Silas muttered an incantation low under his breath, and in a whirl of wind and leaves, the corpses of the snatchers arranged themselves into a pile among broken pieces of dead wood. The Grand Wizard raised his staff high, toward the slice of silvery moon that hung low in the darkness above them, and swung it down in one heavy blow. A bolt of lightning shot down from the sky, striking the pile of snatcher bodies and the dried twigs and sticks he’d gathered for tinder. The bodies caught fire, which soon grew to a full blaze. The three of them stood in uneasy silence, watching the remnants of their enemies turn to ash. A crow cawed from somewhere in the darkness, their only witness.
Ree looked down at her hand. She was still clutching that disgusting rag the snatchers had stuffed into her mouth to swallow her screams. It was all that was left of this bloody ordeal, the last shred of evidence that there had ever been one at all.
She caught her mother’s eyes from across the fire. There was anger. And there was pain. She looked less like the fearsome Quarter Queen she knew her to be and more like a mother who’d just endured her worst nightmare.
The fire reeled higher into the night, snapping and hissing. Silas stared into the flames, a rueful smile playing on his lips as thosetwisting shadows danced over his face. “No saints,” the alchemist murmured.
Ree didn’t believe in her mother’s saints and angels, it was true. But even if she did, she wouldn’t dare waste her prayers on the likes of these monsters. She tossed the rag into the flame, watched as it burned down to nothing at all. “And no fucking sinners.”
Chapter Six
Ree
Ree didn’t dare utter a word the whole way home. Her mother watched her, mouth pressed into a flat, displeased line, Silas sitting quietly beside her. Their carriage passed into the city gates, and soon enough they were trundling over the French Quarter’s cobbled roads, back into the warmth of torchlight and tinkling laughter that carried down from the tangle of terraces above. Soon, the carriage had turned onto St. Ann, where it rattled to a stop outside of the Laveau home. Their house was a modest cottage once owned by a judge whose ailing son Marie Laveau had brought back from the brink of yellow fever. Now it was Marie’s, her name signed to the deed, an ode to her days as a young plague nurse.
The silence stretched between them until Ree couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“You’ve done enough.” Her mother’s tone made it perfectly clear that there would be hell to pay for her insolence, just not in front of an audience.
“Marie,” Silas began quietly. “You mustn’t be too hard on the child. Better for her to see with her own eyes the violence of bigots than to learn from a book.”
“Do not feign innocence, Silas,” Marie snapped. “Your kind carryenough bigotry of their own for my people on matters outside of magic. Or did you forget?”
Silas leaned on his great staff, touching a hand to the black stone dragon coiled upon the end, its fanged jaws clenched upon its own tail—the ouroboros, the beast that consumed itself. “How could I, when I have you, my dear queen, for a friend?”
If asked just yesterday, Ree would have never believed that her mother and Silas could befriends.But now she wasn’t so sure. They’d killed three white men together, burned them down to nothing. That wasn’t exactly the business of enemies.
But Marie said nothing, just yanked open the carriage door, gesturing for Ree to quickly get out first, then following and snapping the door to a close behind her. After a moment, the carriage set off down St. Ann before it turned into the Quarter’s shadowed alleys.
Ree went inside their home. She knew what people whispered about her mother—that their house’s modest exterior was but one more illusion the eternally self-serving witch Marie Laveau had cast upon the city and its people. That it was really a palace, a hidden chateau filled with expensive baubles, cursed objects, and trinkets she’d conned from the men she’d hexed for her own amusement. But there was nothing remotely palatial about their home. Her mother scrubbed the hardwood floors with oil and soap herself, sewed simple lace curtains with her own needle and thread, purchased rugs from enslaved women at the French Market. In the kitchen, Marie kept a tin pot of cinnamon, orange peel, and bay leaves boiling all night and day for luck and protection. Ree smelled it now, that familiar autumnal scent.
The only space Marie Laveau had indulged in was the front parlor, where she’d covered the walls in oil paintings of black folks going about their lives in a variety of ways: A grandmother in a blue cotton skirt and tattered head rag washing her fussing petit-bébé in a wooden wash bucket. A newly married couple gleefully jumping the broom. And Marie’s favorite, a mother and her young daughter hand in hand walking down a long stretch of dusty magnolia-lined road, on their way into the sunlit unknown together.Real people,she’d told Ree when she was just a little girl.Real freedom.
Ree stood in the parlor now, feeling very much like that same little girl about to be scolded.
With a wave of her jeweled hand and just a thought, Marie started a fire in the grate. It was with Ogoun’s blessing, of course. The great metalsmith god favored her mother and would gladly lend the fire from his sacred forge for her whims. Sosie came slithering out from beneath the settee, and Marie stooped to pick her up; she wound her way up Marie’s arm until she settled comfortably around her shoulders.
“This is why,” Marie snarled, leveling a ringed finger at her, “I insist on your training. The spirits are not compelled to simply serve you because you ask, little girl. You must serve them too. Prayer. Fasting. Sacrifice. It is a relationship, like any other. One that depends on fairness, upon the utmost equilibrium.”
“Because you know all about fairness in relationships, Mother.”
“I know better than you. Clearly.”
Ree’s eyes stayed on Sosie, the way her mother stroked her scales, cradling the snake close like a child at her breast. For some reason, the sight of this made her positively seethe. “Do you? Because every relationship you have, you manipulate to your advantage,” she retorted.
“And you’d be wise to do the very same. This city’s rules are not made for us, Ree. They never were. Before either you or I were even born, this city had profited from our people’s pain, suffering, and forced labor. And I was determined for that to not be our fate. And so, yes, I am guilty of everything that you say. I manipulated. I plotted. I’ve even killed.” Her eyes were cold. “But all of my whims have had ends. And what of yours, hm? What are your reasons, daughter? Simply to spite me?”
Ree froze.
Marie sighed, turned away, and massaged her aching temples. “Like it or not, the safest place for you is this city.”
“It is a gilded cage,” Ree said, her voice suddenly small, nearly shy.
“Look around, child. Better a gilded cage than a collar.” Marie closed her eyes, and Ree knew she was trying to shut out the imageof her kneeling in the dirt, a collar bound to her neck. She lay both hands on Ree’s shoulders. “The safest place for you is New Orleans, because here, whether you like it or not, you are a Laveau. And that means something. Holds power. But outside of these walls? Your power would be used against you, and you would be forever hunted. Always running. Imagine the kind of power a slaver could wield with a girl like you under their thumb.”
Ree shook free from her mother’s grasp. “And yet here I am, Mother, right under yours.”
It was an awful thing to say. But sometimes her mother could be a truly awful woman.
