She checked the streetcar map on her cell. “Our stop is the one after this.”
* * *
“Bourbon Street runs parallel to Decatur. We need to take a right on one of these streets,” M said.
Ash took in a deep breath as they walked. “Smells a bit like London. Piss, river water, diesel, food cooking.”
M laughed. “You’re right. There must be a bakery nearby. Smell the bread and some kind of pastry?” She took another sniff. “And somebody’s definitely smoking pot.”
“We can do a guidebook. Instead of the city sights, the city smells,” Ash said.
“Did you notice the smell of the elephant pee when we were in Kerala?” M asked, glad Ash was acting normal, as if their moment on the streetcar hadn’t happened. “It was like black licorice.”
“That’s definitely going in.” Ash came to an abrupt stop. “One moment.” He disappeared into a small shop.
M followed him. “That mask in the window, the deep green one with the crystals and the feathers on one side? I’d like to buy it,” he said to the woman behind the counter.
“Lovely,” she replied, her face lighting up. “It’s the only one we have. Handmade, one-of-a-kind.” She smiled at M. “He has good taste. It will be striking with your green eyes.”
“It’s not for—” M began.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Ash told the woman.
“You’re buying it for me?” M asked.
“For our masquerade ball,” he said, winking at her. After he’d paid, he handed the bag to M.
“Thank you.” She felt like she should say more but couldn’t figure out what.
“Pleasure,” Ash said. He held open the door and waved her outside. “Less of a piss smell on this street,” he commented.
“Um, yeah.” M was flooded with confusion. She was used to pushing emotions away, locking them in an airtight compartment. She’d assumed that was what they were doing with whatever that had been on the streetcar. But Ash seemed perfectly happy to lean into it. He was acting as if flirting and present buying could fit right into their normal relationship. She didn’t know what to think or where to look. M might be able to break thousand-year-old codes written in ancient languages, but right now she was squarely out of her element.
Focus, M.
They walked in silence until he pointed to a round sign outside a store with peeling blue shutters. “There it is. Papa Ozee’s House of Voodoo.” He led the way inside.
The amount of stuff—too much to identify at first—assaulted M’s senses as they walked into the dim interior. Hundreds of necklaces hung from the ceiling. Wooden masks that looked African were hooked on the beams. Voodoo dolls in surprisingly bright colors cascaded down one wall next to shelves crammed with large candles. Were those Buddha statues on the floor? She leaned closer. Yes. And some of the Virgin Mary, too. Bags of herbs lay heaped next to a display of bow ties. M felt like she could stand there for an entire day and not see everything.
A young redheaded woman pushed through a doorway heavy with strings of beads at the back of the shop. Only a few years older than M, she wore a long gauze caftan of all white, with, M was pretty sure, nothing on underneath. It was hard to tell because the room was shadowy and the caftan was floaty. She shot a glance at Ash. He was trying to look anywhere but at the girl.
“What can I help you with?” the girl asked him, and only him, her voice almost theatrically low and throaty. She brushed her long, curly red hair away from her face.
“We’re here to see Papa Ozee,” M told her.
“And what is your business with Papa?” she asked, resting a hand on Ash’s arm. M blinked in surprise. Was she this full-on ridiculous with all the male customers?
“We’d like to ask him about an artifact he might have for sale,” Ash replied. “It would look something like this.” He showed her the picture.
The girl took it, letting her fingers slide slowly over Ash’s, then turned and hip-swayed her way through the bead curtain. “Seriously?” M muttered.
“Hmmm?”
M trailed her fingers down his arm as suggestively as possible, while staring into Ash’s eyes. “I think she must work on commission,” she said, mimicking the girl’s husky tone. “If not, she’s definitely still selling something.”
“Jealous?” Ash asked, the corners of his mouth twitching with amusement.
Before M could respond, the girl returned with an elderly man, his dark head bald and his beard gray.
