Chapter Twenty-Seven Ree #3
One last appeal. He needn’t have. His fate was set. All of theirs were now.
“Respectfully, Felix.” A wicked smile pulled at Ree’s lips. “Fuck the rules.”
She made a dropping motion with her hand. And Felix Corbin plunged through the air, right over the balcony from his big house, free-falling through the starlit night and down into the dark, gaping mouth of the damned that waited for him below.
Ree watched the zombi crash over him in a crushing wave, swelling around him. His flailing limbs poked the air, twisted white thorns. The undead seized him with snarling mouths. They tore the flesh from his bones as easily as peeling a rind. In the end, they tore him down to nothing at all.
Corbin was dead. The mutiny done. But now the game had changed and set itself anew.
There would be consequences. And as sure as the sun would rise, there would be a reckoning.
Another sound rose above the screams, the gnashing teeth, the crackling of magic and transmutation spells being hurled into the night.
Papa Legba’s laugh danced on the wind, rustling in the sugarcane, a voice only Ree could hear. Well done, Quarter Queen.
Something changed. She felt the pull of the world below, the invisible currents of fate rustling around her. She recalled her question to Papa Legba: Could one change fate? You must ask yourself, child: Do you have the power to change it?
Ree grinned. Yes, she thought she might, after all. Maybe they all did.
Fate stitched around her, unseen hands reaching from the cosmos, rearranging the light of the stars.
She felt it inside the marrow of her bones—deeper than that, down in the dark well of her spirit.
It was the dance of the ancestors awakening inside her.
The stir of the old gods finding their way through her blood.
This was the magic of ordainment, the raw, blistering power of magic bending shape, changing hands, the anointing of a queen finally being crowned.
Below, the crowd stared up at her, an awestruck silence permeating the dark.
The few Voodoos knelt. The Brotherhood stilled, alchemical sigils surrounding their pale shining heads like halos.
She spotted the white circle of Henryk’s face below as he saw her with new eyes.
Ree turned, saw her reflection in the looking glass that hung inside the room.
Her mother’s golden cloth had spun itself into a new shape. A glowing fleur-de-lis crown.
She was the Quarter Queen, like her mother before her. Now and into the long hereafter.
Outside, the world had changed shape. What was left of Corbin’s grounds burned, the sugarcane fields transformed into a gruesome battlefield littered with slain men and curling smoke.
Ree stumbled forward through the oily stench of alchemy and aurum, blood and gunpowder.
She put a hand to her chest where she felt a deep shudder at her touch.
There was something inside of her, something terrible that was trying its best to tear its way out.
It was the magic of the Veil, she realized.
Some part of it was still working its way through her, a violent deluge of a thousand cold hands clawing up from the darkness of her heart.
It was the zombi. They were using her. Stealing her life force to keep crossing back over. And they would not stop, Ree realized. She could not stop them. This was not the magic her mother had taught her. This was her father’s magic. And he was not here.
The ground tilted beneath her, and Ree fell, rushing to meet it—
A hand seized her from the dark, holding her up in a viselike grip.
Marie Laveau stared down at her. The widowed queen. The priestess. Her mother. Her eyes were so white they were silver, a wholly unnatural power circling around her in pulsing waves. A sun veve glowed at the center of her forehead.
“You will not die, daughter. So long as I draw breath,” she said, “I expressly forbid it.”
Marie helped Ree to her feet. Her eyes flitted over Ree, the crown on her head, and Marie smiled, tears flowing from her white eyes.
Wordlessly, Ree took her by the hand. She felt the magic flow between them, easy now in a way it had never been before.
She knew that whatever would come, they would face it together.
Arm in arm, Marie and Ree stepped into the chaos. But something was wrong. Very, very wrong. That dark feeling inside Ree was too much. It was clawing at her now. The voices behind the door were getting louder and louder, multiplying by the second. More undead were demanding to be let out.
Spells whizzed past her head as she and Marie made their way across the grounds.
Voodoos and Brotherhood holding back Corbin’s men.
Zombi trudged forward, shuffling in silence through the smoke.
Ree felt them calling for her, reaching for her with rotted hands.
An army of soulless creatures, listlessly awaiting her command.
Let us out, the dead demanded, over and over again.
Too many dead to count. Vast and terrifying in their numbers.
Ree shoved her hands to her ears. With a start of horror, she realized they were bleeding.
