Chapter Seventeen Ree
Chapter Seventeen
Ree
So, they had been in love.
This was Ree’s first thought when she came to in the bayou house, a sweaty mess on the floor beside her mother’s bed.
She needn’t be near her to channel, although the proximity helped to deepen her connection.
The channeling was stronger now, as if it had a life of its own, as if her mother was the one forcing her to see.
And see what exactly? That she had told another lie?
It was clear that Jon the Conjurer was not just the enemy Marie had made him out to be.
Of course, she knew her mother must have felt something for the Conjurer if Ree was the result of their coupling.
But it was more than that. Her mother had loved him.
She’d felt as much. And, if the images of the past were any indication, he had loved her too, once upon a time. Just how had they gone to war?
Ree wanted to press on with her channeling, to go deeper this time, but with one look at her mother’s waxen face, she knew it would be too much too soon.
But you are playing a dangerous game, little Laveau, Claudette had warned after the ordeal with Anabelle had ended and they’d found themselves in the bayou house, standing over her mother’s body. The more you draw on your mother’s mind, the more life force you take from her body.
Under Claudette’s guiding hand, she’d learned how to reach deeper into her mother’s mind, to carefully pry through the dark of her thoughts.
Now Claudette entered the room, a warm cup of tea in hand.
She passed it to Ree, who drank it quickly.
It tasted of lavender and rose hips. Protection and strength.
“And what did you see this time?”
“My mother and Jon.” She met Claudette’s gaze. “And…the Brotherhood. What they did to those people…”
Ree shut her eyes to those horrible visions.
Bone shattering and re-forming. Bodies contorting wildly to raucous laughter.
She’d never known La Lune to harbor such evil.
But then again, she’d never thought to look.
What other evils lay beneath the Quarter’s grandeur, its spell of illusion?
And there was the matter of Silas. He’d slipped that code to Jon and had opened that door for Marie.
But for the life of her, she couldn’t understand why.
Claudette balked. “So you’ve seen what the Brotherhood of the White Hand is truly capable of. I say good! With each new invention they pretend advances the city’s cause, no one thinks to wonder the price. Fucking imbeciles.”
The pieces of Marie’s past were beginning to form into a clearer shape for Ree.
She could see now, perhaps, why Marie might have aligned herself with the Conjurer, why she might have had little other choice in the matter.
But what she couldn’t understand was how they’d become such bitter enemies in the end. Not yet.
Outside, Ree heard music coming their way from the surrounding wilderness.
Her heart twisted as she realized that she was late, today of all days.
Today was the day they mourned Marcel, when they would commend his spirit on to the next world.
She wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him, to the part of herself that had loved him.
Already so much had changed in her world since his death, already so much loss.
“Go,” said Claudette, nodding toward the door. “They will be expecting you there. Not me. Do not worry, I will keep watch over your mother.”
Ree nodded, then made her way to the door.
“Oh, and little Laveau?” She sponged at Marie’s damp brow. “Do try not to cause any more trouble for yourself. You don’t need any more eyes on you.”
But that was exactly what she felt now, a thousand eyes on her as she walked amongst her mother’s Voodoo court.
They carried Marcel’s body deeper into the bayou, where the moss trees hung above them, their spindly arms tangled together in cobwebs that blotted out the fading sun.
With so much suspicion toward their kind now, he could not be laid to rest in the city, where they might make a mockery of his corpse, swinging him from a rope, or chaining his body to a pole where passersby might spit and piss on his withering bones.
Ree watched from the back of the procession, eyes trained on the wicker box holding Marcel’s body as it was carried along on the shoulders of stone-faced men, her mother’s devoted followers.
But are they devoted to me? It was a thought she could not escape.
Ree was not their chosen Voodoo Queen. After all, Marie Laveau was not dead—not yet.
But by now everyone knew she had disappeared.
A new queen would need to be named. And soon.
Ree was dressed in her best mourning white, her hair braided away from her face, her cheeks and lips bare of their usual dark red rouge. For all their tears and sorrows, funerals were celebrations of another kind in New Orleans. But Ree could not summon an ounce of revelry.
