by J. D. Horn
That day, the day of their last fight, she told Luc that if he went through with the insanity and issued a challenge to Nicholas—a challenge meant to leave one of them victor and the other dead—he shouldn’t come back. At the time, she’d had no doubt he would be the victor. She’d believed in Luc that much. He was so sure of himself, so full of fire. She’d worried he wouldn’t be able to cope with the guilt of killing his father.
Luc had laughed at her ultimatum, confident he could depose his father as the head of the Chanticleers, then win Evangeline back. He’d believed in himself that much, too.
Nicholas had surprised them both—twice. He’d bested Luc, then offered his hand to him in forgiveness. In a different world, father and son might have one day made their peace, but Celestin had forestalled that happier conclusion by murdering Luc in cold blood. Only Alice had seen him do it. Alice, who’d been the first to carve up his corpse at Précieux Sang. Though she wished she could have spared Luc’s sister that pain, Evangeline couldn’t be happier they’d butchered that bastard’s corpse, and that he’d been aware of every cut.
“I’m sorry,” Luc’s voice reached her, not triggered by memory but coming to her from the center of the pentagram. These were the words she’d wanted to hear most, so it came as no surprise that they should be his first.
The Luc in her living room would say what she desired to hear, tell her what she believed to be true. The Luc in her living room wasn’t really Luc.
She had to fully own that, in her heart, before she let herself look at him.
It was an open secret among witches that most of what went under the cover of necromancy, although it did rely on actual magic, was nonetheless still a fraud.
Witches didn’t raise the dead.
No, Evangeline corrected herself, witches didn’t raise the dead often.
But that hadn’t stopped witches throughout the ages from pretending that they did, either for profit or out of sympathy. A witch could take a mourner’s memories and shape them into a simulacrum, a seemingly intelligent, interactive, sometimes even tangible double of the deceased, but the “returned” was really nothing more than a puppet molded from ectoplasm. Such chicanery was even viewed as benevolent, for it gave the mourner closure—a chance to say the things that in life had gone unsaid, to ask the questions that had gone unasked.
This conjuring was known as an Endor spell, named after the biblical story about King Saul’s attempt to contact the spirit of the prophet Samuel. According to the canon, the witch panicked when she recognized King Saul, but the true source of her dread was that Samuel’s actual spirit materialized. It would’ve been like fishing in a slow creek with a cane pole and landing a whale.
“You haven’t changed.”
This made her laugh. The thought that her own vanity should float so near the surface. She’d been twenty-three when Luc died, and she’d been dragged along a decade’s worth of rough road since.
“Why did you call me here if you won’t talk to me?” It was his voice, all right, the perfect timbre, the perfect rhythm, and a hint of amused arrogance. “You’ve certainly waited long enough to reach out.” The patronizing irritation in his tone sounded so much like the real Luc that her eyes snapped open.
“Ah, there’s my girl,” he said.
The Luc before her was the twenty-one-year-old she remembered, only he glowed with his own interior light, brighter and steadier than the candle’s flame.
“I’m not a girl,” she said.
“I can see that,” he said. “But are you still mine?”
Evangeline hugged her knees tighter in the heavy silence that followed.
“I see then. That’s what this visit is meant to determine.” He ran a finger down his forearm, seemingly surprised by its solidity. He tried to step outside the pentagram, but the tip of his toe stubbed the air like he’d kicked a solid wall. He flashed her a sly, challenging smile that stirred something deep within her, something she’d forgotten or at least buried deeply in her mind. For a moment she was tempted to cross the boundary and go to him, but then she remembered the man she saw before her only existed in the form of imagination people speak of as “memory.” Luc was no longer real, but Lincoln was.
“I’ve met a man,” she said, her mouth going dry. “A good man . . . who’s good to me. And good for me, too.”
“Then he must not be a Marin,” he said, pausing to let the knife he’d just plunged into her heart turn. “Yes, I know about you and Nicholas.”
