The Romeo Catchers

by Arden, Alys

  She walked over to a floating moonstone. When she touched it, it didn’t move. She pushed it harder, and it stayed resting against the A in NANETTE BORGES.

  Dee got up and walked over to another stone, and then another, but neither of them could get a stone to budge. Adele moved quicker, with a peculiar look on her face.

  I knew that expression. She had an idea or had figured something out. Normally I loved that look, but now I was feeling the cold in my bones, and I just sat there watching both of them, as if in a state of paralysis.

  Adele ran back to me, grabbed the pen from behind my front pocket, and hurried back to the tomb wall. She glanced up and jotted things down on her arm. Désirée caught on and began running to the different stones, yelling back and forth to her, but I didn’t move.

  I was cold. I shuddered. Something wasn’t right.

  “Isaac . . . ,” a voice said.

  I whipped around.

  “Protégez la . . .” The words slipped over my ear, making chills tear through my flesh.

  “Stop it!” I yelled.

  “Isaac . . . ,” she said again. “Ga-ga-gho . . . witch.” She sounded farther away but somehow more clear. “Ghost witch.”

  “Isaac!” her voice sounded different now. “Isaac!”

  My eyes shot open. It was Adele’s voice. Both her and Désirée were leaning over me. I was lying on the ground. Adele’s hand was in mine. They were both yelling my name, shaking my shoulders. I sat up, embarrassed, kind of not caring. Still cold. My lips were still moving—muttering. “An-n-n-imaran-nimarumpraedatoranimarmanimarum.”

  “Isaac!” Adele yelled.

  I stopped and blinked a few times.

  “It worked. It worked! You were talking to her!” Désirée pounced on me, her arms around my neck, knocking me back down to the ground. “Could you see her? What did she look like? Why did she appear to you and not me?”

  I pushed her off onto the grass next to me and sat up again.

  “I want to see her! She’s my grand-witch!”

  Adele sank back on her knees, inhaling hard. Are you okay? she mouthed.

  I nodded quickly. “Cool your jets,” I said to Dee, balling my fists to stop them from shaking. “I didn’t see anything.”

  Adele got up and went back to the stones. I was glad—I didn’t want her to see that my hands were still shaking.

  “What did she say?”

  I looked back to Dee. “I don’t know. That the spirit world is in trouble. She kept calling me a . . . ghost witch. Just like your gran did that night she was in the trance.”

  “Ghost witch? You failed to mention that earlier.”

  “Did I?”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all I heard—what I remember.” Adele came back, and I shook it off.

  She slid the pen back into my pocket and held out her arm—a list of names. Some of the letters were distinctly bolder than the others.

  NANETTE BORGES

  ANGELIE BORGES

  MATHILDE ROCHE

  SOULIE HENRI

  VICTOIRE PARRISH

  FOUCHER MOUNIER

  ALBERT MILON

  ROSE FORTIER

  WILLIAM THIERRY

  HENRIETTE ROCHE

  JEAN-BAPTISTE MILON

  EULALIE HENRI

  ORY BORGES

  FAVRE DAQUIN

  HENRI FORTIER

  FRANCOIS PICOT

  MAZANT E DAQUIN

  ZAMORA THIERRY

  “Those are the letters the stones hit,” Adele said. “That’s one hell of a planchette, Désirée Borges.”

  “‘All souls will suffer,’” Désirée read out loud. “Well, that’s ominous, as per usual.”

  Adele touched my hand. “You’re freezing.”

  “Yeah,” I said, standing. I pulled her up with me, then both of us offered a hand to Désirée.

  “Isaac,” Adele said, her eyes growing wide.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “You’re . . . glowing.”

  A faint light was shining through the sleeve of my hoodie. “What the eff?” I ripped up my sleeve, and on my arm, glowing icy silver, was a triangle with a line through its peak. “What the hell?”

  “Whoa,” said Dee, which was not exactly the reaction I wanted from her. From Dee you always wanted the exact matter-of-fact explanation when something weird was happening.

