“Oh, ma sha, non she is not,” Maman Brigitte said softly, and Evangeline burst into tears. Loving bone-arms slid around Evangeline and pulled her into an embrace. “Dear little darling girl.” The lady-god rocked her back and forth, back and forth, and Evangeline held onto her like someone sinking below the surface of the bayou.
“Her grave is too far away,” Baron Samedi said.
“I want her to come up.” Evangeline’s voice shook. Maman Brigitte, I called you because I don’t know where she’s buried. And she doesn’t have a headstone, or flowers. But if she can come up…”
“Someday, when you’re older, you can go,” Maman Brigitte said. “I’ll tell you where—”
“Now! I want her now! I’ll do hexes! I’ll be in the army! I’ll-I’ll kill someone if you want me to. I’ll kill Nyarlahotep!”
Maman Brigitte kissed her forehead. “No. This war is for dead folks. Nyarlahotep, he’s a god, like us. He can zap you to a cinder with a look if he wants. Or make you fall in love with him.”
Baron Samedi spit out his cigar with a guffaw. “Don’t give him powers he don’t have, Brigitte,” he said. He gazed at Evangeline, then put a hand on top of her head. Felt like an ice cube seeping into her brain. “This is who he is, sha. Listen and stay away.” He crossed his legs and took a fresh cigar from his breast pocket, rolling it between his bone fingers.
“Nyarlahotep is an ancient god,” the baron said. “Some call him the Crawling Chaos, and see him with bat wings and tentacles. But my wife sees a tall, thin black man with an angel’s smile. He’s got tricks, lots of tricks”—the baron reached into his coat pocket again and this time drew out four playing cards, all aces, fanning them into the air, where they floated “—tricks that make you fall all over him in a swoon. His own army’s standing—that means it’s always ready. We been building ours, sweet-talking our dead into joining this battle.”
“He could capture them, take them away to his kingdom. His hell,” Maman Brigitte said. “You don’t want that for your maman.”
Evangeline shifted uneasily. She didn’t want bad things for her mother, but oh, what it would be to see her again, even if she was dead. Even if her face was a painted skull. She thought about that a moment. How much could change before her maman was not her maman?
“How could you love someone who can take dead folks to hell? Someone with tentacles?” she asked Maman Brigitte.
Maman Brigitte shrugged. “I never loved him, sha. Me and the baron, we step out now and then. We live forever. If all you ate every day was donuts, wouldn’t you get tired of them, maybe want a piece of chicken?”
“Is that why you showed up when I brought you a chicken?”
Both the loa chuckled. Then Maman Brigitte stopped smiling and touched Evangeline’s cheek. She said, “Honey, I gave that chicken to my hungry dead children. Dead folks are the same as living folks—they need food and love.”
“Is my maman hungry?” Maman Brigitte cocked her head. “Don’t be so worried about her, sha. When this is over I’ll go check on her. I promise.”
“Unless Nyarlahotep’s army beats your army,” Evangeline said. “Then what happens?”
“It won’t happen,” Baron Samedi said.
Evangeline’s balloon-heart swelled, ready to pop. Her forehead beaded with sweat and she looked at Maman Brigitte, so pretty. “But what if it does?” She grabbed Maman Brigitte’s fingertips and held them tight. “I want to fight. I can fight!”
“He take one look at you, he eat you up,” Maman Brigitte said, and Baron Samedi nodded.
“C’est vrais, sure enough,” he concurred. He pushed back his top hat. “I’m thinking you best go home now and stay away. In three nights, it’ll be over.”
Two nights left:
The drums chanting: Crawling Chaos, Lord of Infinity, King of Madness, he come from the power, he come from the glorious kingdom. Baron and Maman, give up now!
“There’s bad stuff in the air,” Evangeline’s cousin Beau said to someone in the back yard, a man she couldn’t see and didn’t know. It was dark out; the fireflies buzzed around. Frogs croaked. “I don’t understand it all, but—”
“It’s a devil coming, Beau,” the other man said. “I brought you a hex to keep your family safe. Put it over your door. It’ll keep that devil away.”
“Merci, my friend,” her cousin said. “Hey, so how’s your sister?”
“You stay away from her,” the stranger said. “She’s engaged.”
“So?” Beau asked.
The two men laughed.
One night:
The hex was a circle of straw with a tiny stuffed doll stuck with sewing pins stretched across the center. When no one was looking, Evangeline got the rickety wooden step-ladder out of the shed where they kept the pirogue. Once, twice, three times she raised up on her toes and flailed her arm to grab it. When her fingers wrapped around it, lightning sizzled down her arm. She cried out and dropped it. Smoke fluttered upward and she crouched on the ladder, rubbing her arm as tears sprang, watching the smoke as it traced a thin line in the sunshine, then faded away.
“Evangeline, honey? Can you go to the store for me?” her gramma asked from inside the house. “I got the list.”
Catching her breath, Evangeline clambered off the stool, grabbed up the hex, and stuffed it in the pocket of her jeans. It burned. Burned bad. She jumped in a little circle, then checked to see if there was smoke or if her pants were on fire, but no; she dashed inside and saw her grandmother with her straightened hair and grabbed up the list.
“Going!” she ground out, and she flew down the path and ran for all she was worth to the graveyard.
“Maman Brigitte!” she shouted, whirling in a circle. “Please come! I got something for you!”
Between the tombs, dusty weeds baked; her hand throbbed and suddenly—
Immediately—
Without warning—
A horrible fear washed over her like the river water at her baptism. Washed right over her, clogged her throat; there was a pin-prick stabbing against the walls of her balloon heart.
Danger.
Terror.
She was rooted.
Il arrive.
Farther down in the City of the Dead, a shadow hovered. Her eyes watered as it stretched upwards, sideways, floating and undulating like something underneath the bayou water; she thought tentacles and then she forced herself not to think at all because if this was who she thought it was, she didn’t want to call him to her.
I got the hex, she reminded herself. But she didn’t know if it would work.
The shadow thickened, darkened. Blacker than black.
She blinked, and the next thing she knew, a tall, thin black man in a robe and a cloth wrapped around his head stared at her with purple-black eyes from atop the pile of bricks where her mother’s hair was buried. Dizzying sickness clutched at her stomach and she staggered one step to the left. The hex burned a mark on her thigh—she was sure of it—but she pressed her hand against it; her head pounded with warning drumbeats. Or maybe it was just her heart, ready to explode.
“Hello, lovely one,” said the man. His smile was as pleasant as Baron Samedi’s. He raised a hand and pointed at her. His whole arm seemed to stretch like a garden hose. “What do you have there on this fine afternoon?”
The ground under her feet shifted and rumbled. He looked startled. Was it the loas’ army of the dead? Then his face kind of closed in on itself. Blurry and hard to see, the crackling air waved around him. Tentacles.