The Book of the Unwinding Read online

  Still in flight, Mathilde finished the rat off with three vicious jabs of her sharp beak. She dropped the bloodied corpse at Margot’s feet. An offering of fealty, or perhaps a gift given in affection.

  Mathilde touched down and turned toward the dark fire. She began bobbing, lowering herself to the earth and rising back up—bowing, it seemed, as best as her feathered form would allow. For a heartbeat, Evangeline could almost feel the presence of Mathilde’s human mind, but then it slipped away again, the bowing motion turned into a pecking search for insects. Margot kicked the dead rodent away, sending Mathilde hopping backward to reclaim it.

  “She’s mostly lost,” Margot said, focused on Mathilde. “One sister trapped in animal form, another in animal mind.” Mathilde feasted on her prey, undisturbed by Margot’s words. “Each change, ma chère, will make you less of what you were and more of what you will be. You may writhe and struggle with the determination of that poor rodent, but you are looking at your own future. We both are.”

  “None of you are sisters, not really,” Evangeline said, less out of spite than to draw her own attention away from Mathilde’s shredding and swallowing of fur and flesh.

  Margot didn’t rise to her challenge. Instead, she fell as silent as stone, appearing to contemplate the great darkness before them.

  Evangeline advanced on her. “Why are you doing this to me? Why did you bring me here?”

  Margot’s laughter rang out, and Mathilde added her own rough caws, though Evangeline sensed the elder witch was reacting to sound rather than meaning. “But my dear, we didn’t. You were drawn here by your own darkness.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe me, don’t believe me. It’s of no consequence,” Margot said, managing to sound offended nonetheless. “I didn’t come here to quibble with you. Time will tell.” Then she paused, seeming to reconsider her words. “Blood will tell.” Three pointed words wrapped in cotton to hide their sharp edges. Evangeline knew better than to touch them.

  “She doesn’t blame you, you know,” Margot said, lifting her hand to point at the night sky. A gargantuan bird circled overhead, a black bird in an onyx sky. Evangeline couldn’t make out the form directly, but she perceived it through the starlight it blocked, and the sound its black wings made as they beat against the night air. She knew it was Marceline, still trapped in the form she’d taken to assist Celestin Marin in slaughtering the witches at the ball. The necklace Hugo had put around the shifter’s neck would keep her in that form until death—unless Marceline found a loophole in the magic. “Marceline’s always been fond of you. She is paying the price for that affection now.”

  “I’m not to blame. What happened to her was of her own doing.”

  Marceline’s caw rang down like a contradiction descending from the sky.

  Margot rocked back a bit, lifting her head and looking down her nose at Evangeline. Her eyes flashed and she opened her mouth to speak, but then seemed to think better of it. She shrugged her shoulders. “We are who we are,” she said, her tone conciliatory. “You’ll come to understand that. Accept it. Then perhaps you will judge us more kindly.” Once again, her eyes turned skyward. “Watch her.” Evangeline heard something akin to pride in the witch’s voice. Marceline climbed higher and higher, her flight a tightening spiral. She reached the spiral’s apex, then hung there, unmoving. With a sudden cry, she turned toward the earth and plummeted. “Like a shooting star,” Margot said, raising her clasped hands, shaking them in excitement, cheering Marceline on.

  Evangeline’s eyes struggled to follow Marceline’s meteoric descent through darkness, until a blinding flare shot up from the dark form, and the quaking earth knocked her to her knees.

  It took some time for her vision to clear. “I don’t understand.” She forced herself up on unsteady legs. “What just happened? What did she do?”

  Evangeline sensed Margot was wrestling with herself. “She freed herself in the only way she could.”

  “She’s gone?”

  “She may very well be,” Margot replied. Evangeline thought she could see a tear tracing its way down the witch’s cheek. “Or the dark fire may renew her. Return her to this world, a true phoenix.” Margot seemed to remember herself. She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “It was a calculated risk,” she said, her voice turning cool.

  “When will we know?” Evangeline turned back to the dim conflagration.

  The being’s heart beat louder, faster. The sound of the flute grew louder.

