Gathering Deep

by Lisa Maxwell

  “Hey—” I said, the anger and the hurt spiking all at once.

  The lights flickered again.

  “Chloe’s okay,” Mama Legba told him before I could say anything else. “Just because you have someone’s blood, don’t mean you have to become them. You of all people should know that, Odane.” She sent the boy a chastising look.

  Odane frowned as though her words had hit a nerve, and he didn’t say anything else.

  “Y’all ready?” Mama Legba asked us. “It’s past time

  we go.”

  “Don’t be going off mad,” her sister said.

  “Come on, girls,” Mama Legba announced, ignoring Odeana. This time she didn’t sound like she was asking.

  “At least let me drive you back,” Odane offered.

  Mama Legba looked like she wanted to refuse, but it had been a long walk and already the day was hot and sticky. “Okay, then,” she said. “But that’s all. Just take us back.”

  So he did. We wedged ourselves into the too-small cab of his rusted pickup truck, Lucy perched almost on my lap and my side pressed up against the warmth of Odane.

  Odane managed the traffic, and I tried to manage my thoughts.

  “How many days?” I asked.

  “What?” Lucy said.

  “Your sister said that if the aloe cured for a certain number of days, it could be used to summon Cimitière,” I told Mama Legba. “How many?”

  “Five days,” she said, her expression grim. “Sundown on day one to sunup on the fifth day.”

  “So if we’re right and Thisbe is the one who took it, we have a little less than a week to stop her?”

  “Less than that, Chloe-girl. That aloe has been in the black cat oil for a day already.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. None of us were, it seemed, because as Odane drove us the rest of the way through the narrow streets of the Quarter, the interior of the truck’s cab was silent, like none of us wanted to say a word.

  Twelve

  By the time we got back to Mama Legba’s shop, it was nearly evening.

  “Your parents know where you are, Lucy-girl?” Mama Legba asked once we’d climbed out of the Odane’s truck. “It’s getting late, and I don’t want them to be worried.”

  “I texted my mom back at your sister’s, so they know it might be a while,” Lucy told her. “We can help you straighten things up before we head out.”

  Mama Legba studied her for a second, like she was considering it. Finally, she shook her head. “No. I don’t like the idea of you two running around here once night comes. Not with everything that’s happened and might happen still. Y’all had best get on back.”

  “But your door—” I couldn’t imagine it was a good idea for Mama Legba to stay in a place that didn’t even have a door you could secure against the night and all its wildness.

  “I’ll take care of it for her,” Odane said. His words were friendly enough on the surface, but underneath, they sounded like a challenge. Like he was stepping forward to claim his family.

  Fine enough. I’d do the same if I had a family of my own to worry about.

  “Y’all need a ride over to where your car is?” he asked in an easy drawl that covered the tension I could feel radiating from him.

  “No. We’re only a block over,” I told him, and I sensed he was glad to have us gone.

  The ride back to Le Ciel was quiet, but uneasy. Seemed like Lucy didn’t want to talk about anything that had happened any more than I did. At least not at first, but right about the time we hit the highway leading to Le Ciel, she spoke up. Of course, she’d start with the very thing I didn’t want to think about much less talk about.

  “So this Cimitière guy, he’s bad?”

  Funny thing—a few months ago, Lucy could barely conceal her disbelief of anything to do with Voodoo. It hadn’t been all that long, but now she sounded like she really wanted to know.

  “I wouldn’t say that he’s bad, but from what I know, he’s not exactly good. I’ve always been told he’s more of a guide and guard for the dead than Death himself. He’s a trickster—a kind of spirit who doesn’t exactly play by the rules. He likes smoking, and drinking, and making deals that benefit him and him alone. From what my momma told me … ” Which was probably damning evidence right there.

  “Go on,” Lucy said after I hesitated.

  “From what she told me, Baron Samedi’s deals are all tricks. He always works something into the deal to make sure that he wins.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” I told her honestly. After all, my momma might have told me stories to warn me off, but I knew well enough that she’d left more out than she ever told me straight. “But I always got the sense that Baron Samedi would require something impossible from the person summoning him, and when the person can’t or won’t hold up their end, the deal goes south in a hurry.”

  Lucy seemed to consider what I’d said. “But if your mom was the one who told you this, she’d know she couldn’t make a deal with him.”

  “I would have said that my momma should know that, but who knows what Thisbe knows or thinks. Maybe she’s overconfident in her own power?”

  “Maybe,” Lucy agreed. “After what she pulled off with Alex to live for so long, I guess it’s possible.”

  “In a way, she’s already pulled one over on Samedi. She should have made his acquaintance some years back,” I said. “Still, I don’t know who she’d go to all this trouble to summon him for. She never talked about anyone … ”

  “What about Augustine?” Lucy said.

  I’d thought of that, too. “Maybe,” I told her. “But I don’t know for sure that he was real. Piers could be right—I could be dreaming or imagining what I want to think about my momma.”

  “But you don’t believe that,” Lucy said. I could feel her watching me. “You think there’s something to the visions and the dreams you’ve been having.” I was relieved that it didn’t sound like any kind of condemnation.

