The King of Bones and Ashes Read online

  “I knew what you were thinking, what you were doing, from the second your eyes picked me out in the crowd,” Nicholas continued. “I saw how badly you wanted, needed, to punish my son. And I guess I wanted to punish him, too.”

  It was true. It hadn’t been her finest moment, not by a long shot. But somehow . . .

  “But somehow from such a bitter seed,” Nicholas’s words echoed her thoughts—there really wasn’t a single door that could keep him out—“love grew.” He leaned in. His lips brushed her ear. “It’s real, what we have. Isn’t it?” He leaned back, his black eyes—so like Luc’s—pleading with her.

  Sugar pranced into the room, arching her back at the sight of him. But then she stopped and stared at him, her glassy green eyes blinking once, twice. Sugar leaped up on the table next to Nicholas and rubbed her head on his arm in a shocking expression of solidarity. He stared blankly at the cat, then reached out and began stroking her head and running his hand down her back. He caught Sugar in the crook of his other arm, and she responded by laying her head on his shoulder and purring.

  Perhaps they’d arrived at the end of days after all.

  She nodded. “Yes. It’s real.” She reached out to place her palm against his stubble-roughened cheek. “Nicholas, what is this all about? What’s wrong?”

  He grasped her hand, pressing it to his lips. His mouth twitched. His eyes widened in an expression that blended relief with disbelief. “The great Celestin Marin has at last departed this world.” He drew in a breath and breathed it out.

  “Oh, Nicholas,” she said, “I’m so sorry . . .”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” He shook his head and lowered Sugar to the floor. The cat meowed in protest, then slunk away and found a patch of sun on the floor. Nicholas’s face hardened. “Celestin has been in a coma for eight years, just hanging on in that hospital bed like a tick on a dead dog. He’s been dead to the world for nearly a decade. He’s been dead to me even longer. But still I have to pretend that I care.”

  His reddened eyes smoldered with a hatred Evangeline sensed he was trying to tamp down. “The coven is insisting we throw a commemoration ball in the old man’s honor—a full-blown witches’ ball the likes of which New Orleans hasn’t seen in thirty or more years . . .” His words trailed off. “It’s important, to the older members, at least. The kicker is that we only have a day to organize the thing. Son of a . . .” In spite of his apparent determination to maintain his composure, a tear brimmed in his eye and ran down his cheek. He dropped her hand and whisked the tear away.

  Evangeline stood and leaned over him, wrapping her arms tightly around his shoulders. “Go ahead.” She felt him shudder. “Let yourself cry.” She sounded like a mother. She wondered if she would’ve made a good mother. It seemed less likely than ever now that she’d have the chance. Nicholas always pirouetted whenever she gave even the slightest of hints she wanted this with him.

  She forced herself to focus on the moment, on his loss. “No matter how bad your relationship with him was, he was your father. You have to mourn him.”

  His face buried in her bosom, he started laughing. At least she had to think of it as laughter, even though the sound he made came out slow and sad. He pushed her back with gentle hands while raising his gaze to meet her own. “Oh, my love,” he said, then laughed again. “It isn’t my father I’m mourning. It’s the loss of my children.” A fresh anger ignited in his eyes. “And now that bastard’s funeral is going to give him one last chance to rub my nose in just how badly I’ve failed them.”

  He peeled her arms from around him and slid his chair back from the table, the scuffing sound causing Sugar to stop licking her paw and stare at him. “How badly I’ve failed you . . . ,” he said, and held up a hand to stop her from speaking. He stood and walked around her to the doorway separating the kitchen from the living room. He turned back. “I can’t give you the life you want. I can’t give you any more of myself than you already have.” She knew what he meant, but he drove his point home anyway. “You’ve seen my luck with children,” he said.

  “What happened with Alice wasn’t your fault . . .”

  “But it is. You can’t deny there’s a pattern. My little girl. As mad as . . . well as mad as her mother. And hell, my mother, too. My oldest son. Dead. After trying to take my place. And Hugo”—a bitter laugh followed his younger son’s name—“well, Hugo is doing everything he can to make sure the line ends with him.”

