Gathering Deep

by Lisa Maxwell

  “Name?” La Rue asked, still not bothering to look at me.

  “Sarabeth Johnson,” I said, supplying the name I’d been using for the last few years.

  He scribbled something down on the pad of paper.

  “Experience?”

  “I’ve been working as a domestic since I was about fifteen years old.” I pulled the forged papers out of my purse. “I have referrals from my last three posts.”

  LaRue glanced up to accept the papers, but as he put his hand out for them, his dark brows beaded together and he studied me for a moment that drew out long and painful and slow. “Well, well, well.” Then his mouth curved up into a feral-looking smile. “Sarabeth, indeed,” he drawled.

  My hands froze on the papers. “Roman?” I whispered, even as I knew it was impossible.

  His smile widened. “Thisbe.”

  As the shock of his words wrapped around me, I lost hold of the papers and—

  With a strangled gasp I came back to myself, to Mama Legba’s shop. My brain raced, trying to put together what I’d seen.

  “Chloe?” Lucy asked. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head. “It just happened again.”

  “What happened?” Odane asked.

  I explained to him about the visions I’d had when I touched the charm before, and the ones I’d had in her cabin. “I thought it was maybe some kind of magic that was still on the charm or in the places where she worked those spells, but … ” I looked up at Mama Legba. “When I touched that clipping, I was back there. I was seeing her life again.”

  Mama Legba was considering me with an uncomfortable intensity. “So it ain’t only the charm that causes them.” She picked up another scrap of paper that had been taken from the box. “But I can’t get no sense of Thisbe on these, so I don’t think it’s anything she’s doing to you, either.” Mama Legba frowned. “Though I don’t rightly know how that could work.”

  “People leave bits of their energy behind all the time, Auntie. You know that. Everything in this world we touch becomes a part of who we were, what we are. She’s got her mother’s blood, so I don’t see why she shouldn’t have a touch of her power. Maybe that’s why she can sense traces of this Thisbe on the things she touches.”

  Mama Legba shook her head. “It don’t feel right.”

  “Nothing about any of this feels right,” Odane said.

  “What did you see?” Lucy asked, picking the clipping from where it had fallen to the floor. She frowned a little, like she’d expected to have a vision, too.

  “Thisbe came back to Le Ciel. Must have been about the time of that clipping. The guy it talks about, the one who was lost at sea—La Rue—he was hiring a new maid and she wanted to get into the house, so she applied. But he recognized her.”

  “What do you mean ‘recognized her’?” Mama Legba asked.

  “I mean, he seemed to know somehow that she was Thisbe and not the ‘Sarabeth Johnson’ she’d called herself by.”

  “How could he have known that?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t exactly understand,” I told them, “but I got the sense that Thisbe thought he was Roman Dutilette.”

  Mama Legba made a small sound of disbelief.

  “He didn’t look anything like Roman,” I said, trying to explain. “I mean, he had the same coldness in his eyes, but he was a rich white man looking at a black servant, so maybe that accounted for his expression.”

  “But Thisbe didn’t think so,” said Odane.

  I shook my head. “No. She didn’t. She called him by name, and he didn’t deny it.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  Mama Legba took the clipping from Lucy. She closed her eyes for a second, like she was trying to get a reading on it, but then opened them, clearly confused. “I don’t rightly know, but you came back, Lucy-girl. You found your way back here to finish what Armantine left to be finished, didn’t you?” She set the clipping back on the table, like she didn’t want to hold it for too long. “Maybe Roman did as well.”

  “But it sounds like he recognized her so quickly,” Lucy said. “When I first met Alex again, I had a sense that I was being drawn to him, but it took me weeks of dreaming before I pieced everything together and could really remember who he’d been to me.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that he came back,” Odane said. “This Thisbe found a way to live for more than a century beyond her natural life, so what’s to say that Roman Dutilette couldn’t have done the same?”

  “How would he have learned to do a thing like that?” Mama Legba asked doubtfully.

  Odane shrugged. “You can get any information you want if you’re willing to pay enough for it.”

  “Let me try again,” I told them.

  “I don’t think—” Mama Legba started, but I cut her off.

  “You just said you don’t sense any of Thisbe’s magic on these. Whatever’s causing the visions, it’s probably nothing she’s doing, right?”

  “We can’t be sure, Chloe-girl,” Mama said, but without much conviction.

  “You’re all here. If something happens, there are three of you and one of me. I think it’s worth the risk if we can learn something more.”

  Mama Legba frowned, but after a few moments of hesitation, she gave me a small nod. “You right. I don’t like it, but it’s what we have right now.”

  “These older articles are written in French,” Odane said, already sorting through the pile. “This one looks to be from 1811.” He studied it, his brow drawing together as he read it over. “Some sort of attempted slave revolt, it looks like. My French is pretty bad, but maybe you can get something more from it.”

  He handed it to me, and, ready for anything, I reached out. The second my fingers touched it, heat shot through me, so powerful and angry that I gasped as Mama Legba’s shop fell away and I found myself standing alone on a road, with the scent of death so thick around me that my stomach clenched.

