Anabelle put a finger to her lips, silencing whatever answer she might have given. “Tomorrow. The Bridal Bridge.”
Ree froze. Could she know? No, she decided, this woman could not know of the pain that same fateful place had brought her eight years ago. Because she had never spoken of it. She could not know the pain Ree harbored from her decision to leave Henryk Broussard standing all alone on that bridge, her choice to remain in New Orleans because she hadn’t yet learned to sever that invisible, suffocating thread that tied her to her mother. At the time, leaving her mother had felt impossible in a way that it didn’t now. Anabellecould not possibly know about that old pain. It was the magic of coincidence and nothing more. Now Ree had learned from her mistakes. Now she might choose her own fate, chart her own path outside of her mother’s reign. She felt giddy with delicious possibility. She was scared too. But somehow it was easier to imagine the danger of leaving than to imagine the stifling safety of staying. Because at least when she left, she wouldn’t have to face old ghosts.
But Henryk Broussard was more than a ghost. He was the wound on her fickle heart that might never, ever heal.
“When the bells toll at sundown. I’ll be there…” Anabelle pressed her lips to Ree’s. Ree tasted the salt in her tears. “And I hope you will be too.”
Chapter Seven
Ree
Ree carefully left Anabelle sleeping and slipped out of the House of Flowers before dawn. If her mother wasn’t going to relinquish the answers Ree so desperately wanted, then she would get them herself. When she reached the hairdressing parlor, she slipped inside and retrieved Sanite’s grimoire from the back. By the time she returned home, the sun was just starting to rise, and her mother was still nowhere to be seen. She knew that she shouldn’t touch the grimoire, let alone read it. But what did it matter if Ree was really leaving tonight?
Turning the grimoire over in her hands, she shivered. The book called to her.Sangto her. There was something dark in it, darker than anything Voodoo had ever shown her. But what did that matter to a girl like her? Something dark lived in Ree too, the very same thing that made the city’s gentry quicken down the road when she passed, that startled the nuns and churchgoers to suddenly cross themselves with hurried blessings muttered under their breath.
Ree cast a careful look about her bedchamber, straining to listen for the telltale creak of her mother’s footsteps. But the house was quiet. Ree turned back to the book in her hands, running a finger along the twin intertwinedQ’s stamped in a violet wax seal uponthe cover. She opened the spell book, thumbed to the page her mother had left turned at the corner, and began to read:
It is said that Voodoo is the wellspring from which all magic of life comes forth. But what of death? What might be gained from tampering with life beyond the Veil? The answer to this question was born not here in the new land, but across the sea, in our sister country—Haiti. I have heard whispers that when I banished Jon the Conjurer, it was to these shores that he fled. It was here that he truly began his reign of terror. And for this sin, I alone am responsible.
Ree’s eyes fell upon an inky symbol in the center of the page—asmall cross erected on a black coffin. She knew the symbol well enough, for it was the veve of death and hung on many a tombstone—it was the mark of Baron Samedi. Lord of Death.
During the height of Haiti’s rebellion, it was said that the renowned general, Toussaint Louverture, sought a means to build his dwindling army. And so he summoned the Lord of Death himself, Baron Samedi. But like other loa such as Legba, Samedi is never one to be summoned without proper offering, lest the summoner suffer terrible consequence. It cannot be known what Toussaint offered Samedi for his power, but from whatever terrible bargain they struck, only one truth remains certain among the many myths that came after: Under Toussaint’s command, the raised souls of his dead countrymen and ancestors emerged from the earth…and began to walk amongst the living once more. This conduit of dark magic came to be known as one word…a word more feared in New Orleans than rebellion itself. Henceforth, this dark magic became known as the unholy re-creation of the undead: the zombi.
