by J. D. Horn
She looked away. Beyond the passenger window, a shifting black line of trees marked their progress. “It would’ve been a lot faster to take Lake Forest.”
“This is the first time I’ve come out here. I figured it might be better to return the way I got to the park.” His voice dropped to a low, grumbling mutter. “You could’ve given me directions.”
“You could’ve asked.”
A warm laugh turned her head. The headlights of a passing semi illuminated his face. For a moment she could make out the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “I can tell I’m not gonna have an easy road with you, Ms. Caissy. Good thing I like a challenge.” He turned back to the road.
A pang hit Evangeline’s heart. Whatever he’d seen earlier had convinced him that their future was guaranteed. He saw a straight line, but Evangeline knew nothing was guaranteed. The happiness he’d seen them share was nothing more than a potentiality. A strong one, no denying that, but life had thrown her too many curves for her to jump into something without caution. Once she’d been certain her future belonged to Luc Marin. With Nicholas, she’d never suffered from the delusion of certainty. Every moment with him had been a question mark. Still she’d clung to him desperately and, to a large degree, blindly.
Lincoln seemed to feel certain her heart would soon belong to him. Right or wrong, he’d have to face up to the reality that her heart came used, as-is, and without warranties.
“I didn’t count on having to drive all the way to Eden to find a turnaround. Not many exits out this way.”
“Not much out this way to exit to.” She scanned the empty darkness that ran one hundred eighty degrees ahead of them. “At least not anymore. You should’ve gone straight across coming off Michoud instead of getting back on the highway. You’ll have another shot soon. I think the next loop around may never have reopened, but there’s another one after that before we hit Pontchartrain.”
“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“You know the night I’ve had.” Her words came out in a harsher tone than she’d intended, but hell. “You might want to keep the sarcasm to a minimum if you want a second date.” He lifted his chin and pushed back into his seat. She could feel the smug satisfaction wafting off him. “What?”
“Nothing. Just pleased to know this counts as our first.”
A shrill whine worked its way into her consciousness. Now that she’d become aware of it, she realized it had been there the entire ride. She looked at the ancient AM radio in the dashboard. “You know what I mean.”
He tilted his head to the side and glanced over at her. “Ben ouais, sha. Maybe even better than you do.”
“You are lucky I feel I owe you for helping me out.”
“Nope. I’m lucky just to be sitting here next to you. You don’t owe me anything. ’Course our second date might be more romantic if we don’t bring a corpse as chaperone.” She was too distracted by the annoying sound to follow his words. She grabbed the radio’s power knob and gave it a hard left twist. The radio was already off.
“That thing works. Mostly sports and one-sided propaganda passing for news, but there are a couple of music stations. Go on. Turn it on, if you want.”
Evangeline shook her head, then realized his eyes were focused on the road. “No. Don’t you hear it?”
“What?”
She raised her hand to her ear, surprised that the whine got louder and higher as she did. “That sound. That squeal.” Like an unwanted souvenir carried from a dream into the waking world, she seemed to remember that drone, though its significance skulked at the edge of her consciousness.
Lincoln went silent, tilting his head first to the left, then the right. “Nope. Nothing. Probably the wheels arguing with the asphalt. Not to worry,” he said and patted the dashboard. “Old Bud here might complain a bit, but he’ll get you home.” He patted the dash a second time, this one, she reckoned, for good luck. “Besides, we have bigger concerns than Old Bud.”
He was trying to comfort her, to distract her. She wanted to be distracted, so she bit. “Such as?”
“That Hugo boy of yours. He’s getting close to Wiley. I need to know if his intentions toward my little brother are honorable.”
“Unlikely.” She found herself looking down at her hand and, unable to help herself, she brought it up to cup her ear again, pretending to brush back her hair. “I don’t think Hugo’s had an honorable intention since junior high. He’s self-centered and reckless.” The whine grew louder again. She dropped her hand to her lap. “He’ll never think of your brother’s feelings first. Oh, he’ll be sincerely sorry when he messes up, but that won’t stop him from messing up again.”
