Servants of the Storm (20 page)

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 to 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.

“Fair ’nough, girl. Can he see?”

“He’s starting to. I gave him red stuff. And I want to go to Riverfest tonight.”

“Good. You won’t like what you’ll see there, but you’ll learn something, sure ’nough.”

We’re silent for a few minutes. Gigi’s thinking, her eyes squinched almost shut and her tongue poking her cheek.

“What you need,” Gigi says slowly, “is a hex.”

I just stare at her.

“They can smell it on you, sugar. Once they take your bone,
they can’t feed on you anymore. Can’t taste you. They’ll know you’re up to something at Riverfest. But Gigi knows how to hide, yes she does. Y’all wait here. Gigi’s gonna fix you up.”

She stands, popping in about twenty places. As she shuffles off into the kitchen in her slippers, she mumbles to herself. With a ragged yowl the old gray cat hobbles after her.

“This is seriously weird,” Baker whispers. “But the cake was good.”

“The cake was great,” I say. “And she’s one of the good guys. What I saw last night was . . . a lot worse.”

I hold up my right hand and unwind the Batman Band-Aid. Baker gasps and grabs my wrist.

“Jesus, Dovey. Where’s the rest of your finger?”

“It’s . . . in a demon’s stomach.”

I spend the next twenty minutes telling him everything while Gigi sings Motown songs on the other side of the closed kitchen door. Baker nods and grumbles and gasps at all the right places, but I don’t see doubt on his face. Fear and amazement, but not doubt. He takes it a lot better than I did. That red stuff must be pretty potent.

Finally he pushes the hair back off his forehead with both hands and leans back.

“So you think we can find your bone thingy and Carly’s bone thingy and the box that . . .”

“Contains her soul. Yeah. I think she wants me to.”

“Even though this Isaac guy says it’s impossible?”

“I have to try.”

He nods once and says, “I’m in.”

Gigi hobbles back in through the door, holding a mason jar full of sludge.

“This don’t taste as good as my chocolate cake,” she says, “but it’ll get you what you need, keep them demons from seeing what you are.”

She hands me the mason jar, and I take a sniff and gag.

“Are you sure this will work?” I say.

Gigi straightens up and pins me with her glare. She only comes up to about my armpits, but right now it feels like she’s towering over me.

“You doubtin’ me, girl?”

“No, ma’am. I just don’t want to drink that mud,” I say, knowing honesty is the only option.

She nods once and settles back down. “You drink it down now anyway. Y’all go to Riverfest tonight and see if you can find my Carly. See if she knows anything about where Kitty’s got that box hid. She probably don’t, probably couldn’t tell you even if she did. But you never know. All them demons gather round Riverfest at night, especially near holidays, have their own little buffet. Maybe you’ll hear something. Maybe not. I don’t think we got long to find out. There’s something big going on. Gonna happen soon.”

“What if we can’t find her?” I say.

“Then I guess we gonna talk to a ghost,” she says with a sly smile.

“Ghosts are real too?” Baker says.

“You got a lot to learn, boy.” Gigi pats his arm. “This is Josephine’s Savannah. If it’s bad, it’s real.”

AS I PULL OUT OF
Gigi’s driveway, baker exhales shakily.

“You could have warned me,” he says, and I laugh.

“I told you. She’s scary, but she’s on our side,” I reply.

“What did the hex taste like?”

“Exactly what it looked like.” I swallow, still tasting it in the back of my mouth. “Mud and dog shit.”

“At least she gave you another piece of cake afterward.”

He stares out the window for a few minutes, watching the empty houses go by.

“It’s so weird to think that people used to live here,” he says. “There were swing sets in the yards and people mowing the grass and dogs running around. And then one day they were just gone. And everybody in the city just sort of forgot about it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “People manage to forget all the bad parts and only remember the pretty things. I guess I just never realized it until now.”

“And next up is Riverfest, huh?” He slumps down in his seat. “I’ve seen that place—it’s totally trashed. What’s the plan?”

I take a deep breath.

“Well, you have to decide if you’re going with me. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to fight. When the red drink wears off, you’ll go back to seeing what they want you to see, doing what they want you to do. You might forget what just happened. Which is really creepy, but I think it’s safer. When you’re not a threat to the demons, they mostly just let you be.”

