Chapter 22 #2
I hold it out. The cord she gave me is already there—it never comes off—the little wooden bead worn smooth now against the inside of my wrist, against the pulse. She turns it once with her thumb, checks the working knot, nods like a woman signing off on a load-bearing wall.
"Three breaths if it gets to be too much," she says, low, just for me, under the noise. "Take it out, breathe, remind your body there's a down. Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"You're gonna walk in there and ruin some bloodlines, Cal."
I laugh—the kind that comes out as breath instead of sound—and that's when the Voice arrives.
Look at you.
It settles into the warm low place behind my sternum the way it always does, unhurried, like it never left.
There's no edge on it tonight—none of the territorial blade from the night Kage's blood was in my mouth, none of the trust is expensive.
Just warmth, and something under the warmth that aches.
You let them in, it says. You let yourself have this. I told you that you were strong. I don't think I ever told you that you were brave.
I go still in front of Nellie's mirror, my fingers tangled in my hair, the bright room talking on without me.
Where have you been? I think at it. You vanish for days at a time.
A pause. The warmth deepens, the way someone leans closer.
Closer than you think. Always closer than you think.
And there it is—the click. The thing I've been refusing to total for weeks because totaling it felt like double-texting someone who left me on read.
I can feel you right now, Emric said across the table on the levee, sugar on his cuff, sitting there waiting for me to be afraid.
The same read, from inside my skull and from across a table, in the same breath, again.
All the coincidences I've stacked and refused to add tip over into a number.
It's him. It's been him the whole time. Emric Vane, with his kind eyes and his witch grandmother and his red ears, who reaches across the dark to find me whenever the night goes wrong.
Emric, I think, careful, hopeful. Is that you—
Be careful tonight, Calypso.
The warning lands and it makes me smile—helpless, warm—because he reached all the way into my head, on the busiest night of the year, just to tell me to look out for myself.
Because he cares enough to drop in and say it.
My whole stupid heart has decided tonight's the night I finally ask him to his face.
I will, I think. I'm going to find you tonight. I have something to ask you.
Silence. The warmth holds a beat longer than usual—holds like a held breath—then fades to the edges. Present. Watching. Choosing not to speak.
"You good?" Nellie's watching me in the mirror, an expensive bottle of perfume in her hand.
"Yeah." I turn the bead once with my thumb. "Yeah. I'm good."
I could go on and on about all the things that aren’t good–the rune still carved in my door, Corvin who I’m certain is spying on me for someone other than the council, Leopold and his… Just Leopold.
I push all of it down. Not tonight.
"Okay." Tess claps once, surveying me. "She's done. She's a problem. Let's go be a problem."
∞∞∞
The Revel doesn't happen in the quad.
The quad was the unveiling—the bonfire, the warm-up act.
The Revel takes the whole north end of the grounds, in a hall I've only ever seen as a silhouette through the oaks: a great pile of grey stone older than the rest of the campus, arched windows three stories tall, the bones of a chapel that got rich and stopped being holy about it.
Tonight every window burns from the inside, and the light comes through the old glass gold and trembling, and the live oaks lean in close dripping moss to the ground, and the whole thing glows in the dark like a reliquary somebody pried the lid off of.
We come up the long path, and this close to the edge of campus, New Orleans comes with us—gas lamps glowing past the low wall, the far brass of a bar, a streetcar groaning somewhere out in the dark.
The walk itself is lined with iron lanterns, the flames in them burning a cold blue no honest fire makes.
Marigolds everywhere—heaped along the path, banked up the steps, looped around the doors in ropes, witch-orange and overflowing, more of the flower-you-leave-for-the-dead than I've ever seen in one place.
Off to the left, where the old cemetery starts, the above-ground tombs stand pale among the oaks, a candle lit on every one of them, so the dead have their own little glowing city alongside ours.
The air's thick enough to chew—bayou heat and crushed marigold and candle smoke, and underneath it something sweet and rotten, sugar and woodrot and old flowers.
And the music finds me before the doors do.
Brass. Low and slow and grieving—a dirge, the kind they play walking a body to the tomb in this city, trombone and a muffled drum dragging the beat like it can't bear to let go.
