The King of Bones and Ashes Page 6

  “What have you taken?” she asked, looking down into his enlarged pupils. She grasped his chin and turned his face into the glow of a neon beer sign.

  “I dunno,” he said, laughing. “Something red, something blue,” he nearly sang the words. “Something yellow. Maybe something purple, too. A whole rainbow”—he stretched out the word, rocking back as he did—“of feel good.” Hugo indulged in many nights of decadence that would have killed a normal man. But he was, of course, far from normal. A witch’s tolerance for drugs and booze was renowned, but sooner or later, if magic truly was fading, Hugo might just push his way past the limit.

  “You can’t keep living like this,” Evangeline said. “You’ve got to pull it together.” He stared up at her, offering her the same boyish charm that had worked on the drag queen. Too bad for him, his brother and father had immunized her against the self-serving charm of the Marin male.

  She crossed her arms over her chest as a blast of wind whipped past them. “One of these nights . . . ,” she said, her voice failing her as she wondered how much of Hugo’s problem could be attributed to her habit of cleaning up after him.

  “One of these nights, what?” he said, laughing, looking up with her with a sparkle in his blue eyes.

  “One of these nights”—she forced the words to come—“I’m not going to stop. I’m just going to keep walking.”

  His brow lowered as the smile fell from his face. Tiny lines formed at the edge of his eyes. “That night isn’t tonight, is it?”

  She stood there for a moment, gazing down at him. She shook her head. “No. It isn’t tonight.”

  “Good,” he said, his face brightening, cockiness returning to his tone. “’Cause I’m not sure I can stand.”

  She crouched down beside him and hooked her arm around him. “On three?” she said, helping him balance more than rise once they arrived at that number.

  “I love you, you know?” he said, weaving a bit as he did. “I mean really love you.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She gave him a tight squeeze.

  “Not like Father either. Not like Nicholas.”

  “Let’s not talk about your dad right now. You just focus on not tripping, okay? You’d take us both down.”

  “Okay.” He leaned in and surprised her with a kiss on the top of her head.

  She had a flash of him as the gangly, sullen, love-starved teenager he’d been upon her first introduction to the family. He might be a grown man now, but to her he’d always be that kid. “You’re not punishing Nicholas by doing these things to yourself,” she said. “You’re only hurting yourself . . . and me.”

  “I thought we weren’t talking about Nicholas now.”

  “We’re not,” she said, tugging him forward, willing the rain to let up, surprised when it did. She hadn’t intended to use magic.

  “She’s coming home. Our Alice. Vincent has set up a family reunion.” Evangeline hadn’t heard. Nicholas had always painted his daughter as being too fragile to leave the hospital. But before she could express her surprise, Hugo carried on. “I figure it’ll only take a week or two before she’s back in care.” He laughed as if what he said were funny. “We’re hard on our women, the Marins. Two end up in the nuthouse, and one takes to the Dreaming Road. Aunt Fleur was lucky. Celestin just bartered her to her husband for a chance at prestige and political clout.” He looked down at her, nodding in drunken agreement with himself. “You’re pretty damaged, too, you know.” He plodded forward, weaving worse than before. “Even my mother had the sense to take off. But not you. You bed Luc. He blows his brains out. Then you spend a decade screwing the guy who damaged him. Like it was nothing.” He tossed the words out with such nonchalance. As if they held no weight. No sharp edges. “Where do you think you’ll end up? Crazy or dead?”

  She stopped in her tracks. She felt herself shaking, not from the damp, but from rage. She heard a sizzling, popping sound as one neon sign after another exploded, shooting sparks, making Bourbon Street light up like a burning sparkler. The display seemed to shock him to sobriety. She raised her hand to strike him, but he’d already braced himself for it. Hugo had gone through life braced. Pushing away those he loved as fast and as hard as he could, just so they could hurry up and hurt him. She laid her palm against his cheek, caressing it.

  “I’m not your mama. I’m not gonna leave you,” she said. “I’m not Nicholas either. I don’t give a damn whose sheets you warm. I love you. Not in spite of who you are, but because of it.” She grasped his hand and gave it a gentle tug. “You gonna behave yourself now?”

