Gathering Deep (25 page)

Thirty-Two

“We need to get her out of here,” Odane said as he listened to the shallow breaths Lucy was taking. “She's alive, but barely.”

“But Piers—” I started.

“We'll find him,” he promised, his jaw tight as he spoke. “But Lucy might know something about where Thisbe went, and she won't be able to tell us anything until we get her some
help.” He pulled a knife out of his boot, ready to cut the threads away.

“Don't,” I said, grabbing his wrist.

He gave me a puzzled look.

“Thisbe did something else before she wrapped up Lucy's body. I think she might have trapped her soul with a binding spell.” I tried to think back to everything I'd seen in the vision.

“And a body can't live without a soul,” Odane said, understanding. “So we'll leave the thread be for now, and we'll get her back to Aunt Odette.”

Getting to Mama Legba's place was a challenge. That late, the Quarter was packed with people—none of them all that sober. As we drove, I watched the crowd, wondering if Thisbe was out there somewhere, hiding in plain sight, waiting to find another victim. Or if we were already too late.

Eventually, we made our way to the shop by the cathedral. Odane pulled into the alleyway behind it and parked illegally, so we could get Lucy into Mama Legba's without anyone seeing us carrying around a tied-up white girl through the streets.

Before we were even out of the car, the door opened and Mama Legba and Odeana came out.

Odane brushed past his aunt and ignored his mother's concerned expression as he carried Lucy in and laid her on the low couch. Mama Legba went over to Lucy and knelt next to her. Carefully, she touched her forehead, her cheeks.

Mama Legba' mouth was drawn tight and when her eyes met mine, I saw a fear in them I'd never seen there before.

“What?” I said. “You can help her, can't you?”

“She ain't in there, Chloe-girl,” Mama Legba murmured, and then glanced up at me. “But you knew that, didn't you.”

I nodded silently.

“What did Thisbe do to her?” Mama Legba asked.

“I think she bound her soul,” I whispered. My hands were shaking as I looked at Lucy's quiet body. “Thisbe used another one of those little carved dolls, but she took the charm with her.”

“Can we get these strings off the girl?” Odeana asked, pressing her hand to feel the heat coming off Lucy's body.

“As long as she got that charm, she got Lucy,” Mama Legba told me. “We take off the strings, we take away the only thing holding her to this world.”

“She has Piers, too,” I said, and I told Mama Legba and Odeana everything I'd seen when I touched Lucy and everything Ikenna had told us about what it took to summon Baron Samedi.

“But why not just summon him right then and there?” Odeana asked, ignoring her sister's disapproving murmurs about Ikenna.

“It hasn't been five whole days yet,” I told her. “Sunset on day one to sunup on day five. That's tomorrow.”

“She could have just as well stayed where she was, though,” Odane admitted. “It would have been easier than moving a grown man somewhere else.”

“It's because she finally figured out what happened to Augustine,” I said slowly, thinking of the book covered in human skin.

“Where you going?” Mama Legba called as I ran out the door and back to the Nova. I returned with the envelope filled with the copied journal.

“There's got to be something in here I missed,” I said, pulling out the pages and handing everyone a few. “In the past that Ikenna helped me see, Roman said something to Thisbe right before Augustine disappeared—he basically threatened to get to her through him. When she took Piers, he had this book with him. Not the copy, but the real book—the one with the cover of human skin.”

“Which might actually be Augustine's skin,” Odane said.

“Yeah, and Thisbe's had this book for days,” I continued. “She has the charm she bound Augustine to her with. There has to be something else that we're missing—something that would make her risk taking Piers somewhere else instead of just performing the ritual to summon Samedi right there at the park.”

“This here is nothing but marks and lines,” Odeana said, examining one of the pages. “How would this Thisbe make heads or tails of it?”

“It's not random scribbles,” I told her. “It's a language from Nigeria.” I looked up at Mama Legba.

“You meaning that Thisbe could have read this?” Mama Legba didn't sound convinced.

“I don't know for sure, but you saw all of those tickets and things in that box we found. Thisbe traveled a lot—and she traveled to Liberia at some point. It's close enough that it's possible she traveled other places as well—maybe even Nigeria. It's possible that she could have understood what this all says without these translations. I know, it's a leap, but—”

“Here,” Odeana said, holding out a page to her son. “Take a look at this.”