He scoffs, shakes his head. “If you’re going, I’m going too. So I ask you again, what’s the plan?”

“We go to Riverfest and act dumb.”

“I don’t see how that’s remotely possible for me.”

I swallow a laugh. “Do your best. The hex should protect me, and your amazing acting skills will hopefully protect you.”

His eyebrows scrunch up, and he stares at me, a crafty gleam in his eyes. “That red stuff is making me see what’s really there, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So if I don’t drink any more, I’ll go back to normal? Whatever normal is when you’re surrounded by hungry demons?”

“Supposedly.”

“Then no more red drink. If I see what they want me to see, then you’ll know what to pretend too.”

“You are freaking crazy, boy,” I say. He just grins. “Flat-out
crazy. But are you sure? You’ll be a sitting duck. Who knows what the demons will do to you?”

“I told you—”

“I know. You’ll never give up. And I told you I wouldn’t either.”

His hand sneaks across the seat to hold mine. I’m more scared than I’d like to admit about what’s to come, so I let him. He’s careful of my pinkie, and I look down briefly. His pale hand, dusted with a little dark hair, over mine. My last finger too short, the stitches bristling, unnaturally black. I can still remember Carly’s hand in mine just before the curtain went up on our first play. My hand the soft brown of bread crust, hers so dark, it was almost purple, both of them shaking against the ratty red velvet. “We’re going to kick this play’s ass,” Carly told me then. And we did. My heart twists, and I start to pull my hand away.

“I can hold thy hand or lick feet. Your call,” he says in Caliban’s voice, waggling his tongue and making me giggle, bringing me back to the present.

“Don’t make me brain you with a book, valiant monster,” I say with a grin.

But I don’t pull my hand away. I let him hold it the whole way back to his house.

He invites me inside, and part of me yearns to go, to be welcomed back into that small part of what I’ve always thought of as my family. I miss his sisters begging to play with my hair and then getting frustrated when they can’t bend it to their tiny little wills. But I need to go home and check in with my parents and brush
my teeth, because Gigi’s hex was like drinking swamp mud.

“I’ve got to get home,” I say. “Pick you up in a couple of hours?”

“I can’t wait,” he says with a grin.

I narrow my eyes at him and snort.

“You can’t wait to go to the abandoned amusement park crawling with demons to look for our dead best friend?” I say.

“I can’t wait to go
with you
.”

I roll my eyes at him. I might be crazy, but he’s off the charts.

When I get home around dusk, my mom is still crashed out in front of the TV, her eyes unfocused.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m going out tonight.”

“Hmm,” she mumbles.

“I’m going to go drag racing without a seat belt and then pick a fight with a cop.”

“Hmm.”

I look closely. Her pupils are huge and black. She looks totally stoned. And I bet I know why.

“Mom, did you start any new medicine recently?”

“For my ulcer.”

I find the brown bottle lined up neatly with her vitamins in the kitchen cabinet, the snowy-white pills all too familiar. I almost dump them down the disposal, but I’m starting to understand that for most people it’s safer to do what the demons want. People
are like cattle to them, and docile cattle are less likely to get in trouble, right? Plus, if she’s zonked, I can come and go as I please. But guilt twists in my stomach at the thought of leaving her, alone and as stupid as a cow grazing outside a slaughterhouse.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?”

I pause, squat in front of her. Her smile softens, and she runs a hand over my head.

“Are you happy?” I ask.

“Feeling pretty relaxed,” she answers. “Stomach doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s nice. And you look pretty, honey.”

“Stay in the house, okay? I need to go out and do something. For the play.”

She just nods dreamily and refocuses on the TV.

With a heavy heart I change my clothes and fix my hair and putter around, waiting to see if my dad’s going to show up. His schedule is weird, and I want to see if maybe he’s more alert than he was the other morning. But there’s no sign of him, and the food on the dining room table is untouched. At noon it smelled sweet and warm. Now it’s heavy and oppressive with just a hint of rot, a scent that will forever remind me of Josephine. My house is too empty, and I have to get out.