by Rhodi Hawk
Trigger grinned, breathing through his mouth and wearing an expression that seemed far better suited to his previous, eleven-year-old self. “Superstitious on what? What’re they trying to get out of it?”
Ferrar’s expression tightened just a bit. “They’ve been told if any man can trap a ghost and bring him to the witch in New Orleans, she will reward him.”
“A ghost? Meaning…?”
“No one here is safe.”
Patrice thought of how her body had been left behind unoccupied while her mind was in the briar. “How did we … not get taken, then?”
“This place is easy to defend. The boardwalks are laid out like spokes on a wheel. We moved you to a different one from time to time. We prevent anyone from coming down your boardwalk. Francois is the commodore here, and he oversees everything. This is where the outlaws come to trade.”
Patrice looked down toward the end of the boardwalk, toward the center of the village. She could hear voices there now. See the torchlights flaring in anticipation of sundown.
Ferrar said, “And the village itself is very difficult to get to. We watch the channels carefully. When anyone approaches we see them long before they get here. Unless…”
“What?”
He shrugged. “Unless it’s a ghost. They come up through the boil.”
That stunned her. She tried to imagine an older version of herself, fresh from some other world, swimming to the surface.
Patrice looked out over the water. It appeared like any other bayou at sunset, reflecting the persimmon sky and throwing dancing cables of light across the shacks. The fine bubbles at the surface were masked by late season hatches and the fish that were feeding on them.
“We have to get Gil and Rosie back,” Patrice said.
“That’s what you said the last time you spoke to me. All these years, I thought I might be able to find them and bring them to you before you fell back to your body.”
Such weight in his voice. She looked at him, wondering, and grew quiet to the skin.
When her father used to go lost in the briar, he looked different—less human, more animal. His facial expressions lacked self-awareness. Even people who did not know him and did not speak to him could tell something was wrong. That they should be cautious.
“What did I look like? All those years. I must have been … so … wild.”
“I don’t know. Francois wouldn’t let me near you.”
That surprised her. “Why not?”
Ferrar shrugged. “A young lady, vulnerable. He was protective. Francois has spent the past six years guarding you two and the village itself. People who live here have had to fight for it. Every attempt by outlaws to enter the village has failed, because unless they give the signal, no one can get through the channel.”
“What’s the signal?”
“It changes. Sometimes it’s three bells sometimes it’s light flashes. He allows only the regulars.”
Ferrar paused, lifting his fingers to graze her jaw for just a fleeting moment. “You, he kept hidden from everyone. I saw you only by looking at your ghosts from a distance.”
Something about his expression. He was hiding some secret knowledge. Knowledge about her. She didn’t like that.
She said suddenly, “We have to go. Gotta leave here and meet our mother by sunset tomorrow.”
He frowned. “You do that, her men will kill you. Either that or take you away.”
Patrice and Trigger explained their mother’s ransom. As they relayed the details, Patrice started feeling sick all over again. How were they going to escape this without one or all of them getting hurt or killed? She finally believed it now, that mother was capable of killing them. She hated them that much. She hated that they refused to be what she wanted them to be.
Ferrar said, “I think it’s a bad idea. You don’t know how many times she’s sent bad men here to kidnap you. But that was in the early days. Now, when they come, they come to kill you.”
“We have to go,” Trigger said.
Ferrar turned to look at Trigger and was very quiet for a long moment. “What you don’t know, is many have tried to get your brother and sister. I have tried. Always, she sets a trap, and there’s bloodshed.”
“What exactly are you saying?” Patrice asked.
“I don’t think they can be helped.”
It landed on her like a punch to the belly. Patrice wrapped her hands around herself.
Trigger said, “Well you think wrong.”
Patrice turned to look at her brother and caught her breath. His face had gone so dark. She wasn’t sure if it was because he was older now or that he’d gone too cold in the briar, but he looked hard. Her Trigger.
He said, “We’re gonna get rid of our ma and get away safe, all four of us: Rosie, Gil, me and Patrice. This time we’re gonna pull it off and nobody’s gonna say any different, you get me? Old Socks?”
