gonna feel so good soon, honey,” Clio said in a soothing voice. “We all have quite a night ahead.” The entire group traded looks with the same hungry eyes.
“Welcome to the Krewe,” Jimmy piped up now, with a smile, reaching out to stroke my hair.
My mind, my vision, my everything went black.
We were racing through the streets now, this pack. Lucian was there too. He reached out and clasped my hand, running with me. The wind whipped my hair and my dress. I felt like I was flying, and had to look down to confirm that my feet were still on the ground. What was I wearing? I hadn’t put on a dress for dinner, but now I wore an outfit resembling Clio’s: short, tight, with a flared miniskirt, and patterned with bursts of color. And stiletto ankle boots�
�the kind I wouldn’t have thought I could walk, much less run, in. It was perfect for this warm night—it felt so much hotter now than it had been when I set out earlier, or was it just my body temperature that had spiked?—and perfect in general if I were a different kind of girl, the kind who knew how to have a good time, who always appeared at ease with herself. Who was afraid of nothing, able to seize anything and anyone she wanted, the girl I sometimes wished I could be. Tonight, for once, I felt comfortable inhabiting this persona. I didn’t quite know how that had happened or why, but it felt good and freeing.
On we ran through the lamplit streets of the French Quarter together, Lucian pulling me off into dark corners to kiss me. He whispered in my ear that he wanted us to be away from the others, on our own, that we could be together. That a world awaited where we had to answer to no one, a world devoid of these divisions or these rules and levels to attain as angels or devils, where we could exist. We could just be. That was all he wanted and dreamed of, and all I had to do was follow him into that realm and we could have that.
I couldn’t get my bearings, though. It looked like we had reached that leafy park, Congo Square, where Dante and I sometimes ate lunch. But then, next thing I knew, we were along the waterfront. Lucian let go of my hand and kept running, disappearing into the distance. Before I could make sense of it, in a blink, I was on one of the steamboats as it cruised the river. Music played as the passengers danced and sipped drinks. My mind felt too slow to process everything bombarding it—the sights and sounds and the wild, thrilling adrenaline that accompanied it. And yet, despite the confusion, it felt as though something had been unlocked, allowed to lift and lighten and let this new brand of freedom in. My soul rose up from somewhere deep within to meet the world, to run wild.
Lucian had yet to return, but this, like everything else right now, didn’t bother me. Clio and Jimmy were sequestered on a bench overlooking the water but paying no mind to the view. She broke away, sidling up beside me as I gazed into the dark harbor with dreamy eyes. I was content to watch it all pass by, living in the moment of it, my mind slowed down to match the easy pace of our boat journey, but my heart and every nerve ending revved up to take it all in—from the sweet, sticky scent of the river air to the wind sweeping through me and the hypnotic ripple of the water below us. My senses and soul worked in overdrive, extracting each ounce of feeling from every second of every minute.
“You know he loves you, don’t you? You’ve got to know,” Clio said wooing me.
“He does?” I didn’t know why we were talking to each other like we were friends. Why wasn’t I afraid of her? But just as quickly I whisked those thoughts away from this landscape, like a bird might swoop down to snap a fish from the water’s surface and fly away all in one smooth movement.
The brunette appeared. “He’s so beautiful and he loves you. Why aren’t you with him?”
“It’s complicated,” I heard myself say.
“Why?” asked the brunette. “You’re seventeen. What needs to be complicated? Because you’re an angel?” The word, spoken by this relative stranger, should have registered as a shock in my heart, but instead it felt no more different than a conversation about the weather or what happened on a favorite TV show. “You’re not really, though. Not yet, anyway. Not completely.”
“You have a long way to go,” Clio offered. “And you probably won’t get there. They don’t tell you how hard that path is. They act like it’s easy, that it’s destiny, meant to be. It’s brutal and the journey there is littered with those who failed.” She paused, smiling in that way that she had to know was a great weapon. “It would be so easy to just go with him. To be in his world instead. Wouldn’t you love that? Wouldn’t that be so much easier than what your life is like now?”
“Do you actually like your life right now?” the brunette asked.
“Now that you’ve already seen some of what it takes to become an angel?” Clio finished the thought. They were on either side of me, each filling my ears with these ideas that sounded so true, as though they had tapped into some very hidden part of my subconscious that never wanted to voice any of these concerns for fear that acknowledging them would ruin what drove me and kept me alive.
“Have you noticed how you have it harder than everyone else? How much more is expected of you? Why is it that way? It seems pretty unfair.”
“When do you get to live? When is it your turn to enjoy the things that others get to do every day instead of being mired in constant worry and dread?”
“Don’t you wish those scars would stop stinging?”
“Things don’t have to be this way. There’s an easier way. A better way.”
“We’re just so excited to have you as part of us. Aren’t you having fun? This is what every night feels like here.”
