The Final Days of Magic

by J. D. Horn

  Alice tried never to linger on these bright memories. The joyous moments were tricks, malicious fifolets intent on leading her into darkness. Along with these lighthearted souvenirs, Alice carried a well-rehearsed, cheerless litany of memories, strung together like the beads of her rosary and enumerated by rote. From the false memory she’d woven from a long-lost family portrait, the only one to include Astrid, to her final horrific image of Luc, his hand wrapped around a pistol and Babau Jean’s hand wrapped around his. In between, scenes of Luc’s red-faced fury crashing into Nicholas’s white-faced rage. The day in the attic when he’d revealed to her that her beloved Daniel had been conjured, not born.

  Alice passed beneath the statue of Jackson on horseback. Like the gnomon of a sundial, the sculpture cast its shadow over Alice, its touch palpable. A tickle traced down the nape of her neck, a gloom tapped her on the shoulder and whispered in her ear that Art was right. The trap had been sprung. Stars were aligning to bring them all full circle to the end.

  The end. Of late, it seemed even the fat and happy were hell-bent on Armageddon. Alice didn’t believe in destiny, but she’d come to question whether Daniel might have been onto something with his theory of people and events following a natural trajectory.

  She stepped into the sunlight and folded her arms over her chest, rubbing them to drive out the chill. Turning to keep the statue in her field of vision, she stepped backward until she arrived at one of the long, curved benches that spanned each quadrant of the middle ring of the plaza.

  She took a seat and began studying the sculpture. The one here in New Orleans was a replica, one of three. After Katrina, during the months she and Hugo had stayed with Fleur and the senator, they had visited the original statue in D.C. The original, it seemed, had lacked something in comparison. This one was somehow special, not due to its subject or the quality of its execution, but because of its placement. The statue took a charge from the land on which it stood, and the power of place imbued it with a meaning the artist had probably never intended for his work, a significance beyond that of the original sculpture in the nation’s capital.

  The bells of the cathedral rang the hour even as Evangeline appeared at the park’s gate. The child whose hand she held, a tiny waif of a girl, broke away and began chasing back and forth between a pair of palmettos, circling each time to pass Evangeline before speeding off again.

  A bit pale, too thin, but other than that the child looked like any of the others profiting from the freedom of the winter break. She wore blue jeans, a black-and-white striped T-shirt, and brand-new, from the look of them, red sneakers. Her long blonde hair was styled, like Evangeline’s, in a loose French braid. Anyone else would imagine the two, so alike in appearance, to be mother and daughter.

  The girl noticed her and came to a stop in front of her, gazing up at her with wide, cautious eyes. Alice’s own eyes lied to her heart, telling her the girl standing before her needed her protection, not her scorn, but Alice forced herself to recognize this as a falsehood. This was no child.

  As fantastical as it seemed, this seeming innocent was in fact an ancient and deadly witch. Defanged and diminished, yes, but perhaps even more dangerous in this new guise. Reflexively, Alice’s hand jerked up. She could feel the energy racing through it, ready to burst forth and destroy.

  Evangeline rushed forward, placing herself in front of the girl.

  She’s protecting her from me. Alice had to fight back a bitter laugh.

  “Thank you for coming,” Evangeline said, her gaze fixed on the fiery glow at Alice’s fingertips. “That won’t be necessary,” she said, her eyes rising to meet Alice’s. “Really, it won’t.”

  Alice turned her focus back to the counterfeit child, who’d shifted out from behind Evangeline.

  Marceline drifted closer. “This,” she said, gesturing from her head to her toes, “is for your benefit. I’ve been reborn to this world in a form that might arouse your sympathies, or at least reassure you I am of no danger to you.”

