by Arden, Alys
Madame Morgana, whose real name was Debra Swanson, was the scariest of all the psychics and infamous all around town. A medium whose reputation for communicating with the dead, along with her wardrobe, preceded her. She always looked like she’d stepped straight out of a closet from 1984—layers of iridescent chiffon and taffeta, one on top of the other, that matched the sparkles in her blue and purple eyeshadows. Her bottom was big and round and barely fit on the chair, and her ego hardly fit in the little booth where she read cards for tourists. She equally compared herself to Cyndi Lauper and Nostradamus and rarely spoke about anything but herself, unless she was complaining.
She complained about her back, or headaches, or being cold—even under all those layers of synthetic fabric. She hated noise, and for this reason she hated children. So when Madame Morgana picked up the crystal ball, panic set into my chest. She’d already warned us not to disturb her trance that day, “or else.”
I saw the chip before she did—I scanned the floor, heart racing, and there it was: a chunk of the crystal ball, lying on the brick.
She didn’t yell like I thought she would; instead, she walked straight to me with three long steps and slapped my cheek, eliciting yells from all the Daure kids.
She dropped the crystal ball into my palm. “You’ll have twelve years’ bad luck, you little fool!”
To my seven-year-old self, there’d never been a face so scary—and I’d grown up a couple blocks off Bourbon.
Caleb and Cam took off running down the hall, shouting for their grandmother, but Codi marched up to her and yelled, “No, she won’t, you old hag!” He slammed his foot down on hers.
As she grabbed his shoulder, I stood there in shock, the broken crystal ball weighing down my hand, guiltily wondering how I could possibly have worse luck than I already had. My mother had already left us, and then horror struck me: Would my father leave me now too? I began to cry.
“How dare you strike a child in my house!” Mrs. Philomena shouted, hurrying into the room. “Get out. You are no longer welcome here. Get out. Get out!”
Mrs. Philly held her hand out toward the front door, which—I swear—through my tears I saw open by itself, and then Madame Morgana stumbled forward, protesting all the way to the curb.
The door slammed shut, and Mrs. Philomena walked to the window and flipped around the sign that said PSYCHIC WANTED.
She turned around all smiles. “How about some cookies?” she asked, rubbing my back as I brushed away the tears, embarrassed to cry in front of the boys.
The Daure kids stood with arms crossed and smug smiles. Mrs. Philly hugged me and told me not to worry, and to keep the crystal ball because I’d marked it and that made it even more special. She made us Blue Eyes tea, which was my favorite because it brewed pink, and she opened a tin of vanilla butter ring cookies.
As everyone slurped their tea and munched shortbread from around their fingers, I kept wondering how the box had tipped in the first place. I knew I’d placed it securely on the mantel. Mrs. Philly never questioned me about it, and on the scale of trouble the Daure kids got into, the incident was quickly forgotten.
Now, thinking back on it, I knew.
It was my fault the little box tipped.
I hustled the last block, the rain plopping harder on the umbrella.
There were more cars parked on Désirée’s block than usual—and by “usual” I meant post-Storm usual. Pre-Storm the street would have been bumper to bumper, with others slowly circling, waiting for someone to leave.
The sign hanging above the stoop was a simple wood carving: a curvy line wriggled underneath the words VODOU POURVOYEUR like a snake. If it wasn’t for the sign, you’d probably walk past the shop altogether—a former shotgun house. Its long shutters were closed, and there were no other indicators it was a place of business, like posted store hours or decals showing they took Visa and MasterCard. I guess the people who were meant to be here knew to look for it. A pile of fried chicken bones was strewn on the sidewalk. I didn’t know why, but I knew enough about the Borges to know that nothing here was random.
I shook out my umbrella, silenced my phone, and gently shut the door behind me, always feeling like I might be disrupting something important when I entered the shop. The atmosphere felt very particular, as if great care had gone into crafting it.