The way Trigger’s chin was set. The look of determination on his face. It gave Patrice a chill. Maybe a little too determined. It felt reckless.
Suddenly Patrice wondered if she was about to face the worst possibility of all: losing all three of her siblings.
Trigger was staring at Ferrar like he wanted to throw a punch. “You think I’m gonna leave them to rot you got another thing comin.”
“Easy,” Patrice said.
“Well how do we know he ain’t makin this up? He could be working for her, too!”
She had grown so accustomed to thornflies stinging her at the first hint of panic that she half-expected them to rise from the bayou and swarm her now. She tried to tamp down the anxiety. Trigger’s temper was about to boil over.
But Ferrar, he said nothing. He did not try to calm Trigger down. His face showed no expression of anger or chagrin or apology or even sympathy—only a distinct … listening. Patrice stopped herself from arguing with Trigger, even though she knew Ferrar was the best ally they had right now, and that he was the last person Trigger should be antagonizing. Ferrar was listening. Patrice listened, too.
Trigger stared at Ferrar for a few moments longer, and then slumped where he sat. “I’m sorry.”
She reached out and put an arm around her brother. His shirt was damp with sweat. The world on his shoulders. The sparse hairs on his face made him seem like an eleven-year-old playing dress up.
Eyes wet, he said, “We just gotta get them back.”
Ferrar nodded. “I understand. I will take you to New Orleans come first light.”
The sun was sinking, and the floating village was alive with voices though all Patrice could see were floating shanties and boardwalk and the winking flames of the torches.
fifty-two
LOUISIANA, NOW
MADELEINE WAS HAVING A hard time hanging on. Her thoughts were random and easily stolen by the sylphs. She caught swatches of conversation from the others:
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Body failin”
“Where Chloe at?”
“I think she failin too.”
And for one single moment, the situation became clear. Something was wrong with Chloe. She hadn’t come after them as aggressively as Madeleine might have expected. Madeleine guessed it had something to do with Chloe’s determination to find baby Cooper. Somehow, Chloe believed that baby could keep her alive.
And Madeleine was going to die unless she could get her hands on some antibiotics.
So she was now the beetle trying to bore its way out of the pitcher plant. Either Madeleine died and left Chloe to waste away to her death, or Chloe died and left Madeleine to waste away to hers.
And the sylphs were flying. And the briar world moved. And nothing seemed to matter. Ethan, Bo, and Madeleine’s own life were nothing more than old bayou tales told by firelight. She was heading somewhere new. A place where Daddy and her brother Marc had gone.
And then she saw Ethan.
* * *
CATCHING SIGHT OF ETHAN felt like ice water on her fevered body. Everythin
g snapped back into perspective. That she couldn’t lose him. That she couldn’t lose her own life. She remembered now.
He looked so tired.
They were in his lab at Tulane. Madeleine forced herself into full cognizance, separating two worlds. Her view of the laboratory was nested in deep coils of thorns. Tunnels of them. Creatures shifted out of view within the hollows.
Zenon and Josh. Gaston and Armand. Madeleine and Severin. They were all in the briar layer.
Ethan was in the physical world. Cheryl, too—Bo’s next door neighbor and the mother of his wheelchair-bound friend, Ray. And … Bo?
There. All but hidden. His feet were showing, but the rest of him was hidden inside a chamber that Madeleine knew was used for reading neural activity. She wouldn’t have spotted him herself if she hadn’t been looking. She could see only his sneakers just inside the chamber doorway beyond Ethan’s shoulder. And not just Bo’s sneakers—a second pair indicated another child was with him. Ray. His wheelchair rested against a wall near where his mother, Cheryl, stood.
And they were all watching, the river devils and the children of the briar. But had they noticed Bo and Ray? Gaston and Zenon were talking and were paying only half attention to what was going on in the lab.
“What, you sworn loyalty to the old lady?” Zenon said.
“Sworn loyalty? What is this, a black hand gang?” Gaston said.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Hell no, it ain’t a yes, it isn’t. I can’t stand that old bat.”
“So you’re open to a new way of doing things.”
