Chapter Sixteen Marie #3
Ten black men were chained together in a line.
Emaciated down to bones. Their faces deeply swollen from fresh bruising.
They were slaves. Quite possibly runaways.
It was true, runaways were often dealt the worst blows by their masters, anything to weaken the resolve of anyone who might harbor similar notions of escape.
Marie’s chest constricted. This was not going to be a show, not one she would ever pay to see. This was going to be punishment. Public. And if the chanting crowd was any indication—unspeakably brutal.
Gailon’s voice thundered out to the crowd, his words cracking the air like a lash.
“Transforma!”
The first man let out a screech.
His arm split cleanly open—bone bulging, bits of pink fleshy muscle exposed and writhing as it reconfigured itself into a new shape at the alchemist’s behest. The rest of the slaves watched in wild fear, shaking and trembling.
The smallest of the ten wet himself. Marie’s eyes shifted through the crowd, searching for an ounce of disgust, some sense of reason.
But the crowd only watched, breathlessly enchanted.
“Transcende!”
The horde of robed alchemists answered in one hollow voice, echoing Gailon’s words back to him.
This wasn’t cheering. This was decree. Marie gripped the railing, her gut clenching, fear and rage twisting her insides with a cold fist as a single realization struck her.
The Brotherhood had not simply boarded the steamboat like the rest. They were not guests to this cursed sport, bloodthirsty spectators seeking to be entertained. They ruled it.
The man was bowled on the ground now, screaming and hollering as his bones broke and mended all at once, his arms extending out until they merged into a crooked winged shape.
Marie didn’t know much about the laws of alchemy.
But she was sure of one thing—that it should never be used on people.
It was for objects—for stones and metals and the like.
And for elements of the natural world—fire, wind, water, earth. But not people. Never people.
Marie glanced at Jon. His eyes remained unflinchingly fixed on the spectacle. But she saw the way his jaw tightened, the hard set of his lips when the black man screamed out for mercy.
“Progredere!”
Feathers erupted from his skin, raised on horrible end.
His jaw broke, unhinged and hanging, until it stretched itself into a hooked beak.
His wings spread wide, his eyes bright, molten green.
He let out a long, broken cry, a horrible sound that ripped from his beak and out into the chamber.
The transformation was complete. Marie stared, breathless and shaking, at what the man had become.
But he was not a man anymore. Not fully.
The beast had come and taken his place. Marie was reminded of Jon’s story on the rowboat.
Suppose it’s just as well, ’cause the truth is, love, folks are what they believe they are.
Wild cheering erupted.
Marie’s eyes fell to the seat beside Gailon’s, to the face she’d know anywhere.
Felix Corbin. Front and center, the mayor of New Orleans grinning like a fool.
Of course he was here. He was as much to blame as the Brotherhood for this madness.
He would want the runaways publicly punished, even more so if their debasement lined his pockets with more coin.
Transforma, transcende, progredere! Transform, transcend, progress! The Brotherhood of the White Hand’s sacred creed. She’d seen it all over the city, plastered on the shining placards that advertised their latest miracles and advancements. But this was not advancement. This was ungodly. Unnatural.
Tears stung Marie’s eyes. She felt Jon shift beside her. “Do you see now? This is their altar, Marie,” he whispered. “And the body is the only sacrifice.”
Down the line the Grand Wizard went. Coldly repeating those words—transforma, transcende, progredere—until each man had been changed at last into Gailon’s new image.
Monstrous half beasts. A chimera—only the face of the man remained, his mouth slackened in agony, his body changed into that of a golden lion, a goat’s head rising from its back, and a long-tongued serpent at the tail, swaying from side to side.
A horribly grotesque merging of beasts. Another with the stretched, distended wings of a bat.
A half man, half wolf. The sound of flesh tearing, bone re-forming in brutally quick succession.
Gailon tapped his staff again, and the chains fell from the beasts, hitting the ground in a resounding clank.
The crowd surged, eager for more. It took her a second too long to realize what was happening—they were going to force them to fight to the death.