“Wow. You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“No, I don’t. You’d be well advised to remember that.”
“Duly noted.” He paused long enough that she’d begun to consider the topic closed. “If Hugo,” he continued, with the caution of a soldier crossing a minefield, “is such a mess, why do you give a damn about him in the first place?”
“Because every so often you get a glimpse beneath his shell, and what’s there is beautiful. Maybe Wiley can pry off Hugo’s armor, but I’m not going to lie to you. He’s proceeding at his own risk.”
“We Boudreau boys always do. Proceed, that is. And Wiley is as patient as I am, twice as stubborn, and maybe even three times as stupid. When he was ten, I caught the boy wrestling a gator that had snatched up his Braves cap off the bank.” A thumping sound that Evangeline guessed was the engine’s death rattle began. Lincoln took no notice of it. “Gator didn’t stand a chance.” The thumping grew louder, a wild heartbeat, a furious knock at a door. No, not the engine—something out there was demanding to be let in. The owner demanding access to his property.
Her own heart began to thud. She felt the bones in her hand begin to crack.
“No. Come to think of it”—Lincoln carried on, not noticing—“it sounds to me like those two have met their match.”
This couldn’t be. She’d made the change for the third time this month. The moon would next appear as a waxing crescent. The fingers of her left hand began to contort. No! The force can’t control me . . . The thought froze in her mind as she realized the power had duped her, reinforcing a pattern over the last three months, so she wouldn’t expect . . .
“Pull over,” she commanded Lincoln, who turned toward her. She could sense his confusion. He continued driving as he processed the situation. “Pull over,” she screamed as a wave of nausea hit her. She grasped the door handle and flung the door open even as Lincoln brought the truck to a screeching halt. Celestin’s body was thrown up into the air. It tumbled over the top of the cab to bounce off the hood and onto the side of the road.
She didn’t care. The agony was once again upon her. She sensed that an even greater force than her tormentor had triggered the change, but it was her tormentor who’d allowed the pain to return. The pain was a punishment. The realization burned in her mind with as much pain as the change brought to her body. She rolled out of the cab, the sensation of being stabbed by a thousand hot needles shooting through her as she landed on the asphalt. She lifted her head to the sky, screaming, falling silent as she realized the stars had all been replaced by bobbing red lights. Familiar bobbing red lights.
The space where she’d met the sister witches, where she’d watched Marceline destroy herself. She wasn’t physically in that place, which meant that place was in her.
Lincoln’s face appeared before her. A foolish face. He grasped her shoulders. His fingers felt like ten paper cuts. She hissed and pulled back. Her field of vision was widening. Her spine broke. She couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear it.
You can end it. You can end the pain forever.
“How? How?” she cried, but her voice had become the caw of the crow. Her arms snapped, then jerked out of their sockets. They reached up, unfurling as wings, flapping, lifting her to her feet even as her toes lengthened and bent into talons.
(Kill him.)
Kill him—her own thought echoed the other’s voice.
She looked down at Lincoln, still squatting on his haunches before her. The whine fell silent. The drumming heart stopped cold. All that was left was the sound of the blood pulsing in Lincoln’s veins. It was that pulsing that caused her pain. End the pulsing, end the pain.
(Murder.)
(Murder.)
(Murder.)
Lincoln rose to his feet. He took a step toward her.
No. God. Please. She tried to scream at Lincoln. To warn him. To tell him to run. To get back into his truck and speed away. To leave while she still had some control. But her cry came out as a demand for his blood, and intuition told her that if he ran, she would rise up on wing and hunt him. And she would relish the hunt. Catching him, snatching him up, tearing him apart in midair to watch his blood fall to the earth like rain.
He was speaking to her, but his words bore no meaning. A fool’s chatter.
(Murder.)
Yes. Murder.
Lincoln slipped off his shirt, exposing his chest. She could see the pulse in his neck. Yes. That was where she’d tear into him first. She’d plunge her beak into him over and over until his head held on by a strip of flesh alone. She’d sink her claws into his tight stomach, catch his intestines, and fly upward—see how far she made it before they snapped.
