The Map of Moments (31 page)

He shot an accusatory glance at Lamar, who opened his hands in supplication.

“You said get the map, Coco. I got the map. He didn't have anythin’ else on him.”

Coco stared at it a moment longer and then began tearing the map into long strips, tossing them into the air. Some fluttered to the ground, others danced on the breeze and landed in the river, eddying away.

Max still felt that new sensitivity coursing through him, the strange clarity of thought, and with each new piece of information he felt doors opening in his head.
Gabrielle told you nothing,
Coco had said.
That was part of the deal, part of the price.
But the price for what? Ugly thoughts entered his mind, but he sealed them away for the moment, needing to focus.

“You're right, Mr. Corbett,” Coco said, his tone polished again. “Ever since the bitch blew into town, I've been checking on the wards, each and every one. This is the sixth one I've found damaged or weakened, and I've repaired them all. But none of them broke. They're strong. Very strong.”

Max silently agreed. The wards would have to be strong.

But the Tordu had not just forged them in the physical world. The rock had been invisible to him when he had arrived, and even now he doubted he would see it at all were it not for the static he'd picked up following the Map of Moments. Anyone else coming this way wouldn't even know the rock was there. Max figured some of the spells that had been cast would keep people away, make them avoid the place without even knowing why. The ward was both physical and mystical, and it would probably require a combination of both forces to destroy it.

“I've been out here three hours,” Coco went on, “but you're wrong about one thing. I haven't finished repairing this one yet. There's one last element missing.”

Max didn't want to ask, but heard his own voice say, “And what's that?”

Coco smiled. “You, Mr. Corbett. Whatever errand you're after, whatever map you're following, however you know what you know, all that matters is that you're asking the wrong questions. People see you're not afraid, and we can't have that. But just killing you would be wasteful. The wards get their strength from death, and from blood. So you and I are going to finish repairing this one together.”

Max shivered. His skin felt terribly cold all of a sudden. A leaden sadness pressed down upon him, not despair so much as sorrow and exhaustion, and some of the static he'd felt crackling in him diminished.

He'd known they would kill him out here. They had made no secret of it. But the conversation was winding down. He didn't interest Coco anymore. The time had come.

Coco reached into a shoulder bag at his feet and withdrew a filleting knife. He let its sheath fall back into the bag and looked at Max. The moonlight glinted on the blade, a steel smile.

He stepped out of the circle of candles.

“Coco, wait,” Lamar started. “I claim him.”

“Lamar,” the silent woman warned.

But Coco looked at Lamar, narrowed eyes. “For Donte?”

Lamar nodded.

Coco considered a moment and then nodded in return. “All right. You can carve him. But we share the rest—

“He fucking killed my brother!” Lamar snapped.

Coco shot the Fat Man a glance that cowed him. “We share the rest, as we always do.”

Max blinked, glancing back and forth between them, but then he caught the way the silent woman stared at him, the eagerness in her eyes, and he remembered what Lamar had said in the car about eating his heart and liver. He thought about the way Joe Noone had died, and a vision of Corinne's bloody corpse flashed across his mind, body torn open, organs ripped out. More tumblers clicked over in his mind, more doors opened that he wished had remained closed.

“Oh, Jesus,” Max whispered. And for a moment, the frisson he felt was entirely the prickle of fear, with no mystical static to interfere.

Coco grinned, eyes widening. “Oh, so there are some things you don't know.”

Max had only one card to play. “Don't you want to hear the message I have for you?”

Coco sighed. “Lamar, Gerard, bring him into the circle.”

“Wait,” the woman said.

Coco looked at her. “Felicia?”

“In the car…” She faltered, glancing away from him, looking frightened. “He said he had a message from Seddicus.”

Coco lowered his head, brows knitted, and then slowly lifted his gaze again. “Did he?”

He walked toward Max, filleting knife rising. That mad light danced in his eyes again, and this time it was clear that it was not a reflection. The candles were behind him. “What's your message, then?”

Max swallowed. He'd barely thought through what he might say, but there were some secrets of the Tordu he knew for certain.

“Seddicus says that if you repair the wards, you can also break them. He offers you a bargain. If you destroy one ward—if you let him in—he'll spare you when he comes for the others.”

For a long moment, Coco stared at him, blank-faced, and Max had hope. The others seemed to hold their breath.

Then Coco laughed, and Max felt the others relax. And he knew that he was dead.

“You keep revealing what you don't know, Corbett,” Coco said, his own grin matching the curving glint of the knife. “That isn't how it works. My fate has been sealed for more than a century. And Seddicus doesn't bargain. He only eats.”

Coco stepped up to Max and pressed the filleting knife against the side of his throat. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper.

“You're a long way from home now. You come to a city you don't know, you really ought to take what it's offering, what it wants to show you, not try to look under the mask. Especially this city. ’Cos under
this
mask, it's
ours.”

He nodded at the candles. “Step into the circle.”

Max held his breath. Gerard still held the gun, but in a second he was going to have to choose between that or helping Lamar restrain a screaming, panicked college professor.
And I will be screaming,
Max thought. He didn't want to die. Anyone who wouldn't scream for their life probably didn't value it very much.

He blinked, trembling. His skin prickled with that mystical energy, but fear raced through his veins, and his stomach churned. His perception had been altered, but he wondered if all along it had been adrenaline, and this was just what terror felt like. Perhaps he'd been a fool to ever perceive anything magical in it.

Open your mouth,
he told himself.
Breathe.

