With a wave of her hand, Jon fell back against the bed, beneath the weight of her magic. He watched her, something like shock flitting across his face as Marie ripped the clothes from him until he was completely bare before her—every taut line of muscle across his dark flesh, every raised scar lashed across his chest.
“You are mistaken, Jonathan. This is a lesson, yes,” Marie warned in a hushed breath as she lowered herself upon him. “But it isyouwho will learn tonight.”
His lips pressed along the crook of her neck, trailing down and down until his tongue had traced wicked patterns along one of her breasts. Marie leaned forward suddenly, her body arching with heat, and pinched her teeth into the side of his neck, stifling her cries. Such desire she had never felt before with Jacques. It shamed her to admit that to herself. But the feeling of Jon, the utter abandon she felt in his arms, could not be a normal thing. There was something else at work here, some other golden thread of magic that bound them together at last.
His hands moved down to her hips, digging into the damp flesh as he hurried her forward. And then they were in her hair, the wild, wild hair that fell over them both like a dark wedding veil, a veil of mourning.
Marie felt the world shift beneath her, a subtle realigning of the divine. A new path had opened before her in the sultry darkness of this room, before them both. As their bodies hurriedly joined together, so did their magic, intertwined in ways she could not yetknow. Jon made a noise of dark pleasure beneath her, the gold of his eyes steady on her, its magic giving off their own faint, pulsing heat in the dark. It felt ordained in a way that her own marriage had not, a coupling of old and new magic threading itself together into the shape of something new.
It felt like fate.
Chapter Seventeen
Ree
So, they had been in love.
This was Ree’s first thought when she came to in the bayou house, a sweaty mess on the floor beside her mother’s bed. She needn’t be near her to channel, although the proximity helped to deepen her connection. The channeling was stronger now, as if it had a life of its own, as if her mother was the one forcing her to see. And see what exactly? That she had told another lie? It was clear that Jon the Conjurer was not just the enemy Marie had made him out tobe.
Of course, she knew her mother must have feltsomethingfor the Conjurer if Ree was the result of their coupling. But it was more than that. Her mother had loved him. She’d felt as much. And, if the images of the past were any indication, he had loved her too, once upon a time. Just how had they gone to war?
Ree wanted to press on with her channeling, to go deeper this time, but with one look at her mother’s waxen face, she knew it would be too much too soon.
But you are playing a dangerous game, little Laveau,Claudette had warned after the ordeal with Anabelle had ended and they’d found themselves in the bayou house, standing over her mother’sbody.The more you draw on your mother’s mind, the more life force you take from her body.
Under Claudette’s guiding hand, she’d learned how to reach deeper into her mother’s mind, to carefully pry through the dark of her thoughts. Now Claudette entered the room, a warm cup of tea in hand. She passed it to Ree, who drank it quickly. It tasted of lavender and rose hips. Protection and strength.
“And what did you see this time?”
“My mother and Jon.” She met Claudette’s gaze. “And…the Brotherhood. What they did to those people…”
Ree shut her eyes to those horrible visions. Bone shattering and re-forming. Bodies contorting wildly to raucous laughter. She’d never knownLa Luneto harbor such evil. But then again, she’d never thought to look. What other evils lay beneath the Quarter’s grandeur, its spell of illusion? And there was the matter of Silas. He’d slipped that code to Jon and had opened that door for Marie. But for the life of her, she couldn’t understand why.
Claudette balked. “So you’ve seen what the Brotherhood of the White Hand is truly capable of. I say good! With each new invention they pretend advances the city’s cause, no one thinks to wonder the price. Fucking imbeciles.”
The pieces of Marie’s past were beginning to form into a clearer shape for Ree. She could see now, perhaps, why Marie might have aligned herself with the Conjurer, why she might have had little other choice in the matter. But what she couldn’t understand was how they’d become such bitter enemies in the end. Not yet.
Outside, Ree heard music coming their way from the surrounding wilderness. Her heart twisted as she realized that she was late, today of all days. Today was the day they mourned Marcel, when they would commend his spirit on to the next world. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him, to the part of herself that had loved him. Already so much had changed in her world since his death, already so much loss.
“Go,” said Claudette, nodding toward the door. “They will be expecting you there. Not me. Do not worry, I will keep watch over your mother.”
Ree nodded, then made her way to the door.
“Oh, and little Laveau?” She sponged at Marie’s damp brow. “Do try not to cause any more trouble for yourself. You don’t need any more eyes on you.”
But that was exactly what she felt now, a thousand eyes on her as she walked amongst her mother’s Voodoo court. They carried Marcel’s body deeper into the bayou, where the moss trees hung above them, their spindly arms tangled together in cobwebs that blotted out the fading sun. With so much suspicion toward their kind now, he could not be laid to rest in the city, where they might make a mockery of his corpse, swinging him from a rope, or chaining his body to a pole where passersby might spit and piss on his withering bones.
Ree watched from the back of the procession, eyes trained on the wicker box holding Marcel’s body as it was carried along on the shoulders of stone-faced men, her mother’s devoted followers.But are they devoted to me?It was a thought she could not escape. Ree was not their chosen Voodoo Queen. After all, Marie Laveau was not dead—not yet. But by now everyone knew she had disappeared. A new queen would need to be named.And soon.
Ree was dressed in her best mourning white, her hair braided away from her face, her cheeks and lips bare of their usual dark red rouge. For all their tears and sorrows, funerals were celebrations of another kind in New Orleans. But Ree could not summon an ounce of revelry.
Marcel. Her friend, her unspoken brother. Teasing and rash, he’d liked her games and had endured her terrible moods with nothing more than a laugh and a drink. Oh, by the saints, why in the hell had she given him that aurum? Why couldn’t she have passed that task on to her mother, who could turn a man away with only her eyes?
At last, they found their way to a small, blue-grassed meadow, basil and fennel abundant underfoot. This was consecrated land that her mother had cleansed and blessed in the name of Baron Samedi, supreme god of death, father of those long passed from this world. His altar sat empty, a great stone carved to appear like a hand breaking soil, reaching from the ground. The acolytes laidMarcel’s body down in front of the stone altar, waiting for Ree’s command.
“Light the pyre and fill the altars,” Ree ordered.
The others did as they were told, but Ree noticed a flicker of hesitation in the air, and she worried it would soon catch to flame and spread quickly among them. Queen she was not, but she was still her mother’s heir, and that counted for something. It hadto.
