The Final Days of Magic

by J. D. Horn

  Hugo smiled at Alice, then turned to Artemis, raising his eyebrows and cocking his head as if daring her to accept a challenge.

  “Oh,” she said, relishing, it seemed, the chance to do so. “But that’s their version of the story. In mine, Lucifer is a Prometheus figure, punished for illuminating that which the gods wished to keep hidden. He’s the demiurge, the force that converts energy into matter. The one that spins potentiality into reality. Or at least creates the illusion of an objective reality.”

  Artemis delivered her discourse as if she thought Alice—whom she seemed to consider a neophyte—would find her thesis provocative, but the woman’s story wasn’t original. Alice knew the twin had inherited it thirdhand, the Cathars having adopted it from the Gnostics, who, in turn, had adapted it from the ancient Greek philosophers.

  Alice was considering revealing the true provenance of Artemis’s heresy when the sound of Daniel’s voice derailed her thoughts.

  No one likes a know-it-all, Alice my love.

  It felt like more than an encroaching memory this time. She could almost feel Daniel’s presence, but that might be expected after attending his wake, especially considering her heretofore limited experience with alcohol.

  Artemis interpreted Alice’s agitation as a reaction to her own words, and, encouraged by the effect she thought she was having on Alice, her voice grew more animated. “The sages used to speak of the music of the spheres, a great harmony they thought filled the universe. But that great harmony is nothing more than a fairy tale.” She shifted in her chair, leaning toward Alice. “This world wasn’t built upon harmony. It was created through dissonance. The reality we know couldn’t exist without it.”

  She seemed to realize she was growing heated as she spoke. She leaned back, assuming a regal pose and an enigmatic smile that could challenge the Mona Lisa’s. “That is ‘the fall’ of which your clerics speak. The shift from a plane of perfect and infinite potential to an imperfect and finite reality. Your priests dream of the day when this world dissolves into light, but all they’re really craving is the resolution of the true original sin, the state of dissonance that allows us to exist.”

  Perhaps this questioning of what was and wasn’t real was the reason Daniel felt so close tonight. Shreds of Art’s ramblings seemed to hold a sheen of truth, but Alice suspected this was another area where truth could only be glimpsed as it flitted by on the periphery, and even then only by focusing on the negative space surrounding it.

  Alice had spent most of her life questioning what was real and what was true, first in the hospital on Sinclair, and then, to an even greater degree, on the Dreaming Road. Maybe it was the late night, maybe it was the effects of the absinthe, but Alice felt a shadow lingering on the edge of her psyche. The image of a ropy black snake slithering across a snowy field flashed into her mind.

  Polly returned, the scent of a peppery floral perfume attempting to override the smell of skunk rubbed in thyme that preceded him into the room.

  Hugo looked up at the returning twin, sniffed, then wrinkled his nose. “Fifteen-hundred-dollars-an-ounce Caron Poivre to cover up the stink of your, wait, let me guess”—he paused and sniffed again—“thirty-five-dollars-a-pound Kush?”

  Polly looked down his nose at Hugo, then waved his hand in front of himself, causing his scent to waft toward them. He turned his attention to his sister. “Have you finished with your sermon, ma chère frangine? Yes? Good,” he said without giving her even a beat to respond. “She takes such pleasure in her blasphemy.” He paused and smiled beatifically down on them. “I do hope you won’t find me an inhospitable host, but dawn isn’t far off and I should put these old bones to bed.”

  “Oh,” Alice said, half-embarrassed for overstaying their welcome, but entirely happy to have been dismissed. “We’re so sorry to have kept you up.”

  “I’m not,” Hugo said, running his hand down his face, but then he stood and stretched.

  “Don’t forget your masks, children,” Art said, pulling her legs up sideways into the chair.

  Polly crossed to Alice and offered her his hand. “Lovely to see you again, Alice. It really is.”

