The King of Bones and Ashes

by J. D. Horn

  “I’ve found myself siding with your father,” Daniel said, as if that alone should stand as a clear enough answer to her question. It did.

  “So my father and Evangeline . . .”

  “So your father and Evangeline. Took me by surprise, too. Keep in mind I missed a few episodes between Nicholas telling your brother she wasn’t worthy of him, and your father deciding she was plenty good enough for himself.” He shrugged. “She helps keep an eye on Hugo, and she makes your father as close to happy as I’ve ever seen him. She’s a good person. I’m not going to tell you how you should feel about her, though I suspect your cat will. And considering how ferocious that little beast can be, it would be wise to obey.”

  Alice smiled. “I remember that even as a kitten she could be quite . . . convincing.” An unconnected idea began to form in her mind. “You say you learned how to cook from watching videos on the Internet?”

  “Yes, indeed, I did,” he said. “It didn’t take too long, it’s all really just measuring . . .”

  “Do you think,” Alice said, “you could learn how to cut hair?”

  He smiled and ran his hand through his own auburn curls. “You tell me. Just how short were you thinking?”

  SIXTEEN

  Delphine cast a wary eye at the gathering dusk, then closed the curtain before the light of the room could transform the windowpane into a looking glass. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked into an actual mirror. Perhaps it was only because she couldn’t help but see through the glamour. Or maybe it was only tangentially related to her appearance. Perhaps she avoided her reflection because the lure of the Dreaming Road had grown too strong of late. It would be so easy to slip into the dream, letting go of all pain, forgetting every defeat.

  Every breath was a matter of will, but not every battle had yet been lost. Celestin Marin was dead, and whatever spell he had used to hide the book was broken . . . or at least beginning to crack.

  Delphine crossed the room and sat at her dressing table. She rearranged the collection of oils and creams spread across the tabletop, then opened a stone jar filled with a lavender-scented cream. She set its lid aside and dipped her fingers into the cool balm. After spreading the cream over her face, down her neck, and along her left arm, she took a soft towel and wiped herself clean. Next, she moved on to her right shoulder and arm. This was how she bathed now. Her skin was far too thin and sensitive to bear a jet of water. She feared that a soak in a hot tub might cause her skin to slough off like a snake’s, though unlike the lucky reptile, she wouldn’t have a new skin waiting beneath the old.

  The cleansing process would be easier if she could bear to look at herself. Delphine had painted over the mirrors in her own bathroom and covered the one at her dressing table with a shawl. She’d heard others complain it was a hard, cruel world, even in this modern and supposedly enlightened age, once a woman’s looks faded. Delphine had witnessed the birth of the cotton gin. Even to her own eyes she’d long appeared a ghoul.

  She hated her cleansing regime, the touch of her own withered skin. How old was she now? If she hadn’t been robbed, if the witches who had called themselves her guardians hadn’t drained so much of her power, that question might not have mattered as much. Still, a tyrannical part of her mind insisted on doing the math. Delphine was pushing three hundred years.

  They were out there, as near as near can be, “the sisters,” as her former mistresses insisted on calling themselves, even though they didn’t share a drop of blood among them. Delphine could feel them, smell them even. Margot still carried the smell of a fresh earthen grave, and Marceline the funerary scent of mums. Mathilde had once carried a light, albeit cloying, air of myrrh, though of late she smelled only of pee. The fourth, Mireille, the youngest of the quartet, though the first to die, had smelled of honey.

  It was this sweet and familiar scent, tinged with a hint of orange flower, that had wafted above Bourbon Street’s regular morning musk of piss and beer and street washers’ detergent, and led Delphine to discover Mireille’s daughter in the French Quarter. The girl was right out there in the open, living the most ordinary of lives, seemingly ignorant of her heritage, of the power that was her birthright. Delphine made a mental note, after settling up accounts with Soulange’s daughter in the morning, to pass by Evangeline’s charming establishment. Determine if the young woman, so similar in appearance to Mireille, could feel the change that had come with Celestin Marin’s death. Or perhaps she’d felt a tug all along, consciously or not. That could explain why such a beautiful and powerful girl would choose to warm the sheets of the Marin men, fils et père, rather than searching out a more suitable mate. One who didn’t suffer from the inner demons that seemed to torment the Marins.