Gaston lifted his hand toward Zenon as if blocking a glare from his eyes. “Son, I’m too old to be foolin with anything of the like.”
Madeleine looked at him, puzzled, but of course he must be trying to be ironic. “Too old” in his teens. She looked back toward those little boys’ sneakers and tried to swallow back her anxiety. Bo’s lumen glow was centered around his heart and belly and was therefore not visible. Ray, too, was well-hidden. One word from either of them and they would be discovered.
Madeleine whispered very quietly so that the others wouldn’t hear her, “Bo Racer. Keep still.”
To Madeleine’s dismay, Bo immediately started clicking. But he made only two clicks and then fell silent as he likely processed what was happening.
Madeleine held her breath, watching the others. There were enough ticks and whirs coming from the equipment in Ethan’s lab that Bo’s sound might have blended in. Gaston and Zenon and the river devils were now arguing, with Severin—Severin!—coming to Chloe’s defense.
“She alone knows the ways of bringing the thorns through to the other world!” Severin was saying.
Madeleine saw Bo’s feet draw up and disappear inside the chamber. He must have somehow heard and understood the warning. Madeleine imagined his hands moving in quick cuts of sign language to Ray, warning him to be silent. But Ray couldn’t move his legs out of view.
Zenon said, “We’ll talk about it later. Right now we got some scrubbin to do.”
He and Gaston and the river devils turned their attention back to the lab, where Ethan and Cheryl stood front and center. Both wore that residual lumen glow. The glow looked different on a non-lumen. Whereas inside Bo, the light seemed to be emitting from within, on the others it looked like reflections of light. A mirror to a flame.
“What are we doing here?” Madeleine said to the others in hopes of drawing away attention.
“Look who’s up and at ’em,” Zenon said.
Gaston stepped toward her. “Hang in there, Miss Madeleine. Keep your mind bright and your body might follow.”
Zenon grinned. “She’s fine. This’ll wake her up.”
In the lab, Ethan was saying to Cheryl, “Thanks for bringin his schoolwork.”
Cheryl said, “Like I had a choice? You know my boy ain’t gonna stand for bein away from him too long.”
Madeleine raised her voice. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
But they were ignoring her now. Fixated on Cheryl and Ethan. If Madeleine could somehow shut those two up she surely would. She was too weak, and their lumen stain made pigeoning difficult. But this made it difficult for Zenon to pigeon them, too.
Cheryl and Ethan had stopped talking. They were both looking at the doorway. In it stood Oyster.
Madeleine gasped at the sight of him. He was standing with his kerchief around his throat and the paint stains mottling his mouth and nostrils like bruises. In his hand was the white plastic dollar-store bag he’d taken from the box of saltines in his mother’s kitchen. He reached inside it and withdrew a gun. Not a flashlight. An actual gun. The plastic bag drifted to the vinyl tiled flooring.
Madeleine funneled her mind on Oyster: “Put the gun down!”
But Zenon was also leaning on him. Had already had him in a long hold.
Oyster raised the weapon.
“No!” Madeleine cried.
Time slowed. With it came the sting of the thornflies. They swarmed her as she watched. Their sting carried a paralysis with it.
Ethan lunged forward.
The gun fired. A sudden cracking sound and a flash of light.
Gaston was at Madeleine’s side, and she realized she’d been screaming.
Gaston spoke to her in a gentle voice. “It’s alright, Miss Madeleine. Let’m do what they need to do. They stained. Been around lumens. They got to go.”
“It’s Ethan!” Madeleine screamed.
Gaston looked back at them. “Your sweetheart?”
Ethan had hurled himself at Oyster and knocked his arm down. The bullet went astray, burning through the vinyl tile to the floor below.
Madeleine cried, “Leave them alone!”
Zenon was watching Oyster and Ethan.
Ethan pried the gun from Oyster’s fingers and was shouting at him. “This ain’t you, kid! This is someone else taking hold of your thoughts! You want to be a slave to some fool?”