Marie watched from behind her veil, wishing she could slap her hands over her ears to somehow forget the screams that scraped along their tongues, the bulge of their eyes as the lifeblood drained from their veins and across the polished stone.
The more blood that spilled, the louder the crowd grew.
All those cries. Gnashing teeth and wild eyes.
Ravenous for more. An earsplitting throb that thrummed inside her ears, tunneling down into her bones until it could go no further.
When it was finished, the only ones who remained were the man who had first changed into the birdlike creature and another who paced the stage on all fours, more wolf than man.
Marie’s stomach twisted. She was wrong. This was not some kind of crude blood sport at all.
This was a perverse ritual being done in the open, permitted by a hundred waging hands.
A flicker of movement caught Marie’s eye.
It was the wolf creature. He was only a small boy, she realized.
His mouth was slack, left open to a deadened scream, a profusion of blood and bile leaked down his ruined face.
Through the crowd, his eyes found Jon’s.
Those eyes, wide and streaked, begging for mercy.
Jon stared back, his mouth clenched in silent fury.
Marie felt her stomach lurching toward her throat—she was going to be sick.
The curtain snapped to a close, the show done.
Marie shot to her feet and hurried back out the way they’d come. She heard Jon’s footsteps behind her. She snatched the veil from her face, whirled to face him in the empty corridor. “You brought me to this cursed place to watch this?!”
Jon’s eyes flashed from behind the panther mask. “Not to watch. Never to watch, love. To change.”
“I don’t understand—”
“I received a message yesterday, Marie. Wine before blood, beast after body. Only those words were scrawled on the paper, along with the location to this boat and twenty names. Twenty names of runaway slaves sought by the city of New Orleans. The message was clear. Someone wanted us to find this place, Marie. To stop this madness. And that’s what I—what we intend to do—”
“Monsieur and Madame. May I help you?” a voice called from behind them.
Jon and Marie whirled to face the doorman from before, a tray of wine in hand. “Wine for the lovers?” he asked pleasantly, offering up a sweet-smelling flute to Jon.
Marie realized that he had mistaken them for a pair of giddy paramours looking to find a safe place to take their pleasure in the dark.
Surely, they were not the first folks to want to do so aboard this vessel, among the countless debaucheries and sins it encouraged.
She should have been relieved, but the thought only made her sicker.
It was not that some small part of her did not want that.
Saints, she did. But she did not want that here. Not like this.
But Jon only grinned, a twinkle in his eye. “Certainly.” He took the wine, drained the whole of it in one fluid tilt.
Then he drove the glass into the side of the man’s throat.
Marie watched, frozen, as Jon twisted the glass sharply until blood sprayed the air.
Marie was reminded of the bubbling fountain on the steamboat’s second deck, the stone nymphs who frothed dark wine from their screaming mouths.
His body crumpled to the floor. Jon made a flicking gesture with two fingers, and the man’s corpse slid away from their path, his flaccid limbs making a wet squelching sound across the wood.
Jon pulled the panther mask from his face, quickly casting it aside into the dark.
They were past games now. His real work had begun.
Jon pulled her through the darkness, through another door, and they stepped into a holding pen scattered with cages.
Inside were the rest of the runaways, who had not yet been transformed.
One of the men shook at the bars, his eyes red-rimmed and pleading.
“Conjurer!” His gaze flitted to Marie, eyes widening when he recognized her. “Madame Laveau! Save us! Don’t leave us here! Look at us, goddamn you!”
Jon kept walking. It was as if he didn’t hear them.
When Marie gripped his arm, he cast her a sidelong look.
We will come back for them. They hurried along through another door, this one leading to the stage, where the curtain was still mercifully closed.
By the time Jon and Marie emerged fully onto the platform, she could hear the crowd booing, calling for more bloodshed.
Only two of the men remained, if she could call them that.
The boy who had become the wolf. And the first man, his dark brown arms stretched into long, distended-veined wings.
The rest were scattered across the stage floor, a mess of blood-soaked clothing, torn ligaments.
The air was thick with the stench of alchemy and rancid flesh.