  There was a connection, Delphine was sure of it. Mireille’s breaking away, marrying, giving birth, dying . . . Somehow her decision to forsake magic had left The Book of the Unwinding vulnerable and allowed it to fall into the Marin family’s hands. Delphine had last felt the tug of the book when Laure Marin and Soulange Simeon landed in their bit of trouble. With Celestin’s dying breath, she felt the book’s renewed call.

  And this time she would be the witch to answer it.

  She would retrieve the book. She would breathe magic’s last dying gasp into herself, nursing it until it was ready to be reborn in her image. And then, well then, she would light the greatest pyre ever seen—and every degraded witch who refused to kneel before her would feed the flames. A smile rose to her cracked lips. She hoped with all her will that the sisters would be able to hold on long enough, live long enough to see that day. She’d force them to kneel before her. Beg her pardon. Then she would take them apart piece by piece, letting them watch as she used their limbs as kindling, placing them into the lowest level of the fire.

  Other witches, Delphine included, were scrambling, sinking their claws into any scrap of magic they could find, some going so far as to pulverize their own cut locks of hair and fingernail trimmings for use in unguents and incense. She’d hoped to charm Celestin’s granddaughter out of a bit of the old man. The girl was a proper little prig, but—she felt it in her aching bones—no madder than the average witch. That the Marins could afford to waste Celestin’s residual power just proved they counted on having another, deeper well to tap into. This confirmation was far more valuable than a bit of the dead witch’s giblets. It made the morning she’d spent at the airport awaiting the girl’s arrival well worth the time.

  Laure’s madness. Soulange’s death. Nicholas Marin wresting control of the coven from his father—then, when challenged for dominance by his own son, taking both the boy’s life and his love. There was a link between each seemingly unrelated event. Everyone else was playing checkers, trying to jump over each other, but the Marins, they had been playing the long game all along, and until now, their only true opponents had been each other.

  Delphine lay her hand on a thin volume bound in red-stained pigskin, one of the handful of known extant copies of The Lesser Key, a tract reputed by those without discernment to be a heavily censored and intentionally obscured edition of The Book of the Unwinding. The volume touched her back, filling her mind with lovely dark images of standing above the apocalypse, surveying the destruction.

  Copies of The Lesser Key had never existed in large quantity, and the greater part of those had long ago been put to the fire. Now the remaining copies floated around the world, the ugly gems of indiscriminate collections, each still commanding a small fortune whenever death or desperation brought one to the auction block. Delphine had stolen this copy more than a century ago, out from under the nose of a befuddled widower, a man Delphine had helped acquire his widower status. On the surface, the tract seemed to be a standard enough grimoire, illuminated by a medieval hand as skilled as any contemporary third grader. It held none of the power of the greater work, though she somehow felt closer to The Book of the Unwinding with the key in her possession. Like the way a tuning fork when struck can cause its corresp
onding piano string to vibrate, the two held the same frequency.

  She had spent the afternoon poring over The Lesser Key’s parchment pages, trying to glean any information that might help her take final possession of the actual book. So far, she’d seen such little progress that she questioned whether it had been worth the trouble she’d taken to locate it among her belongings. But then she felt a flash of insight and wondered how she had never made a connection before. Mireille’s daughter. Her dalliances with the Marin men . . .

  She needed to determine whether Mireille’s girl posed an opportunity or a threat. Cultivating an opportunity would require finesse on Delphine’s part, and perhaps more time than she had. Dispatching a threat would only call for swift and deadly surprise. Delphine would prepare for either alternative. Perhaps Mireille’s daughter would live to see another new moon. Perhaps she wouldn’t.