  Sixteen

  Bile rose in my throat, and before I could stop my insides from turning over, I stumbled over to retch onto the side of the road until I felt emptied out, body and soul.

  Trying to catch my breath, I wiped the corner of my mouth with the hem of my apron. I wasn’t even close yet and the stink was already so thick I could practically taste it. Not that I had any intention of turning back.

  I’d known that something was coming. For months now, I could practically smell it in the air. But I hadn’t realized how fast it would come, and I hadn’t understood how much it would take.

  My fault, I thought. Because I hadn’t been strong enough to protect him.

  I looked down that dusty road, the heat shimmering off the surface of it, and for a moment, I remembered another road. Another time.

  The first time I saw him, the cane had already been boiling away in iron pots wide enough and deep enough to cook a man. I’d been walking down a road just like this one when Jean-Pierre Dutilette came driving around the bend with a wagon filled with a new crop of men to replace the ones his plantation had cut down.

  Except that time, one of the dark heads didn’t bow. That time, one figure sat straight and proud as the driver who held the whip.

  Without a mother around to protect me, I’d been fighting off unwanted attention ever since I understood a smile wasn’t always a welcome. But when I saw the man with the straight back and too-proud eyes, I knew I wanted him.

  But not even magic as strong as mine had been enough to keep him.

  So I walked on, ignoring the ache in my chest, and I didn’t let myself stop again for anything—not for the heat licking at my skin. Not even to retch on the side of the road when the breeze brought with it the smell of death.

  Ahead, I saw a row of poles that looked like crows were perching on the tops of them. But I knew that what I was seeing didn’t have anything to do with feathers even before I came to the first pike.

  As I approached it, the skin on the man’s face seemed to be crawling alive, there w
ere so many flies on it. All that was left of his eyes were dark, empty sockets staring sightlessly up at the sky. I don’t know whether it was relief that I didn’t recognize this face, or the horror that I’d have to keep on walking that made my legs go out from under me and a sob tear free from my chest.

  I wanted to take the poor man’s head and give it the proper ritual to protect the soul as it went on its way, but I knew I couldn’t risk it. Not with everything that had happened. Not with the hate still spinning through the air and suspicion hanging in the breeze. Still, I took a moment there on the side of the road and, like my mother had taught me, I said the words to call for the spirits to reclaim the man’s soul.

  Then I moved on to the next pike, and the next man who didn’t have Augustine’s face. And as I walked, I thought about the other women who walked this same path, mothers and lovers who hoped for the best but found instead the beaten faces of the men they loved. But with each pike that didn’t show me Augustine’s features, I hoped a little more.

  He’d been gone for fifteen days already. Fifteen days when I didn’t know what had become of him. Fifteen days since I woke to find him no longer in my bed.

  Ten days ago, the River Road had gone crazy with violence and death. Eight days ago, those who could went back to the ordinary dangers of the lives they’d been handed. Five days ago, they’d driven the first pike into the ground and severed the first soul.

  Every night since, I’d gone to wait in our place, and every night I hadn’t found anything but the empty stars.

  Another pike that isn’t topped with a crow. Another face that isn’t his. And each face I find is a fresh wound in the ragged thing that was once my soul.

  Had I been stronger, Augustine never would have left me that night. He never would have been able. Had I been stronger, I wouldn’t have to be searching for him here.

  I vowed not to make that mistake again.

  On and on I walked, until the sun was so hot beating down on me, I thought my own skin would peel like the corpses I met. The hot wind cut across my skin, searing me, forging me into something stronger than I’d ever been before. With each step, the rip in my soul grew a little wider, a little deeper. A little more impossible to ever be mended.

  I walked all the way to the Quarter, following that road of death, all the while followed by the sightless eyes of the damned.

  Seventeen

  I heard somebody calling out, but the voice came from so far away I thought it was the wind itself calling to me. But the wind doesn’t tear at your hands with claws. It doesn’t tug at you and shake you.

  “Let go of that now,” another voice said. “Give it here,” it commanded.

  Suddenly, the sharp bite of something like vinegar burned through the stink in my nostrils, cutting through the vision. My chest ached, but when I took a shaking breath, all I could manage was a keening moan that sounded like it came from something more animal than human. Grief tore me in two and pinned my halves to different corners of the lonely world.

  “They killed them,” I sobbed. Because even though I knew I was back in the safety of Mama Legba’s rooms, the memory of those sightless eyes, like empty holes, was still burned into my vision. My nose was still filled with the sticky smell of flesh rotting in the sun.

  “Chloe-girl,” Mama Legba said, her voice sharp as her hands held my arms steady. “Come on, child. You need to come on back to us.”

  Slowly, the room swam back into focus and eventually I had enough hold on myself to realize that everyone was close by, watching me with wary eyes. All around me, the room was in shambles.

  “What happened?” I asked, blinking up at them through my tears.

  “That’s what you need to be telling us,” Mama Legba said.

  My skin felt feverish as I looked at the crumbled bits of paper that used to be the clipping. They’d destroyed it trying to get it away from me. The rest of the scraps from the box were scattered on the floor around the table.

