The Romeo Catchers

by Arden, Alys

  I took the bend into the courtyard and flew straight up to the third-story balcony at the back of the camelback shop, overlooking the fantastical gardens. A great hearth, which I’d originally assumed was a fountain, danced with fire, lighting up the enlarged fauna and casting creepy shadows on the brick walls.

  Désirée, Ana Marie, and Ritha were standing around the fire, arguing. Désirée’s arms were flailing—very un-Désirée-like. Despite not being that far away, I couldn’t make out what she was saying to her gran, though whatever they were discussing did not look fun. Ritha Borges no longer looked like the kooky grandmother I’d met right before the Storm, but a force to be reckoned with.

  I dropped down to the second-story balcony to hear better, but everything was still a marble-mouth muffle. I lifted off again and swooped in a wide circle around the yard. Normally I wouldn’t be down to spy on my best friend’s family tiff, but the tense faces and animated arms made me wonder if the topic of discussion was vampires. Or maybe Ritha had found out about the new coven in town. Was that the supernatural shitstorm Dee had referred to?

  I swooped lower, rustling the leaves of a tall banana plant. The voices became louder, but the words were no more clear. Just a louder warble. Ritha crossed her arms, just like Désirée always did, making her instantly look more threatening than any of the military guys I was used to being around. She said something to Ana Marie, but her words were still garbled, and I wondered if my magic really was failing.

  I dropped inconspicuously into a patch of tall sunflowers, feeling a jolt on the way down. What the hell was that? I flapped up a few feet, and there it was again, a tiny zap, kind of like the jolt when I crossed Esplanade Avenue through the trapping spell.

  “This is wrong on so many levels, Gran,” Dee said, following the others to the back door.

  Her words were perfectly clear now.

  Magic. The jolt must have been some kind of silencing shield.

  I sailed through the air after them, but just before I reached the shop, the door slammed shut. Dammit.

  I swooped around the building. No open doors. No open windows. If I wanted in, I’d have to fly down the chimney; that is, if there wasn’t some kind of magical barrier. Three long flaps, and I was high above the house.

  Here goes. I held my breath as I swooped down.

  Everything went dark, my wings scraping the bricks on the descent, but I focused on the light, and at just the right moment I swooped out and up, avoiding a crash landing.

  Tiny caws coughed through my beak as I flapped around the candlelit room, shaking century-old soot from my feathers and blinking it off my eyelids. From the shadows, an enormous black cat appeared, glassy eyes glinting—I fluttered up to a curtain rod, my tiny bird heart exploding.

  But the cat didn’t move . . . It didn’t seem interested in me at all.

  Usually I could sense other animals near, or smell them at the very least, but instead the room had a distinct scent that reminded me of freshmen bio lab, mixed with orangewood incense.

  My claws wrapped tighter around the rod as I realized there were animals all around. Birds. Foxes. Rabbits. An alligator on the floor. Loads of antlers were racked on the walls, all frozen in time. What is this place?

  Scattered over the surface of a big butcher table in the middle of the room were lamps, magnifying glasses, and coffee tins filled with brushes and tools I’d never seen before. The Borges do their own taxidermy? Terror pumped through my veins, but then again, the thought of being immortalized in crow form after I died did seem kinda badass.

  I took off and flew out into the hallway and down the stairs to the second floor. Just like the ground level, the second floor was a railroad, or a shotgun as they called it in the South. The rooms flowed into one another with no hallways. The first room had a lush carpet of brightly woven oranges and pinks, and the walls were covered with pieces of art similar to the ones hanging in the shop—at a glance they could be mistaken for paintings, but they were really made up of thousands of tiny beads sewn onto silk. I flew past a beaded mermaid, wondering if this was the room where Ritha’s coven met. Throw pillows lay around the edges of the room, alongside drums, bells, baskets of candles, herbs, and other ceremonial things.

  I slipped through the folds of thick black curtains into an even darker room and immediately braked, landing on the head of another time-stopped beast—the kind I hoped to never meet in real life based on the size of its now permanently growling teeth. A panther maybe? Its eyes glowed yellow. I’d stopped asking why a long time ago with the Borges.