Lincoln kicked off his shoes, balancing on one foot and then the other as he removed his socks. He tugged down his jeans, removing his briefs at the same time. He threw them behind him as he turned to face her, arms held out to his sides, all of his tender flesh exposed. Vulnerable.
He had presented himself as a willing sacrifice. She heard a pop and felt a flash of lightning. He took a step closer. Then another.
“I believe in you,” he said, his words warped and reverberating. No. This time he wasn’t speaking at all. He was projecting his aura into her mind. The message hadn’t been phrased in words but in a wave of pure feeling. He was reaching beyond the monster to touch her true self. This was no Prince Charming coming to save her with a magical kiss. This was a flesh and blood man, willing to risk everything to help her save herself.
Every bone in her snapped at once, then bound back together, the healing as horrible as the breaking.
(Murder.)
A shove from behind pushed her closer to Lincoln. He stopped approaching her, but he didn’t turn. He didn’t run.
His trust reached out to her like a calming balm. He took another step.
(Murder.)
No.
Her refusal rang out, echoing between worlds. Her tormentor could kill her. He could drive her out of her mind, but as long as she held on to a shred of herself, she wouldn’t do his bidding. She would resist.
Another step. Lincoln stood in easy striking distance.
She threw back her head and stretched out her wings. She sucked in the foul night air from that other place and then screamed it out at the top of her lungs, rebelling against earth, air, fire, and water. Against the fixed and the mutable. Against what was above and what lay below. Flames rose up around her. She smelled the stench of burning plumage, but she didn’t stop. A white light shot out of the crown of her head before turning back on her. Thunder met her ears.
Then it was over.
Lincoln stood before her, sweating, relieved, smiling.
“I believe in you, too,” she said, then reached out to him with her very human hand.
TWENTY-TWO
White box, black bag, black-and-white cashmere scarf from last year’s winter season. Fleur had called it a lovely, thoughtful gift when she’d received it from . . . Hell, she had no idea who the giver had been. Only, you weren’t supposed to bring flowers to the hospital anymore—pollen—or even green plants—mold—and between the breakfast visit to the morgue to identify her taxidermized sister-in-law and the fruitless efforts to reach Eli, who, it seemed, might have finally had enough of her, there hadn’t been time to shop for something else. Besides, it was an exquisite scarf, and if not brand-new, it was at least unworn, and she knew hospital rooms could be chilly, especially when you were confined to bed, and dear God, dear God, dear God, please don’t let last night’s activities have any connection to Lisette Perrault’s stroke . . .
Lisette had been worked up about her daughter’s secret relationship. If there was a contributing factor to Lisette’s attack beyond heredity and diet, surely that was it. Fleur had no concrete reason to connect the happenings on Grunch Road to Lisette’s bad turn, but still she had a queasy feeling that a direct line ran between the two events.
“You okay, Mom?” Lucy stood on the other side of the open elevator doors, using her arm to prevent them from closing.
“Yes, fine,” she said, an automatic response that had no relation to reality. The impatient buzz of the closing doors alert goaded her into movement. She hurried out of the elevator.
The hall was bright and sterile, and so elongated that Fleur’s weary mind initially perceived it as a perspective drawing. She blinked, and the space snapped from two to three dimensions. Left wall taupe, right a well-intentioned though off-putting shade of moss. Floor, an angled checkerboard of white and light gray tiles set so that a nauseating diamond pattern led one’s eye to the nurses’ station at the hall’s midpoint. “Has Remy gotten back to you?” Fleur said, prompting Lucy to check her phone’s screen.
“No. Not since he said they were moving Mrs. Perrault to the eighth floor.”
“Not to worry,” she said to reassure herself as much as her daughter, “it’s a good sign—a very good sign—that they’ve moved her out of intensive care. Lisette may have a long road to recovery ahead of her, but she’s already underway.”