  “No, you’re right.” She nodded. “There is a pattern. And it points right to the Chanticleers,” she said, spitting out the coven’s name. “If it weren’t for that damnable coven, you might have had a relationship with your father. Luc would still be here . . .”

  “He’d still be here with you,” Nicholas said. His tone felt like an accusation.

  “He’d still be here with us,” she said.

  “That boy and his foolish challenge . . . ,” Nicholas said.

  She sensed he was trying to shift all blame off his own shoulders. “Like father, like son,” she said, pinning his share back into place, “you both always put your pride first.”

  “I never suspected it would end as it did. Never,” he said, turning away, shaking his head. “If I had . . . ,” he said, looking back to her, steeling his spine. “Celestin encouraged him, you know. It was all about Celestin’s damnable desire to get even with me. But Luc wasn’t ready. I knew that. That’s why I didn’t step down. I was trying to save him from making the same mistake I made.”

  He had never before dared to say this to her. Evangeline had thought he respected her too much, but evidently not. She almost laughed as she studied his features, his expression a well-rehearsed blend of grief and stoicism. How many times, she wondered, had he repeated this rationalization? To others? To himself? “Is this the myth you’ve created to exculpate yourself?” She shook her head in disgust. “You may not be entirely at fault, but you’re not blameless. Neither of us is. So lie to yourself if you need to, but don’t lie to me.”

  His face lost its color, and he spun on his heel. She listened as his measured steps carried him across the living room. And then he was gone.

  He didn’t even have the decency to slam the door.

  TWO

  The bell over the door clanged, announcing that the current had carried a fresh school of tourists down from Jackson Square to the shop’s threshold. A burst of steamy air came in as a bit of the air-conditioned cool escaped. “Everything that gives, takes,” her mother had once explained back when Lisette had still been willing—eager, even—to listen. With the mighty Mississippi flowing maybe a thousand or so feet to the east, rounding Algiers Point on its way to the Gulf, there was certain to be another force, though unseen, pushing back, trying to balance energies, a current that could snatch up deep-pocketed tourists and wash them away from the French Market and past the shop’s door. That’s how it worked, her mom had said, that’s why her mother had chosen this spot on Chartres Street for Vèvè, her Voodoo supply shop that took its name from the symbols, seen from Lisette’s perspective in reverse, painted on the windows. Her mother had believed it to be true, and there was a time before her mother’s death, and before Katrina, when Lisette had believed it, too.

  That time had long since passed.

  A trio of white women, the same who had been milling about the store windows for going on five minutes, snapping cellphone pictures of the vèvès and debating whether they should risk a visit, entered. Lisette pretended to ignore the arrivals but sat up straight and—with a practiced air of mystery—took up her tarot deck and fanned the cards into an arc. She flipped one over and pretended to contemplate it, as if a randomly drawn cardboard cartoon could truly impart any worthwhile knowledge. By serendipity, the card was the three of cups, featuring the three dancers. Cursed by a liberal arts education, Lisette couldn’t help but recognize them as the three Graces. She bit her lip to stop herself from smirking as she silently compared the three winsome goddesses to her patrons.
/>   One of the women, a well-fed brunette wearing a print dashiki and cyan Bermuda shorts, struck Lisette as quite keen to come in and poke around, but her companions seemed agitated. A tall blonde, whose Persian-blue blouse bore traces of powdered sugar, made a show of humoring her friend, her air of amused forbearance revealing that she considered the obligatory visit to a Voodoo shop as much a part of a New Orleans vacation as beignets from Café Du Monde. Still, she remained near the door, her gaze turned toward the window, perhaps scanning the street for some real shopping opportunities. She fished a smartphone from her purse and began swiping away at its screen. “This is Chartres Street?” She pronounced Chartres like the name of the French cathedral city.

