by Alys Arden
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.
Voices bickered upstairs: “You gave her the book, Ritha. It’s hers now. You can’t control her.”
“I told you she was too young to have something so important in her possession. Now look what she’s done!”
“Another coven with the Makandal grimoire? A disgrace.”
Ugh, how hard would it be to slip out of here unnoticed?
“Oh, quiet, all of you,” a familiar voice snapped. Désirée’s mother, Ana Marie. “The grimoire is Désirée’s destiny. There’s nothing you or this coven can do to stop that.”
“Désirée!” Ritha yelled down again. The spot in the ceiling was changing from blurry to semitransparent, the molecules spreading so thin they were forming a hole. “You cannot take that book off these protected grounds.”
Apparently Désirée was done talking. She glanced up at the ceiling with a look that said, Watch me. And then she took off for the front door, me following right behind her.
I glanced back over my shoulder in time to see Ritha Borges jump down through the hole in the ceiling like a spry little ninja.
“Dee!”
Footsteps stomped down the stairs. Without a hair out of place, Désirée pulled the front door, but it only opened a few inches before jerking out of her fingers and slamming shut. When I looked back, Ritha wasn’t chasing us like I’d expected. She was standing among the Voodoo dolls with her arm extended out toward us—toward the door.
Désirée stood back. “Open the door, Adele.”
“Um . . . your gran is—”
“Open the damn door, Adele!”
In my head, I whipped it open, but the door didn’t replicate the motion. “It won’t—”
“Focus,” she mumbled, starting to jitter.
Her grandmother yelled again, just as her aunts reached the bottom of the stairs and charged forward.
I whipped my hands through the air, and this time the door flung open, this time the entire handle, the deadbolt, and all of the locks unbolted and flung out with it, crashing to the floor.
And then, in a blur of motion and magic, the door shut behind us, and we were on the other side: me, Désirée, and Marassa’s grimoire. The door remained closed as long as I wanted the hinges to.
“Come on,” Désirée said, pulling me forward.
As we crossed the Borges property line, energy buzzed through my veins—the kind that could only be produced by rule breaking. I half expected a sorceress alarm to trip and magically drag us back inside, but no such thing occurred. Outside, the streets were just like any other night.
Well, any other night in the French Quarter.
Désirée was too dignified to break into a run, so we just walked—very, very quickly.
How did I get wrapped into this?
I didn’t even have that many family members to argue with, much less fling spells with. The only things my grand-mère was ever disappointed over were my choices of clothing et mon accent français. I’d never even gotten the chance to have fights with my mother, and the biggest fight my dad and I had ever gotten in was over sending me to boarding school, most of which had been over the phone and had involved a lot of crying on my part.
Other than her brow and lips being tauter than usual, this just seemed like any other day to Dee.
“So where do we go now?” I asked, my damp clothes making me shiver. “Or are we just going to wander the night with your homemade witch lab?”
“I don’t know . . . Your house, I guess?”
Désirée Borges wanting to come to my house induced a mild wave of panic. I’d gone to great lengths to hide all of this from my father; brewing potions and practicing spells at home wasn’t going to help conceal my magical life. I racked my brain for another spot.
We were most protected in the Quarter, and wherever we went had to be private. Really private. With enough room to practice without me burning it down or Isaac blowing the roof off.
I turned to her. “It’s technically illegal, but I have an idea . . .”
CHAPTER 12
Location, Location, Location
A twelve-foot-high wrought-iron gate bordered the property, although if it weren’t for the spiky posts sticking out from the top, you’d think it was just a wall of dead ivy. As the clouds passed away from the moon, the mammoth mansion shone with decrepit enchantment.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this,” said Désirée.
The brothel was a lot more dilapidated than I remembered it, like it might fall on our heads upon entry. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I said.
“No. This is good.” The wall of dead leaves rippled when she spoke, as if in agreement. “Very good.” And then the dead-looking tendrils shrank back, slithering through each other like snakes, revealing the gate door.
Désirée turned to me. “I didn’t—”
The sound of metal sliding against metal cut her off, followed by the loud clank of the lock dropping. The wrought-iron gate creaked open just enough for us to walk through.
“Neither did I.”
It was hard to feel like trespassers when the house itself seemed so eager for us to enter. We walked through the gate, pausing to look back when it clanked closed behind us. The thick brown vines slipped back into place, and it appeared once again like it hadn’t been disturbed in centuries.
Flames slowly flickered to life in the gas lamps, lighting the brick footpath to the front door.
As we approached, sprinkles of supernatural energy tap-danced over my shoulders. I wondered if the sensation was a product of the old coven’s protection spells, or if it was the invisibility shield we’d discovered the last time we were here—the one that had kept us hidden while Nicco fed on Theis right in front of our eyes.
“Remind me to test the limits of the invisibility spell,” Désirée said, pulling the thought out of my head. “It’s so badass . . .”
Way to go, Cosette. It only takes a miracle to impress Désirée Nanette Borges.
