The Book of the Unwinding Page 11

  Alice flung the window open and leaned out. “Go,” she said, her voice low and quavering.

  It looked up at her, a palpable shadow in the darkness, no longer capable of assuming, or maybe no longer caring enough to don, Sabine’s appearance. “Go,” Alice said again with growing vehemence, even though she knew her anger only excited the spirit more. “Go.” This time the word came out in a high-pitched and furious scream. Instead, the ravenous shadow drew closer, emboldened, strengthened, nourished by her rage.

  “Let me in,” it keened. Its voice, its accent, its intonation, all perfect imitations of Sabine’s. It lifted its claw and began scratching the siding again. “I love you, baby.”

  Alice closed her eyes and let a wave of hot anger pass, saddened to recognize the wrath she felt was aimed not at the creature below, but at Daniel. Her former nanny, who loved her. Who missed her. He seemed to be one of the few beings in the common world who did. Though he assured her that the entire family and beyond, a world of witches, was assisting him, she understood his efforts were in fact single-handed. He was trying to save her with his mad talk of rightful destinies, trying to bring her home to him. She would always love him, no matter what—but she hated him, too. He had forced her to see the ugly truth, and a dreamer will always hate the one who woke her.

  She tried to keep a tally of the days since she’d last seen Daniel, using the method Sabine—the common world Sabine—had taught her, the first four marks forming a box, the fifth a diagonal strike through. The sheet now held seven tiny boxes, a single strike crossing each of their hearts. Thirty-five days for her. Maybe a day for Daniel? She couldn’t be sure. The more lies she excised from her perceived reality, the longer time seemed to stretch out. Perhaps this was good. Perhaps she’d slowed the rate at which her power burned away, giving Daniel’s attempts to save her more time to succeed. That, or she’d discovered the secret to making hell eternal.

  She closed the window and took a step back, preparing to settle in for another unrelenting night.

  A handful of lights twinkled in the darkness, but Alice suspected the only stars left to shine in her artificial sky were the seven she could spot from her current vantage point. Together they formed a facsimile of the Big Dipper, an asterism that belonged to the Ursa Major constellation. Ursa Major, the Great Bear, seen as a plow by some, a wagon or chariot by others. Constellations. Another set of stories built upon vague impressions.

  Unlike in the common world, the asterism didn’t seem to sail across the night sky. Each night, it glowed to life and then faded out, never changing position in the sky. In the common world, the Big Dipper seemed to revolve around Polaris, the North Star, the star at the tip of the Little Dipper’s handle. Polaris was hidden in her world, but if there was any way to orient the Dreaming Road to the common world, this could be a clue. Maybe the tip of the dipper’s cup still pointed toward true north?

  Alice wondered if she should mark each star’s position relative to her window pane to see if the seven visible stars rotated around an unseen Polaris. If they did, she’d have a chronometer, perhaps not a true measure of time in the common world, but at least something to help her catalog the passing of the year here.

  As above, so below. She decided against blackening the glass. By the logic of magic, and the reason of the Dreaming Road, blacking out their position on the window might well extinguish their light from the sky. Still wrapped up in the attenuated logic of dreaming, she suddenly found herself, brush in hand, daubing paint on the glass. The image she was painting—a pair of crossed lines festooned with curly braces and tipped with six eight-petaled flowers—had no relation to the positions of the stars. Alice felt as if another hand, one more familiar with and practiced at making the sign, guided hers.

  She felt she should recognize the symbol, like it was something she should remember from childhood, but it held little to no meaning for her. She deduced that the plus sign dominating its center had to do with a crossroads of some kind, standard magical fare, but she didn’t know what the symbol as a whole represented. Even without understanding its significance, she recognized it for what it was, a type of sigil. This one felt older than those she’d grown familiar with during her internment on Sinclair.