  “Mmmhmmm,” Lisette hummed, “but around here we say it like ‘Charters,’ and four blocks that way”—she pointed away from the river—“that street’s ‘Burgundy’”—she accented the word’s second syllable, slipping into a bit of well-practiced tourist banter. “And if you really want to pass for native, call the grassy medians like on St. Charles and Esplanade ‘neutral ground,’ and don’t you ever speak of this town as ‘Nawlins.’” She offered the blonde a somewhat sincere smile, but the woman met her smile with a cool stare that seemed to question whether Lisette had suffered a sudden descent into madness.

  “The Napoleon House . . . ,” the blonde said, her inflection rising in pitch with each word. “It’s that way?” She pointed in the direction of St. Louis Street.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lisette said, “it is.” She returned her gaze to the deck of cards, but continued to toss surreptitious glances at the blonde’s cohorts.

  “The symbols in the window,” the brunette piped up, “do they have a meaning or are they just decorative?”

  Most of the people who came into the shop, believers or mockers—it seemed that few ever fell into the realm of true skeptic—came for the Hollywood version of Voodoo. Lisette braced herself to deliver an elevator pitch introduction to the religion. She wondered why she still felt a compulsion to explain, to defend, to enlighten. To educate without biting the hand that feeds, rather than just offering up a bit of theater.

  “Each symbol,” she said, gazing into the woman’s eyes, searching for what? Worthiness of her wasted breath? “Is a kind of pictogram used both to represent and to summon the loa . . .”

  “The intercessory spirits,” the brunette finished her explanation for her. Lisette rewarded the woman for not having referred to the loa as “gods” with a quiet nod and knowing glance, signaling that the woman could, in a safe and easily escapable manner, consider herself an initiate.

  The woman began wandering around the shop, tracing a finger over the books and array of variegated candles, over the statues of loa in their natural and saintly guises, over premade potions with names like “Lover Come Back” and “Four Thieves,” seeming to take stock of all around her. She came to a stop before the painting Lisette’s son, Remy, had done—a reimagining of an old snapshot of the two of them as Erzulie Dantor and child, depicted with photographic precision in warm umbers and ochers, clothed in rich hues of red, indigo, and gold, and marked as an embodiment of the loa by two scars on her right cheek.

  The third woman, a pasty, puffy creature with anxious ice-blue eyes, trailed behind her enthusiastic friend. First she followed her around the shop’s periphery, then through its narrow aisles, her arms folded tightly across her chest, as if she were trying to make herself smaller to avoid coming into contact with any of the displayed wares.

  In spite of the brunette’s attempts to be respectful, the two were all stage whispers and stifled laughter as they passed the altar and caught sight of the erection sported by the grinning skull-faced statuette of Baron Samedi.

  Lisette flipped another card, the tower, upright and looked up. “Quite the cigar, is it not?” she asked in an innocent tone, drawing their attention up to the cheroot clenched between Samedi’s teeth.

  Schoolgirl titters preceded the brunette’s response. “Indeed it is.” Her timid friend gazed down at her own shoes, but at least the baron had managed to bring a bit of color to her cheeks. Maybe Lisette was mistaken. Perhaps these trinkets held some magic after all.

  Lisette had already had more than enough time to gauge each woman’s interest, comfort level, and gullibility. She’d written off the sad, pale sister as a no sale, but the brunette who had instigated their visit, the most open of the three, she was a ready consumer of hygienically packaged cultural exploration. With her, Lisette at least stood a chance of selling a book on the life of Marie Laveau, one of the simpler, more declarative biographies that didn’t attempt to delve too deeply into the many contradictions surrounding New Orleans’s nearly sainted, frequently damned, Catholic Voodoo queen. With a touch of finesse, Lisette might add some jewelry, a silver vèvè pendant perhaps, to the woman’s tab. Or maybe even a made-to-order gris-gris bag, though for that the client would have to be willing to open up about her desires within earshot of her companions. Though perhaps Lisette could sort that out on her own. For what—she focused her full attention on the trio’s most zestful member—did this woman’s secret heart yearn?

