The King of Bones and Ashes Read online

  ALSO BY J.D. HORN

  Witches of New Orleans

  The King of Bones and Ashes

  The Book of the Unwinding (forthcoming)

  The Final Days of Magic (forthcoming)

  Witching Savannah

  The Line

  The Source

  The Void

  Jilo

  Shivaree

  Pretty Enough to Catch Her: A Short Story

  A Peculiar Paradise: A Short Story

  One Bad Apple: A Short Story

  Pitch: A Short Story

  Phantasma: Stories (contributor)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 Jack Douglas Horn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542047104

  ISBN-10: 1542047102

  Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

  In loving memory of Duke Dunkirk Weissman, the best big black dog, and Sugar (yeah, that Sugar) Chloe Weissman, Kittycat Supreme. Your dads miss both of you.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  CHARACTER LIST

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Monday, August 29, 2005

  Alice strained against the weight of the ancient powder-blue suitcase, its metal hinges cutting a shallow vein into the hardwood floor as she dragged it backward down the hall with a two-handed, white-knuckle grip. Inside the case she’d crowded every treasure she’d collected in her seven and a half years. Books and dolls, a battered music box, and a contraband cache of costume jewelry she wasn’t allowed to wear outside the house, purchased at the French Market, though her imagination insisted it had been plundered from a pirate chest.

  In the center of the booty, bound by a heavy silver frame, she’d secreted a picture she usually kept hidden in the false floor of the dollhouse her uncle Vincent had built for her. She loved the photo, not only because it was the sole portrait she knew to exist of her immediate family—her father and her mother and both older brothers, Luc and Hugo—but also because her mother’s gaze wasn’t turned toward the camera. It rested on a miniature and only somewhat recognizable version of Alice herself, balanced between her father’s hands on his knee. Her mother’s hand rested on baby Alice’s tiny leg.

  Alice couldn’t remember her mother.

  “Are you ready then, love?” Daniel asked, materializing before her, hovering an inch or so above the stairhead. Alice couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye, focusing instead on the tan, brimmed cap that covered most of his red hair, then on the stained and dirty blues and greens and pinks of the petit-point flowers embroidered on his suspenders.

  Daniel was bound to their house. There’d be no escape for him. Her father had promised her that Daniel would be all right, that he’d find a way to protect him, no matter what. But her father had also promised to keep her safe, to keep the whole of New Orleans safe.

  Just hours ago, they’d all been so proud. So relieved. Her father’s house had held a party atmosphere, with thirty or more weary, bedraggled witches cheering and congratulating each other on how deftly the Chanticleer Coven had coordinated the efforts of witches all around the city to divert Katrina. The storm should have hit the city dead on, but they, the brave witches of the Crescent City, had managed to slow its winds and nudge it just a bit east, far enough that the storm’s path would cut through less populated areas. A case of champagne still sat on the kitchen counter, placed there in anticipation of the toasts they’d enjoy after besting Katrina, and, from the witches older than her father, duller reminiscences of having weathered Betsy before her. But Pontchartrain had pushed its way beyond its banks, and the levees had failed.

  Her father always kept his word. Except when he didn’t.

  “I can’t find Sugar,” Alice said, moving on to a problem she could solve. “Anywhere,” she added for emphasis. She’d received the tiny Devon rex as a birthday present from her aunt Fleur, and the cat and Daniel had taken an instant disliking to each other, Sugar arching and hissing whenever she sensed his presence.

  “Not to worry. The pewter-coated terror yowled at me in the kitchen not five minutes ago.” Daniel glanced down at her suitcase. “I’d help you carry your things down, it’s only . . .” He let his hand pass through the newel post. “I’ve not been able to take full form of late.”

  Angry voices—Luc’s, plus a few others Alice recognized as belonging to members of the coven. Loudest of all, her father’s voice rumbled up like thunder, causing them both to peer downstairs in the direction of her father’s study. Most of the words were spoken one over the other. Jumbled. Alice couldn’t make out much of what was being said, though she did pick up on her own name, as well as that of her grandfather Celestin. It had been her father who’d spoken his name. Alice’s father only ever referred to his own father as Celestin or, when he seemed to be feeling exceptionally piqued, as “that man.”

  Magic had been fading from the world since long before Alice was born into it, so in times of crisis all witches were called upon to put aside personal differences and form a type of collective to pool their energies. Even Alice had been recruited to try to weaken the storm, to shift its path, to help the levees hold. This morning, when it was still thought this effort would succeed, goodwill had reigned. But now the snatches of conversation Alice could understand told her that everyone was looking to lay the blame at someone else’s feet, and she wasn’t surprised to hear her father pointing the finger at “that man.”

