The King of Bones and Ashes

by J. D. Horn

  Then the laughter stopped.

  Two hands reached forward, clasping the sides of Carver’s face, caressing it, drawing him in as if for a kiss. Carver couldn’t resist. He couldn’t even move. All he could do was stare into the bottomless holes that sat where any normal man’s eyes would have been. It pulled Carver’s head forward and leaned in until their foreheads touched. Cool. Too cold to be alive. A foul smell, like a carcass rotting in swamp water, worked its way up Carver’s nostrils, into his own skin.

  It leaned back, its hands sliding forward until both thumbs met at the center of Carver’s forehead. Two quick slices—each thumbnail like a scalpel—a full circle from forehead to just beneath his jaw, and Carver began screaming. Agony, then a wet sound he remembered from his uncle’s taxidermy shop, and a shower of red. He wanted to pass out. Knew that by any rights he should. Knew that this monster was the only thing keeping him conscious.

  It held up the flap of wet skin, examining it, turning it around and holding it before Carver’s peeled eyes. Then it drew the flesh back, sliding it over its own blank face, holding it in place, smoothing it. As it did so, its body changed, shortening, thickening, becoming a mirror image of Carver’s own. It lowered its hands and leaned in toward Carver, allowing him an eternity to stare at his own face, into his own eyes.

  The creature stepped forward, looping its fingers around Carver’s necklace. It gave the necklace one sharp tug, and then another, nearly yanking Carver off his feet, but the necklace stayed fixed around his neck. A cry of anger sounded from his double’s lips. It caught hold of Carver’s head with a rough grasp, tight enough that he heard the popping of fractured bone. His view twisted. There was a flash of light, and then came darkness.

  EIGHT

  Evangeline stumbled through the house, pulling on one shoe, tilting her head to spy beneath the sofa for its mate. She spotted it across the room, then remembered the kick she’d given it last night as she made her way to the vodka. She didn’t make a habit of drinking late, and she never drank alone—except when it was necessary.

  Last night it had been necessary.

  She’d managed to tug Hugo over the threshold and stretch him out on the sofa. She’d sat down across from him, watching him sleep, and thought of Nicholas and his children. And proceeded to drink herself into a stupor.

  Hugo had been gone in the morning, along with a twenty from her wallet. Little son of a bitch had left an IOU with a smiley face on it.

  She’d have a talk with him later. Probably on her way home from work tonight—after yet another bartender kicked him to the curb.

  But there was no time to stew about it now. She had only fifteen minutes to make it to her meeting at the bank.

  She snatched up the wayward shoe, balanced on one leg like a stork as she pulled it on, then headed back into the kitchen to grab her keys. Sugar followed along, cutting figure eights around her legs, mewling. “Mama’s gonna feed you in a second,” Evangeline said. “It isn’t like you’re starving.”

  The cat started chattering—sharp staccato sounds the likes of which Evangeline had never heard her make. She stopped in her tracks and looked down at the cat.

  “Well, yeah, sweetie. I know she’s coming, but . . .”

  The cat chattered again, cutting her off.

  “She’s here already?” she asked. Sugar’s steady gaze served as the cat’s reply. “No. I don’t know how long Alice is going to be in town. You seem to know a whole hell of a lot more than I do.”

  A chirrup.

  “I’ll ask,” Evangeline said, wondering if she really should. Sugar’s large peridot eyes implored her to make good on her word. “I’ll ask. I will. I’ll ask Nicholas . . .”

  The feline hissed at his name, and Evangeline held up her hands, signaling for her to stop. Looks like the détente was short-lived.

  “I’m not going to the funeral.”

  Her head started pounding, and her mouth felt like she’d been chewing cotton balls. Even after a shower, she was still sweating alcohol. If she showed up at the bank now, she wouldn’t stand a chance. She’d call the loan officer. Tell a white lie. Beg to reschedule to this afternoon, or better yet, tomorrow. She stepped around Sugar and went into the kitchen. Ignoring the cat, she took her time pouring herself a glass of cool water.