A lampshade made of strands of lavender and violet beads that glowed like amethyst droplets cast the front part of the room in a pool of lilac. Even though the store wasn’t designed to be a tourist trap, the front rooms were full of things that might tickle their fancy: colorful candles guaranteed to bring you luck or love, gris-gris bags for protection, drums made of animal hides, bundles of sage and lavender, crystal skulls made up of thousands of tiny glass beads that glowed amber. Sometimes I wondered if all the tourist stuff was just a front, like a mafia-owned laundromat, except instead of crime it hid otherworldly happenings.
In the back corner, a tall lamp with a shade of woven bamboo shone a warm spotlight onto the altar devoted to a Loa named Erzulie. Désirée said Loa were kind of like spirits in Voodoo—the invisible ones, intermediaries between people and the supreme Bon Dieu. Small altars were constructed throughout the house, each one with different artworks and offerings for the chosen Loa. But then in the very back, behind a magenta velvet curtain, was the Borges ancestral altar, which was my favorite, because it was like a miniature museum dedicated to the witches in Désirée’s family line. On one side of it hung the painting of the original Casquette Girls Coven, and on the other was a portrait of Marassa Makandal, the original Voodoo queen of New Orleans—Adeline Saint-Germain’s most trusted confidant.
The curiosities became curiouser as I walked through each room—snakeskins, racks of necklaces ranging from leather fringe to fish bone to iridescent abalone. It was still difficult not to stop and look around, because every time I walked through the room I saw something new, like the two baskets on the floor with handmade signs, one that said Chicken Feet and the other Bat Wings. They were bookended with baskets of incense sticks and lime-green candles.
Yep. Totally normal.
A cat stepped out from behind an enormous tribal mask that rested against a drum. It looked up at me with keen interest. I stared back into its slate-gray eyes, and then it turned away disinterested. Definitely related to Dee.
I stepped into the room of Voodoo dolls, which had just as much diversity as the French Quarter residents themselves, and felt both joyfully artistic because of their wave of color and creepily serious by nature of their purpose. A waist-high doll made of crude burlap and straw with threaded Xs for eyes seemed to stare at me as I walked past. My eyes fell to a group of pocket-size dolls wearing metallic pink sequins and rainbow-colored glitter, and it wasn’t long before it felt like they were looking up at me too. I hurried along.
In the back room, the fireplace was ablaze, its reflection flickering on the glass jars of herbs, spices, oils, and salts that covered all four walls. Désirée was behind the wooden counter.
“Hey,” she said, looking up for only a second.
“Hey, what are you . . .” My voice fizzled as she moved from behind the counter, motioning for me to follow her to the wall of shelves on my left.
She climbed up the rolling ladder and began handing me jars. Désirée wasn’t exactly a chatterbox, but this was low energy even for her; her silence beckoned silence, so I didn’t say anything, just continued to pass the jars back to the counter. In the void, noises filtered down from upstairs. Feet shuffling. Voices murmuring.
Hearing the movement and energy upstairs made me feel the quiet down here. It was the kind of quiet always followed by trouble.
Something was up.
The vibe was kind of like walking into the courtyard of the “not-in-operation” Le Chat Noir. Everything looked dark and shut down, but if you paused, you could feel the beats of music pulsing through the walls. Those beats told you that you weren’t important enough to know what was going on, much
less gain entry. Right now, the party was going on upstairs, and I was pretty sure Désirée wasn’t invited.
“What’s that all about?” I asked, tilting my head toward the ceiling.
Désirée climbed down from the ladder and went back behind the counter. “My gran’s Saturday-night circle.” Her tone was near bitter. She uncorked three of the bottles, and each let out a different color plume of dust: one white, one gold, and one baby blue. “They don’t usually all meet here this time of year, which means something is going on.”
“What kind of something?”
“Something of the magical variety, presumably. Gran kicked me out of the room in front of everyone.”
“Ouch.”
