Rosette shoved the vacuum inside the room she’d been cleaning when that silly Francesca had started screaming, then scooped up an armload of folded white towels from her cart and followed after Kallie Rivière and her forced entourage.
Given that Lord Augustine had mentioned taking the hoodoo apprentice into custody, Rosette felt reasonably certain that he intended to take Rivière to the Hecatean Alliance offices on the fifteenth floor and secure her in one of their magic-warded rooms.
She hurried down the hall, her rubber-soled shoes silent against the burnt-umber-and-scarlet-patterned Persian carpet, the stink of the spilled bucket’s sulfur-and-wormwood-tainted contents fading behind her.
She needed to learn the truth; then she needed to call Papa. Because—for whatever reason—she and Papa had failed. Not only was Rivière alive, but they hadn’t even managed to kill Brûler, the root doctor from Chalmette.
“So far only a nomad conjurer has died.”
But from the sound of things, she and Papa might’ve murdered an innocent man, a completely unintended target.
Innocent. Murdered. Not good to think in those terms. Because, if you wanted to get fussy about it, Kallie Rivière and Dallas Brûler were also innocents about to be sacrificed upon the cold altar of revenge.
Just like her mama had been.
A cold hand tightened around Rosette’s heart. Tit for tat. This was a war—undeclared, maybe, but a war all the same. But their first bold strikes had failed.
And Papa would be far from pleased to hear the news. He would blame her, at least for Dallas Brûler’s survival.
How in bon Dieu’s name had Kallie Rivière known about the attack on Brûler? And she must’ve known somehow, because Rosette couldn’t think of another explanation for the hoodoo apprentice’s presence on the sixth floor just in time to save Brûler’s life.
Unless one figured in chance. Or divine guidance. But perhaps another message lurked in their failure—the loa disapproved of her and Papa’s actions.
To kill a person was one thing. To murder a soul . . .
Rivière and her black-clad escorts reached the polished steel elevators. She folded her arms over her chest and shifted her weight onto one hip, waiting. The female guard leaned past her and poked the Up button with a black-gloved finger.
A cool twist of relief uncorked some of the tension from Rosette’s muscles, and she slowed her pace. Up was good. While they headed up, she’d head down to Rivière’s room to see what had gone wrong and who had died in her place.
Maybe there would be some way to rectify the situation. She sure as hell didn’t want to tell Papa that both tricks had failed. That Gabrielle LaRue was still laughing at him even after all these years. Papa’s voice, deep and musical and burning with a fire banked deep within his soul, sounded through Rosette’s memory.
“I lost twenty-five years in prison to that woman. I lost your mama, my beautiful Babette. I lost my future. I intend to return the favor to Gabrielle threefold. She will lose all she loves, chérie, just like we did. An eye for an eye is never enough. Never, never, never.”
“Might I have one of those?”
Blinking the memory away, Rosette looked up into Lord Augustine’s gray eyes. She stumbled to a stop, barely avoiding plowing into the man. He studied her, head tilted, one lock of dark brown hair sliding down his forehead.
“A woman deep in thought,” he murmured. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He held up his towel-wrapped bundle. A faint rotten-egg stench wafted from it. “It’s leaking, so I wondered if I might have one of those?” He nodded at the towels Rosette clutched to her chest.
“Oh,” Rosette squeaked in relief. “Oui. Of course.” She grabbed a towel from the top of the stack and handed it to him.
Augustine accepted the towel with a cool smile. “Thank you. Given your French, you must be a New Orleans native,” he said, rolling the fresh towel around the one cradling the dismembered poppet.
“Actually, I’m Haitian, m’sieu,” Rosette lied. “But I’ve lived in New Orleans for several years.”
“Your English is excellent,” he commented. “Not even an accent.”
“Merci. Your English is also excellent, m’sieu, even with the accent.”
Augustine chuckled. “Touché.” The amusement faded from his eyes. “Did you by chance notice anyone—aside from your fellow maid—near room 623 this morning? Did you see or hear anything unusual?”
“No. I was cleaning when I heard Francesca’s scream,” Rosette replied. “When I looked out, I saw the man on the floor.” Nodding at Rivière, she added, “Then I saw her and another woman racing down the hall.”
