A little colored girl came stumbling from the dust, cotton dress stained in red, a tattered violet ribbon hanging from her coiled hair. Anotherboomsounded, lifting the girl high into the air. Marie flung out a hand, using Bade’s wind to steady the girl midair. Marie lowered the girl back onto the ground, where she stood shaking. She stared at Marie for a moment, wide eyes streaked with red, irrevocably haunted, before vanishing into the crowd, passing through the smoke like a ghost. Marie plunged deeper into the wreckage, trying to shake the image of those haunted eyes from her mind.
She’d been jailed for less than one night and already Jon had turned the city in on itself, the whole of New Orleans spinning and spinning into mayhem like one of those paper disks performers on Royal Street would twirl on a string, the colorful little pictures moving into one maddening blur.
A hand seized her ankle, sharp fingernails digging into her flesh. “Priestess!” Marie looked down to find a white man gasping at her feet, black bile spilling between his teeth and down his lips. His nails dug in harder, achingly desperate. “Spare me,please.” It was Monsieur Garnier, an indigo merchant who’d made his fortune on a plantation down Bayou Road. A big white house hedged in apple orchards and rolling purple fields. Pleasant enough. The slaves called itl’abattoir—the slaughterhouse.
Black dots blossomed in her vision. Marie coldly shook him off, hurrying off into the chaos. More bodies in the streets, and the damp, decomposed stench of stewing garbage and rancid flesh. Marie had no pity for these men, the same men who watched her through narrowed eyes, day by day, wishing she were under their own lock and key, where she might perform her magic for their own sick amusement and profit. But it was what came after that scared her—war.Aren’t you already init?
There was no time to think—her daughter would wake soon. She needed to get her to safety, and the rest she would sort out after.
The hiss of magic hung in the air, the stench of old spellwork clinging to the humidity. In the distance she could see the waterrising—the deep blue banks of the Mississippi swelling into the darkened horizon. The tide-turners were locking down the docks and channels—no one would be allowed to escape this madness, and certainly no reinforcements would be permitted in. The thought struck her, a wave of horror rising in her chest.There is no one coming.There was only her.
She passed a group of kindlers, young boys who shot fire into the air from their fingers like rifles. They cavorted around the body of a small merchant man who lay facedown, swimming in his own blood. Their former owner, perhaps.
One of the boys extended a flaming hand to her, his smile stretched into his eyes. “Dance with us!”
“We’re free,” they sang and sang at her back. “We’re free!”
Dozens of corpses littered the road—men, women, small children, their little bodies angled oddly beneath their parents, who’d done their best to shield them. This was the cost of rebellion.
The truth was, she would have gladly paid it. But not with her daughter’s life.
Marie might have reigned by Jon’s side, or he by hers. She harbored no fantasies about her power in this city or her golden throne. It was an illusion—the best one she’d ever cast. And for all her magic and wiles, the only power she had was the power theyallowedher. Nothing more. And nothing less. Because that was the way of things in New Orleans, the way things had always been. Those were the rules.But what if they weren’t?
Marie swept the thought from her mind.
Father Antoine met her in the courtyard of Place d’Armes, the St. Louis Cathedral casting its steepled shadow over them. Marie passed him the bassinet. Her eyes lingered over her daughter, over the same brown skin, the glossy dark crown of her head. Even now, she was her twin in every way.Marie Laveau.The child would be her namesake, the only part of her legacy worth keeping.
“Take her. Keep her far away from the sanctuary. Do you understand?” When Antoine said nothing, Marie rattled the old man by the shoulders. “Do you understand?”
This drew a stilted nod from Father Antoine. Marie relaxed. Her daughter would be safe at last. Even if it came to the worst, Antoinewould see to it that her daughter was raised with principle, with kindness, and perhaps, if she was lucky, with love.
“What do you intend to do, Marie?”
“Stop him, of course.”
Antoine’s eyes fell to the infant resting in his arms. A telling silence settled between them. “Will you kill him?”
Marie kept her face calm, steadfast in her choice. “It is better that you do not know.”
“Then may God forgive you, Marie Laveau.” He put a wilted hand on Marie’s shoulder, just as he had done when Marie had been a wayward child looking to her teacher to tell her right from wrong. Perhaps she’d never stopped being that little girl. Perhaps she never would. “And may you, one day, forgive yourself,” said Antoine. He crossed the air over her forehead, the only protection he could give her.
Père Antoine took her daughter and crossed over the threshold back into the road, vanishing into the flickering torchlight. Marie watched him go, staring into the shadows long after the priest’s footsteps had faded on the cold stone. But there was no time for fear. Not when she’d need every ounce of courage to face the monster waiting for her inside.A monster of your own making.She’d set Jon on this path the minute she’d decided to use him for her own selfish gain. And maybe, just maybe, he’d been using her the whole time too. Perhaps they both deserved what was coming to them. The voices of the ancestors, the spirits of the dead, whispered at her ear. Taunting, heckling. Warning. But there was only one voice she heard now, rising above the rest.I told you.Marie laid a hand over her heart, hammering in her chest.Turn your heart to stone.
She raised a hand, and the cathedral door flung open at her silent command. Candlelight spilled out from within, golden and warm, almost welcoming.
Marie took a breath and stepped inside.
It was as if she’d walked into a dream. No—amemory.It was the night Jacques disappeared. They’d had a fight. A bad one this time. They were always bad, by all accounts, but today was worse because Jacques was actually leaving. He had business up north in Baton Rouge and wouldn’t be expected back for a week.
He wanted her to come with him. And she knew why. There was talk of a coup against the governor, whisper among the slaves of a rebellion yet to come.
You’re going to cause a riot!she had yelled at his back.You endanger us all.
It was those words that angered him so, brought him back from the door and made him whirl around to face her, green eyes alight with strange magic.
I endanger us? Surely you meant the white men at the market who shoved that old black lady down in the middle of the road? Surely you meant that danger, mon amour?
Marie froze. She had not. He knew what she had meant. He was mocking her.
