Servants of the Storm

  “Going to Paper Moon,” I say. “English group project.”

  “Just don’t be too late.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Satisfied, she hands me the pill and glass of water waiting on the coffee table. I smile weakly and swallow it down. She nods, the sergeant watching a good soldier. I think about my dad’s bottle of pills and how he must’ve taken one when he got home alone last night, right before going to bed. I need to buy more aspirin and dump his phony blood pressure meds down the toilet too. I now know that whatever’s in that brown bottle is bad news.

  After sending Baker a text about riding together to rehearsal later, I shower and change and spend some time going over my lines. I wait for my mom to call me for lunch, but she doesn’t. When I tiptoe past the couch, a feast of my favorite food is set out on doilies and hot pads on the dining room table, just like my grandmother used to make. My mom is passed out in front of the TV. My dad should have woken up by now, but the house is oddly silent.

  The warm family meal I had hoped for is out of the question with my mom softly snoring and my dad nowhere to be found. I use one fork to help myself to every casserole dish except the collards, smoothing the beans and mashed potatoes and creamed corn back into picture perfect order afterward. I don’t dare touch the pie or deliciously browned macaroni and cheese. I pick up a slice of ham and a biscuit and softly close the front door on my way out.

  When I pull up in front of Baker’s house and honk the horn, he walks right out with his backpack like it’s old times. He gets in and shuts the door, then holds out his hand. The plastic drink sword is on his palm.

  “What are we going to do about this?” he asks. “It’s seriously bothering me.”

  I take a deep breath. “Do you trust me?”

  “I don’t know what to trust right now. But I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Then we’re going on a field trip after rehearsal,” I say.

  “Where to?”

  I give him a wicked grin.

  “To a ghost town.”

  He asks me a hundred different ways what I mean, but all I’ll say is, “Later.” And I understand how childish it is, that all these horrible things are happening and I’m still going to play rehearsal. But I need it. I need to feel good about something because I haven’t felt good in so long. I need the stability, the normalcy. Besides, the things I need to do, we need to do, will keep for a few more hours. It’s selfish, but somehow I think Carly would understand. This theater was part of us both.

  Despite my fear of running into Old Murph, rehearsal is great. Mrs. Rosewater has a new Ariel costume for me, and I look amazing, even if it is just an old bedsheet and a weird yarn wig. I remember all my lines and most of my cues. I have a few more scenes with Baker too, which is really strange. It’s amazing, what a good actor he is. When he’s onstage, he’s not the goof who used to spend the night and watch scary movies. He’s Caliban, monster and clown, and he plays it with a wild and dangerous air. I find my own voice as the spirit of Ariel, and it’s empowering, playing a lead role again. It comes so naturally to me that Mrs. Rosewater doesn’t bother to correct my blocking.

  The only part that’s weird is when I’m perched high up on a ladder, really into the Ariel thing. I shout, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here!” And I would swear I feel a rush of air behind me and hear dark laughter in the creaking catwalk. I know better now than to look, and I turn my shiver into part of the act. There’s something altogether too familiar about that line. I can’t help thinking about Tamika, and I send a silent prayer into the rafters that she’s okay, wherever she is.

  After we practice the bow, everyone claps for me, and I beam.

  “Not bad for a first run-through,” Mrs. Rosewater says. “Just bring that same intensity to the show tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll bring my A-game,” I reply, and her nod is grim.

  After rehearsal I take off my stage makeup, change back into my regular clothes, and duck down the green hallway. As I open the door to the alley, I hear Old Murph holler, “Hey, girl! I got something to say to you!” I slam the door and jog to my car before he can catch me. I’ve never seen him outside the bounds of the Liberty, and I’m hoping it stays that way.

  Baker leans against my car in his dad’s old army jacket, a grin on his face. He remembered to wash off most of his makeup this time, but he left a few accidental smudges that make him seem half-wild. The look suits him, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Or about what we’re about to do. But he’s apparently a big boy now; he can back out if he wants to.

