Chapter Nine Ree
Chapter Nine
Ree
In the bayou house, Ree stood over her mother’s still body, her dark hair pooled against the pillow. She was pale, so dangerously pale. Was she simply sleeping? Ree couldn’t be sure.
A thousand questions. She had no idea how her mother had ended up unconscious in the Dreadwood.
In the passing of only one night, her plans had been cast to the wind, as good as dust, so much of her life thrown into doubt.
Ree could hardly believe that she had been so ready to leave her, to abandon her own mother to this miserable fate.
After one bad fight, she’d been ready to run away, always the insolent child.
Ree marveled at her selfishness, the cowardice.
What had her mother always told her? You don’t run away from problems, daughter. You run toward them.
Ree rubbed her temple, her magic spent from getting her mother to safety.
All night Ree had paced about the bayou house like a madwoman, overturning chests, ripping through dusty tomes and old scrolls scrawled with ancient spellwork, tossing amulets of jade, moonstone, rippling blue lapis lazuli.
She’d seized every trinket, every vial and draught.
Surely at least one must hold the answer to her mother’s predicament. Surely there was some cure.
Her eyes flitted to the window, where the wind rattled the dusty glass panes, the world outside a faceless dark in the early hours of a slowly encroaching dawn.
She waited anxiously for the sounds of Aram’s return; she’d sent him to bring Nan the moment she could come.
But she heard only the owls crying from their branches as inky shadows crawled along the ceiling and over the walls.
The bayou house stood cold without her mother’s fiery presence, as if her very lifeblood had kept the place aglow.
The tignon lay on the ground, pooled in a puddle of gold. Come, a voice beckoned softly from the dark.
It was a silly thing, but Ree had thought it called to her before as a child, in stolen moments alone.
Before she had the sense to know any better, she’d often dressed herself in her mother’s silks, swept her curls away from her face in the same elegant knot her mother wore, and piled her head high with a makeshift turban of her own.
And she’d pretend she was the Quarter Queen, playing make-believe in the shadow of the true queen’s throne.
Her mother had warned her the golden cloth was a gift from the loa, that it was the mark of their chosen queen.
It would coronate only those the gods themselves deemed worthy. Which Ree would never be.
Her mother stirred. Ree shot to her feet, practically running to her mother’s bedside. She snatched her hand in hers.
“Maman? Can you hear me?”
Marie said nothing. Her finger twitched. There was no mistaking it this time. Her mother could hear her, somehow.
“Maman?” Ree took her mother’s hand in hers, and blackness crowded her vision.
She was no longer in the bayou house. A vast wilderness surrounded her, the darkness swallowing her from all sides.
It took Ree a second longer to realize she was channeling.
She was doing this. A face peered out from the dark, inching closer to her from the shadows.
It stared at her so intently, so expectantly, it was as if it had been waiting all along.
Jon the Conjurer.
Jon’s mouth stretched into a wicked smile, his eyes glowing like golden fire in the dark as he spoke in a chillingly low voice: Hello again, Marie.
Startled, Ree dropped her mother’s hand, and Jon the Conjurer’s face vanished like smoke dispersing into the dark.
From somewhere outside in the brush, Aram cawed, signaling his return at long last. She heard the front door open, the sound of hurried footsteps as Nan approached, her crown of short reddish coils springing with her every step.
“Princess, you called—” Nan’s eyes swept the room, falling to Marie’s comatose body. “Oh, saints.” Nan immediately dropped to Marie’s side, examining her state. “God help us.”
But Ree didn’t have time for panic, only answers. “How do we cure her?” she demanded.
“She’s been hexed,” Nan said. Few around these parts were more gifted in rootwork than Nan.
That sacred art of magic drawn from the earth’s roots and flowers and soil to brew potions and poisons, to conjure protection and cast away harm.
Nan laid a hand over Marie’s pale one, her own emitting a soft honeyed light, like butterscotch.
The smell of her magic perfumed the air—ginger and sweet basil.
Nan claimed the voice of Zaka spoke to her, that it was he who mounted her spirit during rituals.
Zaka was the patron loa of harvest, whose nourishing power could coax spells from ancient roots and herbs, whose machete could cull poisonous weeds from the land in one mighty swing.
“Hexed? Hexed by who?” Ree demanded. She’d first suspected one among her own, naturally. Ory. Fabrice. Nan too. A handful of others. But they didn’t have the power nor the cunning needed to pull something like this off.