  In her last few hours on the island, the hospital’s administrator had revealed to her that many of the sigils employed around the hospital were the modern and idiosyncratic work of the artist Austin Osman Spare. Spare had constructed his sigils, his “alphabet of desire,” from bits of deconstructed language, taking phrases that expressed his wishes, stripping out recurring letters, and then compressing the remaining characters into a type of logogram, like an ampersand or a dollar sign, the administrator had explained, though with a more convoluted design and imbued with magic.

  Spare believed that the act of creating a sigil served a dual purpose. First, it helped him focus his will, distilling each longing to its purest, most potent form. And by recasting his desire as a symbol incomprehensible to the rational mind, he ensured the sigil would take root in the viewer’s subconscious—the subliminal sphere from which Spare believed the physical world emanated. Alice couldn’t vouch for his rationale, but she’d experienced the results of his efforts firsthand. A combination of his sigils had prevented her from accessing her own magic during her time on Sinclair.

  The design before her eyes, superimposed over her own blurry reflection, appeared a baroque and senseless design, but her heart told her she was in the presence of something sacred. It felt far weightier than the ones scattered throughout the hospital, like it carried the aspirations and faith of generations. Alice knew the symbol didn’t belong to her, or even to her people. She touched the pane, tempted to wipe it away rather than to risk misusing it. And yet, she sensed her very existence might somehow depend on it. Alice sent up a silent plea for forbearance and committed herself to approaching the object, and those to whom it rightly belonged, with respect.

  Behind the symbol, behind her own eyes, the seven stars flared up, burning with greater luminance than she’d ever witnessed before, the sky in their vicinity changing from black, to midnight blue, to rose. The stars expanded in size, each of them swelling to the relative size of her fist. Some force had changed them, and she knew it had changed her as well.

  From below her window came a cry, then utter silence. No scratching, no cursing, no pleas for forgiveness or offers of clemency from her tormentor.

  Alice watched in wonder as strips of night were torn from the sky, leaving a summer cerulean in its place. It took a moment, but as her dazzled eyes regained their focus, she realized that what she’d perceived as darkness had been woven from the hungry spirits hovering around her, waiting for her to join them, to become one of them. They hadn’t left at all. Now they seemed to have given up on her, or to have been forced to do so. The shadows lifted—at first only one or two at a time, but then en masse—like ashes floating up on a warm current of air, growing smaller as they drifted farther away.

  Alice pressed her face to the glass, needing to see, but unwilling to open the window for fear their peel-away exodus might be a trap, that the spirit that had masqueraded as Sabine might still be down there, ready to scale the wall with her sharp claws in a final desperate attempt to claim her. She went up on her toes to get a better view, a sense of déjà vu washing over her as she did. Smoke rose from a pile of ashes beneath the house. Alice intuited that the ashes were all that remained of the Sabine who’d shared her life.

  Her deliverance from the spirit had arrived with such great swiftness and exactitude . . . She was taken aback, unable to untwine her fear of the impostor from her tenderness for her beloved. Perhaps that conflation was the source of the misplaced sympathy she now felt. Or maybe it sprang from the uncomfortable awareness that the twisted spirit who’d plagued her had started out as a person not so very different from herself.

  She turned away from the window, catching sight of herself once she did so, as if a mirror had been suspended before
her that showed her reflection—first from above, and then from behind. Vertigo sent the world around her reeling as she realized that she was seeing herself and seeing through herself in the same instant. She reached out to steady herself against a chair, breathing deeply and willing the sensation of spinning to pass. A moment of reorientation came as the scene seemed to fold in on itself, returning her normal sense of perspective.

  A new terror drove her to her knees.

  Before her stood the gaunt form of Babau Jean.

  She looked up into blank, black eye sockets visible through his white, masklike face. There was no trace of Celestin in this creature standing over her. She sensed that this was the essence of the beast. The union with Celestin had been broken.

