The King of Bones and Ashes

by J. D. Horn

  “I’d just hide out in one of the cemeteries,” Hugo said. “Find a family who’d died out, and climb right in with them. Hang on for as long as the magic held.” It bothered Alice to hear he had a plan. It seemed like he had at least begun to think it through.

  “You wouldn’t last long in one of those. It can get up to two hundred degrees inside there. That’s how they work.” He winked at Hugo. “You’d be a pile of bones and pixie dust in no time.”

  “How very droll, dear uncle,” he said, putting on an affronted air, though Alice could hear the amusement in his voice.

  Vincent looked around at Alice. “Your friend Delphine,” he said, pausing, seeming to give her a chance to catch up.

  It didn’t take long. “You think she’s using the bodies for relics?”

  He nodded. “She’s both desperate and entrepreneurial. And if it isn’t her, it’s someone like her.”

  “Wait,” Hugo said, removing his sunglasses and stopping in his tracks, seeming to forget they were part of a procession. “You’re saying the people who’ve gone missing haven’t taken to the Dreaming Road. That they’ve been . . .”

  “Harvested,” the word spilled out of Alice’s mouth. She shuddered.

  “Yes,” Vincent said. “Everyone has their head buried in the sand, or up their . . .” He cut himself short. “But I’m going to take advantage of the ball to bend a few ears. Share my suspicions beyond our own coven. Of course it would help if I had something other than a rumble in my gut to use as evidence.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened to mother?” Alice said, surprised by the dark fantasy that began to spin itself behind her eyes. The thought was horrifying, but it was almost . . . comforting, too. It would mean she hadn’t left by choice.

  “No,” Vincent said. Then more firmly, with an air of calming certainty, “No. Of course not.” He paused. “Listen. Put it out of your mind. I’ve spoken to Nicholas, and he thinks I’m nuts. The truth will out itself, but it’s nothing for you to worry about. I should’ve just kept my stupid mouth shut.”

  They walked on in silence. Alice tried to shake the gruesome image of her mother’s body being carved up into tiny, marketable pieces.

  Every few feet Fleur would look back and focus on Lucy, an encouraging smile on her lips, a warm, loving look in her eyes.

  “Ugh. God,” Lucy muttered under her breath. Alice looked over to find her cousin grimacing from behind the gray lenses of her sunglasses. Tiny flowers, each of their petals a precious stone, glinted at her temples. “I think I’ve allowed her a bit too much mother-daughter bonding. If I don’t do something to tick her off soon, she is going to drive me nuts.” Her shielded eyes pointed at Alice. “No offense.” Before Alice could even register if she should be offended, Lucy had turned to Hugo. “You seem pretty good at alienating parents. Any suggestions?”

  “Sleeping with men has worked well for me, though I doubt it’ll have the same impact in your case.” Lucy grabbed Hugo’s arm and leaned in, pressing her head to his shoulder. They were close, Alice realized. They cared for each other. She felt a pang of jealousy.

  “Probably not.” Lucy tugged off her sunglasses and, squinting, held them out to Alice. “Here, try these on. I want to see how they look on you.”

  Alice slipped them on, the uneven pavement beneath her nearly causing her to trip. Vincent caught her arm. “I got you.”

  She leaned on Vincent’s arm as she looked back to face her cousin. She didn’t really need his support, but it felt good to know it was there.

  “Exactly as I thought. They look better on you.” She nodded. “Keep them.”

  “But didn’t you just guilt Fleur into buying those for you this morning?” Hugo said, grabbing the frames of his own glasses as Lucy tried to snatch them away.

  “Yeah. She’ll be a bit annoyed with me. It isn’t much, but it’s a start.”

  Alice felt her heart sink at Lucy’s words. For a moment she had thought the gesture a sign of affection. Now she realized she was just a tool in one of Lucy’s campaigns to annoy and aggrieve. Alice removed the glasses and held them out to her cousin.

  “Oh, don’t give me that look,” Lucy said, holding her palm up to refuse the glasses. “A, They do suit you. B, I do want you to have them. C, I really do like you. And D, it will irritate Fleur.” She tossed her head back in summation. “It’s the modern world, Alice. A woman has to multitask.”