  “Does it hurt?” Adele asked.

  “No. It just kind of . . . tingles.” The glow faded away, but we all just stood there staring at my arm.

  “Well at least it’s gone now,” said Dee.

  “What do you mean ‘gone’?” The glow was gone, but in its place was the exact same shape, just now with thin black lines.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean, there is a giant triangle on my arm!”

  Adele looked at me, concern on her face. “Isaac, there’s nothing there.”

  My pulse sped. “You seriously can’t see it?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “What the fuck?” I stared back at the symbol. I knew the mark. It was carved into the bottom corner of Susannah’s grimoire, my grimoire—the alchemical symbol for Air.

  Désirée sprawled out on the parlor floor with Marassa’s grimoire and an assortment of Voodoo accoutrements, on a quest to discover why a magical mark would appear on a witch.

  Adele lit the fireplace and sat next to me on the floor, our backs against the sofa. I pulled off my hoodie, wanting the warmth of the fire on my skin, and she took my left arm in her hands, turning it to the inside.

  “Are you sure you can’t see it?” I whispered, almost hesitant to ask.

  Her head shook.

  I took her finger and traced it over the black line as she continued to shake her head. She traced it again from memory, sending a wave of chills up my arm, her bright blue eyes locked with mine. She rested her head on my shoulder, and we both stared out into the fire, her fingers unconsciously tracing the symbol until my skin felt a little numb.

  In the comfort of the parlor and out of the dead zone, I wasn’t even sure if I was opposed to the mark. I wasn’t opposed to ink, and I couldn’t really think of anything more badass than magical ink. But if it was magical, why couldn’t they see it? They’re witches. We’re bound together, for Christ’s sake. Why can’t they see it?

  “We’ll figure it out,” Adele whispered, and softly pressed her lips to my cheek.

  She got up and stepped over me toward a regal-looking chair to the right of the couch. It had carved lion’s feet and was the color of the periwinkle that grew in the abandoned, overgrown lots back home. She draped herself across the chair, legs dangling over one of the arms.

  Her fingers played with the chain around her neck as she quickly got lost in Adeline’s diary. The feather I’d sculpted clinked against her medallion when she moved. I was glad to see her wearing Adeline’s talisman again.

  I pulled out my sketch pad and uncapped my pen, trying not to stare at my arm too much as I drew.

  It was clear that the mansion was to become coven HQ, and that the blue room was to become the epicenter. It felt like home. Which I’d almost forgotten was a thing.

  “Isaac,” Adele whispered from the velvet chair, “are you still awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked up from the couch just in time to see her grab her bag and walk out of the room into the adjacent parlor. I wasn’t sure if that was my cue to follow her, but I certainly made it my cue.

  As she lit the candles on the mantel, I slid the pocket doors closed as quietly as I could, hoping that we had the same idea. When she pulled me next to her on the paisley couch, my hopes raised higher.

  “I’ve been waiting for Désirée to fall asleep so I could ask you something.”

  “Okay.” I pulled her closer. Whatever it was, she seemed to be getting more timid by the second.

  “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

&n
bsp; “Um . . . yeah?” I wondered if I’d done something wrong.

  “Like, things that happened in the past that you may not have been comfortable telling me about.” She touched my hand. “Pretending that it didn’t happen won’t make it go away.”

  She remembers. She remembers the token, and she wants it back. I stood up and paced to the fireplace. So this is why she wants to get the rest of the coven together. To break the curse. To let him out. “How did you find out?”

  “Sébastien told me.”

  “Sébastien? How does he know?”

  “This is New Orleans, not Mars, Isaac. We get the New York Times.”

  “The New York Times?”

  She leaned into her bag and pulled out the paper. “You really haven’t seen this?”

  I sat back down next to her, taking the paper from her hands.

  And just like that, my nightmare became real.

  That postapocalyptic day collided with my current reality, and a rush of deep resentment and rage washed over me. “That fucking fuck,” I spat, my fingers crumpling the edges of the newspaper. Unknown hero?

