The 13th Sign

by Tubb, Kristin O' Donnell

  I spun around.

  A small pair, apparently brother and sister, held hands behind me. They were identical to the cherubs in the mural above. Plump, rosy-cheeked. Blond corkscrew curls. Eyelashes for days, tears hanging like gems off the lashes of the little girl. I had to glance back up to the painting to double-check that the cherubs were still up there. They were.

  “We need to find our home,” the little boy said in a crisp British accent. “I believe you can help us?” His voice wavered at the end, betraying his fear.

  I bit the inside of my cheek. Ellie, Brennan, and I had spent far too long in this cathedral already.

  The little girl blinked. A diamond tear slid down her cheek. I couldn’t leave them here. And leaving them with that priest didn’t seem like a good idea; they were so scared already. I sighed and squatted beside them.

  “Where are your parents?” I asked.

  The boy shook his head, the girl’s curls trembled.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s look for them.” I took each one by the hand. Brennan and Ellie followed. We led them around the Cathedral, whispering to groups of adults, “Excuse me, do you know where their parents are?”

  One gruff guy looked at me, then at Brennan. “They’re old enough to find their own parents.”

  The girl sobbed at that, and I kneeled to give her a hug.

  “Two there!” came a voice.

  I looked over the toddler’s shoulder to see the man from the bus stop shuffling toward us, the one who’d helped us with food and clothes. Oh, what was his name? Being bad with names really stank.

  “Henry!” Ellie said.

  “Two there,” Henry answered. “Two!”

  I nodded. “Only one Ellie now. We’re looking for these kids’ parents. Can you help us?”

  Henry shook his head violently. “No, no, no…”

  “Okay, you don’t have to help—”

  “No kids. Fish.”

  That was all it took. The two children turned wavery, watery, dissolving into mist. The gingham checks on their matching blue-and-green jumpers turned slick and slimy, morphing into gray, spotted skin. Golden ringlets of hair stiffened into fluttering gills, thickened into whiskery barbels. Wide pairs of eyes glassed over, bulged out, then slowly shifted to the sides of their heads. Their cheeks hollowed, flattened, drew forward. Their skin bubbled and gurgled, making sucking noises like rubber boots stuck in the mud. The duo collapsed on the floor of the cathedral and convulsed.

  “Pisces,” I said through the clearing mist. The pair of Louisiana catfish flopped and thrashed, agreeing with me.

  Brennan wasted no time. He scooped up one of the huge, writhing catfish. “They were looking for their home. The river. Let’s go!”

  He turned toward the exit. I tried to pick up the other fish, the one that had once been a crying little girl. She writhed, bucking and hopping over the cathedral floor. Her catfish skin was slick, not scaly at all, and picking her up was like trying to pick up a twenty-pound glob of Vaseline. The other tourists in the cathedral were shooting me funny looks. That priest would be back here any second.

  Finally, I wrestled the fish into a sideways position and carried it like a sack of potatoes. A strong, squirming sack of potatoes. The Mississippi River was near.

  “You coming, Henry?” I asked the man.

  “No, no, no!” Henry whipped his hair around, he shook his head so hard.

  “Okay, Henry. Okay.”

  We hustled back through the massive wooden doors and into the twilight falling on Jackson Square, my arms aching from the strain. The statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback threw long shadows across the park.

  Ellie caught up with me, breathless. “Sorry,” she said. “I found the entry for Pisces.” She ran next to me with the open copy of The Keypers of the Zodiack and huffed out the words.

  “‘Pisces, the fish. March 12–April 18. No soul places more trust in humanity than thou, dost Pisces. This allows for an intuition as deep as the seas, but leads to illogical, sentimental decisions. Thou art adaptable, however, so when thy self-pity crests—which it always does—swim deep in solitude and take comfort in thy heartfelt spirituality. Thou art perceptive, compassionate, and tolerant, which can make others cast their hooks at thee, seeking an easy catch. That which is easiest is not always best, Pisces.’”