Odane took the offered sheet of paper and frowned. “Well, that answers the question of what happened to Augustine.”

When he handed the paper to me, I found myself looking at a sketch of Le Ciel Doux. Most of it was notated in French. A few of the strange symbols hadn't been translated yet, but most of them had.

“It does at that,” I said, unease turning my blood to ice. “She was already a loose cannon, but if she has this information, who knows what she might do. And she still has Piers … ”

“We have to get to the big house,” Odane said.

“Right now?” Mama Legba asked, still looking over the papers in her hand.

“What do you expect them to wait for?” Odeana asked. “They either go now, or they'll be going to a funeral.”

“Odeana's right,” I said. “It's today.” I repeated Mama Legba's words back to her: “
Sundown to sunup on the fifth day
. We don't have time to wait.”

“It's not morning yet,” Odeana told us, but then she pinned her son with the kind of look that only a mother could give. “But don't you even think of coming back unless you all in one piece.”

“Wouldn't come back any other way.” Odane gave his mom a peck on the cheek, and we started out the door.

“Wait!” Mama Legba yelled from the doorway. When we turned to see what she wanted, her eyes were determined. “Don't forget about the other charm,” she told us. “We got to burn it before it does any more damage to Lucy.”

“Got it,” Odane said as he started to slide into the Nova.

But I stopped him. “I'm driving this time,” I told him, taking the keys.

His mouth quirked up as he raised his hand in surrender and backed away without argument. I started the engine with a roar, and then we raced back to Le Ciel and the nightmare that waited somewhere in the darkness. The nightmare I'd once called Momma.

Thirty-Three

The grounds of the plantation were bathed in shadow as I pulled through the heavy gates and steered the car down
the fork in the drive that would take us to the big house. The Nova's headlights cut through the darkness and lit up the white columns of the mansion, causing them to throw dark shadows against the house.

I cut the engine and the lights, but the mansion still seemed to glow in the darkness, rising up in front of us like an enormous tomb.

Not
like
a tomb, I corrected. The whole place
was
a tomb because of what Roman Dutilette had done to build it.

How many times had I stood in those rooms and told gawking tourists about how the whole plantation system along the River Road was built on the blood and sweat of people who were forced to labor in captivity? I'd never known how much more devastating that truth was in the case of Le Ciel Doux.

Odane sidled up closer to me. “We don't know for sure they're in there,” he said in an attempt to build up my courage and his own. “We might be wrong.”

“They're in there,” I told him, pulling the tarot card from the visor and tucking it into my pocket. Then I got out of the car before I could change my mind.

If my mother—if Thisbe—had any idea that her lover had been captured by Roman Dutilette, if she had read, as we had, how Roman had sacrificed Augustine, she wouldn't be anywhere else.

It was all in the journal. How Roman had learned young that there was more power available in this world than money could buy. How he'd searched for ways to make that power his.

He'd detailed every sacrifice he'd made over the years, every spell or curse he ever tried, but he'd killed Augustine specifically to hurt Thisbe. Because Thisbe had embarrassed him and he couldn't touch her. Because that scared him, and fear made him angry and desperate. He'd written about how he'd collected Augustine's blood to ward the grounds of his father's house and about the intricate process of preserving his skin to bind the book. But he'd never buried Augustine. He'd never done any of the rituals to send the soul on its way back to the beginning.

Because he wanted more than Augustine's death. He wanted his life as well.

By the time Roman inherited the land from his father and was ready to build his mansion, there hadn't been much left of Augustine but some bone, but he'd ground them up with all the rest of the bodies and souls he'd collected over the years and he used them to create the concrete of those pillars that ringed Le Ciel. Because he believed that the power his sacrifices demonstrated would protect him and his descendants from any sort of attack or magic.

Roman had used the man's skin to protect his words, and he'd used his body and soul to protect his house. And somehow, Roman had figured out a way to keep coming back, again and again.

Which is why Augustine had never come back, and why Thisbe was still waiting. Or she had been, until she'd gotten her hands on Piers and, in turn, on Roman's journal.

As Odane and I made our way up to the front of the house, light was just beginning to break at the edge of the eastern horizon.
Sunup on the fifth day
.

“Come on,” I said, picking up the pace.

“Were do you think she'll be?”

