Gathering Deep (14 page)

Fifteen

By the time we got to Mama Legba's shop, Lucy still wasn't quite coherent. We couldn't take her through the front door like that without people noticing and asking questions we didn't want to answer or calling the police on us, so we shuffled her in through the back.

“Auntie O!” Odane shouted.

Seconds later, Mama Legba appeared in the doorway. “Odane?” Then she saw Lucy, limp and still mostly unconscious in Odane's arms, and her face flashed with confused worry. “What happened?”

Odane looked at me as he set Lucy down onto the low couch and waited, like he was giving me a chance to explain. When Mama Legba realized he wasn't going to talk, she looked at me, too.

“We went to my house,” I told her, and before I could say anything more, she tore into me.

“You went to
what
house?”

“The house I grew up in. Lucy had this idea—”

“Lucy did?” Mama Legba interrupted, glancing at Lucy's still figure and then back at me. “Why would Lucy think about doing a thing like that? She heard you talking about the spell that kept you out the other day. She should have known better.”

“It wasn't exactly all her idea,” I said, backtracking a bit. “I was thinking about maybe going out to Thisbe's cabin again—”

“Thisbe's cabin?” Mama Legba's eyes narrowed even more, if that was possible.

“Are you going to let me finish, or are you going to keep interrupting me?” I snapped, my temper finally starting to melt some of the fear that had paralyzed me most of the drive over.

Mama Legba pursed her lips at my sass and then gave a wave of her hand to indicate that I should continue.

“Like I was saying, I had this idea to go to Thisbe's cabin, and before you say a word, I
know
it was a stupid idea, but we have less than two days before that aloe mixture you made might open up something bad and … ” I felt the beginnings of a breeze sliding across my neck and my voice caught in my throat.

“And what?” Mama Legba asked.

I took a second and tried to settle myself down. I didn't speak again until I was sure that no other wind was kicking up. I still wasn't sure what had happened out there at the house. I didn't think
I'd called up those bugs, but I couldn't be certain.

Taking a final, steadying breath, I went on. “I asked Lucy to go with me to the cabin, but she had this idea that where we really needed to look was my house, because it was the last place my mother had lived.”

“Actually, that wasn't such a bad idea,” Odane said thoughtfully, like he was impressed we'd come up with it.

I glanced over at him, unsure of how I felt about his comment. I didn't need his approval, but even so, part of me was glad I had it.

“So you went to your house,” Mama Legba said. She still didn't sound none too happy. “Did you get yourself through the door this time?”

I shook my head. “No, I still couldn't even go as far as the front porch, but Lucy could. At first everything was fine, but then … ” I took a shuddering breath. Just thinking about it and I could almost feel that unnatural wind and the sharply buzzing wings of the insects that had come down from the sky like a plague.

“Then everything wasn't,” Odane finished for me. “I've never seen nothing like it, Auntie. When I got there, the whole place was covered in a swarm of bugs so dark you'd think night had fallen over that one little piece of land. Chloe was standing there like she couldn't go nowhere else, right in the middle of it all.”

I'd been doing pretty well holding myself together until that point. All the way back from my house to the Quarter, I'd focused on following Odane's truck and I hadn't let myself think about the bugs. But at his description it all came back—the sound of their demanding wings, the sting of their shiny black bodies pelting my skin like bullets. The way they'd surrounded me, almost swallowed me in their dark mass. I had to close my eyes and take a couple of deep breaths to ward off the nausea that rose up in my stomach.

“And what was you doing there, boy?” Mama Legba asked, her hands on her hips and her attention, finally, not on me.

“Mom sent me,” he said simply.

Mama Legba blinked, her expression tense. “Odeana saw it?”

Odane nodded, and Mama Legba sank into her chair.

“What?” I asked, not understanding why the mood had shifted so suddenly, so dangerously, in the room.

