Walking on Sunshine

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “You have power,” my papa said at length.

  “I have need of it,” Mme Vulcaine said. “When one hunts a creature of power, it is good to bear arms. You have some power of your own.”

  My papa stood straight and proud. “It is the power of my birthplace.”

  She grunted. Then she simply walked around him and out the door.

  BAZ

  “Stalker never showed last night,” I said to Veek over breakfast.

  He looked heavy-eyed. “Yes, she did. I intercepted her.” He lathered his pancakes with butter.

  “Thanks, buddy.” I flipped more pancakes off the griddle onto my own plate and brought it to the table. “What you gonna do, now that the old man isn’t pimping you out?” I said, stuffing my face.

  “Go to France,” he said. “My heir has filed suit in the Direction des affaires civiles et du Sceau of the Ministère de la Justice. If I don’t present myself or send a lawyer in two weeks, I forfeit the title.”

  He let his arms rest on the table, knife in one hand, fork in the other. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been around long enough to learn American table manners. Those upper-crust Europeans had hammered their manners into him good and hard.

  “I didn’t know you cared that much.”

  He sighed. “I care. For a long time I’ve been planning to go back there, to fight this battle, once—” Once Jake died? “Perhaps I have no chance. I can’t walk into court to present this.” He lifted his arms again, as if showing me his hard, young-looking body. “This doesn’t look like a ninety-six-year-old man. I could wear an illusion of being an old man in court. But then, even if I win, I would have to spend the rest of—of my life pretending to be an old man.”

  He seemed to shrink as he talked. I noticed the hesitation about his life expectancy.

  I wanted to ask him why he cared about a title he’d ignored for decades. “Do you think the French will be cool with you looking too young?” I paused in the act of forking a thick stack of pancake wedges into my mouth. “I mean, once they get past how you look too black.”

  He gave one of his shrugs. “I don’t know. Magic invaded Europe long before it came here. Other countries are beginning to adapt. But the French don’t change readily, especially their laws and traditions.”

  He looked so worried that I changed the subject. “This stalker chick. What did Jake have in mind when he handed your navel string to her?”

  Veek cut a slice of bacon in half and forked it into his face, chewing daintily. “I’ve been thinking about that. She was as surprised as I to hear of it. I don’t think he handed it to her. I think he hid it among her possessions. Perhaps he distracted her and put it into her pocket.”

  “It’ll go through the wash and dissolve, and then you’re home free,” I said, pointing at the bright side.

  “Or perhaps it’s in her shoe. Or in the lining of her handbag.”

  I wiped melted butter off my chin with the back of my hand. “Something to worry about.”

  “Indeed.”

  I said, “Can the navel string stop me from helping you get it away from her?”

  Veek gave me a look of such gratitude that it nearly made me mushy. That guy lived in silence, alone in the world except for Jake, like a hobo or a monk.

  Okay, like a monk with very expensive tastes.

  “I don’t know. It seems she can command me, but she doesn’t yet realize when she is doing it.”

  “That’s a little weird.”

  “It gets weirder.” He drank coffee from his bone-china demitasse, set it down with a precise clink, and blotted his lips with a paper napkin. “She is the daughter of my heir. Her father is the man who would be Vicomte Montmorency if I could be proven to be dead.” I opened my mouth and he held up a hand. “He’s here in Chicago, looking for me, presumably to find that proof. It is she who told me of the court hearing in two weeks. She thinks Jake was the true vicomte and that I’m ‘some kind of vodou demon Jake captured.’ This could be a problem if she comes to understand her power over me—and if she changes her mind and decides to side with him.”

  I shut my gaping jaw. “You said she doesn’t know.”

  “No. But luck may be smiling on me. She doesn’t want him to succeed. For reasons having to do with adolescent rebellion, I gather, she wishes to foil his plans, to fool him into declaring me the true vicomte. She wants me to go to Paris, to the court, and pose as,” he opened his hands, “myself.”

  “Holy frozen shit on a stick with caramel coating.”