Nan only remained silent, her lips drawn into a thin line. And Ree knew whatever Zaka whispered at her ear was not pleasant.
“Tell me!”
“It is not just a matter of who, but of what.” Nan sighed. “She consumed poison, Ree.”
Ree went still, eyes frozen over her mother’s motionless body.
She could be a corpse. Marie Laveau counted few people as friends, but there was no shortage of folks she might call enemies lurking in the city.
Anyone could have wanted her poisoned and out of the way.
The Church. The Brotherhood. Old Voodoo rivals.
Ree suppressed a shudder. The possibilities were frightening.
“What kind of poison, Nan?”
“Conjurer Root.”
Conjurer Root. Ree had consumed it last night, but she was not the one lying in a bed comatose and at the brink of death.
Her mother was. And then there was…Anabelle.
The lovely Anabelle, who’d left her standing there all alone on that bridge like a lovestruck fool while her mother clung to life.
It was she who had given Ree the Conjurer Root as a gift, after all, but what on earth could be gained from poisoning her mother with it?
A dangerous question with likely a far more dangerous answer, but after Ree handled this business with her mother, she had every intention of finding out.
“I took some too,” Ree pointed out. “I wasn’t poisoned.”
“You did not consume as much as your mother, perhaps. And count yourself lucky, for Conjurer Root holds death magic,” said Nan, brow furrowed.
“You know who brought this root to New Orleans, don’t you?
” Ree did know. She had not forgotten Sanite’s grimoire, those forbidden accounts of Haiti and those corpses rising from the earth one by one. “Jon the Conjurer.”
“What are you saying—”
“After your mother banished Jon, there are some…among us who claim to hear his voice still. That his will still lives on. This root is proof of that. Perhaps…” She lifted her eyes to Ree’s, frightened of her own words. “…it is Jon’s will now that binds your mother so.”
Nan was staring at her strangely. Oh, saints, there was more.
“What is it, Nan?” Ree demanded. But Nan remained quiet, eyes trained on the floor, looking anywhere but at Ree. It was making her nervous, jittery with paranoia.
Nan pulled a paper from her cloak. A copy of The Quintessence, dated just this morning, the headline printed in familiar bold, flourished lettering:
Negro Insurrectionist to Hang; Mayor Corbin to Attend Proceedings in Congo Square.
Ree froze. Panic, pure and all-consuming, crashed through her in a tidal wave, blood thrumming in her ears. As pressing as her mother’s state was, this…by all the saints…this could not wait.
“Stay with my mother,” Ree called over her shoulder as she made for the door.
Here she was heeding her mother’s advice, even now, even when all hope might be lost. You don’t run away from problems, daughter. You run toward them. And run she did—through the door, into the cool damp of the bayou, and toward the danger she knew lay waiting.
By the time Ree reached Congo Square, she was too late.
She saw first the brown bare feet, then the long legs swinging like reeds in the wind, the bare torso corded through with muscle and scars, and the face, deep brown and unsmiling…
Marcel.
Ree cupped both hands over her mouth, stifling down the start of a scream. Gods, no.
In the space of one second, it all became so clear.
She knew. Even with her lack of talent for divination, she could see it all in her mind’s eye: All of the aurum stuffed into one tiny vial.
The one she’d given him. He’d tipped it all into the overseer’s drink.
It was an easy thing to do, wasn’t it? One bad word, one lash too many.
Ree had given him the power of a thunderstroke in one tiny little vial.
Ree might as well have strung the rope up and hanged him herself.
Why had she given him that damned vial? Magic welled up inside her, but she tamped it down with a few shaky breaths.
Anger would not do. Not now. News of her mother’s absence had surely reached the rest of the Quarter, but to what extent she could not say.
“Serves him right,” a white man with long red hair jeered to her left. Ree turned, realizing that he was Brotherhood. “Boy thought he could get bright on one of us. Suppose he got bright enough, didn’t he? Getting all the sun he’ll ever need now.”
The taller alchemist beside him shook his head. “That could be one of us, you know.” His eyes slid uneasily among the hungry crowd. “Magic is magic, no two ways about it.”
The first alchemist sucked the air through his teeth, the squeak of wet boots in rain, and spit a thick wad of tobacco onto the ground. “That will never be one of us.”