The Night is Full of Haints - alcifer

Chapter 1 Chapter Text

The heart burns without light

Leading with chains to follow

There’s a ripe blackness that coats Snake’s Hollow, like night left her shawl over the entire town. It is thick, it is alive, and to breathe it in is to choke down thick snake smoke and the ripe red cayenne peppers left in rum at the peristyle, our voodoo house of worship, where the lwa, or spirits that guard us, descend Jacob’s Ladder from our spiritual motherland of Gineh, to dance with their human devotees.

Even the blackness frightens the lwa, and Bondye, or God. He hides his winking moon face tonight, and even his Pleiadean smile is veiled by ghoulish smoke.

Call the blackness an omen, call it wreaths of sin like dancing pines in a winter gale. Out of all the humans in my small Louisiana hometown, only I, my granmamma, and my best friend Pharah can see the curse of Snake’s Hollow between our three human pairs of simple countryfolk eyes.

The night is full of haints, the church bells toll on their own, and sometimes, you gotta feed the crossroads. That’s what the blackness brings – rougarou, zombies, haints, the Petro Nation – and they stay away because of the archangel Raphael and Papa Legba, the St. Peter of my ancestral lwa, approximate to the saints of Gineh – with the sweet Rada Island, the fiery Petro Nation, and the Scooby Doo Ghedeland - in Voodoo, always on the town’s edge, but someday, the monsters will come marching right on in. That I know for sure, that it’s only a matter of time before your shadows catch up with you, as stains cross generations down here in the swamps, and the sins of yesteryear are as thick and chalky as curdled milk.

Tonight I’m gonna meet them.

The blackness snakes across the woods like Spanish moss, then the ancient curse of Snake’s Hollow enters people’s dreams every night, and my God-fearing granmamma makes a sound in her sleep that could curdle new milk and skim the cream off the cows. When I was younger, barely in elementary school, my guardian angel Raphael would cover me with his old white wings and sing me to sleep in the tongue of angels, and the next day in church, Papa Leggie would have ten more lines on his bark whorl face. Legba and God, they’re poker buddies, or so Raff tells me.

I wonder if they gamble over which town’s turn it is to vanish into the blackness next.

Winter down here is chill and muggy, and maybe I’m riled up on Maya Angelou’s poetry that sweet momma loves to read to me before our dinner prayers, but I’m brave, and Raff is asleep on the roof, and not a soul is awake in this silly little town. They’re all tired out from church - my friends’ parents tried to get slices of salvation just like hot apple pie, and there clearly ain’t enough to go around, or the damn shadows wouldn’t be out here roiling dangerously and watching me.

At the end of Still I Rise tonight, momma says “Be brave, May Uriel Laveau, be strong, because this world will beat stubborn women down, and you aren’t worth anything if you aren’t stubborn as a mule and salt rich as the earth herself.” I wish I was like Storm in X-Men and could clear this place of the nightly darkness with my superpowers, but it’s more than just foul weather at play. Here, the daily hauntings of daylight creep alive as shadows across the weeping willows come evening, and the trees scream in the tongues of winds for release from the haints that climb them.

The blackness is in the bones of this town, fabled for Calf Springs that will heal and Snakes Springs that will curse, that old damned hanging ground. There are so many heroes in my comics and movies – Storm, Lando, Lieutenant Uhura, Nubia, Shuri, Finn, Black Panther, Vixen – and I got a cape and light-up plastic light saber from a few years ago from when I still used to play make believe. I put them on as a shield of sorts, full of sweet childhood memories, then crawl out the window, onto the gutter, and down the widow’s walk, and –

Wings in my face, strong hands at my waist. I’m hauled from the widow’s walk back into my room like a little girl picking flowers by my stubborn guardian angel.

The archangel Raphael just popped up like a daisy from a grave at a funeral wake. Jack’s rabbit if he isn’t fast as a hare. I could have sworn I lulled him to sleep with some of momma’s oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. No one can see Raff except me and granmamma, the Laveau witches, and he’s been with me since birth. I love him, but he’s a pain in my butt sometimes. Well, that’s most of the time, now that I think about it.