She was bleeding. From her eyes. Her mouth.
Her nose. The life was bleeding out of her.
Because they were taking it. That black door inside of her was pounding.
She couldn’t let them all in, not at once.
She wasn’t her father. And this wasn’t the magic she was raised to know.
But we know you, Marie Laveau the Second, those voices said, a sonorous thunder. Give to us, Quarter Queen. Bring us back.
Ree was scarcely aware of her surroundings: There were men firing at them, a zigzag of color and sound all around them.
Then a flash of searing green light as a giant serpent appeared before Ree and Marie, moving in a maddening whirl in the air.
She realized it was Silas’s mark, the ouroboros, moving in a pinwheel of static in front of them, a shield of light.
Then Ree was falling, down into the plantation’s damp earth, then farther below, into the darkness of that long corridor inside.
Her mother’s face was swimming above hers in the moonlight.
She could hear someone screaming. It was her.
It was Marie. They both were screaming. The pain was agonizing, unending, and she felt her body betray her—convulsing, writhing on the ground as a serpent might. And still her mother was screaming.
Marie tried to heal her, tried every spell, every prayer, every bit of knowledge she could think of. But, in all her power, this was not a wound she knew how to mend.
Ree let out another scream—an unnaturally loud, high keening sound. Another wave of dead rose. She could feel them clawing, a tidal wave. She was glad Henryk was not here to see her like this, a malevolent thing, twisting away in the dark.
Ree was dimly aware that her mother had taken her in her arms, cradling her like when she was a child. Her mother held her close, rocked her back and forth, swaying from the weight of her own grief.
“No!” A broken chorus Marie kept repeating over and over.
Ree could feel death upon her, a hovering dark presence that was now pressing down on her, blanketing her vision, her every thought with the promise of oblivion. Of sweet nothingness. She just needed to accept its offer. And there would be relief at last.
Her only regret was in not keeping her promise to Henryk.
She knew now that she would not find him again, and that when this terrible night had long passed, when the magic of Mardi Gras had finally waned, he would go to that bridge, and he would wait for her.
And she would not come to him. The thought made her cry, and then she began to choke.
She fought to hold on to that promise, on to that spark of life that still existed in her spirit.
“Maman,” Ree choked through the blood that was quickly filling her mouth. “I don’t want to…I don’t want to die…”
“Shhhh now, ma petite bébé…” Marie cooed. Ma petite bébé. What she called Ree when she was young, when she would hold her in her arms after a bad dream. Her little baby.
It had been easier to be brave before. But here, cradled in the safety of her mother’s arms, she felt like she was eight years old again, facing down a long, scary road she could not walk alone.
Marie’s tears fell hot on her face as she rocked her in her arms, her lips still moving between every prayer, every curse, every bit of life-sustaining magic she knew.
But in the end, it seemed, the great Marie Laveau did not know enough.
The world darkened. Ree reached up, touched her mother’s face one last time. If she had to die, what better place than in her mother’s arms? There was something about that that made her smile some. She would end as she began.
But there was singing. And it was coming closer and closer.
It was Aram. She was not used to this sound, this strange new crow-song. It was a melody she had never heard before but still faintly recognized. He was calling. But he wasn’t calling to her. He was calling to someone else.
Ree’s vision blurred, but she could just make out, through the horde of undead, the blanket of smoke, the red-orange flare of fire that kindled across the dark grounds, a man in a tall dark hat walking toward her.
Toward Marie. Toward them both.
Baron Samedi, she thought. The Lord of Death was coming to take her at last. At least the pain would end, the door would close with her.
But it was not Baron Samedi who crouched over her, who held her in his arms. The baron’s eyes were dark and sinking, beautifully inhuman.
No, this man’s eyes were golden, bright with strange, old magic.
It was not Baron Samedi who whispered in her ear.
It was Jon the Conjurer. It was her father.
It was her father whom she felt now, lifting her from that cold dark place.
Her father who whispered a word of healing.
This was a magic he was well suited to, the dark magic of death, the delicate balance it held with life.
And she felt that balance shift inside her, felt all the pain and sadness slowly begin to ebb away like a bad dream. The scales righted.
“Get up, daughter.” There was a smile in his voice, and the pain had gone from her. She was healing. The voices were whispering to her again, singing faintly from the dark. A Song of Three. “For a queen never, ever kneels.”