“I was expecting you days ago!” he exclaimed, his own loose white clothing billowing around him.
M frowned. Was this a dramatic way to offer a private reading or something? “Are you Papa Ozee?” she asked.
“Obviously,” the redhead said. Then she smiled at Ash. “I’m Veronica.”
“I have what you’re looking for,” Papa Ozee told them. “And it no longer wants to be here.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Ash said.
“It tried to escape,” Papa Ozee answered. “Come on to the back. If it wants to go to you, you may have it with my blessing.”
“Papa, do you really want to sell a power object?” Veronica asked as they followed him through the beaded curtain.
“Not sell, give. I don’t need power that strong.” His expression darkened. “I pray I never will.” He opened a weathered wooden cabinet altar mounted on the wall. It was crammed with objects, but M’s eyes instantly locked on the small black Set piece. Papa Ozee reached for it.
“Wait!” Ash demanded. He turned to M. “Take off your backpack.”
She understood. As soon as the piece was off the altar, it would want to join the others, and it could hit her with enough force to fracture her spine. She quickly took off the pack, unzipped it, slid the fused Set piece free, and lay it on the floor. Then she backed away.
Ash stepped back too. “You don’t want to be between the altar and this statue.”
Papa Ozee quickly positioned himself to the side of the cabinet instead of in front of it. Veronica hesitated, staring at the piece on the floor as if mesmerized, before slowly moving away.
“What is that?” she breathed. “I can feel its power. It vibrates in my bones. The other gives a tingle, but this…”
“Don’t know,” M said abruptly. “We were just hired to find it.”
Papa Ozee looked at Veronica, Ash, and M in turn. “Don’t try to hold on to it,” Ash warned. The old man nodded, then gingerly lifted the piece from the cabinet. As soon as he did, the piece jerked free and hurtled across the room. It fused with the other pieces so quickly that M heard the click, but didn’t see the motion.
Gasping, Veronica stepped forward, picking up the statue. Her blue eyes were wide, her face so pale that her freckles looked black. “Don’t!” M ordered. “Give it to me.”
It was as if Veronica hadn’t heard. She reverently turned the piece over in her hands. “It’s … complete. There’s no sign of where the connection was made, no crack, no seam.”
M stepped up to her, hand out. Veronica continued to caress the piece—arms, torso, and legs now. “Give it to her,” Papa Ozee instructed. Reluctantly, she handed it over. M returned the Set animal to the backpack and slid it back on. She’d felt naked without it, missing the feel of the small weight and the strange throbbing.
“Mine knew yours was on the way. That’s why it tried to escape. It knew its brothers were coming,” Papa said.
“Do you mean it moved? When?” Ash demanded.
“About a week ago, I took several objects, including that piece, off the altar to clean them. I put them on the table.” Papa Ozee indicated a table covered with a brightly patterned cloth. “Then six days ago, it began twitching. It skittered off the table and started jerking across the floor. I managed to get it back in the altar, and it quieted. And I waited for someone to come.”
“Six days ago we broke open the foundation to the Isis temple, and the two pieces fused,” M murmured to Ash.
; “But that would mean the pieces attract even when they’re on different continents,” he replied. His eyes went wide. “What if this is how they’ve been tracking us? We thought they’d sent followers to places on the map, but maybe that’s not what happened.”
“What are you talking about?” Veronica asked, her voice sharp now, the purr gone.
M and Ash locked eyes. “We have to get out of here,” M said, adrenalin pulsing through her.
“Now,” Ash agreed.
They rushed out of Papa Ozee’s, breaking into a run. As long as she had the artifact in her backpack, they were in danger. They passed shops, restaurants, a cemetery.
M skidded to a stop, whirling around. “I have an idea.” She grabbed Ash’s hand. “In here,” she gasped, pulling him through the black wrought-iron gate of the cemetery. She felt the Set pieces shift as soon as they entered.
“Sacred space,” she said.
