Authors: Heather Hamilton-Senter
CHAPTER TEN
I jumped when my phone went off. I’d dropped it in my bag, and as I searched for it, my hand brushed against the strings of the harp. There was something in the resulting sound I wanted to pay attention to, but the phone in my hand was ringing insistently, demanding I answer.
“Hello.”
“Lacey, is that you?” It was Michel.
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the store.”
I counted to three in the space of silence that followed. “Then you know.”
“Yes.”
“Lacey, listen to me very carefully. I need your help. It has all the bones now, but the spell isn’t working. It needs the harp.”
“What are you talking about?”
His voice hardened. “Don’t play games. I know all about the harp of Binnorie. It’s the only reason your life was spared over my aunt’s—the creature knew it might need you. You have to bring the harp to Marie Laveau’s tomb or Li Grand Zombi will kill me!”
The old Lacey would have run to help a friend, even an acquaintance, but this Lacey was watching Ava roam aimlessly through the store.
“Tell me first what you did to Ava.”
There was another pause. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Fine. I’m going to hang up now.”
“No! Wait! I didn’t do it to hurt her. With how she took down Bel, I knew she was capable of protecting you if it came down to a choice between you and my aunt. I just needed to take Ava out of the equation to give my aunt a fighting chance. Obviously, it didn’t matter in the end.”
Cold settled into my spine as I understood that Michel had deliberately sabotaged Ava, my only support system in the city once the White Lady was dead, to protect his aunt. Something ached in the back of my throat and along my jawline. “How did you know about that? I never told you how Bel saved us from the vampire.”
A third pause, the longest of the three. “Ava did while you were talking to my aunt. We don’t have time for this. Please, Lacey, I’m dead if you don’t come.”
I relented. “Where are you now?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just be at Marie Laveau’s tomb by sundown. Bring Ava and I promise I’ll undo what I did to her after I’m safe.” The phone went dead.
I looked at the others, but Bel waved any explanation away. “Excellent hearing is a universal hallmark of all supernaturals. So, the creature has the ingredients for the spell, but doesn’t know how to use them. Interesting. It’s either the most incompetent evil mastermind ever born, or this is a trap. What’s so special about this spell anyway that it needs so much magical firepower?”
It was Chloe that answered him. “That’s what I’ve been asking myself this whole time. Li Grand Zombi wants to bring Baron Samedi permanently into this world, and now we find a painting of the Baron with a familiar face on it.”
Bel frowned. “Cernunnos?”
The girl’s smile was small and cold. “Buddy, you need to spend more time on the internet instead of at raves, or at least pay attention to Morgause when she’s in a chatty mood. He’s to be called Merlin now. The bones of three witches are going to be used to create a spell to bring the Baron though the Gates of Guinee. What if it’s not a gate? What if it’s a wall?
“What are you talking about, girl? Cernu- . . .
Merlin
created the Wall Between Worlds. Why would he need help to cross it?”
“Here’s another update—it’s a lie that he created the Wall. The Lady of the Lake trapped him in Avalon. He can appear here briefly, but he’s a prisoner there. Obviously he’s been manipulating this Li Grand Zombi creature to somehow bring him across.”
I looked back at the painting. “So now he’s Baron Samedi too? How many names does this guy have?”
Bel snorted. “He’s the Lord of the Grey Lands of Avalon. That place also has many names, including Hades and Sheol—it’s basically the underworld of every culture on Earth—so why not its master? But what I don’t understand is if Merlin is trapped behind the Wall, how did the artist of that painting capture his likeness so well?”
“Let’s find out. Take it down,” I commanded.
“Take it down yourself, little witch,” he muttered, but obeyed anyway, placing the painting on the front counter. The ball of fire followed it and hovered above.
Chloe pointed. “There.” The scrawled signature was easy to read: Claire Benoit.
“She lied to us,” I stated the obvious.
Ava had wandered over to look. “She’s a liar.” There was something strange in her voice. I didn’t know if she’d been getting worse, or if I’d just thought differently of her once I knew she’d been spelled, but the intensity of her zombie-like behavior had seemed to increase. There was something in her voice now that was more like my roommate.
“Ava?” I asked tentatively. I thought I caught a flicker of response in her eyes, but then she looked down and shambled away.
Chloe ran her finger over the painted name. “Claire—the woman who was attacked, right? Was it just an act?”
“She’s working for the other side.”
The girl looked around. “Then why is the painting here? If she knew the Voodoo Queen well enough to give her a painting, maybe she was on her side.”
Something didn’t add up. Claire Benoit was connected to all of them—the White Lady, the Voodoo Queen, and Li Grand Zombi—and yet she somehow knew Merlin’s face well enough to paint it as Baron Samedi’s.
I shook my head. It didn’t matter. My only choice was to leave Ava as she was, or to help Michel so he would take the spell off her.
It took me longer than it should have to make that decision.
I turned to the red-haired man and his young companion. “Will you help me?”
Bel’s eyes were like smoldering embers. “With the bones of three powerful witches, this creature is in possession of a very dangerous weapon. Of course we’ll help you,” he replied gallantly as he made a flourish with his arms. The ball of fire disappeared.
Chloe was staring at him like he’d grown another head. “Um, yeah, what he said.”
I put my phone away in my bag. “Thank you. We have a couple of hours before the sun sets, and there’s something I need to do first. Will you meet me at the cemetery when it’s time? And can you keep Ava with you? Thanks.” I didn’t wait for them to actually agree. Picking up my things, I hurried out the door and down the street.
