Introduction

From the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the Witching Savannah series comes the story of a young witch’s quest to uncover her family’s terrifying history...

Magic is seeping out of the world, leaving the witches who’ve relied on it for countless centuries increasingly desperate. While some see magic’s demise as an inevitable end of their era, others are courting madness, and willing to sacrifice former allies, friends, and family to retain power.

“Horn’s rich characterizations and setting, sparkling magic, and creepy villains bolster the narrative, and his focus on women as major players is particularly refreshing.” —Publishers Weekly

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Excerpt

PROLOGUE

Monday, August 29, 2005

Alice strained against the weight of the ancient powder-blue suitcase, its metal hinges cutting a shallow vein into the hardwood floor as she dragged it backward down the hall with a two-handed, white-knuckle grip. Inside the case she’d crowded every treasure she’d collected in her seven and a half years. Books and dolls, a battered music box, and a contraband cache of costume jewelry she wasn’t allowed to wear outside the house, purchased at the French Market, though her imagination insisted it had been plundered from a pirate chest.

In the center of the booty, bound by a heavy silver frame, she’d secreted a picture she usually kept hidden in the false floor of the doll¬house her uncle Vincent had built for her. She loved the photo, not only because it was the sole portrait she knew to exist of her immedi¬ate family—her father and her mother and both older brothers, Luc and Hugo—but also because her mother’s gaze wasn’t turned toward the camera. It rested on a miniature and only somewhat recognizable version of Alice herself, balanced between her father’s hands on his knee. Her mother’s hand rested on baby Alice’s tiny leg.

Alice couldn’t remember her mother.

“Are you ready then, love?” Daniel asked, materializing before her, hovering an inch or so above the stairhead. Alice couldn’t bring her¬self to look him in the eye, focusing instead on the tan, brimmed cap that covered most of his red hair, then on the stained and dirty blues and greens and pinks of the petit-point flowers embroidered on his suspenders.

Daniel was bound to their house. There’d be no escape for him. Her father had promised her that Daniel would be all right, that he’d find a way to protect him, no matter what. But her father had also promised to keep her safe, to keep the whole of New Orleans safe.

Just hours ago, they’d all been so proud. So relieved. Her father’s house had held a party atmosphere, with thirty or more weary, bedrag¬gled witches cheering and congratulating each other on how deftly the Chanticleer Coven had coordinated the efforts of witches all around the city to divert Katrina. The storm should have hit the city dead on, but they, the brave witches of the Crescent City, had managed to slow its winds and nudge it just a bit east, far enough that the storm’s path would cut through less populated areas. A case of champagne still sat on the kitchen counter, placed there in anticipation of the toasts they’d enjoy after besting Katrina, and, from the witches older than her father, duller reminiscences of having weathered Betsy before her. But Pontchartrain had pushed its way beyond its banks, and the levees had failed.

Her father always kept his word. Except when he didn’t. “I can’t find Sugar,” Alice said, moving on to a problem she could solve. “Anywhere,” she added for emphasis. She’d received the tiny Devon rex as a birthday present from her aunt Fleur, and the cat and Daniel had taken an instant disliking to each other, Sugar arching and hissing whenever she sensed his presence.

“Not to worry. The pewter-coated terror yowled at me in the kitchen not five minutes ago.” Daniel glanced down at her suitcase. “I’d help you carry your things down, it’s only . . .” He let his hand pass through the newel post. “I’ve not been able to take full form of late.”

Angry voices—Luc’s, plus a few others Alice recognized as belong¬ing to members of the coven. Loudest of all, her father’s voice rumbled up like thunder, causing them both to peer downstairs in the direction of her father’s study. Most of the words were spoken one over the other. Jumbled. Alice couldn’t make out much of what was being said, though she did pick up on her own name, as well as that of her grandfather Celestin. It had been her father who’d spoken his name. Alice’s father only ever referred to his own father as Celestin or, when he seemed to be feeling exceptionally piqued, as “that man.”