  Either way, she’d deal with the Marin family, regain the book, and then death would finally claim each of the sisters—perhaps in a single stroke if Delphine was feeling merciful, or perhaps one by agonizing one so that those who remained would suffer the loss of their sisters before their own painful demise. Delphine suspected the latter.

  That three of these witches still lived had long piqued her. That they could still walk freely in the world without having to hide their decrepitude infuriated her. They had somehow found the secret to holding back the hands of time, drawing the life force from others—who knew how many before Delphine, who knew how many after. What Delphine did know was that she had been a special find for them, a witch with a supernaturally long lifespan—a renewable battery of sorts. That’s why they’d taken her in and kept her close for a hundred years.

  Delphine had long suspected that she owed her orphan status to the sister witches. They’d visited her parents three times to discuss Delphine’s future before her father’s death, and once again afterward, just a month before her mother passed. Delphine hadn’t learned of her own powers, the magic these women had fed off, until decades later. And decades more crawled past before she found herself skilled and lucky enough to break free of them.

  Delphine had come with them to America in 1752, although it hadn’t been America then—it had still been Nouvelle-France. She’d turned thirteen the month before she set sail with her guardians, the four witches tasked with transporting a secret cargo, a book about the size of a psalter, from the Old World to the New. The book was Le Livre du Déroulage, or The Book of the Unwinding, as it had come to be known since English had become the lingua franca of magic and business and just about everything else. It contained the fevered scribblings of the mad monk Theodosius, a fifteenth-century Cathar apologist and practitioner of dark magic, excommunicated and imprisoned in the bowels of the Vatican itself for attempting to popularize his own non-canonical vision of the apocalypse. “Unwinding” had always struck Delphine as an imperfect translation for “déroulage,” whose meaning came closer to “unrolling” or even “peeling.” Peeling certainly matched the legend of the book’s creation, as Theodosius, incarcerated with neither ink nor parchment so his visions and prophesies might die with him, was said to have removed his own skin, which the Devil himself renewed each night, to create vellum, severed his own left index finger so that its bone might be used as stylus, and collected his own blood in a depression of his cell’s stone floor to use as ink.

  Still “unwinding” had a better ring to it than “peeling,” and in the end, Delphine reckoned everything came down to marketing.

  The four witches had posed, with the blessing of Pope Benedict himself, as Ursuline Sisters. Delphine, an orphan who worked without pay for the women, an engagée if not an outright slave, came in the guise of a novice nun. It was Delphine who had carried the first pope-blessed nails across the seas, in a pouch worn around her neck. The sisters were not allowed to lay a hand on the pouch for fear the blessing would be corrupted.

  That Benedict would be complicit in such subterfuge spoke of his desire to move the Book beyond the reach of even his most trusted advisers. There must have been a great seductiveness to Theodosius’s eschatology, powerful enough to topple St. Peter’s heir himself. And while The Book of the Unwinding couldn’t be destroyed, proving itself impervious even to fire, it might be forgotten. That he would entrust such a duty to the sisters, reviled sorceresses, spoke of his desire not to stain any innocent souls—other, evidently, than Delphine’s own—in the process.

  That the sisters had agreed to participate spoke to their desperation.

  They’d had little choice but to cooperate. The Church had captured them and bound their magic. A date of execution had been set. In return for delivering the book to the end of the earth and securing it in the newly rebuilt convent’s attic, in a thought-to-be impenetrable vault that would open only when the four sisters could no longer practice magic, the pope offered them their lives, their freedom, and the restoration of their magic.

  And so the pope had kicked the problem down the road for what must have seemed an eternity to him. Delphine had borne witness to every sunrise of Benedict’s eternity. Certainly when the pact was made, none, not even Mireille herself, could have foreseen herself turning away from magic, lovesick for a storefront preacher and contrite for her sins. Nor could anyone have ever foreseen an alliance between Soulange Simeon and Laure Marin.

