by Hudson, Tara
Eventually, my quest landed us in a small park with a double alley of oak trees, where I found myself pacing frantically. Gabrielle silently watched me for a few minutes and then plopped onto one of the park benches that line the alley.
“Told you not to go back in there,” she stated bluntly. “I knew it wouldn’t turn out well.”
“What, so now you’re a Voodoo priestess and clairvoyant?” I snapped.
When she held up both her hands in a gesture of surrender, I stopped pacing and rubbed my temples. Cringing, I slouched over and plopped next to her on the bench.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, staring off in the distance at a small bandstand where a group of jazz musicians played Christmas music. “I just … I have no idea what I’m doing.”
To my surprise, Gabrielle wrapped one arm around my waist and gave me a brief half hug. After she released me, she laughed.
“Like I do? I totally destroyed your afterlife in some last-ditch effort to find my parents. And so I wouldn’t be … alone.”
“Alone? You’ve got Felix.”
She lifted one shoulder and then dropped it. “Felix is my brother, and I love him. Of course I’m glad we’re together through all of this. But at some point Felix has got to get on with his life. Without me haunting it.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Like I told you earlier, I met those Faders once,” she said. “After I became Risen, I still haunted my parents’ graves at the St. Louis Number One, trying to figure out what to do with myself. One night last summer I ran into them, sort of aimlessly standing around what was probably one of their own graves. At first I was excited to meet them. I thought maybe they’d be—I don’t know—good companions or something. But when that pirate guy tried to cop a feel, I decided that they weirded me out too.”
I barked out an involuntary laugh, and she smiled slyly.
“Besides,” she added, “old Nathan Hale was more my type anyway. I just love a man in uniform.”
“The soldier?” I made a sour face. “You really do have bad taste in guys.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, laughing. “Let’s just agree that the whole crew is pretty unsavory. Anyway, the real point of this story is that I’d basically given up on finding someone like me. Then you and Lover Boy walked into Marie’s, and I thought, ‘Holy hell, this is someone I might be able to hang out with.’ And when you touched him? Forget about it—I was totally convinced that another relatively normal-acting ghost with special powers was exactly what I needed. But I really wasn’t trying to ruin your afterlife, or break the two of you up.”
“How did you know I left him?” I asked, frowning. “I mean, before Café du Monde?”
“You talked in your sleep last night. Believe it or not, Felix wasn’t the only one keeping watch over you.”
“Huh,” I murmured, leaning back against the park bench thoughtfully. For a while I just sat in silence, absentmindedly listening to the jazz band. Then I turned slowly toward Gabrielle.
“Look, Gaby,” I said, trying out her nickname, “I have no idea if I can trust you or not. To be honest, I’ve met so many people and been through so much in the last few days that I’m not even sure where to start. But if you’re going to hang around me for an extended period of time, there’s some things you should know.”
Gaby leaned forward, her expression intent. “Whatever you can tell me that will help my parents, I’m all for it.”
I gnawed at my bottom lip for a few seconds before nodding hesitantly. Then without further introduction, I told her everything: how I died and then reawakened when I met Joshua; how I fought off the wraiths when Eli sent them after Jillian; how I narrowly missed entrapment in the netherworld at the hands of the demons. I explained how ineffectual my attempts to reenter the netherworld had been since that dark night. Then I told her about all the things that I’d experienced in the last few days: Eli’s warning; the bizarre dreams; the brief sighting of a handful of demons at the club.
I left out only one detail: what the Quarter ghosts had said about using a middleman to hand me over to the demons.
Despite my better judgment, I’d started to like Gaby. Maybe even trust her, on some level. But I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure she wouldn’t trade me to the darkness the second I dropped my guard. After all, it didn’t escape my attention that the pirate had said “she” when referring to their intermediary.
By the time I’d finished my story, the sun had already shifted in the sky and the warm glow of late afternoon filtered through the trees. Gaby, who’d sat quietly while I talked, now leaned back against our park bench. She released a long sigh and began twisting a curl of her Afro around her index finger.