A jazz funeral. They've started the night burying the dead so they can spend the rest of it raising them.
The wards pass over my skin as we cross under the arch—cool water, layered and old, reading me, deciding, letting me through.
And then the doors, and the hall opens up, and it takes the air right out of my lungs.
It's a cathedral with the religion scraped out and something older poured into the hole.
Vaulted stone vanishing into dark overhead, ribbed and ancient, and hung off all of it—hundreds, thousands of candles in black iron, except half of them aren't burning honest flame.
Witchfire. Cold light in colors fire doesn't come in, deep blue and bruise-violet and a sick beautiful green, drifting up in ribbons that don't quite obey the air.
Will-o'-wisps the size of fists float free above the crowd, wandering, witch-made and harmless, lighting faces from below as they pass.
The walls run black and witch-orange, draped floor to ceiling, dark flowers spilling out of urns taller than I am—and the flowers move. Slow. Breathing. Turning their heads toward the warmest body that passes. Conjure-work. Somebody fed those all week.
And the dead are everywhere.
Every table—dozens of them, long ones under gold-shot linen—has a place laid for someone who isn't coming.
A chair pulled out and waiting. A photograph propped in a black frame.
A plate untouched, a cup of pomegranate-dark wine poured full and going warm.
Marigold petals scattered in paths across the linen, the way you lay them so the dead can find the road back.
Sugar skulls in rows, iced in gold, names piped across their brows in somebody's careful hand. It's an ofrenda the size of a ballroom.
The Vassards didn't decorate for the dead. They set the table for them and pulled out their chairs.
In the far corner, the band: brass, a stand-up bass, a drum draped in black crepe, all of them playing that grieving dirge so slow it aches.
But I can feel where it's rigged to go. The whole night runs on jazz-funeral logic—mourn the body to the grave, then, when the dirt's thrown, cut the rope and let the horns loose and dance the casket all the way home.
By midnight this dirge will break open into something that shakes the windows.
Right now it's still walking the box.
The room is full of monsters in their good clothes.
Two hundred of them, easy. The noble houses cluster near the dais like they grew there—old vampires in black and oxblood and bruise-purple, throats bare, jewels older than the country, faces still as the tomb-statues outside.
Half the room is masked: bone-white half-faces, gilded skulls, here and there a full death's-head worked in jet and gold.
Because of course. Nothing says remember you will die like two hundred immortal beings wearing the faces of corpses to a party.
And the feeding's already started.
I see it the way Nellie taught me to see it—out in the open, where open means consent.
A vampire at the edge of the witchlight with a girl's throat at his mouth, her head tipped back, eyes half-shut, one hand fisted loose in his lapel while the venom does what venom does.
A pair of them sharing a willing shifter between them near a curtained alcove.
Crystal coupes going around on silver trays, and the dark in some of those coupes is too dark, too thick, catches the cold light wrong, and I understand that not all of it's wine.
Nobody's hiding it.
Tonight, in this room, the predators eat at the table with everyone else and call it a sacrament.
And my own kind are working.
I clock the witches by the warmth of them in all that cold—scattered low through the room, lit from within.
A conjure-woman behind a curtain laying cards for a line of the brave, her hands moving the way Shandy's do.
Charms strung on every wrist that doesn't belong to a vampire.
Burning sage threaded under the marigold, and something sharper under that.
A girl by the bar trailing her fingers through the air and leaving a streak of witchlight hanging behind them like a sparkler that won't quit.
Somebody's hex-smoke creeping green and deliberate along the floor, hunting an ankle to wrap.
Whatever this is, it isn't a ball—a ball is humans in a hotel with a chocolate fountain and a DJ.
This is the oldest, hungriest things on the Gulf Coast dressed for a funeral, throwing the dead a party loud enough to wake them up.
It's the most beautiful, most dangerous thing I've ever stood inside, and I want to live here and I want to run, in roughly equal amounts.
"They went all the way for it this year," Nellie breathes beside me, eyes huge.
"It's a tomb with a wine list," Shandy says, and Tess snorts.