  “I do, but I also want some sort of proof there even was an Augustine before I put too much into believing anything about the dreams.”

  “Well, we can go back and ask my dad to get us into those records. We don’t need Byron to get them for us.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and even though everything seemed like it was tumbling down around me, I felt a little better. Because I had at least one person who still believed in me. One person who still seemed to be on my side.

  By the time we were almost to Le Ciel, the fields were ribbons of darkness spooling out, broken only by a single shaft of lamplight here and there. I blew through the wide gates at the entrance of the plantation land and guided the car into a spot next to Lucy’s family’s Volvo.

  “Any word from Piers yet about why he went to Nashville without stopping at Mama Legba’s?” Lucy asked as she opened her door.

  “I don’t think—” But when I clicked my phone on, a message was sure enough waiting for me. I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah.” Relief washed over me like water. “He sent me a text.”

  Lucy smiled as she adjusted her bag so it didn’t hit her camera. “And?”

  I looked at the five words on the screen:

  Change in plans. Talk later.

  It wasn’t much, considering how we’d parted. “He didn’t say much.”

  “Really?” Her face bunched in confusion.

  “We had a fight right before he left,” I told her. “He must still be irritated.” But it didn’t seem like Piers to be so short with me.

  Lucy frowned. “It seems weird that he would change plans like that, though.”

  I stared at the phone for a minute. The message was so damn short—I couldn’t get anything from it. “I think I’m going to try to get ahold of him before I come in.”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Lucy said as she went inside.

  I dialed Piers’s number. It rang for a while, and just as I thought it would click over to voicemail, he picked up. />
  “Piers?” I said after a second of awkward silence.

  “Yeah?”

  Even if his tone was gruff, the relief of hearing his voice on the other end of the line washed over me like water.

  “Hey,” I said. “How’d the drive go?”

  “It was fine,” he said stiffly.

  “We went to Mama Legba’s today. She said you never stopped by.” I hoped he’d hear the question in my words.

  “Had a change in plans,” he said. “I told you that.”

  “I know, I was just wondering why … ”

  “Something else came up, and I couldn’t stop before I left town.”

  “Something like … ?” I let my voice trail off as casually as I could, but he sounded so irritated that I was starting to think calling had been a bad idea.

  “Is there something you wanted? I’m a little tied up right now.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  “What did you want?”

  I cringed at the stiffness and impatience in his tone. “I thought you’d want to know someone broke into Mama Legba’s and stole some things.”

  “Did she call the police?” he asked.

  “No, not yet. We think it was Thisbe.”

  “It’s good you didn’t call the police then. They couldn’t do anything about that.”

  “Right. That’s what we thought. But I thought you might want to know and—”

  “Great. Thanks for letting me know,” he said, cutting me off. “Look, I have to go. Can we talk later?”

  “Later? But—”

  “I don’t really have time to talk right now.”

  “Oh. I see,” I said, hating how disappointed my voice sounded. “When will you be back?”

  “Now that I’m here, I’m not sure how long this will take,” he told me, and I could feel his impatience through the silence after his words.

  “Okay, well … Be safe and let us know if you find anything?”

  “I will,” he said.

  “Love y—” But the line had already gone dead.

  When Lucy poked her head out of the door who-knows-how-long later, I was still staring at my phone, trying to tell myself it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Piers had been frustrated with me to start with, and he hadn’t wanted to leave town in the first place. And I knew how he got when he was working.

  But that didn’t make me feel any better. I’d thought hearing his voice would help, but all it did was make me feel farther away from him than ever.

  That night I dreamed again of the pines, but I didn’t dream of the man named Augustine. Instead, I dreamed of a man who was more skeleton than human. When the man appeared, he walked out of the night. Not out from a distance, but from the darkness around me—poof—an apparition fully formed. One second I was alone, and the next, he was there.

  Snake-like dreads spilled from his skull and writhed around his face like they were alive. He had deep-set eyes, empty and dark, a wide nose, and a sharp chin. When he smiled, his teeth flashed white as the bones of his fingers, and one of his front teeth was a little crooked.

  He was dressed all in black, and his feet were bare. He had the face of a man, but he was missing his skin everywhere else—long, white bones for fingers, long, white bones for toes peeking out beneath the tattered hem of his black pants. On his head, a velvet top hat of deep purple perched at a confident angle, and stuck into its crimson band were three black-as-night feathers that glinted iridescent in the pale moonlight.

  We were in the pines again, but this wasn’t like the other dreams. The grove didn’t feel like an empty, cold place anymore. There was something in the air that hummed across my skin, like it was teasing at me. Threatening and daring me all at once.

  The skeleton man looked right at me, and unlike in the other dream, I knew that this man was seeing me.

  He took a couple of steady, not-in-no-kind-of-hurry steps toward where I was standing. Every bit of me—body and soul—wanted to run, because he looked so wicked and dangerous. He looked like the kind of death nobody wants. But I couldn’t seem to make myself move.

  When he was a little more than an arm’s length from me he stopped and, cocking his head to the side, he looked me over. Up and down, his eyes moved over my body as he took his time about it. Like I was something he could bid on or buy. Like he had all the time in the world to decide whether he would.