Ree traced a finger along the drawings of dark skeletal figures trudging along, one after another, each face more harrowing thanthe last. The eyes sunken into blackened hollows, the mouths open and gnashing…
Many years later, with Toussaint long buried, it was said that in the ashes of this war grew a strange flower. Thought to be Toussaint’s final gift to his beloved Haiti, this flower became known as Conjurer Root, a conduit rumored to give power over death itself. Those who seek the power of the dead must consume it. But be warned, dear reader. The dead may consume ye first…
Ree closed the spell book, her mind racing. Why would her mother have need of Conjurer Root? Or perhaps it was not Conjurer Root she’d been after at all. Perhaps…she’d only ever sought Jon.
Ree went to the armoire beside her bed and picked up the small velvet box Anabelle had gifted her. She carefully slid off the top and held the Conjurer Root beneath the candlelight. All that forbidden power, the likes of which not even one as formidable as Sanite Dede had wanted to meddle with, right there in her hand. Such a tiny thing. Such a glorious thing. Rumor had it her mother had scorched the earth of all the Conjurer Root she could find after the Quarter Quarrel, had bled the land dry of it, leaving only ash for soil. Now here it was in her hands, the forbidden fruit, plucked from some far-off Eden, hidden even from Marie Laveau.
Just one bite, not a petal more,Anabelle had warned, red lips curving into a lush smile.Anything more? Well, there would be unintended consequences…
Just one bite. Ree plucked a black petal from the flower and placed it on her tongue.
Ree stumbled back onto her bed, her body crashing like a boulder onto the mattress, her mind doused in shadow. Her breath hitched, then slowed. Slower, slower, slower…
When Ree woke again, she was standing in the middle of a cotton field, engulfed in a darkness so deep that it consumed her. She didn’t recognize this place. No, Ree thought quickly, thisworld.Wherever she was, it was not the New Orleans she knew. It held some of the same wet heat, but not the kind that left a trail of waterykisses down your back. That was the New Orleans Ree knew. No, this dampness was interwoven with darkness, like the entire city had been plunged into the far reaches of black swamp water. If she focused hard enough, she could make out silvery wisps on the horizon.Spirits.Coming and going, slipping back and forth through a pale doorway that looked, if she squinted hard enough, more like a flapping piece of silk caught in a ghostly breeze. It looked like…aveil.
Something squirmed in the dirt beneath Ree’s bare feet. She crouched, examined it closely.
A hand emerged from the earth, pushing through root, earthworms, and bone, the hand itself blackened from sun and death. Ree fell back, horrified. The hand clawed out, becoming an arm, the shape of a torso, and finally…a man.
Drenched in dirt and root, a man in raven-black dressings towered over Ree. He had the skin of pure midnight, dark and gleaming, with powerful, field-working shoulders. His eyes were golden, bright enough that they gave off their own light, a lantern in the night.
“What are you?” And yet she knew. She knew this man whom she did not know at all. There was something curiously familiar about him, something that drew Ree to him without question. It was the same knowing as when she practiced Voodoo—she needn’t know a particular spell or hex; it came to her through seeing, through doing, through channeling the magic from the world she knew and the world beyond.
WhatwasI, is the question. I was chained. But now…
He leaned in, golden eyes going flat black. It was the preternatural blackness of eternal night, of a moon that would never fall from the sky.
…I am free.
He turned, gesturing to the cotton field that surrounded them in a white halo, where bodies broke through the ground.Slaves,Ree thought. Even now, even in death. They were still in their plantation clothes, some still scarred from the whip and the barb, mouths slack from screaming for a justice that never came. They rose, one by one, from the darkness and dirt.
And so are they.
Ree screamed. She was screaming still when she came to, back within the muzzy warmth of her bedchamber, back in the natural world. There were no bloodied cotton plants in her room, no whispering darkness. Ree was on her bed, curled into herself, drenched in sweat and her own fear. She’d been crying, somehow, though she hadn’t felt sorrow. At least, nothersorrow. She’d felt other sadness gripping at her, a thousand black hands reaching up from the earth and seizing at her, tearing at her, reaching for anything that might recognize their pain. Who had that man been? But she knew.