  Lisette bit her tongue as her current best client disregarded the “Do Not Touch” sign above the altar, reaching out to trace a finger along the neck of an undrinkable bottle of crème de rose liqueur placed there ten years back as a sacrifice to Erzulie Freda. Of course. Love. No, passion. The words came to Lisette in her mother’s voice.

  Lisette no longer allowed herself to believe in the loa, but since she had been taught about them since infancy, their stories still resonated with her. Her subconscious dealt with the cognitive dissonance of her disbelief in the myths with her emotional attachment to them by moving the narrative into her dead mother’s voice. At least that’s what she’d been told by the one hundred and twenty dollars for a fifty-minute-hour therapist she’d consulted, until she decided—crazy or not—at those prices she’d have to learn to live with it. And she had.

  She had.

  The brunette’s eyes sparkled as they caressed the other items on the altar. Danger. Lisette’s mother’s voice began whispering the ingredients she should place in the gris-gris bag—an odd combination to suggest, given that it would, if it actually worked, dampen the woman’s chances of realizing her goal. Lisette shut out her mother’s voice but still felt a pang of sadness for the brunette, who she suspected would have no more luck in attaining the desires of her heart than the weepy Erzulie Freda herself.

  A pendant. A good-quality one at a fair price. One Lisette would wear herself. That’s what she’d sell this woman. Damn. She knew better than to allow herself to feel empathy for customers. The weekly receipts suffered each time she did.

  To balance it out, she’d send the blonde off with a Voodoo doll keychain, a souvenir for a coworker or underappreciated spouse, thirty-nine cents wholesale, seven ninety-five retail. It didn’t matter that Voodoo dolls had no place in real Voodoo. The use of the poppet to harm or control another was the invention of European witchcraft, grafted on to her mother’s religion by Hollywood. But now, in the public imagination, those dolls were inseparable from the faith.

  “Soulange.” The blonde shocked Lisette by speaking her mother’s name. It took her a moment to realize the woman’s eyes were focused on a placard advertising “Readings by Soulange” affixed to the wall behind her. “Is that you?”

  Lisette smiled and nodded. The sign had been there for almost as long as she could remember, but she often let tourists believe that she was the once famed seer Soulange Simeon. It was partially done out of expediency, partially in imitation of the Laveau women, whose multiple generations of Maries had come close to building a myth of a single immortal woman. Perhaps one day her daughter, Manon, would choose to pick up the mantle and join in the game. “Would you like me to read the cards for you?” She reassembled the deck and held it out to the patron.

  The blonde was tempted. Lisette could read the curiosity in her gray eyes. If she’d
come into the shop on her own, she would’ve said yes, but then again, she would’ve never deigned to darken the door without her fellow Graces. “No,” she lied as her friends awaited her answer. “It’s just a pretty name.”

  Lisette smiled. “It is indeed.”

  Just over the blonde’s shoulder, through the window, Lisette caught sight of a familiar head of closely cropped gray hair. Her father, Alcide Simeon, came weaving down the sidewalk, threading his way through the throng of tourists, stopping and bowing theatrically before a young girl, stepping into the street and ceding the sidewalk to her and her parents. The girl’s father reached down and swooped the girl up into his arms as a car horn blared a warning at Alcide. The driver swerved around him, and he stepped backward onto the uneven sidewalk, stumbling but righting himself. The glint of something silver in his hands caught Lisette’s eye.

  Lisette’s father did not take drugs. He did not touch drink. Always said he’d watched too many of his buddies lose it all down those roads. But here he was, stumbling toward the shop. Still, seeing her teetotalling father drunk was a lesser shock than the sight of the strange instrument he carried. Bessie was his “brass belle,” the horn such a familiar sight that it seemed an extension of her father’s hand. Seeing him with this new horn cradled in his hands made her feel like she’d caught him carrying on with a strange woman.

  “You’ll excuse me for a moment,” she said without looking at the women. “You all just keep on looking around as much as you would like.” She stepped around the counter and brushed past the blonde. She grasped the door handle, and, walking through the bell’s protest, slipped out to the street.