  He nodded.

  I wrapped my head around this for a while. “That navel string is gonna be a wild card. How the hell did Jake get hold of it, anyway? And how did you get hold of it?”

  “My nurse gave it to me when I was very young. She was first my mother’s nurse. She warned me to guard it forever, so I did.”

  “Obviously it got away from you.”

  “I gave it to Jake.”

  I stared at him. “I know you were close, but jeez.”

  He flicked a glance at me. “We were boys in that vodou house in New Orleans together. He was my cousin. I was a stodgy fifteen, he was a reckless twenty. We, how you say, bonded. Soon after we ran away, I became uncomfortable with happenings—the stirrings of the powers I have now—and I wanted to ensure that someone I trusted was there to stop me. I feared that I might do something I should not.”

  Which was so typical of Veek. Most guys who find powers like ours coming on don’t waste a minute trying ’em out. I began to see why Jake had wanted to shake him out of his sobriety.

  Veek looked bleak. “Jake called it my ‘leash.’ Sometimes he would remind me he had it. If for example he got us into trouble, sometimes he worried I might not want to get us out.” Veek almost smiled. “I would always have done so.” He said simply, “We were like brothers.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “No, not lovers. Jake belonged to Samedi, who has his moments, but he never went there with me.” He smiled broader now. “Jake blamed all his peccadilloes on Samedi. I should have known he was hiding things from me. He liked to shock me. It was part of our friendship.”

  I stared at him while he went back to eating bacon with a knife and fork.

  Veek was the youngest of us slacker demons, not quite a century old, and the most fragile. Yes, fragile. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, toughened by hard miles, lean and muscular, a good boxer, inked on his face like a rapper. But he was nearly a century old.

  A baby, in fact.

  I was twenty-seven hundred myself, and our ex-roomie Kamadeva, who had recently moved out and gotten married, was over six thousand.

  I wondered if it was time to talk about this stuff with Veek.

  “Look, buddy,” I began. “There comes a time in every immortal’s life when he begins to realize that he isn’t going to die. Maybe he’s been told he won’t die, but it hasn’t sunk in yet. Or maybe nobody has told him, and it just happened somehow. That radioactive spider bite doesn’t come with an instruction booklet.”

  Veek’s little hazel eyes got round.

  I said bluntly, “Jake was your last tie to your past—your mortal life. He knew you when you were young and stupid. When the last friend of his first life dies, an immortal feels it. It’s when he loses an irretrievable part of his humanity.”

  On some sneaky level I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge, I was glad to be the only person left who knew Veek for even half of what he was. He would need me. I was damned glad to have even one roommate left.

  He said, as if he’d been thinking of something else, “I should have known Jake would save some secrets for the very end.” He raised his eyes to me. “He burned his candle at both ends. I read a poem about that once.”

  “Dorothy Parker,” I said, hiding my astonishment.

  He put his dishes in the sink, and picked up his briefcase. Not for the first time I wondered what the hell he kept in it.

  “You’re still manning the shop?”

  “
The mambo from Jake’s people was supposed to come today for the burial ceremonies. She will be annoyed with me for not being already there to begin last night.”

  “Sounds like a fun time. Write if you get work.”

  “Text,” he said, showing his teeth, not a happy face if you knew him. “We text now.”

  I waited ten minutes, then put on some street shoes and mooched out after him. When that priestess came for Jake’s body, she would have me on her tail.

  VEEK

  When I arrived at Jake’s botánica, the mambo was waiting for me, as well as a police ambulance to take away Jake’s body. I had to sign some papers because I had been present when he died. The officer scolded me for not having called earlier. The mambo explained their practice of washing the dead. The officer didn’t scold her. We learned that they would determine cause of death and, it was hoped, release Jake to be shipped home.

  As the ambulance drove away, the French child Sophie arrived. “I have come to help you bury Jake,” she said to the priestess. “I was at the death.” She marched inside the shop.

  Drawing in air between my teeth, I shut the door behind her and locked it. We stood in the front parlor of the store.