I thought for a moment. My mother had started working at Le Ciel when I was a baby. She'd started as a tour guide, just like me, and then worked her way up until she helped manage the place. She would have known every nook and cranny of that old house, but there was only one place I thought she would make a stand—the inner sanctum of Roman Dutilette's world.

“She'll be in Roman's library. Whatever she has planned, she'd do it there, because that was his favorite room. It's where he ran his entire empire. It's where she would want to bring him down.”

The front door was open when we reached it, and we slipped into the cool darkness of the house. “This way,” I whispered, nodding in the direction of the library. From high on the walls, portraits of Roman and Josephine watched us pass, their eyes cold and disapproving of our presence in their domain.

As we made our way down the hall, I heard a voice at the same time that I detected an odor in the air that didn't belong there.

“Smells like gasoline,” Odane whispered as I wrinkled my nose. “I think she's already doused the place in it.”

My eyes widened. I'd known it would be bad—that she'd want to destroy anything left of what Roman had built—but I hadn't expected to walk into a powder keg.

“We can go back if you want,” Odane whispered. “Get some backup before we get in there.”

I shook my head. I was more sure now than ever that my mother—that
Thisbe
—was in here, and that Piers would be, too. And I was pretty sure we were out of time.

I nodded toward the library and started again, moving down the hall toward the voice. Outside the library's doors I hesitated. The voice was chanting, a resonant song of sorrow and pain in words I'd never heard, but in a voice that sounded like my momma humming to me as she stroked her fingers down my neck. I couldn't seem to stop myself from closing my eyes, just for a moment, and remembering the mother I'd once known.

“Chloe?”

I blinked my eyes open and found Odane watching me warily.

“Are you sure you're ready to do this?” he whispered. He was looking at me as though he was trying to decide something. “If you can't, go now, and I'll manage. But if you go in there, you have to be ready. Focused. You can't go soft on me. You can't think of her as your mother—not in there.”

I took a deep breath to steady myself but gagged on the sharpness of the fuel that soaked the wood paneling and carpets all around us. It was enough to remind me of what I was doing—of who the woman in that next room was to me now. “I'll be fine,” I told him, and I hoped I was telling the truth.

Odane nodded, and we both eased ourselves into the library.

Even though it was August and not even a little bit cold, a fire was burning in the library's hearth. Its unnaturally red flames threw shadows across the floor, and its heat made the whole room feel like an oven. In the strange glow of the flickering fire, Thisbe had her back to us and was bent over a low, wide couch where Piers lay, unconscious. I almost gasped at the sight of him, but Odane's hand covered my mouth in time, and his arm kept me still.

Thisbe didn't notice our entrance at first. She was busy with her deep, discordant chanting, and her focus was on the white symbols she was drawing on Piers's half-naked body.

A moment later, though, she went stiff and raised her head to sniff the air like a wolf scenting her prey. A smile crept across her face as she turned to face us.

She looked older than she'd ever looked before—the smooth-as-satin skin I'd hoped to inherit was now creased with lines that should have taken more than a handful of weeks to form. Her hair, which she'd always worn tucked back, was wild about her head and shot through with gray like some kind of Frankenstein's bride.

Her eyes narrowed when she saw me, like she didn't recognize me right away, and then all at once her face lit with recognition and the chanting stopped.

“Chloe?” Her voice sounded like it always did when she was crooning a song or telling a secret just for me, and I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to go to her. To bury myself in her arms like I'd done a thousand times before as a girl.
Do you really believe I would ever hurt you?
a voice whispered.

Before I could take a step toward her, Odane's hand on my arm steadied me and brought me back to myself. The look on his face when I met his eyes—a warning, a question—reminded me what we were there to do. I gave him a small nod, to let him know that I understood and that it wouldn't happen again.

“Thisbe,” I said, because I couldn't call her Momma and do what needed to be done, but the sound of that
name released something in her. Her face transformed itself into something horrible then, and all trace of my momma was gone.

She smiled at me, a creeping-up-your-spine kind of smile that made me regret ever entering that room, and I had the sudden realization that I'd been wrong. I wasn't strong enough to face her like this. I wasn't strong enough to face what it meant to be her daughter.

I heard a low chuckle rumble through my mind, amused. Like it knew what I'd been thinking and wasn't surprised in the least.

You're mine
, the voice whispered.
You've always been mine. Made for me and me alone, baby girl. Come to me now. Come to your momma.