“Wow,” she muttered. “And I thought my afterlife was eventful.”
I snorted softly in agreement. Then, smiling just a tiny bit, I said, “Dude, you have no idea.”
Gaby laughed and once again wrapped me in a half hug. Then she let me go, leaping to her feet. Still rapidly twisting her hair around one finger, she began to pace just as I had.
“So, how do we do it?” she mused. “How do we reopen the netherworld? I mean, without tracking down Eli or the demons and basically asking them for an extra house key.”
I sighed and lifted my hands uselessly in the air.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I’ve had no luck at all. I stood at that river for hours every day, with no results. So what’s the point? And besides, what are we going to do? Hitchhike back to Oklahoma to try again?”
Gaby shook her head. “We don’t need to. You said it yourself: all the different parts of the netherworld are connected, according to the redheaded girl in your dreams. If we can get into one of those—what did she call it?—portals, then maybe we’d have access to all of them.”
“It’s an interesting theory. But where do we find another portal?” I asked.
She frowned, and her eyes flicked over my shoulder, to the south. “Actually … I have a pretty good idea,” she murmured.
Abruptly, she lunged forward, grabbing my hand and yanking me to my feet. “Come on,” she demanded, and began to hurry down the alley with me in tow.
“Where are we going?” I cried, stumbling behind her.
“You’ll see when we get there,” she called back over her shoulder.
“Why do I feel like you’re always dragging me all over New Orleans?” I grumbled. Gaby laughed loudly.
“Because I am dragging you all over New Orleans.”
Once she realized I would come along without duress, she released my hand and continued to walk briskly out of the park. I nearly had to run to keep pace with her as we moved west on the city sidewalks, back toward the Quarter.
I didn’t ask her any questions; I didn’t say anything at all. But when I saw a familiar awning up ahead, I slowed to a stop. After a few steps Gaby noticed that I no longer followed her. So she reversed course and crossed back to me.
“Amelia,” she said impatiently, “it’s, like, almost three o’clock. They’ve definitely gone home by now.”
Without taking my eyes off Café du Monde, I nodded. “Yeah, probably. It’s just … you know …”
“Yeah, I know.” Her tone was surprisingly soft. Kind.
She gave me a brief moment to compose myself and then tugged gently on the sleeve of my jacket, urging me forward again. With a small breath for courage, I hurried alongside her, keeping my eyes glued to the sidewalk as I moved past the café. Even the beguiling scent of chicory couldn’t entice me to look inside.
A few blocks away, Gaby slowed to round the corner of Decatur and Toulouse Streets. I followed her south on Toulouse, passing a tall building full of retail stores and crossing over a steep footbridge. At the bottom of the bridge, however, I skidded to a stop.
There in front of me, just behind a small building constructed to look like a lighthouse, stood the netherworld pavilion.
Or at least something that looked almost identi
cal to it.
Through the open walls of the structure, I saw the gray water of the Mississippi River moving lazily past the Quarter. Underneath its roof, I could make out the shadowed angles of metal girders.
But the roof itself bore little similarity to the one in the netherworld. While the dark pavilion had a purplish, almost transparent ceiling, this structure’s roof resembled that of Café du Monde, with its cheerful green-and-white stripes.
“The pavilion?” I whispered to Gaby.
“Not a pavilion, exactly,” she said. “This is the entrance to the Toulouse Street Wharf, where all the old steamboats used to dock. The only boat still running from this wharf is the Natchez, though. When you described your dreams to me, I thought about this place. What do you think? Is it a match?”
Slowly, I nodded. “Yeah, this is pretty close. Not as bone-chilling creepy. But still …”
Gaby stared at the wharf with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe this place is our portal into the netherworld. The dark pavilion going out over the water, the river that looks like an ocean from the right angle—it all fits the bill. We could always come back here tonight, to find out …”
When I shivered slightly, Gaby reached over and gave my hand a quick, reassuring squeeze. “But we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” she added.