  As the little girl regarded Alice, her pale complexion reddened with mounting pique. “You await an expression of regret. My exterior has changed, but my heart remains the same.” Her head rocked back as she huffed out a sound of disgust. “You wish to hear of my regrets? Bargaining with the Dark Man without combing through each and every intricacy, thinking He might, if only once, look upon me with favor for the centuries of faithful service rendered to Him, rather than see me as an amusement. De cette bêtise, je m’en mords les doigts.” Her robin’s-egg eyes flashed like blue flames jumping to life. She glared at Alice over her hands as she mimed biting off the tips of her fingers. But in the next instant, her heat faded to a gray despondency. She lowered her hands and focused on her empty palms. “I am here, but my sisters are dead. I’ve been defenseless before, but never alone.”

  Marceline stood only an arm’s length away, her expression sober, her body tensed as if preparing for an attack. Alice understood far too well how this type of trepidation felt, but the old witch could rest easy. Alice had given into her rage once, and the bitter aftertaste still hadn’t left her. If she continued to cede to her anger, she might find herself walking in Marceline’s shoes, and that was not a trek she cared to make.

  “I’m . . . ,” Alice began, intending to express her satisfaction over the sister witches’ demise and Marceline’s well-deserved comeuppance. The moment before the words slipped out, she realized there was already far too much cruelty in the world. Justified or not, she wasn’t going to add to it. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Marceline’s eyes popped wide with shock. “Mercy, even now,” she said, studying Alice’s face, searching, Alice sensed, for a scorn she did not feel. The reborn ancient seemed disconcerted by her sincerity. “It doesn’t suit you,” Marceline said as she regained her composure. “You are a warrior, une femme-chevalier, not a nun. Not that nuns are known for extravagant displays of mercy.”

  “You said,” Evangeline said, addressing her aunt, “that you had information about Luc.”

  “Of course,” Marceline said, and Alice felt the full focus of the foul child fall squarely on her. “You will follow me?” The way she posed the question made Alice wonder whether she doubted Alice’s willingness to do so or her own safety with her back turned.

  “Lead the way,” Alice said, rising.

  Marceline nodded, then set out in a straight line across the grass toward the statue of Jackson. She stopped and looked up, contemplating it. Alice sensed that growing chill once more, the sense that everything was coming to a head, although neither of her companions reacted to it. As they drew near to the statue, Marceline looked over her shoulder at Evangeline.

  “Long before this dashing fellow drew his first breath, this square was known as le Place d’Armes. We would come here, you know, your mother and I. Mathilde and Margot, too. We’d purchase pecan pralines from the vendors who lined up along there.” She traced a line with her finger along the Decatur Street edge of the park. “We never missed an execution.” The wistful nostalgia in her voice held a gruesome incongruity to her words. “Margot always preferred the hangings to the firing squad.” Marceline spun around, rising up on her toes and rocking back and forth. “La pendaison sans cagoule, surtout.” She laughed, bugging out her eyes and twitching her face muscles to imitate the condemned who died from strangulation rather than a broken neck.

  She seemed to take their lack of response as reproach. Perhaps she was right.

  “Do not regard me as if we were savages. Were they to resume the public executions today, your contemporaries would wait hours in line to purchase tickets. ‘Make Executions Public Again,’” she said, miming tugging down the bill of a baseball cap. She then doffed the imaginary hat to them. “A winning slogan, of this I am most certain.”

  Alice couldn’t argue the point. The uncanny ancient wasn’t wrong. Civilization had proved itself to be no more than a thin veneer on a myriad of occasions in the intervening decades. She was ready to say a
s much, but Marceline had already moved on.

  “You know, don’t you,” Marceline said in a child’s piping voice, “the river created this land, this thin crescent of earth, by carrying silt and soil with its flow and depositing sediment where we now stand. The land on which this square, with the horse and rider at its heart, is situated is younger than the Great Sphinx of Giza. Man merged with beast. Man merged with beast.” She repeated the words with reverence, as if they formed a benediction—or, more likely considering their source, a malediction. “The Sphinx sits approximately six and a half thousand miles to the east of New Orleans’s iconic centaur at this same latitude.

  “As above, so below.” She repeated the most famous dictum of magic. She placed her hand over her heart. “As without, so within.”

