Tears stung Marie’s eyes. She felt Jon shift beside her. “Do you see now? This is their altar, Marie,” he whispered. “And the body is the only sacrifice.”
Down the line the Grand Wizard went. Coldly repeating those words—transforma,transcende,progredere—until each man had been changed at last into Gailon’s new image. Monstrous half beasts. A chimera—only the face of the man remained, his mouth slackened in agony, his body changed into that of a golden lion, a goat’s head rising from its back, and a long-tongued serpent at the tail, swaying from side to side. A horribly grotesque merging of beasts. Another with the stretched, distended wings of a bat. A half man, half wolf. The sound of flesh tearing, bone re-forming in brutally quick succession.
Gailon tapped his staff again, and the chains fell from the beasts, hitting the ground in a resoundingclank.The crowd surged, eager for more. It took her a second too long to realize what was happening—they were going to force them to fight to the death. Marie watched from behind her veil, wishing she could slap her hands over her ears to somehow forget the screams that scraped along their tongues, the bulge of their eyes as the lifeblood drained from their veins and across the polished stone. The more blood that spilled, the louder the crowd grew. All those cries. Gnashing teeth and wild eyes. Ravenous for more. An earsplitting throb that thrummed inside her ears, tunneling down into her bones until it could go no further.
When it was finished, the only ones who remained were the man who had first changed into the birdlike creature and another who paced the stage on all fours, more wolf than man.
Marie’s stomach twisted. She was wrong. This was not some kind of crude blood sport at all. This was a perverse ritual being done in the open, permitted by a hundred waging hands. A flicker of movement caught Marie’s eye. It was the wolf creature. He was only a small boy, she realized. His mouth was slack, left open to a deadened scream, a profusion of blood and bile leaked down his ruined face. Through the crowd, his eyes found Jon’s. Those eyes, wide and streaked, begging for mercy. Jon stared back, his mouth clenched in silent fury. Marie felt her stomach lurching toward her throat—she was going to be sick.
The curtain snapped to a close, the show done.
Marie shot to her feet and hurried back out the way they’d come. She heard Jon’s footsteps behind her. She snatched the veil from her face, whirled to face him in the empty corridor. “You brought me to this cursed place to watchthis?!”
Jon’s eyes flashed from behind the panther mask. “Not to watch. Never to watch, love. Tochange.”
“I don’t understand—”
“I received a message yesterday, Marie.Wine before blood, beast after body.Only those words were scrawled on the paper, along with the location to this boat and twenty names. Twenty names of runaway slaves sought by the city of New Orleans. The message was clear. Someonewantedus to find this place, Marie. To stop this madness. And that’s what I—whatweintend to do—”
“Monsieur and Madame. May I help you?” a voice called from behind them.
Jon and Marie whirled to face the doorman from before, a tray of wine in hand. “Wine for the lovers?” he asked pleasantly, offering up a sweet-smelling flute to Jon.
Marie realized that he had mistaken them for a pair of giddy paramours looking to find a safe place to take their pleasure in the dark. Surely, they were not the first folks to want to do so aboard this vessel, among the countless debaucheries and sins it encouraged. She should have been relieved, but the thought only made hersicker. It was not that some small part of her did not want that. Saints, she did. But she did not want that here. Not likethis.
But Jon only grinned, a twinkle in his eye. “Certainly.” He took the wine, drained the whole of it in one fluid tilt.
Then he drove the glass into the side of the man’s throat.
Marie watched, frozen, as Jon twisted the glass sharply until blood sprayed the air. Marie was reminded of the bubbling fountain on the steamboat’s second deck, the stone nymphs who frothed dark wine from their screaming mouths. His body crumpled to the floor. Jon made a flicking gesture with two fingers, and the man’s corpse slid away from their path, his flaccid limbs making a wet squelching sound across the wood.
Jon pulled the panther mask from his face, quickly casting it aside into the dark. They were past games now. His real work had begun. Jon pulled her through the darkness, through another door, and they stepped into a holding pen scattered with cages. Inside were the rest of the runaways, who had not yet been transformed. One of the men shook at the bars, his eyes red-rimmed and pleading.
“Conjurer!” His gaze flitted to Marie, eyes widening when he recognized her. “Madame Laveau! Save us! Don’t leave us here! Look at us, goddamn you!”
Jon kept walking. It was as if he didn’t hear them. When Marie gripped his arm, he cast her a sidelong look.We will come back for them.They hurried along through another door, this one leading to the stage, where the curtain was still mercifully closed. By the time Jon and Marie emerged fully onto the platform, she could hear the crowd booing, calling for more bloodshed.
Only two of the men remained, if she could call them that. The boy who had become the wolf. And the first man, his dark brown arms stretched into long, distended-veined wings. The rest were scattered across the stage floor, a mess of blood-soaked clothing, torn ligaments. The air was thick with the stench of alchemy and rancid flesh.
From somewhere above them, she heard the tapping of Gailon’s staff, the signal to continue with the show. The curtain would soon rise again. They had minutes, possibly seconds, before they wouldbe discovered. And what then? Would they take on the whole of the crowd, the Brotherhood of the White Hand?
The winged man crawled to them, smearing blood across the shining wood. He looked to Marie like a fallen angel groveling at thefeet of the Lord. “Conjurer,” he said in a gasp. There was relief in his voice, a note of strangled hope. “Kill me,” he moaned. “Please.”
Marie stood frozen, shaking. “Jon, no! You can’t…you can’t just…” Her eyes swept over the disfigured corpses on the ground. The long, bloodied smears. “There must be a way…”
But even as she spoke the words, she knew there was not. Because if there was, Jon the Conjurer would have done it. He was stronger than her, his magic older than even the Quarter Queen’s. She understood now the hope she’d heard in the man’s voice had not been for survival. It had been for rest.
“Jon,” Marie pleaded.
But Jon kept his eyes on the man crawling toward him. “Lock the main entrance, Marie. And lock it now.” When she didn’t move, hesnarled, “I said lock the doornow,Marie!”
Marie held up a hand, silently called out to Legba. Through the loa of crossroads’s power, she felt along the darkness of the chamber, the air hissing and curling as her magic searched along its edges. Jon was right. This place did resist their magic. The Brotherhood’s magic was too strong here, the alchemy resolute. It had steeped and hardened into diamond, nearly unbreakable. The door resisted her, bucking wildly against Papa Legba’s pull, but she heard the shudder of the lock sliding into place at last, the final click of the latch.
Now Jon turned to the men, golden eyes burning with some unnamed emotion. The boy was crouched on all fours, whimpering as a hurt dog might, too frightened to approach closer. But the winged man was at Jon’s feet now, his rasping breath shaking the whole of his transmuted body. Jon bent low and reached out, held the man’s deformed cheek in his palm. In that moment, he seemed less the famous High Jon the Conjurer. He was a lone priest charged to perform the last rites of contrition for a dying man.
“You will be avenged,” Jon promised softly. Tears leaked from the man’s bright eyes, down his cheek, and into Jon’s palm. A tendersmile touched Jon’s lips, an offering of one last small comfort. “And then you may finally rest, brother.”
Jon snatched his hand away, the motion cutting the air like a sword. And at once, both men’s necks snapped out of place in a sickeningcrackthat made Marie flinch. They dropped to the floor and did not move again. Marie stared down at the corpses, her head throbbing. But Jon was not finished yet.