  Adele said something about the photo, and I sprang up, back to the fireplace. I couldn’t even look at her. Anxiety rushed my chest, choking me, pummeling me like the water had, and suddenly I was drowning again, and those little fingers were slipping out of my grasp. My eyes blinked wet. Stop being a pussy. You can’t cry in front of Adele.

  My fingers rattled against the marble mantel.

  But she’s not supposed to know about that day. She’d never be able to count on me. She’d never be able to look at me.

  “So it is you?” Her hand touched my shoulder.

  I pushed right through it, walking back to the couch. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Elbows on knees, my head went to my clammy palms. “It’s nothing.” My foot tapped the floor.

  “It doesn’t seem like nothing.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t look up. But then she was sitting next to me and her hand was on my back. “You saved a little girl.”

  “I’m gonna kill that fucking photographer.”

  “Isaac. What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” In a flash I saw everything collapsing, the fight we were about to have, the fraud she’d think I was, and how she’d never speak to me again. But I yelled at her anyway: “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  A moment of silence went by. She just stared back at me with her wide blue eyes. Eyes I never wanted to hurt or disappoint.

  Eyes that didn’t waver. “Okay,” she said, resting her hand on my shoulder.

  I realized I was shaking—not shivers, but violent tremors.

  “Okay,” she said again, nodding. She scooted behind me, her hand sliding to my chest, pushing me down to the pillows. And then we were lying there on the couch, her head on my shoulder and her arm wrapped around me.

  “Okay,” she said, one more time, and that was it.

  As we lay there, her heart raced against my chest. I’d scared her, and I hated that. Not that she’d shown any outward sign of being frightened, but that bothered me too. I liked all of her emotions. I liked that she wasn’t cold and unrufflable like Désirée.

  I’d never snapped like that before.

  She’d just caught me so off guard. I’d planned to tell her one day, when I was ready, but right now I wasn’t even ready to bring it to the forefront of my consciousness. I’d always imagined the conversation being private and intimate between just her and me, and she’d understand. And she’d somehow make it better. Make the nightmare stop. It wouldn’t be on the cover of the Times for the entire world to judge . . . to call me a hero.

  Fuck.

  And then she curled up closer and held on to me tighter, and if there was ever any doubt that I loved this girl, it was gone forever.

  All the flames flickered out when she drifted off . . . a beautiful harmony of consciousness and magic. The deeper into sleep she fell, the more she curled into my chest.

  I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I know that I didn’t have the nightmare with her tucked beneath my arm, and I didn’t care that my sleep was brief, because I woke up to her thumb rubbing my arm, and to her wanting to kiss me nearly until my alarm went off. And I certainly didn’t care that today at work was going to be brutal because of it.

  PART 2

  The Unseen

  By the pricking of my thumbs,

  Something wicked this way comes.

  William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  CHAPTER 15

  Blue-Tent City

  January 2nd

  The radio program hummed in the background as I wiped the tables down, the deluge of crime reports, water-boil advisories, and economic statistics: a constant reminder of the police-like state we were living in.

  “The National Guard, in conjunction with the NOPD, has apprehended the prime suspect in the O’Keefe homicide.”

  With a quick flick of my eyes, I turned up the volume.

  “Simon Fuller: thirty-three-year-old black male. Resident of the Lower Ninth Ward.”

  I stuffed the edge of the rag into the back pocket of my jeans and felt something crinkle—I pulled out a folded coffee filter. How the—? But then I saw the ink peeking through. Isaac must have slipped it into my pocket when he stopped in this morning.

  I unfolded the thin paper to reveal the sketch. Two pairs of legs, the river and the sunset beyond. New Year’s Eve. Or I guess I should say New Year’s Morning.

  After the party at Le Chat, we’d stayed up all night to watch the sun rise. He was sitting against a tree, my back against his chest, his sketch pad propped up against my knees. As the sun rose, the moment was so perfect we tried to capture it on paper. Both of us furiously sketched it out on the same page as the sky became more and more orange.