  “This square, the lines and curves of its paths. These buildings”—she nodded at the older Pontalba building, then at the younger twin facing it—“along with the fine cathedral, Presbytère, and Cabildo. Church and state and commerce positioned around the central square. Their presence to be expected, but their arrangement far from haphazard.”

  As she spoke, Alice imagined she could see silver threads of energy linking the buildings together, forming a familiar pattern she nonetheless could not fix in her memory.

  “What does this have to do with us?” Evangeline said, prodding the girl, her tone that of a parent losing patience with her precocious child. “With Luc?”

  “Why, everything,” Marceline responded. “It’s about you, and her”—she nodded in Alice’s direction—“and your Luc. It’s about the fate of magic in this world, but if you feel I’m wasting your time . . .” She fell silent, crossing her arms and glowering like the petulant child she appeared to be would.

  “Go on,” Alice said with a cautioning glance to Evangeline, “we’re listening.”

  Marceline hesitated, looking to Evangeline.

  “All right,” Evangeline said. “I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

  Marceline gave a satisfied nod, then leaned in toward them. “Despite what you’ve been told,” she said in a loud stage whisper, “magic is not fading, nor is it dying. Magic comes to us through a tear in the fabric of this reality, a wound, if you will. That wound is healing. This land, right where we are standing, is the best place to create a new wound, to open a new artery.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Good morning,” Lucy said, the greeting sounding a tad too perky to Fleur’s ears after the invectives they’d endured the night before.

  Fleur released the hem of the dress she was preparing to baste and pushed the needle back into the pincushion she wore on her wrist. “We’re on speaking terms again?” She looked up to find her daughter leaning against the doorframe, her long hair piled up on her head.

  “I’m good with the arrangement if you are.”

  Fleur gazed at her daughter and found herself suddenly awash in ambivalent feelings that had little to do with Lucy or the holes her sharp tongue had poked in Fleur’s heart.

  “You’re still mad.”

  “No,” Fleur said, then rethought. “Well, yes, I am a little, but it isn’t that. It’s only with your hair up like that, you look so much like your grandmother Laure.” It was to be expected that blood would tell, that Lucy should resemble Fleur’s own mother, but here, in her mother’s house, in her mother’s favorite room, Fleur knew it was more than that. Her mother had at last found a way to haunt her.

  Lucy tugged the clip from her hair and shook her hair out. “Oh, great. I look like the lunatic.”

  “Please don’t call her that.” Fleur felt her cheeks flush, but she couldn’t decide if the heat was sparked by an offended sense of decorum or shame. Perhaps she’d tapped into the dregs of her filial loyalty.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said, and Fleur recognized true regret in her voice. Her daughter dropped her hair clip on a side table and drew closer. She laid a hand on Fleur’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean it. Well, I did, but I didn’t mean to hurt you. Do you ever worry it might run in the family, the mental illness thing? Sometimes I worry that maybe it’s in me, too.”

  Fleur felt a flash of anger meet a long-repressed sense of abandonment. “Your grandmother’s condition was not hereditary. She brought it on herself.” Fleur patted Lucy’s hand. “She chose it. You do share much with your grandmother, but you do not share her madness.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, to start, your grandmother was a legendary beauty. Fiery and independent, I’ve been told, when she was young. She was spirited like you. But unlike you, she was selfish, and incapable of saying those two little words: ‘I’m sorry.’ You’ve gotten the best parts of her. Be glad of that and keep a guard against her less enviable characteristics.”

  Her daughter’s face took on an inscrutable look. “But I’m a lot like you, too, right?”

  In spite of all the to-be-expected teenage rebellion, and the entitled hellfire Lucy had let loose last night, Fleur sensed her daughter did in fact admire her. Lucy needed to feel she reflected the best of her mother—ironic really, as Fleur turned to her daughter for proof of her own worth. “I see your open heart and hope that came from me.” She rose and leaned in for a quick hug, then stepped back. “Enough.” She nodded at her work. “Let’s have it, then. What do you think of the dress?”

