Infatuate (27 page)

Clio went on: “We will be able to take many souls in the coming weeks, if we all do our part. We should have plenty to boast about when we make the pilgrimage to see our brothers and sisters of Père-Lachaise.” Père-Lachaise. I turned it over in my mind. Yes, I knew it. From AP French. Paris. It was a cemetery there. Full of artists and writers and even a rock star or two, if I recalled. I tucked it away for now and kept listening. “. . . and so tonight we celebrate the first of what will be many soul captures.” She dragged out the phrase, letting its importance linger in the air.

She then gestured to those along the tapestry edge to her right, holding out that elegant arm to summon with the slightest flick of the wrist. “Come, my lovely,” she said. The line parted and a guy stepped forward, serene and dreamlike, floating toward her. He wasn’t dressed in white garb, though. Instead he wore his street clothes. Which I recognized. Even from this distance I knew him: Jimmy. He looked just as he had when he had burst into my room. The wild hair, the torn shirt and worn jeans. He seemed completely entranced. His gaze never left Clio’s face. He stopped beside her.

“Today we are privileged to be welcoming someone new to our fold. We expect great things,” she said. Jimmy didn’t quite look like anything was registering. A man came forward from the back row and on bended knee presented Clio with a black satin bag. It was Wylie. She took it from him with both hands, as though it was something sacred.

Beginning with the bone directly in front of her, she used nothing more than her index finger to slice off the slimmest sliver and place it in the bag. She made her way around, taking bits of each ingredient, pouring in a few trickles from the jars of blood, until she had each item represented in her bag. She gave it a shake, then put both hands around it until the bag glowed red. Reaching inside, she pulled out an incandescent scarlet orb the size of a baseball. The bag fell to the ground and she held one hand out, fingers fanned, focusing her eyes on part of the burning pentagram symbol closest to her. It grew brighter and brighter, then the flame kicked up, rising to meet her hand. She held the orb in both hands again and the blaze licked at her, turning her hands and the ball itself a fiery orange. Finally, she pulled away and held a handful of molten ash. With a master craftsman’s careful fingers, she molded the fireball into a sharp point, like an ice pick.

She nodded to Jimmy and he obediently took off his shirt and turned around, his back to us now. Even from so far away, I saw those scars, stubbornly embedded, the ones all of us angels in training had across our shoulder blades. Those marred patches of flesh awaited something so lofty and divine and beautiful, if we could only get to that point in time: wings. Clio lifted the sharp stake into the air, its point twinkling like a diamond. Then her arm swooped down. In two sharp swipes, Clio slashed at each of those scars.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
It sounded like the feedback from a microphone. Jimmy’s back arched at the pain, but you could see, even from here, the muscles tensing, trying to fight it off, and he quickly straightened out. Two slash marks, black and thick, oozed from his shoulder blades now. Beneath them, those scars bubbled and sizzled and then, in seconds, evaporated. It happened so fast I thought I had missed something. His back became an entirely smooth canvas, his rippled muscles the only texture. But when he turned around, he wasn’t Jimmy anymore. He was that other figure, that blond man I had seen flashes of as I had fought him in my room. Lance leaned forward, crouching now, anything to get a better look. I touched his arm.

“You saw that too, then?” I whispered.

He nodded, his lips pursed.

Clio gave the slightest bow. I worried things were wrapping up before I’d had a chance to really mentally record it all. I scanned those figures surrounding her. Who were all these people? Where had they come from? As my eyes passed over them, I caught a few familiar faces clustered near Wylie, the handful of his Krewe cohorts I’d seen in my photos.

Clio kissed Jimmy on the forehead and handed him the weapon that had done her dirty work, transforming him. “Now we thank the great Prince for the powers he has bestowed upon us for our service.” He held it up into the sky as she clapped her hands three times and the women who had presented the ingredients returned to retrieve them. The group stood in a circle surrounding Clio and Jimmy. Clio clapped twice more and now everyone flowed onto the tapestry with her. The drums sounded again, beating another spirited rhythm. The women with the urns held them above their heads, waving them in the air, moving to the beat as the whole group began dancing. They hopped and skipped and threw themselves around, so free. Some danced together, while others were in their own worlds. Some of the men pulled off their shirts, tossing them to the side. The women with the long dresses lifted them up to their knees and thighs as they moved. Clio remained at the center of the tapestry with her new recruit, dancing with him, the others leaving a ring of space around them, reverentially.