Magic had been fading from the world since long before Alice was born into it, so in times of crisis all witches were called upon to put aside personal differences and form a type of collective to pool their energies. Even Alice had been recruited to try to weaken the storm, to shift its path, to help the levees hold. This morning, when it was still thought this effort would succeed, goodwill had reigned. But now the snatches of conversation Alice could understand told her that everyone was looking to lay the blame at someone else’s feet, and she wasn’t sur¬prised to hear her father pointing the finger at “that man.” Alice liked her grandfather. He never treated her like a baby. He never shied away from topics the way her father and uncle did. He always answered her questions directly—although those direct responses were more often than not in French. If it weren’t for her grandfather, Alice might never have learned of “the Dreaming Road,” where witches give in to the intoxication of their own magic to escape their unhappy lives. Nor would she have known that her mother had chosen it over her.

“Shall I go fetch Hugo to help with your case?” Daniel said in a near whisper, as if he were afraid of drawing attention to himself.

Alice nodded, unable to speak, afraid what she might say if she did. Daniel faded away as quickly as he’d appeared.

A tardy flash of lightning tore through the gloom, and she turned, crossing to the large landing window and then rising up on her tiptoes to peer out. On the other side of the glass, a towering wall of muddy water spun counterclockwise just beyond the strip of green that stood between their street and the finger of water that had given their neigh¬borhood, Bayou St. John, its name.

The water had risen so quickly. In minutes. The world had been drowned all around them, leaving their house and a few on either side an island protected by a levee of her father’s failing magic. And even though the flooding had now leveled off behind her father’s wards, this levee, too, would soon fall.

The swirling water reminded Alice of the color of the milky tea Daniel would pour himself, though never drink, each morning. Someone’s white plastic lawn chair bobbed like a marshmallow on the water’s surface before sinking back into the abyss, its legs straining to puncture the clear membrane of magic protecting the house. And then the chair was gone, dragged down and away by an unseen current.

It was mesmerizing, and Alice made a game of guessing the origins of the jetsam scraping the dam’s cellophane-like wall. The blue trike that belonged to the little kid two doors down. A door—a red door—she didn’t recognize offered the illusion of an escape, then popped up to the surface like a listing raft. A plastic pink flamingo from a garden on Mystery Street surfaced for only long enough to bob its head toward her. Two large gray garbage containers clung to each other in despera¬tion as they spun around, the wheel of one caught in the hinge of its partner’s lid. Alice caught the name of the corner store located a few blocks over painted on the side of one of the cans just before it lost its hold. She felt almost sad for it when its mate was washed away. A bubble of air belched up to the water’s surface, bringing with it an explosive, colorful pattern similar to the millefiori paperweight on her grandfa¬ther’s desk. Alice strained to make out the details, only then realizing a small school of paperbacks and DVDs had crested, their covers’ bright colors floating on top of the water behind her father’s magic dam.

Alice wished she could turn into a mermaid and slip safely into this new kaleidoscope sea. “Nicholas lied to you, you know.” Alice spun around at the sound of Luc’s words. She hadn’t heard him approaching, and the sharpness of his tone worried her. He was her brother, but lately—always angry— he’d begun to feel like a stranger. He had a girlfriend now, and he spent most of his time with her. It was just as well. When he was home, it was nothing but yelling—Luc at their dad, their dad at Luc.

Luc had taken to calling their father by his given name, Nicholas.

Luc’s girlfriend was a witch, too, but as far as Alice could guess, Evangeline was a different kind of witch, a kind her father and grand¬father looked down on. Strange that Luc’s girlfriend was the one thing her father and grandfather could agree on.

“The girl is talented, no doubt,” she’d heard her father say to a coven member, “but lacks any pedigree.”

To Alice, pedigree seemed an odd thing for a person to have. It was a quality one might use to describe Sugar, not a person. Evangeline and Luc had taken Alice out with them a few times since they’d begun see¬ing each other, mostly to the French Market, but once to a movie and once to City Park. She seemed nice enough to Alice. Maybe a little too anxious to make friends, but nice all the same.