  “Madame Vulcaine,” I said, bowing and keeping as much space between us as I could. The part of me not devoted to watching the mambo was wishing that Sophie wasn’t here, listening to everything with that puppyish fascination, as if she feared nothing on the planet. “This is a private matter, a matter of family.”

  The mambo, vodou priestess, was a strong-faced, red-brown woman with a Spanish nose and crinkly hair, a lusty mouth and figure, and large hands. She looked only forty—less than half my age—but much older in power and assurance.

  She examined me from shoes to scalp. Then she studied Sophie. “You may stay,” she said finally. “We will have use for you.”

  Sophie went to sit in a straight-backed chair on the wall, as silently smug as a cat.

  I objected. “What use?”

  “She knew Jacob. There are so few who can tell his life in the burial ceremonies we must perform—unless he had other women?” She cocked her head.

  “No,” I said hurriedly. “Customers only.” I flushed. Whatever Jake’s relations with our customers might have been, mine were not to be spoken of to this woman. “He had no regular . . . female companion.”

  The mambo nodded. “Well, boy,” she said in Kreyol. She settled herself on Jake’s broken-down couch, her brightly-woven Caribbean dress sliding stiffly around her like a comtesse’s brocades. “You were to meet me here yesterday. Do you call this giving your kouzen a proper burial?”

  “I’m no hounsi,” I mumbled. I had failed to fulfill my initiation, my kanzo—failed disgracefully—and could not claim hounsi status.

  “That is no excuse. Your explanation. Begin with how you left our house without warning in the middle of preparation for your kanzo.”

  Here it came. I had evaded telling Sophie, and now I would have to tell her and this awful woman.

  “You must have heard something,” I muttered. My Kreyol was rusty. Only Jake had spoken it to me in all these years.

  “From others. And now I will hear from you.”

  I looked at the tips of my brogues and back at her. “I was fifteen, a boy, a fool. I had led a life—I wanted to be important. All boys do.”

  I left out the part about hating Eton, hating Cambridge, being hated by my family, about fleeing university to my mother’s people in this woman’s vodou house.

  Instead I confessed to the mistake that had changed my life. “At a ceremony, I ate some of the offering food.”

  “Offerings are consecrated to the spirits.” Her eyelids drooped. “Sensible boys don’t eat it.”

  Like a boy, I blurted, “That was Jake’s idea!”

  She made a kiss-teeth sound. “Didn’t Jake warn you that the food was consecrated? That it could harm you?”

  I shook my head.

  “How were you found out?” she said. “Speak English now. We have reached a part of Jake’s life that must be told in his family.”

  Shit. She wanted Sophie to hear this! I mumbled, “The gede found me out. There at the ceremony.”

  “Describe.”

  “He—Baron Samedi—took possession of his serviteur, my mother’s uncle. His eyes lit on me and he came striding over with those big steps, like a spider. He said something.” I swallowed. “He said that I had eaten his food, so now he must eat me.” Hairs rose on my body. “It was all pretend.”

  “All. What all?”

  “When he pretended to eat me.”

  Mme Vulcaine’s lips made a kind of smile. “He wasn’t really angry.”

  “Oh, I think he was.” I could feel Sophie’s gaze on the tips of my ears. “He wanted to know what the big idea was. Why I had done it.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  My throat was tight. “That I wanted to be a god.”

  Her finely-arched Spanish eyebrows went up. “Only that?”

  I flushed hotter. I cast my gaze downward.

  “Then what happened?”

  “He said, the gede said, ‘Bon, but it will cost you everything.’” Eighty years later, I shuddered at the memory of that unearthly voice saying everything. “Then he put his hand on my head and his other hand on my genitals and he—”

  I had never described this to anyone, not even Jake, who had been present at the ceremony but drunk.

  “He pushed me together somehow. And then he pulled me apart. Like a concertina. When he let go of me, I was . . . different.”

  “And?”

