Chapter Eighteen Marie
Chapter Eighteen
Marie
Magic had changed Jon’s face again, this time into the shape of a monster she’d thought herself rid of many, many years ago.
It was the face of the one who had left her first, whose absence had marked her soul with a terrible brand of loneliness.
Her mother. When Jon’s face had changed again and taken on the shape of Marguerite Darcantrel, she couldn’t bear it.
Flashes of her mother’s face came back to her—that eerie smile from behind that long black veil, the shape of her sinking into the shadows.
Would she ever be free of that terrible night on the steamboat? La Lune might never let her go.
“Enough!” Marie snapped. “I said enough!”
She crashed her own magic into the illusion, smashing it in the moonlight, bits of silver floating away in the bayou wind and into the ragweed and trees.
Marie was on her knees, panting. Although Jon held nothing back in their lessons, she found this one to be particularly cruel, worse even than when he had pretended to be Jacques.
“What do you fear, Marie?” asked Jon quietly.
He knelt beside her, lifting her chin so that she was gazing into his eyes. So very gentle he had become with her in these last few blessed weeks, so gentle those golden eyes had been when she was gazing down at them in the dark, astride him.
“Tell me, what do you fear, Marie?” he repeated. “Those fears will be made manifest when you open the door to death if you do not learn to conquer them now. The loa do not respect any show of weakness. You cannot demand them to change the course of death if you haven’t conquered your own life.”
His words circled in her head, a maddening riot of sound.
What do you fear, Marie? But he knew. He had seen inside her mind, had made himself privy to the dark thoughts and fears she kept hidden away.
The steamboat had seen inside of her too, hadn’t it?
It had gazed into the dark of her heart. And it had wanted more.
“I thought…I thought I wasn’t afraid of that monster anymore,” said Marie finally.
“That wasn’t the face of a monster, love.” His hands moved to her shoulder, slowly caressing the bare skin where the sleeve of her dress had slipped.
Oh, yes it was, a different kind of monster altogether. “It was my mother.”
“Ah,” said Jon. His grip on her shoulder tightened. “The curse of family.”
Sometimes it did feel like Marie’s family had been cursed.
Marie was the first in her family to have been born free.
Both her mother and her grandmother had not been so fortunate.
Grand-mère had bought her freedom, of course, toiled off her debt in the sun until Corbin’s father had turned her free.
Didn’t know what he had in her bloodline, because if he had, he would never have let her go so easily.
Her mother had a tryst with a mulatto freedman, Charles Laveau, and birthed Marie shortly after.
Because her mother was newly freed, so was she.
It was the one good thing her mother had given her—freedom.
“She left me, Jon,” said Marie finally. “She left because I was too much, much more than she bargained for. My grandmother didn’t have this strength of magic. My mother didn’t either. So she had no reason to believe her daughter might. But I did. And I…couldn’t control it.”
Marie was barely five when her mother had left her with Grand-mère.
Said she wasn’t right for motherhood, didn’t have the knack for it, as if it were simply a card trick you could learn on a street corner.
Truth was, she’d been afraid of Marie, of the strange happenings around her, the magic in her eyes, the spirits that whispered from every dark room.
She let her go. Went to chase her freedom.
Marie had sworn if she was ever to be a mother, she would not do the same.
And so, Marie had learned to hide herself, to make her magic smaller.
To make herself smaller. But that did not help, did it?
People still laughed at her, whispered about her behind her back during mass and in the dusty roads of the corner markets, jeered at her on the street.
Such a strange, strange girl, they’d sneered.
And then, years later, Grand-mère had passed on, leaving Marie with no one to guide her, to shape this strange magic.
There were tears in her eyes, perhaps even tears in his eyes too. He cupped her cheek, slowly thumbing away the wetness from her skin. “It is not your fault, Marie Laveau. The ancestors bless their magic accordingly to those who can handle the burden of their divinity. To those who are worthy.”
Was she worthy? Her own mother and grandmother had not thought so.
Her magic was something to be snuffed out like a candle burning too brightly.
Later, when she’d married Jacques at eighteen, she’d struggled to meet his expectations of her.
To make herself larger than she was, to use her magic for more.
And when he had disappeared, had vanished so easily from her life, she felt that wound reopen.
Yet again, someone she had loved had gone and left her alone.
“And so very often”—his golden eyes dimmed—“that magic can feel like a curse. This I know all too well, love.”
Jon straightened to his full height. He held out a hand to Marie, waiting.
“The Veil is the twilight, the final crossroads. There are many doors to death, but it is the first.” Jon stared at her for a long moment, his look strange.
It was as if he were trying to see within her, looking for the trap that surely lay beneath.
“Are you sure that you want to learn to open it, Marie Laveau?”
Marie stared at his hand, thinking. Was she sure of anything at this point? She told herself that she’d started this because she wanted—no, needed—to have Jacques returned to her.
