Ree spoke the only word that came to mind, the name that thrummed in her blood.
“Jon.”
The dream haunted Ree the rest of the day, even as she mindlessly tended to customers at their hairdressing parlor and packaged tins of butter balm and love potions and gris-gris into their jars and satchels. Her mother was nowhere to be seen, but it was Friday, and she used the time to prepare alone for rituals to commence at the beginning of the week. Ree knew her mother was due to perform her usual crossroads ritual in the Dreadwood, where she would commune with the loa in private. She wouldn’t have the chance to ask her about the grimoire, about the dream, or about Jon.And,a small voice reminded her,you won’t be able to tell your own mother goodbye.
But she knew Marie Laveau would get on well enough without her for a time and would have her hands full with Quarter politics and holding court. Ree wanted nothing to do with the Harbinger, with the Conjurer Root, or with visions of Jon. She would leave with Anabelle tonight and be done with this godforsaken city, just as she should have done eight years ago. She’d missed her chance with Henryk. She wouldn’t be so foolish now.
Now the cathedral’s bells tolled as Ree stood alone upon the Bridal Bridge, waiting. With each second, she could feel herself growing more nervous. Dusk was falling, and night would sooncome. The bridge was a little white stone crossing connected to the long promenade that overlooked the rippling blue expanse of the Mississippi River. It was mostly empty at this hour. The crowds had all but whittled away, gone inside to have supper on the covered patio at Labelle’s, where they would eat steaming bowls of crawfish gumbo and golden disks of hot water bread, or to Sweet Kettle, the port-side confectionary that served praline candies tied in petal-pink bows, golden pitchers of clove-spiced lemonade and sweet wine.
Still, she waited. She’d spent the day in a panic, not fully knowing what choice she’d come to, knowing only that staying in New Orleans a moment longer felt suddenly impossible. She’d told her mother as much, hadn’t she?It is a gilded cage.
And now? She could escape. Once she and Anabelle were far away from the city and found somewhere safe, Ree would ask her exactly where she had gotten the Conjurer Root, how she’d come by such nefarious magic. Ree could hear blaring horns in the distance, those steamboats gliding into harbor; the cry of gulls flying overhead; sailors yelling as they hauled barrels of sugar, cotton bushels, and fresh oysters in from port. But she did not hear any approaching footsteps. She did not hear Anabelle.
Ree stood alone, bracing herself on the iron railing, staring out into the dusky red sky, into nothing at all. The bells tolled again. The hour had changed. How long had she been standing here alone? One hour? Two? Three? The world felt frozen, wrong in a way that it shouldn’t. Anabelle was not here. Ree’s throat felt raw, itchy. She was going to cry, right here in public. Because now she knew the truth. Anabelle was not coming. She’d been waiting for nothing, nothing at all, just as Henryk had eight years ago.
Unease suddenly prickled up her spine. Had it truly been coincidence that Anabelle picked this exact spot? What was Ree missing? Had Anabelle been mocking her this whole time?
A cry from above startled her. A crow squawked as it circled Ree, drawing a dark ring against a molten sky. It was Aram. And he was trying towarnher.
Then she felt it—a twisting pain in her chest. She tasted something too. Something sharp and bitter on her lips. The taste was allearth and root, and something deceptively sweet too, like mulled wine. She’d tasted this before, hadn’t she?Conjurer Root.But the taste was sharper now. This was Conjurer Root in a dangerously high proportion. It tasted like…poison.
A picture flashed in her mind’s eye of a woman drinking deeply from a golden cup. And then she was sputtering, spewing ritual wine into the air, gasping wildly for breath…
With a pang of horror, Ree realized she was seeing hermother.
“Aram!” she called, flinging an arm out toward him.
But he wouldn’t come down, which meant he was trying to lead her. Ree took a breath and swallowed down the lump of panic in her throat. She steadied herself, forced her mind clear to channelher thoughts to her familiar.
Show me,Ree told Aram.Take me to my mother.
Aram flew low, close enough that she could reach out and touch his wings if she stretched, and Ree kept pace, her skirt catching on bramble. She ran through muck and weeds toward the part of the forested ground that even the moonlight dared not touch. Aram suddenly stopped, circling just on the edge of the path that he would not enter, at least not without Ree’s permission. Ree knew this place. Knew it well enough to know that she never wanted to step foot into it again.
The Dreadwood.It was sacred land to the Voodoos in New Orleans, thought to be Papa Legba’s first crossroads in the New World. There were many that one might find, but this was the first that Legba had blessed. Tall, spindly trees rose so high into the sky that it seemed the whole of the forest stood on wooden stilts, calling to her, as the trees so often had in the long days since her initiation. Her initiation rites had been brutal, and while she had little else to compare them to, she’d heard her mother’s Voodoo acolytes whispering behind her back. All initiations are painful, they’d said. But better pain than torment.Hell,they’d murmured. Ree tried hard not to think of those days spent wandering in the forest, so deep in her spiritual fasting that she hadn’t had a piece of bread, not one crumb, in days. She subsisted on water and a few herbs she’d boiled over an open flame in a little copper pot she’d fit into the single knapsack she’d been allowed to take. She’d wandered round and roundin those dark woods, lost in a fever dream, while the spirits taunted her.
Now Ree didn’t think. She ran. Her feet carried her over grass sleek with dew, over twigs and stones and past a variety of creatures that made the Dreadwood their home—imps with molten yellow eyes, boo hags, and spirit-folk that wandered on and on, caught in a labyrinth of memories from a time long gone. One such spirit floated out at her, baring a long, vicious tongue.
“Cross any deeper, child, and I will peel the skin from your bones,” the spirit warned.
“Begone from me!” Ree threw out a hand, the action born more of reflex than of any real courage, flinging the spirit back into the mist. Ree kept running, the hem of her cloak snatching in the gnarled fingertips of branches reaching out for her ever closer.
There,the wind whispered.There is Marie Laveau, after all.
If it were any other day, Ree wouldn’t have had the nerve for that kind of magic. But today was not any other day. Today was the day her mother could very well be dead. Now her magic felt different, sharper, hot against her fingertips and tongue like lightning waiting to strike.
Somewhere high above her, Aram circled. Other crows joined him, cawing, their song broken in places.
Ree screamed.There.There was her mother’s body, lying still in the wet grass. Ree pressed her ear to her mother’s chest.A heartbeat.Marie Laveau was alive. Only justso.
Amidst the searing panic, the frenzied stammer of her heartbeat, the scream that scraped from her mouth in a long wail, a terrible thought overcame Ree. It was greedy. Dark. Completely and disgustingly selfish. She had no right to the thought, no right at all. And yet Ree couldn’t help but understand the glaring irony of her predicament: She couldn’t escape her mother. Notnow.
Just when Ree had been about to fly away, her mother had made sure to leave her first.
Chapter Eight
Marie
Marie awoke between worlds.