“But we’re still standing out in the open.”
She glanced around, searching for a hiding place. “Over here,” she pointed and took off. Ash raced behind her to a mausoleum near the center of the cemetery, where she hopped over the low fence, then ducked inside.
“The pieces…” She had to pause to suck in a breath. “Don’t attract in here. They fell apart.”
“And if they don’t attract one another, they won’t pull on the piece the cult of Set has.”
“It’s the throbbing, the vibration,” M said, realizing it even as she spoke. “The pieces only do it when we leave a sacred space, the same way they suddenly attract. That throbbing is some kind of signal the Set animal sends itself.”
Ash’s nostrils flared. “It wants to be complete. Set wants to rise again.”
She pushed aside how fanatical he sounded. No matter how much magic she saw, she couldn’t believe there was an actual god involved. “If we’re right, the reason Bob and Liza were at the temple in Kerala was because they already knew we were there,” M said. “Except they were already in the gopura when we spotted them.”
“Right.” Ash said, thinking. “Say they were tracking us. At some point, they would have seen we were heading toward Kerala, and your father had already sent them there once. It wouldn’t be a big leap to assume that’s where we were going. They just got there first.”
“I know why we were safe at the convent. Can’t get more sacred than that,” M said. “But why didn’t they nab us in Bali? We thought going by boat would make us hard to follow, but the pieces would have been signaling all the way there.” She sunk down onto the cool granite of the mausoleum floor. Ash sat beside her.
“Remember how the pieces kept falling apart and coming together in Bali?” Ash asked.
“Because there were offerings and altars all over the place, even in cars!” M exclaimed. “Almost the whole island was sacred.”
“Mike even had some kind of holy garland hanging from her car—along with a St. Christopher’s medal—most of the way to the convent. Maybe the pieces stopped sending the signal before we even got there.”
“Do you think we’re safe here?” M asked, worried. “If they know how sacred spaces affect the pieces, and our trail ends at a cemetery, they wouldn’t have to be geniuses to know we’re here.”
“Maybe not,” Ash said. “We’ve seen the way the pieces act on sacred ground, so we eventually made the connection. The Set people didn’t know we were in a sacred wood when they lost the signal—if that’s what happened. Or that we’d gone into a church.”
M chewed on her lip. “We don’t know how the tracking process works, either,” she added. “Is it like a paranormal GPS, where they know precisely where we are? Like you said, if they knew we were around Kerala, it made sense to go there. If they knew we were on Java, it would make sense to check the biggest temple. Even if they don’t know how the pieces react to sacred spaces, they must have figured out the places on the map are holy.”
“So it’s likely they know we’re in New Orleans. But not precisely here.”
“It’s not like Java, where there was an obvious place to start, either.” M fingered a piece of moss that had pushed its way through a crack in the floor. “The map didn’t send us here, so they wouldn’t start out with a location. They could be searching random churches or whatever, but there’s no reason to think we were at a voodoo store with an altar.”
“So we stay put,” Ash said. “When we leave the cemetery, the signal starts up again. On the other hand, if they were able to track us to the cemetery gates, well, like you once said, I have my power, you have your bo staff.”
“And that ain’t nothing,” M agreed. “But we can’t stay here forever. We have another piece to find, and my dad…” Her voice wavered. She didn’t want to say it.
When Ash spoke, he spoke slowly. “The jaguar temple in Guatemala isn’t on the map either. We got that location from a signpost.” He hesitated. “We have to split up.”
“No,” she said.
“It’s our only choice, M.”
“Not happening.”
“It’s the safest way,” Ash insisted. “One of us stays here, hidden, with the pieces. One of us goes to Guatemala—with no possibility of being tracked.”
“Then I stay.” The pieces were Dad’s life. She wasn’t letting go of them. But even as she said it, she realized that if the Set devotees did search the cemetery, her bo staff wouldn’t be enough to stop them. She’d seen what Ash’s power could do. He at least had a shot.