  “Let’s do this,” he says.

  We get in the car, and I show him the bottle filled with red liquid from Isaac’s fridge.

  “Is it Very Cherry or Super Strawberry?” he asks.

  “Neither.” He tries to swipe the bottle, and I playfully shove his hand away before remembering that I have fresh stitches. I wince, but he doesn’t say anything about it. “I don’t know how much you’re supposed to drink. But it’s supposed to show you what’s really there. What I’m seeing.”

  He looks at the bottle doubtfully. “Do I want to see what you’re seeing?”

  “Probably not. I mean, I don’t want to see what I’m seeing. But if you want to help me, if you want to help Carly, you need to.”

  I wiggle the bottle and wait. He stares at it, then at me, as if making calculations in his head, weighing out his options. Finally he nods once and takes the bottle.

  “Okay. Bottom’s up,” he says.

  He takes two swallows and recaps the bottle, his usual careless grin back in place. I have to admire his courage. Or maybe it’s loyalty.

  “Mmm. Tastes like forbidden knowledge,” he says, wiping his mouth off. For just a second I wonder if maybe I’ve given him a shot of grenadine instead of Isaac’s demon truth serum.

  “Do you feel any different?” I say.

  He looks around the car, blinks a little.

  “No,” he says. “Do you?”

  I think about it for a moment. I feel entirely different, but also the same. But then I think of a way to tell if it’s working.

  “Go back inside,” I say. “Go ask Old Murph a question.”

  Baker shrugs and heads for the side door with his usual slouch. He chats with some of the guys coming out and then disappears inside. I wave to the other kids and fidget with the Band-Aid I put on my pinkie this morning. No one has said a single word about the missing inch of finger. I wonder if they just didn’t notice, or if the wound, like so many other things, is controlled by what Isaac called demon magic. I should have just asked Baker about it, whether or not he could see any difference. Too late now.

  The door opens so hard that it bounces off the brick, and Baker jogs back to my car like he’s being chased. He’s seriously freaked out, slamming the car door shut and locking it.

  “What the hell was that?” he says.

  “That was Old Murph.”

  “Jesus, he’s scary.” He shudders. “That hair. It’s all squirmy. How can you go back in there?”

  “The show must go on,” I say, and he groans.

  I glance at Baker as I start the car. From the look on his face, he’s still trying to adjust to his clearer vision. He’s twitchy and energized, glancing up and down the street like a kitten watching Ping-Pong.

  “We’re not going to see a bunch of Old Murphs, are we?” he asks. “Cuz DAMN.”

  “Nope.” I grin. “Just a witch.”

  The car starts, and I pull away from the curb before he can jump out.

  We drive for about twenty miles before I turn down a road so old and poorly kept that grass grows through cracks in the asphalt. Not many people know about this road. I only know about it because I used to drive down here once a month in the back seat of Carly’s mama’s car.

  “Gigi just has to hold court,” Miz Ray would complain, waving her cigarette out the front window as Carly and I giggled in the backseat. “Gigi just has to have her way.?
??

  “I like Gigi,” Carly always said.

  And her mama always snorted and said, “You’d better.”

  But I always liked Gigi too. She and my grandmother had been best friends growing up, just like Carly and I were. And although I never put much stock in dreams before the past week, I feel a growing excitement as we near our destination. I’m on the right track; I just know it.

  “You sure you know where we’re going? This place is creepsville.”

  “I know exactly where we’re going,” I say smugly. “Don’t worry.”

  We turn right when I see the old wooden sign, long fallen on its side.

  “What the hell is Weatherwood?” Baker asks.

  “It’s a neighborhood.”

  “It smells like farts.”

  “Yeah. That’s the landfill it’s built on.”

  His eyes get big, and he turns to look at me, one hand on the car door.

  “You mean this is that neighborhood that got condemned twenty years ago because it was built on a dump? The one that blew up?”

  “Don’t believe everything you read, Baker.”

  “Jesus, Dovey.”