“Ah, thank you, mademoiselle . . . ?” Augustine arched a dark brow.
“Rosette St. Cyr.”
“If you should think of anything pertaining to this morning’s incident, mademoiselle St. Cyr, please contact the Hecatean Alliance offices.”
Rosette nodded. “Of course, Lord Augustine.”
“Bonjour, then.” Swiveling around, the Hecatean master sauntered the remaining short distance to the elevator, joining the black-pink-black trio waiting in various postures of pretended ease and, in Kallie Rivière’s case, impatience.
The hoodoo apprentice stabbed a finger against the already glowing Up button. A musical ding! chimed down the hall; then the elevator doors slid apart. Flashing her escort a triumphant look, Kallie stepped inside, followed by Lord Augustine and the guards.
The black-uniformed and -shaded guards turned around in a graceful, almost synchronized movement to face the front of the elevator. The male guard motioned with his brush-cut head for Rosette to take the next elevator. She nodded, smiling. The doors thunked shut.
Rosette thumbed the Down button; then, sagging with relief, she leaned a shoulder against the cream-colored wall. “A woman deep in thought.” More like a woman who happened to be an idiot. Daydreaming when she needed to remained focused. If she was careless, Papa would go back to prison. But not alone, no. She’d go as well.
When the elevator arrived, Rosette hurried inside and punched the fourth-floor button. Her nose wrinkled. A previous occupant’s white musk cologne haunted the air, the smell almost thick enough to be visible.
Slipping a hand into her pocket, she brushed her fingers against her universal keycard. A quick visit to Kallie Rivière’s room to assess the situation and figure out their next move, then she’d call Papa.
Towels hugged against her chest, Rosette marched down the hall toward the hoodoo apprentice’s room. When she was only a door away, a tall man in jeans, a sage-green tank, and boots with painted flames on the sides pushed a gurney out into the hall. Blue-inked tattoos curled in concentric designs from his shoulders to his biceps. Long, honey-blond dreads snaked almost to his waist.
The gurney held a comforter-draped burden. A body-sized burden.
Rosette slowed to a halt, her blood chilling in her veins.
“Are you quite sure you don’t need help?” a female and British-accented voice said from inside the room—a voice Rosette recognized. A woman in a rose skirt and white blouse followed the words into the hall, her strawberry-blonde hair glimmering beneath the lights. Lord Augustine’s bouncy assistant, Felicity Fields.
“Nope. Don’t need help. Thanks.”
“Will you want your friend’s clothing and any other belongings we might find in Ms. Rivière’s room brought to you, or would you prefer to pick them up in our offices?”
The gurney stopped. The muscles along the man’s shoulders bunched and rippled beneath his tank. He turned around carefully, one arm slanted and braced across his chest—injured?—his dreads swinging against his back. A gorgeous man, tall and lean-muscled, his whisker-shadowed face in need of a shave. Dried blood smudged the skin beneath his nose, streaked a dark line from his ears down along his neck.
Rosette frowned. What had happened to him? A fight? Then an ice-slivered possibility skewered her thoughts. The aftermath of the hex’s cold and po
isonous kiss?
Not possible. He’d be dead. Not standing in a hall talking to Felicity Fields.
“Just leave a message and I’ll come get ’em,” he replied. A small tattoo Rosette wasn’t close enough to make out curved beneath his right eye. Nomad.
“So far only a nomad conjurer has died.”
Rosette’s gaze shifted back to the gurney and its burden, and all her rationalizations about the cost of war unraveled. She felt sick.
“Cheerio, then,” Felicity chirped. “We’ll be in touch.” Without another word, the tall nomad turned around one more time and resumed pushing the gurney toward the elevator. Rosette stepped aside, putting her back against the wall to give the nomad and his burden room to pass.
His gaze cut to her as he pushed the squeaky-wheeled gurney past, his green eyes brushing over her and drinking in details as if by habit. Then he looked away, his attention once more fixed on the elevator at the end of the hall.
Rosette stared after him, pulse pounding in her temples, haunted by what she’d glimpsed in his eyes.
