CHAPTER THREE
The specter of what I had done followed me on the drive home that night, making the journey itself seem longer and lonelier than usual. Night had gathered long ago, and now a light rain had started to fall also, bringing with it a mantle of mist. I had watched the tendrils creep across the road in front of me; now it was just a mantle of gray.
The windshield wipers whirred back and forth, keeping the droplets of rain out of my field of view of Magazine Street. I had flicked the radio on for some company, but after getting nothing but static for a while, I decided to turn it off. I wanted the comfort of my own thoughts, wanted to mull over what had happened back at the house, what I had seen, what I had done.
I almost couldn’t believe it. My hands gripped the steering wheel more tightly as I blinked away the mist that seemed to have invaded my own thoughts, as well as the world beyond the extremities of my car. I’ve just brought a cat back from the dead, I thought, I did that. Was it shock preventing me from fully processing what had happened, or the unnaturalness of it all?
Maybe all I wanted to do was forget what I had done. I wasn’t sure I would be doing it again; not that I thought I would ever have to. I didn’t have any pets that might one day need resurrection. The magick was useless to me. So, why had Remy taught it to me? Why had he encouraged me to use it? Maybe this was a stepping stone to some other secret, powerful magick.
That had to be it.
This was a precursor. A prelude. There existed, out there, a kind of magick that required the user know how to bring an animal back from the dead. I thought this spell would, perhaps, be the ability to bring humans back from the dead. Remy hadn’t said it was impossible; he had said it should never be done.
That made sense. Animals are simple creatures, driven by their instincts and instincts alone. Some, the more intelligent ones, had cognitive capabilities others didn’t—like an ape’s ability to learn sign language, or a dog’s capacity to feel for and recognize its owner. But none of them had the ability to process the complex emotions of having just come back from the dead.
They were alive and able to act according to their instincts, or they were dead and it didn’t matter.
I noticed a spot of fog pulsing orange up ahead and slowed. As I got closer, I saw the orange light was coming from a diversion signal on the road. A man wearing a luminous jacket stood next to the sign and his vehicle, with his hands in his pockets and his hood pulled all the way up. I looked around for a sign to tell me which way to go as I passed him, but saw none. The car ahead of me sped up until his two red taillights disappeared into the mist like phantoms.
Then I was alone, and remained alone for some time. Five minutes? Ten? Half an hour? I wasn’t sure, but the drive from the Garden District should not have taken me that long.
My eyes narrowed, and I inched my head closer to the windshield, as if that would somehow help me see more clearly through the mist. Realizing that it wouldn’t, I did the only thing any sane witch would do in this situation; I decided to use magick.
Checking the rearview, I noticed the road was clear of other cars. I opened my right hand, stretching my fingers but keeping the ball of my hand pressed against the steering wheel so my control of the car wouldn’t be compromised. I imagined my car as a giant fan, pushing a continuous gush of air in front of me to clear the mist and let me see where I was going. The inside of the car suddenly became very cold, and as I watched with my third eye, I saw magick sigils glow into existence on the back of my right hand.
The pattern was mesmerizing—beautiful, curly lines that seemed to have been drawn into my skin with glowing ink. The sigils radiated with tiny bursts of intensity which almost mimicked a heartbeat. When I turned my eyes up at the road again, the magick had started to work. A breath of air had pushed up ahead of the car, causing the mist to part in wispy flourishes and allowing me to see the road more clearly.
But something was wrong. This wasn’t Magazine Street. It wasn’t a street at all. I was… on the freeway?
That didn’t make sense. I couldn’t have hooked onto the freeway from where I was, not unless I had taken a series of wrong turns and not even noticed I had taken them. But I was here, on the freeway with trees all around me, about half an hour out of the city by my estimation, and I had no idea how the hell I had gotten here.
I decided to look for an exit and start on my way back, accepting what had happened as one of those things that would go away with time, once I started getting used to the roads out here a little more. Just then, a dull pain hit me behind my eyes. Wincing, I brought my hand up to my right temple, and when I caught myself in the rearview, I noticed a spot of blood trickling out of my nose.
“What the hell?” I asked. A figure suddenly came darting into the road from the left. I screamed and turned the wheel as hard as I could, hitting the brakes to try and slow myself down. But the car whirled out of control and veered off to the right too much. I watched, eyes wide, as the barrier on the side of the road seemed to come hurtling toward me too fast.