Lucy sidled up to her and bumped her shoulder against hers. “Come on,” she said in a tone Fleur knew well—the softening Mom up, we’re-in-this-together, here-comes-the-big-ask tone she’d been perfecting since the age of twelve. “Isn’t there something we can do—and by ‘we,’ I mean you—to help speed up the process? Just a little.” She held her hand up before Fleur’s face, her thumb and index finger in a loose pinch.
Fleur stopped and placed her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “No, ma petite mendiante, there is nothing we can do.” She leaned in to whisper in Lucy’s ear. “My magic is all but gone.” She released Lucy and stepped back. “A spark or two, but the battery is nearly dead. You know that, ma chère.”
“Don’t think you can French your way out of this. I know what I saw last night . . .”
“You saw the cost of it, too. No more shortcuts. Not for us. Not anymore.” She held the bag with her hand-me-down gift out to Lucy. “Here, take this. It will mean more to Lisette coming from you.”
Lucy accepted the bag, but continued to search Fleur’s face as if she didn’t accept her rebuff, or at least the reasoning behind it. “Okay. Maybe not you, but what about the walking defibrillator? Nathalie’s kind of like family now, right? Mrs. Perrault’s kind of family, too. We could talk to Nathalie . . .”
“And by ‘we’ . . .”
“I mean we.”
There it was again, the generous goodwill wrapped up in entitlement and ornamented with a bow of impatience. Lucy meant well. There wasn’t a shred of self-serving in her wish for Lisette to make a speedy recovery, but she had to learn that life didn’t work that way. At least not anymore. Besides, Fleur had her own thoughts about how Nathalie’s magic might best be channeled.
“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about Nathalie or her abilities,” she said, giving Lucy a nudge toward the nurses’ station. “Sure, she seemed impressive last night, but it might have been the equivalent of a panicked mother lifting a car off her child. A show of adrenaline, nothing more.” She started down the hallway, unable to resist glancing into the open doorways of the rooms they passed, though she only caught sight of the feet of narrow beds, or the occasional family member staring back at her through anxious, exhausted eyes.
“Yeah, but we c
ould still ask, right? What could asking hurt?”
“Let it go, Lucy.”
“And nevertheless, she persisted,” Lucy said. Catching Fleur’s hand, she turned her back and regarded her with a mixture of defiance and humor. Fleur was yet again faced with the knowledge that, for the good and the bad of it, Lucy was exactly the young woman she had raised her to be.
In this matter, though, Fleur could not capitulate. She riffled through available excuses to deny Lucy what seemed like a reasonable request. She put her finger on the best truth-adjacent one. “I’m sure Nathalie would want to help. If you ask her, she will most certainly try. But Nathalie is at best an amateur. She’s had absolutely no training, and I’m assuming no practice either. What you saw last night was the use of a raw, imprecise force. Helping Lisette heal would require perfect precision, or the results could prove disastrous—possibly deadly, almost certainly debilitating. The risk is far greater than any possible gain.” Fleur felt relief—and the stab of a guilty conscience—when Lucy’s face fell. She was buying it. “Listen. The human body is a wonderful thing. It wants to be whole and healthy, and Lisette is a strong and determined woman. She already has those two things going for her. What we can do is see to it she also receives world-class medical care and any necessary rehabilitation. If the Perraults can’t afford the best, we can. Your mother may soon no longer be a senator’s wife”—she looked around them and drew closer to Lucy, lowering her voice—“or an eminent witch, but she’s still one of the wealthiest and most influential bitches ever to walk this obdurate crescent of earth. Lisette can count me in her asset column as well. Okay?”
“Okay,” Lucy said, and her tender caress of Fleur’s hand said that she was both grateful to and proud of her mother. Then she dropped Fleur’s hand and turned away, and the moment was over. “Kudos, by the way, on squeezing two of my SAT study guide words into a single sentence.”
Lucy took off in the direction of the nurses’ station, but stopped cold at the sound of her name coming from the room she’d just passed. Remy emerged from the room as Lucy approached it. Lucy threw her arms around his neck, the bag slapping against his back. To Fleur’s surprise, Remy removed her arms from his shoulders and stepped back. “You shouldn’t be here.”