But he couldn't. The fear had closed his throat. No breathing, so perhaps he wouldn't scream after all. He'd just run, and if they caught up with him, he'd fight. Escape was too much to hope for, but he would rather force Gerard to shoot him than be pinned to the ground while Coco cut him open, carved him alive.

“I said, Step. Into. The circle.” Coco pricked him with the point of the filleting knife, and Max felt a bead of blood run down the small of his back.

He stared at the ward, and then the circle in front of it.

Enough space separated each candle that he could have walked between them, but Max stepped over them as though they created a barrier to be hurdled, setting his left foot inside the circle. Coco and his knife were right behind him. Felicia watched, but the other two Tordu were moving to follow. Max might be cooperating now, but every one of them knew that wouldn't last. Lamar, at least, clearly relished the idea of having to hold Max down while Coco cut him open.

“Gerard, put away the gun,” Coco said. “He's not going anywh—”

Max brought his right foot down inside the circle, and Coco's voice ceased, cut off in the middle of a word without even leaving an echo behind.

The air shifted. Max's skin prickled again, but differently. It felt as though a thousand butterflies had been at rest upon him, and now the brush of their wings was the last thing he felt before their absence exposed his skin to the elements.

The sensation overwhelmed him and he bent slightly, shaking. The stink of the paste from Coco's metal pail remained, and he pressed his hand over his nose and mouth to block it out. He stared at the candles at the edge of the circle.

Motion in his peripheral vision drew his gaze up to the bent, twisted figure now standing in front of the ward. Without turning toward Max, he dipped a clawed hand into a black metal pot and smeared it across the rock.

Mireault.

Max froze, taking a tiny breath, barely a sip of air.

Mireault stiffened. Slowly, eyes narrowed, the twisted little man turned. For a second, he peered at Max as though uncertain of what he might be looking at. Then he muttered something in French and returned to his work.

Beyond Mireault, the river looked different. Its banks were more ragged, more overgrown, cypress trees hanging out over the water. Taking long, slow, silent breaths, Max turned around, half expecting a poke from Coco's filleting knife. But deep down he knew that no such assault would be forthcoming.

When Max turned, Coco and the other Tordu were gone.

He trembled, glancing back at the busy Mireault, then looked again at the place where the Tordu had been an instant ago.

No, not
had
been. They're still there.
You're
still there.

Max stood now in the space between Moments. He felt flushed, his skin warm as though radiating heat from within. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, filled with static.

The stone and gray brick of the old military fort shone in the moonlight, clean and new. Its upper portions were ragged, but not because the fort lay in ruins. Though all work had ceased for the night, the place was still being built. Max turned once more toward Mireault, mind racing, wondering how this was possible.

This can't be one of the places Ray had in mind. It's beyond the edge. We're off the map.
This wasn't the Seventh Moment, yet here he was. Whatever power Coco had put into this spot, whatever magic Mireault had invested the ward with over the previous two centuries, it resonated. Max was tuned in,
humming along on the frequency of New Orleans’ magical history.

What it meant—what might happen at other wards, or other places of magical power in New Orleans, now that his whole body was suffused with that static—he wasn't sure. He'd been following the map according to Ray's plan, but now it really struck him just how little he knew about the magic, and what other side effects it might have.

Stop,
he told himself.
Worry about this shit later.

Frantic, he glanced around again, thoughts falling into place, a surreal calm descending upon him. Tumblers clicked. Doors opened. Would the Moment pass? How long until it did, and he slipped back into the flow of 2005 to let Coco carve out his organs? No telling. But he looked at Mireault again, carving symbols into solid stone with his crooked finger, and thought that when Mireault finished, this Moment would be over.

He stared at the ward. At the river. And he smiled. At the Beauregard-Keyes House, he'd gone in the front door with the Tordu right behind him, but in the midst of the Moment he'd moved from the front of the house to the back. From the Tordu's perspective, he had stepped through the front door and out the back in the blink of an eye. Several times now, as he'd borne witness to the past, he had wondered how far he could wander inside a Moment.

It was time to find out.

“Catch me if you can, fuckers,” Max whispered.

Mireault whipped around, faster than it seemed he ought to be able to move that contorted body. He scanned the night and his eyes narrowed, staring right at Max.

“Quelle êtes-vous?”

Max ran at him. Mireault's lips peeled back in a savage sneer and he raised his gnarled hands with their hooked fingers, muttering some kind of incantation under his breath. Max didn't slow. He raced past Mireault, past the ward, and dived into the river, swimming as hard as he could.

After four strokes, he kicked off his shoes. He heard a shout behind him but did not slow until he'd gotten three quarters of the way across. When he risked a glance back, Mireault had returned to the task of preparing the ward. It wouldn't be finished until he had sacrificed a life within that circle, but the gnarled man worked feverishly now, as though whatever he'd seen had spooked even him.

The river's current was lazy, and Max reached the other side in no time. Breathing hard, he stood and slogged to the bank, moving into the trees. He turned to peer across the water at Mireault working in the moonlight. The current had brought him a little off course, and the angle gave him a clear view of Mireault. Catching his breath, he watched for a minute or two.

When Mireault stepped back from the ward and began to dab the ground beside the stone with the revolting concoction, Max knew that Mireault had concluded his preparations. All that remained was the sacrifice, the blood, the fucking cannibalism.

Max shuddered, feeling the wind shift and the humidity pounce as though it had been stalking him all along. He knew before he saw it start to happen. For a beat he saw the past and present together, as if perceiving 19th-century Mireault with one eye, and 2005 Coco and his Tordu posse
with the other. And then there was only the present, and the four people standing in the candlelit circle at the river's edge.