The front of the car hit the guard rail hard, sending a shower of sparks in all directions. The airbag popped and hit me in the face with enough force to make me see stars, but the car kept going and slipped into the natural ditch, bumping over the difficult terrain for what seemed like forever until it finally stopped. I was still holding the wheel, my head pushed back into the headrest, jaw clenched tightly. The windshield was cracked and covered in moss and fallen leaves, the radiator was steaming, and the car had died out.
“Holy shit,” I said, when I regained the ability to breathe and talk. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Besides the hissing radiator, the only other sound was the patter of rain on the car itself. The area the car had come to rest was dark as the naked night. Without the headlights, I couldn’t see a thing in front of me. What had I hit? Had I hit it at all? I couldn’t remember hearing any bumps or knocks before I hit the barrier.
I turned around and checked over my shoulder. The mist had rolled back in, hiding the road from my eyes, but also hiding me from the road and concealing me behind a curtain of swirling gray. I saw it when I turned around to face the front of the car, and my breathing stopped again. There was someone there in the darkness, staring at me from beyond the hood.
I swallowed hard. I wanted to reach for my knife, or my phone—reach for anything that could give me comfort. But I couldn’t move. Whoever it was standing there was looking right at me, and I couldn’t move. I thought maybe this had been the figure I had seen in the road. It hadn’t been an animal; of that I was sure. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought the figure had been human in shape… just like this one.
It cocked its head to the side and made a move toward the car, toward me. My body loosened. I reached down toward my ankle and drew my knife, which had been strapped to my boot, readying myself to attack this person. But when I turned my eyes up, it was gone. I looked around—the sides, the back—and saw nothing. The entire area was empty and black as pitch.
In my mind, I tried to conjure an image of what I had seen. It was human—two arms, two legs, a head. I couldn’t determine any distinguishing features on its face or what it was wearing, but it had long, black hair, and its eyes shone like pearls in the depth of a deep, dark ocean. Everything about it screamed danger, and it could be anywhere right now.
I searched around blindly for my phone, which had dropped from the dashboard holster into the gearshift crook in the center of the car, until I found it. Phone or magick, I thought, shit—phone or magick! Once I had my phone, I struggled to remove my seatbelt, and then I opened the driver side door.
Stepping out into the darkness, I felt my way around the car. Dangling fingers of moss, or spider webs for all I knew, caressed my hair and face, causing me to jump whenever one touched me.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice loud and commanding. “Show yourself.”
The woods around me swallowed my voice and robbed me of even an echo. My heart was pounding now. If something came at me out here, if I died out here tonight, no one would find me. They wouldn’t hear my screams, and gators would probably eat what was left of my corpse.
“Come out!” I yelled, but again, nothing came back. I could feel eyes on the back of my head, causing my entire body to shudder, but I couldn’t find the source. It—whatever it was—didn’t seem to want to talk. Judging by the way the car was facing, I determined the direction the road was in. I couldn’t have gone more than a few feet.
A twig snapped somewhere off to my right, and I jumped and turned around. There was a chance this was not a supernatural being. If I used magick in front of them, I would be breaking the witch’s oath of secrecy and would have to deal with that later. If it was supernatural, all bets were off. But regardless of which, one thought made itself clear in my mind.
It was playing with me.
“Fine,” I said, “let’s do it your way.”
I clenched my right hand into a fist, drew a sliver of magick out of myself, and then opened my palm sharply. When my fingers stretched, a shining ball of light burst into existence, sending a pulse of bright, silver light in all directions. Instead of waiting to see if I could spot the thing I had seen moments ago, I ran, pushing my legs as hard as they would go in the direction of the road. As I heard the second set of footsteps, I knew it was behind me.
Again, I clenched my hand into a ball and let a trickle of magick to gather inside. Sparing only an instant to glance over my shoulder as my feet kept pounding the wet earth, I threw the ball of light into the darkness and watched it explode like a soundless bomb. But there was no one there. The light touched the trees and car, but no person.
No madman with an ax. No monster with three heads. Nothing at all.
I stopped running now and backed away slowly, breathing heavily to match the pounding of my own heart. My eyes moved wildly from side to side, taking every possible inch of this swamp in. I thought of throwing another bright pulse into the darkness, but a car hissed along the road behind my back. Civilization—and humans—were close, and I didn’t want to risk being seen.
Humans couldn’t see magick, but a ball of light was a ball of light.
I picked my way up the embankment and back onto the road, feeling the semi-solid gravely sand beneath my feet and exulting in the sensation. I grabbed my phone now and, finding a signal, decided in the moment to call Remy. He would know what to do.