Of course he would. This Luc could see deeper into her psyche than she could herself, because that’s where he came from. “Do you love him, this new beau of yours?” “Beau.” He might have said “lover,” or perhaps the ill-fitting word “friend,” but he’d chosen “beau,” a word that both acknowledged and mocked her relationship to Lincoln.
“New.” She chose to focus on that word instead. “It’s all new. Too new, maybe. But I think I do. Love him.”
“Like you thought you loved me.”
She bristled. “I did love you. But you’re gone.”
“Dead, sweetie. Not gone. No need to parse words.”
Of course, that was exactly what she had been doing. The first bitterness that came with an Endor spell was it left you to argue with a candid, all-knowing mirror. She ignored the quip. “You’ve been gone a long time now. And I wasted a lot of that time.”
“You wasted time mourning me?”
“I didn’t mean that. I meant I wasted it with Nicholas.”
“Same thing, really. We both know what that was about. Punishment.”
Evangeline felt that knife twist again, pushing in deeper. “It started that way. I wanted to punish you.”
“Punish me?” He shook his head and snorted. “That slow train wreck of a tryst you shared with Nicholas was never about punishing me. It was about punishing yourself. And Nicholas, too. Holding him close so that neither of you could ever forget that you’d failed me.”
That was a bit more truth than she could handle in this moment. She threw up her hands, ready to send the wraith back into her subconscious, but then he spoke. “What is it you need from me?”
She lowered her hands, but she could no longer look at him. “I need you to remind me why I loved you, so I can let you go.”
“Come on,” he said, barking out a laugh of disbelief. “That’s an easy one. I represented everything you felt you weren’t. Wealth, privilege, a sense of entitlement. I was the lord of a feast where you always felt like a beggar. I was your Prince Charming, come to raise you up. Being my girl meant you got to stand in the glow of all that. I deemed you worthy to stand by my side, so you were just as good as anyone else.”
“Was it . . . was I really as mercenary as that?”
He shook his head. “Of course not, at least not quite. But you needed me to peel away those layers before you could see beneath them. You loved me because you knew I saw that special spark in you. The strength, the smarts, the power everyone else overlooked. And I think I loved you because you reminded me of my mother. Or at least my idealized version of her.” His inky black eyes glowed a bit more brightly. “What a time the two of you might have had. God knows that’s really why Celestin and Nicholas wanted me to have nothing to do with you. That’s why they tried to demean you by calling you a ‘swamp witch.’”
Evangeline wasn’t sure how to feel about her deeper psyche comparing herself to Astrid Andersen Marin, but that was baggage she’d have to unpack another day.
“The spark you say you loved. He sees it, too. And he loves that I’m powerful not because of what I can do for him, but because of what I can do for myself and others.”
“But?”
“But I’ve begun sabotaging myself . . . my relationship with . . .”
“You can say his name. I know I just spoke of myself as Prince Charming, but this isn’t an old fairy tale. I won’t use his name to lure him to his doom.”
“I know I can say his name, it’s only when I try to
open my heart up to him . . . completely . . . you’re still in the way.”
“Then either there’s something you miss about me, or something you distrust about him.”
The final bitterness of an Endor spell was that once the key truth was spoken, the spell itself was broken, and the mourner was left alone with fresh feelings of loss. “Though I’d like to think,” the conjured specter said as he faded away before her, “it might be a bit of both.”
ELEVEN
“Papa-san has returned.” Hugo stood in Alice’s doorway, holding a blue duffel bag over his shoulder. With a tilt of his head, he asked to enter, and Alice stepped aside to let him pass.
“I know,” she said, as he dropped the bag onto her dining table. “I tried to call you twice last night, and again this morning, but you didn’t answer your phone.”
He looked back at her. “I have a phone?”
“That explains why your voice mailbox wasn’t set up. I tried texting, too, but—”
“Daniel.” He cut her off with a shrug. “Any number you have would be for the phone I gave him. He fielded all my calls.” Hugo smiled. “And occasionally handled the . . . um . . . overflow for me.”