A stone-hard and bone-deep resolve. Unshakable.
A look she recognized, since she’d seen it before—in her own mirrored reflection.
A mysterious wasting disease whittles her mama away a pound at a time, dulls the color of Mama’s dark chocolate eyes into a filmy mud.
Rosette watches as hoodoo root doctors and voodoo mambos and houngans drape Mama with fragrant charms, bathe her in potions smelling of frankincense and sharp sage, sprinkle her body and bed with magic powders, and oil her up with herbs and flowers and salts. She watches as they wash and ward the house inside and out. But nothing helps.
No one can find the trick that’s killing Mama or discover who laid it. One by one, they shake their heads, trudge down the porch steps, and never come back.
And so, all alone and in a silent house, fifteen-year-old Rosette watches Mama die. But she knows who jinxed Mama even if the root doctors don’t—or claim they don’t: Gabrielle LaRue. The evil sorceress who also stole her papa away from her.
Rosette knew that the nomad would never give up. Whoever lay beneath the carefully wrapped comforter-shroud on the gurney—brother, sister, wife, friend—the nomad would hunt until he’d found and killed the person responsible for their death. The fierce resolve Rosette had witnessed in his eyes, a hard and steady flame fueled by rage and grief, told the complete story—grim ending and all.
“An eye for an eye is never enough. Never, never, never.”
And, one day, he’d find Papa—her too, no doubt. And then Gabrielle LaRue would win the war without lifting a hand. The crafty old spider would laugh long and hard.
Not if I can help it. But time is ticking away.
Unlike the night Mama had died. That night, time had simply stopped.
Rosette shoved away from the wall and continued down the hall, her shoe soles padding against the carpet in perfect rhythm with each hard thump of her heart. As she walked past Kallie Rivière’s room, she saw Felicity Fields close and lock the door.
With graceful swirls of the thumb and the index and middle fingers of her right hand, Lord Augustine’s assistant traced sigils in the air in front of the door. Rosette caught a flash of brilliant white from the corner of her eye as Felicity’s seal activated. A pungent wisp of myrrh tickled Rosette’s nostrils.
Felicity swiveled around in her rose-tinted pumps. A sunny smile curved her lips as her gaze landed on Rosette. “Off limits,” she said. “Oui?”
“Oui, madame,” Rosette replied.
With an approving nod, Felicity Fields turned and walked down the hallway, well-rounded hips swaying beneath her tight rose skirt, following the nomad’s path to the elevator.
Rosette pulled her keycard from her pocket and stopped at the first door with a please clean tag, which happened to be the room across and one up from Rivière’s. Unlocking it, she stepped inside. She stood for a moment, mind blank, staring at a wedge of sunlight slanting across the carpet.
With Kallie Rivière in Lord Augustine’s custody and soon, no doubt, Dallas Brûler as well, she needed to find a way to get them both away from the Hecatean master before the nomad started his hunt. Walking across the room, Rosette swung open the slender French doors and stepped out onto the black wrought-iron-bordered terrace.
The early-morning air smelled fresh, laced with the sweet perfume of the jasmine and carnations growing in baskets along the lips of the railing and the moss-and-fish odor of the Mississippi. The diesel roar of buses and constant honk of horns told a tale of frantic morning-rush-hour traffic on the streets below.
Once she’d loved New Orleans. But now it only reminded her of dimming chocolate-dark eyes, of the vinegar and garlic stink of protective floor washes, of the murmur of useless prayers.
She’d grown up listening to Mama’s stories about the tall and handsome Creole she’d loved and married, the papa Rosette had never known, each word woven into the fabric of her being by Mama’s smooth and nimble voice.
“Oh, baby-girl, people came from all around the country to seek your daddy’s counsel and potions. They called him Doctor Heron because he could find and solve any problem, any jinx, just like a long-beaked heron spearing a fish. No better root doctor existed anywhere on earth.
“But one dark, dark day, a jealous and wicked witch named Gabrielle LaRue fixed her evil eye on your daddy and worked morning, noon, and night to destroy him.”
And had succeeded.
But Mama would’ve been appalled to know what they’d done—Rosette and Papa—in their efforts to settle the score. They had murdered an innocent man—a civilian and not a part of their war—body and soul. How could they ever atone for that?