  Alice liked her grandfather. He never treated her like a baby. He never shied away from topics the way her father and uncle did. He always answered her questions directly—although those direct responses were more often than not in French. If it weren’t for her grandfather, Alice might never have learned of “the Dreaming Road,” where witches give in to the intoxication of their own magic to escape their unhappy lives. Nor would she have known that her mother had chosen it over her.

  “Shall I go fetch Hugo to help with your case?” Daniel said in a near whisper, as if he were afraid of drawing attention to himself.

  Alice nodded, unable to speak, afraid what she might say if she did. Daniel faded away as quickly as he’d appeared.

  A tardy flash of lightning tore through the gloom, and she turned,
crossing to the large landing window and then rising up on her tiptoes to peer out. On the other side of the glass, a towering wall of muddy water spun counterclockwise just beyond the strip of green that stood between their street and the finger of water that had given their neighborhood, Bayou St. John, its name.

  The water had risen so quickly. In minutes. The world had been drowned all around them, leaving their house and a few on either side an island protected by a levee of her father’s failing magic. And even though the flooding had now leveled off behind her father’s wards, this levee, too, would soon fall.

  The swirling water reminded Alice of the color of the milky tea Daniel would pour himself, though never drink, each morning. Someone’s white plastic lawn chair bobbed like a marshmallow on the water’s surface before sinking back into the abyss, its legs straining to puncture the clear membrane of magic protecting the house. And then the chair was gone, dragged down and away by an unseen current.

  It was mesmerizing, and Alice made a game of guessing the origins of the jetsam scraping the dam’s cellophane-like wall. The blue trike that belonged to the little kid two doors down. A door—a red door—she didn’t recognize offered the illusion of an escape, then popped up to the surface like a listing raft. A plastic pink flamingo from a garden on Mystery Street surfaced for only long enough to bob its head toward her. Two large gray garbage containers clung to each other in desperation as they spun around, the wheel of one caught in the hinge of its partner’s lid. Alice caught the name of the corner store located a few blocks over painted on the side of one of the cans just before it lost its hold. She felt almost sad for it when its mate was washed away. A bubble of air belched up to the water’s surface, bringing with it an explosive, colorful pattern similar to the millefiori paperweight on her grandfather’s desk. Alice strained to make out the details, only then realizing a small school of paperbacks and DVDs had crested, their covers’ bright colors floating on top of the water behind her father’s magic dam.

  Alice wished she could turn into a mermaid and slip safely into this new kaleidoscope sea.

  “Nicholas lied to you, you know.” Alice spun around at the sound of Luc’s words. She hadn’t heard him approaching, and the sharpness of his tone worried her. He was her brother, but lately—always angry—he’d begun to feel like a stranger. He had a girlfriend now, and he spent most of his time with her. It was just as well. When he was home, it was nothing but yelling—Luc at their dad, their dad at Luc.

  Luc had taken to calling their father by his given name, Nicholas.

  Luc’s girlfriend was a witch, too, but as far as Alice could guess, Evangeline was a different kind of witch, a kind her father and grandfather looked down on. Strange that Luc’s girlfriend was the one thing her father and grandfather could agree on.

  “The girl is talented, no doubt,” she’d heard her father say to a coven member, “but lacks any pedigree.”

  To Alice, pedigree seemed an odd thing for a person to have. It was a quality one might use to describe Sugar, not a person. Evangeline and Luc had taken Alice out with them a few times since they’d begun seeing each other, mostly to the French Market, but once to a movie and once to City Park. She seemed nice enough to Alice. Maybe a little too anxious to make friends, but nice all the same.

  Luc pushed his blue-black hair back from his inky eyes. “We’re not packing to go to Grandfather’s.” Unlike Bayou St. John, the Garden District where their grandfather lived sat on the rim of the punchbowl New Orleans had become, high enough to escape the worst of the flooding. Bayou St. John and the Garden District were the extreme boundaries of Alice’s world map, bolstered on each end by great dragons: one her father, the other her grandfather.

  “He thought you’d be easier to manage if you didn’t know the truth. If you thought you were going someplace familiar.”

  Hugo, younger than Luc but a world ahead of Alice, approached the landing from the hall, arriving in time to hear Luc’s revelation. Hugo was seven years older than Alice, and back in the spring—she remembered the exact day she’d noticed, June 23—he had started looking more like a man than a boy. He resembled their father, nearly an exact copy, though with their mother’s lighter coloring. Hugo was the opposite of Luc, who stood a good foot taller than their father, and whose dark eyes stared out from a face very like their mother’s.

  Alice turned to Hugo for verification of Luc’s words.

  Hugo nodded. “Father told me not to tell you. But I agree that you should know.”

  “We’re evacuating,” Luc said. “All of us. We’re deserting New Orleans.”

  “What about Daniel?” she said. He’d been there to watch over her every day of her life. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him here alone. “Will he be okay without us?”

