Royal Street

by Suzanne Johnson

  New Orleans ain’t the city of brotherly love, at least not when a storm’s brewing and traffic’s creeping at less than two miles an hour on the I-10.

  It took more than ninety minutes to drive the ten miles to New Orleans East and another hour to inch over the five-mile Twin Span bridges that crossed the eastern edge of Lake Pontchartrain. As I sat on the eastbound bridge, I had plenty of time to watch the whitecaps chop and foam on the lake and try to ignore the ominous mountain of clouds building around me.

  Katrina was turning into one nasty storm. I tried to concentrate on the audiobook and calm the fingers of panic that scrabbled around the edge of my brain, looking for a way in.

  I knew most of the day would be spent on the road, surrounded by other cars full of nervous people. If normal hurricane frenzy ranked five on a scale of one to ten, Katrina hysteria had ratcheted up to fifty in the past twenty-four hours. Friday, it had been a minor storm headed for Florida. Now, it was a monster hurtling straight for us. Without a miracle, the City That Care Forgot (or, as we liked to call it, the City That Forgot to Care) would be in trouble.

  So I’d gotten up early enough to go through my most effective grounding ritual, part meditation, part magic. Aromatics in a room hydrator, Pachelbel on the iPod, both hands holding magic-infused rubies washed in holy water for emotional protection, eyes closed, mind focused on precisely nothing. Works every time.

  And, just in case, I had put fresh herbs in my mojo bag.

  I edged the Pathfinder up another three feet and wondered: If enough wizards turned their powers toward it, could they change the path of a hurricane? Of course, doing so would violate magical law. The Congress of Elders keeps the magical community on a tight leash, and despite his doubts about the system, Gerry had taught me every thou-shalt-not in the book, including the one about interfering with nature.

  Bottom line: I couldn’t do anything about this storm, which really ticked me off. I just crept along and started hour three of the audiobook. Bill the Pony could make better time in this traffic.

  Whenever I stopped to stretch my legs, I found people gathered around radios, fear mirrored from one face to the next. My emotional shields were holding so far, which was a good thing. My own skittering nerves were bad enough. Add any more stress and I’d be sitting on the side of the interstate gibbering like a chimpanzee when the storm hit.

  “Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,” warned a National Hurricane Center spokesman, his voice vibrating out of someone’s car radio at a rest stop. The NHC guy used phrases like “catastrophic structural failure” and “human suffering incredible by modern standards,” sending a palpable tremor through everyone within earshot. The feds were putting the Drama King to shame.

  I still couldn’t accept it. We’d had too many close calls. Hurricanes headed our way, the weather prophets spouted doom and gloom, and the storms either took sharp last-second turns or fizzled out before landfall. We had an unwritten belief system: God watches out for fools and New Orleanians. I’d clock anyone who said that phrase was redundant.

  Waiting my turn at a gas station outside Meridian, Mississippi, I heard people talking about fuel shortages along the evacuation routes. I bit my lip, thinking. Maybe I could do something to help, at least on a small scale. Let the Elders track down my happy evacuating backside if they didn’t like it.

  I jumped out of the Pathfinder and dug through my backpack full of potions and charms arranged in neatly labeled vials and bottles. I finally found the one I wanted: a replenishing potion made from a simple blend of ground hawthorn and geranium in my usual base of magic-infused olive oil. I stuck it in my pocket and went to lean against the nearest pump, half-listening as evacuees from Biloxi and Gulfport exchanged horror stories about the scarcity of hotel rooms.

  A red-faced man in a white polo shirt that failed to camouflage the evidence of a few too many Budweisers ranted to nobody in particular. “I heard there’s over a million people running from this dadburned storm.”

  He had to be from Mississippi. Nobody from Southeast Louisiana says “dadburned.”

  A white-haired woman in wrinkled shorts and a pink visor nodded at him from the next pump. “Heck, I just talked with my cousin Luanne. She left Yscloskey last night with three babies and a dog, and they couldn’t find no place to stay. Spent the night on the floor of a motel up near Jackson.”