It should have looked like chaos, but there was something intoxicating about the freeness of it all. A primal, tribal wave swept that space and traveled as a current in the air. I felt my tensed muscles loosen, my posture ease, my mind let up from its racing and its fears as I watched. The dancers’ skin glistened with sweat and their clothing clung to them now, but none of them seemed to mind. All that seemed to matter to them was this need to move to those resounding beats. I could feel them thumping in my heart. I looked at Lance leaning against the pedestal, watching intently.

It’s hard to say how long it went on. The night felt endless, and yet, when the drummers drifted slowly off that mat and others began to follow, it seemed too soon. The drums played on as everyone collected any items they had left along the periphery. A handful of them helped fold up the tapestry, moving with such coordination the process almost looked like a choreographed dance itself.

Once that task had been completed, the drummers began their recessional, leading the group through the cemetery. Along the way, several peeled off to slither inside a tomb, then seal it back up. The group snaked around near our perch and Lance and I crouched behind the pedestal, so still that neither of us was breathing. That man who had crept out from here earlier left the group and pried open one of the casket vaults to return. I didn’t dare move or breathe until I heard the heavy marble slide back into place as the winding tail of the group traveled on farther. The members of that core group we knew as the Krewe’s leaders hung back, Jimmy among them, with Clio at the very end of the line. They reached the part of the wall nearest to us and a few scaled it.

Wylie scooped up the woman beside him in one arm and scurried up the wall, clutching her tightly. When he reached the top, Clio stopped in her tracks, looking up.

“Wylie,” she called, her voice so soothing. He paused and took a seat atop the wall with the girl on his lap, her long arms wound around his neck. She wore a slinky white dress and certainly hadn’t been standing along the edge of that tapestry—I would have noticed. Maybe she had been in the shadows somewhere observing it all quietly. Even from here, I could tell from her lethargy and how she hung on him that she was in some kind of trance.

“Yes, love?” Wylie called down to Clio, flirtatiously.

“I believe there’s someone who would love to meet her,” Clio said purring.

“So soon?”

“Trust me.”

“Lucky us,” he said sincerely. He looked into the girl’s eyes, brushing the long golden brown hair from her face. She barely moved; she just beamed at him dreamily. “We’re taking a field trip, my sweet,” he said, planting a kiss on her lips. She nodded and smiled, clinging even more tightly to him. He swooped back down the wall, landing lightly on his feet. He set her down, but kept one arm around her, pulling her close as they walked now. “Just so you know, we should probably make it quick,” he said to Clio. “I think the toxins will soon be wearing off.” The girl’s head lolled forward, as if she were drunk.

“We’ll be fast,” Clio promised. “But it will absolutely make his night. And besides, you know you’re going to love taking credit,” she teased him, squeezing his arm. She flitted down into that crypt from which she had emerged earlier.

“You know just what to say, don’t you?” he said, helping the girl inside, then climbing in himself. In seconds, the passage sealed up behind them all as though it had never been disturbed in the first place.

It gave me a chill. I knew where they were taking her.

Lance and I neither spoke nor moved for several minutes. It seemed like we both wanted to be sure they had all been sufficiently swallowed up into their respective portals to the underworld before we dared to do anything that would put us at risk for being detected. But when it finally felt safe to speak, I didn’t know where to begin. There was so much to sift through, so much jumbled in my mind. So much I couldn’t make sense of.

“I guess Wylie’s got someone new. I wonder if Sabine knows,” I said.

“Why would she care?” he snapped, his voice attacking me like a blunt object. “She’s done with him. She knows what he is.” It stung to see Lance so upset about her.

“I don’t know. I told her to stay away from him. Connor told her too. She wasn’t thrilled with us; that’s all I’m saying.” He wasn’t looking at me. He sat with his elbows perched on his knees, playing with a leaf, peeling it into tiny pieces. I went on: “Do you really not remember how hard it is to get someone out from under the spell of these . . . these creatures?”

“Of course, I remember,” he said bitterly, shooting daggers at me. “Tell me again about that note from Lucian.”