  Rather than take his hand, Alice startled and rubbed her eyes. She was experiencing a hallucination, imagining the black snake from her vision had coiled around Polly’s hand, pulsing and breaking into segments. “Oh, dear,” Polly continued, causing Alice to look up from his hand. He was regarding her with mild concern, likely for good reason. His skin appeared to have grown translucent, and she could see the inky snake slithering just beneath it, slipping down from his head and coming out of his mouth. She had the odd impression it wasn’t really Polly speaking, but the serpent revealing itself through him.

  “Perhaps you should get her home,” Art said. Alice glanced over to witness a serpent wriggling beneath her skin, too, down her cheek.

  “I’m fine,” Alice said, rising to her feet. “I’m fine,” she repeated, trying to reassure herself more than the others. Her eyes fell to her own hand, only to see the snake writhing there like short, dark veins. It darted deeper, disappearing within her flesh. Her knees buckled, but she felt Hugo’s arm reach out and wrap around her.

  “C’mon, lightweight,” Hugo said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  Alice nodded and, with her eyes closed, leaned against her brother’s shoulder.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was going on three a.m., but Evangeline felt no hurry to get back to an empty—or mostly empty, if you counted Sugar—bed. Mostly empty, she decided. There was no way not to count a cat who delivered menacing ultimatums one moment, then called you “Mama” the next. A cat who would stretch herself across the comforter and gaze at Evangeline as unblinking, and—Evangeline occasionally suspected—all-seeing as the eternal Sphinx.

  But it wasn’t a too-quiet house that had kept her at Bonnes Nouvelles, her only companion the painting of Daniel she’d move to the storage room for safekeeping until Alice came back to claim it. Evangeline had stayed here tonight because she was waiting for something, though she hadn’t known what until she caught sight of the girl standing across Bourbon Street, awash in the cold white of a waiting taxi’s headlights, her abject gaze fixed on Evangeline, waiting and willing herself to be seen.

  Lincoln had taken to calling the slight street kid “ghost girl” after Evangeline had made a number of attempts to point her out to him, only for the girl to fall back behind a wall or lose herself in a crowd before he could spot her.

  Of course, she’d chosen to show herself again while Lincoln was away in Natchitoches.

  Evangeline had first noticed her a couple of weeks ago. Spindly and pale, the waif wore dirty, garish, oversize sweats she’d either found on the street or stolen from a souvenir shop. She looked to be ten, maybe twelve; Evangeline found it difficult to guess her age from her size, malnourished as she appeared to be. Her straight blonde hair hung in dirty tangles. Dark purplish-brown circles cradled her eyes.

  But for the color of her hair, the girl was a goddamned mirror.

  A mirror that could bend time, reflecting not the woman Evangeline Caissy had grown into, but the feral adolescent she had once been.

  From that first sighting, Evangeline had wanted—felt compelled even—to do something for the girl. There was no doubt her desire sprang from concern for the child’s well-being, but she couldn’t pretend her motivation was undiluted altruism. A good dose of yearning to set old wrongs right hitchhiked along with her philanthropy. Evangeline had gone through a lot growing up, and she’d done things she wasn’t proud of in order to survive. A gnawing in her gut seemed to promise her that if she could help a child—this child in particular—she’d be cleaning the slate.

  The ragamuffin had taken to slinking up and down Bourbon Street, relying on the kindness of some of its daily-changing strangers and the carelessness of others. She’d first caught Evangeline’s attention as she was weaving her way, unaccompanied, through a throng of day drinkers, each toting a plastic neon
-green grenade. It had taken Evangeline less than an instant to divine the girl was surveying the crowd, searching out the softest mark. No sooner had that thought registered than the child bumped into a rotund man whose overburdened Celtic cross T-shirt stuck out like a shelf over his camouflage hunting pants. On impact, he reached up with his free hand to grasp the bill of his red baseball cap, pushing past the girl as she lifted his wallet from his back pocket without ever rousing his drink-dimmed suspicion.

  Evangeline had never, even for a heartbeat, considered alerting the guy to his loss. Honor among thieves, perhaps, or maybe the sympathy of someone who’d once walked in an orphan’s shoes. Indeed, her first thought had been to hope the mark’s bar-crawling itinerary had included a recent stop at an ATM, so the puny pickpocket’s take would be worth the risk.