His scarred face is all stern, and he sits me down on my bed, and dang it am I in for a talking.

“May! What did I tell you about going out at night? It’s too dangerous for you to even fathom! I didn’t raise you to lose you, girl.” His voice gets all gentle in the end, and he scratches his shaved curls. He looks at me as if I am a fragile dandelion blossom whose seeds could be blown to the wind with the slightest whisper of a breeze.

Perhaps there is a grain of truth to his fierce protection of me, after all – the Woman in White, my cursed great granmama Lailah, is always waiting. I take after that particular family ghost the most, after all.

I squint at Raff in the darkness of my room. He’s got skin brown as me, and I used to not believe that he was an angel when I was younger. I would say angels were only blonde women from the Hallmark Channel that played harps flying around the manger of baby Jesus, but Raff has a flaming sword and isn’t very good with babies. He thinks they’re cute and all, but he’s been a bachelor since Literal Day 1. You should see him with my best friend Pharah’s newborn sister Rosalie. He almost dropped her!

“You didn’t raise me to be a scaredy cat either, Raff. I’ve seen the Baron come down at fetes and watched my uncle get ridden by Ogou and swallow ghost peppers whole. There’s a magic to my town, and a curse of some kind that only I can see, and I’m going to save it. I won’t let Snake’s Hollow be another of Leggie’s bets. It’s not fair for God to play craps with Leggie over my own home town!”

“Legba isn’t trying to gamble Snake’s Hollow away, May,” Raff sighs, sitting gently down next to me. He runs a finger through my twin puffs and fixes a stray curl. “He’s trying to protect it. We all are, lwa and angel alike.”

The blackness exhales outside my window – it always comes at the stroke of 3:00 AM, the witching hour, then leaves by dawn, when the sun is coming up. The howls of the rougarou on the bayou can keep me awake all night when the curse grows thick enough. When the black magic breathes, it sounds like the whistle of a ghost train, and when it leaves, it’s like a tea kettle burning.

Raff makes the sign of the cross, only his fingers draw holy fire on the air, and the cross floats to me where it kisses my heart. Blessings from angels never hurt, but I don’t need his protection. I need his answers.

“You’re funny, Raff, you ain’t a proper man, and you’re not a good angel. Angels don’t lie, after all.”

Raff narrows his sunny yellow eyes, the irises of them an unearthly golden amber. They always remind me of dawn over a new age – an age of freedom. “What am I lying about?”

“Bets. The lwa make bets all the time. Leggie’s a trickster, after all. So am I – so I would know.”

Raff harrumphs, crossing his arms as he stakes his sword in the wood of my floor. “Legba loves you, May. He’s keeping the blackness away. We all are. Now go back to bed. You got school tomorrow.” He hugs me then takes off my cape and tries to tuck me in. I squirm and push him away, then squiggle back into my cape as a second blanket.

“I don’t need you pulling the blankets up to my chin Raff, I’m eleven, not seven. Anyways, this cape is my super shield – I need it to sleep well.”

Raff smiles like river pearls are in his mouth, then laughs. “Night, May-flower.” He climbs up onto the roof and soon I can hear him snoring like a foghorn.

I watch the blackness until dawn drives it out.

I never get much sleep here, where the whippoorwill moans, and the sparrow breaks her wings on Southern soil.

The night is alive in Snake’s Hollow.

In the dark, the Dead have names.

