The Tangled Bridge (29 page)

Chloe said nothing for a moment, looking at Madeleine, and then: “It's a complex thing, a relationship, business or personal. Would you say that my relationship with you is complex?”

“Of course.”

“And so it is with Zenon.”

Madeleine said, “‘And so it is.' Not, ‘so it was.'”

Chloe opened her hands. “Why don't you ask what you came here to ask?”

Madeleine hugged herself and looked at her feet. “Actually, I've come to ask for help.”

Chloe nodded. “Of course you have.”

“Zenon, he's been coming after me. Hunting people. Figured out how to project his consciousness from his body. I think he might try to hurt me and … others.”

Chloe looked at her for a long moment, each facial feature occupying its own fold of skin. She turned toward Oran and gestured to the Persian rug. Oran disappeared into the hall.

Madeleine said, “I want to know if there's a way to obscure myself so he can't find me.”

Chloe nodded. “I can hide you.”

“I mean in a briar sense, not so much physically.”

“I know what you mean. You want my help but you don't want to engage with me. Cannot dirty yourself with the truth of what is to be done.”

“Listen, Chloe I—”

“Get on your knees.”

“What?”

Chloe gripped the armrests of her wheelchair and rose to her feet, her lips quaking. “You, Madeleine, are no different from any of them. Only your own self and your one tiny little life. No care for the wider existence. You come here for my trick of protection, then so be it. Get on your knees. I give you what you ask.”

Oran had somehow reentered the room beneath Madeleine's notice. He had an armful of bleached towels which he was spreading over the Persian rug.

Chloe's hand was on Madeleine's arm, pulling her toward the towels. Madeleine found herself going to her knees as ordered. Like with the sherry, she was reacting more from stunned curiosity than obedience.

Severin had said Zenon had found a trick of hiding. Maybe that's what Chloe was doing for Madeleine now.

Chloe dipped her fingers in Madeleine's sherry and sprinkled it into her hair.

Madeleine said, “Chloe, what is this? I was thinking there was a way through the briar—”

“Shush!” Chloe took her roughly by the chin. Madeleine was on the verge of getting to her feet and walking out, but this was too important. Lives were at stake.

“
You
are the one with the gifts, Madeleine. You have what I have always wanted and yet you waste it.
You
are a child of the briar but
I
am not. And yet you come here, to me, and
you
want
me
to help
you
, but only under
your
conditions with nothing to offer in exchange.”

Chloe released her and took short, slippered steps to the credenza. “I can guide you but I cannot do what you can do.”

Chloe seemed so unsteady she might lose her balance.

The old woman pulled open a drawer and retrieved a stamped tin box. “I cannot benefit from the gifts you squander, unless you deign to hand me your scraps. For me it is the old ways of the river. Crude tricks. But it will work. It will hide you.”

Madeleine watched in awe. Chloe stepped back to where Madeleine stood kneeling on the towels and pushed Madeleine's head down. She stroked Madeleine's hair forward, muttering, “to hide this girl, to hide, to hide, to hide her hide…”

She was sprinkling something down the back of Madeleine's neck. Musty herbs. And then more sherry. Madeleine didn't know what to make of it.

And then, a slicing pain along the skin at her neck.

Madeleine jerked her hand to the spot and got to her feet. Chloe was watching her.

“What was that?” Madeleine said.

She looked at her fingers. Blood where she'd touched the back of her neck.

“Cruder magic,” Chloe said.

Madeleine looked at Oran, who'd now shrunk back down the hall though his reflection was visible in the mirror.

Chloe said, “It is all you need. You must now be surrounded by water. You will be hidden.”

Madeleine looked at Chloe with incredulity. “That's it? And Zenon can't find me?”

Chloe nodded.

Madeleine frowned. It didn't feel like it could be so simple. “But what if I want to hide someone else, too?”

“Who you hide, girl? Your brother's child?”

Madeleine felt an internal jump. “What are you talking about?”