“She said I ‘lost all privileges’ when I joined a ‘mixed-magic coven.’” Désirée flicked the lid of a jar so quickly it flew off, clanking to the floor. “But we’re about to find out what they’re up to.”
I whipped the lid up into my palm. “Oh Lord.” A sinking feeling told me that this was a bad idea. “Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”
She pulled a cauldron out from under the counter and set up her little portable spell-cooking station between us. “Fire,” she said, and opened Marassa Makandal’s large leather-bound grimoire.
When I didn’t immediately comply, she looked directly at me. “Be useful, or go away.”
“Okay, jeez.” I flicked my gaze to the cauldron, igniting a flame underneath it, and then tried to bring the convo back to the coven search. “So, Dee, have you made any progress with the descendants?”
“Shhhh,” she hissed, and pushed a pile of assorted dried herbs my way.
I grabbed a mortar and pestle made of dark granite. She took them back and replaced it with a set made of jade.
“Green is for edibles. The black one, nonedibles.”
“Nonedibles?”
“Stones, brick, metals . . . or plant and animal material that’s poisonous.”
“Right.” I laughed as I ground the herbs, thinking about the difference between the Le Moyne and the Borges household safety measures.
When the herbs started to resemble a powder, she took the mortar. “Grab a fistful of dried indigo,” she said, adding the herbal powder pinch by pinch to the cauldron.
I turned to the wall and scanned over the labels. If they were in any kind of order, it eluded me.
“On the floor. Third basket from the door,” she added in a way that indicated haste.
The basket contained long stalks with tiny shriveled flowers ranging from purple to black. When I returned to the counter, she was covering the sides of the cauldron with long banana-plant leaves.
“Break off the flower heads and throw them in. They’re just for color—to help us direct the magic.” She stirred the pot, while removing a black feather bookmark from the crease of Marassa’s grimoire, and turned the page. The wooden spoon continued to stir itself as she scanned the spell with both hands.
“Okay, got it,” she said to herself, laying her palms out to me on either side of the cauldron, which meant whatever she was about to do was complex and she wanted the power of two.
My pulse picked up, but I trusted Désirée as she read words from the antique tome about parting ways—just enough to let sound seep through.
Smoke billowed from the pot, purples and blues, accumulating into a beautiful little cloud that hovered at eye level. She used the banana leaves to fan the cloud straight up and then took my hands again, and we continued the chant three more times.
The cloud crawled across the ceiling, slowly and with intent, and then it stopped about four feet to my right. Désirée pushed the cauldron station over so we stayed directly underneath it.
“Come on,” she said. “I know this will work.”
The cloud seeped into the ceiling, creating a purple spot about the size of grapefruit, and a smile crossed Désirée’s face. “It found the most porous place to penetrate.”
“Penetrate what, Désirée? I know you aren’t referring to just the ceiling.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I found a spell that lets me break down organic matter and move it at a molecular level.”
I suddenly felt like I was talking to Jeanne or Sébastien.
“But it will only hold as long as the spell is active.”
“Why would we want—?”
She drew a finger over her lips and looked up. The purple stain on the ceiling dissipated until it was barely noticeable—just a blurry wooden blotch.
The noises upstairs gradually became louder, seeping through the spot where the spell had thinned out the layers of ceiling and floor above us, but the words weren’t comprehendible; they warbled in and out, nothing more than wah, wah, wahs.
“Dammit!” Désirée whispered. “I forgot about the privacy spells they always cast at the beginning of the night.”
I couldn’t tell if she was truly annoyed by this or enthralled to rise to the challenge. She walked to a waist-high barrel on the rear wall and grabbed a handful of the largest fava beans I’d ever seen. She dumped them in the pot along with a fistful of bay leaves and a fistful of rocks.
I bopped between total fascination and feeling like a bump on a log who couldn’t offer assistance. “What are those rocks—?”
“Shhhh!”
