by Alys Arden
She nodded.
“It doesn’t matter whose family started it. We ended it.”
She nodded again, looking up at me. I moved closer until our lips touched, and I kissed her in the middle of the curfew-silent street. Even if every resident on the block had stepped outside, I wouldn’t have broken the kiss. I was done fighting. I was done with the insecurity. I was done with Nicco Medici.
When she broke away, she whispered, “We ended it.”
She slipped her hand back into mine, and we rounded the corner onto her block.
“Shit.” She yanked me back a few steps before she peeked her head around the corner of a vine-covered brick building.
I looked out over her shoulder. “Shit.”
Mac was entering their front door.
“He’s going to kill me,” she whispered. “He always checks on me when he gets home from work—like since the day I was born.”
“Can you open your window from down here?”
“Of course.” She raised her hand a few inches, and the window slid up with it.
We walked down the block, and when we were nearly in front of her house I quickly looked both ways down the street, smiling. “Are you ready?”
“For wh—?”
Before she could protest, I ripped my hand back, pulling a tight gust down the street. It rushed up from the ground, grabbed her around the waist, and spun her up through the air. A gleeful yelp slipped from her lips.
“Shhh!”
I directed the air forward so that it gently pushed her through the window. Well, almost gently—she landed on the floor with a thud. A moment later she leaned back out the window, reeling with excitement. “I love you!” Her mouth snapped shut, as if the words had escaped by accident. “I mean—I don’t mean—I don’t know what I mean . . .”
“No take-backs!” I yelled, too loudly, but I couldn’t help it.
I turned away so she couldn’t see my big goofy smile, and I was gone, soaring the rest of the way home.
CHAPTER 35
Witch Killer
January 18th
Isaac’s voice wafted out through the glassless windows of the Marigny Opera House foyer, making me smile a dippy smile. Clipboard in hand to check in straggler volunteers, I bounced down a few steps, closer to the street curb and into a patch of sunlight. I still didn’t understand how saying those three little words could have such a physical impact.
It felt like I’d had a stomach full of butterfly chrysalises, and those words had made them start magically hatching over the last week. Some had hatched one by one, others by the dozen, depending on how much I was thinking about Isaac. It made me feel silly, and it made me perpetually blush, and it made me want to hide under a blanket. Is this what love is? How are you supposed to know? I don’t even know why I’d said it, but now, with the butterfly invasion, I must have meant it. Right?
Over the past week I’d buried myself into things because I was sure that everyone around me could tell I was acting weird, that everyone could hear the delicate wings in my stomach, brushing against my organs, jittering my nerves.
I dove into homework. I called Brooke and e-mailed Codi a million times, never getting a hold of either of them. I made a dress from the last of the Paris-purchased fabric I’d been hoarding, a plum-colored silk. Today it was Johnnie and Veronica’s mentorship fund-raiser: a neighborhood effort to restore the music venue and convert the outer-lying buildings into temporary housing for displaced musicians. Alphonse and Klara Jones were funding the project with a benefit record they’d just released. Isaac had organized his entire crew to volunteer for the weekend, and there must have been a hundred other people here scattered throughout the grounds. My dad even ungrounded me for the occasion.
A young couple with two children approached.
“A lot of the kids are helping out in the backyard,” I told them as I wrote their names down.
A hodgepodge of brass musicians were set up in the street, playing all the local hits, their trills echoing throughout the neighborhood, encouraging all to come out and help.
Again Isaac’s voice echoed out over the shrill of a saw—he was showing a group of my classmates how to rip away the walls without destroying the marble floor. Another butterfly hatched.
Most everyone I knew back in town was on site helping out. My father was erecting a statue he’d made of Allen Toussaint, Callis had a team in the back doing landscaping, and Annabelle had found the least dirty job she could: handing out water and Kool-Aid with the senior squad and Celestina.
Car doors slammed shut, and I looked up to see two blacked-out SUVs parked at the curb. An enormous suited man opened the back door of the first SUV, and Désirée stepped out in designer jeans, sneakers, and a souvenir I ♥ NOLA T-shirt. Next came Ritha and Ana Marie. Morgan Borges and various other mayoral staff members got out of the second car.
Désirée hopped up the steps toward me.
“Is that a ribbon in your hair?” I asked.
“Give me a sledgehammer and something to hit, or I’m going to murder someone.”
“Team Isaac it is. Foyer.”
She walked straight past me, ignoring the shrimpy guy with a fedora, tortoise-rimmed glasses, and a camera who was calling her name from the curb.
More people approached, but my attention fixed on Jeanne and Sébastien, who were hurrying down the street.
“Put us to work,” she said as I greeted them both with tight hugs.
“Actually, I have the perfect job for you, Jeanne.” I handed her the clipboard. “I’m ready to get my hands dirty again. Why don’t you take over here?”
“I do like a good system,” she said, scanning the list.