  Even as the clown had stumbled on unaware, the girl stopped cold and turned, as if by instinct, to face the only witness to her offense. Their eyes locked, and the girl’s sense of despondency punched through with such intensity that, even if Evangeline hadn’t been reaching out with her empathic powers to read the girl, it would have taken her breath away. Open as Evangeline had allowed herself to be, the sensation struck her like the sudden, shrill feedback from a microphone, leaving her rattled and dizzy. Before she could recover, the girl turned away and darted down Bourbon. Evangeline lost sight of her as she flitted up St. Peter toward Congo Square, but the look in the girl’s eyes—the ferocious innocence of a wounded animal—had haunted her for days.

  Evangeline knew that look. She knew what it felt like to go to bed hungry for stretches of days at a time.

  By the third day, you can’t stop shivering. Even on the hottest night, wrapped up in a heavy, itchy gray wool army blanket that has been knocking around in this world longer than you have. How the old man who runs the convenience store by the factory catches you stealing a candy bar, then takes one look at you and hands you a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk to go with it.

  How you intuit all charity is short-lived, so you learn to become a more adept thief.

  Tonight, the girl had stood waiting, watching, her imploring gaze fixed on Evangeline. But before Evangeline could go to her, something caught the girl’s attention from the direction of Toulouse Street. She glanced over, then turned away, her eyes grazing Evangeline once more as she began walking, a brisk but not panicked pace, in the opposite direction toward Conti.

  Evangeline bolted after her without a second thought. She’d crossed over Conti before realizing she’d left Bonnes Nouvelles empty and wide open. She called after the girl to wait, but the waif took off running, increasing the distance between them each second. The girl was young and fleet, and, unlike Evangeline, she hadn’t been doing shots all night. She was slipping away, already a block ahead. To Evangeline’s surprise, she stopped for a moment, glancing back over her shoulder as if to ensure she was still being followed.

  A clamoring rose up from the street ahead as a mixed group of drunks, male and female, in identical Santa Claus costumes, stumbled from a karaoke bar onto the street. They shouted and hurled raucous merry Christmases at all those they encountered, then started howling out a rough-voiced rendition of “Silent Night”—a cacophony that sounded more like a battle cry than a carol.

  One rough Santa snatched at the girl as she tried to run past the inebriated rabble, catching her by the hand and screaming, “What do you want Santa to bring you?” The child responded with a hard kick to his groin. As he dropped to his knees before her, she tugged her hand from his grip and slapped his face. Having served up the fight, the girl now opted for flight. She sped down Bourbon at a pace Evangeline could never hope to match to the accompaniment of the man’s obscenities and his gang’s laughter.

  Evangeline dodged across the street to avoid getting caught up in the tangle of red suits, but her effort came too late. The girl was gone. Evangeline opened herself up, sending her energy out like radar, waiting for it to bounce back.

  A sense of loss, tinged with rage, punched her in the chest. Evangeline turned and began running up Bienville, away from the river. And then it happened. The transformation was nearly complete before she’d even registered it had begun. Her clothing dissipated like vapor and her field of vision widened as sprinting gave way to flight.

  No compelling force or lunar phase controlled Evangeline’s transformations now. There was no pain. No disembodied voice to taunt her and tempt her with promises of sweet release. No hellish fermata retarding the process until it seemed time itself stood still.

  Now she could change form in a blink, but the gift came at a cost. In that blink Evangeline touched darkness, and the darkness touched her.

  “Each change, ma chère, will make you less of what you were and more of what you will be,” her mother’s sister witch, the ancient Margot, had said. Margot’s words had seemed not so much a warning as a blunt statement of what the crone had considered to be an inescapable truth.

  Margot was gone now, as was the even more ancient, addled Mathilde. The same power that had been forcing Evangeline’s tortured transformations had turned the pair to dust.

