Amma dropped the last card. “There it is.”
He balked, muttering in a language I didn’t understand. But I could tell he wasn’t happy. The bokor swept clean his rickety wooden table, bottles and vials shattering on the ground. He leaned as close to Amma as I’d ever seen anyone dare to get. “The Angry Queen. The Unbalanced Scale. The Child of Darkness. The Storm. The Sacrifice. The Split Twins. The Bleeding Blade. The Fractured Soul.”
He spit, shaking the feather at her, his version of the One-Eyed Menace. “A Seer from the line a Sulla the Prophet is smart enough to know this is not just any spread.”
“Are you sayin’ you can’t do it?” It was a challenge. “That I’ve come all this way for cracked eggshells and dead swamp frogs? Can get those from any fortune-teller.”
“I’m sayin’ you can’t pay the price, old woman!” His voice rose, and I stiffened. Amma was the only mother I had left. I couldn’t stand to hear anyone talk to her that way.
Amma looked up at the ceiling, muttering. I was willing to bet she was talking to the Greats. “Not a bone in my body wanted to come to this godforsaken nest a evil—”
The bokor picked up a long staff wrapped in the crisp skin of a snake, and circled Amma like an animal waiting to strike. “And yet you came. Because your little dolls and herbs can’t save the ti-bon-age. Can they?”
Amma stared at him defiantly. “Someone is gonna die if you don’t help me.”
“And someone will die if I do.”
“That’s a discussion for another day.” She tapped one of the cards. “This here is the death I care about.”
He examined the card, stroking it with his feather. “Interestin’ you would choose the one who is already lost. Even more interestin’ you would come to me instead a your precious Casters. This concerns them, does it not?”
The Casters.
My stomach dropped. Who was already lost? Was he talking about Lena?
Amma drew a heavy breath. “The Casters can’t help me. They can barely help themselves.”
Link looked at me, confused. But I didn’t understand any more than he did. How could the bokor help Amma with something the Casters couldn’t?
The images crashed down on me before I could stop them. The unbearable heat. The plague of insects infesting every inch of town. The nightmares and the panic. Casters who couldn’t control their powers, or use them all. A river of blood. Abraham’s voice echoing through the cavern after Lena Claimed herself.
There will be consequences.
The bokor circled around to face Amma, measuring her expression. “You mean the Light Casters can’t.”
“No other kind I’d ask for help.”
He seemed pleased with her answer, but not for the reason I thought. “Yet you came to me. Because I can do something they can’t—the old magic our people carried across the ocean with us. Magic that can be controlled by Mortals and Casters alike.” He was talking about voodoo, a religion born in Africa and the Caribbean. “They don’t understand the ti-bon-age.”
Amma stared at him like she wished she could turn him to stone, but she didn’t leave.
She needed him, even if I didn’t know why.
“Name your price.” Her voice wavered.
I watched as he calculated the cost of both Amma’s request and her integrity. They were opposing forces, working the extremes of a shared mysticism that was as black and white as the Light and Darkness in the Caster world. “Where is it now? Do you know where they’ve hidden it?”
“Hidden what?” Link mouthed silently. I shook my head. I had no idea what they were talking about.
“It’s not hidden.” For the first time, Amma met his eyes. “It’s free.”
At first he didn’t react, as if she might have misspoken. But when the bokor realized Amma was serious, he circled back to the table and pored over the spread. I could hear broken bits of French Creole in his gnarled voice. “If what you say is true, old woman, there is only one price.”
Amma ran her hand over the cards, pushing them into a pile. “I know. I’ll pay it.”
“You understand, there is no turnin’ back? No way to undo what will be done. If you tamper with the Wheel a Fate, it will continue to turn until it crushes you in its path.”
Amma stacked the cards and put them back in her purse. I could see her hand shaking, jerking in and out of shadow.
“Do what you need to do, and I’ll do the same.” She snapped shut her purse and turned to go. “In the end, the Wheel crushes us all.”
9.19
The Far Keep
And then Link and I bolted like Amma was chasing us with the One-Eyed Menace. I was so scared she would know we’d followed her, I didn’t get out of bed until morning.” I left out the part where I woke up on the floor, the same way I always did after one of the dreams.
By the time I finished telling Marian the story, her tea was cold. “What about Amma?”
“I heard the screen door close as the sun was coming up. By the time I came downstairs, she was making breakfast as if nothing happened. Same old cheese grits, same old eggs.” Except neither one tasted right anymore.
We were in the archive in the Gatlin County Library. It was Marian’s private sanctuary, one she had shared with my mom. It was also the place where Marian looked for answers to questions that most folks in Gatlin didn’t even know to ask, which was why I was here. Marian Ashcroft had been my mom’s best friend, but she had always felt more like my aunt than my real one. Which I guess was the other reason I was here.