  All the windows and entrances in the room had been draped with heavy black fabric, and the only light came from low flames crackling in the fireplace and racks of candles dripping wax onto the mantel among statues of skeleton people. Mirrors of all sizes rested along the walls, reflecting the flames. Some were enormous, in tall wooden frames, some were wide and beveled, while others were smaller and had intricately designed frames of silver vines and rosettes, as if straight from a fairy tale. Across the entire room, shards of suspended glass hung from the ceiling at varying heights, like a room-size wind chime. What the hell is this?

  I recognized the scent of burning sage.

  A tiny caw of surprise slipped from my throat when I realized two men were on the sofa, both slumped forward, as if passed out, their faces obscured by the shadows and flopping dark hair—one had curls, the other dreadlocks.

  Someone else, a small white-haired woman, was curled into the paisley armchair next to them, also slumped over and still as death.

  What the . . . ?

  Pulse pounding, I took off and flew low around the room, avoiding the strands of tiny glass beads hanging from the ceiling—the broken mirror pieces reflected everything below them, creating a beautiful juxtaposition of soft color and sharp edges.

  Footsteps pressed into the ceiling above, shaking the strands of floating mirror shards, followed by rattling metal, like chains. Before I could inspect any further, voices rose from behind the curtain at the opposite end of the room. I landed back on the panther.

  “You can’t do this, Gran,” Désirée said, walking into view with her gran and mother. “You have no right.” She walked to each of the sitting people and placed two fingers on each of their necks, as if checking their pulses.

  What the fuck?

  “Désirée, they’re not dead,” said Ritha. “The spell is not going to kill them. Now I’m sure you have more important things to do with your coven?”

  “Mom! What the heck? Gran has lost it!”

  “There is a perfectly valid reason for all of this,” Ana Marie answered, “which I’m sure your grandmother is about to tell you—”

  “There is, and I won’t. When you dismiss your family coven, you dismiss your privileges. Access is something you should have considered before removing a family grimoire from this protected house and using it to awaken your most powerful ancestor without closing the portal to the spirit world.”

  “I didn’t know about closing—?”

  “You’d know, Désirée, if you were here, where you’re supposed to be, learning the powers of centuries of magic in our family! Leaving a tear to the other side makes the spirits of our ancestors vulnerable to the malevolent! And if the ghosts of our ancestors suffer, we suffer. Our magic will suffer. The whole magical ecosystem suffers when the spirit world is disrupted.”

  A moment of déjà vu washed over me. I’d heard these words before: the night I’d seen Ritha muttering in the garden. She’d said something about supernatural crimes, and destroying the . . . binding. Or everything will unravel . . .

  “The spirits hold everything together,” she continued. “You know this, child. All magical connection is bound to those who came before us. We must protect them. Protect the binding, protect the magic.”

  Spirits are the binding? I struggled to understand what they were talking about. Did spirits bind the natural world to the magical world? Did they bind us to our magic?

&nb
sp; Are we the magical ecosystem—witches and spirits and magic?

  But that didn’t explain why a spirit would need protection. What could harm a spirit?

  Protection . . .

  Protégez la.

  Protect her.

  My fingers tingled, and the mark on my arm pulsed.

  “Just because I joined another coven doesn’t mean I betrayed the family,” Désirée snapped, a slight shake in her voice. “I don’t deserve to be shut out completely!”

  “That girl is going to be trouble. Mark my word.”

  Girl? What girl? Adele?

  “Just because it’s not your coven doesn’t make it trouble!”

  Murmurs came from the couch. “Ghohhhhh . . .” It was the curly haired guy. “Ghooowich.”

  Ritha straightened, looking deeply unsettled.

  “What did he say?” Ana Marie asked with a hint of panic.

  “Witch,” the man moaned. “Ghost. Witch.” He gestured to me with a wavering hand.

  The heads of all three Borges women shot my way, along with Ritha’s hand.

  Oh no.