“There is nothing to hide but yourself from yourself. This is all you ever do.”

Madeleine felt a strange tickling on her nose, and she scratched it with the back of her hand. She needed to hide Bo, too. Hiding herself wasn't nearly enough. But she didn't dare tell Chloe about that.

The tickling progressed from her nose to her lips. Madeleine rubbed. But in doing so a shimmer of light caught her eye. When her hand moved through the rays of sun that were spilling through a gap in the curtains, she saw a faint reflective thread, invisible but for the sunlight that bounced from it. No, there were several threads.

Madeleine gasped. Spiders. Tiny ones that could fit on the head of a pin. Spinning over her hands. Her arms. All over.

She tried to shake them off. Slapped at her legs.

“Get back down, Madeleine,” Chloe said.

“The spiders! What did you do?”

“Then it has caught hold already. This is good. What you see is an illusion.”

The spiders were wrapping her in their silk, so thin and faint she could only see it when the light shined on it. But then one of the spiders bit her on the forearm. She gave a start. In the pinprick of blood that welled up, the creature burrowed into her skin. Madeleine screamed.

“Go to your knees, girl. River magic isn't for pretty.”

The spiders were wrapping, wrapping, burrowing into her skin. She sank to her knees. The ghastly things were wrapping her from the inside now. Around her throat so that she could no longer speak above a whisper.

“Chloe,” was all she could choke out.

Her feet and hands were numb. Her knees had gone cold. She felt the spiders in her spine, in her joints, in her neck. A curtain of white with a single blood speck covered her left eye, and she realized that she was now on her side, staring into the towels. She was wheezing.

She managed to squeeze out the words, “The blood is real.”

A single spider darted over her eye carrying its silken thread. It itched. She watched it move across her field of vision with another silken layer.

And though she could no longer see Chloe, Madeleine could hear her voice from somewhere above. “Yes, Madeleine, your blood is real. And now you belong to me.”

 

thirty-four

NEW ORLEANS, 1927

WHAT SURPRISED PATRICE WAS
that Simms and Hutch went off somewhere with Guy and Gilbert, leaving the girls alone with the soft-curled woman who'd painted their lips. She was holding a satchel full of sheet music.

Patrice realized she'd never introduced herself to this woman and didn't know her name. But as Patrice was about to remedy this she stopped herself, thinking it could somehow make it easier for Maman to find them if the woman knew their names. Names were powerful.

People crushed in all around them. Patrice couldn't believe how many people were on the streets. No wonder no one they'd asked had seen Ferrar. How could any single person remember seeing another in this madness?

How were they even going to find Ferrar?

And were the children, also, just as anonymous? Perhaps with all these crowds, Maman would be less likely to locate them.

“Well, get on with it,” the woman said.

Patrice looked down at the sheet music in Rosie's hand but paused when she looked back up at the soft-curled woman's face.

“Go
on
!” the woman said. “Ain't got all day!”

But suddenly, the manner in which she was speaking—she wasn't of her own way. She was being whispered.

“Allons! Rapidement!”
She said it with wide vowels like the country French common at Terrefleurs.

Her voice had changed and her face contorted. Patrice felt Rosie rear up beside her.

“Careful, Rosie.”

Rosie was holding the sheet music and it was crumpling in her hands. Patrice gripped Francois' Bible.

“Don't look at it,” Patrice whispered to Rosie.

Patrice rarely had to look upon other people's river devils. Usually it was just her own, or the ones who taunted her siblings. Everyone had a river devil but few knew it, and the devils liked to stay hidden. The fact that they'd become so apparent to Patrice now meant that the briar was folding over them in a very uncontrolled way. They shouldn't be out on the streets like this. They should be home in bed, tied down or at least watched over by someone. Walking their physical bodies while their spirits drifted was a dangerous thing. It meant you had to pay attention to both worlds at once.

Patrice knew that there were two things above all else that inflamed a devil—being subdued or being recognized for what it was. And she recognized the creature on this woman. It snaked around her and infused itself into her skin. It saw Patrice.