  “Yeah,” Hugo said. “At least for a couple of days.”

  She looked back up at him. “I’ll take what I can get.” She led him left, turning off Bourbon and onto St. Ann.

  FIVE

  Alice was walking from her grandfather’s home to her father’s. She knew this to be true, even though the path leading between the houses was a long interior corridor rather than a five-mile trek cutting through the heart of the city’s Central Business District. Even though the muffled roar of jet engines at the edge of her awareness protested that her actual body was soaring over the spinning earth at thirty thousand feet.

  The corridor seemed more real than the jet. More tangible. More plausible. And so Alice carried on down the hall despite it being too dark for her to see. Flickering light glowed to life around her, as if in response to her complaint. Both sides of the hall were suddenly lined with gilded torch lamps shaped in the form of women, all in varying degrees of classical undress.

  She recognized the golden torchères as belonging to Versailles’s Galerie des Glaces, a place she had always dreamed of visiting, and instantly she became aware of the Hall of Mirrors’ vaulted ceiling and tall rounded windows. For an instant, full light flooded through those windows, but it extinguished itself just as quickly, perhaps to justify the quivering play of shadows and candlelight.

  It was ridiculous, of course. Even Alice’s sleeping mind balked at a geography that would have Versailles’s Galerie des Glaces running like a corridor linking two houses in New Orleans, but still she walked along.

  Alice wondered that her footsteps made no sound as she continued down the wide hall’s parquet floor, but the thought left her mind, for she suddenly heard Sabine’s voice droning on behind her. She was reading aloud in English—a language Sabine understood but rarely spoke—from a guidebook, a passage about Charles Le Brun and the hall’s 357 mirrors.

  At the mention of the mirrors, Alice found herself staring into one, and though the looking glass offered a good faith reflection of her image, something told her it was designed to look deeper than the surface—that it was, perhaps, capable of seeing her unspoken desires.

  Sabine’s voice carried on directly behind her, but her friend’s reflection didn’t appear on the mirror. Alice looked back over her shoulder. Sabine wasn’t there, and the hall fell silent.

  Alice turned back to the mirror, her eyes fixed on their own reflection, while in the periphery of her vision, the hall around her changed, rounding itself into a perfect sphere. The mirrors cracked and then shattered, their jagged edges spinning smooth until she was surrounded by hundreds of round looking glasses. She remained fixed in place, but the mirrors revolved around her, a whizzing, buzzing movement that caused her reflection to tremble and blink, almost imperceptibly, in and out of existence. Each mirror took her measure, each offered her a different view, though the speed at which they moved was too great for her to consciously register a fraction of what she saw. Vistas arose and erased themselves, slowing, seeming to grow in precision as they honed the world around her in response to desires she might not without some discomfort avow as her own.

  And then an image, incorporating some aspects of the hall and reimagining others, came into focus around her. It claimed her, making her part of the tableau. Women, some in corsets, others in antique-style lace nightgowns, each exquisite in her own way, stood immobile in the flickering light. Alice recognized them as
her dreaming mind’s reinterpretation of the torchères. One, a tall, commanding beauty with olive skin and lustrous black hair, stood before the room, naked except for an opulent, museum-quality necklace of diamonds and teardrop-cut emeralds. Her eyes shone greener than the precious stones she wore.

  The flicker of the light stilled, and the women stirred as if they had stolen movement from the light. Their swaying, a dance full of a sensuous languor, demanded music.

  A group of male musicians appeared beneath a gas-lit chandelier. The women’s spirited dance quickly fell in time with the music. A muted trumpet sang out over the rest of the ensemble, the player’s fingering hidden beneath a handkerchief draped over his hand. A trombone and clarinet teased and taunted the trumpet to more and more dangerous improvisations. A drummer tried to maintain the order, but it was the pianist who provided the underpinning, giving the others a home base to return to when their wanderings were done. The music moved along, begging the pianist—Alice intuited him to be the prisoner of strict classical training—to break free, but his style, though faultless, remained bound by precision.

