“What the fuck?” he whispered.
Because it was all wrong.
The wind hit him, making him stagger, and the rain pelted his face. He raised his hands to protect his eyes as he took two steps out into the street. The moonlight had gone away. The storm howled along the street, tugging at shutters. Trash skittered in the wind, flapping down the sidewalk.
A gust pushed at him again.
“This isn't it,” he said quietly, and then his voice rose to match the roar of the storm. “This isn't the right time. This isn't it!”
The night he'd walked in on Gabrielle and Joe Noone had been months before Hurricane Katrina. But here was the storm. Dark as it was, it might only be hours before landfall. Right now, at this moment, she would be up in her attic, waiting and hoping for the storm to kill her so she would not have to face the evil she'd done, the person she'd become.
“You fucker!” he screamed into the storm, turning back toward Cooper's.
The old sign still hung there. But the door was boarded over now, the façade covered with wood and nailed down tight. The words WE SHOOT LOOTERS had already been spray-painted across the boarding. The Cooper boys weren't taking any chances. The only thing missing was the brown tidal line, but that would be here soon enough.
The worst had already happened. Gabrielle had given up her soul to Seddicus. She'd murdered Joe Noone. After all Max had been through, Ray's conjuring had fucked him again. He had arrived too late to save Gabrielle from herself.
But if he hurried, there was still time to save her from Katrina.
chapter
17
This time it was real. The Katrina-battered street knew that Max was here. Wind howled around him, rain sliced through the air to sting his exposed skin, and he could feel a rumble through the ground, like the approach of something terrible. But it was when two men struggled past him along the street that he knew this was not just another Moment. Because they both looked at him, and one of them grinned. The man shouted something that sounded like, “Here we go again!” and then they were gone, arms around each other's shoulders to help move along the road.
Max started after them. There was an urgency in him, inspired by both the incoming storm and the sense that his time here was not without limit. Perhaps it would be dictated by the strength of the drink Ray had given him, or maybe his accumulated magical aura would determine exactly how long he could live this moment again. Am I reliving it, or is it reliving me? he thought, confused and terrified at what this meant for time, and existence, and everything he had ever known.
Viewing the Moments had been like witnessing the past, and he had been unable to influence what he saw. Here, when he placed one foot in front of another, he was changing events with every motion, every heartbeat. The man who had just grinned at him had been at this point before, and that time Max had not been here for him to smile at. How could that affect the future? How much could it change the past? He knew the saying about a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane. Well, here he was in the path of one of the greatest storms known, and he had no wish to be a butterfly at its mercy.
Time.
Ticking away, for him, and for Gabrielle.
Max started running.
This was a very different New Orleans from the one he had been immersed in for the past few days, yet there were striking portents of the tragedy to come. Many businesses and homes had been boarded up, and some of this temporary protection would remain for months to come. Several homes had small boats already moored in their dry yards, tied to the buildings or stakes in the ground with long ropes, ready for the water. And more than once Max saw the glare of lights behind drawn shutters, evidence of those who had been unwilling or unable to leave. He wondered how many of them would die tomorrow.
And then he wondered if he could die here, and the answer came back fast, obvious, and terrifying.
As he jogged, he tried to figure out in his mind the quickest route to the house in Lakeview. Frustratingly, after days of staring at maps of the city, he could not conjure an image of the New Orleans streets, so he simply headed west, knowing he would have to traverse City Park to reach Gabrielle's neighborhood.
A lot of people were just leaving, finally realizing that the Big Easy wasn't going to skate by this time. On the main roads there were cars jammed with evacuees, and trucks piled high with what some seemed to value: suitcases; furniture; bedding; boxes of food. In a couple of trucks, Max saw someone quite literally riding shotgun in the passenger seat, the barrel of their weapon on display. Go into a disaster with that mind-set, come out the other side the same, he thought. But he berated himself for being so judgmental; this was not his city, and this had never been his disaster.
