My heart was beating, but now was not the time to break character, so I forced a smile. “I suppose no one knows the Gates of Guinee are really the entrances to Paths either.”
“Not just any Paths, but I think you know that already. Your transcripts said you were bright, but that’s not the reason I expedited your transfer to Westover Academy. I expect you know that too.”
“You brought me here for this spell.”
She tossed a long black braid of hair over one shoulder. “You weren’t even trying to conceal your digital footprint. When I saw you nosing around the Darknet looking for a witch-friendly school, it was easy to create a few false online identities to push you this way. I’d already heard about the Crone and her role in Arthur’s rising. I put two and two together and figured it was a safe bet that you were her heir. Now there were finally enough powerful witches within my grasp to give me what I wanted.”
Something didn’t quite add up. “When Morgause warned the White Lady that someone was looking for the bones of three witches, you already had three witches right here in New Orleans.”
Her eyes narrowed into slits, green gleaming through her lids. “As if the Seer of New York cares about what happens to a few witches! She was just sticking her delicate little nose down here because she wants the same thing I do.”
“So why did you need me to come to New Orleans?”
“Why did I need you? I’ll let you in on a well-kept secret—Adelaide wasn’t a witch. The fearsome Queen of New Orleans Voodoo was a fraud. All the magic of her line went to her nephew. He should have been the first Voodoo King in a hundred years, but instead, Adelaide used him to create the illusion of having power.”
I picked a smile that said I was confident and not the least bit frightened. “So Michel is the Voodoo King and you’re Li Grand Zombi.”
Claire moved towards me in a strange, slinking motion. “Not exactly. The title is masculine, not feminine. My great-grandfather served Marie Laveau as a symbol of Dhamballa incarnate. He was her loyal assassin. He even allowed her to bind him and all his descendants as eternal servants to each Voodoo Queen. I suppose the Crone taught you that the wording of spells must be painfully exact. Even though she had no power, Adelaide was still the Voodoo Queen, and I was bound to her until her death released me.”
“So you killed her.”
Her smile was almost a caricature of evil. “I couldn’t. The binding would never have let me.” She gestured and Michel stepped out of the shadow of a tomb.
I felt sick. “You killed her? You did . . .” I couldn’t speak of the brutality of it. “You did that to your own aunt?”
Michel shook his head. “It was quick. I would never have made her suffer. I couldn’t tell how powerful you were, and you slipped me by taking Ava to Morgause’s people. I didn’t want to tangle with Bel, so I left the mess to convince you that Li Grand Zombi had the third set of bones. I knew you would come, even if only to help Ava, and I’d heard enough about Bel to expect you would come alone.”
Remembering the surprised look that Chloe gave Bel when he offered to help, I wondered if Michel was right.
“And the White Lady? It was a good act, Michel. I really believed you were as shocked as I was.”
He glanced at Claire before answering. “I was. It was the first time I’d ever seen . . .” He swallowed. “It was a terrible thing, but it had to be done. All of it.”
“Why?”
Claire gestured impatiently, but Michel seemed to want me to understand. “It wasn’t fair. I had the power, but I was forced to pretend I was Adelaide’s clerk, her personal chef, her errand boy! My own mother convinced me that New Orleans would never accept a Voodoo King. I used my magic to prop up Adelaide’s reign and accepted it as my family duty until I saw how she treated Claire, how she turned a magnificent creature into a killer for hire. I couldn’t bear it. I had to free her.” Claire reached for him and he took her hand.
“You jerk!”
He looked at me in surprise. “What?”
“You made Ava think you liked her!”
The bokur laughed. “You and the girl are children to those of my kind.”
Claire pulled her hand away, frowning. “What is she talking about?”
Michel shrugged. “It’s nothing, chère. I just pretended to be attracted to the girl to get closer to her. She’s strong; she had to be neutralized before we advanced on the Maiden.”
While their attention was on one another, I pulled the harp out and brushed my hand against the strings.
The harp of Binnorie sings with the voice of a drowned girl trapped in an instrument made from her body. It sang my name once and made me its keeper, but this time, the harp communicated to me in a wave of pure thought. My own thoughts were corrupted by the disease of my OCD. When the harp entered my mind, I was healed. I had no memory of actual words, but when the harp was done, I knew the truth.
“You made a deal,” I whispered.
When she turned to stare at me, the look on Claire’s face was naked, suffering. Without warning, her skin rippled, and the impression of scales stood out in relief on her body. “I can’t control it anymore. It takes over and I have no choice; I have to obey. I become a thing, not a person. Even now that Adelaide’s dead, her supporters are gathering. They’ll keep turning me into a monster against my will until the day I die! The Gates—the Paths—have a leeching effect on my power. Here I’m less of a slave to the creature inside.” She turned and touched Michel’s face gently. “Here I fell in love.” He cupped her hand with his own, but she sighed and pulled away. When she looked back at me, her pupils were long and narrow.
“It was also here that Merlin appeared to me. I knew him as Baron Samedi, and it took a long time for me to trust him, to believe his promise to free me from the curse of my power if I freed him from his exile. He was the one who told me how to remove the protection spell on Marie Laveau’s tomb. I’m bound by all the queens, even the dead ones, so I offered the vampire an unlimited supply of victims if he would paint over the witch marks on the tomb and break the spell.”