Chapter 2 Chapter Text

The laughter grew harder and lethal

How harsh the breath of morning

Years sail past like the boat of the moon on the Mississippi, and I am seventeen sun dances old, bright as the same star that shines down on the green of all New Orleans, and as ripe as the lady of the moon with magic. Jimmy Pages’s supergroup The Firm did a song about her, Midnight Moonlight Lady, and daddy always sung that to me before bed right and tight tucked in. “You’re my Midnight Moonlight, little lady,” he’d always say, then trace a crescent moon on my forehead. Sometimes, when I’m feeling witchy, I draw that very same symbol onto my brow in eyeliner, then give my lids thick lines like a fox, and I sing along to Sinnerman as I watch the rain steam on the pavement, drinking rose hip team with lime. Pharah, my girlfriend, plinks a tune on the piano, and we put Nina Simone to shame.

“The haints come out past midnight, May-be baby doll,” “Hot” Pepper my granmama says sagely, knitting on her rocker as the will o’ the wisps burn out. I drew a cornmeal veve, or lwa calling card symbol, with Bawan Samedi’s intaglio to welcome the Ghede, or blessed dead, down to our humble abode on the front porch. My homemade piman, Baron Samedi’s favorite alcoholic drink, is steeping on the railing from my many brewed creations. There’s a white mint liquor for the Rada, and fiery peppery drinks laid out for the Petro too.

Pharah and I are going to start a brewery when we turn 21. We’ve been saving up since middle school, first in piggy banks, now by babysitting. I’ll sell spirits too, but Pharah always loved beer. Good thing the blue pigs know not to card a Montanee or Laveau. Police fear us from the time of Marie Laveau and Dr. John Montanee. We send hounds after them, or they meet unfortunate ends. Stray dogs bring them no delight, and their water sours into vinegar. Granmama always made right sure of that, especially during her crusade with Luther and Gabriel in Birmingham.

More underage drinks for me and PharBear, then.

The piman is strong, just like Baron Samedi’s ego. It’s spicy as a fiddle in the Devil’s bar, with Johnny plucking it hot and playing it soulful as sin.

I took a swig with Raff and Pharah for bravery like a chicken stealing corn from a fox before the harrowing of fall starts, and the fox thins the flock. It is a ritual we do every Friday the 13th, the witching day, when the curse of this town is thickest, and the dead rise. Now that Friday the 13th unfortunately fell on Midsummer, all hell will break through, with the stars and times aligned.

Good thing I’m a hellraiser. For hell breaks loose tonight.

Haints always come calling, after all, on this thorn of an unluckiest day of the year.

All the children in the neighborhood are tuckered out from too much cake from a neighborhood Summer Masque for Midsummer, a neighborhood old Snake’s Hollow countryside tradition. They’re dressed in cobwebs and bat wings and devil horns. Pharah dressed up like Nichelle in the first Star Trek movie, and I’m Ironheart, Ironman’s Chicago-born protégé whose comics I always collect. Raff wishes I’d read the Bible instead of comics, but that sure as fat as a cat is a lost cause. My girlfriend and I are nerds through and through, if my Marvel and Pharah’s old movie collection has anything to say about it.

Oh, if only the cute little kids running around dressed as demons knew the true creeps of the night – then the pint sized pipsqueaks wouldn’t be so happy to roam about these badlands as beacon lights. St. John’s Day is drawing to its close once again. Turning of the seasons, followed by the turning of the tithe of this ashen town.

“The curse is always at its worst this time of year,” granmamma warns. “Something about that summer sun soaking into their ancient, accursed bones. Oh Bondye, keep us safe, tucked away all mum and plum and secret from the sins of Judas’ hanging rope and his traitorous Iscariot kiss!”

Pharah squeezes granmama’s hands. “It’ll be okay, Hot Pepper – my gris gris bombs will rupture anytime a haint crosses the border.”

I smile, giving my girlfriend a reassuring look.

“And my piman will make them sick. The ghouls and ghosts always are crawling over this town this time of year, granmama, it’s old school style today,” I agree, watching as their blackness rolls in to the forest surrounding our cul-de-sac. The wind of the Dead sways the Spanish moss on the magnolias in a choking sin. The Dead smell like bitter coffee grounds, sulfur hot springs, and iron.