It is now. Maybe it already was. I wasn't even here and it ruined me.
Somehow, though, the terrible wind and rain seemed to partition him from the New Orleans he had known. Filled with panic and held breath, raging with storm, this was a strange place to him, almost as strange as the ruined city to which he had returned just days ago.
Max ran, slipped, fell, and rose without slowing, propelling himself forward. His heart beat in time with some internal clock. He tried peering through the rain, hoping to see some clock tower or a bank building with a digital sign. How much time did he have? How long before Gabrielle's lungs filled with water?
Goddamn you, Ray. You old bastard. Goddamn you.
Think, Max.
In the midst of the maelstrom, it would be so dark that it would be difficult to tell what time of day or night it might be. But shutters weren't tearing off, signs weren't pinwheeling across the street. Katrina hadn't yet made landfall. What he raced through now was just the first flirtation of storm and city.
He tried to remember. Landfall would be right around dawn. And then the flooding would start, first breaching the levees off the Intracoastal Waterway into New Orleans east, then battering down parts of the levees to flood the Ninth Ward, Bywater, Chalmette …so many neighborhoods.
Focus. Why didn't this matter before? They aren't just details, they're people's lives.
Maybe two hours after landfall, Lake Pontchartrain would be so pregnant with the storm surge that it would overtop the floodwalls. And that would be it for City Park, Gentilly, and other northside neighborhoods.
So how long until the 17th Street Canal floodwall failed, and a tidal wave swept through Lakeview? How long until the water filled Gabrielle's house and rose up into the attic? Three, maybe four hours after dawn?
But when was dawn?
Max let out a scream of frustration, lost in the howl of wind and rain, and ran on. His chest burned, his muscles ached. His clothes were soaked through and his hair was plastered to his scalp. He reached City Park and started through, shocked at how different it looked from the last time he had seen it. Old oaks bent and creaked, but at least they were still standing. Grasses danced as the wind made exotic patterns across the ground, and soon they would be smothered with water and muck. Trees that had stood for hundreds of years vainly swayed and bent to the whim of the wind …but soon, they would fall.
Nothing, he realized, lasts forever.
Immortality was a lie.
Ray was dying. Old and powerful though he might be, and ruthless in his manipulations of lesser mortals, he was fading. And this storm had snatched his last hope for leaving an enduring legacy behind: Gabrielle. Like one of those old oaks, Ray could rage against the storm, but there were never any guarantees.
Max felt a weight of responsibility crushing him down, and he did not want to become a part of the mud. I could die here, he thought, still coming to grips with the reality of it. This place where he had never been, this tragedy he had never seen, could become his grave. Yet there was something incredibly potent about such a possibility, and for a moment he realized just what Ray must feel.
“I don't want the power!” he shouted, but his voice was lost to the wind, and the only thing that heard was Katrina.
Landry Street, Lakeview. He wanted to smash down each door, shout at anyone left behind that they had to leave, flee, abandon the city to its terrible fate. And he tried, knocking at one door several houses away from Gabrielle's aunt's house. A frightened old man opened his front door on a chain and Max started screaming at him.
The man slammed the door in his face, and Max tried to remember what he had seen of this house after the storm. But his memories were no longer clear. His mind, buoyed though it was with magic, was not well suited to what it had been through, and what it was still going through now. Perhaps this juggling with time would affect his memories and perceptions …but perhaps, also, he would never know. What would he remember? What, God help him, would he forget?
At last, he stood before Gabrielle's aunt's house. The last time he had been here, it was a ruin, with 1 IN ATTIC spray-painted across the dormer. He was here now to ensure that message was never left.
There were no lights, and he could see no sign of anyone being inside.
As he mounted the steps the storm seemed to shift up a notch. A sheet of corrugated iron flipped along the street, scoring the road and smashing a car windshield as it sailed by. Water gushed along gutters, carrying litter down into the sewers. Rain dashed horizontally, and in the distance Max heard a sound like a siren, rising and falling and casting its doom-laden notes across this condemned city.