“Is that why you sent him to kill me? To get my bones for you?”
The woman shrugged, powerful muscles running under her shoulders. “The vampire was a lurker. He must have heard me talking about you with Merlin and decided to go after you himself.”
“So what’s the deal then? You set Merlin free, and then what do you get out of it?”
“The way to the Grey Lands of Avalon is through the Path of Destiny. The Wall Between Worlds demands a balance. Merlin can’t come through unless I take his place.”
Michel looked at her in shock. “What?”
She kept her gaze fixed on mine. “You know the lore, don’t you, witch? All of us cursed with immortal power trace our ancestry back to that place. Here, our abilities are enhanced. But in our true home, we can live like normal people. I don’t want to be this thing anymore.” Her eyes were suffering, pleading.
“If Merlin comes through the Wall, there’ll be war, you know that.”
She shook her head and it wobbled on a neck that had grown thicker and longer. “War is already here. This will just put the players in place a little faster. Besides, what does it matter to you? You already tried to raise a dragon for Merlin.”
The calm the harp had placed in my mind was fraying. I fought the urge to count in sets of threes, to turn around three times, to carve X’s into the tombs around me.
Claire’s head darted forward and the rest of her body contracted and lengthened, her clothing sliding off and falling to the ground. “Don’t fight it,” she hissed as her arms and legs were absorbed into a massive, snake-like form. Only her face remained, balanced obscenely on top of her sinuous length.
Michel continued to stare at her. “You’re leaving me? After all I’ve done for you?”
She ignored the question. “Michel, the girl. Now!”
The bokur never took his eyes off Claire, but he gestured, and Ava shambled out
of the darkness. “Zombie!” he yelled. “Do what you were made for.” I tried to run, but Ava was too fast. She pulled me back and pinned my arms behind me.
Claire sighed. “Thank you, my love.” Then she lunged and swallowed Michel whole.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AN UNDERSTANDING
Somewhere in the world there was still love and laughter, hope and understanding. Somewhere in this very city, there were Christmas trees that hadn’t been taken down yet and families gathered together in the warm afterglow of the season. Somewhere there was light—there had to be—but here, all the light had been swallowed like an Ouroboros swallows its tail.
Powerful muscles contracted along the great snake’s body as it digested Michel. Watching, I felt like I was floating above myself again. One, two, three—there goes one layer of Michel. One, two, three—there goes another. I laughed and I could hear the edge of crazy in it. The shock of it brought me back to myself.
It took a long time for the bokur to die. I knew the exact moment because Ava let go of me and fell to the ground. When the creator of a spell dies, so does the spell itself. Only truly powerful beings like Rhi’s mother could create a spell that would last beyond death.
When Claire’s lips peeled back and her jaw unhinged, I knew what was coming, but couldn’t look away. She disgorged what was left of Michel on the ground between us. Then I disgorged the beignet I’d eaten earlier.
But Claire wasn’t done. Another heave and out they all came, all the bones she’d collected and somehow magically internalized in her human form.
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “Why?”
She sighed softly as she slipped her jaw back into place. “He loved me, but he would never have let me leave, and I can’t bear this life anymore. I thought Adelaide would have pity on me when she learned how much her nephew loved me. Instead, she tightened her hold on both of us. Because of my grandfather’s oath, she could make me do whatever she wanted, even kill myself. She used that threat to keep Michel in line.” The contrast of her beautiful face bobbing on the body of a monster made the entirety more horrific. “I went to work for the White Lady to see if she could help, but the woman was more interested in surrounding herself with stupid school girls to replace her dead daughter. Her sentimentality was her undoing. When she bound herself to protect me against all threats, she rendered herself incapable of attacking me when I came to kill her. For all her power, she never knew what I was until the very end. She never knew I was a slave.” Claire’s voice broke off in a deep sob.
The old Lacey might have felt sorry for her. Claire had obviously suffered. She was also obviously more than a little insane. But there was no pity in my heart, and I knew, finally, that the old Lacey was gone forever. “Are we done here? You have your third set of bones. You don’t need me.”
She slithered towards me through the mess of flesh and bone and vomit, tears glistening on her face and running off the green scales of the neck of her true body. “But I do. I need you to perform the spell. Besides, Merlin wants you. He even made it a condition of accepting my offering. There’s a risk to a spell like this. If something happens to me on the other side, Merlin will be weakened. He may even become trapped again. He agreed on the condition that I give you over to him. He knows you’re the Crone’s heir. He has plans for you.”
It felt as if someone had injected ice water into the veins in my neck, and I shoved my hands in my pockets to stop them from shaking. Grasping the little Voodoo doll, I held it tight in my right fist. “I don’t know the spell.”
“Just because the Wall keeps Merlin from coming here permanently, doesn’t mean he can’t break through for a short time. He has eyes and ears everywhere.” Claire was close enough to strike now. Backing up, I nearly tripped over Ava’s unconscious form. She moaned a little, but didn’t move. “For example, he knows all about the laptop Morguase gave you. The spell will surely be in there, chère.” The word was all wet sibilance.