  Evangeline had watched as the third sister witch, Marceline, destroyed herself. Rather than suffer the yoke that had once controlled Evangeline’s mother—a necklace forged to separate a witch from her power—Marceline had offered herself as a sacrifice to the Dark Man, the all-consuming shadow that, while not the source of magic, served as the conduit through which all magic flowed, in the hope of being restored. Only after Marceline’s destruction did Evangeline learn this sorceress, who’d orphaned her by snatching her father into a starless night sky and dropping him so his head burst like a hot watermelon, had been her mother’s sister by blood. Her aunt.

  Blood. Bad blood. Spilled blood. Anyone else might have celebrated the murderous witches’ annihilation, but their deaths, especially Marceline’s, had severed the last tie Evangeline had to her mother, taking away any chance to learn who her mother had been before she’d signed her name in the Dark Man’s book.

  Soaring above the Vieux Carré’s rooftops, Evangeline could see all—the late-night revelers bathed in a neon glow, the whirling blues and reds of police-car lights, the street corners ruled alternately by spirited musicians and insolent panhandlers, the street lamps glinting off the pocket-change tributes passersby offered both.

  And, of course, her quarry. The aerial vantage had helped her spot the child in moments. The girl had passed out of the Quarter on Rampart. She paused at Canal Street, then darted against the light across six lanes of traffic and the median that separated them, creating a symphony of blaring horns and screeching brakes on both sides of the common ground. She continued until she reached Gravier, where she turned right, away from the river. Suddenly, as if she’d been winded, her pace slowed to a walk.

  Arriving at the common ground separating the directions of Loyola Avenue, the child looked up and raised her hand in greeting.

  The child knew her even in this form.

  Evangeline swooped lower in a wide circle, catching sight of a movement in her peripheral vision as she did, a creeping shadow that took the shape of a man even as she focused on it, as if her attention had given it form. It lurched forward in a jerky bear walk along the edge of Duncan Plaza, pausing and lifting its head in a manner that reminded Evangeline of a predator sniffing the wind to catch the scent of its prey. Its neck elongated, stretching to a length far greater than any actual human being’s could. Its head snaked forward and fixed on the girl, who appeared unaware of the entity’s presence as she passed it. If anything, the child remained fixated on Evangeline, spinning around once and gazing up, moving along once she was sure Evangeline still followed overhead.

  The staggering shadow’s movements gained fluidity even as it began a violent chattering. It slipped onto the street, shielding itself needlessly behind a parked car—the girl continued, not hearing, not seeing. With a shriek, it bounded onto the roof of the car and began to turn in place, it
s head flailing back and forth. Evangeline realized the shadow was sounding a warning. No, it was calling others to the hunt. It pounced from the car roof to the asphalt, its landing silent.

  Evangeline intuited the child’s lack of fear prevented the shadow from claiming her. If the girl perceived what stalked her, she would flee, and seal her fate in doing so. Nothing was more tempting to a predator than the sight of its prey bolting in panic.

  The girl approached the long-deserted Charity Hospital and slipped behind the plastic traffic barricade as two more shadows, one coming from each direction of LaSalle Street, crept up to join their brother. Another quick glance up from the child as she grasped the top of the chain-link fence and tensed, preparing to pull herself up and over it.

  Evangeline also tensed, readying to swoop down between the creatures and the unsuspecting child. But rather than charge the girl, the three shadows drew toward one another, sparring, she sensed, for dominance, till two bowed their heads. A gust of wind rose up around them, carrying with it a scent as acrid as sulfur but as sweet as myrrh, as they joined together into a single black mass.

  She flashed back to the day of Celestin Marin’s trial. An involuntary cry, a husky corvid caw, pealed from her as she recognized this shadowy being as the demon she’d sensed lurking around the tombs of Précieux Sang Cemetery. She’d been fool enough to leave herself open, and it had reached in and rattled her bones, turning the breath in her lungs to ice. In a flash, she’d recognized it as one of the hungry shadows Fleur told her Daniel reported encountering on the Dreaming Road. This shadow had the same energy to it as the dark entity Evangeline herself had sensed lurking in Précieux Sang.

  The girl froze and looked up at her.

  The demon’s head twisted a full rotation as its neck stretched up toward the sky. Evangeline dove down to take a defensive position between child and demon, flapping her wings and cawing with all the fury her terror could stoke.