Amma was the closest thing I had left to a mother. I wasn’t ready to assume the worst of her, and I didn’t want anyone else to either. But still, I didn’t exactly feel comfortable with the idea of her running around with a guy who was on the wrong side of everything Amma believed in. I had to tell someone.
Marian stirred her tea, distracted. “You’re absolutely sure of what you heard?”
I nodded. “It wasn’t really the kind of conversation you forget.” I’d been trying to wipe the image of Amma and the bokor out of my mind ever since I saw them. “I’ve watched Amma freak out before when she didn’t like what the cards were telling her. When she knew Sam Turley was going to drive off the bridge at Wader’s Creek, she locked herself in her room and didn’t say a word for a week. This was different.”
“A Seer never tries to change the cards. Especially not the great-great-great-granddaughter of Sulla the Prophet.” Marian stared into her teacup, thinking. “Why would she try now?”
“I don’t know. The bokor said he could do it, but it would cost her. Amma said she’d pay the price. No matter what. It didn’t make any sense, but it has something to do with the Casters.”
“If he was a bokor, that’s not idle talk. They use voodoo to hurt and destroy rather than enlighten and heal.”
I nodded. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was actually scared for Amma. Which made about as much sense as a kitten being scared for a tiger. “I know you can’t interfere in the Caster world, but the bokor’s a Mortal.”
“Which is why you came to me.” Marian sighed. “I can do some research, but the one question I won’t be able to answer is the only one that matters. What would send Amma to a person who opposes everything she believes in?” Marian held out a plate of cookies, which meant she didn’t have the answer.
“HobNobs?” I winced. They weren’t just any cookies—Liv’s suitcase had been full of them when she arrived in South Carolina at the beginning of the summer.
Marian must have noticed, because she sighed and put the plate down. “Have you talked to Olivia about what happened?”
“I don’t know. Not about—well, no.” I sighed. “Which really sucks, because Liv is… you know, Liv.”
“I miss her, too.”
“Then why didn’t you let her keep working with you?” After Liv broke the rules and helped free Macon from the Arclight, she had disappeared from the Gatlin County Library. Her training as a Keeper had ended, and I’d expected her to go back to the U.K. Instead, she started spending her days in the Tunnels with Macon.
“I couldn’t. It would be improper. Or, if you prefer, forbidden. Until everything is sorted out, we aren’t to see each other. Not officially.”
“You mean she’s not staying with you?”
Marian sighed. “She’s moved into the Tunnels for now. She may be happier there. Macon’s seen to it that she has a study of her own.” I couldn’t picture Liv spending so much time in the darkness of the Tunnels, when all she reminded me of was sunshine.
Marian turned in her seat, pulled a folded letter from her desk, and handed me the paper. It was heavy in my hands, and I realized the weight came from a thick waxen seal at the bottom of the page. Not the kind of letter you get in the mail.
“What’s this?”
“Go on. Read it.”
“ ‘The Council of the Far Keep finds, in the grave matter of Marian Ashcroft of the Lunae Libri…’ ”—I started skimming—“ ‘… suspension of responsibilities, with regard to the Western Keep… trial date forthcoming.’ ” I looked up from the paper in disbelief. “You were fired?”
“I prefer suspended.”
“And there’s a trial?”
She set her teacup on the table between us and closed her eyes. “Yes. At least, that’s what they are choosing to call it. Don’t think Mortals have a monopoly on hypocrisy. The Caster world is not exactly a democracy, as you might have noticed. The whole free will bit gets a little sidelined in the interest of the rule of law.”
“But you had nothing to do with that. Lena broke the Order.”
“Well, I appreciate your version of events, but you’ve lived in Gatlin long enough to know how versions have a way of changing. Nevertheless, I expect you’ll have your day on the stand.” The lines on Marian’s face had a habit of deepening from lines into shadows when she was really worried. Like now.
“But you weren’t involved.” It was our longest running battle. From the moment I learned Marian was a Keeper—like my mother before her—I knew the one rule that mattered. Whatever was happening, Marian stayed out of it. She was an observer, responsible for keeping the records of the Caster world and marking the place that world intersected with the Mortal one.
Marian kept the history; she didn’t make it.
That was the rule. Whether her heart would allow her to follow it was a different story. Liv had learned the hard way that she couldn’t follow the rule, and now she could never be a Keeper. I was pretty sure my mom had felt the same way.
I picked up the letter again. I touched the thick black wax seal—the same as the seal of the state of South Carolina. A Caster moon over a palmetto tree. As I touched the crescent moon, I heard the familiar melody and stopped to listen. I closed my eyes.