Gathering Deep

by Lisa Maxwell

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  Gathering Deep © 2015 by Lisa Maxwell.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  First e-book edition © 2015

  E-book ISBN: 9780738746043

  Book design by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover images by iStockphoto.com/11307378/©martinedoucet

  iStockphoto.com/14427275/©Kubrak78

  iStockphoto.com/32752266/©vectorarts

  Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maxwell, Lisa, 1979—

  Gathering deep / Lisa Maxwell. — First edition.

  1 online resource.

  Sequel to: Sweet unrest.

  Summary: When Chloe Sabourin suspects that her mother has returned with her dark magic, she joins forces with the mysterious Mama Legba and ends up in a desperate race to rescue her boyfriend Piers. Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. ISBN 978-0-73874604-3 () — ISBN 978-0-7387-4542-8 [1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Occultism—Fiction. 3. Vodou—Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction. 5. African Americans—Fiction. 6. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M44656

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015033060

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  Flux

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Helene, AdriAnne, Kate, and Kathryn:

  Who helped to make this whole crazy ride a little more sane and whose words inspire me every day.

  Once upon a time is for fairy tales, and besides, there

  ain’t no once about it. There’s only still is and ever was.

  After

  Hair don’t weigh no more than a soul, but taken all together, it’s got the sort of gravity that anchors a person.

  Shh. Shh. The scissors whispered their sharp commands, and pieces of who I was fell around me. I wanted to scream, to tell them I’d changed my mind. But I couldn’t seem to make my mouth form the words.

  Shh. Shh. Like each snip of those blades was telling me Hush, hush. There ain’t no use in arguing, so hush now.

  Two more coils slid into my lap, but my hands were clasped too tightly to bother with catching them. Even though I could almost feel the bite of my fingernails through the bone-deep numbness that had wrapped me up tight, I couldn’t make my hands let go. It felt like I was trying to hold myself together.

  Not that there was any reason to catch the pieces. As soon as they fell, the coils of hair were taken from my lap and tossed into the fire, where they crackled in fury.

  But the scissors weren’t done. Shh. Shh.

  My momma always told me that I’d come into the world quiet, wide-eyed and ready, and with hair that was already locking on the crown of my head—a sign of who I would be. She told me to never let nobody cut it. Ever. She said cutting it would be a sin against who I was. But my momma was gone, and everything I’d ever been was balled up so tight, it didn’t feel like anything worth preserving.

  There was something else inside of me now, though—a scratching thing. Maybe that part had always been there, just waiting for its chance to break free, to claw and tear at the world until the pieces could never be put back. With each coil of hair that tumbled to the floor, that deep-down part of me became more and more unsettled. More and more sure.

  Shh, the scissors whispered. Don’t tell them how much you want their world to feel like yours. Shh.

  I couldn’t have argued with that whispered demand even if I wanted to. Because they were all still watching me with ready eyes, waiting for the shell of who I was to break.

  Too late, I wanted to scream. But the words wouldn’t come.

  Shh, the scissors ordered, so I didn’t tell no one that a part of me wanted to tear at their eyes and claw at their unbroken lives. Shh. I didn’t warn nobody that a part of me felt so much bigger than what my skin should contain.

  With each lock that tumbled into my lap, my head felt lighter, but my soul felt the weight of something more dangerous.

  One

  I don’t care what anybody says, the house looked angry. Its shuttered windows were like narrowed eyes, and its once-welcoming porch reminded me of a broken smile. Like it was just waiting, and not for anything good.

  Piers touched my elbow gently when I didn’t get out of the car right away. “You don’t have to do this, Chloe.”

  I shook my head, wanting like crazy to agree. It would’ve been so easy to turn around and go back to his apartment in the Quarter, but I’d been there two weeks already, and I was already starting to hate the way he was so careful around me. He handled me like I was spun from glass and hovered over me all the time, like he didn’t trust me to be okay without him.

  Or maybe it was that he didn’t trust me.

  Not that I blamed him for that, really. It had been barely more than two weeks since everything had happened, and I wasn’t sure that he should trust me. I wasn’t so sure I trusted myself.

  I wiped the sweat that was already beading on my forehead. It was too damn hot to sit in the car anymore. The air conditioning hadn’t worked right in my old Nova since it belonged to my momma, and the sticky heat of a Louisiana day in early August was maybe even worse than whatever I was going to find inside that house.

  It was just a house. Just my house.

  Giving the door handle a jerk, I forced myself out of the car. A moment later, Piers was by my side.

  “Are you sure about this?” The dark curve of his head against the blue of the sky and the unexpected contrast between his country-club style and the black-as-night runes on his right arm were as familiar to me as my own face. But for the last two weeks, things had been different between us. Fragile and dangerous all at once.