  “Nicholas doesn’t care what happens to the people who get left behind,” Luc said. Alice could feel the heat of his anger, an actual physical sensation, wafting off him. “No one in the coven does. And none of them give a damn about Daniel either.” He leaned in close to whisper in her ear. “He isn’t even real.”

  She pushed him away. “I don’t believe you,” she said, even if she wasn’t quite sure which part of his statement she was contesting. Even though she sensed truth in his every word.

  “Well, you will soon.” Luc grabbed hold of her hand, whisking her off her feet and into his arms. The force behind the movement made her breath catch. But she stopped herself from crying out. He’d call her a crybaby. She didn’t want him to call her a crybaby.

  “Luc, knock it off,” Hugo said, stretching to his full height, the action a silent and entirely ignored challenge.

  She looked back at her suitcase, sitting there at the top of the steps, as Luc carried her down the hall. Hugo chased after them. Suddenly, they were climbing the tight, shadowy back stairs that led to the attic, the door to which their father usually kept sealed with both a protection spell and a heavy padlock. But the padlock lay forgotten on the floor, and the magical bans that had once fixed the door shut had been rendered useless. All magic, great and small, had been diverted by the united covens to aid their attempt to lessen Katrina’s sting.

  “We’re not supposed to come up here,” Alice said, her protest half-hearted at best. She knew her father had only permitted the attic to be opened to allow for the removal of a few objects considered too precious or dangerous to leave in the storm’s path.

  “No. But in an hour there may not be a ‘here’ to come.” Luc shifted her so he could look into her eyes. “Don’t you want to see what Nicholas has been hiding from you, from us, before it disappears?”

  Father would be furious if he knew, but there was no use denying her desire. She nodded.

  Hugo’s silence was his consent.

  Luc kicked the padlock against the wall, then opened the door and hefted her over the threshold. The electricity had failed forever ago, leaving the space in deep shadow, with only dim castoff light seeping in through the two dormer windows on the house’s front. Still, she could tell the room was enormous, spanning the length and breadth of the house.

  Luc set her on her feet and took her hand. The ceiling hung low enough that he had to duck as he tugged her to the farthest, darkest corner. He released her and snapped his fingers, causing a ball of light, about as bright as a candle, to form overhead. Until the crisis was over, they weren’t supposed to use magic, not even a little. But it seemed that today was a day for breaking rules.

  Despite never having breached this space, Alice knew this forlorn corner was where her father had hidden away everything belonging to their mother—at least everything he hadn’t burned. She’d heard Luc and her father fight over the rightful ownership of what was left of their mother’s possessions.

  “Behind here,” Luc said, and Hugo helped him push aside a stack of unlabeled cardboard boxes, a whiff of perfume rising from them. Their mother had left before Alice could walk, and memory, that fickle thing, had betrayed her—she wouldn’t even know what
her mother had looked like if not for that single image of the Marin family. And yet, this ghost of the once heady fragrance of sweet olive and gardenia came close to conjuring her mother’s face.

  Luc paused, seeming to have caught their mother’s scent as well. But then his face hardened, and he whipped away a sheet that lay over a dozen or so canvases, exposing paintings Alice somehow knew to be her mother’s work.

  She would have liked to look more closely at each, but Luc flipped through them, slapping one against the other, taking no care to protect their mother’s art. Alice caught a flash of what looked like an unfinished portrait of her grandfather, then Luc discovered the painting he’d been searching for, pulling it out from the others and turning it so she could have a better look. It was of Daniel, all right. The same cap. The same ginger hair poking out from beneath it. The same sweet but sad look in his eyes.

  “Our Daniel believes himself to be a ghost, the unsettled spirit of a young Irishman who died during the construction of the New Basin Canal. But Daniel isn’t a ghost. There never was a Daniel.” Luc paused, maybe to give his revelation time to sink in, or maybe just to see if she’d flinch. She didn’t. Luc seemed satisfied with her reaction. “He’s a magic trick,” he carried on, “a servitor spirit our parents conjured up to look after Hugo and me—so they didn’t have to. Nicholas thought they had more important business to attend to, and mother, well, she did whatever he told her to do, like it or not. Until the day she stopped . . .” Luc’s voice trailed off.

  They stood for a few moments in total silence. “Mother,” Hugo said, nodding to confirm Luc’s story, “painted this to help Father visualize Daniel. She didn’t want to. Father made her do it.”

  Luc looked up from the painting. “That’s the first step, you see.” His voice sounded scratchy now. “You give a servitor form, one that suggests the traits you’d like it to have, and then you imbue—you know what I mean by ‘imbue’?” She shook her head, so he offered a different word. “You fill it with a sense of self. That’s the glue that helps keep the entity intact. It works best if you give the servitor a tragic past, an injustice it can fixate on. Saddling your creation with a dark secret or two, something it’s ashamed of, something it’s afraid you’ll learn, doesn’t hurt either.” Luc’s light brightened, and he held the painting up, offering her a final look at it.