  I giggle as I drive, weaving back and forth just to make Baker nervous. It’s not like there are any other cars on the road or pedestrians to worry about. The entire area is utterly abandoned; there aren’t even birds or squirrels. We pass house after house, their yards overgrown and their driveways empty. Here and there a shutter lies crooked or a roof has fallen in. When I was younger, being here terrified me. But I grew used to it, to coming here with Carly. Her grandmother’s chocolate cake made everything okay.

  “I came here once a month from age five to age fifteen,” I say. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Do you understand what methane is? Have you ever seen an explosion?”

  “None of these houses has exploded since the late 1980s,” I say with a shrug. “It’s fine.”

  “Your magic chill pills are looking kind of good right now.”

  “Don’t even start with me, Baker.”

  I turn onto Tiara Lane, and number 145 comes into view. What’s left of it. It was the one that started the problem, the one that made the county finally investigate the neighbors’ claims of strange smells and a weird, greenish haze during the hot months. Now it’s just a curled black husk of a house in a wide circle where even the weeds won’t grow.

  Gigi always called that one the Honey House. The one that sweetened the deal.

  A few houses down I turn into number 152.

  “What. The. Hell?” Baker asks.

  It is surprising. All of these abandoned, ruined houses, and then there’s one yard that stands out like a knockout rosebush in the middle of a drought. That confirms it for me: if her house is the same, she’s got to still be here. She really is alive.

  Gigi’s house is a ranch, since she always said she was too old for stairs. She’d been here since just a few months after the county bought out the neighborhood and forced everyone to move. Carly asked her once why she got to live here when everybody else had to leave, and she just laughed and said, “Ain’t nobody tells Gigi what to do, sugar. ’Specially when I’m workin’ my magic.”

  Her house is the same pink as the inside of a seashell, with darker pink shutters and a purple door. Her yard is bright, brilliant green and uniformly cut, although I’ve never seen a lawn mower in her garage. Camellias and topiaries frame the front door, and a lawn jockey stands by the bird feeder. I asked about it once when I was little, and she told me it was her own private joke.

  “You remember Carly’s grandmother, right?” I say, pulling into her empty driveway.

  “That old lady can’t still be alive,” Baker says. “I saw her at Carly’s funeral. She had to be over a hundred. I thought she was . . .” He pauses, thinks about it. “Wait. What actually happened to her?”

  I smile and lick my lips, thinking about the chocolate cake.

  “Looks like we’re about to find out.”

  17

  BAKER FOLLOWS ME TO THE front door and taps his fingers nervously against his leg while I reach out to knock. Before my fist hits the door, it swings open.

  “It’s about time, Billie Dove,” Gigi says, her creaky old voice halfway between a tease and a tantrum.

  “Yes ma’am, Gigi,” I say, leaning down to kiss her withered cheeks. Her arms wrap around me, and it’s like hugging a bag of brooms held together by rubber bands. Baker’s right, though—she looks older than God. Just like she did in my dream last night. And she’s wearing the same sweat suit.

  “And you done brought me a present,” she says, peering around me at Baker. “He grew up in a year, sure enough. Come here, Joshua, and give Gigi her due.”

  He shuffles around me awkwardly, like a puppy with big feet. Her thin black arms meet around his waist, and he grunts in surprise as she squeezes him. She pulls away and looks up at him, adjusting her bifocals.

  “You got tall, boy,” she says to him. “You takin’ care of my Billie Dove?”

  He blushes and mumbles, “I’m trying to.”

  Her face cracks into a big smile, showing dentures. “But the wind, she’s a changing. Y’all come on in. I got a cake set out. And sweet tea, oh yes.”

  Baker looks at me doubtfully, but I smile and walk inside. Some things never change, and Gigi appears to be one of them, still hard as a nut and quick as a whip. Part of me was scared that she would have fox ears or acid-green eyes or be missing her pinkie. Or that I’d get out here and find her house as broken and dark as everything else Josephine left behind. But there’s always been something magical about her. Her house feels like the safest place I’ve been in months, even if the state claims it’s on top of a ticking time bomb.