Ren had said there were only four original French buildings left in the Quarter that had survived the great fires of the eighteenth century. It could be no coincidence that three out of four of them had turned out to be places where the Casquette Girls Coven members had resided.
Moving vines, welcoming doors, and invisibility spells. What more proof do we need that this place is also a part of our coven’s history?
This house had to be connected to Cosette Monvoisin. Ren had also said the house used to be a brothel once upon a time. According to Adeline’s diary, Cosette got kicked out of the convent dormitory for indecent behavior. I hated to make assumptions, buuut she was able to control the hearts of men.
Excitement bubbled in my belly at the prospect of finding a clue to who Cosette’s descendant was. Our next coven member.
Stairs ran up both sides of the once-lavish porch that sat on top of a raised basement, and the supernatural sensation became stronger as we climbed up. Four tall windows ran floor to ceiling on either side of the door. They’d been designed to catch a cross breeze through the mansion, the air-conditioning of the time, but now they were all boarded up and had been since long before the Storm.
A transom fanned out like a seashell over the door, which began to shake as we stood there—the magic struggling to push it open against decades of rust and filth and humidity-swollen wood.
When was it last opened?
Désirée and I glided our hands through the air, giving it a boost—her magic moving the wood and mine the metal. The door groaned open, splitting a blanket of cobwebs that covered the inside and startling a family of birds nesting in the foyer chandelier. As the sounds of their flapping wings faded into the house, my fingertips brushed the scar on the side of my fa
ce. But I wasn’t scared.
I couldn’t wait to call Isaac.
This was it. We were home.
A flame rose from my palm as Désirée and I lingered in the foyer. The fact that we were breaking and entering was only a distant hum in the back of my head—constantly present but easy to ignore. I was more focused on the sounds of scurrying claws. Mice. I shuddered.
Of course there’d be mice. What did you expect to find in an old, abandoned mansion? Mermaids?
The foyer forked into three different directions: straight ahead was a wide hallway that went all the way to the back door to create a cross-breeze tunnel through the house, splitting the ground level in half. The other two led to parlors.
I bobbed my hand, bouncing the flame shoulder-height, and there it hovered like a loyal pet, waiting to guide the way.
“Right or left?” Désirée asked, shining her phone at each doorway.
The flame floated to the parlor on the left.
It’s just a house, I told myself as we followed. A witch’s house.
A witch whose descendant we need to find.
The prospect burned out any fear, and I felt like I was walking into a gothic French dream. I gently pushed the flame around the dark room, letting it vacillate just long enough to get a good look.
The fifteen-foot-high ceiling had a grandiose medallion in the center from which hung a massive chandelier. The crystals must have once sparkled like diamonds, but now they were spun so tightly with cobwebs and bird nests that the fixture looked like a black cloud floating above the room. Layers of crown molding and millwork connected the walls to the ceiling like delicate, ornate puzzle pieces and reminded me of ma grand-mère’s estate in Paris. I wondered how long it would take for her to get suspicious of my mother’s whereabouts and show up on our porch one day. The thought terrified me. Luckily, my grandmother loathes America.
The floorboards creaked underfoot as we moved through the room. Dried leaves were piled in the corners, and the striped wallpaper on the lower half of the walls had been scratched by an assortment of claws.
The house had clearly been abandoned for decades, but it wasn’t a time capsule from the eighteenth century either. The details in architecture might have been, and the tufted chairs and gilded, framed paintings of Parisian theatre scenes, but the tea cart Désirée was investigating had a glass shelf held by brass that curled into geometric patterns, which were distinctly art deco.
I walked to her side as she lifted a bottle from the cart and swirled it around.
“That’s sure to bring a buzz that would rival the Green Faerie’s,” I said.
“Yeah, or kill you.”
We moved on, each of us sliding one of the pocket doors that led to the next room. The flame dove ahead, but I held my hand out, calling it back. I bounced it up in the air, and it burst, fracturing off into a dozen smaller fireballs.
“You’re getting pretty good at that,” Désirée said.
“Merci beaucoup.”
The tiny fireballs swarmed around the room, shedding light on thousands of books. Shelves and shelves of classics—science, history, philosophy. I pulled a few out and pushed them back in. None were any newer than 1940. Despite the tickle in my nose, I breathed in the overwhelming sent of leather, canvas, and parchment.
“Talk about old-book smell,” I said, remembering the guy at the café this afternoon. I pulled a copy of Henry V from the shelf, and a cloud of dust puffed into my face. A sneeze burst out of my mouth, and the lights blinked out.
Something scurried across the dark room, and Désirée shrieked. When I reignited the flames, she was standing on the couch. I turned so she didn’t see me laughing as she climbed down.
“Soooooo,” I said, looking at an old map of the Vieux Carré hanging on the wall. “Are we going to talk about what happened back at the shop? What did Ritha mean when she said that you’ll get nothing but trouble mixing magic with those two?”
She let out an enormous sigh. “The Borges are a preserved-magic family.”
“Meaning?” I sent the light swarm into the next room. We followed side by side.
“Preserved-magic families have kept their magic lines pure throughout the centuries and never mixed in other base Elemental abilities.”