Luc pushed his blue-black hair back from his inky eyes. “We’re not packing to go to Grandfather’s.” Unlike Bayou St. John, the Garden District where their grandfather lived sat on the rim of the punchbowl New Orleans had become, high enough to escape the worst of the flooding. Bayou St. John and the Garden District were the extreme boundaries of Alice’s world map, bolstered on each end by great drag¬ons: one her father, the other her grandfather.

“He thought you’d be easier to manage if you didn’t know the truth. If you thought you were going someplace familiar.”

Hugo, younger than Luc but a world ahead of Alice, approached the landing from the hall, arriving in time to hear Luc’s revelation. Hugo was seven years older than Alice, and back in the spring—she remembered the exact day she’d noticed, June 23—he had started look¬ing more like a man than a boy. He resembled their father, nearly an exact copy, though with their mother’s lighter coloring. Hugo was the opposite of Luc, who stood a good foot taller than their father, and whose dark eyes stared out from a face very like their mother’s.

Alice turned to Hugo for verification of Luc’s words.

Hugo nodded. “Father told me not to tell you. But I agree that you should know.”

“We’re evacuating,” Luc said. “All of us. We’re deserting New Orleans.”

“What about Daniel?” she said. He’d been there to watch over her every day of her life. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him here alone. “Will he be okay without us?”

“Nicholas doesn’t care what happens to the people who get left behind,” Luc said. Alice could feel the heat of his anger, an actual physi¬cal sensation, wafting off him. “No one in the coven does. And none of them give a damn about Daniel either.” He leaned in close to whisper in her ear. “He isn’t even real.”

She pushed him away. “I don’t believe you,” she said, even if she wasn’t quite sure which part of his statement she was contesting. Even though she sensed truth in his every word.

“Well, you will soon.” Luc grabbed hold of her hand, whisking her off her feet and into his arms. The force behind the movement made her breath catch. But she stopped herself from crying out. He’d call her a crybaby. She didn’t want him to call her a crybaby.

“Luc, knock it off,” Hugo said, stretching to his full height, the action a silent and entirely ignored challenge.

She looked back at her suitcase, sitting there at the top of the steps, as Luc carried her down the hall. Hugo chased after them. Suddenly, they were climbing the tight, shadowy back stairs that led to the attic, the door to which their father usually kept sealed with both a protec¬tion spell and a heavy padlock. But the padlock lay forgotten on the floor, and the magical bans that had once fixed the door shut had been rendered useless. All magic, great and small, had been diverted by the united covens to aid their attempt to lessen Katrina’s sting.

“We’re not supposed to come up here,” Alice said, her protest half-hearted at best. She knew her father had only permitted the attic to be opened to allow for the removal of a few objects considered too precious or dangerous to leave in the storm’s path.

“No. But in an hour there may not be a ‘here’ to come.” Luc shifted her so he could look into her eyes. “Don’t you want to see what Nicholas has been hiding from you, from us, before it disappears?”

Father would be furious if he knew, but there was no use denying her desire. She nodded.

Hugo’s silence was his consent.

Luc kicked the padlock against the wall, then opened the door and hefted her over the threshold. The electricity had failed forever ago, leaving the space in deep shadow, with only dim castoff light seeping in through the two dormer windows on the house’s front. Still, she could tell the room was enormous, spanning the length and breadth of the house.

Luc set her on her feet and took her hand. The ceiling hung low enough that he had to duck as he tugged her to the farthest, darkest corner. He released her and snapped his fingers, causing a ball of light, about as bright as a candle, to form overhead. Until the crisis was over, they weren’t supposed to use magic, not even a little. But it seemed that today was a day for breaking rules.

Despite never having breached this space, Alice knew this forlorn corner was where her father had hidden away everything belonging to their mother—at least everything he hadn’t burned. She’d heard Luc and her father fight over the rightful ownership of what was left of their mother’s possessions.

