by Lisa Maxwell
Before she’d walked off into the swamps and left me behind, my mother had whispered to me secrets that her mother had taught her. Secrets of blood and life, of power and magic so thick it could smother a person. My whole life I’d hidden away those secrets from the hateful eyes that looked at my skin like it was my fault. From those who saw her in my blood, like I had any choice.
But I’d use those secrets now. I’d save him.
Taking the bright blade of the knife, I made the smallest of incisions in his palm. He didn’t so much as stir this time, so I pressed the knife deeper, carving through the skin of his hand, following the strong, steady curve of his lifeline. As the blood welled, dark and shining in the flickering light, my mouth formed words that my tongue had never tasted. Words I hadn’t even realized I knew.
When his palm was filled with the inky darkness of his own blood, I took the small figure and I placed it in the pooling blood. Dark rivulets ran over the edges of his cupped palm, staining the material of my skirt, but I didn’t waver. Ignoring my ruined dress, I twisted the little carved man until it was coated with Augustine’s lifeblood.
My mouth kept on chanting those strange words until my throat went hoarse and the blood began to slow. Gently, I bound up the wound and placed his bandaged hand back on the bed. Only then did I allow myself to relax any, satisfied at the work I’d done.
Only then did I allow myself the pleasure of pressing my lips to his.
As I pulled back, the sleeping man’s eyelids flew open. But all I could see was the whites of his eyes.
I jerked away from the carved doll and gasped as I came back to myself. I wasn’t wearing a long, roughly spun skirt but the same shorts I’d had on earlier. We weren’t in a fire-lit room but still in Dr. Aimes’s cluttered office.
“Did you hear anything I just said?” Piers asked, his tone dripping with irritation.
“What?” My voice came out breathy and unsure.
He let out a sigh. “See, this is exactly what I was telling you. You’re not ready for me to go anywhere yet.”
I tried to focus on what Piers was saying and not on the fact that I might be losing my mind. “I’m fine,” I said, failing miserably to keep my voice steady. “I just got a little lightheaded or something.” I couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “It’s stuffy in here,” I added, which wasn’t exactly a lie.
Piers took me gently by the arms and brought his face down to mine. The irritation in his expression had been replaced by concern. “You still feel lightheaded? Do you need to sit down?”
I could still practically feel the man’s lips against mine, and I felt unaccountably guilty. I had to force myself not to pull away from Piers. “I just need some air. I’ll be fine,” I said, hardly able to breathe with him so close, watching me like he was waiting for me to prove him right.
“Okay. Let’s get you some air.” Piers finally released my arms to put the lid back on the box. I wasn’t sure if it was him giving me some space or that the box was closed that made it seem like air in the room around me sighed with relief.
I didn’t think Piers had any idea what had happened to me. Whatever that vision had been, it was clear he hadn’t seen or experienced it.
I took a breath, forcing myself to hold it together. There had to be some sort of magic clinging to that dark charm that caused the vision, and I was more certain than ever Piers needed to be the one to take it to Nashville.
Even the sultry warmth of the evening air didn’t make me feel any better. I knew I needed to tell him about what happened when I touched the charm, but he was acting so protective and nervous about me being a little lightheaded that I couldn’t seem to find the words. I told myself that I only needed a few minutes of peace to let my thoughts settle and to figure out what I wanted to say, but Piers kept hovering so close.
The farther we got from the charm, the more unreal it all felt, and I told myself that maybe I’d only imagined it. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the image of my skirt stained with blood and the whites of the man’s sightless eyes.
Four
Outside, we found Lucy waiting for us on the deep-set front porch, but then T.J. bounded up to us and wouldn’t be shooed. We couldn’t get rid of him without being mean, and we couldn’t talk about curses and dark magic in front of him, so Piers ended up leaving before I found a way to tell him what had happened when I touched the charm.
I didn’t feel like hiding anything else that night, so I made up an excuse about being tired and turned in early. After I washed up, I ran my fingers along my scalp, scratching it a bit as I studied myself. I might look just fine with my hair so short, but I didn’t think I’d ever get used to feeling so naked and exposed. For as long as I could remember, I’d looked out at the world through the dark frame of my curtain of hair, but now, everything seemed a little off. The whole world seemed a little too close.
Studying my profile in the mirror, I searched my face for I don’t know what. Some hint of my mother’s features? Or maybe I was looking for some hint of my mother’s evil? But the only face that looked back at me was my own.
I didn’t have any more doubts that my mother was powerful, and I knew enough about what had happened to understand she was most likely evil. But I couldn’t shake the idea that evil doesn’t sing you to sleep when you’re up with worry or keep you alive when you’re burning with fever. I’d always believed that evil doesn’t know how to love.
But when I thought about the vision—the way I’d felt drawn to the sleeping man on the bed, the warmth that had flooded through me when my lips touched his—I wasn’t sure I understood what evil was at all anymore.
I raised my hands to my own mouth and tried to rub the feeling of that man’s lips from my skin, but it didn’t work. The memory of the soft warmth of his mouth against my own clung to me like a spiderweb.