  “Sure as I’ll ever be,” I told him. Which, to be honest, wasn’t very sure at all.

  As though he could read my thoughts, he slid his broad palm into mine. Some of the anger and guilt I’d been feeling receded a bit as our fingers intertwined, but not all of it. The rest was still there, simmering below the surface. Some days, it took everything I had to keep all those hot feelings from bubbling over.

  Piers waited a couple of
seconds longer, giving me a chance to change my mind. He’d been arguing against me coming back to my house ever since I’d come up with the idea the day before. But I couldn’t back down now. The more he’d argued against it, the more I knew that I needed to do this for myself. And for us, too, because love’s a little like a fire—it won’t grow if it can’t get no air.

  I gave him a tight nod, and then made myself start toward the house.

  One step. Two. And then a few more, and we were standing at the foot of the steps that led up to the deep, shaded porch of my childhood.

  How many times had I climbed those steps, skipping up into the coolness of that shade? How many times had I sat there, the only place I’d ever really felt safe and sure? Sometimes in the evenings my momma would sit me in front of her and rub my scalp with her strong fingers as she hummed some old song or another. Sometimes we’d sit in silence, letting the evening settle around us until the night buzzed with cicadas and the stars blinked themselves awake, one by one. Always just me and Momma. She was my whole world.

  That was before I found out she was nothing but a lie.

  I took a breath and tried to shake off the black thoughts that had flown up and taken roost in my head like a murder of crows that wouldn’t be shooed. There wasn’t anything to be scared of. It was still my house. Sure, I was going to feel lonely and left behind when I went inside, but I already felt that way and I was still breathing, wasn’t I?

  I lifted my foot to take a step toward the porch, but I couldn’t seem to make myself keep going. Piers looked over, his hand tightening when he realized I’d stopped short.

  “I can’t,” I told him, my throat tight with all the things I was feeling but couldn’t say.

  “You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have anything to prove.” He brushed his thumb across my cheek and the tenderness of that one little touch about brought me to my knees. My Piers may look all tough and dangerous, but he has soft hands—a scholar’s hands.

  But he’d misunderstood. I hadn’t changed my mind.

  I had to force the words out past the tightening in my throat, past my own gnawing sense of dread. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t go up these steps. There’s something stopping me.”

  I pulled my hand out of his and wrapped my arms around myself. It was ninety-something degrees outside, but my skin felt like ice—and that was before I looked up at the door and finally saw what was waiting there for me.

  Piers’s eyes followed mine. I could tell when he saw it too, because his body went all tense-like. He cursed softly under his breath.

  “That’s what I think it is, isn’t it?” I asked him.

  He didn’t have to answer. There was no mistaking what we were seeing—a lifeless black rooster, hanging by its feet from the doorknob. Its blood had already gone dark and thick where it had dripped down from the missing head. Down to where it had pooled below, coating the threshold of the door.

  It’s not that I was scared of some rooster, dead and bleeding or not. No. It was that my feet felt like my shoes had taken on roots, and the air around me had gone thick and solid. I could barely breathe much less move. What kept my feet planted was something stronger than fear—it was something like magic. Dark magic.

  “Thisbe,” Piers said, using the name like a curse.

  It was still strange to hear him call her that. Before everything happened, it had always been Mina or Amina or Miz Sabourin. Or Momma.

  But that was before I lost whole days. Before Lucy Aimes and her family moved to Le Ciel Doux—the old plantation where I worked as a tour guide—and set everything in motion by unearthing the secret my momma had hidden for more than a century. Whatever had happened two weeks ago had killed any affection or respect my boyfriend once had for the woman who was my mother. Mina Sabourin was dead to him. There was only Thisbe now.

  Piers and Lucy and Mama Legba told me it was my momma who’d killed my friend Emaline. They told me my momma tried to kill Lucy and her little brother, too. They told me she was evil, that she’d used the darkest sort of magic to keep herself alive for more than a hundred years past when any natural life should end. They told me that she’d possessed my body and used me, too.

  I didn’t want to believe any of it could be true, but I know I never would have stolen a photograph of Lucy’s little brother so my momma could work a curse on him. And I don’t think I’m even capable of threatening Lucy, much less trying to strangle the life out of her, which is what they told me I did. But as much as I wanted to deny all of it, I had whole days I couldn’t remember. Whole days when those terrible things happened.

  My whole life, Momma warned me about messing with the spirits, so it was hardly believable that their stories about what she did could be true. But my friends’ proof sliced away at my doubts bit by bit, until the truth was bare and bleeding before me: A still-healing gunshot wound in Lucy’s shoulder. The look of disgust and fear in Piers’s eyes when he explained how my momma’s voice had come out of my mouth. And the fact that my momma never did come back after the night I woke up on the damp ground in a dark New Orleans cemetery without any notion of how I’d gotten there.