  I don’t think either of us wanted the night to end—and we were both a little buzzed from sneaking champagne—so he drew a figure breaking the water’s surface, a dolphin, as if, in the Mississippi. I decided the dolphin’s friend was a Pegasus, flying over the ferry boat, and soon the page was filled with water nymphs and Loch Ness monsters and backstroking unicorns until the sun was so magnificent in the sky we had to set the drawing aside. With our hoodies over our heads and his arms curled around me, we watched the first morning of the new year roll in together. And now it was immortalized on a coffee filter.

  I swear he had some kind of special memory power for detail. It was all there, in a perfect blend of kitsch and beauty. I smiled, folding it back up. I’d always thought the butterflies were supposed to come in the very beginning, in a big knee-melting, heart-gushing, warm and fuzzy rush, but the more I got to know Isaac, the more he made my stomach cartwheel.

  It had been over a month since the night I’d asked him about the newspaper article. Since then, there’d been handmade Christmas presents and midnight New Year’s Eve kisses and spills off his skateboard, and amid it all, Isaac Norwood Thompson had become my boyfriend.

  We never had a discussion; it just kind of happened sometime between our metalwork lessons, joint spellwork, and falling asleep too many times together on the couch after talking all night, and subsequently freaking my dad out when he got home from work, because he didn’t know whether kicking an eighteen-year-old kid out onto the curfew-silent, crime-ridden streets or letting him stay was the right thing to do.

  I showed Isaac the city, and he sketched most of it. He told me about Pratt and Prospect Park and the difference between Yankees and Mets fans. And that a schmear was the cream cheese paired with a bagel. That he could legally fly a plane! And about how his mom had died of breast cancer and how his dad, who he called Pop, had done nothing but work ever since. He said he didn’t mind because all his pop cared about was making things better for people. I’d yet to meet his father, but I guess I now knew where Isaac got his selflessness.

  We talked about everything, but we never talked about that night at the brothel and his picture in the
paper.

  I’d woken up alone that morning. He’d already gone off to work without waking me, but he’d left a sketch on the mantel, right next to the painting of the original coven. It was of me, him, and Dee sitting on the brothel porch.

  The newspaper was gone, but of course I managed to get another copy. I didn’t tell him that, or that there’d been a follow-up article trying to solve the identity of the mystery hero—the guy won the Pulitzer, so people were starting to obsess over the photo.

  Every day I thought about bringing it up, but then I remembered the way his pulse had raced against my chest, how scared it had made him. And Isaac wasn’t scared of anything, for better or for worse. The Storm had affected everyone in different ways, New Yorkers not excluded.

  He’ll tell me about it one day. Who am I to push the subject?

  I, who clammed up anytime he asked me about Paris. I wanted to know what had happened to him the day the levees broke, but not pushing him somehow made me feel better about not telling him the whole truth about my mother.

  I’ll tell him about Brigitte one day.

  But not until I figured out how to help her. Because I didn’t want to lose her, and I didn’t want to lose him, and the only thing Isaac didn’t have a shred of compassion for was vampires. I knew that if I could just find a way to save her—so he could meet her and see her as more than a faceless monster in an attic, he would see her as my mother.

  “It’s pathetic,” the radio DJ said. “Nothing has been released in terms of motive, and the suspect had no prior criminal record. His two small children have been taken into police custody, at the time of arrest, ‘At least they’ll get some food now,’ a bystander heard him saying. Pathetic. People. Pathetic!”

  I wondered how long a vampire could go without eating before they lost control of their bloodlust. I fantasized about it being a really big number. Months. Years, even. After all, Gabe, Lisette, and Martine had been locked away for nearly three centuries. Brigitte had been in the attic for nine weeks. Every morning I woke up wondering if I would be too late, and every evening I went to sleep wondering if I would ever figure out a way to save her. Each day I stressed out about it a little more, and each day I learned to push it down deeper inside. She was enduring the attic to save me. I could endure keeping her secret to save her.