I was seething now. It built up in me and I knew I had to try to stifle it or I would explode and make this so much worse. I was ready for this night to be over. “I was talking about Dante, but whatever.”

By the time he finally spoke again he had cooled down just enough. “Well, we’re going to have to do something. This is only gonna get worse. I don’t know what they did to Jimmy, but it seems like they intend to do more of it.”

We went straight to Connor’s room when we got home and found River and Tom already inside debriefing him.

“That was some messed-up stuff,” River said as we walked in.

We filled in what few blanks there were, earned a “Good job, team” from Connor, then all filed out. I was too worked up to go back to my room so I followed River and Tom out to the courtyard, where the three of us recounted the night’s events, taking comfort in the shared horror of what we’d seen. Lance opted to stay inside. He and I didn’t even say good night to each other.

When I finally went to bed, my room was dark, and Sabine was nestled in her bed, asleep.

I awoke the next morning from such a deep sleep that I wasn’t sure where I was when my eyes opened. My dreams had been wild and freewheeling, populated by those characters I’d watched in the cemetery. But instead of Clio at the center of that tapestry dancing and leading her group, commanding all those eyes, it was me. What seemed the worst about this dream was that it wasn’t a nightmare. It should have been. After what I’d witnessed last night, I had braced myself for waking up in a cold sweat, being scared to even let my eyes close. And instead, to have found my subconscious plucking out some part of that experience and twisting it into any sort of pleasant dream was terrifying.

I let my arm drop over the edge of the bed, like a dead tree branch, and fished around in my bag blindly until I found the cool, hard shell of my phone. I brought it to life and, as expected, found a new message waiting. The latest directive filled the screen:

Last night was no doubt eye-opening. You may have not even fully realized how much you learned. What may be most important is the feeling it evoked. That is the strength of this group—they can infatuate and entice like no other. This is how they operate—in a visceral, emotional way that can catch a person off-guard and then seize them before it has even occurred to them to fight back. This realm is less intellectual than what you encountered in Chicago and more physical. You may not be able to think and reason your way through—you will have to feel your way. It may very well be a more formidable fight than before. That’s why this is the second of the tests. It gets more difficult.

I turned it over in my mind: I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant right now, but I didn’t like the notion that this thing was telling me flat out to expect a tougher battle. I had barely made it out alive the last time.

Part Three

22. We’re All Winners

Dante and I spent much of Saturday strolling the city together, camping out in the courtyard of a coffeehouse.

“Dan, I’m so impressed you’ve got such a classic date night ahead of you,” I said, picking a pecan from a praline the size of a hockey puck. Ever the thoughtful friend, he had shown tremendous restraint, barely mentioning it, since he knew my romantic status had deteriorated quite literally overnight.

“I know, right? Dinner and a movie. And you won’t believe it, but I totally let Max make the reservations,” he said, proud of himself.

“Wow! You must really like him to give up control of your dinner location.”

“You know what?” He stirred his iced coffee and looked up, whispering, “I really do. Like, so much.” He stopped for a minute, sighing. “And, as for him, I know it’s probably just that gris-gris bag at work, but I’m having so much fun I almost don’t care.”

“Hey, now,” I comforted him. “I actually don’t think there’s any extra magic going on. I think it’s you.”

He thought for a moment. “Thanks for that, Hav,” he said, sincerely. Then, in his gentlest tone: “So, are you and Lance really . . .”

I exhaled. “I don’t know what’s going on. We’re taking a ‘pause.’”

“Are you going to Sabine’s group thing tonight? That concert or show or whatever?” He rolled his eyes dismissing it, which I appreciated. She had organized some sort of outing—inviting me as though things were actually normal between us—that I had been pleasantly noncommittal about all week. Now I shook my head. I didn’t want to tell Dante about Lucian. I knew what he would say; I knew that I probably shouldn’t be seeing him at all, but I couldn’t help it. Something just pulled me to him. Even though, deep in my heart, I still wasn’t sure what to think of all this, or what had happened when I saw him. That kiss shouldn’t have happened; it was just too sudden for me to properly process then. I couldn’t help but wonder if that would happen again tonight. Or perhaps it had just been a case of him being so relieved to hear that I had agreed to help him, as I had pledged to do. I thought the latter, to be honest, which might be for the best.