  Sugar padded into the room and sat in its center.

  “Because I haven’t been invited,” Evangeline said, irritated at being interrogated by her own pet. “Why? Maybe because I pissed him off.” She scowled at the cat. “You were sitting right there sunning yourself, so don’t pretend you didn’t hear the whole damned thing.” She held up a finger, like she’d just had a brilliant idea. “Or wait, maybe because Celestin hated me, and the whole world knows it.” She dug a bottle of aspirin from the junk drawer and swallowed a couple of pills, draining her glass and setting it on the counter.

  The damned funeral was tomorrow. And Nicholas didn’t have time for her. She’d called. Twice.

  She’d spent nearly a decade waiting for him to remove this armor. To expose his heart fully to her. She thought maybe, just maybe, yesterday had been the beginning of that. It was the rawest she’d ever seen him. But then he’d gone and made her angry, giving her that line of bull. And maybe she’d snapped back a little too hard, ’cause now he didn’t want her. Not at the wake. Not at the funeral. Not at the ball. If he did, he would’ve already asked.

  She’d hoped he’d see her as someone he could lean on, but she’d let her fool self forget. Nicholas Marin did not bend.

  “Oh, yes, and thank you for reminding me. I’d forgotten my close personal relationship with the other Marin men.” She shook her head. “You know that one is different,” she said, speaking of Hugo. “It isn’t like that with him.” She grabbed her keys, then scanned the room for any sign of her phone. A meow. She stopped to glare at the cat. Sugar returned the glare.

  “I don’t know why Nicholas hasn’t asked me to go with him. Maybe he’s just waiting for me to say I want to.” The cat made a sound that could only be meant to express disbelief. “No. I don’t really think that’s true either.”

  “Listen,” she said, leaning over and offering a caress, but the cat had no intention of approaching her. Evangeline drew her hand back. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed. Hurt. Alice left a long time ago. She was a little girl. She may not even remember you.”

  Sugar offered a simple declarative meow.

  “Okay. Of course you’re unforgettable, but it’s been a long time. She may not feel the same way for you she did when you two were young.” A blank stare. “I just mean, she may not love you like she did. But it’s okay if she doesn’t, ’cause I do.” Sugar twitched her tail. “No, I am not jealous . . . well, maybe I am. A little.” Sugar padded closer, rubbing her cheek against Evangeline’s leg. “All right. All right. I’ll find a way. I’ll reach out to her. But you’ve got to promise Mama you won’t get . . .”

  Two loud thumps hit overhead in quick succession.

  “What the . . . ?”

  Sugar arched her back, hissing.

  Evangeline looked up. A heavy clawing, like an anchor being dragged across the roof, sounded from above, moving from the center to the side. Then came the tapping, a recurring rhythmic strike against the windowpane. It was coming from the old-style, multipaned French doors that opened out of her bedroom into the tiny walled-in garden behind the house. Those doors, and the ones in the guest room, were the only way to enter the garden. Anyone would have had to sneak through the house to get in there, or drop in . . . from the sky. The tapping grew louder. Like stones being pitched in waltz time—one, two, three, one, two, three—against the glass.

  Then came the unmistakable sound of one of the panes shattering.

  Sugar howled, and Evangeline shushed the cat. “Mama needs you to hide. Real good. Like you hide when you’re mad at Mama. You hear?” The cat darted from the room.

  Another pane smashed. She crept through the kitchen, edging up to
her bedroom door, craning her neck to try to see what awaited her beyond the French doors. A movement near the bottom of the door caught her eye. A black bird—a raven, she realized—stood staring in at her. When she didn’t move, it began tapping the pane with its beak.

  “Come, half-witch, join us,” she heard a woman’s voice say, though to anyone else’s ears it would have sounded like a rough cruck, cruck, cruck, cruck. Another pane smashed. The raven began to grow in size and morph into another shape as it cawed.