When he found me, I was sitting next to the broken barrier, keeping my eyes wide open for any sign of the thing I was almost sure I had just seen. Before he arrived, I’d been completely sure there had been something on the road and in the woods. Now, the memories were a little blurry; the details were sketchy and ephemeral, like a half-remembered dream.
Remy pulled up alongside me, the wheels crunching to a halt on the gravel. He stepped out of the car and circled around the hood with his hands in his pockets. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I think so.”
“And the car?”
I threw my thumb over my shoulder. “In there somewhere. I called the emergency services. They’ll be here soon.”
Remy pulled his hands out of his pockets and crossed them in front of his chest. “How the hell did you wind up out here?”
I looked up at him. Thanks to the mist, encasing us in a gray cocoon, it looked as if we were the only two people on the planet—completely separate from the rest of the world. “Is it possible something followed me from your house?” I asked.
“Followed? How?”
“I don’t know. But is it?”
“There was no one else there but us. Who could have followed you?”
“I don’t know. A spirit, maybe?”
“Spirit?”
I sighed. “You know more about blood magick than I do, Remy. I did something in that house I’ve never done before, and now I’m sitting here, having been run off the road I didn’t know I was driving on, by something I don’t even remember being there.”
Remy cocked his head. “You don’t remember?”
“No. I mean, I know I was driving, but then I got lost and turned around somewhere, then I was on this road and something caused me to drive my car into the barrier. I think I saw it again in there. But now I’m not even sure I know what it looked like.”
“You don’t know if it was human or animal?”
I shook my head. “I think it was human,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
Remy took a deep breath and surveyed the area where my car had gone into. You couldn’t see the back of it from here. The darkness beyond the road was full of misty tendrils and hanging moss, shivering with the cool, night wind. Something about the dark made my heart want to gallop again, so I looked away.
“I’ll go inside and have a look,” Remy said.
“No,” I said, probably a little too quickly. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”
“You’re sure?”
“I think so. I may have spooked it. Either that or it was just playing with me and it chose to leave. Whatever it was, do you think it had anything to do with the magick I just did?”
Remy seemed to consider this for a long moment—longer than I would have liked. “I can’t say,” he said.
His words made my stomach go cold. “You… can’t?”
“You’re a high magician; you don’t cast magick from the mind, you cast it from the heart. I don’t know of many other high magicians who use blood magick. And those who do probably don’t use it to bring things back from the dead.”
“So, you aren’t sure if we just did something we shouldn’t have done.”
He turned his face down and shook his head.
“Well, shit. Now what?”
“Nothing,” Remy said, “I’m going to figure this out and get to the bottom of it. The best thing you can do now is get back to Lumière. Its magick will protect you.”
“What about Tamara?”
“What about her?”
“Do you think she…”
“It’s not like her to do something like this. Tamara isn’t subtle—she’d have wanted you to know it was she who did this to you.”
I sighed. “Well, I don’t like the idea of cooping myself up in that house again. I’ve done it one too many times.” It was also empty in there again, only I didn’t want to admit to that.
“We don’t have a choice,” Remy said, “Not until I figure out what just happened to you.”
A frown darkened my face. “So, you’re telling me I’m supposed to wait back at my place for you to go and figure this out? You realize we’re throwing a masquerade ball in less than twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll have an answer by then.”
“You’re sure about that?”
He shook his head. “But I am sure that if you don’t get home and get some rest, you’re going to let this consume you.”
Sending me home, telling me he would handle things and expecting me to wait, was exactly the same kind of attitude that had prevented generations of New Orleans witches from learning how to fend for themselves and protect their city from intruders. I understood it was his instinct to do things on his own, and I thought about calling him out on it. But I didn’t.
This day had gone on long enough.
“We should wait for the emergency services,” I said. “They’ll want me to talk to them about what happened.”
“Tell them you saw a gator on the road,” Remy said.
I nodded.
“Will you be needing a ride, after?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll wait also.” He sat down on the guard rail next to me.
“What should we do while we wait?” I asked.
Remy shrugged. “I suppose we could play a game.”
“Do you know any?”
“Not really.”
I nodded. “Probably best to just wait, then.”
“I could teach you more magick, but given the circumstances I don’t think that’d be the best idea.”
“No, I guess it wouldn’t,” I said, allowing myself to chuckle, but a shiver ran up my spine as I laughed, causing the whole thing to sound forced. Fake.
I wouldn’t tell Remy, but after that odd shiver, I almost wanted to lock myself up at home.