“Okay, that was more information than I would have liked.”
“I do apologize for offending your delicate sensibilities,” he said, placing a hand over his heart, “but get over it. Daniel had many facets, and like it or not, one of them was a randy buck. Now, jumping back to the present, your father-brother”—his brow furrowed as if he were debating a point within himself—“brother-father? Do we start with the long-accepted relationship or the actual gnarled branch on the family tree?”
“How about we stick to Nicholas?”
“Sure thing, sister-aunt. Nicholas is moving back in, so I need to be moving out.” He looked around the apartment. “Okay if I hang out here for a day . . . or twenty?”
“You’re always welcome.” Alice’s apartment was fine for one. It would be tight for two. She knew he’d be more comfortable with Fleur in the grand Garden District house, but she also knew his request had nothing to do with needing shelter. Her brother, she realized, needed her.
“You say that now,” he said, already unzipping his bag, “but in three days when you’re picking up my dirty socks and watching me drink the last of the milk straight from the carton—”
“How about we don’t let it get to that?”
“Hey,” he said, “I can try, but some things are out of my control.” He hefted the bag up and dumped its contents onto the table. Glass vials, bottles of pills, plastic bags of powders, and what Alice guessed were dried psilocybin mushrooms and psychedelic herbs. He gave her a mischievous grin. “Brought the whole pharmacy. By the way, I’ll need to borrow some socks for you to tidy up.” He winked. “Kidding. My suitcase is in the lobby. Wanted to make sure I was welcome before I lugged it up. By the way, you know they make buildings with elevators now, right?”
“What’s all this for?” Alice said, not surprised that Hugo had a large stash of drugs, but disappointed he’d been inconsiderate enough to bring them into her new space. She had grown up in a psychiatric hospital where medications were forced on you, where clearness of thought was a privilege only granted to the docile. The thought of narcotics for recreational use struck her as inconceivable.
“I dunno. What is any of it for?” He reached into the pile, sifting through it until he came upon a small brown glass vial filled with a liquid. He unscrewed the cap, releasing a scent not unlike one of the cleaning fluids used by Sinclair’s janitorial staff. He lifted the bottle to his nose, sniffing its contents with each nostril. He shook his head and shuddered, but a wide grin spread across his face. “I started using them to reach altered states to enhance my spells. You get it, right? Launching my rocket where there’s less gravity to drag it back down.” His glee was short-lived. His expression turned somber as he recapped the bottle and set it on the table. “Then I started using them to reach altered states, period. Thought all of this might be of some use to you, since you and Evangeline appear to be in the running for last witch standing.”
He was right. Alice had always been able to sense the strength of other witches. A remnant of bright sparks still hovered in the ether, the most brilliant Alice herself and Evangeline, but every day a few more lights blinked out. The snuffed lights did not, as far as she could tell, signify deaths or witches taking to the Dreaming Road. The witches remained alive and present, but their powers had failed them. She turned her focus on the shimmer she knew to represent Hugo, surprised to catch an image of a star swallowing a star. His magic, she realized, was being appropriated by another. By Fleur.
“Hugo—”
He seemed to read the revelation in her eyes and held up a hand to stop her. “It’s okay,” he said. “It was my idea. A donation given freely and for a good cause.”
“A good cause?”
“Lucy. She’s dead. Or she should be. But I suspect you already knew that. It’s why you granted Fleur the prime cut of Celestin. The thing is,” he said, spinning a chair around, then dropping onto its seat, “Fleur told me. I can’t help but wonder how you found out.”
Alice hesitated, unsure she should discuss Lucy with him before first talking with Fleur. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I sensed it. When I focused on her, I could see this weird corona around her, like she didn’t quite fit in her skin.”
She pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down at the table. “How does it feel to be losing your magic?”