  The air around me exploded into smoke, and I fell to the floor in human form.

  “Ghost witch!” the white-haired lady in the chair shrieked. “Ghost witch!”

  Désirée’s hand went to her temple.

  I jumped up. “I’m sorry! I was worried about you! And clearly I should have been.”

  “Yankee!” The man’s head of long black curls bobbed up with a burst of energy.

  “Ren? What the hell is going on here?”

  “You have to help me, kid. I’ve dried out, I swear! I don’t even have the shakes anymore.”

  I stepped closer to the couch.

  “Don’t even think about touching him,” Ritha said sharply, stopping me in my tracks. “The entity could transfer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The man next to Ren began to stir. Only when he jerked his arms did I realize they were all bound by ropes. “This is insane!”

  Désirée’s expression changed, like she’d put the pieces together. “This is an intervention!”

  Ana Marie and Ritha turned to her. “Exactly, sweetheart,” her mother said.

  I glared at them. “Since when do interventions involve involuntary imprisonment?”

  “When the problem is of the malevolent variety,” said Ritha.

  “What?”

  When Ritha said nothing more, Ana Marie explained. “It’s very dangerous. We don’t know for sure that they’ve been taken by demons, but the hosts’ strange behavior leads us to believe the entities are malevolent. Possibly parasitic.”

  Dee stepped closer to the tied-up trio, seemingly back to her usual self, like all of this was totally normal.

  “What are you talking about? What . . . strange behavior?”

  “Polarizing mood swings,” said Ana Marie. “Aggression, other abnormal activities. That’s how it all starts. We’ve tried mojo-bags and baths, and other means of extraction, but nothing has helped, and the longer the entities remain, the more violent the hosts’ behavior becomes.”

  An image of Ren swinging at Theis flashed into my mind, but then a scream came from the floor above us, and another slam of metal, again, like chains rattling.

  Dee and I stared up at the ceiling.

  “She was the first one we found,” Ana Marie said. “About two months ago. She’s had a total seize of the mind. We’re afraid the next phase may be final.”

  “Final?” I asked. “Like death?”

  Another scream came from above. None of the Borges women wavered.

  Ana Marie looked to each of us. “We’re trying to help them before they harm anyone else or endanger themselves. Unrestrained, these people are a threat to anyone around them.”

  “You!” Ren yelled, trying to stand so suddenly, the whole couch jerked with the constraint before pulling him back down. He was looking straight at me. “I should have known that you were behind this all along!” His voice sounded different—deeper, and with a slight accent, kind of like when he was performing, but more foreign. European.

  All six Borges eyes turned to me once again.

  “This is all part of your diabolical plan to get rid of me!” he shouted. “First you move in on Julie—”

  “What? Julie?”

  “Now you think you can move in on my girl? Bring her back from the other side? Over my dead soul! I’m on to you, Yankee!”

  Désirée looked at me with what the eff eyes, but in my mind things were starting to add up. Ren’s recent erratic behavior—from the night he appeared to be having a heart attack on the street, to his orange-juice cologne, to him nearly going to blows over a girl at the bar. It all began to make sense, in a fucked-up, supernatural kind of way.

  But it was something Julie had said the night in the courtyard with Onyx that bubbled to the top of in my mind: What if I never see Alessandro again? What if we never find him?

  I stiffened. “He’s not possessed by just any random malevolent entity.”

  Both Ritha and Ana Marie crossed their arms. Désirée had been in arms-folded stance pretty much since I’d dropped in.

  I moved nearer to the couch. “Ren?”

  No response.

  “Ren.”

  He turned his head to the opposite wall like a kid.

  “Ignore me all you want, Ren, I have plans tonight. A hot date. It’s gonna be bangin’. I should probably leave now so I’m not late picking up Violette.”

  “Ti ucciderò!” he yelled, trying to Hulk out of the restraints.

  The Borges didn’t flinch, totally confident that the ropes would hold him. Magic, I guessed.

  “Ti ucciderò!” he yelled maniacally. “Vi ucciderò tutti!”