The next room was an office. Faded wallpaper curled from the walls, and piles of leaves collected against the baseboards.
Dee leaned against a large wooden desk. “Witches are encouraged to master many traditions of magic, but at the end of the day, our family circle is still made up of only our inherent Elemental magic. According to my gran, there are very few of us preserved-magic families left in the world.”
I walked past a typewriter and couldn’t resist pressing one of the round keys to see if it still worked. The carriage released with a loud zing.
“Jesus, Adele,” Désirée said, clutching her chest.
We moved on to the back corner of the house. The two exterior walls were made up of rows and rows of small panes of glass, now so murky I couldn’t see through them. Brown plants sprawled across the windows and up the staircase that led to the second floor, forever frozen in place by death. I could imagine myself here in better days, curled up with a book in hand, cat in lap. The sun shining on my face, making it impossible to read more than ten pages at a time before daydreams stole me away to lands yet undiscovered.
I was officially in love with the room.
Rather than taking the staircase to the second floor, we crossed the hallway into the other side of the house.
“So everyone in your family has the Elemental magic Earth?” I asked, lighting the wall sconces with a glance around the room.
This corner room mirrored the one we’d just left, with the windows and the staircase, but it had a table and chairs and, in another lifetime, might have been a perfect breakfast nook.
“Everyone in my family with magic does, certainly everyone bound into the coven. It’s so stupid—it’s like magicism!”
I motioned for silence.
“What?” she asked.
“Shhh . . . !” My heart thumped. I could have sworn I heard something.
Creeeeeaaaaak.
There it was again. Directly above us.
Désirée stepped closer to my side. Another creak from above, and we craned our necks up.
“That is not a rat,” I whispered.
With a slow exhale, the lanterns extinguished, and the flame hovering at my shoulder shriveled to a wisp of smoke. I motioned for her to hide behind the door, and I dropped to the floor and crawled underneath the table, sliding the chair in place behind me.
The creaks, now with the distinct sound of slow-moving footsteps, were coming down the staircase.
I held my breath as a figure came into view: a guy in a hoodie. It was impossible to make out much more in the dark. He paused, sniffing the air, probably catching the lingering scent of smoke.
Something went skittering across the floor with a series of squeaks, and he grabbed a vase from the mantel before realizing it was just a mouse. His shoulders relaxed, but he didn’t put the vase down as he crossed the room.
I turned underneath the table, trying to feel for metal, but it was difficult to sense anything over the pounding of my pulse.
A loud creak came from the doorway where Désirée was hiding, a hinge in desperate need of oil. He shot toward the sound, raising the vase to strike, his hoodie slipping off, revealing his tiny, dirty-blond ponytail.
“No!” I yelled.
He spun toward me. “Adele, what the—?” The door cracked into the back of his skull, the vase smashed to the floor, and he stumbled forward, cursing.
I scrambled out from under the table and grabbed his wrists, knowing his knee-jerk reaction would be to turn and swing at his attacker. “Isaac, relax! It’s just Dee!”
“Oops,” she mumbled, coming out of the corner.
“Help me!” I said as Isaac started to lean heavily on me.
She pulled out a chair, an
d I toppled him onto the cushion, but the old wood collapsed beneath him and sent him to the floor.
“Jesus!” He swatted my arms away as I tried to help him up. “Get off!”
I backed away. “Sorry! I was just trying to help.” My hand whipped in a circular motion, and all of the lanterns flickered to life.
“I know . . .” He pulled himself up, woozily reaching for another chair, testing its integrity before sitting. “I’m sorry,” he said, clutching his head.
I pulled away his hand—it was covered in blood. “Jesus, Désirée!”
She made an apologetic face and shrugged. “He was about to hit me with that vase.” She pointed to the pile of ceramic on the floor.
I pushed his hair aside to inspect his scalp.
“I’m fine. It’s just a surface wound.”
I leaned around his shoulder. “Because you can see the back of your head?”
“Let me see,” Désirée said, nudging me aside. “Grab my bag from the counter.”
“You’re right,” she said to him as I fetched her witch supplies. “It’s a shallow cut.”
“No shit. It’s not the first time I’ve cracked my head open.”
“And if there’s anything certain in this world, it won’t be the last.”
He grunted.
She held back his hair with one hand and fished around in her bag with the other, all the while rambling on about how it was his own fault, which was her way of apologizing, because if she really didn’t care, she would have moved on immediately. Finally, she produced a small glass bottle and popped the cork with her teeth. Without warning, she poured the contents onto his scalp. Isaac sprang up, his head nearly clocking her chin.
“What the witchy hell was that?” he yelled, coming to my side, as if I was going to protect him from her.
“You’re such a ninny.” She held out the unmarked bottle for us to see. “It’s a homemade antiseptic. Don’t want it to get infected, right?”
“You carry around a homemade antiseptic?” I asked.
“I don’t like germs.”
I laughed. “It’s New Orleans.”
“Exactly,” she said, “it’s a cesspool.” And then she was laughing too.