  So when Piers told me that it was the red threads my momma had woven into the coils of my hair when I was just a girl that gave her the power to control me, I didn’t have any fight left. I let them cut all my hair off, hoping it was enough to prove that I was on the right side of all this. I guess part of me had still been hoping against hope that my momma would come back and show everyone how it had all been some horrible misunderstanding.

  But there was no way to misunderstand the vise-like pressure in my chest when I tried to take another step toward my own house. The porch wasn’t even two feet away from me, and I couldn’t set foot on the first step. It felt like claw-tipped fingers were gripping my heart, like they were trying to suffocate my love for her right along with my life.

  I pulled my foot back and the pain around my heart eased enough so I could breathe again. “She don’t want me in there,” I told Piers, and I didn’t even care how my voice broke. “She made sure to keep me out.” Out of my own home.

  He took my face in his hands. Even warm as it was that day, I could feel the heat of him against my cheeks as he made me look into his eyes. “This isn’t about you, baby. This doesn’t mean anything at all about you.”

  But I knew deep down he was all sorts of wrong.

  At first, it had been a kind of numb shock that had kept my eyes dry after that night in the cemetery. Then, even with the constant ache building in my head, I’d refused to allow myself the luxury of grief. It would have felt too much like a weakness to give in to tears. So I’d held on to that ache as determinedly as I’d held on to the hope they were all wrong. Because allowing myself the freedom to cry would have meant an admission of my mother’s guilt. Maybe even an admission of my own.

  But something about that moment—the invisible wall that separated me from the only home I’d ever known, the ever-present pity and worry lurking in my boyfriend’s eyes, and the absolute understanding that he was wrong about what all this meant—made me stop fighting that ache and give in to the truth.

  The summer air was dead and still. No breeze dried the tears that traveled down my cheeks, so there wasn’t any reason for the bottles to begin rustling in the trees like they did. Clink clank clink, glass clicking against glass. I’d helped Momma hang new bottles each spring—always with the rough, red thread she kept just for that task. To keep the bad spirits away, she’d told me, because red had a power all its own. Back then, I’d believed in her tales. I believed in her.

  As my chest heaved with the angry sobs I’d held back for two weeks, the dull clank of the glass bottles grew louder.

  Piers pulled away, sensing the danger, but I didn’t pay him no mind. My body was shaking with all I’d been holding back for days and days. I couldn’t have stopped the tears if I’d wanted to, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Because the overwhelming relief I felt when
the grief poured out of me seemed like the first thing that felt real in two weeks.

  Then, all at once, the bottles went still.

  I went still as well. A heaving sob caught in my throat at the unexpectedness of the silence around us. I waited with Piers for the unseen danger to reveal itself. I didn’t bother to wipe the tears from my cheeks, just watched for what would come next.

  As the first tear broke free from my cheek and tumbled to the ground, an invisible hand began cutting the strings on the bottle tree. Pop. Pop. Pop. One by one, the bottles fell in time with my tears, shattering the stillness when they hit the hard ground below. Shattering the last of my hope about my momma—and about who I might be—right along with them.

  Two

  Once the last of the bottles crashed to the ground, Piers didn’t waste any time in getting rid of the rooster. He took its stiff body by the feet and looked at the feathers dulled by blood for less than a second before he tossed the whole thing over the porch railing and out of my sight. Not that it made any difference—even once the blood was washed from the door, I still couldn’t go any closer to the steps of my own front porch.

  I didn’t know whether Piers had noticed that the bottles seemed to have dropped at the same rate the tears had fallen from my cheeks, but I didn’t think he had. He seemed more worried for me than afraid of me.

  But I’d noticed, and the idea that I might somehow have been the cause of that invisible wind or of the bottles falling like suicides made my blood run cold. So when Piers insisted on driving back, I didn’t argue like I usually would have. I was too shaken by what had happened, and for the first time in a long time, his watchfulness didn’t chafe.

  Mama Legba had been so certain Thisbe wouldn’t have a hold on me once my hair was cut off and the red threads woven through it were burned up. They’d all assumed the red threads were the same ones she’d used in her darkest spells, and that those threads were what had let her have power over me. But there wasn’t nothing natural about that wind or those bottles breaking—and my hair was gone.

  Either they’d been wrong about all that, or there was something else going on. I wasn’t sure which option worried me more, so I stayed on my own side of the car, thinking things through and trying to figure out what it could all mean as I watched my home get smaller in the side mirror and then disappear altogether.