“I know you don’t want to leave the Set pieces with me—” he began.
“Those pieces are all I have to guarantee my father’s life.”
“I know,” he said. “M, I know. He means everything to you, and you don’t trust the Eye to rescue him unless you can bargain with them. And … I think you’re right. I don’t believe Philip will save your father if he has already secured and rehidden the pieces.”
She stared at him, astonished. “You said we had a deal.”
He nodded. “We do have a deal. You and I, we have a deal.”
“But you’re admitting the Eye can’t be trusted?”
“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” he said as he took her hands, intertwining her fingers with his. “Except you. I trust you, M.”
His eyes hadn’t left hers for a second.
“I trust you, too.” The words escaped M’s lips without her deciding to say them. They came from her gut. Mike was right. There were reasons, huge reasons, for Ash to betray her. She was on one side, his god the other.
But her gut told her to trust him, and her parents had taught her to trust her gut. She pulled her hands from his and slid the pieces out of her backpack, knowing what she was about to do could get her father killed, but believing—or at least hoping so hard that it was almost like believing—that Ash would keep his word.
Ash took the pieces and stowed them in his pack, looping a strap around his arm like she always did. His eyes slid away from hers, and he suddenly looked guilty. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“What?” M demanded, every nerve crackling.
“Nothing that changes our deal,” he answered quickly, his gaze jerking back up to meet hers. “But I don’t want you to leave with any secrets between us.”
She just nodded. Her throat felt too tight to speak.
“M, your guardians? They’re my parents.” His words were rushed. “I know it might make you hate me.”
M stared at him, too shocked to speak. What was he talking about?
“They’re … they’re with Set. I was born to Set, raised to worship Set,” Ash said. “I’m sorry.”
Bob and Liza? Those disgustingly normal people? They had nothing in common with Ash. But it was a lie, everything I knew about them was a lie, she thought. She still hadn’t adjusted her thinking on them enough. None of this computed.
“That’s why they hated me. It wasn’t my power. It was because my power came from the enemy of their god.” His throat convulsed as he swallowed hard. “
I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I’m an idiot.”
M’s brain whirled as she tried to take in what his confession meant. “So when you went undercover…”
“I had to pretend I wanted back in. I had to make my oldest friend believe I’d realized my power was an abomination,” he replied.
It had always nagged at her that the Set cult had let some grunt get close enough to her father to speak to him. Now it made sense. “You got back in as the prodigal son.”
Ash nodded. “I should have told you.”
A reluctant smile tugged at M’s lips. “Well, if you’d told me you had any connection to Set that first night, you would have been saying hello to my bo staff.”
He didn’t smile back. His face looked haggard, his expression haunted. M frowned. He really thought this would change her opinion of him.
“Ash, you’re not them,” she said. “Bob was the one who…” She gestured toward the scars hidden beneath his shirt. “And Liza, she said those horrible things to you. They’re horrible. I hate them. I don’t hate you.”
He nodded, lips pressed together as if to hold in a sob. “Thank you,” he whispered.
She reached out and took his hand, unsure what to say. She’d known his family life was bad. But apparently it was even worse than she’d realized. Of course he hadn’t trusted her with the truth. How could he ever trust anyone when his own parents thought him a monster?
“You should’ve told me, but I know why you didn’t,” she said. “We’ve never completely trusted each other. Until now.”
“I’ll keep the pieces safe,” he promised.
“I know.”
They sat in silence, staring at each other. Finally M sighed. They had work to do. “There’s not much food. Should I—”
“No, when you leave the cemetery you need to run. You can’t risk being seen.” Ash smiled wanly. “I have water. And I’m used to self-deprivation, you know.”
She smiled. “Horus likes that, I hear.”
“Just don’t be gone too long.” He reached into his own bag and pulled out a wallet. “There’s enough in there to get you to Guatemala and back.”
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