Chapter Fourteen Marie #2
Marie drew in a great breath and blew it out, releasing a cloud of orange-gold flame from her mouth.
Ogoun’s flames devoured the tangle of snakes at her feet, disintegrating them in one sweep.
All three alchemists pointed their wands in the air, holding a warding spell together.
But Marie was satisfied to see that, despite their shield, the hems of their cloaks were charred, the ground around their feet scorched to dust.
Marie sneered, enlivened with rage now. Ogoun’s power fed on such emotions, and she could feel it thrumming in her veins like drum-song, a white-hot pain that made it hard for her to keep conscious.
But she did. She would kill them all for daring to attack her.
She would scorch their bones to dust and scatter their ashes upon the Brotherhood’s halls in retribution.
But Ogoun’s power was leaving her. Her next realization hurt worse than the blistering agony of summoning his sacred fire: She simply wasn’t strong enough to contain him.
She heard the god of fire’s voice in her ear, speaking a searing promise: Do not take so long to light my candles, priestess.
Lest I burn your flesh as tribute instead.
If she were in a better mood, she might have laughed at his fickleness.
But Ogoun was like all loa, swift in their rewards, so petty in their vengeances. It was a wonder she served them at all.
Exhausted, Marie flung out a hand, and the smallest of the alchemists flew back into the alley wall, then hit the ground, unconscious. The last two rounded on her, sending bright sparks from the tips of their wands.
“You are more powerful than Gailon warned,” said the tallest. “But this was never a battle of wills, witch.”
With a swish of their cloaks, the two alchemists vanished, leaving their third brother behind. He couldn’t return to the Brotherhood’s halls if he wanted to. As far as Gailon was concerned, he’d been bested by lesser ilk. And that was as good a death sentence as any.
Gailon.
Had she really offended the Grand Wizard so when she’d mended Felix Corbin all those days ago?
No, Marie thought quickly, thinking back to the night of Mardi Gras.
This was no petty revenge. Gailon was seeking a foothold over Sanite.
And what better time to usurp power than when public goodwill for the Voodoos was so thin?
Attacking Sanite would prove difficult. The old woman’s paranoia meant she rarely left the bayou without a guard, her time in the Quarter only for rituals on Sunday nights. But Marie? She was easier prey.
The bells of the St. Louis Cathedral were tolling now, thundering across the sky. Over and over again. It was a signal meant only to be used when Les Magiques were causing unrest.
At last, Marie understood. It was a signal meant for her. The Brotherhood had not intended to kill her. No, they intended worse. To have her arrested, then publicly charged. Hanged before all the city as warning of what would happen to any Voodoo who might follow in her footsteps.
A bright stab of pain at the side of her neck.
Marie clasped a hand to the wound, and it came back covered in blood and something else.
A thick, dark gold substance, strangely alchemical.
Venom. Horror flooded her. She’d been bitten.
On the ground, a yellow-and-black serpent reeled back, hissing, scaled head raised, its eyes bright with a preternatural yellow glow, the glow of alchemy.
She’d missed one. The serpent slithered on and away.
But the burn of its bite remained. Marie could feel it slowly spreading in her blood like a smear…
No, thought Marie. She could not flee in time, drained as she was. Reckless, Sanite Dede would have spat. Why conjure one as powerful as Ogoun? A lesser spirit would have done just as well. Your pride hinders your magic as always, Marie.
Marie steadied herself upon a railing, struggling to breathe. At the end of the road, men on horseback approached. Snatchers by the looks of them, ready to collect their bounties. A trap. The whole thing had been a fucking trap.
Suddenly a crow cawed above her and landed on the post across from her, staring at her, its gaze dark and unblinking.
Jon stepped from the shadows, as if he had been there all the while.
His gaze swept over her haggard form, narrowing when he noticed the glowing embers still licking the ravaged road, remnants of Ogoun’s breath, and the oozing wound at her neck.
Her vision darkened. “Jon…” She didn’t have the strength to say much more. What would Sanite think? What would the others say if they knew she was with him?
But the bells still tolled. Her enemies pressed closer. She did not have long.
The poison made her unsteady on her feet, and the world was spinning until the whole of it seemed upside down, and she was falling—
Jon caught her, pressing her close into the circle of his arms, a great crow enfolding her in its wings.