“C’est parfait,” Sébastien said as I took his arm and we walked up the stairs and through the foyer, where Isaac’s team was creating an acoustical collision of power tool screeches, and then into the cavernous space where Chase’s team was removing all the drowned pews. The venue wasn’t an opera house at all but a converted nineteenth-century church. It still retained most of its original form. Stone archways led from the foyer all the way to the stage, where the altar had been, and arched windows lined the long walls. Every pane of glass had been blown out by the Storm, giving the old structure a medieval feel. Sunbeams poured in, spotlighting the multicolored patterns in the terrazzo floors.
“So what did Isaac think of the paper this morning?” Sébastien asked.
“You really have a warped sense of an average teenage morning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Isaac’s been here since five. I really don’t think he read the paper.”
“Wait. Have you read today’s paper?”
“Er . . . no.”
“Which do you want? The Times or the Pic?”
Oh shit.
He pulled them both out of his messenger bag and handed me the thicker one. The front page had the photo of Isaac.
UNNAMED HERO IDENTIFIED
Isaac Thompson, Son of Acting FEMA Director
The young man in the now globally famous photo, appropriately titled The Day the Levees Broke, has been confirmed as eighteen-year-old Isaac Norwood Thompson of New York City, son of now-acting FEMA director Norwood Bowen Thompson. The photo was taken by Julian Roddick the morning after the hurricane, which is now officially the biggest economic natural disaster in US history, with over ten thousand deaths. The photo captures Thompson holding a little girl up above the water as waves crashed over them from the Industrial Canal levee breach. She’s now been identified as Rosalyn Jackson, age six.
The article went on criticizing the atrocity that was FEMA, debating whether Isaac’s dad was cut out for the job. Pfft. Is anyone cut out for that job?
Jory leaned over my shoulder and took the paper from my hands. “The Corpse Whisperer’s in the New York Times?”
“That’s not funny,” I said, trying to take it back, but Chase reached over and grabbed it. A small c
rowd gathered around us as the paper was passed around, eliciting hoots and exclamations. I gave up trying to get it back.
The pages of the Times-Picayune in Sébastien’s hand fluttered in the breeze. My hair blew in front of my face, not wildly, but enough for goose bumps to prick the back of my neck. I turned, looking for him—Isaac was just standing in the front entrance, watching blankly from a distance.
A woman with a flannel jacket and a matching fur-trimmed trapper’s hat set the Times on the floor and clapped, slowly and purposefully, with admiration.
All heads looked to him, and everyone clapped with her.
More people came in from outside: students, first responders, lots of neighborhood folks, even the mayor. The newspaper fluttered away—Celestina chased after it and then ran back to Callis.
The chandelier began to sway, and the breeze poured in through the blown-out windows like flooding water, but no one blinked an eye, because in south Louisiana, no one ever questioned a cool breeze; you prayed for them.
Callis glanced at me from across the room, and Désirée motioned for me to do something.
I hustled over to Isaac, who was gazing out at the crowd, a million miles away. The breeze picked up.
“Hey,” I whispered, sweeping my hand over his lower back. “Just smile.”
“Aw, guys,” AJ called out, “did you know we’ve been working with a hero this whole time?”
A bunch of people in the crowd laughed playfully.
“Of course we knew,” said Betsy, whose southern accent rivaled Dixie Hunter’s.
“It will be over in a sec,” I whispered. “Just smile.”
“I don’t want to smile.”
“Well, you’re going to have to channel your inner southerner and suck it up.”
The corner of his mouth cracked. “What a very New Yorky thing to say.”
“Learned from the best.”
Désirée folded her hands into boxes around her face.
“What is she doing?” Isaac asked, now really trying not to smile.
“Voguing. I think?” It was quite possibly the only time I’d ever seen Désirée do anything silly—it was confusing. Funny but confusing.
“The award ceremony is tomorrow.” Isaac’s voice mellowed along with the wind. “I’ve tried everything I can to get out of it.” He turned to me. “Do you think . . . you could come? Maybe Mac would even want to come to this stupid thing?”
For something so “stupid,” he sounded completely stressed out about it. I hooked my fingers in his. “Sounds like the kind of thing he’d wake up for.”
He kissed my cheek, which brought on insta-blush.
“All right, break time’s over,” he said to the crowd, and just like that he switched back into work mode and sent everyone scattering. When he thought no one was looking, he grabbed the copy of the Times-Pic from the floor and dumped it in the trash.
He scooped Celestina up, throwing her up to his shoulders. “We have a new recruit,” he said, moving his team to the back of the church, where the altar would have been. “I hear she has years of experience with electrical work, which is just what we need.”
She erupted with giggles.
My heart swelled a little. The image was a stark contrast to the one of Nicco killing Maddalena, which still roosted in the back of my head a week later.
A hand touched my shoulder. “It frustrates me how impossible it is to hate that kid,” my father said.
“Dad, you don’t need to hate him.” I sighed. “I wasn’t even with him the night I broke curfew.”
“You mean the night you didn’t come home, leaving me to think you were dead?”
I nodded.
“Then where the hell were you?”
“I . . . broke into the school library and fell asleep reading from one of the textbooks since we don’t have our own copies; the next thing I knew it was morning.” It was getting increasingly difficult to lie to my father. I hated it.