  A protest, in the form of a loud cough, came from one of the coven members behind them. Alice slipped the glasses back on and cast a quick glance over her shoulder. The line of dour faces behind her made it impossible to say which gray-haired adherent had made the complaint. She caught sight of Lucy rolling her eyes. Alice mouthed the word “sorry,” then turned back.

  They made another and, Alice hoped, final right and then began proceeding down Dryades Street.

  A man with hair as silver as the trumpet he held stood at the corner. A member of the band, Alice surmised, come to join in for the happier tunes to be played as they returned from the cemetery. She didn’t much blame him. If she’d been in the band, she would’ve skipped the dirge portion as well. As the hearse reached him, he lifted the horn to his lips and began to add discordant, staccato notes to the music the other musicians had begun a block back. The notes he played were devoid of any grace, and the way they meandered through the hymn struck Alice as disrespectful. Sacrilegious.

  Unholy.

  Such antiquated concepts, but no other words seemed to fit. This nice-looking older gentleman seemed intent on inflicting harm, though to whom or why she couldn’t even hazard a guess. The atmosphere around them thickened until Alice felt like she was treading water rather than walking on solid ground. The carriage’s wheels began to creak, and though the horses strained against it, the vehicle slowed to a dead stop right before the trumpeter.

  A young man approached him from the side, moving slowly, like a mime walking against the wind. There was something about this younger man that struck Alice as familiar. The hairs on the back of her neck began to tingle. She removed her new shades and craned to get a better look at him, but could only make out the back of his head. His hair was so black it shone blue in the bright morning light.

  “Come on, Grandpa,” he said. He reached out for the silver-haired man’s instrument, but the older hand slapped the younger away.

  “Alcide,” Vincent said, advancing with effort on the older man. “What are you doing here, my friend?” Alice turned to her father to see if he’d join Vincent, back him up. But Nicholas stood there, watching the scene but not engaging in it, confused, ineffectual. She felt disgusted by him and focused back on the trumpeter.

  This Alcide looked out at her uncle through narrowed, angry eyes, but he never stopped playing, even after all the other musicians had fallen silent. The tune, if it could be called a tune, rang out over the street, high and sharp, winding and sinking. “’Cause,” Vincent continued, “I’m not quite sure what you’re up to, but I don’t think you really know either. You can feel it, can’t you? I know I can. It’s wrong, whatever you’re doing here. It’s gonna change you.” Alcide stopped playing and lowered the horn, his gaze shifting from Vincent to the horn he held in his trembling hand and then back again. “I’m a good man,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, you are,” Vincent said. “Always have been.”

  “I’m not going to let Celestin take that away from me, too,” he said, turning to Alice almost like he was looking for her assent.

  “No, sir,” Vincent said. “Nobody can take that away from you.”

  Another man, this one around her uncle’s age, came forward and took the trumpet from Alcide’s grasp. The newcomer paused a moment before Vincent—the two seeming to take each other’s measure—then the stranger shook his head and wrapped his arm around Alcide’s shoulders. “Come on. Let’s get you back home.”

  “What the hell was that about?” Hugo said, lowering his sunglasses.

  “Damned if I know,”
Lucy replied.

  The three men passed, the youngest offering them an embarrassed smile, though his gaze seemed to linger longer on Lucy than on Alice or Hugo.

  That sense of déjà vu surged back. Alice knew him. She was certain, though she couldn’t place him. Then she felt her knees begin to buckle.

  The sparkling black eyes. The thick lashes. The Cupid’s bow lips. The image of a naked beauty covering his features with a white porcelain mask.

  The hearse pulled forward, and the band began to play. Hugo clasped her hand and tugged her along.