  Logic told her that she should scream at the sight, that she should fight her way up and flee. Only her world had been diminished to this small square of space. She had nowhere left to run, and nothing left to drive her to do so. She waited on bended knees, not trying to rise, not trying to fight. If this was the end, then at least she would end this life as herself, not spend an eternity seeking out others to feed from and destroy.

  Babau Jean approached her with a halting step until he stood within reach of her.

  You’re afraid?

  Yes, I’m afraid. She responded to his silent question.

  He reached up and pierced his own flesh with his razor-sharp nails, peeling away his glossy, bone-white features. She couldn’t see—or perhaps just refused to see—what lay behind his flesh.

  He knelt before her and smoothed his own skin over Alice’s face. He reached out and took her in his arms.

  One moment, she was lost in his embrace. The next, she was seeing through his eyes.

  ELEVEN

  Yeah, it did feel good. Damned good.

  Evangeline stomped down Bourbon Street toward her club, the soles of her flat sandals beating out a warning, announcing the approach of a woman who—by God—was not going to take one more piece of crap from one more person. At least not today, and maybe not tomorrow either.

  Variegated local day drinkers and tourists, some of whom were even wearing those god-awful Bonnes Nouvelles T-shirts bearing her caricature, milling about and gawking in windows, took notice of her and started showing better than normal sense. A few cautious glances in her direction, and the crowds parted like the Red Sea at low tide.

  She’d locked herself away, ashamed and blaming herself for what was being done to her. That was over, too. The molting sisters and their bastard accomplice saw it as their right to manipulate her, to twist her mind and break her body. She might not yet know how to swipe back at them, but once she figured it out, she’d go after them like a scalded hellcat. Until then, she vowed to herself that she’d take every measure she could to resist this thief, this usurper. Right now it seemed existence was the best form of resistance.

  She was going to start reclaiming her life, right here, right now. She was going to beat them. Sooner or later, she’d regain control. Even if it took years.

  Years? a tremulous voice whispered in the part of her mind that had remained conscious through the breaking of every bone. Could she survive years of this?

  She stopped in her tracks, clenching her fists, then forced herself to relax, breathing out the fear and lingering fatigue. She didn’t have to survive years. She just had to survive one more damned day. One more hour. One more moment. She’d break it down, parse it into as many morsels as it took. This power wouldn’t have the upper hand forever. And when the tables turned? Well, by God . . .

  The thought pushed her forward.

  She could see Bonnes Nouvelles a few odd yards ahead when a car blared its horn. Evangeline looked over and spotted a familiar, though unloved, face. Reverend Bill, the wretched old hypocrite who spent half his life camped out in front of the club, shouting scripture and condemning her, and the other half with his lips wrapped around a bottle, was stumbling toward her. It didn’t help any that the old man reminded her of her dad, if not in appearance, for sure in behavior. Either someone up there felt she needed not one, but two wild-eyed fanatics to swill liquor in her presence and promise her she’d spend eternity burning, or she’d been born lucky.

  Reverend Bill had started his “ministry” on Bourbon Street around five years ago, targeting her and her club for special attention right from the get-go. Even now, with a city council doing their damnedest to drive clubs like hers off Bourbon, there were still more than a half dozen of them planted in a zigzag up and down the street, including a new one “for the ladies” that featured male dancers. Still, Reverend Bill didn’t pay the rest of the other clubs combined a tenth of the attention he gave Bonnes Nouvelles.

  Now here he was again, bottle in hand, wobbling and weaving his way down the center of Bourbon, calling out her name, wild and desperate, like he was screaming murder or trying to alert a sleeper on an upper floor to a fire raging below. At least he was shouting her real name this time and not one of his tried-and-true pet names for her—Jezebel, Great Whore, or the one that had real teeth, Trailer Park Trash.

  She shook her head and held her palm out facing him. “Today is not the day, old man,” she said, picking up her pace and making a beeline for the door. She didn’t move fast enough. Reverend Bill sprinted, tripping as he stepped up onto the sidewalk but managing to right himself. Any normal day, she would’ve taken a reflexive step back. Today she dug in. “I am warning you . . . once.”