“Well, Doctor,” he said, feigning a German accent for some reason, “I feel just fracking fine.” He leaned in. “Really,” he said with his normal inflection, “I say good riddance.” Alice sensed he meant it. “I mean, magic never brought me anything but grief anyway.” He draped his arms over the back of the chair, the same way Nicholas had done the night before. Hugo was of course much younger, and his coloring was fair, but otherwise the son was a perfect twin to his father. So many tiny behaviors, learned or innate, betrayed one’s parentage. “Besides,” he continued, “I haven’t been able to count on it since . . . well, you know . . . out on Grunch Road. Shorting out on me without warning. If what little I have left can keep the brat around a while longer, Fleur is welcome to it.”
“Nicholas said Fleur had to kill to bring Lucy back.”
“Well, I don’t know the details, but resurrection spells . . . they always require a trade. I figured she must have taken someone out.”
“And this thought doesn’t bother you?”
“Even desperate, she would have been discerning. I’m sure it was no one nice, and knowing our—excuse me—my tatie, probably no one attractive either.”
“Lucy should have been born a witch. That means Fleur would have had to sacrifice another witch. She could be burned for—”
“Yeah, yeah, how terribly Malleus Maleficarum. But who’s gonna find out? And how? And even if they did, there aren’t enough witches left with big-enough balls,” he held up his hands, “or—not to be sexist—ovaries to even try to go after her. Her magic may be on the wane, but her money isn’t.”
Alice bit her lip. She wanted to believe there was no need to worry, but Nicholas’s accusations continued to haunt her.
“Listen,” Hugo said with a sigh, “witches always used to talk a good game, condemning blood magic, but that was all bull. The real reason necromancy was forbidden is because its holy grail is to capture the essence of a great magician—the ultimate relic—and trap it in an alabaster urn or a precious stone like a firefly in a Mason jar. No one wants to be that magician.” Alice’s mind flashed on the famed diamond of the now extinct Silverbell Coven. Of course, that was why the stone had been coveted. “But times have changed. Nobody is going to care if Fleur recycled the spark of a witch no one has missed in going on two decades to resurrect her child. A lot of witches have been doing a hell of a lot worse for a paltry amount of power. Besides, even if somebody might care, nobody but us knows.”
And there it was. “Nicholas says the Boudreau family knows. He says that’s why Lincoln and Wiley came to New Orleans.”
Hugo’s eyes went wide as his jaw dropped. He tilted his head and looked at her with the confused irritation of a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. “Oh,” he said and nodded. He leaned back as his confusion gave way to anger, his widened eyes narrowing to slits. “This is about Evangeline.” He wagged his finger at her, another gesture he’d picked up from his father. “This is classic Nicholas. If he can infect you with distrust for Lincoln, the virus might start to spread.” He shook his head and puffed out air. “Nicholas doesn’t want Evangeline for himself. He doesn’t love her. He just doesn’t want her to be loved.”
“There’s something else,” she said. “I told you Astrid claimed Celestin trapped her on the Dreaming Road.”
“As punishment for not being willing to sacrifice you.” The price required of the heir to The Book of Unwinding.
Alice fell silent. She’d clung to this one shred of evidence that Astrid hadn’t been a complete monster. She bit her lip. “Nicholas says otherwise. He says he put her there to protect us—you, me, and Luc. He says he caught Astrid reading to us from The Lesser Key of Darkness. Nicholas threw the book in the fire, but it wouldn’t burn.”
Hugo’s gaze went distant and a line formed between his brows. He shook his head and focused on Alice. “Sounds like quite the dramatic confrontation, but I don’t remember anything like it ever happening.”
“Then he’s lying?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that. It’s quite possible it did. It’s only I don’t remember much from that period. Don’t care to, really.”
“Then it seems we’ll never know what happened.”
Hugo pushed a path through his mound of illicit pharmaceuticals to find Alice’s hand. “Listen. You’re wondering which of them is lying, Astrid or Nicholas. Chances are it’s both of them, through shading and omission if not through outright duplicity. You’re the artist here. Finding truth in this family is like showing the outline of an object by using the negative space around it. You may never see the truth itself, but you might be able to guess at its shape based on the lies surrounding it.”