Had it all been for nothing? Would it have always led to this?
Marie bent her head and wept.
“Come now, Marie. I taught you better than that.”
A hand appeared in front of her. And Marie slowly looked up into the face of Jon the Conjurer. She stared, frozen, tears in her lashes, remembering his last words, the words she heard in her heart and in her nightmares every night. At every mass, in every dark room.I love you.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Jon murmured. His eyes, rich gold, softened.
His face, scarcely touched by time. She wondered how he saw her all these years later. Was it vanity? Some semblance of old feeling? Time had changed her—creased her brow in faint lines, threaded the dark of her hair with strands of gray—and most days she thought for the worse. But here now, with him again, she felt as if she were twenty all over again. Young. Powerful. A terrifying illusion.
“You would take my hand again, Jon?” she asked quietly. “After everything I’ve done? After all this time?”
His answer made her breath hitch. “I would take your hand always, Marie. Always.” His hand was still before her, as it had been many years ago during their dance. “Now, come. I have much to still teach you. And there is still so much you might learn.”
Marie considered his eyes, the peculiar eyes of a harvest moon, the eyes that told her everything with one look: that he had not forgotten her sin, nor his own. The eyes that said that he might love her still, that after all this time apart, he had never stopped. She would not ask for his forgiveness. But for their daughter’s sake, she might ask for his help.
And very slowly, she took Jon’s hand once more.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ree
The world was still frozen around them, cocooned in the Lord of the Crossroads’s power.
Ree beheld Papa Legba. He Who Stands at the Beginning and the End. If she were at one of his altars, she might offer poured rum and pale slices of coconut flesh. A pipe and tobacco. Simple gifts. But she was not at his altar. She was at his sacred doorway, a door many whispered should never be opened.
“You have called. And I have come,” said Legba.
A strange light touched his eyes. If Ree hadn’t the sense to know that these loa—these spirit-gods of different names—were so unabashedly inhuman, she might have mistaken him for simply a very old man. But an old man he was not. His eyes glowed with enough heat that her skin ached.
“You wanted me to come, didn’t you? Why?”
“This was a lesson, child. And you have been a very, very difficult child to teach,” explained the elder loa.
“I don’t understand.”
A sudden whisper at her ear that made her hair stand on end.Oh, but you will.
Then Papa Legba was gone.
In the darkness he still spoke, his voice coming from different directions all at once.You were born with your mother’s life in you. Your father’s gift for death. You are the balance. You are the door. And we command the dead to walk through it. But the loa are kind, and so we allow choice. You must choose the road you seek.
“Did you allow my mother to choose? Or my father?” she called to the dark.
She turned on her heel to find the loa was standing behind her, silently appraising her. Her heart leapt into her throat—she might never get used to seeing gods made flesh.Dangerous,a small voice inside of her screamed. He could end her with a thought.
“Yes, in a way. Marie Laveau and the Conjurer chose their fates for different ends. One for love. And the other for revenge. The sun and the moon.” And she was the star. At last, maybe, she was beginning to understand. “You will be our vessel for war. This was the will of the loa before your birth, before the union of your mother and your father. Such was decreed by the first Quarter Queen, the agreement with death she struck on the pyre, and it was so. You will finish her work, and you will avenge. But only if you accept.”
Saloppe had burned on a stake. Had the loa allowed that? Had all of this suffering truly been the will of the gods? Had they simply stirred a war with Marie and Jon and all the sorrow in between to fulfill their own selfish whims?
“We loa do not control the mortal world,” Legba answered, easily reading her thoughts. “We can only guide what already exists, manipulating the threads man has woven. We desire only to cleanse the mess mortals have foolishly made. You must see this, yes?”
New Orleans. The city was broken long before the loa. The Voodoo gods and spirits did not call for chains and misery. This was not their sin.
“Bring Marie back. Papa,please.” She was not her mother. She was not used to making such requests before the loa, less sure of how to make herself humble before their divinity.
“Bring back one. You bring backall.” Legba made a tutting noise with his tongue, an elder admonishing a wayward babe at his knee. “Choose now, and choose wisely. You open this door, and there may be no closing it. If you do not, you will go on living as you are.But your kin will die. If youshouldopen it, the will of the loa comes again, and we will bring war. And that war will cost you, Marie.”