When I didn’t move, she reared up and hissed, her tongue flicking at me as her teeth disappeared into the flesh of her gums and two needle-sharp fangs replaced them. “Do it!”
I let go of the Voodoo doll in my pocket and pulled my hands out. They were steady now. As I retrieved the laptop from my bag, I deliberately brushed the harp with my fingers, but there was no sound from it at all. It was a bad sign if even the harp of Binnorie didn’t want to be heard. Sitting down cross-legged beside Ava, I turned on the computer, hoping the sound of the machine booting up might start to wake her.
As I looked through the files, Claire began to clean up the human waste she’d disgorged, brushing what was useless off the path with her long tail, and gathering the bones with her mouth. When I glanced up, the ground between us was clear, and the bones were arrayed like an altar in front of the pyramid tomb. Claire was draped across them, watching me with glittering eyes.
I swallowed, just once, surprised at my own control. “This might take a while.” She didn’t speak, and her eyes drooped as if she were too weary to respond.
I was lying; I knew the spell she wanted. It was the same one the Crone had planned to use to bring Merlin to this world, but not until she had the gift of the dragon Melusine to appease his anger. Even if they traded places and she was trapped behind the Wall, the Crone wasn’t sure it would keep him from returning to Avalon, and she’d originally supported Morgana and Arthur in their war against him. But after long years, my mentor was just like Claire—she wanted to go home.
Claire hissed impatiently and I knew I’d delayed too long. “I found it.” Covering my action by standing, I hit Ava with the back of my heel, hard. This time, she stirred and her eyelids fluttered as she began to come to.
As I approached Claire on her altar of bones, I could feel their collective power. The Crone wouldn’t have needed them to perform the spell, but I would. Putting down the laptop, I angled the screen so I could see it. Stretching out my right hand, I held it cupped over Claire’s head as I recited the words on the screen:
From the Triads of Tara—
These are the three candles
That illuminate every darkness:
Truth, nature, knowledge.
One by one, the marks of power on the bones began to appear—silver swirls on the White Lady’s, etchings of rust on Marie Laveau’s, and charcoal printing all over Michel’s. I didn’t recognize the symbols on the women’s bones, but I could see a word here and there in the jumble of Michel’s. I wished that I could stop and investigate, but Claire was watching me closely, venom dripping from her fangs. I continued:
These are the three aids of theft:
The dark forest, the long cloak,
And the deep night.
The symbols flared once—white light, a reddish haze, a swirl of darkness—and then disappeared. Except they weren’t gone; they were in me.
The pain was excruciating. I fell to my knees. Shards of bone on the ground cut through my leggings into my skin, and my blood strengthened the spell. I wanted to scream, wanted to throw back my head and howl, but I didn’t dare make a sound that wasn’t in the spell. After an eternity of ten or twenty seconds, the pain subsided to a dull ache, and I knew that if someone were to cut me open right at that moment, my bones would be covered in marks of silver, rust, and charcoal.
I stood gingerly. I was ripe to almost bursting with spells—with power—and I didn’t doubt their ability to burst me open quite literally.
Claire had raised herself up on her bed of bones and her face was level with mine, swaying slightly with eyes like green fire. “You have the power of the bones,” she hissed. “Speak the spell!”
“You asked for it,” I muttered.
The gift of the Maiden was the violence of new growth, the blossoming of young love, and the rising of the sun that melts the snows of winter. It was the gift of transformation and the possibility of creation.
These are the three slender things that support the world:
The slender stream
of fresh milk into the pail,
The slender blade of green corn emerging from the ground,
And the slender thread in the hand of a skillful woman.
While my hand was in my pocket, I’d unwound the three hairs from the neck of the little Voodoo doll. As the power of three witches drained from my bones and concentrated in my cupped palm, the hairs twisted and grew until they became a shining cord.
Comprehension dawned in Claire’s face, but I was too fast. I threw the cord around her neck and grasped both ends, crossing them and pulling tight. Arms wide and muscles straining, I screamed the last line of the spell:
I bind you by the three marks of a wise maiden:
A steady voice, a steady heart,
And a steady hand!
I had to pull the cord tighter as Claire returned to her smaller, human form, but she was now mine to command. She looked at me with eyes bright with tears. “And now I’ve traded one slavery for another.”
I was tempted to bind Claire to my will the same way Adelaide had. The old Lacey was a good girl with a heart of darkness who became a witch. Maybe the new Lacey—maybe I—wasn’t exactly a good little girl anymore, but I could still decide what color my heart was going to be. The Maiden’s cord would protect me from Claire; I didn’t need to make her suffer.
Before I could loosen my grip, there was a flash of light so bright that I closed my eyes instinctively, stumbling as the cord went slack. When I opened my eyes, Claire was gone, and all that remained of her was shining ash scattered among the bones.
“Be a good girl and step away from the bones, Maiden.” Bel was illuminated by the flames dancing in his hand. I looked around for Chloe, but the man was alone. When Ava groaned and pushed herself upright, Bel called fire into his other hand and pointed it at her. “I don’t want to hurt either of you, but I will if I have to.”
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