Even after I’d climbed under the covers and tried to fall sleep, I couldn’t shake the memory of the vision. The vivid reality of it. I knew almost instinctively that what I’d seen had something to do with Thisbe. She’d been working some sort of spell to bind the sleeping man to her, but I couldn’t quite let go of the idea that I hadn’t sensed any malice when she sliced through the man’s lifeline, only calm certainty and affection. I didn’t know what to make of that either.
She’d thought of her mother, too. The hurt and anger that had throbbed through her heart when she thought of being left behind still made my throat feel tight and my eyes ache. Or maybe that was my own hurt, my own understanding.
Finally, I found sleep, but it wasn’t restful. All night, I dozed on and off, plagued by strange dreams of a lonely grove of pines. The cool night air was filled with the sharp bite of resin, and the world was still and completely silent. No insects buzzed in the trees. No breeze could be heard rustling the branches. And no matter how far I walked, I never found the end of the grove.
Above, the endless pines towered into the sky like the roof of a cathedral. They were so thick, so dense I could barely make out the stars above. Moonlight found its way down to the ground below in narrow shafts, like dim spotlights revealing a path through the forest. But the path never led anywhere.
After wandering for days or weeks or lifetimes, I stopped, settling myself against the base of a pine, and waited. And as I waited, something stirred in the trees beyond. I couldn’t hear it, but I sensed it and I knew that something was out there. Pacing. Hunting.
I stood, bracing myself against the rough bark of the tree behind me. Waiting. I didn’t even breathe.
You really think I would ever leave you behind?
The voice came out of the darkness, soft and low, and it echoed through my mind. Flesh and blood. Heart and soul, baby girl. Then softer, like a promise or a prayer. Soon, baby girl. Very soon. You’re meant for great things.
I knew that voice as well as I knew my own. “Momma,” I screamed, looking around the dark grove for the source of the sound, wanting an answer. But not even my own words came back to m
e. The pines were silent, and I was alone.
Or maybe I wasn’t, because right before I woke up, I felt something in the darkness smile.
Sometime after dawn, I pulled on some clothes and eased myself out of the house into the hazy morning air. At first, I sat on the front steps trying to shake the unsettled feeling my dreams had given me, but I was too restless and needed to move. Before I’d really consciously decided where to go, I found myself walking down the path that led out, away from the big house, to the fields beyond.
Even once I realized where my feet were headed, I didn’t turn back. Resolute, I made my way through the tall grass on the far side of the plantation’s property, through the wooded area surrounding the pond, and out toward the abandoned cabin they all said my momma used to call home so many years ago, when she still called herself Thisbe.
The cabin was small and low to the ground. Spindly pines partially hid the ancient-looking structure from view. Some of the trees still had the remnants of faded, rust-colored string hanging from their branches. Someone had cut the bottles down that had hung there, and now the wisps of thread, like forgotten webs, were all that remained.
I hesitated as I studied a burned-out spot a few yards away from the cabin, but I’d come this far. I wasn’t going to turn back now.
As I stepped a little closer, into the copse of trees, I kept expecting something to stop me, like it had at my own house. I waited, holding myself steady against the crushing defeat of being pushed away and held back from understanding once again. But as I took tentative steps toward the cabin, nothing seemed to be blocking my way.
Near about everyone in the area had heard tell of the lonely cabin just beyond Le Ciel Doux. Most people heard stories about the ghosts that supposedly haunted the woods and swamps around it and stayed away. I’d never been out to the cabin myself, not even after the university managed to buy the property. At least, I didn’t remember going out there, which in my case doesn’t really amount to the same thing.
But standing a few steps from the front door, I wasn’t in no hurry to face whatever it was I’d come to face. So I waited in the lacey shade and tried to imagine what the place must have looked like way back when an ex-slave named Thisbe lived there. I tried to see the ramshackle structure through her eyes—what had that rusted-out roof been made of back then? What would that wide front porch have meant to a woman in her position? And why had she decided to stay once her owner—and father—had freed her, when she could have left that life behind?
I stepped toward the house and ran my finger along the uneven boards of the porch, closing my eyes as an image of the past rose up softly in my mind, the colors burned-out and faded like an old photograph. The cabin with its walls washed white in the heat of a summer day with its doors open and welcoming.
She must have been powerful even then to rise so far for someone in her position. I could almost see her, a little older than I remembered my mother ever being, but not quite old, sitting in the shade of that porch and never alone. Always surrounded by people who believed in her power and feared her because of it, but who knew she’d care for their needs just the same. As I imagined it, a warmth that felt like fingers began stroking down the tense cords of my neck. Easing out the knots that stress and sleepless nights had put there.
When I opened my eyes, the fingers disappeared. The cabin was gray and worn, the doors shuttered now instead of open.
Stupid. I was imagining what I wanted to feel. After the rooster and the curse on my house, I shouldn’t have had any illusions that my momma wanted anything to do with me, or at least nothing good. Giving myself a mental shake, I mounted the steps before I could change my mind. It took a bit of time to wrench open one of the French doors at the front of the house, but once I did, it was easy enough to step into the closed-up warmth of the interior.