His brow crinkled. I prayed the story was ridiculous enough to believe. “Why didn’t you just tell me that?”
“Uh, the whole breaking-into-school part seemed a bigger offense than sleeping with—at—sleeping at Isaac’s.”
“Jesus, Adele, you nearly scared me to death. You have to be more responsible. Curfew. Crime.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But don’t be mad at Isaac.”
“I’m not mad at him . . . I’m just not as ready for the next phase of your life as you seem to be. The phase with boys and college, and without me.”
From the way he tensely squeezed my shoulder, I knew there was more coming. “And also—You know, you can tell me if you’re thinking about having . . . Just. You can tell me anything.”
“Dad.”
“I’m serious, Adele. I just want you to be safe. I know I’m not your mother, but if you need anything I want you to come to me. And I promise no harm will come to Isaac.”
“Got it. You can tell me anything too.” I smiled up at him. “And thanks.”
His arm slid around my shoulders, and mine slid around his waist, and we both just stood there for a minute, watching Isaac work—me really hoping he wasn’t imagining the things I was imagining.
“I worry about him,” he said, kind of out of nowhere, but kind of a long time coming. “You know there are trauma counselors on base specifically for first responders? I looked into it.”
“He won’t even talk to me about it.”
“Of course he doesn’t want to talk to you about it. He’s in love with you.”
“Dad.”
“Be careful with him, sweetheart.”
I don’t know how we went from my father telling me he wouldn’t hurt Isaac to him telling me not to, but we both just stood there for a minute, watching him, and the butterfly wings inside were back to brushing against my heart.
The band moved to the backyard, and more and more people showed up: the Daures and Blanche. Ren and Theis with a live-in friend whose green hair had faded to a bile hue. Most people in the city had gained a couch dweller or two or ten: friends and family waiting for FEMA trailers, or for insurance claims, or for their jobs to come back.
There must have been three dozen people working in the backyard, draining fountains of sludge, picking up trash, raking leaves, hacking back bushes, and pulling up dead trees. A group of children gathered up the scattered bricks that used to be the footpaths.
Callis dropped a shovel to the ground and tugged a tree root. Seeing him made me think about Nicco, which curdled my Isaac warm and fuzzies like spoiled milk.
I should have hated Nicco even more after the front-row view into his monstrous behavior, but somehow it had the opposite effect: it made me empathetic, which made me disgusted with myself.
Day and night the argument went full circle in my head. Nicco hadn’t always been that way—he doesn’t deserve to be eternally trapped. Always landing back on the fact that he was a monster now. A monster who was after me and my family. A monster who’d terrorized Callis. A monster who needed to be stopped.
But, then, whatever logic I applied to Nicco I had to apply to my mother, which was infinitely harder. And the more I humanized my mom, the more I humanized Nicco, and it was just one eternal Möbius strip. Clearly, I’d be the first to go in a zombie apocalypse.
Callis’s face dripped dirt and sweat while he wrestled with the slippery root. He looked so much healthier, cheeks even showing a little color. I hoped he was on the road to getting his Elemental back.
“Do you need some help with that?”
“Please,” he said, holding the root out to me. “On the count of three.”
He counted off, and we both heaved, but the root didn’t budge. God only knows how many decades—or centuries, even—it had been buried in the ground.
We tried again, but I slipped and landed on my ass.
I laughed. “This is really a job for Dee.”
“I beg to differ,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm. “You
could do it. You’re just not trying hard enough.”
I lowered my voice as I stood. “Oh, I meant magically.”
“So did I.”
“Yeah, maybe if the tree was made of iron. Or silver. Or steel.”
He softly laughed. “Is that what you think? That your telekinesis is limited to metal?”
“Given that I’ve never been able to move anything but metal. Oui.”
“Get up. Grab the root.” He came behind me, gripping it as well. “Close your eyes, and picture the root.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Don’t think of it as a root; think about it as positive space. When you’re ready, think about the ground. Now don’t think of it as dirt and grass and earth. Just think of it as all of the negative space surrounding the positive space—the root.”
I let out a little laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing. You just sound like my dad.”
“Clearly, a brilliant man. Okay.” He lowered his voice. “Telekinesis is about moving objects, but you, my dear, are better than that. Don’t think about moving this object. Think about removing it. Evulsing it from one point of negative space—the ground—to another, the surface. Mentally excavate the positive space from the universe, and place it in another point.”
“Scratch that. You sound more like Copernicus.”
“Focus.”
My eyes slipped shut, and I mentally pulled.
Mentally pulling turned into mentally straining. It was like trying to hear something so faint you’re certain the sound isn’t there.
His hands slipped over mine, and a jolt of energy shot up my arms, knocking us back to the ground, Callis involuntarily breaking my fall.
“Yeah . . . exactly. Like that,” he said, pushing me off as heads turned our way.
A round of applause came from the nearest volunteers—the root had ripped out of the ground all the way across the yard. It must have been thirty feet long. Nervous laughter slipped from my lips after having used magic so openly in front of so many people. Not that we’d done anything superfishy, other than rip out a pretty large root with the combined muscle mass of a large turkey.