Ethan handed the gun back to Cheryl and kept both hands on Oyster, trying to shake some sense into him. Cheryl had gone ashen and like Madeleine, was covered in thornflies. Only Cheryl couldn’t see them. She probably couldn’t feel their stinging. Madeleine understood that the thornflies must be heightening Cheryl’s anxiety without her even knowing they existed. Something else, too—a humanlike creature that must be Cheryl’s river devil, hovering over her shoulder. The gun was shaking in Cheryl’s hand. Panic and dismay. Chaos. All that chaos. It sucked Bo’s light right out of her.
Zenon’s lip curled back in a hateful smile.
Gaston had his arms around Madeleine and was talking to Zenon. “Alright. Leave the sweetheart alone, yeah? We figure out what to do about that another time.”
Cheryl’s expression changed. The fear left her. She raised the gun and pointed it at the back of Ethan’s head.
“No!” Madeleine screamed.
The thornflies rendered her useless. She ought to be able to take hold of Cheryl now that the light inside her was gone. But Madeleine couldn’t function through her own panic. The drain of her sick, weak body dragged at her very consciousness.
Gaston was staring hard at Cheryl. Cheryl’s grip on the weapon faltered. And then she turned it to her own cheek in a salute—and fired.
So fast. It was over in a second.
Ethan turned. Cheryl’s body lengthened, and then crumpled. The hole at her temple was nothing more than an anthill. But then it wept blood, and Cheryl was on the ground.
Madeleine’s eyes turned toward the chamber where Bo and Ray were still hidden, Ray’s sneakers still dangling within view. He likely had no idea his mother had just shot herself. That his life was about to change forever.
Cheryl’s devil watched her body for a moment, then raised its eyes to Armand. Armand stared back, mouth open. The other devil turned and receded into the tunnels of thorns.
“You killed her,” Madeleine said.
Gaston was holding her arm. “It was her or your sweetheart, h
oney. We can’t let them lumens take over. She’s stained.”
“The light had already left her!” Madeleine said.
“Once stained, it comes back all too easy. Just like you make someone a pigeon once, you don’t have to try all that hard to do it again.”
Madeleine was straining to see beyond into the laboratory, but for some reason she could see nothing. She looked at Gaston, right beside her, and couldn’t see his face at all.
“Madeleine leaves us now,” Severin said.
Zenon said, “What? Keep her alive for chrissake!”
“How do you suggest I do that?” Gaston said.
“I don’t know! Get back to your bodies!”
Severin’s voice: “But Chloe wishes for—”
Zenon said, “Chloe ain’t one of us! Madeleine dies, you gonna be just another cockroach in here. You know what’s good for you, take’r back to her body and let the hairy skink boy fix her up.”
But their voices were mere sound fractals and made little sense to her. Madeleine was striving to find out whether Ethan and the boys were OK. If she really was going to die, let it be knowing that they at least were OK.
fifty-three
BAYOU BOUILLON, 1933
PATRICE HAD TO VISIT the willow tree and that was all there was to it. She wished to high heaven she’d just listened to Francois when he’d told her to use the bucket. Now she had to go urgently, and couldn’t bear the thought of using the bucket with Ferrar around even if he waited outside the shack. It just seemed it would make her low.
Ferrar agreed to walk with them to the tree and back. She was relieved to get going and walked quickly so that they had to keep up. She didn’t want Francois to find out they were using the willow instead of the bucket. How could she possibly explain why, and even if she did, he wouldn’t understand.
Trigger was happy to walk to the willow again, too, if only for an excuse to move. Their bodies wanted to stretch forth, to run, to swim, to move in uninhibited strides—luxuries denied them for six straight years. They would run down the boardwalk just to feel the physical burst of sensation if circumstances were different. The deep twilight provided plenty of camouflage from anyone who might be looking for them. The light level was at that in-between stage that made things more difficult to see even than in full darkness, when torchlight highlighted movement. Now, everything looked black and white like a photograph. They walked silently, listening to the voices of traders and bootleggers all around. Patrice and Trig paused just before the center of the spoke, the heart of the village, while Ferrar advanced and waved them across when no one was looking their way. As she crossed to the other side, Patrice saw Francois seated on a barrel in front of what appeared to be a shop. He was looking the other way, toward a group of men.