Marcel. Her friend, her unspoken brother.
Teasing and rash, he’d liked her games and had endured her terrible moods with nothing more than a laugh and a drink.
Oh, by the saints, why in the hell had she given him that aurum?
Why couldn’t she have passed that task on to her mother, who could turn a man away with only her eyes?
At last, they found their way to a small, blue-grassed meadow, basil and fennel abundant underfoot.
This was consecrated land that her mother had cleansed and blessed in the name of Baron Samedi, supreme god of death, father of those long passed from this world.
His altar sat empty, a great stone carved to appear like a hand breaking soil, reaching from the ground.
The acolytes laid Marcel’s body down in front of the stone altar, waiting for Ree’s command.
“Light the pyre and fill the altars,” Ree ordered.
The others did as they were told, but Ree noticed a flicker of hesitation in the air, and she worried it would soon catch to flame and spread quickly among them. Queen she was not, but she was still her mother’s heir, and that counted for something. It had to.
Her skin prickled. She was being watched.
Henryk stood to the back of the procession, the horse he had rode in on some yards away.
He hadn’t said a word to her, and he hadn’t needed to.
Not when she knew why he was here. After the debacle in Congo Square, it was her understanding that all Voodoo and ceremonies would need to be under supervision.
And it would seem the High Inquisitor had made it his business to do just that.
But she wondered if it was more than that.
Was the part of Henryk who had loved Marcel still alive in the shell of the man she saw before her now? And if he was…
Ree tried her best to put the thought from her mind. But still it rang, haunting her. Is that part still in love with you?
A hand squeezed Ree by the shoulder. She turned to find Father Antoine at her side. His lined face bore deep, timeworn grooves, but his light blue eyes were as bright as ever beneath a pair of bushy gray eyebrows.
“Responsibility suits you, Marie,” Father Antoine said simply.
He was using her birth name—her Catholic name—to grate her nerves, she supposed. “I do not keep your faith. So you needn’t have ventured out this far, old man.”
The priest was harmless—kind, studious, and certainly generous to the poor and needy. Père Antoine let his parish believe how they wanted and seemed to keep the Vatican at arm’s length. Until now.
His eyes crinkled at the corners. “No, but I liked to. And besides, your well-being is still of concern to me. You were baptized Catholic, you know.” So, he was teasing her.
“That was my mother’s choice.” As all other things in my life were.
Soon the pyre smoked, the air clouded with bittersweet poppy to bring rest, rosemary for remembrance.
Her mother used to say that if you looked closely, you might see Baron Samedi in the smoke, his skeletal face forming in the silver wisps.
But Baron Samedi did not come, and Ree was glad for it.
She was in no mood to entertain the loa, especially one such as Baron Samedi, who would call for dance and song as tribute, for laughter instead of tears.
The Voodoos poured the god of death’s favored rum along his altar, lit cigars wrapped in wax paper, scattered coffee grounds into his stone hand.
Henryk was questioning Ory now. He took down careful annotation of what he said in a leather book.
She wanted to scream at him, to curse his name loudly for everyone to hear.
How could he stand there and pretend as if Marcel had never meant anything to him, as if she had never meant anything to him at all?
It was easier before to distract herself with a bit of whiskey and lovemaking, but there was no distraction from this—the cold fury lacing its way up her spine and through her blood.
Antoine followed Ree’s gaze, his eyes softening. “I’m afraid Inquisitor Broussard believes, as most of my peers do, that magic must be…managed.”
But had he always believed that? Had he simply hidden his prejudices from her when they were children?
What had she been to him exactly in those quiet, loving moments?
And why had he asked her so desperately to leave that night eight years ago?
But the answers hardly seemed to matter now, not when she could feel Marcel’s spirit drifting further and further away.
What had become of his dreams of freedom?
Those beautiful dreams of Haiti? Where might all those hopes and dreams go now?
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t share your sympathies,” Ree said. “That sense of management usually ends with a witch up on the end of a pike.”