The woman made a sound resembling that of a cat facing down a coyote.

Patrice swallowed in hopes of bringing moisture back to her mouth. She understood that some of this was unfolding in the material world, but not all of it.

Relax, listen to the birds—

But there were no birds here on this street. No wind in the trees, no quiet bayou. That's where she was used to focusing her attention.

Patrice could see Hutch and Simms now. They were looking at them from down the block. Looking so as not to be noticed. Spying. Their devils, too, had become visible. Everyone's had. All the people on the street wore them like capes. The devils twitched when they saw the children. Or rather, when they saw the children seeing them. Some of the devils looked like humans. Others looked part-animal. They were baring teeth at the girls.

Next to Patrice, Rosie started singing. Loud.
Very
loud, and gloriously off-key.

But Patrice realized her sister was right to do this, and Patrice started singing, too. The girls sang full voice, bringing attention inside to the song, and in focusing attention the effect was like stealing oxygen from the river devils' flames. At least as far as the girls were concerned. There were enough folks on the street who were feeding their own river devils with their mind chatter, their worries, their fears—all of which the creatures inhaled and spat out as chaos. Chaos that might erupt in the form of tempers flaring, or it might simmer for later release on their families, friends, enemies.

Patrice and Rosie were singing. Awfully. They tried to find the proper key but their voices were seesawing in erratic directions. The soft-curled woman, though her river devil had relinquished interest in the girls for the moment, was sneering at their tone.

Then, somewhere nearby—much nearer than at the warehouse—the clock tolled once for the half-hour. Full and round. Patrice moved her attention to the sound and matched its key, the same as the song, and she sang out from the bottom of her belly. Rosie fell in after her and was finally on key, too. The sound was lovely and innocent even to Patrice's own ears. The song was pretty.

And its effect was immediate. People slowed in the streets, and their devils seemed drowsy.

“Look, how sweet!” someone was saying.

“If you tilt them do their eyes close?”

Laughter.

The soft-curled woman settled down, too, and shooed the girls forward so they might stroll while singing, caroler-style.

Patrice stepped forward and felt like she was walking among a pack of wild dogs that she hoped wouldn't catch her scent. To slip attention would be to draw the chaos from all those river devils. So very many of them. She glanced at her sister. Rosie had an expression that hung somewhere between fear and outrage, a very Marie-Rose kind of quality that made her intimidating beyond her size to just about anyone but her siblings. Her painted cupid's bow lips were now pouring out that song as though they could blow brimstone to ice.

Hutch was now moving through the crowd, looking theatrically interested in the girls' song. But that wasn't right. Patrice had seen his face when he'd listened the first time, when he was truly curious. This was different—he was grinning and gesturing at the girls. His devil was whispering.

Someone was buying a sheet of music from the soft-curled lady.

Someone else was moving through the crowd. One of the men from the warehouse—that fat one who'd run his fingers up Patrice's spine when she'd inquired about Ferrar. He was watching Patrice and Rosie but again, his attention was elsewhere.

Where?

The soft-curled woman led the girls forward. They'd now gone through the song three times. The plan was that they would sing it five times, then move down several blocks and begin again.

It disturbed Patrice that Hutch and the other man from the warehouse were following along. Also, the soft-curled woman had only sold three copies of the sheet music. Were they going to be able to sell enough to pay the girls and still make a profit?

With all these thoughts, her attention was wavering. The river devils seemed to grow restless. And the thorns arose, too.

Patrice looked to her left and saw water was now coursing down the cobbled streets. She caught her breath in mid-phrase, and her voice stumbled back to the melody.

That water wasn't real.

This was the thorn world overlaying God's world. This was the shadow river, coming to swallow her into the briar.

And on the other side of the river, a pool of tar, and a tar creature watching. It moved as though anxious to get to Patrice and Rosie but it couldn't seem to cross the water.