Chapter Sixteen Marie #6
She had been abandoned. Twice now by her own mother.
By the loa. But no, she wasn’t being abandoned—it was far worse than that.
She was being spat out. Same as Jon had openly done before Gailon, no different from Father Antoine’s words ringing down at her from his pulpit, more warning than sermon: So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of My mouth.
Both Jacques and Jon had warned her. As had God.
And now the Baron of Death himself. In her selfishness, she had not chosen a side, only her own.
And she supposed it was divine judgment that she should be left here now, utterly alone.
Marie staggered through the darkness, desperate to be free of this hellish cage.
The boiler room. The air swollen with steam, tinged with the glowing red embers of burning coal. Dark-robed figures crouched before an open furnace, its insides red like a belly split open down the middle. They fed it strange offerings…dark limbs…and stones…teeth.
Behind the furnace, the dark, shadowed shape of a long-horned thing, growing larger with each sacrifice, fat and grossly protruding from its offerings.
The thing stood, and it kept on rising, stretching, looming larger than any natural room could contain, than the entire steamboat could hold, until the shape of it seemed to swallow the darkness whole…
Marie stumbled back with a cry.
This was not the work of some distant Greek deity, not at all the work of the horned god Dionysus conjured from myth.
Marie understood at last the blatant truth of the whole of the steamboat: Every decadent arrangement, every act and drop of wine had been a performance meant to mask something much more malevolent that lived within its dark heart.
This place was an altar to something truly evil. Demonic.
She could feel it. Something infernal breathed within that room, something alive, powerful and ancient, and so very wrong.
The robed figures snapped their heads up to her, turning as one. They stood. And slowly started toward her—
Marie turned and ran. Her mouth open and soundless, weighed with a silent scream that wouldn’t come. Thundering footfalls behind her. The dark thing was close. It would soon have her.
“Legba!” Marie called. “Papa!” she cried, hot tears blinding her as she stumbled forward.
Then she felt it. The subtle curve of the air, the cool breath of the loa of the crossroads as he passed over the threshold into the land of the living. There, Papa Legba whispered. Turn there. Crying with relief, Marie did as she was told. She turned, the hallway twisting into—
A dead end.
There was no door this time. Only an empty wall. No exit. No way out. The footfalls grew closer.
Marie screamed. Why would Legba lead her here?
Was this amusement for him? Was she nothing more than a puppet that could be worked on a string like those poor men on the stage?
Was this simply a game for the gods to see how far her mind could bend before it broke?
Marie clutched at the walls, but her hands came back wet, slippery with something dark and warm like blood.
“Goddamn you! You left me! You all fucking left me!” She gasped, desperately frantic. “There’s no way out,” she whispered, half sobbing. Blind panic seized her. Her hands dug into her hair, grasping at her scalp, dragging down the sides of her face, smearing the blood. “There’s no fucking way out!”
Marie screamed. For the men who had been enslaved and mutilated and killed for sport. For the loa. For her saints, for God. Jon. Her mother. The echo of her terror circled the dark until she felt the entire presence of the steamboat screaming back at her.
Behind her, a presence.
Marie whirled to face a figure stepping out from the coiling mist. Black-robed, a pointed hood concealing its face. The flickering red lights stuttered in and out overhead, a mad heartbeat hammering in the dark. It approached her slowly, as if floating.
Marie shrank back against the wall. Her first, frenzied thought was that it was a demon, something infernal conjured from the boiler room that had found her at last. But it was not.
Silas.
The alchemist neared her, and she could see as he grew closer the way the snow-white ends of his hair made a determined climb toward the ruddy-gold roots, eating away at what was left of his natural color bit by bit.
A dark, inky ring spread out from the center of his irises, slowly overtaking what was left of the blue. A sickness slowly spreading.
Marie was shaking when he stopped in front of her. Reaching out slowly for her.
Marie slapped him—hard. “You monster! All of you! Fucking monsters!”
Silas watched her in silence for a moment. If he was angry, his face betrayed nothing. Then, so softly she almost missed it, he murmured, “Wine before blood, beast after body.”
Marie stared blankly at the alchemist, not comprehending at first. “…It was you.” He had slipped Jon that message. He had wanted them to find this place. “Why?”
