by Rhodi Hawk
“I did. I learned.”
“Yes you did. Yes you did.”
The sound of floorboards creaking above. A soft thud.
Maman said, “Does it pain you to know that if you obeyed me all those years, you might be able to save those two? Does it? You can do nothing for them now. Because you were the one, Patrice, who defied me. You had the greatest skills. But you defied me and you turned your brothers and sister against me.”
“What do you want!”
“What do I want? I want you to do what you were born to do. Unlock secrets from the briar and bring them into the world.”
“You’ve got to let them go.”
“And then? Are you offering an exchange, ma p’tite? You for them? It is not impossible. All along, I’ve wished for you to be my ambassador to the river devils.”
If Patrice were speaking, she would have spoken her next words through clenched teeth. Instead they came from Mr. Chapman in a dull monotone: “Why would you ever want to commune with river devils?”
Maman simply smiled and shook her head. “My dear, if you would have honored me instead of turning on me, you would understand. To commune with devils is to control the chaos. To control chaos is to control everything.”
“I’ll take those bandits you keep around, and I’ll turn them on you.”
“Try that, and your brother and sister hang dead from the rafters before anyone can so much as touch me. It is only by my enchantments that they don’t fall.”
Patrice looked to the attic above. The cords around their necks.
Maman was shaking her head. “If only I could trust you. If I had you in my attic, you would let yourself die before you obeyed me. And Guy, his skills are duller than yours, but he can find things, yanh? He could find you. Maybe even get you free. Already, he was the one who found the other two and brought us to this.”
Maman looked thoughtful and said, “Maybe because we speak their names. Easier to find when we speak their names aloud.”
Maman shrugged. “It is no use to hide them from you. You must be compelled of your own heart. You must step to me; I cannot pull you. But the only offerings I have for one of my children are the lives of my other children.”
And as Patrice listened, she knew there was only one alternative. Take this man Jacob Chapman and make him strike her mother down. Kill her in defense of Rosie and Gil and Trigger. Killing Maman was the only way Patrice could make sure her siblings survived. If Patrice were quick, Rosie and Gil would be safe because Tatie Bernadette was still feeding them up in that attic. For the present at least, they weren’t in the rafters.
But Maman seemed to have guessed what she was thinking because she seized something from the table and raked Mr. Chapman across the face.
Patrice watched, reaching for him though she knew it futile, and she felt her pigeonry sieve away from him. He sank to his knees, then all fours, and then he lay on his belly and closed his eyes.
In Maman’s hand was some kind of bird’s talon—a large one, from a raptor like a hawk or owl. “He is not dead. Just sleeping. I do not have your abilities, chère, so I must resort to common poisons and enchantments.”
Patrice could say nothing more to her now that Mr. Chapman had fallen.
Maman said, “Yes. It is clear I cannot trust you. You will not listen unless I spill blood. A good thing you have three siblings. Sacrifice one, and the other two might still be around to keep you interested.”
“You will sacrifice no one! No one! Do you hear me?”
But of course she didn’t hear her. Mr. Chapman had fallen and Maman’s sensitivities weren’t keen enough to hear Patrice in the briar.
Maman said, “And even if you were to surrender to me, Patrice, my second son, Guy, would eventually find you and free you. Wouldn’t he? He finds things. What is it you call him now? Trigger? He is your weapon. The one whose soul you sacrifice from your God so he can work the sins for you. I had a man like that. Bruce Dempsey. I sent him to bring my children to me, but Guy killed him, didn’t he? Your Trigger.”
Patrice couldn’t bear to listen. The thornflies were stinging her, but she barely cared. She just wished her mother would hush. If only Patrice could simply walk away from here with Trigger and Gil and Rosie, and never look back. Never see their mother again.
Maman said, “So now you must choose. You may come to offer yourself to me, and if I feel I can trust you, I will let the other two go. You trade one for two. That is a good bargain. But if you do not make this bargain with me, the other two die.”
Patrice listened, sick. It was monstrous.
Maman said, “From this day, I give Gilbert and Marie-Rose a poison. And then later I will give them something to tame it. You don’t know when they receive the poison or the relief. If you find a way to kill me, you risk that they die from the poison. You fail to come to me in two days’ time, I will let them die from the poison.”
Patrice felt a numbness that penetrated her soul. It would have been easier if Maman had asked her to lay down her life. Then at least it would have been over soon. That at least would have been an escape.
Maman turned her back to her then, the way she’d done so many times before. She settled into her chair and picked the newspaper up. Patrice didn’t move.
Mother looked up again, listening, watching, and then said, “Are you still there? Go back to your body. The tar devils will let all of you alone now. You come at sunset the day after tomorrow. Go to the ferry dock where we found you with the lumen, there by the new bridge. Then you may have Marie-Rose and Gilbert back.”
Patrice looked up toward the attic.
There in the ceiling, Trigger was suspended between the floor above and below. Leaning down as though from a tree limb. Listening. His expression was grave but when he saw Patrice looking at him, he gave her a wink.
fifty
LOUISIANA, NOW
MADELEINE HEARD SEVERIN’S LAUGH. She was doing somersaults in the air, jumping as though on a trampoline, and Madeleine watched from a bed of duckweed. It felt so good to escape that agony-ridden body. The infections, the overall heaviness.