  A living chimera now stood on the other side of the door, a creature with the head of a woman, her blonde hair long and flowing, and wings where arms should have been. She stood balanced on one foot. The other dark, scaly appendage reached in through the broken pane, flipped up the lock with its talons, and drew the door open.

  Evangeline was repulsed and attracted in equal measure. These witches had killed her father. Left her alone in the world. Still she couldn’t deny that their magic spoke to hers.

  “You’re not welcome here,” Evangeline called out, walking like a somnambulist over shards and splinters of glass, a quarter pane snapping into smaller fragments beneath her heel.

  She’d caught sight of her mother’s sister witches, sometimes as women, sometimes in avian form, a few times over the years, but they’d always kept their distance, never approaching her, never speaking to her directly. She might have chalked up their occasional visits to bland curiosity, if she hadn’t always sensed them trying her magic, sipping at it as a chef might sample a soup for readiness.

  “Imagine,” the chimera said, then turned back to address someone beyond Evangeline’s field of vision, “her mother’s own dear sisters not welcome.” Evangeline watched as the wings transformed into pale arms, the claws below wriggled and then changed into normal human feet. Those feet turned away and disappeared into the garden. Marceline, the witch’s name came to her.

  “That’s her daddy’s doing,” another voice said.

  Evangeline stood at the door, doing her best to muster her courage. As she suspected, there were two others in the garden, the witches Margot and Mathilde. Somehow she could tell which was which, even in bird form, as surely as if she were looking on their human faces.

  She had first learned their human features from an old daguerreotype her father had forced her to study—a precaution so she’d recognize them. That’s how little he’d understood these witches. He may have known the names that went with the faces in those pictures, certain details Evangeline’s mother had shared with him when the marriage had been new and happy, but he’d been completely ignorant of their magic. The very thing he feared. Bird form or human form, Evangeline needed no photo to identify them. She could feel their magic, savage and seductive, buzzing in her veins.

  “You aren’t my mother’s sisters. Not by blood,” she said, hoping she sounded unafraid, maybe even confident in her ability to protect herself. Despite her own protest, a part of her thought of these gruesome strangers as her mother’s true sisters. Her own aunts. The pull of their shared magic made it seem somehow true.

  The creature who’d broken the panes now stood at the edge of the brickwork garden, a full-fledged woman deadheading a potted plant. Marceline glanced back over her bare shoulder, smiling at Evangeline. “Blood may be sticky, but it makes a poor glue. We shared a stronger bond, your mother and we.”

  “You killed my father.”

  Marceline gave a slight shrug. “Your father needed killing.”

  Evangeline had a flash of her father, red-faced with fury, eyes bloodshot from drink, the day he had caught her working magic, a magic Evangeline hadn’t even known she possessed. His rough hands had nearly choked her as he forced the ugly pendant her mother had worn until the day she died around Evangeline’s neck. She could still feel the way the medallion had burned into her skin, glowing as it drained the magic from her. Her hand wrapped around her throat, halfway expecting to find the damned necklace still there. Like she’d never escaped its grasp, like she’d never escaped him. Evangeline felt only the pulse in her neck, a physical reminder to stay in the present, to face the danger currently before her. She took a step backward.

  “And worse,” came two caws from a large, though by all appearances natural black bird, its wing outstretched. It bent its head in toward the wing and started preening. This creature was Evangeline’s mother’s eldest “sister,” Mathilde, though when it came to these witches, age was counted not in years, but in centuries. If what her father had told her was true, these women had been around to witness Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British navy.

  “You’ll forgive me, child,” the second voice she’d heard spoke again. Its owner, Margot, crouched low, her arms spread out and feathered like wings, though ending in hand-like tips—trapped, it seemed, between human and avian forms. “Changing doesn’t come as easily to me as it once did.”

  Margot forced herself up onto her somewhat human legs, then reached out and took Evangeline’s hand, her grasp too strong to escape, and led her over the threshold into the tiny courtyard.

  “She made that medallion, our Mireille,” Marceline said, less reading Evangeline’s thoughts than walking her back into the memory, reliving it with her. “Forged it herself, then let him place it around her neck on their wedding day. Only death . . . only death could release the clasp.”