“Behind here,” Luc said, and Hugo helped him push aside a stack of unlabeled cardboard boxes, a whiff of perfume rising from them. Their mother had left before Alice could walk, and memory, that fickle thing, had betrayed her—she wouldn’t even know what her mother had looked like if not for that single image of the Marin family. And yet, this ghost of the once heady fragrance of sweet olive and gardenia came close to conjuring her mother’s face.

Luc paused, seeming to have caught their mother’s scent as well. But then his face hardened, and he whipped away a sheet that lay over a dozen or so canvases, exposing paintings Alice somehow knew to be her mother’s work.

She would have liked to look more closely at each, but Luc flipped through them, slapping one against the other, taking no care to protect their mother’s art. Alice caught a flash of what looked like an unfinished portrait of her grandfather, then Luc discovered the painting he’d been searching for, pulling it out from the others and turning it so she could have a better look. It was of Daniel, all right. The same cap. The same ginger hair poking out from beneath it. The same sweet but sad look in his eyes.

“Our Daniel believes himself to be a ghost, the unsettled spirit of a young Irishman who died during the construction of the New Basin Canal. But Daniel isn’t a ghost. There never was a Daniel.” Luc paused, maybe to give his revelation time to sink in, or maybe just to see if she’d flinch. She didn’t. Luc seemed satisfied with her reaction. “He’s a magic trick,” he carried on, “a servitor spirit our parents conjured up to look after Hugo and me—so they didn’t have to. Nicholas thought they had more important business to attend to, and mother, well, she did whatever he told her to do, like it or not. Until the day she stopped . . .” Luc’s voice trailed off.

They stood for a few moments in total silence. “Mother,” Hugo said, nodding to confirm Luc’s story, “painted this to help Father visual¬ize Daniel. She didn’t want to. Father made her do it.”

Luc looked up from the painting. “That’s the first step, you see.” His voice sounded scratchy now. “You give a servitor form, one that suggests the traits you’d like it to have, and then you imbue—you know what I mean by ‘imbue’?” She shook her head, so he offered a different word. “You fill it with a sense of self. That’s the glue that helps keep the entity intact. It works best if you give the servitor a tragic past, an injustice it can fixate on. Saddling your creation with a dark secret or two, something it’s ashamed of, something it’s afraid you’ll learn, doesn’t hurt either.” Luc’s light brightened, and he held the painting up, offer¬ing her a final look at it.

Alice studied the portrait, her mouth open, her heart pounding. Though she wanted to deny it, it all made sense. Whenever she asked Daniel what his childhood had been like, he couldn’t remember the simplest things. Nothing. Not even if he’d gone to school. If he’d liked candy. If he’d had friends. He could rattle off some memories, mostly historical events, but the stories he told were always the same. Word for word. It was like he’d been given a list of facts to memorize. Facts that would fit what he believed to be true about himself, but nothing to show he’d actually had a life before joining their family.

Alice could feel that the Chanticleer Coven’s magic was, at least for now, nearly exhausted, probably only enough left to ensure them safe passage out of the city. That Daniel still held together at all was testa¬ment to how deeply he believed the lie of his own existence.

“Nicholas would’ve probably let him fade away by now,” Luc said, “but then you came along. And mother left . . .” He slid the painting back in with the others and then flung the sheet back over them. He was rough when handling the paintings, acting as if they meant nothing to him. But if he didn’t care about them at all, Alice realized, he wouldn’t have bothered to offer even this flimsy protection.

He turned back toward her and Hugo, fixing her with his gaze. “You see, that’s who our father is. This is what he does. He builds people up. Programs them to his liking, and when they stop being of use, he tosses them away without giving them another thought. Eventually you’ll be one of the ones he throws away.” His eyes shifted to Hugo. “You both will.”