Inside was dim and smelled strongly of new plaster and something damp and old beneath it. I detected another scent, too—something earthy and heavy—an almost oily smell that reminded me of the jars sitting on Mama Legba’s shelves. Maybe some herb I wasn’t familiar with? But I couldn’t tell if it was the ghost of a scent from years past or something more recent.
The interior of the cabin was mostly empty. The floors were worn in certain places where furniture might have once stood, and everything was covered with a layer of dust from the restoration the university was doing. But small as it was, it was a comfortable space, and the way the rooms flowed one into the next reminded me of my own house.
I took my time walking around, wondering what it would have been like to live there a hundred years ago. Imagining the furniture that must have stood against the walls.
The walls would have been washed white, I knew, to protect against the diseases that ran so rampant in the slave quarters. Like a little whitewash could stop cholera. And there would have been some furniture, maybe even a picture or two on the walls.
I ran my fingers along one of the jointed boards of the wall.
A finely wrought chest stood there, its wood gleaming darkly. Opposite, a velvet-covered settee …
I shook my head, disrupting the image. No way would an ex-slave woman in Thisbe’s position have had anything so fine as what I was imagining. And yet, if I closed my eyes … I reached out and pressed my hand against the wall again. All at once, I could see it. All at once, an image rose up stronger than before, wiping away my present and pulling me back, back into a distant past …
Strangers filled the rooms—and friends, too. But all of them wanting something. All of them needing something. All they had to give me in return was a couple of limp chickens or a few handfuls of meal.
And they would give it.
They’d give the fish they stole from their master’s stream, and the scuppernong they pilfered from the wild vines in the forest. They’d give near anything for one of my charms. Anything for the hope of something more than the narrow lives they clung to. Some would trade their very own soul for some protection against the dangers of this world.
Always filling up my rooms and wanting and needing. And not one of them ever bringing what I really needed. What I’d been waiting for so long.
I pulled my hand away, startled at the thoughts that had tumbled through my mind. The image had been so vivid that I could have reached right out and run my hand across the velvet. Still, I could almost smell the bodies with three days of labor clinging to their skin and feel the pressure of the crowd pushing down on me with their need, when all I wanted to do was breathe free. When all I craved was the cool night air and something else that I’d been missing.
But it wasn’t me that was missing and craving something. Like yesterday, I was seeing through another pair of eyes, feeling another person’s thoughts.
Yesterday, I’d thought that the vision happened because the charm still contained some of Thisbe’s magic, and I wondered if that explained this vision, too—maybe the cabin itself still held a bit of her power. But I didn’t sense any power here, not like I’d sensed the almost spiteful energy that radiated off that charm. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
I followed the rooms until I reached the back of the house. The university had recently rebuilt the fireplace there, and the new brick stood out strikingly red against the blackened remains of the hearth. The furniture in that room had been pushed up against the wall—a low bed, a worn cabinet with an amazing number of doors and drawers.
That room felt strangely peaceful. The whole cabin was silent as a grave, but the back room was somehow even more so. It felt like a private place, but nothing there looked like the mother I knew. Nothing felt like her.
I sat carefully on the low, platform-like bed, and the moment my hands touched the worn slats, the room around me shifted, changed …
A fire was burning low in the hearth, the room dark except for its subtle glow. On the low-slung bed was the body of a younger man with sharp features and hair like spun gold. His face was slack with something stronger than sleep.
; I bent over him, my mouth curving into a smile. “You’re going to give me more time,” my mouth said, moving on its own. “You’re gonna give me everything.”
I gasped, standing up and releasing my hold on the low bed, and when I did, the room came back to me as it truly was. But my heart was thundering in my chest, and my breathing was fast and anxious. It had seemed so real.
Forcing myself to take a slow, steady breath, I considered what had just happened. Slowly, because I wasn’t sure that I was making the right decision, I reached out and touched one of the small drawers in the cabinet next to the bed.
I pulled out the tiny man I’d made for that particular purpose, excitement coursing through my blood. Last time, it hadn’t worked. Augustine had left and he’d never come back. But this boy wouldn’t be going anywhere.
My other hand held a bloody knife, and I turned to the man lying still and barely breathing and I raised that blade …
When I pulled my hand back, the knife was gone. I was me again.
If I had any doubts about what was happening, that last vision erased them. The blond boy on the bed, the knife and the voodoo charm—Lucy had told me enough about her dreams for me to know that I was seeing what had happened in this place long ago. I was seeing Thisbe, but I wasn’t dreaming the way Lucy did when she learned about her own past life.
I looked at my hands in horror, not understanding what was happening or why. I’d never been able to see anything like that before, and I shouldn’t have been able to see anything like that at all, not when they’d taken my hair. That sacrifice was supposed to have stopped Thisbe from having any connection to me. I couldn’t let myself believe it had been for nothing.
But again, I felt the sensation of warm fingers stroking my neck.
My skin prickled, and the room felt suddenly too warm, like a fire was burning in the empty hearth. Every cell in my body said run, but I couldn’t.