Odane was there beside me, though, and when he took my hand in his, it gave me strength and anchored me to what was real. When he gave my hand a reassuring squeeze, it helped to mute the droning voice in my head.

“You came,” the witch said, her eyes lighting on me. “Just as I knew you would. Just as I intended for you to.”

I couldn't speak, but Odane's hand tightened around mine again. “The only thing we came for is Piers,” I said. “We're not leaving without him.”

Thisbe laughed, a dry-throated cackle that reminded me of nails on a chalkboard. “Then you came for nothing, because this one”—she ran her finger across Piers's throat—“he's mine now.”

Odane and I exchanged an uneasy look. We had to get Thisbe away from Piers.

Distract her
, Odane's eyes told me.

“I thought
I
was yours,” I said, my voice breaking. “Isn't that what you always told me? I thought I was your girl, blood and bone, heart and soul?” I shivered as I said the words she'd crooned to me throughout my childhood, hearing for the first time something more sinister in the words I'd always thought meant love.

“Yes, you are that, baby girl,” Thisbe said, her mouth turned down. “But you didn't come to me like you were supposed to. You chose them instead.” Her face went thunderous. “You weren't supposed to have a choice.”

“Why wasn't I?” I asked, taking another step to the side, but she didn't move from her place near Piers. “Because of those charms you wove into my hair? Is that why you could control me?”

She sneered. “Those? You think those bits of hoodoo were powerful enough to let me control you? No. Those
weren't anything more than shielding charms, so you
never learned what you really are. I could
still
control you if I wanted to,” she said with a wicked smile. “Right now. Tomorrow. Anytime I wanted.
Forever
if I want.”

I flinched, my eyes darting to Odane, but he shook his head, letting me know he had my back. Letting me know he trusted me.

I only hoped his trust in me wasn't misplaced, because now that I was away from the protection of his hand, that voice was back, calling me.
Come to me, baby girl
, it crooned.
Leave all this and come be with me.

“What am I, Thisbe?” I asked, forcing myself to take another step away from Odane, forcing myself to ignore that seductive voice.

“You're nothing at all,” she said. A smile as pleasant as it was terrible turned up her lips.

“I'm flesh and bone,” I said. “I'm real. Human, unlike you.”

She laughed again then. “You think so?” she asked, shaking her head. “You're flesh and bone, all right, but human? How can you be human without a soul?”

I froze. “I have a soul.”

“You say,” she scoffed.

“Everyone has a soul,” I said. Because didn't a body need a soul? I shook my head. I wouldn't let her mind games get me all tangled up.

You're already tangled up, baby girl
.
You're already part of this.

“Stop stalling and let him go,” I said, ignoring that voice even as I wanted to sink into it. “You can't win. The police are already on their way.”

“That's a lie,” Thisbe said. “Always did know when you were lying, didn't I?”

She stepped away from Piers then, not far, but just enough that her motion unnerved me. “You ever wonder why I was so good at picking out your falsehoods?”

I didn't answer. She was right, though. I'd learned a long time ago that there wasn't any way to lie to my mother. Not tell her things, maybe, but any lie I spoke and she knew the truth of the matter before the words had finished coming out of my mouth.

“You never could lie because I know you better than you know yourself. I
made
you.” She sneered. “I've been deep down inside you since the day I brought you into this world. You can't escape me.”

Something deep within me shifted, like it was answering the challenge in her voice. Like it knew she was right.

“That doesn't matter anymore. You won't walk away this time,” I told her, feeling the truth of it. With the hanged man card warming my back pocket and the smell of gasoline heavy in the air, I knew I would do what I had to. I'd make any sacrifice I needed to make so that she didn't leave this room a free woman. To make sure she couldn't hurt anyone else. This would end with me, even if it ended me.

“I don't plan to walk away from this, baby girl. Not in this old body, at least.” She huffed her delight when I didn't respond right away. “Confused? I thought by now you'd have worked it all out.”

“Worked what out?” I asked, stepping aside and hoping to lure her again.

“What you are. What you've always been.”

I wouldn't let myself play into her games. I stood silent, waiting for her to show her hand.

“What I made you to be, baby girl. And I did a good job of it, too, didn't I?” She took another step. “Beauty and brains and as empty inside as a vessel.
My
vessel.”