  “You said, ‘they killed them,’” Lucy said gently. “Who killed who?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. And then I explained the heads on pikes that lined the River Road. I told them all about what I’d seen, and I told about the hate that had burned in me during the vision. But I didn’t tell them that the hate still warmed some part of me, searing deep down like a fire banked by the memory of what I’d seen.

  Mama Legba frowned. “Could be one of the rebellions that flared up ’round these parts way back when.”

  “There were human heads staked like scarecrows all along the River Road, all the way from the plantations to the Place d’Armes in the Quarter,” I said, bile rising in my throat at the memory of the vision. “I don’t remember learning anything like that.”

  Mama Legba’s mouth turned down. “That wouldn’t exactly be a welcome tale in schools anywhere, but especially not ’round these parts, now would it?”

  “But you didn’t get anything else about Thisbe and Roman?” Lucy asked.

  “No. But if it was only 1811, maybe that was too early for Thisbe to have known him? Let me try again,” I said, reaching for another scrap.

  Mama Legba caught my hand before I could grab it. “Wait a minute, child. That wasn’t just a vision you had there.”

  “She’s right, Chloe,” Lucy said. “The first time, I barely noticed anything had happened to you until it was over, but this time when you touched that clipping … ” She hesitated. Finally, looking almost embarrassed, she glanced away. “It was different this time.”

  “It felt like a storm was blowing through,” Odane said, his voice tight and his eyes curious and assessing. “The second you touched that bit of paper, it was like you weren’t even in there anymore. Then, a moment later, a wind kicked up that didn’t stop until we ripped it out of your hand.”

  “There’s something more than visions happening,” Mama Legba said with a frown, “and I don’t think we should play with it anymore until we know how much more.”

  “What about the dreams?” I asked. “If these visions are connected to Thisbe, the dreams I’ve been having probably are, too.”

  “You’re having dreams, too?” Odane asked, his expression unreadable.

  I gave him a tight nod and briefly explained what I’d seen in my dreams, then turned to Mama Legba. “If you help me dreamwalk, like you helped Lucy, maybe I could find out what Thisbe was doing back then, maybe find out what it has to do with what’s going on now?”

  Mama Legba studied me for a second, but then her mouth screwed up and she shook her head. “It might could be, child, but that maybe ain’t enough for us to take that risk.”

  “But you did it for Lucy—”

  “You saw what happened to Lucy last time, and she knew more about her dreams than you do,” she said, stopping my argument. “When she came to me, she’d already been able to control parts of her dreaming. What you told me don’t sound like you have no control at all.”

  “But—”

  “No.” Her voice was more forceful now. “Lucy was dreaming of her own past. But you’re saying you dreaming of Thisbe’s past? That still just don’t seem likely to me, or at least it don’t sound natural.” Mama Legba frowned. “Dreams maybe tell us our own lives, but we can’t get into someone else’s without some sort of violation. If these is even dreams about her actual life, to try breaking into them means breaking through into part of Thisbe. Our souls is meant to be our own, and it would take a darker magic than I know to do what you’re asking. I don’t want no part in that kind of magic,” she said.

  “But we both know someone who wouldn’t mind working that sort of magic,” Odane said thoughtfully.

  “Don’t even start,” Mama Legba said, pointing a finger at him threateningly.

  He shrugged. “I’m just saying … You and I both know Ikenna could help with this. He knows more about darkness like this than anyone around. He might even be able to help keep her safe if she wants to see what all this is really about.”


  “There ain’t no safe with him,” Mama Legba snapped. “And there’s no way I’m letting Chloe go messing around with dreaming or these visions, not till we know for sure what’s causing them.

  “So that’s it?” I asked, my stomach twisting. “You’re giving up and shutting me out of this, too?”

  Mama Legba pursed her lips. “It isn’t about shutting you out,” she said. “It’s about taking our time and making sure we don’t misstep. There’s too many parts to this to go jumping in feet-first without looking where we jumping. That wind you called up wasn’t like nothing I’ve ever seen before, child. It was stronger than most people can conjure when they trying, and you weren’t even trying.” She paused, frowning when she met my eyes. “At least let me think on it before we do anything else.”

  “We don’t have time for you to think,” I snapped. I knew it was only temper that had me lashing out, but after all that had happened that morning, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  “I’d rather take the time than rush in and lose you to this,” Mama Legba told me.

  I stood up and turned to Lucy. “You ready to go?”

  She studied me with a frown for a moment before she agreed.

  “Now don’t rush off in a huff,” Mama Legba said.

  “I’m not in a huff,” I lied. “I just need to go. I want to try to call Piers again before it gets too late, and—”

  Mama Legba touched my arm. “Wait a minute, child.” She stood and made her way back to the front of the shop. When she came back, the deck of tarot cards was in her hand. She drew one card from the top and then set the rest aside before coming over to me. Taking me by the wrist, she turned my hand palm up and slid the card into it.

  The hanged man.

  “You can’t hold so tight, child. Knowledge and power can’t be forced. It’s only going to come when you let go.”

  I tried to hand the card back to her, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “I can do this,” I told her, one last plea. “Please. Let me try again.”