  Delphine clutched The Lesser Key, focusing. She tried to understand, but no new flashes of insight came to her. She sighed and slipped the tract into the pocket of her robe.

  There was a connection between The Book of the Unwinding and that damned shop Vèvè. She felt it. The call of the Book echoed in its walls. For that, she’d purchased the building, offered an exorbitant bribe to soften Soulange’s daughter’s conscience. Hell, she would have spent her very last dime to secure the store and its contents. She gritted her teeth as she thought of her fool of a man, Carver. She’d paid him to commit a little light vandalism, just enough to help make Soulange’s daughter uneasy, not damn near destroy the shop. If she learned he had damaged anything of use, anything she needed, anything that might point her to the Book, she would do a little déroulage of her own when she got her hands on him.

  He hadn’t answered her calls or responded to her messages. Perhaps she had been the fool. He’d demanded five thousand dollars for the job on Vèvè. She hadn’t thought twice about parting ways with such a small sum, but now she realized it must have seemed like all the money in the world to a man such as Carver. For a brief moment, he would feel rich, though he was probably off somewhere now, drinking or drugging or whoring his way through his windfall. She’d just as soon not gaze at his pinched face and rodent’s eyes ever again, except for the necklace she had loaned him, one that had the special power of turning away unwanted attention. She sent out a call to the necklace, a summons its possessor wouldn’t be able to resist. Carver, or anyone else to whom he may have traded it, would feel compelled to return it to her.

  At one time, she wouldn’t have given the purloined bauble a single thought. But she relied on it more than ever, now that her own magic was failing her, now that it had become a burden to maintain the glamour that hid her true grotesque appearance.

  Three loud booms, one on the heels of the other, worse than thunder—couldn’t be thunder, thunder wouldn’t have set the protection wards glowing—shook Delphine’s house hard enough to jostle the items on her dressing table. The wards were purchased, not magic of her own making, and she watched with fading hope as the ward hanging on the wall before her evanesced and died. Her house had just been bombarded, three strikes of magic stronger than Delphine had experienced in going on twenty years. Below, she heard the click of the exterior door being unlocked, followed by a long, slow creak as it was eased open, a haunted-house effect intended, she felt sure, to frighten her.

  Save it for the tourists, she thought, putting on a brave front for herself. A woman, even a witch, didn’t survive for centuries with a faint heart, especially in these parts.

&
nbsp; Delphine had anticipated the sisters and was surprised to sense a strong, masculine presence. The sound of footsteps, deliberate, proprietary, as if the true master of the house had returned, resonated on the ground floor. Delphine’s heart pounded in a mixture of indignation and adrenaline, the ancient call to fight or flight. Still, her first instinct was to whip her wig off the headstand and place it on her head. Glamours always worked with less effort if the right props were used. There was an intruder, one with strong magic on his side, but she was too worried about seeing the truth of what she’d become reflected in his eyes to fret about his intentions. The eyes of others were the only mirrors she couldn’t cover, couldn’t paint over.

  The footsteps continued for thirty seconds or so, then fell silent.

  “Delphine,” a familiar voice called her name. “You best come on down now. You won’t like what happens if you make me come up there for you.”

  The damned whelp. Delphine felt herself flush with rage, followed fast by confusion. That had been real magic she’d just felt. Strong magic. And the necklace Carver Roy had stolen from her, though once a potent relic, had long lost any of its great magic. He could never have used it to batter his way in. Besides, the fool Carver knew nothing of magic. Though perhaps he had met someone who did.

  It didn’t take a mastermind to put the pieces together—the sisters.

  She tightened the belt of her robe, slid her feet into her nonskid slippers. She stood, placing her hand on the vanity to help herself rise.

  She focused on the image of herself she wanted to project. One faithful to how she had appeared long ago, the image she still half expected to find looking back at her whenever she found herself before a reflective surface.