Chapter Fifteen Ree
Chapter Fifteen
Ree
Ree was in her mother’s dream.
Or, her mother was in hers. She couldn’t be sure anymore.
It was as if her mother’s eyes had become her own.
She saw cryptic flashes, shining in and out like bright pops of light: her mother facing down sneering alchemists, venom from the snake’s fangs, fire in her blood.
Ree twisted and writhed, screaming into the oblivion for some sense of relief.
But no one answered. She felt herself falling and falling until the darkness of sleep overcame her.
When she woke again, the pain had receded, and she was moving down a long dark corridor, drifting quietly as if the air itself carried her bare feet across the cold stone.
The corridor stretched before her, the darkness pooling around her as thick as tar.
But she could see something moving at the end of the hall, pale as a ghost. It was a long tattered white veil.
The veil drifted, as if stirred by a stroke of wind, revealing a tall black door.
And someone was knocking from the other side.
The pounding got louder and louder, a maddening sound that made Ree smash her hands over her ears and squeeze her eyes shut tight. Open your eyes. Her mother’s voice. Always her mother’s voice.
When Ree opened her eyes again, she had moved—she was standing directly in front of that great black door. The knocking had ceased. The corridor hung empty, filled with blessed silence. And then the white veil parted before her, as if in invitation.
Come closer, Marie Laveau, a voice sang from the other side, and right your mother’s wrongs.
Slowly, Ree parted the silken veil further and pressed her ear to the door. It shuddered, and she heard the wailing of a thousand ancestors, their voices carrying as one. We are many, they called from the other side, and we are coming.
Ree woke with a strangled cry, casting a wild glance about the room.
There were no more terrible whispers calling from the shadows, and the only veil that dared move now was the curtain hanging over the terrace door, drifting with the early morning draft.
Two pretty redheads lay on either side of her, fast asleep.
She’d been channeling her mother. After finding Claudette at the Pint her pride would not allow her that.
So instead, she settled on saying, “No, but I have the strangest feeling you’ll enlighten me. ”
“They want a witch to answer for this, Ree,” explained Henryk. His face contorted, almost cruelly. “Both the Church and Corbin have decided they can’t simply abide such a show of magic. They fear it would make them look weak. And they’ve…well, they’ve called for an execution.”
Ree’s lips curled. “They are weak.” The Vatican could peddle their myths on another street corner for all she liked, so long as they left the Voodoos to their own lot.
“After the Quarter Quarrel, they won’t allow another one.” He went quiet, pensive almost. “You’ve quite the parentage. You should know it has made you a target.”
Ree went very still. She hoped her face betrayed nothing. She’d hardly had a moment to herself to process these new revelations in her life—Marie’s secrecy, Jon’s reputation, and her place in all of their twisted history. The last thing she needed was to give the Church some sign of weakness.
“Your mother had a very telling relationship with her most famous enemy,” Henryk continued. “One that intrigued the Vatican. It was a long-held position that you might be the daughter of the one they call Jon the Conjurer. Your bloodline makes you the bigger threat to the Vatican. The bigger—”
He stopped himself short, but there the word was, hanging between them unspoken.
Enemy. “The only payment this city has ever demanded is blood. So play your games and have your fun, princess, so long as you understand, the city will demand a witch’s blood spilled before next dawn.
” He moved to the door, their business done.
“But they can’t spill what is already gone. ”
This warning was not for her. It was for Anabelle.
She couldn’t understand in the slightest why he was telling her this now, why he could possibly want to spare a witch from a fate his faction so easily doomed witches to.
If he was warning her, there was only so much he could say, she knew.
But what he could not tell her in words, he spoke with his eyes. She knew what she must do.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Henryk’s eyes held hers, silently willing her to understand. He hesitated. “I can’t forget what you did for me.”
She’d saved his life, pulled him back from the doom of yellow fever, even when her own mother had thought him beyond saving. And how? How had she done that? It was with her father’s magic, she knew now. Magic her mother had denied her and kept secret.
Ree knew that she shouldn’t—shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t even think of the possibility—but she couldn’t help herself.
She was selfish. “And what of me? I don’t suppose you are willing to spare me in the end, Inquisitor?
” questioned Ree, her voice cold. Her eyes turned toward the window, to the city that sang with music and spells, where dawn would wash the day anew.
Henryk stopped. And just like that, she watched him falter, saw the moment a crack had worked its way across the stoic lines of his handsome face.