She looked around. If she stared at any one thing—a tree trunk, a thorny vine—it would reveal itself to be crawling with life. Tiny beasts, creeping or flying, tasting nectar, hunting one another. Many of them had human-looking limbs or animal faces. They blended in with their surroundings and only came into view when Madeleine stopped and stared. Too easy to do that, stop and stare. Everything here absorbed her. A thousand distractions to keep her attention from the material world.
“There you are.” She saw Gaston emerge from the black woods.
Madeleine looked at him, remembering, and struggled to her feet on the duckweed turf. “Where are our bodies?”
“They safe for now in the village.”
“No Chloe?”
He shook his head. “Believe me, she ain’t got a prayer of finding her way to that place, doesn’t have one. But that other one? The one she was hiding you from with the spiderwebs?”
“Zenon.”
“Yeah, him. You ain’t wearin the spiderwebs no more, you’re not anymore. If he’s briar he can find you.”
Madeleine sagged. “Great.”
“Well, Miss Madeleine, he find you he’ll be findin me, too.”
Madeleine swallowed through a smile, taking his hand and squeezing it. So young. Loyal in the way a teenager swears an oath to his country before going off to war.
Severin pointed at Gaston. “This is not for you to attend.”
“I’m comin all the same y’overgrown spider.”
“Wait, where are we going?” Madeleine said.
Severin turned her scowl toward Madeleine. “To see the last child of the briar!”
Madeleine shook her head, feeling her heart grow cold. Chloe’s last attempt to get to Cooper.
“No way. We are not going anywhere near them.”
“Ah, but now you do as I say,” Severin said.
Gast
on squeezed Madeleine’s hand again, his voice gentle. “You ain’t in control here, Madeleine, not here and now. Chloe got you so messed up that both your body and your mind is failin.”
Madeleine looked at him, and it was true she felt very strange.
Gaston said, “Ya ain’t got enough to face off against your river devil. She want you to go somewhere in here she’ll just drag you along.”
Gaston turned to Severin. “An I bet you just crawled up into Chloe’s lap and purred!”
Severin glared at him. “It is a better thing that we do not bring them!”
“Them?” Madeleine said.
“She means me and Armand,” Gaston said, gesturing just beyond Madeleine’s shoulder.
Madeleine turned. Gaston’s river devil was standing there. Right there behind her. She stifled a gasp. Something in his manner, watching her with a predatory stare, she could tell that if she had screamed it would have somehow enticed him. She forced her shoulders and spine to her tallest posture and stared back. His breath held an odor of sourness like rotting teeth.
Armand said something to her in a deep whisper. It was French, old Louisiana river French, and she was slow following it. But she did catch the word vache.
She said, “Better a cow who can walk with humans than a river devil who can only whisper.”
His face peeled back in a sneer, exposing decay, and Madeleine turned her back on him. Gaston was looking on with galvanized interest.
But then, Severin began to move.
Against her will, Madeline was moving with her. She dug in, certain she was standing still, and yet she advanced along with Severin as she’d done back in Nova Scotia. Hands and feet and bodies in general were only illusions here. And she and Severin were bound together so when one moved in the briar, the other moved, too.
Madeleine threw a desperate glance at Gaston, who was keeping pace even though each step traversed miles. It almost seemed as though they were all standing still and the world was moving beneath them.
“Wait,” Madeleine said.
Severin paused and glanced back at her.
“I’ll go with you…” Madeleine began.
Severin laughed. “Of course you go! You have no choice!”
“But first we have to go to New Orleans. I need to see if everyone’s OK.”
Gaston looked doubtful. “Your man Zenon’s gonna be payin you a call any minute now. You sure you want him to see who you lookin in on in New Orleans?”
He was right. Madeleine wanted to see Ethan so badly she was almost tempted to risk it. Just to make sure he was alive. The not knowing was killing her.
But of course she couldn’t risk seeing him. If Ethan and Bo had managed to stay hidden from Zenon thus far, she wasn’t going to ruin it.
“Nothing to see, then, in New Orleans,” Severin said, and she turned back to the same path.
Madeleine said quickly, “No, there is. I want to see the baby. The orphan.”
“Ah, this is only to delay!”
“What’s it to you? Don’t we have all the time in the world? The longer I’m in here, the harder it is for me to leave the briar. Isn’t that true?”
Severin was scowling but she said nothing.
Gaston took Madeleine’s arm, whispering, “You playin with fire. It’s true, you get lost in here you may not find your way out. She ain’t gonna lead you free.”
Madeleine shook him off. “You remember, Severin. That baby? From that day under the bridge when Zenon used Shalmut Halsey as his pigeon. Shot all those people, including Del, and now that baby’s got no mother.”
Severin’s expression grew excited. “Yes, such as that. A lovely dance of chaos, truly.”
Madeleine’s eyes lifted to the sylphs that now drew in around them. Graceful, gorgeous. It seemed she could smell the skin beneath the satiny, brilliant-colored down. She couldn’t resist reaching up to pet one. It flew just out of reach.