“An eye for an eye is never enough.”
Remembering the tight-jawed grief on the nomad’s blood-streaked face, the unshifting granite of his eyes, green and hard, as cold as a winter-frosted tomb—Rosette had a feeling that, for him, no atonement would be possible except through shed blood and stilled hearts and dead souls.
It was a sentiment she understood. One she shared.
And even though Papa had laid the trick, Rosette had been just as culpable. She’d traded floors with another maid and had sneaked Papa into the hoodoo apprentice’s room. Then she’d stood watch as he’d stripped the bed and shaped the hex on the mattress.
Rosette knew she had to keep the nomad away from Papa, put an end to his hunt before it even began. Her pulse slowed as a clear light poured through her like molten sunshine, wisping away all shadows, all doubts.
She knew what she needed to do.
Rosette drew in a deep breath, then pulled her cell phone from her dress pocket and hit the speed dial. Papa answered on the first ring.
“Everything went wrong,” Rosette said. “The root doctor’s still alive, and someone else died in Kallie Rivière’s place.”
“‘Went wrong,’ chère? Sounds like it musta gone to hell in a huge goddamned handbasket if both still be breathing. Sounds like you screwed up. Were you spotted?”
Not one question about who had died, not one word of regret. “No, Papa. But Lord Augustine’s got possession of my poppet.”
“Damned handbasket keeps getting bigger, Rosie,” Papa grumbled. “So where’s the Rivière girl now?”
Rosette paused, wondering if she should tell Papa about the nomad and what she’d seen in his eyes. Wondered if she should tell Papa what she’d seen in her own eyes the night Mama had died. Wondered if Papa had stared into his own mirrored reflection and had glimpsed the darkness dwelling within his heart, the monster deforming his soul.
“Rosette?”
“She’s in Augustine’s custody,” Rosette replied. “But I know how to fix that and how to keep Augustine from sending out the hounds.”
A moment of silence, then, “Keep talking, chère,” Papa replied.
NINE
TRAPPED MAGIC
Perched on the edge of a high-backed, sigil-carved chair, Kallie recounte
d her discovery of Gage’s body and the events that had followed in a low, calm voice as she watched Basil Augustine place the soggy, sulfur-reeking towel on a polished oak examination table.
Hand-carved sigils, ancient and powerful, swirled around the table’s rim. She suspected that the sigils acted like an electric fence, trapping all magicked items placed upon its surface until they were either removed by authorized individuals or their magic was dispelled.
Augustine spread the towel open, revealing the disemboweled poppet.
“And then you walked into the room,” she finished. “Yes. A good thing, too. Otherwise Mrs. Conti would’ve called the police.”
Kallie sighed. “Yeah.”
Augustine reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a handkerchief-wrapped object. He unrolled the plain white cloth, revealing a slender steel pick that he used to poke at the poppet’s guts—sticks, torn cloth, red yarn, and a foul little knot composed mainly of what looked like Spanish moss, the other ingredients too wet to differentiate—except for that goddamned strip of paper.
“Squeamish much?” Kallie asked, unable to keep the amusement out of her voice. She’d bet anything that the Brit carried the pick for the express purpose of poking at things he deemed icky.
“Cautious when it comes to things of a dubious nature, Ms. Rivière.” Augustine’s gaze flicked across the smeared ink letters on the strip of paper. “Who is Gabrielle LaRue?”
“My aunt. The woman who raised me and my cousin.”
Augustine glanced at Kallie. “Ah. So your aunt is also a hoodoo. I imagine she taught you.”
“Conjuring runs in the family,” Kallie said. Then, thinking of her cousin, Jackson, she added, “For the most part.”
“You mentioned that Mr. Brûler was a family friend,” Augustine said, flipping the towel back over the disassembled doll. The bitter smell of wormwood twisted into the air. “Why would your aunt want him dead?”
“She doesn’t. She thinks the world of Dallas.” Kallie bit back the words “but dozens of cuckolded men do not share those sentiments.” “She taught him everything she knows about conjure.” Kallie shook her head. “She’s being set up.”