  “He’s not possessed by some random supernatural parasite,” I yelled over his hisses and snarls. “It’s Alessandro, the Italian fruit peddler’s son. Julie’s friend! She’s devastated over him being missing.”

  “Sì, sì, aiutami!”

  “Who’s Alessandro?” Ana Marie asked.

  “Alessandro, one of the Royal Street ghosts.”

  They looked at me blankly.

  “You know, the one who . . . got his junk ripped off.”

  “Romeo going up, Juliet coming down!” Ren yelled enthusiastically in his normal tour-guide voice.

  “The Romeo Catcher,” said Dee.

  “Exactly!”

  She turned to her gran. “If the entity is just a common house-ghost, why haven’t you been able to exorcise him? It should be a cinch for you. It’s like your specialty.”

  “The entity might have been a friendly house-ghost at one time, but the way he’s attached to his human host, draining him, it’s an abnormal possession. It’s parasitic, making it nearly impossible to detach or exorcise.”

  As Ritha spoke, my gaze stayed on Ren. His eyes drooped, weighed down by potato-shaped bags beneath them. His glistening curls, which usually sent middle-aged women into tizzies, hung limp over his shoulders, and his cheeks were sunken, like those of the skeleton-men on the mantel.

  Désirée turned to Ritha. “What would make a house-ghost parasitic?”

  “After death, the soul is still protected by a body. Instead of a physical one, it’s an ethereal body—a ‘spirit’ or a ‘ghost’ as we call them in the natural world. But if something were to harm the spirit badly enough, it may release its soul, just in the way we release our spirits after death. In order to survive in the natural world, the soul would need to seek out a new spiritual body to connect to. Another ghost—”

  “Even if the ghost is still inside another human!” Désirée finished.

  My hands folded on top of my head. “So Alessandro’s soul is, like, seeking asylum inside Ren, and . . . draining away his future ghost-spirit-body-thing?”

  Ritha nodded. “If Ren’s spirit is holding two souls, the imbalance is unnatural. Unsustainable. But perhaps more importantly begs the question, who—or what—is attacking the g
hosts so gravely they are releasing their souls?”

  “Anininiinanimimarrrrrummm,” Ren mumbled incoherently. “Anininiinanimimarrrrrummm Praaaaedator.”

  I looked at Désirée. “That’s what Marassa said the night of the séance.”

  Ritha’s head flipped my way. “Marassa Makandal spoke to you? What exactly did she say?”

  Dee answered for me. “‘All souls will suffer.’”

  “And that phrase,” I added. “Animarum Praedator. She kept saying it over and over again. Animarum Praedator. La protéger.”

  Ana Marie’s voice became sharp. “Protect who? Désirée?”

  “I—I don’t know. I thought she was talking about Adele.”

  Which reminded me. I pulled out my phone: 22:07 hours. No new messages. Something about that made me nervous. I needed to get out of here. I could come back to help Ren once I knew Adele was safe.

  Ritha’s gaze settled on me. “Animarum Praedator is Latin. It means Spirit Predator. What did Ren mean when he called you a ghost witch?”

  “It’s my Spektral magic . . . I think.”

  “You must be very gifted to have made contact at such a young age. It can take a lifetime for even the greatest witches to master contact with the dead.” Her tone became pointed. “Ghosts are the hardest things in the magical ecosystem to hunt because of their ethereal nature—”

  “Hunt?”

  “But I imagine it would be much easier to hunt them if you can sense them. See them.”

  “Wait, what are you trying to say? You think I’m the one the ghosts need protection from? That I’m hunting ghosts? That I’m one of these . . . Spirit Predators?”

  “Do you deny your connection to the spirit world?”

  “What? No, but—”

  “Mom, enough!” said Ana Marie.

  “All of this started happening around the same time my granddaughter started hanging around you. Halloween night. When you bound your coven.”

  “That’s ENOUGH,” Désirée said. “Leave him alone!”

  “If it’s not you, it’s Miss Le Moyne,” Ritha continued. “She’s got a connection too. I’m certain of it.”