Of course, I didn’t miss the disappointment in her voice. Still feeling a little unnerved, I shook my head.
“No, we need to try, and tonight’s as good a time as any. But remember: we still have the problem of how to open it.”
“I know.” She sighed, leaning back against the rail of the footbridge. “I’m at a total loss. Part of me is tempted to walk right up to the Mayhew Seers and ask them to join me in some type of magical priestess-Seer council or something. But since we just got your heart to start beating again, we probably don’t want to go break it one more time by letting you see Joshua....”
Gaby hadn’t even finished speaking before I jerked upright. My head whipped around toward her.
“Say that again?” I demanded.
She frowned. “We don’t want you all mopey and pathetic tonight?”
“No, the other part. About my heartbeats,” I urged.
“Um, that we just got it to start beating again?” she offered, obviously confused. “Or at least the resurrection spell makes it act like it’s beating. I don’t think it’s actually pumping blood or anything. Maybe. I’m not exactly cutting myself to find out.”
For the first time in hours, I flashed her a genuine, broad grin.
“Gabrielle Callioux, you’re a genius.”
“Of course I am,” she gloated, and then frowned. “But would you mind telling me why?”
My grin widened. “In my experience, a ghost only hears a heartbeat when someone nearby is dying. That’s how Eli tracked his other victims—how he knew the exact moment to take them into the netherworld. If he could hear dying heartbeats, don’t you think other supernatural beings can? Say, for instance—”
“The demons,” Gaby breathed. All at once she sounded excited. “You think if we trick them into thinking we’re dying, they’ll send one of their minions to take us into the netherworld.”
“Exactly. But … there’s still a big problem. When the redheaded girl gave me that vision of myself transforming, my heartbeat sounded pretty strong. That means we’ve probably got to find a way to make our heartbeats more sluggish. Make them sound like they’re slowing down. And I obviously have no idea how to do that.”
“But I do,” Gaby said, beaming. “Marie has this off-limits potion that makes you seem like you’re dead. She calls it zombie juice, but I know for a fact that it doesn’t have the same effects as the stuff in Haiti: the trances, the deathlike stasis, and so on. It just slows the heart rate way down. It’s still risky, of course. But since we’re already dead …”
As she trailed off, I felt a little frisson of fear. But I shrugged it off and finished her sentence: “Since we’re already dead, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Gaby snickered nervously. “Totally. Other than blinking completely out of existence, right?”
“Right,” I answered, placing my hands on my hips in an effort to look brave. Fearless.
For a full minute Gaby and I traded anxious, uncertain glances. Then she crossed over to me and threaded her arm through the crook of my elbow.
“Come on, Amelia,” she said, flashing me a wicked grin. “Let me show you how to plunder a Voodoo priestess’s secret stash.”
Chapter
TWENTY-SIX
The outside of the Conjure Café looked just as shady today. Perhaps more so, when I gave myself time to think about its back room and what I planned to do there. As I stared up at the dirty front window—its grime so thick, it didn’t even reflect the pinkish light from the sunset—I forced myself to flicker invisible. That precaution hardly eased my fears.
Gaby noticed my reluctant frown and nudged me with her elbow.
“Don’t be such a wuss. We agreed to do this incognito, remember? So as long as you don’t freak out and go all visible on me, we should be fine.”
“Sure. Fine.”
I nodded mechanically and rubbed my palms on the thighs of my skinny-jeans. Why my hands chose now to start sweating again, I couldn’t say. Gaby threw another glance my way and then, with a confident smile, opened the door of the Conjure for both of us to go inside.
Tonight, the restaurant had a few patrons: desolate-looking folks, faces sagging and eyes cast down to their unappetizing dinners. Not a single person glanced up when we entered, despite the fact that the door must have appeared to open on its own.