Armand pointed at the sylphs and said something to Severin in French, and Madeleine realized that the sylphs had drawn her attention so that she’d already forgotten what she was doing. The material world suddenly seemed like a charming old legend. She shook off the sensation.
Madeleine said to Gaston, “I don’t like it. Why does Severin want to see Cooper? We already know where he is.”
“I wager it’s cuz this time the old witch is watching. She workin her spells so she see into the briar.”
“She can see us?”
“Just guessing. But probably.”
His gaze lifted to the trees, and Madeleine looked, too. And by looking she observed something she ought to have realized earlier—the coldness, the void. Always present in the briar but now it felt like it was slowly draining the very blood from her.
Madeleine said to Gaston, voice low, “But why would Severin even care what Chloe wants?”
“The old bat been spending the last eighty years figurin out how to get them devils to do her work, those river devils. She know how to charm’em. Got her own brand a devil, too—the ones that’re oily and wild. Start out workin for her but over time they just go feral.”
And then Armand had turned his attention back to Madeleine. He stood far too close, sour and seething, his gaze boring into her.
“Qu ’est-ce que tu veut? Pourquois l’enfant?”
Madeleine shook her head. “Just want to take a look, is all.”
Because she didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t let Chloe find her nephew, little Cooper, and his mother Emily. If Gaston’s existence was an example of what happened when Chloe got her hands on a child of the briar, Madeleine would do whatever it took to prevent it. She’d blurted out an interest in Del’s baby only as a means of distraction from Cooper.
The river devil was pointing at her, and when he spoke again he used English. “Who you follow? Zenon, or Chloe?”
Madeleine was taken aback. “What? Neither!”
“You follow Madeleine! Ha!” He grinned at Severin and gestured to the sylphs.
“Vas-y!”
Severin gave Madeleine a queer look but then resumed the journey. This time, Madeleine was sure they were not heading to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where Cooper and Emily Hammond lived in hiding. This time they were headed back to New Orleans.
* * *
MADELEINE HAD EXPECTED TO find a foster home or even an orphanage. Considering the fact that baby Declan had been homeless even when his mother Del was still alive, it seemed implausible that he had any relatives that could care for him. But this place was too given over to squalor to be a foster home. The woman who was looking after him had to be a relative. Probably Del’s mother. Natural that the child would be placed in the care of a grandparent after Del died that day in the shooting under the Huey P. Long Bridge.
There were coupon circulars and bills on the coffee table, all addressed with the name Cassel Whalen, and so Madeleine took it as the name of this woman. And Cassel didn’t resemble Del much but she did look like baby Declan—sort of. It seemed Cassel was missing most of her teeth which highlighted the fact that the shape of her mouth and chin were exactly like Declan’s. A distinctive pie wedge point to the jaw line. She was smoking something hand-rolled in front of the TV and sipping from a plastic tumbler of what looked like pink wine on ice.
Madeleine moved across the living room to where the baby lay in a car seat atop the kitchen table. He was crying, and his diapers were sagging and bunched, a bloom of red sores just below his navel.
Madeleine threw a fierce look at Cassel. “Change his diaper!”
Cassel looked over toward Declan’s car seat and then back at the television. Madeleine could tell the idea had registered but she seemed sluggish to heed it. Probably had had this idea on her own before but had gotten into the habit of ignoring it.
Madeleine grit her teeth and walked over to where Cassel sat on the sofa. She trained her mind on Cassel’s hand as she raised the tumbler and poured iced wine down her shirt.
Blinking at her hand
as though it were possessed, which of course it was, Cassel said slowly, “Fuck … my … life.”
Madeleine tried again, and this time Cassel rose from the sofa and slipper-shuffled to the kitchen table where little Declan lay. “Whatcha cryin for, sweet baby?”
She picked him up and patted his diapered bottom as she gazed out the window, humming.
And then a surprised look crossed her face. “Ooh, you wet.”
She laid him bare on the kitchen table and revealed that he was more than wet. Madeleine’s head was swimming. The room was breathing with black briar. Thornflies crept along the hardened stems, waiting for a sign of panic or anxiety or fury. She watched as one of them stretched its wings and combed it back, using its hooked forearm to clean itself from head to wing to stinger.
Gaston stood at Madeleine’s elbow, shaking his head. “I don’t get it. Whatchyoo doin exactly?”
She blinked, trying to remember where she was or why she was there. She saw the pointy-chinned woman changing the pointy-chinned baby and remembered she’d pigeoned that.
“I wanted to see what happened to this child,” she said.
“I mean, what are you doin? You come here knowin the babe’s gonna have it hard. Why you gotta see on that?”
“Because I’m human and I care.”
“You care because you got the stain. It ain’t doin you no good, it isn’t, not any. Let me clear it for you.”
Madeleine stepped back.
“I already done that.”
They looked. Zenon was standing near where Cassel was changing the baby, and his river devil, Josh, was there, too. Madeleine had never seen much of him beyond shadows and glimpses.
Zenon said, “Where you been, little sister? Hangin out with lumens by the stain in ya. I showed you how to get it out.”