  We ducked between art vendors, palm readers, and horse-drawn carriages to reach Decatur, the busy street between the cathedral and the river. Halfway across the intersection, the fish in my hands thrashed, slicing a deep gash across my left wrist with its gills, cutting me like a dull, jagged knife. I winced and dropped the fish. The catfish thumped to the ground. It flopped on the sun-warmed pavement, gasping for breath. I didn’t have much time to get these fish home.

  I bent to pick up the heavy, hopping fish, and heard a shrill screech followed by a horn blast. I looked up and saw my own reflection in the shiny chrome bumper of a taxi cab, inches from my face. I breathed a gasp and left a cloud on the chrome. “Move outta the way!” the driver yelled.

  Picking up the bucking beast after it flailed on the dirty road was no easy task. Ellie grabbed the tail of the fish and motioned for me to get the head. Together, we carried the fish the rest of the way across the highway, over three sets of railroad tracks and toward the riverfront.

  “No, no, no,” Henry mumbled, scuffling up beside us.

  “Henry, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Ellie said.

  “No, no, no!”

  Brennan was waiting for us at the riverside. The shore here was steep with jagged rocks. “I didn’t know if we needed to toss them in together, or what,” he said, still wrestling with his fish. We lined up beside each other on the riverbank. “On three,” Brennan said, lifting his chin at the muddy water.

  “No, no, no!” Henry grew more insistent.

  “One,” Brennan said. Ellie and I swung our fish backward. My stomach tightened suddenly. That which is easiest is not always best.

  “Two.” The increasing count made my pulse race. This wasn’t right. Henry knew it. My gut knew it. And no one knows to trust instincts more than a Pisces.

  “Three!”

  “Wait!” I dropped my end of the fish and tackled Brennan and his fish. We tumbled and rolled across a few of those jagged rocks, a slick catfish squishing between us.

  “Jalen!” Brennan said my name like a curse word. It felt like a knife.

  “This isn’t right.” I hopped up and offered Brennan my hand. The fish flopped dangerously close to the wall of rocks leading down to the river. If it fell in from here, there would be no getting it back. Climbing down those rocks would be like climbing through a barbed-wire obstacle course.

  “This—the river. This isn’t their home,” I said.

  The fish Brennan had carried flopped two, then three more times. His body weight flumped down the rocky hill. I dived for the catfish, catching him by the slick tail. This fish was bigger than the other, weighing at least thirty pounds. Brennan, thankfully, caught me and dragged us both onto solid ground.

  The catfish lay on the ground next to me. Both of us panted.

  “Fish for fish,” Henry said. He’d stopped me from throwing these fish in the river, thank goodness, but now he was telling me to fish for them? “Fish for fish.” Henry gave me a thumbs-up, waggling his thumbs.

  Ah, yes! It would be easier to catch this bottom sucker with a little noodling than try to pick him up again.

  I stuck my thumb in front of his twitching whiskers and wriggled it, waiting for the pain. His jaw clamped down on my thumb like a wrench made of sandpaper. Once I felt the sting, I pulled with all my might and hugged the fish against my chest with my other arm. I stood with my catch. The catfish stopped thrashing and concentrated on trying to twist my thumb off.

  “Whoa!” Brennan said with a half grin. “Where’d you learn how to noodle?”

  I shrugged. “My dad was the best fisherman around.” It felt good, remembering him like tha
t, without a painful stab punctuating the end of the memory.

  The other catfish, still laying on the riverbank, was no longer flopping. Its gills fluttered, trying to breathe. It gave a halfhearted flip of its tail fin.

  “We have to go,” I said. “We don’t have much time.” I carried the fish I caught with help from Henry.

  Brennan picked up the dying fish, and Ellie grabbed its tail. “Which way?” he asked.

  I looked around for the nearest, highest point. A point that would give us enough height to send Pisces home. The spires of the cathedral, covered with silvery tiles that looked like fish scales, glinted.

  “There,” I said. “We have to go back.”

  We shuffled and hauled and scooted back across the railroad tracks, back across Decatur Street, back across Jackson Square.

  The middle steeple of Saint Louis Cathedral held the clock. The smaller steeples had window-like openings on each side of their spires, I guessed for the bells. “There has to be a way to get up there,” I said.