“I suppose I could get used to this,” I heard myself say and just as instantly I felt betrayed by my own words. I felt a division within myself, a line being drawn, splitting my soul into halves, but I felt powerless to stop it. These words were coming out of my mouth; there was no filter. I was at war within and I couldn’t find the sane me; it was being buried. But it was being buried by bits of truth. I had grown weary of the pressure on me, of following such a difficult path. What I said wasn’t a lie. These were things I felt, even if I tried so hard not to.
Right now was certainly something far better than I’d felt for as long as I could remember. It was invigorating. I felt like my eyes had opened: I hadn’t realized the extent to which this fate of mine, this role forced upon me, weighed on me. I didn’t realize how it infected every cell and muscle and bone and thought and every scrap of my existence. I didn’t grasp the full capacity of that pressure and how frustrated and fearful I had been until the veil was lifted. Yes, I could get used to this. I could even get addicted to this.
I barely had time to put these thoughts together, though, and I was swept up in another mad rush. This night was a near constant whirling, the kind that enlivens every ounce of your being and you don’t want it to end—even if, for some reason, I wasn’t completely aware of what was going on the whole time. It was as if someone had hit shuffle on the night’s events—nothing seemed to unfold in any linear way and huge chunks seemed to go unaccounted for. I had no idea how I got from point A to point B or what other points I might have hit along the way.
I vaguely recalled, for instance, that Lucian and I had been in that haunted house with everyone, and that he and I had made some sort of pact that bonded us together and left me feeling like he did care about me and he did want me and was as drawn to me as I was to him. It had been a revelation. But I just didn’t know any of the details; none of them could quite push to the forefront of my mind, except for the residual joy. The pervading sense of invincibility, power, strength, peace, coursing through me at once, couldn’t have been more all-encompassing or intoxicating. There was a freewheeling, freefalling, otherworldly charge to it all. It took over, wooing the nervous, wary parts of my consciousness that originally set out questioning everything then ended up surrendering. What had I been so afraid of?
The last thing I remember was catching sight of my reflection in a store window as we passed in the wee hours. I brushed the hair out of my face, just as the reflection did. But the reflection wasn’t me. The reflection was of someone else, some sort of ideal: flowing flaxen hair, willowy limbs taking graceful strides as though on a runway, and commanding, sultry eyes. Who was this? Where was I?
27. This Isn’t Even You
I heard the bells first. They were so loud and booming they shook my entire body, echoing in my head like they were pealing from somewhere within me. Then came something at a different pitch—sirens? But I paid that no mind. I felt too at peace for that. It all faded blissfully into the background.
My eyes opened to the smallest slivers, letting in the pale light of the sun just beginning its ascent. The chilly morning air encased me. I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten here, but it didn’t matt
er right now. I wasn’t ready to open my eyes any further, anyway. Why bother? What was the rush? I couldn’t quite move, couldn’t really feel much of anything, except for the sense of pure calm running through me as if I was floating through time and space. All seemed right with the world, like I was experiencing a sweet serenity that had eluded me my whole life so far. And I thought of Lucian. I wished he was here right now. Why did we have to follow any of these rules that kept us from each other? It felt so absurd. It seemed so clear that we should be together. Where was he? Where was I? I had no idea where I had been, who I’d been with, what I’d been doing. I was only aware of this sort of nirvana. I wanted more of it. I drifted, letting my eyes fully close again.
The bells. Those bells again. Make them stop, I thought. What were they? Why were they so loud? They made my body tremble and my eardrums feel as though they might burst. Finally, I pried my lids open against the burning sun. It blinded me, so that I couldn’t see anything at first but a white flash. Then objects began to take shape: someone on a horse, frozen in time, somewhere below me; leafy trees rustling in the chilly breeze; and straight ahead, sky, clear out to the river. I sat up, jittery, unsteady. My head throbbed, my muscles ached, and my bones felt like they’d been mangled in a grinder. But my legs felt free, loose. I looked out again. I was on the level with the clouds. I looked down and then my breath stopped. I knew that man on the horse—that was Andrew Jackson. Below me was Jackson Square. Below me.
My heart lurched. I sat on a ledge, my legs dangling in the air, nothing fencing me in. I could easily just keel right over onto the pavement below. Had I slept here? I could have killed myself simply by rolling over. I gripped the edge with my sweaty hands. The bells stopped. I tried to take a deep breath but it came jaggedly, making me cough. I had to get off this ledge, but how? I felt paralyzed, scared to move, and yet my heart jumped out of my chest, pulsing so hard and fast I thought that alone could propel me from this spot. I was sweating, shaking, hot and cold. I couldn’t look down again. So instead, I looked up. Just above me, stretching into the stratosphere was the central steeple of St. Louis Cathedral. But . . . how?
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