  “Careful, young one. I’m beginning to think you’ve come to care what happens to her.” Margot reached out and placed a finger on Evangeline’s forehead, touching the spot mystics speak of as the “third eye.” She seemed to be searching for something buried deep in Evangeline, though Evangeline couldn’t imagine what she might expect to find there.

  “You were wrong, you know,” Margot said. Evangeline could sense that the older witch was struggling with herself. “When you said we weren’t real sisters. We were sisters, we four. Driven by hunger, by shame, by stifled rage, we went together into the shadowy wood to pledge our troths to Lucifer. The Devil.” She spat out the words contemptuously, then chuckled. “We knew nothing of magic at the time, but we believed what we’d been taught, so we went off together to seek a shared damnation. That act alone bound us as sisters,” she said, her speech slowing, a hesitation before crossing some unseen barrier. “But Mireille and Marceline,” she said, “they were sisters before our encounter with the font of our powers. They were sisters by blood. Marceline is your aunt.”

  FIVE

  St. Ann Street, just off Dauphine. The arch of Armstrong Park in plain view. Fleur mentally ticked off Hugo’s directions till she stood before the you-can’t-possibly-miss-it Creole cottage that belonged to Evangeline Caissy. The cottage, painted a shade too deep to be called salmon, too bright for coral, winked at her with its dazzling citron right door that peered out from between open sky-blue shutters. Like many of the neighboring houses, the cottage had two front entrances separated by two windows. The cottage’s left door and center double windows were all hidden behind closed shutters—the shutters all identical in length and painted the same brilliant blue. Only the citron steps leading up to the shuttered door betrayed its purpose.

  The Caribbean color palette suited the house. Brilliant. Welcoming. The sight of it made Fleur smile. In spite of the Garden District mansion Fleur had inherited from her parents, she felt a twinge of envy for Evangeline’s sweet little cottage. No, she realized, if she envied the solitary Cajun witch anything, it was the independence she’d always enjoyed. Unlike Evangeline, Fleur had been passed, hand to hand, from father to husband, a tool to help both fulfill their ambitions.

  But those days were good and done.

  Fleur mounted the right-hand steps and prepared to rap on the door, but it swung open before she could act.

  “What?” Evangeline said, though the word was more of a challenge than a question. Evangeline pulled back from the bright light of day. She looked like a ghost, pale, drawn. She’d lost a good ten, maybe fifteen pounds since Fleur had last seen her. Back in July. At Vincent’s memorial, when they had poured his ashes into the Mississippi River, only a few blocks south of where they now stood.

  “How,” Fleur began, distracted by the deep purple circles beneath Evangeline’s red-rimmed eyes. Those eyes squinted against the sun, and Evangeline raised her hand to shield them. “I was going to ask how you’re doing,” Fleur said, “but I don’t have to. You look like hell.” She moved to push past Evangeline.

  “I don’t remember inviting you in,” Evangeline said, stepping forward to block Fleur’s way.

  “I’ve come to help.” Fleur caught a whiff of alcohol seeping through the woman’s pores. If anyone struck a match, she and Evangeline both might light up like torches.

  “Help?” Evangeline said with a laugh that felt like a slap. “I don’t need help, especially not from my bastard ex’s prissy little sist
er.” Evangeline stepped back, one hand on the door, preparing to close it in Fleur’s face.

  “No?” Fleur said. “Well, then I ask you to consider the most salient point from among the many reasons I think you do.”

  Evangeline froze, and Fleur knew the color rising to the woman’s cheeks was not the flush of health—it was a sign of her red-hot temper. “And what in the hell might that be?” she said, grinding each word between her teeth.

  “Hugo asked me to come. He thinks you need an intervention. Stop and think about it. Hugo thinks you need an intervention.”

  Evangeline’s eyes opened wide. She slipped back from the doorway and retreated into the shadowy interior of the house. Not quite an invitation, but it would do.

  Fleur entered the house and closed the door behind her. With all of the other shutters closed, the darkened, airless room felt too close. From across the room, she heard a click, and a lamp came on.

