Blood thrummed in Ree’s ears, deafening. It was now or never.
She could feel the power thrumming in her veins, the static of lightning and the heat of cauldron-fire, alive in its own way.No more, priestess,said the voice in her ear.You will hide no more.Ree gritted her teeth and swallowed down the lump of fear in her throat, all the way down to her belly, where it sat like a stone. For just this once, she would have to agree: She would deny what she was no more.
Ree removed her hood and stepped forward to face the crowd unmasked.
Ree drew in a shaking breath and allowed herself to say the words she’d long denied herself. “I am Marie Laveau.”
A murmur moved through the crowd, slithering from tongue to tongue like a worm. Ree could feel every eye on her, appraising, as if to some she were a jewel to be prized, to others a bauble to be discarded.
Corbin’s eyes fixed upon her, coldly appraising. “Marie Laveau the Second.” He smiled, and it struck Ree then that he possessed a face that shouldn’t smile at all. “Where is your mother?”
“I—”
A flash of movement at the corner of Ree’s eye. It all happened so fast—one moment she was facing the mayor of New Orleans, and the next there was Anabelle, beautiful Anabelle, pressing her way from the whispering crowd. Ree stared, dumbly. She thought for one strangled second that Anabelle was simply walking toward her. But Anabelle was not walking toward Ree. She never would again. She was walking toward Corbin, a glowing hand raised in the air, black sparks flying from her fingertips.
The blast struck Corbin square in the chest, and he went flying across the square, ostrich hat toppling from his head in the wind.
“No!” It was a stupid reflex. But Ree felt herself reaching out,steadying Corbin before he could hit the ground. She left her arm extended, still holding him with the weight of her magic, while she turned to face Anabelle, who was sneering at her.
Ree stood frozen. She did not know this face. The voice was at her ear again, laying soft kisses along her neck.Perhaps you never did.
“Anabelle?” Ree hated the sound of her voice, so small it was among the growing unrest.
“Let him go, Ree. He deserves this.” She was still looking at Corbin, hanging suspended in the air.
“You don’t know what you’re doing—”
“Don’t I? I’ve known exactly what I’ve been doing this entire time. Did you?”
Ree’s heart gave a sickening lurch. Something about those words.Did you?She felt her heart breaking in her chest, splintering right in two, and there was absolutely nothing that she could do about it. “Anabelle…what have you done?”
“Everything you Laveauswouldn’t,” snarled Anabelle. “Some of us prefer the old way. Some of us still remember the way of High Jon.”
It all went back to Jon. Had her mother truly rid the world of him? There was no escaping him, she understood now.
Ree moved in a slow circle, keeping Corbin in the air. “If you kill him, harm him in any way, it won’t just be you they hurt. They will hurt all of us. You would…you would start a rebellion, Anabelle.”
Anabelle’s lips tipped into a red half-moon. “And that, mon amour”—magic propelled from her in waves—“is entirely the point.”
Anabelle let out a cry, and the startling voice of Erzulie, loa of love and protection, screamed through her, an earsplitting sound, the goddess’s maternal wrath shaking the very air, rippling right toward Ree. But she bucked against the magic with the sudden force of Bade’s wind, and Anabelle’s magic bounced from Ree and back across the square. Anabelle was pushed some feet back, her hair windswept behind her, gnashing her teeth from the force of the blow.
Ree gasped. Bade was a loa of justness and scale and longed for balance in all things. What was asked from him, he took in equal measure. The air in her lungs constricted as the hand of the god of wind squeezed for control.
“You can’t best me, Anabelle,” said Ree, breathless from the seizing force of Bade’s magic.
Anabelle was strong, to be sure, but she was not the daughter of Marie Laveau.
“But I bested your mother, didn’t I?” asked Anabelle, a toying edge to her voice. “Where is the great Marie Laveau, I wonder? Perhaps enjoying the deep sleep I put her in? Amazing what a little too much Conjurer Root can do.”
In that moment, her suspicion confirmed, Ree felt it all flee from her: Whatever sense of restraint she’d been harboring, whatever regard for the Quarter’s rules she’d been clinging to, her mother’s careful training…it all left her, as quickly and cleanly as a stroke of wind. In its place, something else lived and breathed—disbelief, heartbreak. Something else too, mingled with her grief, sharp as knives. Rage.
“You fuckingtraitor!” Ree flung out a hand, calling upon the metalsmithing loa, Ogoun. It was his iron-heavy strength she used now, not fire, to pressure Anabelle back from her, but she dodged the blast.
A bolt of heat zipped past Ree’s ear, and she turned to see the taller alchemist had snuck up behind her. He suddenly collapsed to the ground, howling in pain when Anabelle’s attack cut right through his hand.
The red-haired alchemist pushed his way through the crowd and raised his staff at an overhanging tree that shaded the square. One of its branches snapped off, sprouting with six more wooden limbs that hung like crooked fingers, re-forming itself until it held the shape of a whittled claw that flew straight for Anabelle.
Ree turned Ogoun’s strength on the alchemist now, hissing out her spell, the taste of hot metal on her breath. The man froze, bound at the arms by smoking iron called to form by the metalsmithing loa’s forge. He hit the stone with a thud, limbs locked into place.The truth was she did not know what she meant to do with Anabelle. But there was no way in hell she would allow the Brotherhood to interfere.
