Chapter Nineteen Ree
Chapter Nineteen
Ree
After Marcel’s funeral, Ree felt like she was trapped in a fever dream she had no idea how to wake from.
Screams twisted in the air. Henryk’s accusing stare pierced her through the fire.
She’d forced herself to slip into the turmoiled crowd, running through bramble and muck until she reached the bayou house, where she barricaded the door, shuttering herself from the chaos.
Hiding would do no good against the Inquisitor.
The Inquisition would surely come now. The raising of the undead was cardinal sin, blatant blasphemy.
Ree was uncertain of her next steps, but she had the sinking feeling she’d just damned herself, that her newfound magic had set into motion some terrible machination.
Her mother’s memories had only further confused her.
Marie had sought the power of the Veil for herself, had been conflicted between her dead beloved and her love for Jon.
History had gotten Jon the Conjurer’s story wrong.
He was no menace, hardly the worst player in all of New Orleans.
From what she could see, her father’s “war” had been a rebellion. Her mother was closer than ever to learning the secret of the Veil. Which meant Ree was closer than ever to learning how to bring her back. She need only channel her a bit further, push a bit further…
But the Veil’s power was taking its toll on her mother’s body.
She was thinner than she had been three days ago, and gray hairs had begun to sprout along her hairline where there had been none before.
Being among the dead for so long was literally draining her. Ree knew she did not have much longer.
Earlier in the bayou house, Aram fluttered to her shoulder, a piece of rolled parchment tied to his leg.
She unfurled the note and quickly read the scrawled handwriting.
Father Antoine wanted to meet with her. Of course he did.
He had seen with his own eyes her strange new power. But better him than the Inquisition.
“If you go to him now, there is not much protection he could provide,” Claudette had said. “But it might do your reputation well to be seen communing with a holy man.”
“What would you have me do?”
But L’Enchanteresse had only shrugged. “Go to him. See if you might be able to work the fondness he has for your mother for yourself. Perhaps he will speak on your behalf with the Inquisitor and hold him off long enough to see your mother returned.”
“And then?”
“Do not worry about after,” Claudette had chided. “Go to him while you still have the upper hand in this mess.”
Now, as Ree walked Royal Street alone, she wondered if she’d ever had the upper hand at all.
Darkness had fallen, but the city was still alive, a dizzying whirl of color and lights that never slept.
There was cheer in the air, in the music that drifted from the various parlors and coffeehouses, and in the windows of the shops that had begun to hang their gold and violet tinsel in preparation for Mardi Gras.
She passed almsgiving priests who handed out loaves of stale bread to beggars and left warnings to not indulge in the sin the holiday encouraged, as Lent would soon be upon them.
Ree walked into St. Louis Cathedral’s cool, damp interior, past the city folks who’d come for evening mass, allowing her feet to take her to the door of Antoine’s private chambers.
She knocked once, but there was no answer.
The door was unlocked. Inside, Antonio de Sedella’s chamber was sparse—a candle burning in a small copper dish, a desk piled with letters and tomes, the familiar white marble bust of the Holy Virgin cradling an infant Christ, a reading chair pushed beside a fire that crackled behind the grate, smelling gently of pine.
The door shut behind her.
“Have a seat, Marie Laveau the Second.”
Before Ree could answer, someone had shoved her into the chair by the fire. But she’d know that rough scrape of a voice anywhere. She’d heard it too often in her dreams, whispering huskily in her ear, or in nightmares that kept her turning in her bed, his voice full of venom.
Henryk stepped out from the shadowed corner. He wore a long, hooded blood-red robe and a pitch-black lacquered mask, the shape of it terrifying in its utter blankness. Ree stared, wide-eyed. It was the kind of mask Inquisitors wore before questioning. Before torture.
Henryk Broussard had come to question her at last.
He stepped farther into the firelight and away from the shadows where he’d been waiting for her to come. Like a moth sucked into hideous flame, she’d walked right into a trap.
“Henryk—”
Silver cords shot out from the chair, wrapping tightly around her arms, banding all the way down to her wrists, bolting her in place.
They burned into her skin, a gnawing pain that could only be aurum.