  Okay, maybe I wouldn’t diss my family. At least I had a place to go.

  I strolled around the gas pumps, looking for the circular cover that led to the underground fuel storage tanks. I finally found it and knelt, pretending to tie my shoe while I pried off the lid and looked at the hatch. The tanker-truck drivers probably had a special wrench to open it, but I had something faster: magic. Using a tiny bit of magical energy, I managed to get it open enough to pour the replenishing potion inside. This set of pumps, at least, wouldn’t run out of fuel for another six or eight hours.

  “Take that, Gerry,” I said, replacing the cover and returning the empty potion vial to my pocket. Red Congress wizards might fight better, but they were downright dangerous when it came to electronics, fuels, or explosives. If Gerry had tried that stunt, we wouldn’t have to worry about a hurricane. We’d be so deep-fried you could roll us in powdered sugar and sell us as beignets.

  The beginnings of a headache rewarded me for my efforts. After filling my own tank and buying a giant coffee with enough caffeine to keep a narcoleptic awake, I wedged the Pathfinder back into traffic and snaked up the I-59 into Alabama, stopping to magically replenish fuel storage tanks along the way as long as my premade potions lasted. Always, I was surrounded by drivers whose faces grew incrementally more worried. A series of back roads out of Tuscaloosa eventually led to my grandmother’s house in the tiny northwest Alabama cotton mill town of Winfield.

  I’d spent the first seven years of my life here, not all of them particularly happy. I prayed it wouldn’t turn out to be the only home I had left.

  MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2005 “Superdome becomes last resort for thousands unable to leave. New Orleans braces for nightmare of the Big One.”

  —THE TIMES–PICAYUNE

  CHAPTER 4

  As Katrina grew to monstrous Category Five status and started her last slow march toward land, I’d spent Sunday night frozen in front of the TV in my grandmother’s living room with no more eloquent prayer on my lips than “please.”

  Please let this storm die out. Please take care of those people who couldn’t leave. Please help my home survive. Please help Gerry. If nothing else, help him make it through this.

  I drifted into an exhausted sleep around four a.m., then awoke to the news that Katrina had weakened just before landfall and taken a last-second jog to the east. It had avoided the direct hit, socking New Orleans with a blow from its weaker, westerly side. Relief rolled through me, relaxing muscles I hadn’t realized were bunched. News hadn’t come in from the Louisiana and Mississippi coastal areas east of New Orleans, but it would be bad.

  I was still trying to process it when Gran, wearing her pink housecoat and fuzzy slippers, wandered in to tell me coffee was ready. “Looks like it didn’t amount to much in New Orleans,” she said in her slow drawl as we watched TV news teams wander around the French Quarter. The reporters seemed torn between relief at their own safety and disappointment that the big story was happening to the east, where Katrina was probably making mincemeat of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and the Mississippi coast.

  “I don’t know what I would’ve done if it had hit us head-on.” I watched as camera crews captured the palm trees on Canal Street bending under 140-mph gusts. Hundreds of windows on the Hyatt Regency had exploded, but the building stood. An old storefront downtown had collapsed on a car, but no one was hurt. There would be a lot of wind damage, but it wouldn’t be catastrophic. New Orleans would survive.

  “Well, you’d have moved back here, I reckon,” Gran said. “Wouldn’a been the end of the world. Come get breakf
ast.” A woman of few words and highly understated compassion, my grandmother.

  As soon as I’d arrived Sunday night, I’d moved my late grandfather’s old Pontiac out of the garage and created the other end of the transport in case Gerry needed it. We’d talked by phone, made sure the two portals were connected, and then I’d locked myself in the bathroom and retraced the steps of my grounding ritual. I’d learned the hard way that Gran and I got along better if I didn’t know what she really felt behind that stiff upper lip.

  I wandered into the kitchen, slid a biscuit and piece of ham onto a plate, and poured some coffee.

  “Is Gerry coming here?” Gran sat at the kitchen table scanning the Birmingham newspaper, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose and every strand of silvery-blond hair in place. “You gonna see your daddy while you’re here?”