  “There is,” Brennan answered. We entered the narthex of the church again but turned immediately right, passing through a small, almost-hidden latticework doorway to a tight flight of spiral stairs.

  “How did you know this was here?” Ellie huffed.

  “Boy Scout trip,” Brennan panted back.

  I smiled. I could totally see After Brennan as a Boy Scout, but Before Brennan? Surprising.

  My arms strained and my breath came in short puffs as we wound up and up and up the stairs to the top of the spire. The space grew smaller, tighter, hotter, and soon we could hear the clicking gears of the clock tower. Henry had to shuffle through the stairwell sideways. At last, we reached one of the shuttered window openings, and it swung open easily. I thought back to last night, when I’d leaned out of my own attic and unlocked Ophiuchus. When I’d had no instincts or gut reactions or beliefs whatsoever.

  My thumb was raw and bloody from catfish teeth, but I managed to shove the huge fish through the small window. Brennan stood next to me, holding the other fish five stories above New Orleans.

  “Do you think this is what Pisces meant?” Brennan asked. “About going home?”

  I took a deep breath. “I hope so.”

  And then I let go. As I watched the fish plummet, I realized why people believe in things like heaven and astrology and higher powers. They believed in them because it was comforting to have order, to have a promise about the future, to categorize and make sense of our differences. They believed in them to feel connected—to the universe, to the cosmos, to each other—in some complex master plan. They believed because sometimes you just felt what was right and what was wrong, and there was simply no other way to explain any of it.

  But the fish kept falling. I held my breath. Wasn’t this what Pisces meant—going home? To the heavens? My instinct had told me to find a high spot, release them, and watch them fly home. But the fish kept falling.

  And when the fish were inches, mere inches from the flagstone pavers so far below, a blue aquamarine birthstone thumped to the floor at my feet. I scooped up the stone and chanted, “Sic itur ad astra.” The two fish illuminated and swam into the skies, swirling and twirling and twining into the heavens on their way home.

  Believing doesn’t mean having all the answers—just the opposite. Believing is having none of the answers and going forward anyway.

  “Smart and strong, like her daddy,” Henry said. “Like her daddy.”

  Then he turned and said again, earnestly, “Two there.”

  We said good-bye to Henry—he refused to come along any further, and I didn’t blame him. I interpreted his mumbling to mean that he’d done this once before, with my dad. And he either didn’t want to answer my questions, or he couldn’t. So he gave each of us a smelly, gritty hug and pushed us on our way, telling us, “Two there,” as a good-bye.

  The black Lincoln slid down Decatur Street when we left Saint Louis Cathedral. We ran a few blocks west and hopped on the Saint Charles streetcar, which was thankfully at the stop. Ellie took deep breaths and closed her eyes, falling into a narrow wooden seat. Brennan and I each took a seat to ourselves, across the aisle from one another. The streetcar dinged its bell and moved forward, grumbling and jerking along steel tracks embedded in the streets of New Orleans.

  My knees bounced and my eyes flittered from face to face, trying to decide which, if any, of our fellow passengers might be the last to attack and how. We had one battle left to fight: Aquarius. Would it be the driver, who hummed Zydeco tunes while he cranked the streetcar levers? Or the weary businessman, whose crooked necktie told of his already awful day? Or the mom bouncing the chubby toddler on her knee, or the toddler herself? Brennan reached over and cupped my knee in his hand. I suddenly remembered those scorpion stings, and how I hadn’t felt them again until now. I cringed but nodded at Brennan. My knee stopped bouncing.

  I leaned my head against the cool glass. It was about 7:30 p.m. We had one hour to go and one Keeper to meet. I prayed it was enough time. The streetcar clattered toward the Garden District, where the frilly Victorian homes looked like gingerbread houses trimmed in lace and icing.

  My eyes were looking into the skies, up at the first stars melting into the early evening. There were more stars this evening than there were last night. That’s why I didn’t notice the water.

  “Jalen!” Ellie breathed. She spun in her seat. “Look!”

  Ellie had managed to keep her mind out of the clouds. She pointed to the sewer grates under the sidewalks; they were overflowing with water.