“It is not for you to know yet.” The alchemist turned to the wall behind Marie. “Mutatio.” The steamboat resisted, hissing like a snake. “Aperi,” he pressed on, coaxing the beast to obey. No, not coaxing. Demanding. “Aperi.”
Finally, a shape worked itself into the steamboat’s cursed metal, the sound like breaking bone. A door appeared, etched with glowing symbols she couldn’t decipher.
Slowly, it opened.
When Silas spoke again, his voice was a cold rasp. “Go now, Marie. Go and never return to this place.”
Marie would not return to this hell, even if the loa demanded it. But she understood all the same. He would not be here next time. And the beast would not release her from its maw. The next time, it would make sure to swallow her whole. Still shaking, Marie started toward the door.
“Marie.”
She turned, pausing at the glowing threshold.
“You were wrong,” said Silas. He pulled the black hood over his face, taking a step back into the roiling shadow. “There is always a way out.”
And then he was gone. Marie turned toward the door and passed through, stepping right into—
Chaos.
Marie emerged onto the higher deck at last surrounded by wind and terror.
People streaked by in half-ruined costumes, screaming for help.
Some had already sailed off on rowboats, escaping back toward the Quarter.
With no rowboats left, the remaining guests flung themselves into the river.
Anything but to face the chaos. Farther out on the dark water she saw Nonc Croc and the runaway men, their little rowboat seized by Gailon and his alchemists, who’d entrapped the vessel in a swirling vortex of water.
Nonc Croc was not a strong enough tide-turner to withstand such an assault and navigate them to safety. They would die.
“No,” said Marie. Power coursed through her, vibrant and strong. She was not under the pull of this vessel anymore. And she would not be cowed again.
Marie flung out both arms wide as the power of three loa entered her body, coursing in opposite directions.
On one end was the torrential pull of Agwe and La Sirene.
On the other came Bade, his searing wind cutting through the noise of her mind.
It was painful to contain one loa. It was agony to contain a trinity.
More, the loa urged. Use us. Use us all, child.
Marie lifted from the ground and screamed.
With one hand, she held back the alchemists, lashing wind pressing down on them, and with the other, she used the river to push Nonc Croc out of harm’s way.
Gailon and his men were flung to one side of the boat, a rippling funnel of wind barring them from advancing.
Marie used the rest of her power to push Nonc Croc’s boat along the dark water and away from La Lune’s long shadow. Just a little farther and…
Marie’s nose bled. Her limbs seized, contorting from the pressure of the loa bearing down on her. Her lungs filled with the weight of deep water. She could not contain all three at once. They were going to tear her clean in two.
Finally, the rowboat broke free. It floated off into the dark, sinking into the mist.
Marie exhaled—a sound of relief, a hushed prayer. She dropped back down onto the boat’s deck, barely able to hold herself up against the rail. From the far side of the boat, she saw the Brotherhood running toward her, staffs raised and glowing. A hand seized Marie by the arm—
It was Jon. The sharp lines of his face sagged from exhaustion, depleted from the cost of his magic. But still his eyes blazed, hell-bent as he always was on seeing his way through the dark. Here was a man who would not break. Not now, Marie decided. Not ever.
“Shhh, I got you now,” the Conjurer soothed against her ear.
Jon nodded toward the water, his message clear. They needed to go. Now.
Together they jumped, free-falling through the dark and down into the lapping black water below.
When Marie broke the surface, gasping, Jon pulled her close.
Even through the pain and the stench of alchemy, she was overcome with the smell of him, the bitter ancient magic that wrapped itself around him, an impenetrable armor. It was wrapped around her too now.
“Don’t let me go,” she begged, clinging to him, dizzy from the fall.
His eyes twinkled, the only light she needed in the dark. “Only a fool would.”
Arms clasped around each other, they swam away into the night, leaving the wreckage behind.
By the time they reached land again, the stars had turned in the sky, and the first hours of morning were not far off.
Trembling from exhaustion and sopping wet, Marie collapsed.
Jon staggered to her, then slumped onto the ground beside her, his chest heaving.
Strong as he was, she could see the night had left its mark upon him too.
He might be unbreakable, but even the Conjurer was not without scars.