Nature angry at his interference, perhaps.
He tried the door, found it open, and entered without knocking.
Max climbed the staircase, then and now and on a day yet to come, simultaneously, as though he existed in this place in all of those moments at once. The first time, Gabrielle had been leading him by the hand, smiling back down at him, her smile so gorgeous that he had been looking at that instead of her naked behind. The second time he had gone alone, because Gabrielle had promised that she would be waiting for him up there. True to her promise, she had, with a bottle of wine, and a hundred candles turning the attic into a golden dream. Several times after that blurred into one, all ending in the same passionate, sweaty embrace on the wooden floor. And the last time …when he had walked in on Gabrielle astride…
Joe Noone.
The name conjured images Max wished he could forget.
He walked slowly up the staircase, his progress masked by the sounds of Katrina's fury. As he reached the narrow door at the top and gripped the knob, he wondered if this would be the final time he ascended these stairs. He looked around at the shadows, searching for observers from past, present, or future, but he saw or sensed no one.
Alone, he opened the door.
Gabrielle sat on a mess of blankets piled on the floor. An empty wine bottle stood beside her, and another, half-full, was cupped in her hands. The attic was lit unevenly by a dozen fat, squat candles, and shadows danced around her. She was fully dressed in shapeless clothes that seemed to match what she had become—a shape where a woman had been. Though the hands around the bottle's neck seemed clean, Max saw them stained with Joe Noone's blood. He'd never be able to look at her again and not see those stains.
“Hello, Gabrielle,” Max said.
Her eyes opened wide, then wider still when she saw him, and she let out a small, strangled cry.
He'd thought he might cry, that his heart would swell with hope. He'd sacrificed everything he had believed about the world to reach this moment, given up his own past and perhaps his future just to stand here, to be able to reach out and try to reclaim the happiness she'd stolen from him. Perhaps even the love she'd thrown away. At the very least, her life.
But the woman before him was broken and empty. He had seen what she had done, and felt a dreadful certainty that no matter what havoc magic wreaked on his memory after this, the sight of her plunging a blade into Joe Noone was something he would never be able to forget.
He silently cursed Ray yet again. Why couldn't you even give us a chance?
“You went back to Boston!” Gabrielle gasped. Candle flames flickered and swayed, and the shadows seemed alive. “I made sure.”
“I did,” Max said. “But I had to come back.”
“Why?”
“For your funeral.”
“Max…” Her eyes sparkled with panic, and she looked past his shoulder at the dark staircase behind him.
“Don't worry, I'm alone. The Tordu don't even know I'm here.”
She gasped. “You know about …?”
“Coco? Mireault? The Tordu? Seddicus?” He saw her shiver as he uttered the demonic name, and for a beat he almost went to hold her. But this was an empty woman before him, someone who had already given her soul to the demon in return for …what? Power? If what Ray said was true, yes. But here she sat, more powerful than any normal person in New Orleans, yet still readying herself to die.
“You left,” she said. “I sent you away so you didn't have to know any of that.”
Frozen, he couldn't approach her. His hands ached to touch her but he stopped himself. Anguish stabbed him, twisted.
“What do you think is going to happen, Gabrielle?” he said, shouting to be heard over the howl of the wind and the trembling of the house. “You're going to die in the morning. And then Corinne will call me, and I won't be able to stay away—”
“You were supposed to—”
“I can't. You know I can't! So when Corinne calls, I'll come, and I'll find out everything. What you did, and what you gave up.”
“Why?” she screamed, voice matching the cry of the storm.
“Because…” Because I love you? If he said that, would it mean anything to her now? To this soulless girl with blood on her hands? “Because Ray tells me,” he said instead.
Gabrielle glanced away at the mention of the Oracle's name, but he could also see understanding in her eyes.
