There it was again—that name.Jon.
“It has always been Jon.” Silence stretched between them, and for a moment the only sound that rose up from the quiet was the distant melancholy singing of the nuns preparing for evening mass, the swell of an organ’s chords. “I am a fool. A lovesick fool. I thought that I had killed the past. And that whatever had remained of Jon had died along with it.”
“And now?”
“Jon taught me better, didn’t he?” A bitter laugh escaped from Marie’s lips. Her eyes slid toward the far wall, to the space where Ree’s face was wedged in the darkness. “Some things never die.”
Had her mother seen her? Quickly, Ree slipped out from the closet and back into the street. She knew Jon the Conjurer as the rest of New Orleans knew him—as a dark blight on its history, awould-be Voodoo King of malevolent magic, an old evil that had been thwarted by the powerful Marie Laveau, never to be conjured again. But her mother had spoken of him as if he had been something else…somethingmore.
“Gather, gather, all around!”
At the corner of Royal Street, Ree joined the crowd in front of the Théâtre des Lys, its high golden walls dwarfing nearby establishments. A show had already started at the base of its grand spiraled steps, where a puppeteer wore a carnival mask made to look like a cheap imitation of the loa Papa Legba. Children sat cross-legged around the stage as stringed shadow puppets danced across an embroidered partition.
“Come ye, hear the tale of this city’s bloodied war, and Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, the witch of lore.”
The silhouette of a figure in a long coat and top hat emerged.
“His name was Jon the Conjurer, a man, a witch, and a monster all in one. His darkness swept through the streets, chasing away the sun.”
From puppet-Jon’s coat, swirling shadows emerged. From the way that the puppeteer so nimbly worked his fingers, Ree almost believed he was using magic to enrich his performance. Perhaps he was.
“From the depths of hell, High Jon called forth the power of the devil. And all the good people of the Quarter bent the knee beneath a king who reveled in misery.”
The shadows encased a crowd of puppets cowering with their arms raised in fright. The puppet-crowd sank to their knees.
“But there was one who did stand. A fair creole witch with power beyond man. With all the light of heaven and Voodoo, this witch banished the dark spell, and with one mighty blow, Jon’s reign she did quell.”
A female puppet in a high turban appeared. She gestured her arms out toward puppet-Jon, and he was unceremoniously flung across the partition and out of sight. On cue, the crowd of onlooking children clapped.
“Hair of raven. Skin of gold. Blood of new. Blood of old. Here be thy queen forevermore, Marie Laveau!”
With a pop of sparkling smoke that made the watching children applaud and laugh, the turban upon the Marie Laveau puppet transfigured into a golden crown. Her hands rose into the air, the war won. The puppet figurines bowed in her shadow. The curtains drew to a sweeping close, the show concluded. Ree watched, unnerved. She’d seen the show dozens of times, and she could no more blame the children for being enraptured with the puppeteer’s tall tales than she could blame the city for peddling them. The real Quarter Quarrel was not something her mother liked to discuss. Ree had only just been born then, and she didn’t know much beyond the street shows and puppet-fodder for tourists.
The puppeteer was looking her way now. “There she is! There she is! Our Quarter Queen.”
Ree shuffled on her feet, slightly embarrassed at the dozens of gazes directed her way. They were seeing her mother, she knew. Not her. “I am not your queen. I’m—”
“Your name is Marie Laveau, is it not?” There was challenge in his voice.
“That isnotmy name.” She’d said it before thinking. Marie Laveau was her name, but she didn’tfeellike Marie Laveau—she never had. Nor did she want to. And she was not the Quarter Queen, nor did she ever want to be, despite her mother’s hopes.
Ree felt the sudden weight of a hand on her shoulder. She whirled to find her mother staring back at her, her expression unreadable. But Ree saw the way the muscle in her jaw ticked, the tightness at the corners of her eyes. She’d wounded her.
“You would renounceme? Your legacy?” Marie asked stiffly.
Ree looked away, both ashamed and triumphant in her insolence. “That’s the trouble with you, Mother. You believe those two to be one and the same.”
Chapter Three
Ree
Her mother didn’t say another word to her until they reached the port, the water glistening and blue in the midday sun. At this hour, sailors and dockworkers were busy readying for the next morning’s voyage. Ships were docked and tucked away, their sails ballooning in the wind like white sheets stretched and fluttering on linen lines. Beyond them,La Lune,one of the city’s most prominent party steamboats, glided down the Mississippi, drunken guests waving from the rails, the bright notes of the brass band on board wafting to shore. At night, the beaded lights strung along the sides changed from red to emerald to gold, courtesy of the Brotherhood’s alchemy.
Ree hated the port, though she knew her mother’s business brought her here on a weekly basis to pick up the incoming supplies for their hairdressing parlor. She could feel a thousand gazes on her, the weight sending a chill down her spine. The city’s Les Magiques were under lock and key, sorted according to their magic and employed according to the city’s or their masters’ needs: the storm-callers and tide-turners as steerers on the sea, even for slave vessels carrying their own kind as cargo; the soil-sowers for their gifts in the field to yield better crops of cotton and cane; the kindlers tasked as cooks, but on some occasions cutthroats too.
The Laveaus could not be so easily classified. While some Les Magiques were bound to a single loa or two, the Laveaus were the conduits for the many and possessed a myriad of powers from the pantheon of loa. But for all their power, the chains still held, slavery still rampant.
There were whispers of rebellion in small pockets in the South, Ree knew. Slaves turning their pitchforks on their masters. Kindler fire sending up whole plantations in smoke until they were nothing but ash in the wind. Those whispers had reached farther south to New Orleans, to its merchants and slavers and planters, who’d begun to fear the worst. The white men who told themselves they’d never allow New Orleans to become Haiti, whose enslaved blacks had won their freedom through revolution. Slaves whispered of Haiti longingly.