  “I’ve always respected you,” Fleur said. An odd place to begin, perhaps, but she sensed it was something Evangeline needed to hear, and moreover, it was something she needed to say. From what Hugo had passed on to her, Nicholas had been carrying Evangeline around like old chewing gum on the bottom of his shoe for years. He’d misled her about many things in general, but about Fleur in particular, projecting his own prejudices against Evangeline’s background and occupation onto his sister.

  She glanced around the cluttered room. “May I?” she said, nodding at a sofa swallowed up in a sea of empty bottles and dirty clothes.

  “I don’t live this way,” Evangeline said, tossing a guilty glance at the dirty laundry and the empties swaddled in it. “This isn’t me. Not normally.” Beneath the shame rode an anger that might blaze at the tiniest spark. She rushed around Fleur to clear a space on the sofa, snatching at the items there like they had insulted her, and dumping them on top of another mound that rested on a moss-green eyesore of a club chair.

  “I know it isn’t,” Fleur said, moving toward the sofa. “Hugo tells me you’ve long been the glue that’s held his life together. That is why your current state has him shaken.” She sat, crossing her ankles and smoothing her skirt, growing self-conscious beneath the weight of Evangeline’s leaden stare.

  “I’m sorry,” Evangeline said, perching herself on the edge of the club chair’s cushion.

  Fleur raised her eyebrows and shook her head to signal she didn’t understand.

  Evangeline leaned forward a bit. “For calling you prissy.” Her apology was sincere, earnest even, but the word still sounded silly.

  “Prissy,” Fleur said with a laugh. “Were I you, I would’ve gone with ‘presumptuous bitch.’” Evangeline’s eyes widened and her lips parted—ready, Fleur intuited, to protest the harshness of words she’d not even said. Fleur held up her hands. “Among my circle of friends, that’s considered a compliment.”

  “You need better friends.”

  “I’ve heard you clean up nicely. Maybe you could be the first.”

  Fleur spotted a flicker of a smile on Evangeline’s lips, but then the other woman looked her up and down, her gaze hardening. She was suspicious of her overture, and Fleur couldn’t blame her. Not after the dozens, if not more, of her brother Nicholas’s subtle betrayals.

  Fleur felt a wispy tingle at the edges of her senses. Evangeline was an empath, and Fleur could sense that the other witch was casting some type of psychic net over her, intent on divining her true intentions. It wasn’t worth trying to hide anything from her. Good thing Fleur had come to share all. “I would’ve come anyway,” she said, intent on revealing the truth before Evangeline could uncover it on her own. “Even if Hugo hadn’t asked me to. I have my own selfish motives to see you straighten yourself out.”

  “Imagine that,” Evangeline said, then ran a hand through her tangled mess of red hair, “Honesty from a Marin.” Fleur suspected Evangeline was reacting more to Fleur’s aura than to her words.

  “I’ll always speak the truth to you,” Fleur said. “That’s the ‘bitch’ part. I’ll earn the ‘presumptuous’ by assuming you’ll always want to hear it.” She fixed Evangeline with her gaze, trying to shake off the woman’s magic. It surprised Fleur to find she couldn’t. It pleased her, too. She needed a strong witch like Evangeline. “Listen. My father and mother. Your mother and her ‘sisters.’ They’ve all committed abhorrent, unforgivable acts. We are both decent, caring women, and we cannot help but feel ashamed. But we can’t let that shame pull us out of the world, keep us from attempting to work good in it. And you do bring a lot of good . . .”

  “I can’t help you with Alice, you know,” Evangeline said, “if that’s what you’re after.”

  Fleur had been prepared to discuss Celestin. Her best hope for drawing Evangeline out of her spiral of self-contempt and shame, she thought, was to engage her in a discussion of their common enemy, and how best to defeat him. She hadn’t anticipated Evangeline would bring up Alice, at least not first thing, but empaths are led by strong emotion, and while on the topic of shame, Evangeline had easily tapped into Fleur’s greatest regret. Fleur turned the image of Alice around again and again her mind, still trying to fathom that the girl she’d believed to be her niece was in fact her half sister. It was even harder to accept that her brother Nicholas, knowing that he couldn’t be Alice’s father, had purposefully painted the child as unstable and left her to rot in a psychiatric care facility.