But it was also, strangely, the work of magic too.
Not Voodoo. But it was magic, to be sure.
That the Church was willing to use magic in its efforts to root out those with magical blood should not have surprised her on matter of principle, only irony.
But this problem was hardly her biggest. Her most pressing problem at the moment was more than six feet tall and staring down at her from behind a black mask, its lines listless and cold. The picture of silent terror.
“What is this?” she demanded.
But she knew, didn’t she? This was the long-overdue interrogation, the one she’d known was coming ever since she gazed up at him through the bars of that miserable little jail cell. He’d come back for this, and the High Inquisitor would not be kept waiting any longer.
Her time was up.
“As it turns out, the Brotherhood’s inventions can prove quite useful,” Henryk explained. “They supposedly use these little novelties on their subjects in their laboratories. I wouldn’t struggle if I were you. Only makes things more painful.”
You would hurt me? she wanted to ask. But of course he would.
She’d told herself he kept himself from harming her maybe out of old sentiment, maybe because it had simply not come to that.
But it was Antoine’s doing that had kept her safe from him.
And even that goodwill had gone. She tried to keep herself from thinking of the stories of torture she’d heard Inquisitions wrought on their victims: Stretching contraptions meant to pull limbs in directions they expressly weren’t made to go.
Brutal bullwhips set with spikes shaped like gnarled teeth.
Countless and nameless horrors that might be had in dark rooms.
“An Inquisitor who dares to use magic?” She was stalling, her eyes searching the room for some means of escape. But there was none. He had her cornered at last. “How very heretical of you. What might the Church think of this?”
“You will find that my aim diverges from the Church’s when it suits me.”
The Inquisitor seized the chair tucked behind the desk and dragged it with deliberate slowness across the floor, the dull scrape making the fine hair along Ree’s arms stand on end.
“I have a game for us to play,” he said finally as he positioned the chair in front of hers.
“We both know how much you love those. It’s the one where you finally tell me the truth.
And I mean every bit of it.” Henryk took a seat, facing her directly, then pulled a small black book from his robes.
“According to an eyewitness account, under demonic influence, you spoke the words of the Harbinger at your mother’s midnight ritual in Congo Square.
I will repeat the words as I have them here: And so it shall be: A Laveau witch’s reign will raise hell upon the earth.
From its gates, the damned will return. Their king, High Jon, will walk the Quarter once more. Is this true?”
“If you believe what’s written down in your little book, then yes.”
“Don’t”—he snapped the book closed—“lie to me.”
“I think all we’ve been doing is lying to each other.”
He leaned forward with frightening speed, his arms pressed on either side of her chair.
Ree stared into the black mask, the face that was not a face at all but the horrible visage of a red-cloaked demon.
“Out of respect for our friendship when we were children, I have tried to be patient with you, witch. But you are out of time. You created the living undead before the public. Do you not think word has already spread around the city? Do you not think every friar, every priest and nun has written to the Vatican of your accused heresy?”
“I do not care what the Vatican thinks.” Capture made her bold. Or maybe it was the fear snaking its way through her belly.
“Oh, but you should. You see, because of your little stunt, the Church has sent a Tribunal of Inquisitors across the sea. They come to New Orleans as we speak. And these are not kind men.”
“Do you believe yourself a kind man, Henryk?”
“Do you admit to committing necromancy, Marie Laveau the Second?”
“We do not call it necromancy in our culture. So, I cannot call my magic a name I do not accept from a religion I do not believe in.” She was bluffing, but it was buying her only meager time.
“But if I did, surely you must know that it was that same power that brought you back from the cusp of death too.”
It wasn’t quite the same. Henryk hadn’t been dead yet, not fully. But he’d been slipping into its dark folds, and she’d found a way to reel him back to the land of the living.
“Maybe,” Ree said quietly, “you should write that down in your little book too, and give that to the Vatican.”
“There may yet be a way for both of us to get what we want.”
Ree hesitated before asking, “And how might we do that?”
A minute passed, then another. He stared at her from the gaunt holes of the black lacquered mask, and she found it terrifying she had no idea what he may be thinking. And then he did something she did not expect him to do.