But that had been before. Now things had…
changed. With Jon. With her. She didn’t just want Jacques—she wanted Jon too.
She was selfish. She was every terrible thing people called her behind her back.
Maybe it is not Jacques that you want back, not truly.
You want what you have never had. You want love, Marie.
Devotion. The communion of souls. You want it all.
Marie stared at the Conjurer, heart stammering. Did she have that now? Maybe she need not open the door to her past to find those things again. Maybe, a small voice reminded her, they are here with you now. With him.
“Yes,” said Marie at last, as she took his hand. “Teach me.”
Hours later, when Jon had finished his lesson, he’d made a fire and cooked trout for them over a spittle. Marie sat tucked against his chest while they watched the flame hiss into the night.
“Why did you learn such magic?” She cast her eyes up at him, trying to imagine who Jon might have been before all of his pain. So much of him was still a mystery to her.
The fire breathed between them. Finally, Jon said, “There was an attack on my village. Slavers dragged me from the shores, from my family, and into the sea. I was sold to the highest bidder, brought here.”
A flash in her mind’s eye: A young man dragged along white-foamed shores, thick silver-gold chains dragging him by the neck.
More chains…and white-capped fields of cotton so pale they glistened like melting snow beneath an impossibly hot sun…
countless lashes against a young man’s back, each turn of the whip forcing the flesh apart like teeth…
“To Corbin?”
“No. He came after. When I returned to New Orleans again.” Jon shifted away from Marie, and she was forced to sit up, watching as he stared absently into the flame.
“When I was first captured, it took me some months, but I managed to escape. I sailed back home. Only there was no more home. There was only ash on the wind. Decay everywhere I looked. Later a fisherman from another village told me that my wife slit her own throat. She didn’t want to—couldn’t—live in a world with chains.
” He closed his eyes. And when he opened them again, she saw that his face had changed.
He looked more human than Marie had ever seen him.
That bright, endless magic about him had waned.
“My children…three sons…and a daughter…had been scattered. They were young, too young to be left alone. Later, I was able to piece together the knowledge that my sons had all died in the belly of a ship. Cold and alone. Starvation, a woman who had been captured with them told me in Haiti. They never made it to shore.” He stopped for a moment, his throat wobbling with choked emotion.
Marie took his hand. “Only my daughter remained. By the time I found her in the sickbed of some village doctor, disease had already taken root. I was a great healer. I was the best. But I was late. I was too late, Marie. The fever made her loose of tongue. She told me she had dreamed that a man in a tall dark hat whispered in her ear that I might have another. A daughter. A silly story, I remember laughing, even as I wept. And I realized, holding her cold body in my arms, that even if that were the truth, it was a dream I couldn’t afford to have. ”
“Jon—”
He held up a hand. She understood. The story was like a spell that demanded to be finished once started.
“When I went to bury her that night, who should appear at her graveside but a man in a tall, tall dark hat? And this strange man with eyes of coal offered me a deal—that if I learned his magic of death, I could use it to avenge those like me. But there were costs to his magic, he warned. Sacrifices. He said I would feel this pain once more, but only once more. ‘We must be willing to sacrifice the few to save the many,’ Baron Samedi whispered in my ear.” His eyes were full of wrath. “And I listened.”
Silence. The fire had smoked down to almost nothing. Cold bayou wind stirred between them now. Jon stared into the coals and ash, into its nothingness. “This war requires an army, Marie. Baron Samedi intends to give us one.”
There had been rumors. Stories of why Jon had been banished by Sanite. Talk Marie had never allowed herself to indulge because she had been afraid.
“Do you intend to raise zombi, Jon?”
She was a hypocrite for asking. But she must know.
What she had intended for Jacques was to bring him back, even if it meant he was undead.
She had heard such magic was possible. Why not then, for love?
What could be the harm in raising one zombi?
But many? Marie let his hand go. Maybe, she thought, some doors were better left closed.
Jon slowly turned to her, golden eyes full of unshed tears, and fury like she had never seen, and sorrow, endless sorrow that no man should ever endure.
“Our people toiled in this land, sowing their blood, their pain into it. What do you think happens to pain like that? Where does it go? It always comes back.”
She could see now—fully—what it had done to him. All that pain and wrath twisted into one unnamable feeling that burrowed within his very bones, sinking into the dark waters of his heart. Where does it go? It always comes back.
He placed a soft kiss on her knuckles. She was reminded then of the hissing alchemical snake that the Brotherhood had transfigured, whose golden eyes had looked deeply into her own before it had struck out and bit her.
That look had been a warning from a hidden enemy, she realized, one last chance to turn and run. But she didn’t. She couldn’t.
She was in love.
“I need you, Marie. This world needs you.” Jon’s lips found hers, and she tasted that bittersweet, unnamable feeling for her own. “And together, we may make a new one.”