  “I was chastised and sent to sit in a corner for the remainder of the ceremony.” The next part was painful to tell, also. “I felt odd for many days afterward. Things happened.”

  “What things?”

  I drew in more air. “Changes in myself.”

  I looked at Sophie. She was leaning forward, her hands twined together. Our eyes met. She had my leash. She urged me on with a lift of her chin.

  “I was changing, reverend mother,” I admitted.

  “Describe.”

  “In my sleep, I found myself flying. Often I would dream I was circling Lake Ponchartrain like a gull on the wing, and then I woke slowly to realize that it was really happening. At times, I dissolved into vapor, and then, when I wanted to, I could congeal into a man again. Once I followed a girl from the French Quarter home to her lodgings, and upstairs, and watched while she—”

  Absurdly, I could not say it. I’d spent eighty years with Jake, many of them visiting the bedrooms of women at his command, and also the past twenty years rooming with the sex demons in the Lair on Ravenswood Avenue, hearing every kind of coarse speech, learning how to excel at the same trade.

  Now in the presence of these two women I was as tongue-tied as a boy itching in his woolen school uniform. I finished, “And other things.”

  “Such as?”

  I frowned in concentration. Powers that had terrified me during those final weeks in New Orleans had, over the years under Jake’s casual tutelage, become commonplace.

  “I could enter someone’s dream and direct it.” That was what I’d done for the clients who visited this shop. “Or, Jake would make bets. I would enter someone’s dreams to learn how to win them.” I skipped over the years of Jake’s lonelyhearts business—my sex demon work.

  For a miracle, Sophie didn’t make mention of it either, even though these past two weeks, she had been here when Jake ordered me forth.

  Mme Vulcaine sucked her teeth again, but she didn’t look angry. “Go back. What made you run away from our house?”

  I swallowed. “I was too restless. These powers that grew in me—they were a misery, like itches I couldn’t scratch, like dog whistles to my ears. In fact my ears grew more sensitive every day. It seemed I was summoned by something without a voice, but I didn’t know what. It wouldn’t—it wouldn’t shut up.”

  Even now I could hear that voice. It was
to drown it out I had fled, and rioted drunkenly with Jake on the road, and immersed myself in beers and bongs for twenty years with my slacker demon friends.

  I swallowed. “I couldn’t bear to stay still. Finally, only three days before my kanzo, I went to Jake and said I wanted to run away. He tried to talk me out of it. Then, the next night, he said he would run away with me.”

  I said nothing about how Jake had taught me to use those powers. I’d already said too much about the uses he put me to.

  Mme Vulcaine leaned forward. “Now you will hear some things maybe you never heard before. When you walked into our house you handed us a terrible responsibility. My aryè-granmè made a divination. She learned that you were only an embryo, but full of extraordinary potential, destined someday to grow great. You were a kouzen bound to us by blood and then separated from us.” She paused.

  I knew that she referred to my mother, who had herself been the mother of her house when she married my father and went away, pregnant, to her death in France. Mme Vulcaine’s lips closed, exactly the way my French grandmother’s lips had closed when she wouldn’t speak of my mother.

  The silence having disposed of my mother, Mme Vulcaine resumed. “When you returned, we invested heavily in you—the teaching, the vestments, the ceremonies we all made to prepare you for kanzo. All wasted when you ran away.”

  “I know it,” I snapped. I was most guilty of all for that, for the waste of their care for me.

  “Through the dreams of several people, Samedi spoke of our obligation to help you complete your destiny.” She looked me up and down again, not satisfied. “We are still under that obligation. Jacob Pierre did not complete it.”

  “I don’t want any destiny!” I had expected her to mock my fifteen-year-old foolish self, who had wanted to become a god. This was worse.

  “What you want doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, her eyelids creasing on a silent laugh. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “To force it on me!” I shot a look at Sophie. Would she, too, force me?

  “No, you idiot.” The mambo leaned forward and put her hands on her knees. “To help you as he did, to delay it as long as necessary, until you are ready. When the lwas call, you must come. But sometimes we can negotiate.”