There were tears in her eyes, perhaps even tears in his eyes too. He cupped her cheek, slowly thumbing away the wetness from her skin. “It is not your fault, Marie Laveau. The ancestors bless their magic accordingly to those who can handle the burden of their divinity. To those who are worthy.”
Was she worthy? Her own mother and grandmother had not thought so. Her magic was something to be snuffed out like a candle burning too brightly. Later, when she’d married Jacques at eighteen, she’d struggled to meet his expectations of her. To make herself larger than she was, to use her magic for more. And when he had disappeared, had vanished so easily from her life, she felt that wound reopen. Yet again, someone she had loved had gone and left her alone.
“And so very often”—his golden eyes dimmed—“that magic can feel like a curse. This I know all too well, love.”
Jon straightened to his full height. He held out a hand to Marie, waiting.
“The Veil is the twilight, the final crossroads. There are many doors to death, but it is the first.” Jon stared at her for a long moment, his look strange. It was as if he were trying to see within her, looking for the trap that surely lay beneath. “Are you sure that you want to learn to open it, Marie Laveau?”
Marie stared at his hand, thinking. Was she sure of anything at this point? She told herself that she’d started this because she wanted—no, needed—to have Jacques returned to her.
But that had been before. Now things had…changed. With Jon. With her. She didn’t just want Jacques—she wanted Jon too. She was selfish. She was every terrible thing people called her behind her back.Maybe it is not Jacques that you want back, not truly. You want what you have never had. You want love, Marie. Devotion. The communion of souls. You want it all.
Marie stared at the Conjurer, heart stammering. Did she have that now? Maybe she need not open the door to her past to find those things again.Maybe,a small voice reminded her,they are here with you now. With him.
“Yes,” said Marie at last, as she took his hand. “Teach me.”
Hours later, when Jon had finished his lesson, he’d made a fire and cooked trout for them over a spittle. Marie sat tucked against his chest while they watched the flame hiss into the night.
“Why did you learn such magic?” She cast her eyes up at him, trying to imagine who Jon might have been before all of his pain. So much of him was still a mystery to her.
The fire breathed between them. Finally, Jon said, “There was an attack on my village. Slavers dragged me from the shores, from my family, and into the sea. I was sold to the highest bidder, brought here.”
A flash in her mind’s eye:A young man dragged along white-foamed shores, thick silver-gold chains dragging him by the neck. More chains…and white-capped fields of cotton so pale they glistened like melting snow beneath an impossibly hot sun…countless lashes against a young man’s back, each turn of the whip forcing the flesh apart like teeth…
“To Corbin?”
“No. He came after. When I returned to New Orleans again.” Jon shifted away from Marie, and she was forced to sit up, watching as he stared absently into the flame. “When I was first captured, it took me some months, but I managed to escape. I sailed back home. Only there was no morehome.There was only ash on the wind. Decay everywhere I looked. Later a fisherman from another villagetold me that my wife slit her own throat. She didn’t want to—couldn’t—live in a world with chains.” He closed his eyes. And when he opened them again, she saw that his face had changed. He looked more human than Marie had ever seen him. That bright, endless magic about him had waned. “My children…three sons…and a daughter…had been scattered. They were young, too young to be left alone. Later, I was able to piece together the knowledge that my sons had all died in the belly of a ship. Cold and alone. Starvation, a woman who had been captured with them told me in Haiti. They never made it to shore.” He stopped for a moment, his throat wobbling with choked emotion. Marie took his hand. “Only my daughter remained. By the time I found her in the sickbed of some village doctor, disease had already taken root. I was a great healer. I was the best. But I was late. I was too late, Marie. The fever made her loose of tongue. She told me she had dreamed that a man in a tall dark hat whispered in her ear that I might have another. Adaughter.A silly story, I remember laughing, even as I wept. And I realized, holding her cold body in my arms, that even if that were the truth, it was a dream I couldn’t afford to have.”
“Jon—”
He held up a hand. She understood. The story was like a spell that demanded to be finished once started.
“When I went to bury her that night, who should appear at her graveside but a man in a tall, tall dark hat? And this strange man with eyes of coal offered me a deal—that if I learned his magic of death, I could use it to avenge those like me. But there were costs to his magic, he warned. Sacrifices. He said I would feel this pain once more, but only once more. ‘We must be willing to sacrifice the few to save the many,’ Baron Samedi whispered in my ear.” His eyes were full of wrath. “And I listened.”
Silence. The fire had smoked down to almost nothing. Cold bayou wind stirred between them now. Jon stared into the coals and ash, into its nothingness. “This war requires an army, Marie. Baron Samedi intends to give us one.”
There had been rumors. Stories of why Jon had been banished by Sanite. Talk Marie had never allowed herself to indulge because she had been afraid.
“Do you intend to raise zombi, Jon?”
She was a hypocrite for asking. But she must know. What she had intended for Jacques was to bring him back, even if it meant he was undead. She had heard such magic was possible. Why not then, for love? What could be the harm in raising one zombi? But many? Marie let his hand go. Maybe, she thought, some doors were better left closed.
Jon slowly turned to her, golden eyes full of unshed tears, and fury like she had never seen, and sorrow, endless sorrow that no man should ever endure. “Our people toiled in this land, sowing their blood, their pain into it. What do you think happens to pain like that? Where does it go?It always comes back.”
She could see now—fully—what it had done to him. All that pain and wrath twisted into one unnamable feeling that burrowed within his very bones, sinking into the dark waters of his heart.Where does it go? It always comes back.
He placed a soft kiss on her knuckles. She was reminded then of the hissing alchemical snake that the Brotherhood had transfigured, whose golden eyes had looked deeply into her own before it had struck out and bit her. That look had been a warning from a hidden enemy, she realized, one last chance to turn and run. But she didn’t. She couldn’t.
She was in love.
“I need you, Marie. This world needs you.” Jon’s lips found hers, and she tasted that bittersweet, unnamable feeling for her own. “And together, we may make a new one.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ree
After Marcel’s funeral, Ree felt like she was trapped in a fever dream she had no idea how to wake from. Screams twisted in the air. Henryk’s accusing stare pierced her through the fire. She’d forced herself to slip into the turmoiled crowd, running through bramble and muck until she reached the bayou house, where she barricaded the door, shuttering herself from the chaos.