Alice wished she could defend her father, but Luc’s words gave expression to something she’d always suspected. Always feared. Her father was loyal to no one but himself. He’d erased most if not all evidence of Alice’s mother from the world, and while he allowed Alice to visit her grandfather, he rarely dealt with Celestin himself. She’d often heard him mock his own brother, her uncle Vincent, with Gabriel Prosper, the coven’s second—but she’d also heard him curse Gabriel behind his back. She’d watched him pit coven members against each other in minor battles, then step in as peacemaker. “Then we should go. Go live with Grandfather.”

Luc exchanged a silent look with Hugo before bursting into laugh¬ter. “Who do you think made Nicholas the way he is?”

She glanced at Hugo, who was biting his lip as if to hold back laugh¬ter of his own, then shifted her gaze to Luc. He stopped laughing and reached down to touch her cheek. “At least we’ve got each other, right?”

She bit her lip. Wanting to cry, but not wanting Luc to see it. She nodded.

Hugo took her hand. “We’ll be leaving soon. You should head downstairs.”

“Yes,” Luc said, his voice suddenly bright, “before Father forgets you. Here, take this.” He snapped his fingers, and the glowing orb he’d conjured floated down to her.

“Go on,” Hugo said, “Luc and I have to talk, but I’ll be down soon. I’ll bring your case.”

The light followed Alice as far as the foot of the attic stairs before it blinked out, leaving her with only her dark-adapted eyes to guide her. The voices below had quieted and grown fewer. She let her mind reach out, feel around to see who remained. Other than herself and her brothers, she sensed only her father and uncle.

Curious, she descended the stairway and crept down the hall toward her father’s study. The door stood ajar, and bright streaks of light cut through the gloom of the darkened hall and raced up and down the wall across from the opening. Sugar sat by the wall, batting at the glints.

While Alice still sensed her father and uncle in the study, the hall had gone silent. She realized one of them—most likely her father—had placed a spell on the room to keep whatever they were discussing from being overheard. She craned her neck to spy through the opening, but all she could make out was the twinkle of the rhinestone-studded buckle on Aunt Fleur’s vintage black crepe pumps. Her aunt was doing that thing again, where she was there, but not really—the same way she came to birthday parties or showed up for a few minutes on Christmas morning. That was why Alice hadn’t picked up on her presence. Alice’s grandfather told her the name for this gift was “astral projection,” though Uncle Vincent always referred to it as “discount travel.”

The scintillations on the wall shot up and dove again, synchronized to the impatient movement of Fleur’s foot. The light the shoes were reflecting was probably hundreds of miles away, in her aunt’s house. Any other day, Alice wouldn’t have been able to resist barging in to ask her aunt, who wasn’t really there, how the light playing off her shoe buckles could be in two places at once. She understood that her aunt appeared as a type of psychic projection, but this part of the puzzle didn’t make sense to her.

For a moment Alice stood there, as mesmerized by the danc¬ing glints on the wall as her cat was, but the sound of the front door creaking open caused her to look up. At first she thought it had to be the wind, that the door hadn’t been pulled to properly after the other witches had left. But then she sensed a presence on the other side. A male presence. Sugar, too, stopped pawing at the wall and turned to face the foyer, curious as to the identity of the new arrival.

The door eased forward, inch by deliberate inch, until it stood wide open. Alice’s eyes lied to her, telling her there was no one there, but her other senses insisted someone stood just beyond the threshold, beckoning her, inviting her to come out and play. She wondered if it could be a ghost, a real ghost, or another servitor spirit like Daniel, sent out by its master to brave the flood, but her instincts told her no. This visitor was something entirely different. And she wanted, no needed, to go out and meet him.

Alice understood—she felt the entity on the far side of the door warn her—that she mustn’t be seen, or they’d stop her. They wouldn’t let her join him.

She didn’t hesitate even a single second. Scooping up the cat, she hurried past the doorway as silently as Sugar’s anxious purring would allow. One of the magical wards her father had woven, now weakened by their fight against the hurricane, snapped, but it didn’t matter. She needed to get to her visitor. Standing beneath the gallery, Alice reached out with her final spark of magic, already scanning her surroundings. Finally, she sensed him. But he’d pulled back. He now stood near the rotating wall of water. Eager to get to him, she stepped forward, moving out from beneath the gallery and onto the sidewalk.