  I sighed. Two loaded questions.

  “I don’t guess Gerry will have to come after all,” I said, sitting opposite her at the table. “And do you really think Dad wants to see me?”

  My father, Peter Jaco, had dumped me on my grandparents’ doorstep when I was six, shortly after my mom died of an aneurysm. She’d been on borrowed time her whole life and didn’t know it. Dad had worked at the conveyor belt plant, a solid and quiet man. My mom had given up her magic to marry him and live a normal life just like Gran had done with my grandfather. But with Mom gone, Peter Jaco hadn’t wanted the stress of a six-year-old kid with magic skills. Maybe it wasn’t that simple, but that’s how it looked from my end of things.

  “Well, of course your daddy would want to see you. What a question.” Gran rattled her paper and turned the page, ending the discussion.

  I ate silently, trying to think of an excuse not to visit him. Really, though, he’d done no worse by me than my grandparents. They’d kept me less than a year before driving me to New Orleans and leaving me with Gerry, a complete stranger. I don’t think I was a bad kid, just one with a lot of untrained magic. I tried not to blame them. Sometimes I even succeeded.

  I poured the last of my coffee into the sink, then placed my mug in the dishwasher. “I’ll see Dad before I head back home.”

  “When you going?”

  What was the old saying about fish and houseguests stinking after three days? “In a day or two, unless Gerry needs me sooner.”

  “Stay as long as you want to, Drusilla Jane. This is your home too.” Her face was hidden behind the newspaper, and I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. One of these days, I was going to have to come to terms with the fact that Gran and Dad were my closest family members whether or not they approved of the life I’d chosen. But not today.

  Back in the living room, the cable news reporter had left the French Quarter and stood in the New Orleans Central Business District, the CBD, looking perplexed.

  “We’re getting reports of rising water in different parts of town, but we haven’t been able to confirm more than this.” He pointed the camera’s focus toward his shoes, which were immersed in a half inch of water. “This wasn’t here an hour ago.”

  I frowned and returned to the sofa, my dysfunctional family forgotten as I listened to new reports filtering in. Storm surge had caused levee breaches that were dumping tons of water into the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The Lower Nine was a predominantly black neighborhood a few miles east of the French Quarter; St. Bernard was predominantly white and just east of the Lower Nine. Other breaches in the area’s broad levee system had reportedly flooded New Orleans East, but the media couldn’t confirm it—only that 9-1-1 calls had come in before the phone lines went down. No one knew where the water downtown was coming from.

  I scrambled in my jeans pocket for my cell phone and called Gerry.

  He answered on the first ring. “I thought it was about time you called. You’re such a mother hen.”

  “Are you getting any news?” I said. He sounded relaxed, even cheerful. Maybe nothing was wrong after all.

  “No, the electricity went out early this morning, but I’d say the worst of it missed—” He stopped talking, and I heard him moving around. “Damn.”

  “Gerry? The levees are failing. Get in the transport.”

  He didn’t answer, but I heard him calling Sebastian. “There’s water coming in the first floor. I think the floodwall—”

  The phone’s tiny gray screen blinked CALL ENDED. Hitting redial got me nothing but silence.

  I raced through the kitchen to the garage, passing Gran along the way. “Something’s wrong.” My voice sounded calmer than I felt. “I’m going to try to bring Gerry here.”

  I knelt beside the interlocking circle and triangle I’d drawn in chalk on the concrete floor. Lighting two small candles from my backpack, I set one on each end of the transport and laid small chunks of green amber at each point of the triangle. I warmed the largest piece of green amber in my hands, placed it carefully on the circle, and shot a tiny bit of energy inside it. The power of the transport caught like an ember bursting into flame. Gerry should be able to come through.

  Nothing happened.

  “TV just said the Lakeview levee broke.”

  I started, unaware that Gran had come into the garage and was standing behind me.

  A thrill of fear shot through me. “You’re sure it was Lakeview?”

  She nodded. “They say the whole place’ll fill up like a soup bowl. They had no business buildin’ a city below sea level in the first place.”