  The dance demanded music; the music called for an audience.

  But the hall didn’t transform itself into a theater. Instead it took the shape of a mirrored parlor, complete with a style of furnishing Alice would have expected to find in a Victorian-era gentlemen’s club. The sight of wriggling along the walls alerted her to the presence of others, men, their features swallowed by shadow. They stepped forward one or two at a time, glancing around as if trying to spot their marks on a stage, and then took their places.

  Soon a peppering of men, many in formal attire, most wealthy looking, filled the space. As one, they turned back to look at the mirrors. Their faceless reflections stepped through the glass, doubling their numbers in a blink, each reflection developing his own unique features as he emerged into the space. Soon the parlor was filled with men. Drinking. Smoking. Laughing. They approached the women and brushed up against them, grasping them roughly. Alice flushed with anger, astounded when the women looked on unaffected, some laughing. A few even groped the men back, then pulled them into the swaying mass of dancers undulating before the now outnumbered band.

  Alice looked away, and her eyes fell on two men smirking at each other from their seats on opposite ends of a card table. Both were wearing black tie, but the man who sat between them had on a sweat-stained striped shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and a straw hat pushed back on his head. He eyed the cards he held. Alice sensed that he was trying to maintain an air of sangfroid, but the pallor of his face broadcast his dismay.

  Her eyes shifted to another man with a thick, bushy mustache and heavy, lethargic eyelids, reclined opposite the table on a divan. A mahogany wine table on three slender legs sat before him, a small lamp burning at its center. It struck Alice as strange that rather than brightening the room, the lamp seemed to swallow the light around it. A long metal pipe ending in a wolf’s head with fierce ruby eyes dangled between the fingers of his left hand. He leaned forward, holding a tiny knob on the pipe’s lower section over the lamp’s low flame. Then he placed the pipe’s other end to his lips and inhaled, his face tilting back as he exhaled a filament of cloying smoke that smelled of perfume gone off from age.

  The man seemed to feel the weight of her stare, and he turned his face toward her. His tongue slid out to moisten his lower lip. “Alice,” he said, but something about the way he spoke her name made it seem as if he had just imparted a word of great import. Her name combined welcome and warning, recognition and regret. He looked at her over the length of his pipe as he inhaled once more. He let the plume escape his lips, then his mouth curled into a smile. “What would your mother say if she were to see you here?” His gaze drifted upward, toward the ceiling, where Alice saw her own name trace itself, as if written by a living serpent of neon light, before flashing out.

  The nude beauty circled the room, pausing before each of the men, longer before some than others, seeming to inspect them. Most of the men present looked old, in their thirties or even her father’s age, but two younger men made their way to the center of the room, champagne flutes in hand. The beauty signaled to two of her sisters, who came and escorted the men to the foot of the stage.

  It struck Alice that a stark dichotomy existed between the men in the hall. The musicians were all darker-skinned, the audience white. Unlike the men, divided by race, the women mingling there, like the beauty, appeared to be of Creole extraction, some darker, some fairer.

  The beauty stopped beside the unlucky poker player and whispered in his ear. She kissed his ashen cheek, then laughed and undid her necklace, laying it atop the pile of cash at the center of the table before sauntering away.

  She drew near Alice, reaching out and taking a glass of champagne from the silver tray Alice had only then realized she was holding.

  “Alice, my girl, Miss Lulu doesn’t pay you to stand around gaping,” the beauty said. Alice looked down, surprised by the harsh contrast of her own dress’s long black sleeves and the white apron she wore over it.

  Suddenly lucid and aware that she was dreaming, Alice wondered if she should play along with the role her subconscious had assigned her or break character, but the other woman just held up a silencing finger as she turned back to the band.

