The smirk faded on Ree’s lips. “I don’t think I like that question.”
Marcel’s eyes held her, molten brown in the parlor’s candlelit darkness. “You forget I know you, Ree. I know how you really felt about Henryk Broussard. However badly that ended. I know it was real. But this thing you got going with Anabelle? Consider this the advice of a friend: You playin’ the wrong game with this girl. And it’s going to end badly.”
“And why is that?”
“You know why, Ree.” His mouth quirked into a tight smile. “Because you both been dealt two very,verydifferent hands.”
Ree said nothing. She reached into her pocket, retrieving the vial of aurum. She passed it to Marcel beneath the table. But when she spoke again, her voice was unusually quiet. “Now you owe me,” she said, changing course. “And more than just a few drinks, you bastard.”
Marcel grinned. “Forever indebted.”
After they concluded their business and stepped out from the House of Flowers’s sweet damp and into the street, Ree considered her friend with narrowed eyes one last time. “Be careful, Marcel. Only half a tincture. Not a drop more. And slip it into something he ingests, something that can cover the taste.”
“His moonshine?”
“I don’t care if the bastard drinks piss. That’s his business. You just make sure it’s strong enough to cover the taste of aurum.”
Marcel’s grin deepened, and she could see his plan alreadyhatching in his thoughts. “You’re a good friend, Ree.” His voice took on a strange note. “You’ll be an even better queen one day.”
One day.Those two little words haunted her sometimes. The inevitability of her fate was almost too much to bear most nights. Because she didn’t want it. She’d seen what the costs of being queen had done to her mother.
“What if…what if I don’t want to be queen?” she asked quietly. She could allow herself a moment of weakness with Marcel. He saw past her little games. He saw her.
“I don’t think this city will allow folks like us to choose much what we want.” He dipped a finger beneath her chin playfully, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “So, take what you can get, darling.”
Marcel turned to go, but Ree stopped him by the arm. “Listen, Marcel.Not a drop more.Don’t be a fool.”
“Don’t worry, Ree. I’ll be a perfect little saint like you.”
Ree chuckled. “No saints,” she called after him as he set into a jog down the road.
“And no fucking sinners,” he shouted back over his shoulder.
Ree carried those words with her back down Bourbon Street as nightfall deepened over the Quarter and gas lamps flickered to life one by one.No saints and no sinners.A common saying among New Orleans’s underclass. She couldn’t help but think of her mother, infamous for just as many miracles as misdeeds. And what about herself? Would this favor to Marcel be a miracle or, she feared, a misdeed? What if he used more than he needed? It became an annoying refrain she chewed on as she made her way home through the Quarter’s mist-laden streets.What if? Whatif?
By the time she turned onto St. Ann, she could see the barest shape of a carriage whisking away. Her mother’s private carriage. Curious, Ree approached the front of their house, where there was always a Voodoo acolyte stationed by the door for protection. Tonight, it was Nan standing duty.
“Where is my mother going?” Ree asked.
Nan twisted a scarlet coil with her finger nervously. “She had business. That is all I’m at liberty to say.”
“Well, I’m at liberty to make you say more if you don’t,” Ree snapped.
A talented soil-sower, Nan was a girl all of seventeen who had escaped life on her plantation just the year before. She’d come downriver from Mobile seeking refuge with the Laveaus and had a wicked talent for brewing poisons that Marie Laveau had found useful. She was talented, but she wasn’t stupid. Picking a fight with Marie Laveau the Second was a good way to be sent back upriver.
“The Brotherhood,” Nan relented.
The Brotherhood? Again? What kind of unholy alliance was her mother stirringup?
Nan shifted uneasily, and Ree crossed her arms. She had a cherubic face, an air about her that made her seem younger than she was. Ree almost felt bad leaning on her so hard. “What else?”
“They spoke of an Inquisitor,” Nan burst out then abruptly made a face suggesting she wished she hadn’t.
Ree’s eyebrows bunched together. “An Inquisitor? Here in the city?”
“Not yet. But they are expecting him.”
So, Antoine’s talk of a tribunal was true. The Church was already sending an Inquisitor to the city. Inquisitors were witch-hunters, arresting those accused of heresy and blasphemy and interrogating them. Her mother had warned her of their terrible instruments of torture—terrifying contraptions that pulled limbs from their sockets, spikes that would penetrate through the mouth and the anus. Commonly, they set their victims alight on towering pyres of howling flame.