I slipped into the third open doorway I found and hid behind a rack draped with Mardi Gras beads and carnival masks. Watching the street through the eyehole of one of the masks, I didn’t have to wait long. Bel was striding down the street, looking up and down—obviously looking for me. Chloe grabbed him by the arm. Shaking her off, he spat out what looked like some very colorful language as he hailed a cab. Ava followed them into the vehicle.
“Can I help you, chère?
I whirled around. An older man in a wife-beater shirt and brown cap was frowning down at me. It took me a moment to realize I was running my hands across the purple and gold beads, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth . . ..
Even though he was staring at me, I couldn’t stop myself from running my hand over the necklaces one last time to complete another set of three. Once I finished, I had control over my body again.
The man’s face hardened. “Are you going to buy something or not?”
I nodded. “Sorry, yes.” While my body had been on auto-pilot, my mind had decided on something. “I’d like three of these necklaces please.”
I paid for the garish beads, declining the bag the man offered as I shoved them into the pocket of my sweater. My fingers brushed against the little Voodoo doll. It was strangely comforting.
Needing somewhere to go to work, I made my way down to Decatur, near the river, where the striped green and white awning of a coffee shop beckoned. I ordered some beignets and orange juice and found an empty table as far from the street as possible. The place was busy; the customers created a living wall that hid me from the world.
Taking a bite of one of the square, puffy donuts, and coughing a little as some of the powdered sugar went down my throat, I popped open the laptop on the table. I started searching the files on the hard drive, but the Crone’s naming system made no sense to me at all. I was about to give up when something familiar caught my eye. When I clicked on it, the spell that opened was the one the Crone and I had used to bind Melusine’s spirit and warp it into a dragon.
I didn’t understand everything until after the Crone was dead. Most powerful magic users have spies to keep an eye on their rivals. The Crone used owls which she imbued with supernatural power. They must have told their tale to someone because it was on the Darknet only a few days later. Freed from the bitter infection of the Crone’s spirit, I slowly began to understand the events that had rocked the world of magic, and my true part in them. But even then, pride kept me from going to Rhi and asking her forgiveness, though the horror of how I’d almost unleashed a dragon on the world haunted my dreams.
As I read through the words of the spell, intuition sparkled on the edges of my mind, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. I minimized that spell and opened one called
Three-fold
.
My left hand tapped a drum beat on the marble counter. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. The words swam in front of my eyes: three-fold goddesses, three ages of man, three great sorrows, three elements contained in the body and bound by the spirit, three colors from which all other colors spring, bad luck comes in threes, third time’s the charm—the list went on. But it was the last passage that made my breath catch and time stand still: three Paths.
I hadn’t seen everything Rhi and Peter had seen. I hadn’t been taught by Taliesin. I’d had to study and scrape, scouring the Darknet for information, but that was OK because I was used to climbing to the top of the class all on my own. I knew about the Paths. The Crone didn’t like using them, and I’d never been on one, but I understood them.
The Paths were the remnants of ancient magical byways that had been created by the sentient world forest at the dawn of time. As the forest lost its consciousness, the magic of the Paths faded until only those born with the gift knew how to travel them. But according to this, all the Paths were only the branching tributaries of three main arteries: the Path of Time, the Path of Destiny, and the Path of Life and Death.
I read on eagerly. Only the most powerful of magic users could find these three great Paths, let alone access them. The Path of Time allowed one to view the past or the future, though there were rumors that some could actually travel them. No one knew the meaning of the Path of Destiny, but magic users were warned in dark terms to never try to find it. The Path of Life and Death was the most sought after, and over the centuries, its known entrances had actually been recorded.
I closed the lid of the laptop carefully, and wrapped my hands around my glass of juice, letting the condensation cool my fingers. For once, the frantic count of threes in the back of my mind was silent.
St. Louis Cemetery No. 1—New Orleans’ City of the Dead—contained one of those entrances.
I lifted the glass and gulped down some juice, letting the sugar revitalize me. As I watched the sun fade, I’d never felt so still in my life. I was perfectly balanced on the edge of a knife; I could feel the sharpness, but it wasn’t cutting me. Yet.
I’d always forced things—excellence at school, achievement in every arena, even making myself into a witch, though my natural talent was small—but now I’d found a place of perfect calm. I was the Maiden. The Crone had told me I would know it, and I did. I just wasn’t sure what it meant.
A snippet of one of the Crone’s spells teased my mind and I closed my eyes to fix it in my memory:
I have loved thee three times thirty.
I have loved thee nine times nine.
I’d been hollow, empty for so long. Magic couldn’t fill me. Only love could. Sighing, I opened my eyes. Unfortunately, the only love left in me was for a dead brother, and for a boy who didn’t return my feelings.
I put the laptop away; if there was something in it that explained what Li Grand Zombi intended, I couldn’t find it. The top of the breastbone frame gleamed in the dying light. I longed to take the harp out and touch the strings made of golden hair, but my time had run out. Hurrying into the bathroom, I changed out of my jean skirt and into black leggings that I tucked into my low-heeled boots. Belting my black sweater tighter over my white t-shirt, the next phrase of the Crone’s spell came to me.
Caught between heaven and earth,
Only a white shift and a dark cloak are mine.
Pulling out some makeup and a hairbrush, I began to prepare myself as if I were getting ready to go on stage. When I finished, my hair gleamed dully against the dark of my sweater, and my eyes were shadowed and mysterious—a mask to hide behind.
Catching a cab, I was at the gate of the cemetery within ten minutes. I waited for the driver to move on before I went down the side street to where the wall was lower and crumbling. It was harder without someone to help me, but after a couple of tries, I finally made it onto the top of the wall. Sliding down the roof of the nearest tomb, I landed with a thud and fell to one knee. As my bag hit the ground, the harp cried out with a sound like a woman who’d been hit. I froze, but nothing followed.