  We walk past the living room, where everything that’ll hold still is covered in doilies and afghans. I recognize a bony nest of gray fur on a ripped-up ottoman and have to smile at Tyrus, her cat, the only thing in the world that looks older than she does. One yellow eye opens and stares me down as if promising to bite me for real this time. Gigi motions me to a chair at the dining room table, and I sit down at my usual place. A slab of her chocolate cake is waiting for me on a china plate next to a tall, icy glass of sweet tea with sweat on the sides. A place is set right next to it for Baker. She sits at the head of the table and grins smugly at us. Gigi loves to be one step ahead of everybody. Always has.

  “Eat up, y’all,” she says.

  It’s always like this. She won’t talk to anybody until their stomach is full and they’re letting out their belt. So I start eating, and Baker is one forkful behind me. The whole time I’m eating and drinking, I can feel Gigi’s sharp eyes on me. After I dab my lips with one of the white linen napkins she reserves for company, she leans back and steeples her fingers.

  “Looks like you’re waking up, Billie Dove.”

  “Looks like it.”

  For the first time in my life, Gigi looks at me and nods slowly like we might be something close to equals, or at least like I’m not the same little girl who used to get her hand slapped for touching the wrong broom or cauldron in the pantry. I still remember the time I asked Carly if Gigi was a witch.

  “I hope so,” Carly said, smoothing down her pink church dress. “Sure would explain a lot.” As soon as I saw her in my dream last night, it all made complete sense.

  “You seen my girl, haven’t you?”

  No point in lying to her.

  “Yes, ma’am. I think so. In a dream, and downtown. Do you see them too?”

  Her head falls forward into her hands, shaking sadly. Her scant white braids and tight ballerina bun wag back and forth mournfully. Tears make my eyes burn, but I don’t want to cry in front of Gigi.

  “Course I do. Always have. All them horns and funny tongues. Hoped you and Carly wouldn’t be a part of their world, hoped Able would just forget, fall asleep, and let us be. I should have been there when the clouds were gathering for Josephine. I should have taught you girls better t
o look out. But y’all were so young. We ran out of time.” She looks up again, all steel and fire. “You know why they took her?”

  “Because she was easy,” I say, and my voice breaks. “So they could use her.”

  “Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Maybe that’s true. Maybe not. What’d she tell you, in your dream?”

  “She showed me a black box. Said I’d have to eat my collards if I wanted my lemon chiffon pie.”

  Gigi meets my eyes, throws her head back, and laughs until she wheezes.

  “That’s my girl. Anybody still got a spark left, it’s gonna be her. She wants to be free, don’t she?”

  I snort, my eyes darting to my bandaged pinkie. “I expect we all do.”

  Baker’s hand closes around my good one, and I squeeze back. He’s staying silent, which is smart, as Gigi would bite his head off if he started interrupting her. His face is impassive, serious, soaking it all in. His eyes shoot to mine, and I know that he’s going to demand answers the second we leave.

  “Y’all know where Carly is?” Gigi asks.

  “Riverfest. I guess that means the amusement park that closed down after Josephine?”

  “It ain’t closed, if you go at the right time. You seen Kitty?”

  “Yes’m. She’s the one who took my distal.”

  Gigi nods slowly, as if she already knew this and doesn’t approve one damn bit.

  “What about Dawn and Marlowe?”

  I shake my head. “Who?”

  “Never you mind. Don’t call trouble by name, they say. You seen Josephine?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Good. She’s comin’ soon, though. I can feel it in my bones. Her kind always likes an anniversary.” She points a gnarled finger at Baker. “And why’s this boy here? He ain’t part of this.”

  “I can’t do it alone, Gigi.”

  I’m not about to tell her about Isaac, if she doesn’t already know. Of all the things I’m not sure about, I’m 100 percent certain she wouldn’t approve of me tangling with a cambion.