Chapter Thirteen Ree
Chapter Thirteen
Ree
Someone tapped at the window as Ree ran a damp cloth over her mother’s feverish brow.
Her heart leapt, nervous that yet another intruder had discovered her mother’s secret.
But it was only Aram, who’d brought a sprig of lemon balm tucked into his beak.
Ree pried the glass up, and Aram flew in, landing on Ree’s shoulder, where he liked to perch after his travels.
“Silly bird,” she cooed, stroking the soft feathers along his neck.
He turned his head, proudly showing off the bright green herb.
He was always bringing her gifts, but this she knew was for Marie.
Lemon balm could be used to bring down fevers.
They sold bags of it at the apothecary from time to time.
But not even Aram’s arrival could brighten her mood.
How could it, when so much else blighted her mind?
Henryk’s arrival in the city; circling for answers she didn’t have; and then the matter of Silas, cryptic and toying, who somehow knew about Marie’s condition, which, with one look at the sickly sheen on her skin, had only grown worse in the span of one night.
Sosie was curled at the foot of Marie’s bed, watching Ree with piercing eyes as she worked over her mother. She knew the snake didn’t trust her. That was fine. She never had. But ever since Marie had fallen into her sleep, the two of them had struck an uneasy alliance of sorts.
Nan entered the chamber, armed with a pitcher of cold water and fresh linen to replace what Ree had used. “Has there been no change?” she asked quietly, refilling the wooden bowl with water. Aram fluttered over, politely dropped in the sprig of lemon balm, then flew back to Ree.
“She’s worse somehow,” said Ree. “Whatever she’s experiencing…it’s taking a toll on her.”
“How long can she go on like this?”
Ree’s heart beat in a jittery rhythm. She did not want to think of the worst, of what might become of her mother in a few days’ time, what might become of her when she was gone. “I am…not sure. But it cannot be much longer.”
A few days. A few days was all she had to save her mother.
“Ree, forgive me, but we need to turn our minds to what comes next.” Nan’s voice drifted, and Ree knew where this conversation was heading—into dangerous territory.
“The Voodoos cannot be without a queen. The others are getting nervous. First, news of a Harbinger spreads, and now Marie has not been sighted. We need to think—”
“You need to stop,” Ree snapped. “Not another fucking word, Nan. Fetch more water, and this time be quicker about it.”
Nan lowered herself into a stiff bow, then promptly made herself scarce.
Ree sighed, rubbing a hand along her pounding temple.
She shouldn’t have been so coarse with the girl, but she didn’t need obvious reminders of how dire their situation was.
Nonetheless, Nan spoke the truth, one she hadn’t ever let herself consider.
The Quarter could not be without a queen.
Not for long. The Voodoos needed a leader; without one, the city would gladly take control, and what would be left of them then?
Ree turned her eyes back to her mother. If not for the slow rise and fall of her chest, Ree might have already mistaken her for dead.
She remembered grasping her mother’s hand, her mind suddenly flooded with an image of Jon.
Was it possible she was seeing what her mother had seen—what she had wanted her to?
Perhaps Marie had been trying to tell her something; perhaps she was still trying to now.
Ree went to the side of the bed and took her mother’s hand in hers.
She felt the pull of Marie Laveau’s magic drawing her in, taking root inside of her thoughts.
Dozens of images flickered inside her mind’s eye, flashes from another time, another place, a scattering of sounds, bits of words and phrases she could hardly catch.
Her mother at a younger Mayor Corbin’s bedside, holding a vial.
A brown-skinned woman named Claudette beside her with eyes of deep emerald.
Her mother gowned in white, like one of the mourning widows.
Marie kneeling, staring up at a golden-eyed man who gazed down at her in hushed wonder.
A bloody handprint across her cheek. Cold white eyes glowing out from the dark.
Ree opened her eyes, the images and sounds vanishing.
None of it made sense. But it would. It must. There was one image she recognized.
The woman with the emerald eyes. She had seen those same eyes staring at her that day in Congo Square, when she’d stopped Anabelle from killing Corbin.
The eyes had been glowing then, full of old magic.
Claudette Duvalier.
Ree had heard her name traded among the Voodoos, but never had she met the woman.
L’Enchanteresse, some called her. She was proudly Haitian, as many were in New Orleans, and had brought older magic across the ocean with her.
Although she was no friend to the Laveaus, she was the only person from her mother’s past who was left in the city.
Which meant she might be the only person in all of New Orleans who could help her.
Ree turned to Aram, who was perched on the golden brass knob of the bedpost, fluttering his feathers at her expectantly, as if to say, I can help you.
Ree held out an arm, and he flew to land on her wrist. She showed him with her mind’s eye the same image of Claudette she’d received from Marie, and at once the little blackbird cawed.
“Show me,” murmured Ree.
With a ruffle of his black feathers, Aram took flight back through the open window and out into the bayou.
She followed him for some time, and it was after sundown when Ree finally turned onto Canal Street.
It was less a common street, Ree supposed, and more a crossroads of sorts, one that separated the rest of New Orleans from the inner cloisters of the French Quarter.
Ree could feel the boundary of Marie Laveau’s magic, the invisible tug of her wards, as she walked along the road.
The Quarter Queen’s magic ran stronger, truer, in the heart of the Quarter. Less so outside of it.
The street itself ran in a long spine down to the riverside, but not narrow and twisting like the rest of the Quarter.
It was enormously wide, each side swaddled in stately retail: Countless regal emporiums and dressmakers advertised their wares in big, glittering letters.
Hotels shot up from the ground like weeds, flanked by charming coffeehouses and banks with gilded doors guarded by men in caps and gloves.
Horse-drawn streetcars raced down the middle, as did grand carriages and noisy marching parades that went on at all times of the day, folks waving their handkerchiefs and dancing in step.
Here the signposts changed every few minutes from French to English, alchemically transforming, all the better to accommodate those uptown folks who didn’t speak a lick of “bayou talk.”
Ree followed Aram, stopping only when he suddenly swooped over her head and landed on top of a creaking wooden sign; its placard read The Pint a large shaggy gray dog dozed loudly in its warmth.
Miss Hattie-Jean ran the bar, same as she did every night, a flowered apron tied around her front, a rag on her shoulder.
A tiny teacup of a woman, she hummed along to the music, her molasses-brown pin curls bobbing up and down as she worked the counter.
Every word she spoke was dipped in honey—overly saccharine and thick.
“Got the best gumbo in town. A sight better than Labelle’s,” she was telling a man who clutched his clouded pint, teetering woozily in his chair.
It wasn’t—but that was beside the point. There was no arguing with a woman like Hattie-Jean.
“I got the best pig feet in the whole Quarter,” Hattie-Jean went on as she served another round.
She didn’t. But what the Pint & Pea lacked in taste, it made up for in portions: bowls of spiced greens as big as wagon wheels, and pints of lager and moonshine poured as deep as trenches.