  Then, amusement sparking in those otherwise empty eyes, he took out a cigar, lit it, and inhaled. He closed his eyes as he sucked the smoke deep, deep into his chest, and then he blew it easily into a ring that floated toward me. The smoky ring wreathed my head, never breaking its shape. It smelled thick and earthy, the same heavy and almost oily scent I’d smelled in Thisbe’s cabin.

  The man took one look at my puzzled confusion and started laughing. He laughed and laughed, and the air bursting from his throat sounded like wind whistling through a cave. All around me the forest rustled as his laughter echoed off the trees and stirred the air, disrupting the quiet and calm.

  At first I didn’t hear the rustling noise, because I thought it was part of the laugh, but all at once I realized it wasn’t. No, the rustling I heard was coming from something else, something alive, but I didn’t understand that in time to avoid the thick swarm of flapping wings.

  Dark-as-night crows barreled down on me, flapping around me so that the little bit of night was swallowed up by their inky, dark wings. Through it all, the wheezing, rustling evil of the skeleton man’s laugh wrapped itself around me like a noose.

  All at once, I was sitting up in my bed, panting from the struggle I’d been through and still smelling the thick, oily scent of Baron Samedi’s cigar heavy in the air.

  Thirteen

  The early hours before dawn found me bleary-eyed and frustrated. I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after I woke from the dream I’d had of Baron Samedi in the pines. I didn’t doubt that someone summoning him would be a very bad idea, and I’d spent the rest of the long, dark hours thinking about what I could do to stop it from happening. We had maybe two more days left before someone would be able to use the aloe. We needed to know what other ingredients Thisbe would need, and we needed to know what Thisbe might want from Samedi if we were going to stop her before it happened.

  It wasn’t quite light out when I decided I was tired of waiting. I knocked on Lucy’s bedroom door. When I didn’t hear anything I knocked a little louder and heard her mumbled reply, so I peeked my head on in.

  “Lucy?” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

  “No,” she grumbled.

  She didn’t seem all that upset about me bothering her, so I eased myself into the room. “Lucy,” I hissed, a little louder now.

  “What?” she groaned, turning over and regarding me with a half-open eye. Then, seeing who it was, she blinked herself awake, sitting up before she was really steady. “What is it?” she whispered, her eyes widening with something that looked like panic. “Did something happen?”

  “No,” I said, cringing inwardly. I hadn’t meant to startle her like that. “I wanted to ask you for a favor.”

  “Now?” She slumped back into her pillows. “It’s not even morning yet.”

  “Sure it is. It’s past five,” I told her.

  “Chloe, that’s still basically the middle of the night.”

  “The sun’s almost up,” I argued.

  She glared at me and turned back over.

  “I need your help,” I said, and that seemed to get her attention again.

  She rubbed at her eyes a bit and pushed that wild hair of hers back from her face. “With what?”

  “I want you to come with me … ”

  “With you where?”

  “I want to go have another look around the cabin,” I told her, “and I don’t want to go alone.”

  “The cabin?” Her brain must have been as sluggish as her voice sounded. “Wait. You mean Thisbe’s cabin?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you crazy?
”

  “No. I mean, maybe, but I’m thinking there might be something there that everybody else missed. A clue or something.” Actually, what I thought was that I could try touching different parts of it again, maybe see if I would have any more visions. But I didn’t want to be alone when I did it. And after Piers’s reaction the first time, I wasn’t ready to tell Lucy my plan.

  She frowned as she stared at me. “You’re serious.”

  I nodded. “I think maybe there might be something in her house that might help us figure out if Augustine was a real person or something Thisbe conjured up to play at my sympathies. Or now that we know she might be trying to summon Baron Samedi, maybe we’ll see something that we missed before—some clue as to what else she might want with him.”

  Lucy thought about that for a second. She still probably thought I was nuts, but at least she was considering it.

  “You’re half right,” she said, flopping the covers back and popping out of her bed all business and ready to go.

  “So you’ll go with me?” I asked, surprised. I really thought she’d say no.

  “Not to the cabin, no way. There’s nothing there, anyway,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Dad’s crew searched that place top to bottom after everything went down a few weeks ago. If there had been anything to find, they would have found it already.”

  Lucy was more alert by now as she pulled on her clothes and looked in the mirror to untangle her nest of hair.

  I couldn’t help but reach up and touch mine—or what was left of it.

  “Anyway, there isn’t any reason to go back there—and not just because that place creeps me out,” she said with a shudder. “But the idea to go search Thisbe’s home is actually a great one. We need to go to Thisbe’s other home.” She looked at me with those old-soul eyes, and I could tell I wasn’t going to like what came next. “To your home,” she clarified, her voice going soft and low.

  Sometimes I hate it when I’m right.

  I wasn’t as sure as Lucy seemed to be about going back to my house. To be honest, I didn’t want to face that feeling of being held out and all alone again, but I couldn’t argue with her, really, because she was right. We didn’t have any other leads, and my momma—Thisbe—had lived and breathed under that roof for most of my life. It was the one place where there should be something of hers, and I had a feeling that we would find something there. Why else would Thisbe have worked so hard to keep me out?