  TWENTY

  Three hundred and seventy dollars for a black, mock-neck, handkerchief-hem dress—“marked way down,” the clerk had said with a knowing smile, as if Evangeline had just negotiated to purchase a soiled kitchen towel, and even that rag was still too good for her. It had damned near killed her to ask him to put half on her credit card—her balance now just twenty dollars south of its maximum limit—and accept the rest with cash. Seventy-five dollars with tip for a visit to the blowout bar for a double strand crown braid—one of the few nice styles her rebellious hair might hold in this humidity—and another forty-eight for a mani-pedi so her feet wouldn’t look like hooves in her new ninety-dollar, French-soled, open-toed flats. Twelve dollars more for a car from Magazine Street to Précieux Sang Cemetery. She eyed her discount-store gray beaded handbag with suspicion, worried it wouldn’t pass muster, but dammit, she’d squeezed the turnip dry. She didn’t even know how she was going to manage to pay electric at her house this month.

  And all this because of a three-word text from Nicholas. I need you.

  So here she was, more or less crashing Celestin Marin’s funeral. The message had been cryptic enough that she had no idea if Nicholas truly wanted her here, but he had reached out, and she wasn’t going to spend another day on the wrong side of the wall he used to compartmentalize his relationship with her from the one he had with his family.

  She felt the sting of her own hypocrisy. She’d told Nicholas, and Luc before him, partial truths about herself, but she’d always let them believe she was the child of a preacher and a back-bayou practitioner of natural magic. A swamp witch, as Nicholas always used to say back in those days when he’d enjoyed disparaging her to his son. She’d never owned up to the witch her mother had been before her fall, and she certainly never mentioned her mother’s sister witches. Not to Luc. Not to Nicholas. Not to anyone.

  But the time had come. If she could manage to pull him aside, even for a moment, she would warn him about the sisters, alert him to their interest in Alice. Later—together—they could connect the dots between his daughter and the book the witches thought was theirs. Attending the funeral was, she felt certain, the right thing to do.

  Still, she didn’t want to embarrass Nicholas. Worse, she didn’t want to embarrass herself. She’d be good and goddamned before she gave his sister Fleur a chance to look down on her.

  In her imagination, Evangeline had already shrugged off, with infinite grace, a thousand different digs aimed at her by “Mrs. the Senator,” as she and Nicholas often spoke of Fleur in jest. He would hold Evangeline in his arms and enumerate the ways she was too good for Fleur, rather than the other way around.

  As the car pulled close to the cemetery, Evangeline caught sight of a decent-sized brass band milling about in the street outside the cemetery’s gate. “You can turn right here and pull over,” she said.

  “Précieux Sang,” the driver said as she followed the suggestion, though she was watching Evangeline’s face rather than where they were going. Nathalie’s—Evangeline remembered the app had said the driver’s name was Nathalie—eyes had spent more time checking her out in the rearview mirror than they had on the road. “When I was little, this place scared the shit out of me. My brother used to tell me this here is where Babau Jean lived. Used to dare me to walk by this place alone and call his name three times.”

  “Funny. I always heard he lived out on Grunch Road.”

  “There ain’t no Grunch Road,” Nathalie said. “At least not anymore. Probably never was. I went to the library once. Looked at old maps trying to find it.” Evangeline wasn’t about to argue the point.

  Nathalie shifted to park and turned back toward Evangeline. “Wish I could let this one be on me, but they’ve already charged your card.” Evangeline did the math in her mind. That meant her card was now eight dollars south of its limit. If Nicholas wasn’t happy to see her, she could very well be walking home. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Evangeline shook her head, laughing. “Don’t be,” she said, “I hated the son of a bitch.” Nathalie cringed, seemingly shocked by her candor. Evangeline silently cursed herself. “I didn’t really. Hate him,” she lied. “It was just always so . . . complicated.”

  “So he was family, then?” Nathalie said.

  “Of a sort,” Evangeline replied. “Thank you.” She clutched her purse and prepared to make her exit.

  “I know you, don’t I?” Nathalie said, snatching up her phone and confirming Evangeline’s name. “Evangeline Caissy . . .” She tapped the air with her index finger. “You dance at that club on Bourbon.” She smiled and nodded, seemingly pleased with having made the connection. “Bonnes Nouvelles. Am I right?”

  “Used to dance,” Evangeline said, grasping the door handle. “Now I’m just management.” She smiled and opened the door. “It’s a play on my name, you know,” she volunteered. “They both mean ‘good news.’”