  She’d tried to sound playful, but in truth she was afraid of Lucy’s opinion, terrified it would echo Laure’s patronizing dismissal of the drawings Fleur had shown her years ago, back when she first told her she wanted to study design. “Tu es bien une couturière douée, mais le modélisme, c’est la quête incessante d’originalité. Toi, ma jolie chatonne, tu es une pasticheuse.”

  “My mother,” Fleur dared, “thought me to be an excellent seamstress, but found my designs too derivative of the works of others. She called me a pasticheuse, a hopeless imitator.”

  “Yeah. This from the woman who thought the eighties was a good opportunity to retrofit her mothballed Cassinis with shoulder pads.” Lucy held up a hand. “Don’t bother defending her, I’ve seen the photos.”

  A tiny smile curled up on Fleur’s lips as Lucy took a few steps backward, studying the dress first from a distance, then spiraled in on it, judging it from every angle. “Not terrible,” she said, her tone signaling the approval she couldn’t bring herself to convey directly. She touched the bodice. “Silk. V-neckline and back. Deep enough to be alluring, but with enough coverage to pass as demure.”

  She circled around once more. “High waist seam, but not too high. Gives the illusion of an hourglass figure.” Her hand dropped to the skirt. “Tulle. Nice geometric cutouts. Oooh. Hand-sewn. Genuine couture.” She paused to offer an appreciative nod that was only tinged with the mildest sarcasm. “A-line, ankle-length, perfect for an afternoon high tea or a wicker man torching.” She paused for a quick, self-satisfied smile. “The black is a tad severe, but overall not bad.” Fleur took this as a grade of A. “I might even wear it.” No, A plus. “The right shoes could make it work.” A summary statement to make it clear Fleur shouldn’t let one success go to her head.

  Fleur realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled, grateful and relieved. “I’m happy it passes muster, if only by a hair. I designed it for you. For tonight.” She brushed back her daughter’s bangs. “Tell me you really love it, because I haven’t slept a wink.”

  “I . . . ,” Lucy began, sounding a bit reticent. “I do. Love it. Really.” But Lucy wasn’t even looking at the dress. Instead, she drifted over to Fleur’s ersatz desk. She circled around it, examining the drawings and fabric samples littering its surface. She paused and picked up the large round millefiori paperweight Fleur had taken from Celestin’s study. This she carried with her as she returned to Fleur’s side.

  “I brought that back from Italy as a souvenir for Celestin. It’s called ‘millefiori.’” She gave a slight nod at the globe in her daughter’s hand. “That’s why I chose it for Father. He was once fond of saying he wished he had a thou
sand little flowers just like me.” She smiled at the sentiment. Perhaps at one time Celestin had been capable of love. “I was only four or so, but I remember the trip well. Mother, Vincent, and I.” She paused to reflect. “I don’t remember why Father and Nicholas stayed home.” She shrugged. “We were in Rome,” she said and laughed. “All I remember from Rome was ice cream at the Trevi Fountain. But Venice. There is no forgetting Venice.”

  “Remy broke up with me.”

  Fleur couldn’t hide her surprise. She shook her head to signal her confusion and opened her mouth to speak.

  “The day after Thanksgiving,” Lucy continued. “Not a big surprise.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish you would have come to me.”

  “I . . . ,” Lucy began, then fell silent. “You were already having to deal with Dad.” She shrugged.

  Fleur felt like a total failure as a parent. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.” There was something else. She could almost hear the wheels spinning in her daughter’s mind. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she said, sighing. “He got all weird after his mom’s stroke. That’s all.”

  “Weird how?”

  “At first, I thought Remy was blaming me . . . well, you, for what happened to Mrs. Perrault. He’d started filling in for his mom at her shop. He and his granddad—even though Remy swore Mr. Simeon hates the place.”

  “Alcide is certainly no fan of the Marin family, that’s certain, but—”

  “Can you blame him?”

  Fleur shook her head. She couldn’t blame him. In fact, she’d wondered at the expert-level parental aplomb with which Lisette had accepted, or at least pretended to accept, her son’s relationship with Lucy. Fleur could only hope her own performance had been equally convincing.