“What'll happen if you're both gone? You're betraying him if you let yourself die.”
“He betrayed me!” she spat. “He destroyed me! Said because I didn't have the same magic in my blood that he did, the only way to be strong enough was to be empty, soulless, like them. Ray said I had to be able to use all kinds of magic if I was gonna fight them. He allowed Coco to take me from him, turn me into what it is those sick bastards are, and I had to…” A single tear dribbled down her cheek, and she touched it as though surprised.
“He betrayed me, too,” Max whispered, realizing at last that this was always the moment Ray had intended returning him to. The bastard had wanted her to be tainted by the Tordu's dark magic, and he couldn't afford to let Max rescue her before she had given up her soul.
“I had to…” Gabrielle looked at her hand, fisted around the shaft of an invisible knife.
And then Max couldn't help it. To hell with the stakes, with what it meant for Ray or Gabrielle or the city of New Orleans. For just a moment all of his illusions about his motivations slipped and the only thing that mattered was what she'd done to him.
“Joe Noone,” he said. “I saw what you did.” He closed his eyes, and what Gabrielle said next could have come from the mouth of the woman he had loved.
“Better him than you.”
“Why would Ray let you do that?” Max asked, shaking his head. “If you've given up your soul, how could he think you wouldn't really be tainted, that you wouldn't just hand the city over to Mireault?”
Gaby wiped away her tears, staring at the dampness on her fingers. “When Ray dies, I'll be the Oracle. I'll have the soul of the city in me. I guess he figured that would be enough. But in between, after what I did, what I gave up …I'm in Hell, Max. Maybe I'd feel different if I were the Oracle, but why would the city want me now? Like this?”
Her despair tore at him. This was what Ray had done, manipulated her into murder and ruin and black magic, and if he had some greater plan for her, full of hope, in her current state she could not believe in it.
Max opened his eyes and leaned against a support beam. “You die in here. Katrina's worse than anyone predicted. The lake surges, the levees break
, thousands die. You're just one of them. They leave you up here for weeks, even though someone sprays a message.” He stepped forward and tapped the dormer cheek. “Outside. It says 1 in attic. That's you, Gabrielle. One in attic. You die alone.”
“It's what I deserve,” she whispered, surrendering, drinking more wine. Abruptly she turned to focus on Max, as if seeing him for the first time. “What time of year is it where you are?”
He shook his head, threw his hands open. “I'm here. Right here!”
She smiled through her tears. “For a moment.”
So she understood. Of course she did. Ray had taught her well. The conjure-man Matrisse. How strange to think that when Max had first met her, all he'd seen had been a nineteen-year-old girl, and already she had been one of the most powerful people in New Orleans.
“It's November,” he said, barely able to hear himself over the storm. “Your body's in the ground. The city's a disaster. The government isn't doing shit. The people are on their own.”
“They always are,” Gabrielle said.
Max stared at her, thinking back, now, to their first meeting. She'd walked in this shadow world that ordinary people could never see, knew ancient secrets that would shake the world. And finally, he thought he understood.
“Is it because I was normal?” he asked. “Is that why you fell in love with me?”
“Love?” she asked, and for a beat he was terrified that she was about to laugh. How that would change things. How that would knock out of shape everything he thought he understood. But instead she looked at him, her eyes now dry, and a great sadness exuded from her. “Max, I can't remember what that means anymore.”
“But you did,” he says. “And I still do.”
“Even after everything?”
“What Ray did to me …I saw you kill Joe Noone!”
Gabrielle turned her eyes away.
“It repulsed me,” Max said. His voice was low. Over the storm, neither of them should have been able to hear the words, but they were strangely loud. “But I know why you did it, and I can only begin to imagine what it cost you, what you gave up for me…” He shook his head, and the house creaked and groaned as the gale strove to tear it away. “I've tried telling myself I can't love you, but it isn't that simple.
The Map of Moments Page 27