  The beauty passed a man who sat backward on a chair, his arms draped over the back. He seemed both part of the tableau surrounding him and removed from it. The beauty ran her fingers through his thick dark curls as she passed. He looked up, and she handed him the glass of champagne. She grasped his free hand, a shade darker than her own, tugging him up and forward to join the two young men in black tie, who now stood on the band’s raised dais. Of course, there had been no raised platform before, but now the dream commanded it. The man shook his head, attempting to refuse both the champagne and the invitation, but the beauty took no heed. The dancers parted at their approach, leaving them a clear path.

  The beauty deposited the curly-haired man beside his brethren. Next to the other two, whose features were handsome but bland, he stood out even more—his complexion a deeper tan than the beauty’s, a strong brow, high cheekbones underscored by a day’s growth of dark stubble, and bottomless black eyes outlined with the thickest lashes Alice had ever seen on a male. He had a thick Cupid’s bow mouth. His features were too pretty for most men, but they only seemed to highlight the unaffected masculinity of his bearing. The more she focused on him, the more his companions paled in comparison. It struck Alice that even though she hadn’t paid much attention to their appearance earlier, it seemed as if their features might have changed, grown less fine, their coloring mousier, to emphasize the contrast with him. The handsome man’s eyes fell on Alice, fixed on her. He tilted his head to see around the crowd milling between them. He took a step forward, moving as if to leave the dais, but one of the other two young men reached out and draped an arm around his broad shoulders.

  The beauty raised her hand, and the band—the entire room—fell silent. She stood still for a moment, letting her eyes graze every face in the room before speaking. “There’s a lot of talk,” she said, her voice as clear as if she were speaking directly in Alice’s ear, “of the law shutting us down. Shutting us all down. Clearing Storyville clean out. All so you menfolk can have that silly little war you’re just itching to have.”

  “Storyville,” the word escaped Alice’s lips as she connected the name Lulu to her surroundings. This, she realized, was Mahogany Hall, or at least her interpretation of Lulu White’s renowned bordello. But Alice knew from her reading that Storyville, New Orleans’s once famed and legally prescribed sixteen-block vice district, had been closed before the beginning of World War I, and Mahogany Hall razed after the end of the second. Why, she wondered, would I have come here?

  “And what you menfolk want,” the beauty continued, “you always get. But not,” she paused and laughed, “before we womenfolk get what we want. Before we let you ship all the pretty young boy
s off to get killed, we’re going to claim one as our own.” She stepped back and gestured with a wide wave toward the three young men at her side. “Ladies,” she called out, “I give you your candidates for Mahogany Hall’s last king of Mardi Gras.” She reached out and ran her fingers once again through the man’s thick, dark curls. The beauty drew him nearer. “I know which one gets my vote.” She placed a passionate, if practiced, kiss on his lips.

  She released him, then accepted a shiny white object from one of her ladies in waiting. Stepping behind the swarthy man, she reached up around him to place an unadorned white Mardi Gras mask over his angelic features.

  Alice knew him then. Babau Jean. He was always present. In all her dreams. She wondered how it was she had only recognized him when he wore his true face.

  In the next breath, he stood before her. The room was silent, empty except for the two of them. He leaned in, the mask brushing her cheek as he whispered in her ear. “There’s such beauty in darkness, Alice,” he said, leaning back and taking her chin in his cool hand. “And such darkness in beauty.” He lowered his hand, tracing a finger down her neck, letting it rest at the hollow of her throat. She felt her pulse throb beneath his touch. He leaned in, the cool bone china mask pressing a chaste kiss on her forehead. On the edge of her darkening awareness, she heard a woman’s cry of distress. The voice was achingly familiar, and it reached in and stirred her earliest memories.

  She knew it to be her mother’s voice. Alice turned her head, searching for the source of the sound.

  A child’s wailing jolted Alice awake, her own reflection looking back at her from the plane’s window, the night sky all around her.

  SIX

  Damned if I know. Damned if I know. Fat raindrops struck her umbrella, the rhythmic sound triggering words in Lisette’s mind that repeated themselves like a mantra until she finally relented—first mouthing them silently, then muttering them under her breath. The responses, she realized, came to her subconscious questions. How many mornings had she walked down this same street to pass another day in her mother’s shop? How many more mornings would she revisit her steps?