Mama Legba glanced up at Odane and then, after he gave a slight nod, she met my eyes. “My sister was born behind the veil. She got the second sight,” she said reverently, like that was supposed to mean something to me. “Some babies is born in the caul, and they has the sight—the ability to see what will be. Odeana been having her visions since we was girls, but she only sees certain things. Important things. Usually, when she gets the sight, somebody's gonna die.”

“She saw one of us about to die?” I asked Odane.

“I'm not sure exactly what she saw, but she yanked me out of bed and told me I needed to get myself to the address where I found you. I learned a long time ago not to question my mom when she's got a vision.”

“Well, I'm glad you didn't question her this time either,” I told him, and I meant every word of it and a whole bunch more that I didn't say.

“Me, too,” he said softly, and maybe for the first time, his voice didn't hold even a hint of scorn. Then he turned back to Mama Legba. “I found Lucy in the basement. I almost didn't find her, though—she'd crawled through a smaller door that went down into a second cellar. It was so dark in there I couldn't see a foot in front of me. I almost turned back, but
I caught sight of the white toe of her shoe right before.”

We all looked over to Lucy, who was curled on the couch and still holding the box securely in her arms even though she hadn't quite come to completely. Her eyes were open now, but she was sort of staring off.

Mama Legba went over and kneeled down next to her. Brushing some of the hair back from her pale face, she made some cooing noises to try and wake her. Lucy stirred a little, but only to adjust her hold on the box.

“Try to get her all the way awake while I make her something to help clear up her energy,” Mama Legba said as she pushed herself up. “She's got mixed up in something dark and we need to be getting it off her.”

While the tea was brewing, Mama Legba lit a smudge stick and wafted the smoke around. Little by little, Lucy's eyes began to look more focused. Little by little she stirred enough that we could get her to sip the tea. Finally, Mama Legba managed to get her to give up the box she was holding and set it aside.

When she was feeling well enough and her eyes had finally taken on their usual sharpness, Mama Legba settled herself down in the chair across from her. “You feeling better, Lucy-girl?”

She nodded and took another sip of tea.

“What happened, child?” Mama Legba asked.

I sat next to Lucy, to help keep her upright, but Odane took to lurking in the corner, a hip propped against one of the countertops, his arms across his chest. He had a look of utter concentration on his face as he listened.

“I went in the house,” Lucy told us, her eyes far off, like she was remembering. “I looked upstairs first, but there wasn't anything that seemed important, so I decided to try the basement, like Chloe had suggested.”

Mama Legba glanced at me, one dark brow raised.

“I wasn't allowed down there as a kid,” I said, sounding more defensive than I meant to.

“At first I didn't see anything interesting in the basement either. Just a lot of old stuff, and I didn't think that Thisbe would leave something important sitting out in the open.” Lucy paused long enough for another sip of tea. “But then I noticed the door. I almost missed it, since it was so dark down there and there were a couple boxes stacked in front of it. So I moved them and found this other part of the basement.”

“That's where I found her,” Odane confirmed.

Lucy's face went a little pink. “Thank you for that,” she said.

Odane nodded, but he didn't add anything more.

“Anyway, I had my phone, so I used the light and went in.” She hesitated then, and her eyes were far away and serious.

“Take your time, child,” Mama Legba said, touching Lucy's knee.

She blinked a few times, then closed her eyes for a long moment, like she was trying to visualize it. “There wasn't any light in there at all,” she said. “But when I pointed my flashlight up on the walls, they were covered in symbols. Kind of like the symbols that were on that tomb.”

Mama Legba frowned. “You mean Thisbe's tomb?”

Lucy nodded.

“Wait,” Odane said. “Back it up. Thisbe has a tomb?”

Mama Legba gave him an impatient look. “Last place they saw the old witch was in one of the cemeteries. She'd been hiding the boy's body—”

“Alex,” Lucy interrupted, glancing up at Odane to explain. “She'd kept his body in one of those old above-ground tombs, only it wasn't a normal tomb. It was all carved up with these strange markings, and they must have had some sort of magical properties, because they seemed to glow.”