  Once Fleur had been able to project her psyche to a distant point, up to hundreds of miles if need be, but even if her power had been running at full force, the wards placed over the institution would have precluded her little magic trick. All the same, she could have made the trek the common way. It would’ve been simple enough to travel to the island: hop on a direct flight from Reagan to the Portland International, then charter a sea plane to carry her from there. Still, Fleur had never once visited Alice. She’d acquiesced to Warren’s wishes. “No need to draw attention to the situation,” her husband would always say whenever Fleur mentioned Alice. If she’d made even a single trip to Sinclair and spent an hour or two with Alice, maybe she would’ve ascertained the truth. Maybe all of this suffering could have been avoided. But no matter how convenient, she couldn’t blame her soon-to-be ex for keeping her away. The fault lay with her. She should’ve told Warren to stick it. The desertion seemed a gross enough betrayal coming from an aunt, but somehow it struck Fleur as an even worse offense for a sister. Now it was too late to ever make it up to Alice. She had been lost to them once again, and this time for good.

  Once a witch’s magic turned in on itself, it created a closed and almost unbreakable circuit. It didn’t matter whether they’d done so willingly or, like Alice, had been forced. There were legends, but no one in living memory had ever come across a witch who’d taken to the Dreaming Road and then returned. “No. I’m aware you can’t,” Fleur said. “None of us can help Alice. We missed our chance to do that when she was here with us.”

  “But you’re still lying to Hugo and Daniel,” Evangeline said, reading her guilt if not her thoughts, “telling them that you’ll find a way to save her.”

  “Yes, I am. Hugo needs the lie. As far as Daniel is concerned, I’m half convinced he senses Hugo’s need and is only playing along for his sake. Each time Daniel manages to enter Alice’s world, he comes back seeming more discouraged. Sooner or later I’m going to have to tell Hugo there is no Santa Claus, and that’s only the first reason I need you to pull it together.”

  “I am together,” Evangeline said, with a lot of defiance but not much conviction.

  “You’re a mess,” Fleur replied. “A disaster.” Evangeline didn’t even flinch. Fleur suspected she hadn’t yet said anything to her that she hadn’t already been telling herself. “You smell like a brewery—a filthy brewery, at that.” Nothing. “You’re throwing everything you love away. You’ve turned your lovely home into a tomb.” Evangeline’s eyes drifted over the room, but she remained silent. “You’re letting your club go to
seed. You’re letting your employees down. I mean, for God’s sake, Hugo’s been running the place . . . yes, Hugo . . . trying to make sure you still have a business to return to when you snap out of this little pity party you’ve been throwing yourself. Oh,” she added, deciding to hit where she knew it would hurt, “I should tell you that you’ve broken your cat’s heart. Daniel says Sugar is pining for you.”

  There it was. Evangeline trembled. “I couldn’t keep her. I couldn’t.”

  “Why? Are you trying to make those who love you feel the way Nicholas made you feel?”

  “It has nothing to do with Nicholas.” Evangeline spoke his name as if her tongue were made of barbed wire.

  “Then what is it?” Fleur pressed. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  Evangeline’s eyes narrowed. Fleur didn’t have to be an empath to know Evangeline was considering tossing her out. She might have pushed too hard, but she’d gone in knowing her attempt at tough love might backfire. “Maybe,” Evangeline said, steam rising off the word, “you should get to telling me what it is you’re wanting from me.”

  Fleur decided a direct approach was best. “I’m rebuilding the Chanticleer Coven . . .”

  Evangeline’s eyes turned to flint. “Why? Is your father planning another massacre?”

  Fleur felt the twined strands of shame and rage she’d been carrying inside her tighten once more in her stomach. She’d returned to New Orleans—in part—to bury Celestin, but the cunning bastard had managed to do the impossible and outwit death. He’d sacrificed nearly every witch between Texas and Mississippi to lay claim to their power.

  Fleur knew she’d been pushing Evangeline. Still, the woman’s callous sarcasm struck a nerve. “I’m sure if he were, your fine feathered aunties would have let you know,” she snapped.