His eyes flashed. “I might use anything as a bargaining chip, Marie. Anything.”
“What is your price?”
“Simple enough. You will tether a piece of your power to mine.”
“That would be…illegal.”
“Everything I’ve done tonight has been illegal, Marie. Let us not worry about the rules now.”
“And what would you do with it?” She had seen what the Brotherhood did in their experiments, though she had no proof. Stealing black folks’ magic for their own purposes in secret transmutation rituals.
“You are an important piece of my game, Marie Laveau. But wemust finish playing first. Ours will be a pact of alchemical equilibrium. If you hurt me, you hurt yourself.”
A matter of insurance then. She should have known. “If I refuse?”
“You will have wished Corbin had taken her. Do you agree?”
Marie was at a loss. Silas had the advantage, and she could not take on both him and Jon. Her eyes fell to her daughter, sleeping soundly. There was nothing she would not do for her. Nothing. Slowly, she nodded.
“Very well. Hold out your hand.” Silas placed his wrist over hers, then tapped the stone end of his staff at the intersection where their flesh met. “Omnes aequales iure.”All are equal in law.
The end of his staff glowed. An emerald ring shaped like a snake formed around their skin. She recognized the symbol. It was the same as the end of his staff—the mythical ouroboros, the beast who devoured itself. Marie felt a searing pressure form between their wrists, constricting like rope, then nothing. The light vanished, the pact sealed.
Silas removed his staff and passed the bassinet to her without touching her.
“They can never know,” he said quietly. “Do not confuse my convenience for anything else. That would be a mistake.”
She did not like this man, could hardly stand his presence, but still she found herself saying, “You’ve saved my daughter, Silas. That is more than I can say for her father.”
It was the curse of her faith. Always searching for the goodness in the hearts of men where there lived none. First Jacques, then Jon, and now a Brotherhood alchemist.But you know why, Marie,sang a dark voice. Because if there existed some speckle of goodness in them, then surely there was still some in her.
“Jon and I share one commonality, and one commonality only,” said Silas. “We are both men who seek means to ends. And make no mistake, saving your child served my own.”
“And what are those ends, Silas? Do you intend to become the Grand Wizard now?” Gailon had made a great Grand Wizard as far as the Brotherhood of the White Hand’s requirements went. A sharp mind. Immense magical talent. A scholar’s taste for advancement atwhatever cost, and cold-as-ice regard for those who dared interfere. But Silas? Shrewd. Calculating. With a sickle-thin smile—unreadable and completely unpredictable. Whatever kind of leader Gailon had been, Silas would exceed him in strides, even Marie knew.
He considered her in the moonlight, searching her face for a moment, weighing, perhaps, how much to disclose when he’d already divulged too much. “I told you, what I intend to play is a very dangerous game, Marie Laveau. A long game with far-reaching consequences. You’d do well to stay out of my way. Are we clear?”
It was as much warning as a man such as he could give. He turned, drawing up his great staff.
She snatched his wrist. Silas turned, eyebrows raised. “Silas, if you do this, if you mean to become the Grand Wizard, you will become Gailon. Is that truly what you want?”
A moment of hesitation bristled between them. She could see now that this was the same man she had glimpsed all those months before in the cathedral’s dark halls with Father Antoine. Deeply and utterly conflicted. Finally, Silas drew his hand away.
“I should think that for whatever man or monster Gailon was,” Silas murmured at last, a strange note in his voice, “I am far worse.”
Silas turned away, leaving her there alone, frozen in the moonlight, as he passed into the oily heat of the night. Somewhere in the distance, a scream echoed. Marie stared down at her sleeping daughter, thinking. Flashes of the night she’d met Jon came back to her. Their dance. His fateful words to her.War I will have, and war I will win.She had not known then what he was truly capable of, what he had intended for her all along.But if you had, Marie?a small voice asked her.Would you have done things differently? Might you have loved him all the same?The truth was, she didn’t know. She had sought Jon for her own selfish purposes, and he had sought her for his. There were so many things she should have done, so many she hoped she still might do when this was all finished. But now she had a different purpose that drove her, a glorious destiny that she held in her arms, hers alone. Her daughter.
Marie wound her tignon around her head, fastening it into a secure knot atop her hair. More screams broke the quiet. Surely,somewhere in the Quarter, Jon was waiting, carefully considering her next move as if this were all some elaborate dance between them. And perhaps itwas.Perhaps the night of the ball, when they’d met again, their dance had never quite finished, and they had been locked into some maddening spiral ever since. But now Marie was done. She would meet Jon again as enemies. No truces. No lies. No love. With her sleeping daughter in her arms, Marie took a step forward into the darkness.
If it was war that Jon the Conjurer wanted so badly, then it was war that he would have.
The crows were watching her.
As Marie ran through the French Quarter’s tangled streets, she could hear them somehow louder than the screams, squawking at her back. Admittedly she’d never cared for the little black birds—crows were exceptionally unforgiving creatures, never forgot a face who’d wronged them, could hold a grudge like nobody’s business. And she needed that—to forget the faces of those who’d wronged her, and even those she’d wronged in turn. She needed forgiveness too for what she’d done—her eyes found the path forward—and for what she was about todo.
Marie turned a corner onto Bourbon Street, bassinet in hand, then came to a breathless halt, eyes darting through the chaos. But she was too late. It had already begun.
Dust choked the air, blanketing the long road ahead in white. A shrieking crowd came surging from the white smoke, faces dusted in debris, stumbling blindly for shelter. The sharp tang of aurum stained the air, burning Marie’s throat and eyes. Her ears rang, thundering with the charge of hooves over stone as the police rode in, brandishing their rifles and batons into the crowd. Her gaze drifted, lingering over the wreckage—the dead littered the street in droves,facedown in their own ruin, black flies buzzing over their pale corpses. Teeth rotten. Plague-ridden. Distant cannon fire rattled the ground, like thunder trapped beneath Marie’s feet,rumbling through the cobblestones, shaking the very foundation of the city until she thought it might tilt right over.