  No, not just overflowing. They were spewing hundreds of gallons of water into the streets, over the roads and sidewalks and streetcar tracks. Panic rose, mixed with orange anger. New Orleans has a long history with rising water.

  “The water bearer,” Ellie said, fishing The Keypers of the Zodiack from her bag. “Aquarius.”

  “‘Aquarius, the water bearer. February 16–March 11. To thou, Aquarius, uniqueness equates power. Thou art therefore highly focused on becoming as fresh and unpredictable as the rains. Be warned, however, that although thou strivest to be creative and visionary, many find thy originality to be moody rebelliousness, like that of a storm. And whilst thou takest pride in thy pursuits of the mind, thou oft forget the pursuits of the heart. This leads others to think of thee as chilly and impersonal. Thine insecurities art well-masked by thy strong, attractive personality. Because of this, thou art a master of deception.’”

  I pressed my sweaty hands against the glass and stared at the water inching upward. Everyone else seemed oblivious to the water they were driving through in the streets, wading through on the sidewalks. Could it hurt them if they couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it? I couldn’t wait around to find out if Aquarius intended on harming all these people.

  “We have to get off,” I said. We pulled the wire overhead, the buzzer sounded, and the driver splashed to a halt in half a foot of rushing water.

  “Have a great evening!” he sang. Brennan hesitantly hopped off the streetcar, over the current.

  Ellie glared at the driver with knife-like eyes and jumped.

  We landed with a splash near Lee Circle. We sloshed across the street and waded up the sidewalk. My panic level rose as the swirling, foaming water inched toward my knees, over a foot deep now, deep enough to sweep over small dogs. A nest of swamp rats burped out of a sewer grate, their orange eyes flashing as they tumbled by us on the current, hissing and cussing. The spring rains sometimes caused water to rise like this, and it was dangerous. My skin turned clammy.

  “Who’s doing this? Where’s it coming from?” I asked, whipping about on the sidewalk, splashing and sloshing. I was high-stepping, trying to keep my balance in the never-ceasing rush of water. The floodwaters were dirty gray and smelled like sewage. Ellie held her messenger bag up near hunched shoulders, trying in vain to keep it dry. Brennan breathed in shallow pants. He was panicking in all this swirling, rising water. A nearby kid smirked and poin
ted at us, laughing with his friends. I could only imagine what we looked like to him, splashing and stepping through an invisible tide.

  The water did nothing to douse my anger. “Aquarius!” I shouted over the roar of the blast. I hurled myself through water that now gushed over my knees. It took every bit of my effort, like walking against a river’s current. “Don’t be a coward! Show yourself!” The group of kids howled with laughter at that, and a few people on the sidewalk shuffled past me a little too quickly, giving me a little too much room when passing by. They hadn’t handled the book; they couldn’t see all this water that was causing my struggle.

  A cackle drifted over the roar of rushing water. I spun and locked eyes with an old dark-haired woman peering out from beneath a red shawl. She hunched on a stool a few doors down, sitting outside a tiny restaurant. A wooden sign swung overhead, AGE OF AQUARIUS.

  It was her! Aquarius stirred a pot of gumbo in a huge clay pot over an open flame. My eyes narrowed on her, her pot. Every time she stirred the pot, the water swelled.

  My stomach gripped like a fist, watching her whip the waters around us. The water bearer, Aquarius, was human. Sure, all the signs had started out that way, but they’d changed into the forms of their constellations. The constellation Aquarius was a woman and her water pot. She wouldn’t change.

  I’d not battled a human yet, at least not directly. I’d fought animals of all shapes and sizes and numbers, and I’d had a hard enough time battling them. But Aquarius wouldn’t morph into some gristly beast; no, she’d remain a woman. There was no way I could hurt a woman, even knowing she would rise to the skies. Seeing what could have been Ellie, choking and writhing in pain…no. I couldn’t do it.

  She flipped her wooden spoon in the thick stew, and the water swelled again. A wave splashed my chest. I scanned the area where we’d hopped off the streetcar; the water was almost to the nostrils of a child passing by in a stroller. I’d have to gather my gumption—now.