Marie closed her eyes and felt the soft caress of Jon’s breath as he whispered a spell into her ear. A soft fluttering sound surrounded them from all sides, the wingbeat of a hundred birds.
And then they were gone.
Marie awoke—screaming.
Fire consumed her blood. She seized and bucked wildly. Strong hands immediately grasped her, holding her to the ground.
“If you want to live, do not move,” a gruff voice ordered. Marie cast a wild look about her. Darkness hedged her vision from all sides. A face loomed over hers, blurry in the shadow. Jon. His eyes glowed, more golden than she had ever seen them, bright enough that they gave off their own light.
And then the pain returned—harsher than before, a wave of agony that rocked her insides. She screamed, and Jon quickly pressed something bitter into her mouth, a piece of willow bark.
He was moving over her, doing something she could not see. She heard the rattling of utensils, the slosh of water in a basin. “Bite down when it feels like too much.”
Then his lips were upon her throat, feather-soft, and there was only fire, more pain than she had ever felt in her life, as he sucked the poison from her wound.
Marie tossed her head back, gasping and writhing as the pain worked itself from her insides. She bit down, hard enough that it feltas if she might snap the bark in two. But it remained whole, as tough as leather. She bit the bark again and again, until all she could concentrate on was the deep aching in her teeth. The room was a dizzying blur. Shadows danced along the walls, mocking her pain. She was spinning, and there was laughter, maddening laughter. Was it her? Was she the one laughing, making such vexing noises?
She saw strange dark shapes moving toward her, smelling of rotting flesh. Demons, she thought. But no, they were not fallen ones. They were a wholly different kind of creature, something not quite alive.Twisting, undead things. Dragging themselves from the long, darkened depths of a shadowed corridor toward her…
Jon lifted his mouth from her throat, and she heard thetingof the serpent’s venom hitting the basin somewhere beside him as he spat out the poison, bit by bit.
“I’m sorry,” Jon whispered. One hand was beneath the curve of her breast, flat against her belly, as he held her writhing body still. And on and on it went, that sametingand his hurried whispers ofI’m sorry…I’m sorry…until she thought she might go mad.
She drifted after that. When she awoke again, she was drenched in sweat and wrapped in a heavy blanket, the colorful patterns not like any she had seen in New Orleans. She had heard slaves talk of such designs in Africa, but never had she seen the swirling shapes and glistening colors for herself. A fire burned in a small hearth. The whole room smelled too sweet. Chamomile, she recognized. For healing.
“Those are from my tribe,” said Jon. He was sitting across from her, feeding the flame pieces of chopped wood. So he’d caught her looking. He turned to her and grinned, the corners of his eyes creasing pleasantly. “I am the last of my kind. My wife…my children…I weave what I can remember.”
His wife.Her heart sank down to her belly, cold like a stone. Children too.I am the last of my kind.It occurred to her that this was a man who’d lost everything. And yet here he was, sitting before her, willingly telling her about it. She had forgotten. Jon was not like her. Depending on whom you asked and why, Marie was either a colored girl or a black woman light enough that she scarcely had to think of the roots of her bloodline. Creole in every sense thatmattered—a person of the new blood born in the new land. So many slaves shared her same story. But not Jon—he had come directly from the old land, young as he was. She could sense it in his magic—a beating song that ran through his veins, strong and steady, unblemished and true.
Marie sat up and looked around. They were in a wooden shack, the walls hung with dried herbs: bundles of marjoram, garlic cloves, prickly bells of thistle. Bits of silver moonlight shone through cracks in the ceiling, the bayou wind rattling the wooden planks like old bones. “And what tribe is that?”
Her gaze landed on canvases leaning against the far wall, some still drying, others splattered in dried paint slashes. A white-capped shoreline. Towering grass soaked in the blood of sunset. Laughing children in luminous pattern work. A Voodoo King. A conjurer of legend. Her queen’s bitter enemy. And a talented artist. Jon the Conjurer, a man of many surprises.
“None that you might know.” He hadn’t meant it as insult, but Marie’s face stung. She hated not knowing. Perhaps that was why she was drawn to him so: the possibilities twinkling in those mischievous eyes, that knowledge still as yet unknown to her.
“Then tell me,” Marie implored.
“Is that a command or a question?”
“I’ll leave that to your imagination. I hear it is quite creative.”
“Sanite Dede has been speaking far too kindly of me then.”
Marie’s smile faltered. “Before…when you…when I…” She hesitated, remembering the soft press of his lips against her throat, that briefest moment of pleasure and relief amidst the madness. “…I saw things.”
Jon stirred a bubbling cauldron over the fire. “Of course you did. You were close to death, Marie. You were moving closer to the Veil. There is a magic that lives between life and death, a crossroads few can open.”
Marie’s mind turned to the moment Jon had saved her, the way he’d transported them away in a blast of air, the turn of a blackbird’s wings. “And the spell you used to take us away?”
She didn’t hide her curiosity about his magic. And he didn’t ask her to, as so many others might.
“That was a road opener spell.”
“That was not like any road opener spell I’ve ever seen.”
Road openers were rituals to Papa Legba meant to open paths to better alignment or luck, to clear spiritual blockages. But he’d pushed beyond her understanding of Voodoo traditions. Jon hadn’t just entreated the spirits to open the paths before him. He hadforcedit, bent time and space to his will. It was unlike any magic she had ever seen or tasted. And by the loa, she wanted more.
“Then perhaps you’ve had the wrong teacher, love.” He winked at her, and Marie flushed. “You would be surprised what you can accomplish, if only you’d dare break a few rules.”