Odane thought about this. “I didn't see any markings in the cellar, but I didn't have a light. I tried to use my phone, same as you, but it was dead.”

“Mine went dead, too,” I told them. But when I pulled my phone out of my back pocket, sure enough, it was fine. Plenty of battery. Plenty of reception.

Still no other messages from Piers.

“So whatever happened must have done something to interrupt the power,” Odane said, checking his own phone and finding it was also just fine.

“That's about all I really remember,” Lucy told us. “I went down into the room—it had an even lower ceiling than the regular basement—it was all made of dirt, like someone had dug it out by hand or something. And the walls, like I said, were covered with these weird inscriptions. There was an altar or something there, but it wasn't like yours,” she told Mama Legba. “It didn't have anything but red candles that had been burned down to stubs and a tarnished silver bowl. Underneath the bowl, I found the box. I almost didn't notice it, because it looked like a stand or something for the bowl, but the second I picked it up … ” She frowned. “I don't know what happened.”

“Sounds to me like you tripped some kind of alarm,” Mama Legba said.

If Lucy had tripped an alarm, it meant that I probably hadn't been the one to cause those evil bugs. That realization made me feel a little better. Not much, but a little.

Mama Legba looked at Odane, her patience at an end. “Now what about these bugs you was talking about?”

“It's like I was telling you, when I pulled up, the whole place was dark as night, but it wasn't night. You think the cicadas can get bad? They don't have nothing on what I saw out there.” Even Odane looked uneasy remembering it. “The whole bed of my truck is
still
filled with them.”

Mama Legba perked up at this. “You best show me, then. You girls wait here. We'll be back.”

By the time Mama Legba and Odane came back, Lucy had more color to her and almost seemed to be back to her own self.

“Please tell me you didn't bring any of those things in here,” I said when I saw that
Mama Legba had something cupped in her hands.

“Oh, hush,” she told me. She went into the hallway—the one that led out to the front shop—and after a minute returned with a heavy stone bowl. “Let's see what we got here,” she said, using a wooden dowel to crush a couple of the black bugs in the bowl.

I shuddered at the sound of the exoskeletons crunching beneath her pestle.

“Scarab beetles,” she said, though I'm not sure if she was talking to us or to herself. “But not really.” When she was done, her brows went up as she examined the contents.

“Well?” Odane said. He didn't seem half as bothered by what was happening as I was.

“They might look like scarabs, but that's not what they is. See?” She thrust the bowl toward him.

He examined the contents critically and then licked his finger and dabbed the tip of it into the bowl. Then he examined the fine powder coating the tip of his finger before touching it to the tip his tongue.

“Ugh.” I couldn't hide my disgust.

“They're not real bugs,” he said, as though that excused it.

“They looked real enough to me, and who goes around putting nasty stuff in their mouth like that? Just … ugh.”

Odane kind of chuckled at that, and I felt the sudden urge to throw something at him.

“They're made of dirt,” he said, taking the bowl from Mama Legba and bringing it to me. “They looked like bugs and acted like bugs, but look—they crumble into nothing when you press on them at all.”

Sure enough, he was right. There wasn't any sign of anything that remotely looked like a bug in the bowl. Certainly, there should have been some kind of wetness from their bodies—the insects hadn't been dead that long. But the bowl only held some dry, dark dirt.

Not that I was going to taste it.

“So what does that mean?” I said, stepping back. Dust or not, I didn't want to be anywhere close to it.

“It means that we was right about Lucy tripping some sort of alarm. These are just a bit of magic. Entering that cellar or touching that there box must have released a kind of energy, enough to animate this bit of earth into something fearsome.”

I shuddered. Fearsome wasn't the half of it.

Mama Legba frowned as she walked over and settled herself on the couch to look at the box. “Sure don't seem like much,” she said, letting her hands hover above it. “But it must be or she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of protecting it like she did. I wonder what it's hiding.”