  He fell to his knees before her. Then he set his half-full plastic one-seven-five of crap bargain Russian vodka to the side and prostrated himself before her, stretching out his arms, planting his face on the ground.

  “Get up,” she said, fighting the urge to kick at him. “I said, get up.”

  He pushed himself up to his knees, caught hold of his bottle, and emptied its contents at her feet. This time she did jump back, but only to keep his swill off her shoes. “A sacrifice to my queen,” he said, then dropped the bottle. It bounced once and rolled into the street. Reverend Bill stayed right where he was, looking up at her with glassy, adoring eyes. He seemed to be awaiting a benediction from her.

  “There is something wrong with you,” she said, stepping around him, like she used to when she needed to pack her lunch for school and her dad was passed out on the kitchen floor. She didn’t look back.

  The doors to the club were wide open. The low thump of bass greeted her. She tossed a glance at the stage. Tina was there, a red crimped-tinsel wig on her head and a bored look on her face. She wasn’t even trying. Her mind wasn’t in the game. Evangeline scanned the room. In all fairness, there wasn’t much game there. Still, a good dancer always gave one hundred percent.

  “Where’s Hugo?” she called out to Matt, the bartender, as she passed by.

  “He’s in back,” the bartender responded, the hint of a Cajun accent slipping out in those three syllables. Matt didn’t have a lick of Cajun in him.

  Evangeline stopped and looked back. A tall fellow with broad, square shoulders and dirty-blond hair—an untamed herd of cowlicks—busied himself with dropping white votive candles into a double row of clear glass holders. Evangeline had been riding a roller coaster already today, but now she felt like she’d been slapped and spun around. Even in the low neon light she could tell his eyes were aqua blue, nearly turquoise. He was about the prettiest damned man she’d ever seen, but right now she was in no mood for pretty. “Who the hell are you?”

  Those aqua eyes flashed, and a smirk rose to his lips. He gave her a curt bow, then a wink. “Lincoln Boudreau,” he said, “quite literally at your service.”

  “What happened to Matt?”

  “Your boy Hugo fired that couillon going on a month ago.”

  “Fired him?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He protracted both words, drawing them out into a dare. Her mind turned to hot August days and skinny-dipping. “That is my understanding.”

  Evangeline caught herself looking him up and down, then flushed when she rea
lized he was doing the same to her. Her pulse quickened beneath his gaze. Electricity. That was what it felt like. Sparks and hot bright lights. She’d never felt this way around a man before. Not with Nicholas. Not even with Luc. She tried to focus, to hang on to the anger that had carried her here. She would not get all caught up in this strange fire.

  Pursing her lips and forcing her eyes to focus on the candles lined up on the bar rather than on the man behind them, she did her best to convey the message that she had no interest in him. She waited a moment, then let her eyes graze him before landing on the bottles, one in particular, behind him. “Well, Lincoln—at my service—Boudreau, I’d like you to do me a favor.”

  “You’re the boss.” The way he said it conveyed both his willingness to help in this and a willingness to take other, more personal orders.

  “Funny you should say that,” she said, though she didn’t even consider explaining the scene she’d faced on her way here. She nodded up at a large clear bottle with a silver cap and blue lettering. “Has that one been opened?”

  He pulled it down from the shelf and held it up. “Don’t think so. It looks full to me.”

  She nodded. “Okay, then. There’s an old man outside. Bald on top, white fringe three quarters round. You take that out and give it to him.”

  Lincoln rested the bottle on his left palm, tightening his grip on the bottle’s neck with his right. “Sure thing. Anything else?”

  She paused and turned to gaze out the open door. She couldn’t see Reverend Bill, but she could sense he was still lingering nearby. “Yeah. Tell him his queen isn’t interested in any damn sacrifices.”