  Evangeline remembered the night drive home with her father from the storefront meeting house he called a church. The sight of her father’s weathered Bible on the seat between them. The rawness of her skin, chafed and red from three days of wearing her mother’s heirloom. The rain was falling so hard Evangeline could no longer tell if a road still ran beneath the shroud of water. She remembered the sound of the windshield splintering as something hit it and rebounded off the car’s hood. Her dad slammed on the brakes, and the pickup spun to face the opposite direction, the Bible flying from the seat down to his feet. The engine stalled, and her dad shifted to park. He looked at her, his eyes glassy with fear and drink. Evangeline leaned over to look through the passenger seat window. She could see nothing. Not an animal. Not a person. But instinct told her that whatever they had hit had been large.

  She expected her father to get out of the truck to see what or whom they’d hit. But he didn’t. Instead, he cranked the keys in the ignition again and again as the engine gurgled and sputtered, only to die a final death.

  He grabbed the door handle, cursing, and nearly fell to the ground when the door opened. Once he found his footing, he walked around to the front of the truck, the headlights illuminating him as he strutted in one direction and then turned, though his image was obscured by the heavy rain and the cracked windshield and the building steam of Evangeline’s own breath. He grasped his head between his hands, seemingly puzzled, before lowering them and peering up. Evangeline leaned forward and wiped the condensation from the windshield with her sleeve. At that exact moment, something large and black, blacker than the night itself, swooped down and lifted him, his scream lessening in volume as the distance between them grew. She sat there in shock, listening to her own throbbing heart. The next instant Evangeline caught a glimpse of her father falling through the headlight beams, followed by a wet popping sound as his body struck the pavement.

  She couldn’t remember what happened after that. She had screamed, she reckoned. She must have screamed. She wanted to scream now at the memory.

  All she knew was when she came to, wandering dazed along the road, it was dawn, the rain had ended, and the necklace had disappeared.

  “Why have you come?” Evangeline said, her voice coming out as a shout. Never, not once on any of their visits, including the one that had ended in her father’s death, had they deigned to talk to her. She tugged her arm, once, twice. Finally her hand slipped from Margot’s, though Margot’s sharp nails left claw marks on her. She grasped the wounded hand with the other, pulling it to her chest.

  Marceline drew near and held out her own hand. “May I?” she said. She placed her
fingers, now very human looking, on the wrist of the scratched hand. Though Evangeline was shaking, she allowed her visitor to take her hand. Marceline waved her free hand over the deep scratches, the gesture erasing any evidence they’d ever been made. “There now, that’s better, isn’t it?”

  “Why are you here?” Evangeline repeated herself, though this time her anxiety had faded. A part of her mind warned her that the witches were working against her, using their powers to make her more amenable to suggestion. She envisioned a curtain rising up around her, blocking them off, and as the curtain rose, she sensed their influence lessening. In a few moments, she felt more in control of her own thoughts, of her own emotions. Still, a tiny voice warned her, that very sensation might be an illusion. Perhaps they were letting her believe she had regained control. She allowed the curtain of energy to drop around her, and it blew outward, pushing her aunts back, their feet dragging along the stone pavers, tiny sparks shooting up from the points of contact.

  “Very good, ma chérie,” Marceline said, a sparkle of true pride in her eyes. “Your mother would have been proud.”

  “Don’t lie to the child,” Margot said. “She knows the truth well enough. Mireille would have been horrified.”

  “Thanks to the poison he put in her head,” Mathilde cawed again from ground level.

  Evangeline knew her parents’ story all too well. How the swamp witch had fallen for the handsome preacher. How that love hadn’t lasted long enough. How fear and loathing had set in. But by then, it had been too late—Evangeline’s mother had the magical noose of her own making tied around her neck, and a child on the way.

  “I don’t want to discuss her,” Evangeline said. “Not with you.”

  “If not with us, with whom?” Mathilde cawed.