She whispered words, waving her hand over the pot, and the smoke formed again. This time, instead of a cloud, the blues and purples and blacks twisted into each other, forming a thick smoky braid, which she pulled out of the pot like taffy and then guided it up to the ceiling until it connected with the spot, linking the ceiling to the cauldron. She whispered:
Écoute et répète. Listen and speak.
Écoute et répète. Tell us the words we seek.
And then the contents in the cauldron complied. The rocks rose to the top, joining the bay leaves and the beans, defying the laws of physics. The pot rattled and the water bubbled as everything swirled at the surface.
Dee continued to chant, and the potion ingredients began to move in different directions, fighting against the swirling water—the rocks zigged and the bay leaves zagged and the beans scattered about.
She leaned over the configuration, and a smile spread across her face. “It’s working!”
As if Désirée ever thought something she was trying for the first time might not work.
She pulled me around the counter for a closer look. In rock and bean and leaf, a word was spelled out in the pot: DISRUPTION. By the time I’d finished reading it, a second one had appeared: SPIRIT.
“What. The. Hell?” I asked.
“Spycasting, level two.” She looked up, and I realized the words in the pot were being spoken upstairs.
A third floated under our noses: WORLD.
More beans and rocks formed into letters until a coherent configuration of words appeared, stacked like Voodoo alphabet soup.
A
DISRUPTION
TO SPIRIT WORLD
“Disruption?” Désirée asked the brew. “What kind of disruption?”
I looked at her blankly and whispered, “Out of all the words floating here, ‘disruption’ is the one you’re most curious about?”
Désirée held out her hand, indicating quiet. Her eyes slowly lifted to the ceiling, and I realized the house was now pin-droppingly silent.
Nothing stirred.
Nothing but a single creak from the ceiling at the front of the room. Then another. Someone was slowly walking across the room above us, and the creaks didn’t stop until they were right over our heads—right above the magical blur in the ceiling.
We craned our necks up, and suddenly I was gargling a torrent of water.
“Gran!” Désirée screamed as we jumped away, not before getting soaked.
The water continued to pour straight through the ceiling into the cauldron, splashing away the message and breaking the smoke braid.
“Désirée Borges!” Ritha shouted from above. “How dare you spycast on a private
gathering!”
The tone in her voice scared me to next Sunday, but as per usual, Désirée didn’t seem fazed.
“A private gathering in my own house!” she yelled back up through the hole in the ceiling, which seemed to be growing.
Feet shuffled upstairs. Wiping water from my face, I shriveled back, not wanting to get any more tangled in this family drama than I already was.
“What is communicated in our gatherings is private information—information you are no longer privy to! You cast aside your family’s coven, you cast aside your privileges.”
“My privileges come with my blood, not my coven!”
“You’re going to get nothing but trouble mixing magic with those two, child. You will learn the hard way. Heed my words.”
I shrank back farther, wondering if Ritha realized I was standing next to Désirée. What trouble?
“Not any more trouble than what comes with being my father’s daughter!”
Ritha’s tone flattened: “You want to act like a child, Désirée, then go outside and play like a child. And don’t come back until after dawn, when our coven business is complete. Our family has traveled far so we can meet in full.”
“Fine!” Désirée yanked a large leather satchel from under the counter and started grabbing things: herbs, salts, knives, and candles.
Was she grabbing at random or with purpose? Something told me the latter.
She stuffed a jumble of multicolored silk scarves into her satchel and followed them with some hastily selected vials of oils and a set of scales.
Pushing my wet hair aside, I looked up at the hole, sensing the energy above us firing up, making me feel like I was about to be in the middle of a spell-flinging family war.
“Désirée Nanette Borges, don’t you take that book out of this house!”
I looked back at Désirée, who was sliding the enormous grimoire into the satchel.
Ritha had passed it down to Désirée, telling her it was the oldest book of magic in New Orleans. She was only partially right: it was one of the oldest grimoires in New Orleans. Ritha didn’t know that the Norwood family book of magic had come to town. I tightened my bag on my shoulder.