Katrina had smelled salty as she chewed through the city, carrying the gulf in her grasp, but now the beach smell had faded. The air just smelled wet. The wind still blew strongly enough to whip up whitecaps on the water held back by magic, and even though the sky above the towering water still resembled the polished steel of their refrigerator door, directly overhead, within their circle of safety, the hot sun shone down from a patch of summer blue. Sugar struggled out of Alice’s grasp, her needle-sharp claws leaving fiery corkscrew tracks as she twined her way up the girl’s arm. Alice watched the thin welts rise, but she felt no pain. She couldn’t feel anything. An invisible barrier seemed to stand between her and all sensation—a barrier much like the clear membrane of magic her father had spun to hold the floodwaters at bay.

The cat paused once in her climb, one of her oversize peridot eyes winking at Alice in rage. Everyone in the Marin household knew better than to bring her outdoors. Even on the best of days, the world beyond her favorite sun-drenched windowsill was a strange and alien place. The feline fought her way to Alice’s shoulder, where she perched and yowled in indignation at the sun overhead, unrecognized in its unfiltered state as the source of hours of golden pleasure. Then the cat fell silent, her head pivoting to the side as she stared at the exact spot where Alice had sensed their visitor. Sugar arched up, sinking her claws into Alice’s flesh, and growled. Then, as if something had startled her, she jumped off her perch and bolted toward the house. Alice’s eyes followed the cat as she tore across the lawn and disappeared inside.

The visitor wanted Alice to laugh, so she started laughing—great, rolling belly laughs, as if the cat’s terror were the funniest thing she’d ever seen. Even though it wasn’t. Even though she didn’t want to. Even though she felt her own animal instincts kicking in. She struggled to free herself, to turn and run after Sugar, but she could not. She felt her feet moving forward, bringing her nearer and nearer the swirling wall of water.

Just behind the water’s sheen, she caught sight of a bone-white Mardi Gras mask with wide and hollow eyes. As she drew closer, a series of bulges pushed out the surface of the water, five points pressing outward, forming a hand made from the water itself. It reached out to grasp her, its twin lunging at her from the other side. And then what she had thought to be a mask came to life, its lips pulling back, opening, exposing a razor-blade smile. She recognized the horrible face from the stories her grandfather would tell her when she begged him to entertain her with ghost stories on rainy Sunday afternoons.

Babau Jean, John the Bogey.

Alice shook her head. Her grandfather’s tales had turned to night terrors on occasion, and her father had always sworn to her this bogey¬man didn’t exist. That he was just a story.

Screams formed in her throat, but she couldn’t make a sound, and when she tried to pull away, the cold, muddy hand closed around hers, holding her tight. It began drawing her in.

“Alice,” she heard Uncle Vincent’s anxious voice calling to her. “What are you doing over there? You know it isn’t safe out here. Come back inside.”

She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t take a step. All she could do was turn her head to look back at him over her shoulder.

Whatever he read in her eyes was enough. Vincent darted to her side, tugging her free from the hand’s cold grip and up into his embrace. He didn’t seem to see the hands made of the water, straining to snatch her away even as he carried her beyond their reach. He couldn’t seem to sense the hatred in the empty black sockets where the monster’s eyes should have been. “What . . . ?” he asked, giving her a puzzled look before she buried her head in his shoulder and gave in to sobs. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

If you could give one bit of advice to any of the characters, which character would you choose, and what would your advice be?

If you know New Orleans, how well does the representation of New Orleans presented in this book match your experience of the city? If you haven’t visited New Orleans, how well does the book’s setting match the mental image you carry of the city?

Were there any plot twists that either took you by surprise, or that you saw coming?

The explanation given in the first chapter for how to create a servitor spirit is close to the method the author uses when creating characters. Discuss how fictional characters might be viewed as being a type of servitor spirit.

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