“You can’t…you can’t…” She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t remember the rules anymore.
“Come now, love. I can,” he said, lips turning into a wicked smile. “And I will.”
Marie closed her eyes and felt the soft caress of Jon’s breath as he whispered a spell into her ear. A soft fluttering sound surrounded them from all sides, the wingbeat of a hundred birds.
And then they were gone.
Marie awoke—screaming.
Fire consumed her blood. She seized and bucked wildly. Strong hands immediately grasped her, holding her to the ground.
“If you want to live, do not move,” a gruff voice ordered. Marie cast a wild look about her. Darkness hedged her vision from all sides. A face loomed over hers, blurry in the shadow. Jon. His eyes glowed, more golden than she had ever seen them, bright enough that they gave off their own light.
And then the pain returned—harsher than before, a wave of agony that rocked her insides. She screamed, and Jon quickly pressed something bitter into her mouth, a piece of willow bark.
He was moving over her, doing something she could not see. She heard the rattling of utensils, the slosh of water in a basin. “Bite down when it feels like too much.”
Then his lips were upon her throat, feather-soft, and there was only fire, more pain than she had ever felt in her life, as he sucked the poison from her wound.
Marie tossed her head back, gasping and writhing as the pain worked itself from her insides.
She bit down, hard enough that it felt as if she might snap the bark in two.
But it remained whole, as tough as leather.
She bit the bark again and again, until all she could concentrate on was the deep aching in her teeth.
The room was a dizzying blur. Shadows danced along the walls, mocking her pain.
She was spinning, and there was laughter, maddening laughter.
Was it her? Was she the one laughing, making such vexing noises?
She saw strange dark shapes moving toward her, smelling of rotting flesh.
Demons, she thought. But no, they were not fallen ones.
They were a wholly different kind of creature, something not quite alive.
Twisting, undead things. Dragging themselves from the long, darkened depths of a shadowed corridor toward her…
Jon lifted his mouth from her throat, and she heard the ting of the serpent’s venom hitting the basin somewhere beside him as he spat out the poison, bit by bit.
“I’m sorry,” Jon whispered. One hand was beneath the curve of her breast, flat against her belly, as he held her writhing body still. And on and on it went, that same ting and his hurried whispers of I’m sorry…I’m sorry…until she thought she might go mad.
She drifted after that. When she awoke again, she was drenched in sweat and wrapped in a heavy blanket, the colorful patterns not like any she had seen in New Orleans.
She had heard slaves talk of such designs in Africa, but never had she seen the swirling shapes and glistening colors for herself.
A fire burned in a small hearth. The whole room smelled too sweet. Chamomile, she recognized. For healing.
“Those are from my tribe,” said Jon. He was sitting across from her, feeding the flame pieces of chopped wood. So he’d caught her looking. He turned to her and grinned, the corners of his eyes creasing pleasantly. “I am the last of my kind. My wife…my children…I weave what I can remember.”
His wife. Her heart sank down to her belly, cold like a stone.
Children too. I am the last of my kind. It occurred to her that this was a man who’d lost everything.
And yet here he was, sitting before her, willingly telling her about it.
She had forgotten. Jon was not like her.
Depending on whom you asked and why, Marie was either a colored girl or a black woman light enough that she scarcely had to think of the roots of her bloodline.
Creole in every sense that mattered—a person of the new blood born in the new land.
So many slaves shared her same story. But not Jon—he had come directly from the old land, young as he was.
She could sense it in his magic—a beating song that ran through his veins, strong and steady, unblemished and true.
Marie sat up and looked around. They were in a wooden shack, the walls hung with dried herbs: bundles of marjoram, garlic cloves, prickly bells of thistle.
Bits of silver moonlight shone through cracks in the ceiling, the bayou wind rattling the wooden planks like old bones. “And what tribe is that?”
Her gaze landed on canvases leaning against the far wall, some still drying, others splattered in dried paint slashes.
A white-capped shoreline. Towering grass soaked in the blood of sunset.
Laughing children in luminous pattern work.
A Voodoo King. A conjurer of legend. Her queen’s bitter enemy.
And a talented artist. Jon the Conjurer, a man of many surprises.