As I walked down the center aisle of the Conjure, I looked down at their food. Although their dinners smelled revolting, my stomach still churned with hunger. I felt it strongly enough that a nearby plate—covered in something that resembled a cross between lasagna and meat loaf—didn’t look that bad. Now I really regretted dropping that second beignet at Café du Monde.
Feeling a bit disgusted with myself, I lowered my head and followed Gaby to the back of the restaurant, where she pulled aside the curtain to Marie’s sanctuary. We ducked into the room, and Gaby let the curtain fall shut behind us.
As it closed, the limited light in the room all but vanished. Tonight, no candelabra glowed, no incense burned. However impossible it seemed, the place was even creepier without the candlelight and tendrils of smoke.
After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I tucked my hands into my tiny jean pockets—something to do besides wring them, I supposed.
“Where’s Marie?” I murmured softly.
I could just make out Gaby frowning into the darkness.
“Actually,” she whispered, “that’s a great question. She always lights candles and does a few spells before midnight mass. So … she should be here.”
“Well, then,” I said, rocking forward onto the toes of my boots nervously, “let’s get what we need and hightail it before she comes back.”
“Fair enough.”
I could barely see Gaby’s form as she crept across the room and slipped into the opposite doorway. In the pitch-black, she almost disappeared. Something about her disappearing trick bothered me. Frowning, I pulled one hand from its pocket and stared down at the muted quality of my own skin.
Then it hit me: we didn’t glow in the dark anymore. While other ghosts shared that soft, eerie glow, Gaby and I looked like living people when the lights went out.
Just another ghostly power lost.
I shifted uncomfortably as Gaby rummaged around in Marie’s secret-potion room. Something about our current mission felt wrong—something other than the theft and the very real risk of ingesting “zombie juice” in order to attract demons.
In fact, I sensed something wrong about this space, in particular. I could almost smell it in the dank air: tangy and bitter, like fear.
I’d leaned forward, about to tell Gaby to hurry up already, when I heard a soft groan s
omewhere behind me. I spun around, trying to find the source of the sound; but I couldn’t see anything in the blackness.
The groan repeated, so I took a few blind steps backward.
“Gaby, someone’s out here.”
I fumbled behind me for a light switch, a flashlight, anything. Over the sounds of my floundering, I could hear ragged breathing from the corner nearest to me.
“Seriously, Gaby,” I hissed. “Get out here and help me.”
Cursing wildly, Gaby stumbled out of the tiny back room and started groping noisily along Marie’s shelving. She must have found whatever she sought, because I heard a sizzle and then smelled the stinging scent of sulfur. Suddenly, candlelight flooded the room.
Gaby grabbed a lit candelabrum and held it up beside me. When she did so, the glow of the flames fell into the corner of the room, and we both gasped.
A body lay crumpled in the corner. If not for the rasping breaths, punctuated by near-inaudible groans, I would have thought it was a corpse. But Gaby knew who it was on sight.
“Marie!” she cried, dropping beside the body and grasping at it. Of course, Gaby’s hands passed over Marie without touching her. One of the many perks of being Risen.
Gaby growled in frustration. In the dim light, I saw her flicker out of and then into focus; going visible.
“Marie,” she called out again, snapping her fingers next to the old woman’s ears. “Marie, wake up.”
Feeling incredibly unhelpful, I willed myself visible and then kneeled beside Gaby as she continued snapping. At that moment, Marie’s head lolled back, just enough to reveal her face.
Her dark skin looked waxen, her cheeks sagged, and her eyes were bloodshot, unfocused.
Studying her closely, I frowned. For some reason, this hunched, sick old woman reminded me of someone. Maybe just because of their similar ages. Or maybe because of how fast they’d both deteriorated. Something about Marie’s current state, and Ruth’s appearance last night, itched at me....
“Gaby,” I murmured, lost in thought, “how would you go about drugging someone?”
Gaby’s head snapped toward me, and her eyes widened in surprise. After a beat, she turned back to Marie and leaned close to the old woman’s face. Gaby pulled in a sharp breath through her nose and then sat back on her heels.