  I bit back a retort and did some mental calculations. The foundation of Gerry’s house sat about twelve or fourteen feet below the levee. If New Orleans really did fill up, his first floor would be underwater, but he should be able to go upstairs unless the force of the water pushed the whole house off its foundation. It would depend on how close he was to the breach.

  Retrieving the large piece of amber, I warmed it in my hands again. “Gerry established his transport in his upstairs study,” I said. “I’m going to try to go there and see if he’s okay.”

  I stepped inside the transport and knelt again, placing the green amber on the line of the circle and willing a small amount of energy into it.

  Pressure squeezed me from all sides, and I waited for the transport to begin. Then it dissipated. Gerry’s side of the transport wasn’t working. It had been disconnected, or destroyed.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2005 “Catastrophic: Storm surge swamps 9th Ward, St. Bernard; Lakeview levee breach threatens to inundate city.”

  —THE TIMES–PICAYUNE

  CHAPTER 5

  Several hours of frantic transport attempts and aborted phone calls passed before I thought of trying to locate Gerry by less-conventional means. The Elders had outlawed unauthorized hydromancy and other forms of divination years ago because they were too easy to abuse, but like most young wizards I’d tried a few times just to see if they worked. Want to see what the cute boy down the street’s up to? Hydromancy is a teenage girl’s dream.

  Sometimes you have to break rules to get things done in an emergency, and I thought a hurricane probably qualified. Besides, I’d run out of other ideas. I’d even checked with Tish, staying at her cousin’s house in Houston, and she hadn’t been able to reach Gerry either.

  My energy was flagging from the transport attempts by the time I headed to the Winfield Walmart in search of makeshift hydromancy tools. A headache nudged at my temples, and my muscles ached as I prowled the aisles looking for an acceptable substitute for a dark marble bowl. I found a smoke-brown Pyrex dish that should work, and purified water to substitute for holy water. Alabama was Bible Belt. Methodists and Baptists do casseroles, not holy water.

  Back at Gran’s, I pulled a small gardening table into the backyard to take advantage of energy from the full moon, and set up the ritual. Faux-holy water in the bowl. Something of Gerry’s—a book I had borrowed. Patchouli incense from Walmart. I really needed mimosa leaves to burn, but patchouli would have to do. I lit the incense sticks and tried to relax while the ashes collected in the mas
on jar I was using as an incense burner. Finally, I added the ashes to the bowl of water.

  I rested one hand on Gerry’s book and dipped the other hand in the water, concentrating on Gerry and tapping my dwindling reserves of magic. A minute passed, then two, and a cloudy image reflected on the water’s surface.

  Thank God. It had been almost four frantic hours since our phone conversation, but at least I knew Gerry was alive. He sat at the desk in his upstairs study, writing by candlelight and looking hot and sweaty and miserable. But alive. I closed my eyes and my heart rate slowed. I couldn’t imagine my life without Gerry. I might share blood ties with my dad and Gran, but Gerry was my family. I’d stop complaining about my assignments. I’d appreciate what I had. I’d trust Gerry to bring my skills along the way he thought best.

  I spent the next two weeks glued to the TV news channels, watching as my beautiful city died an ugly death, broadcast around the world 24/7. Thousands of people were stranded without help because they’d been too poor to leave, or too sick, or too old and frail, or too sure nothing bad could happen. If Gerry and the Elders hadn’t forced me to leave, I would have been one of them.

  International media and private rescue groups swarmed the city immediately, but it took almost a week for squabbling officials to send even such basics as bottled water. In the meantime, people drowned in the eighty percent of the city that flooded, and died on the streets in the twenty percent that didn’t.

  A report on what looked like a voodoo ritual killing of a National Guardsman trying to secure one of the neighborhoods finally propelled me off the sofa. The camera crews raced to a partially flooded Central City area and showed a black-draped form on a patch of high ground next to a boarded-up nail salon. A strange symbol had been drawn on the side of the building in white paint, and reporters speculated that a voodoo practitioner had sacrificed the soldier in some misguided plea to save the city.