  “If you say so,” Nathalie said, the corner of her mouth curling up. “I’ll take you at your word on that bit. I used to drop by the club from time to time. After Katrina. Back when you all had the live musicians working.”

  “Yeah, strangely enough, those were good times. Kind of.” It was true. There was a brief, very brief, period of intense camaraderie after the storm, when even the big musicians would play the clubs on Bourbon Street. Back then, they were happy to find any gig at all. Now, half of them wouldn’t be caught dead playing on Bourbon. Just as well—the younger dancers didn’t want any of that “old jazz stuff” anyway. They only wanted what you could find on the radio. And hell, the tourists plain didn’t care, as long as they had a cold plastic grenade in their hand and a hot dancer to watch.

  “Yeah, kind of a shame,” Nathalie said. “Haven’t been there in a long time. Place just doesn’t seem as welcoming,” she slowed the word down, hinting at a deeper meaning, “as it did before the tourists came back in force. Not that I’m complaining they’re back.”

  Evangeline leaned forward. “We are just as welcoming”—Evangeline, too, slowed down the word—“as ever. Always will be as long as I’m around. You come back. You’ll see.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said, then tapped the wheel. “You got a ride home afterwards? I could hang out. Take you anywhere you’d like. There’s a new bar in the Marigny that does a great happy—”

  Evangeline pursed her lips in fake disapproval. “Are you flirting with me?”

  “Well, maybe . . .”

  “At a funeral . . .”

  Nathalie smiled and shrugged. “Hey, I figured wrong place, and probably wrong team, but you can’t blame a girl for trying.” Her eyelids lowered, and her lips pulled down into a disapproving frown. “You aren’t here for no funeral. You’re here for some guy, aren’t you?” she said, but Nathalie didn’t give her a chance to respond. “Well, whoever he is, he ain’t good enough for you.”

  Evangeline winked. “Tell me something I don’t know.” She closed the door and lifted a hand in farewell as Nathalie pulled away. Part of her wanted to chase after the car. Get right back in and ride away. She had never been to a witch funeral before. If she’d attended her own mother’s funeral, she had done it wearing diapers, and she doubted that her father had allowed much more than a good “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” anyway. She hadn’t gone to Luc’s. A part of her regretted it now, but she had refused to mourn him alongside those she considered complicit in his death. The tomb where
Celestin was being interred also held Luc’s bones. She’d come here once or twice in the early days after Luc’s death, but at least seven years had passed since she’d stepped through Précieux Sang’s gates. She wished she’d brought a flower with her. Not for Celestin, but for Luc.

  “Miss Evangeline,” she heard her name being called from across the street. She looked up to see a man wrapped in a brass sousaphone.

  “Well, Charlie Ferrand, speak of the devil,” Evangeline said, allowing his greeting to serve as an impetus to cross. After an awkward attempt at a hug, she went up on her toes and placed a kiss on his cheek. “I was just talking with my ride about how you and your buddies didn’t use to be too good to play my club.”

  “Ah, don’t be that way,” he said and gave her a smile that said he knew any slight Evangeline might have felt had already been forgiven. “You here for the funeral?” he said. “Friend of the family?” She could read the trepidation in his eyes. She nodded. “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.” He leaned in as best as the brass he wore would allow him to whisper in her ear. “Alcide Simeon set this gig up, but just between you and me, I think he’s lost his damned mind.”

  Evangeline knew this Alcide fellow, but not well. He’d played the club a few times with Charlie’s regular gang, but his daughter Lisette enjoyed far greater notoriety in her circles. Evangeline spent a good amount of time steering her employees away from the worthless gris-gris bags the woman sold in her store. She’d encountered Lisette herself a couple of times, once bobbing and weaving out of each other’s way around a crowded Jackson Square, and again up in the Tremé when Evangeline went to check up on a dancer who’d missed two shifts without sending word. Both times Evangeline had to throw up a wall to protect herself from the woman’s crushing awareness of being a fraud. The odd thing was that it took a bit of power to affect Evangeline so deeply. As far as Evangeline could tell, the only thing that was keeping Lisette from being the real deal was Lisette herself. ’Course that wasn’t exactly the kind of advice a person could walk up and give to a stranger on the street.