In the bayou house, Ree stood over her mother’s still body, her dark hair pooled against the pillow. She was pale, so dangerously pale. Was she simply sleeping? Ree couldn’t be sure.
A thousand questions. She had no idea how her mother had ended up unconscious in the Dreadwood. In the passing of only one night, her plans had been cast to the wind, as good as dust, so much of her life thrown into doubt. Ree could hardly believe that she had been so ready to leave her, to abandon her own mother to this miserable fate. After one bad fight, she’d been ready to run away, always the insolent child. Ree marveled at her selfishness, the cowardice. What had her mother always told her?You don’t run away from problems, daughter. You run toward them.
Ree rubbed her temple, her magic spent from getting her mother to safety. All night Ree had paced about the bayou house like a madwoman, overturning chests, ripping through dusty tomes and old scrolls scrawled with ancient spellwork, tossing amulets of jade, moonstone, rippling blue lapis lazuli. She’d seized every trinket, every vial and draught. Surely at least one must hold the answer to her mother’s predicament. Surely there was some cure.
Her eyes flitted to the window, where the wind rattled the dusty glass panes, the world outside a faceless dark in the early hours ofa slowly encroaching dawn. She waited anxiously for the sounds of Aram’s return; she’d sent him to bring Nan the moment she could come. But she heard only the owls crying from their branches as inky shadows crawled along the ceiling and over the walls. The bayou house stood cold without her mother’s fiery presence, as if her very lifeblood had kept the place aglow.
The tignon lay on the ground, pooled in a puddle of gold.Come,a voice beckoned softly from the dark.
It was a silly thing, but Ree had thought it called to her before as a child, in stolen moments alone. Before she had the sense to know any better, she’d often dressed herself in her mother’s silks, swept her curls away from her face in the same elegant knot her mother wore, and piled her head high with a makeshift turban of her own. And she’d pretend she was the Quarter Queen, playing make-believe in the shadow of the true queen’s throne. Her mother had warned her the golden cloth was a gift from the loa, that it was the mark of their chosen queen. It would coronate only those the gods themselves deemed worthy. Which Ree would neverbe.
Her mother stirred. Ree shot to her feet, practically running to her mother’s bedside. She snatched her hand in hers.
“Maman? Can you hear me?”
Marie said nothing. Her finger twitched. There was no mistaking it this time. Her mother could hear her, somehow.
“Maman?” Ree took her mother’s hand in hers, and blackness crowded her vision.
She was no longer in the bayou house. A vast wilderness surrounded her, the darkness swallowing her from all sides. It took Ree a second longer to realize she was channeling.Shewas doing this. A face peered out from the dark, inching closer to her from the shadows. It stared at her so intently, so expectantly, it was as if it had been waiting all along.
Jon the Conjurer.
Jon’s mouth stretched into a wicked smile, his eyes glowing like golden fire in the dark as he spoke in a chillingly low voice:Hello again, Marie.
Startled, Ree dropped her mother’s hand, and Jon the Conjurer’s face vanished like smoke dispersing into the dark.
From somewhere outside in the brush, Aram cawed, signaling his return at long last. She heard the front door open, the sound of hurried footsteps as Nan approached, her crown of short reddish coils springing with her every step.
“Princess, you called—” Nan’s eyes swept the room, falling to Marie’s comatose body. “Oh, saints.” Nan immediately dropped to Marie’s side, examining her state. “God help us.”
But Ree didn’t have time for panic, only answers. “How do we cure her?” she demanded.
“She’s been hexed,” Nan said. Few around these parts were more gifted in rootwork than Nan. That sacred art of magic drawn from the earth’s roots and flowers and soil to brew potions and poisons, to conjure protection and cast away harm. Nan laid a hand over Marie’s pale one, her own emitting a soft honeyed light, like butterscotch. The smell of her magic perfumed the air—ginger and sweet basil. Nan claimed the voice of Zaka spoke to her, that it was he who mounted her spirit during rituals. Zaka was the patron loa of harvest, whose nourishing power could coax spells from ancient roots and herbs, whose machete could cull poisonous weeds from the land in one mighty swing.
“Hexed?Hexed by who?” Ree demanded. She’d first suspected one among her own, naturally. Ory. Fabrice. Nan too. A handful of others. But they didn’t have the power nor the cunning needed to pull something like this off.
Nan only remained silent, her lips drawn into a thin line. And Ree knew whatever Zaka whispered at her ear was not pleasant.
“Tell me!”
“It is not just a matter of who, but ofwhat.” Nan sighed. “She consumed poison, Ree.”
Ree went still, eyes frozen over her mother’s motionless body. She could be a corpse. Marie Laveau counted few people as friends, but there was no shortage of folks she might call enemies lurking in the city. Anyone could have wanted her poisoned and out of the way. The Church. The Brotherhood. Old Voodoo rivals. Ree suppressed a shudder. The possibilities were frightening.
“Whatkindof poison, Nan?”
“Conjurer Root.”
Conjurer Root.Ree had consumed it last night, but she was not the one lying in a bed comatose and at the brink of death. Her mother was. And then there was…Anabelle. The lovely Anabelle, who’d left her standing there all alone on that bridge like a lovestruck fool while her mother clung to life. It was she who had given Ree the Conjurer Root as a gift, after all, but what on earth could be gained from poisoning her mother with it? A dangerous question with likely a far more dangerous answer, but after Ree handled this business with her mother, she had every intention of finding out.
“I took some too,” Ree pointed out. “I wasn’t poisoned.”
“You did not consume as much as your mother, perhaps. And count yourself lucky, for Conjurer Root holds death magic,” said Nan, brow furrowed. “You know who brought this root to New Orleans, don’t you?” Ree did know. She had not forgotten Sanite’s grimoire, those forbidden accounts of Haiti and those corpses rising from the earth one by one. “Jon the Conjurer.”
“What are you saying—”
“After your mother banished Jon, there are some…among us who claim to hear his voice still. That his will still lives on. This root is proof of that. Perhaps…” She lifted her eyes to Ree’s, frightened of her own words. “…it is Jon’s will now that binds your mother so.”