Pharah chews gum next to me, her gris gris dust bombs at the ready. An herbalist par excellence, her homemade gris gris mixtures can be everything from hexing charms to good luck powder, made out of an array of plants, animal bits and bobs, and secret ingredients only the Montanees know. “They damn better mind my gris gris bomb traps,” Pharah says proudly, winking at me. I squeeze her hand

Raff is preparing in his own way: on the rooftop, gorging himself on candy. Then, a little how do you do to God up above with his evening prayers, my silly archangel’s sinful belly full of chocolate. It’s his Midsummer ritual before he assumes his nightly watch over Snake’s Hollow. I can hear him singing a psalm. “Best you get to bed, I suppose, granmama. No more kids left out to play their pranks: it’s almost three. I can handle it myself this year with Pharah at my side.”

“No my dear Mayflower – I be by your side always, even after I die. Ain’t no rest for these ancient bones. Now, after we are done, you better tuck yourself in before the witching hour, lest the damned ride you down to Ol’ Scratch hisself. His mounts are suicide souls just like in my daddy’s tall tales, God bless them. Maybe he’s riding momma’s flanks now.”

I shudder at the thought of the Devil changing Lailah into a suicide steed and taking her cantering through town, into an ocean of flames, walking from air of the shore into the abyss of fire.

“I don’t like that,” I whisper, mostly to my simple self. Best not let granmama know I’m afraid. Then she’ll want to defend me. She has to get to bed. Her lungs don’t work like they used to, and she’s going in for a cancer screening on Monday.

All I can do is pray.

“Don’t sound none too nice, Pepper,” Pharah whispers, watching dinner plate red eyes emerge from the frothing ferns.

“No child, it ain’t.” Granmama crosses herself extra hard and gives a knowing look to the thick Spanish moss laden woods beyond our cul-de-sac, which join up with Lake Pontchartrain where Marie Laveau, the old Voodoo Queen of New Orleans I’m descended from on granmama’s side, held her Damballah dances. It’s said that Marie Laveau would disappear with her sacred rattlesnake wrapped around her waist and burning candles in her hair, down down down, into Lake Pontchartrain’s depths, only to emerge candles alight, alive, walking on water half a night later to continue the Damballah ceremony.

Damballah is the kind snake king of the lwa, or spirits of Bondye, the Good God up above. Damballah loves sweets, and momma and pa left some white mints on his altar before they fell asleep. Granmamma and I can see spirits, momma and pa can’t. Houngan Marc Montanee, Pharah’s dad, says the true sight sometimes skips a generation. Momma and pa don’t believe granmama, Pharah and I one bit about any of it, the spirits, Raff, or the curse. They just uphold family tradition, tend the altars to their invisible to their eyes lwa, and honor the ancestors and deceased family, but of course. The Montanees know, but they also know my PharBear is the heir of Dr. John, not them – magick, it’s finicky like that. The Montanee houngan and mambo sure as the Devil beating his wife to bring the Midsummer rains know how to lead a good fete, or ritual party for the lwa, though, and like my parents, they tend their ancestral altars into an eternity of desert dancing bones of Resurrection. Our twin family’s dead: the beloved ancestors, are the heart of our worship, even disgraced greatgranmama Lailah that haunts the swamps to this day.

I think of her, and I shudder. Pharah squeezes my hand. I swear I can see her rotten breast breezing as fleshy pennants of putridity among the Spanish moss.

“Looks like you have seen Lailah, my lily petal Mayflower,” Pharah whispers so as not to alarm granmama, who always weeps over her dead mother’s mentioned name.

“It’s okay, I just gotta be careful of Lailah – the Woman in White…” I sigh. Granmama has her asson and is fiddling with the knots over it and rosary beans.

The damned Woman in White of Sourmilk Hill, cursed for summoning the Black Rider instead of tending her own dear daughter Pepper Laveau, my granmamma, is Lailah May Laveau. In our house, her name is a godawful curse.

So here granmama and I are, alongside fairest Pharah, the last two Laveau girls that believe, keeping watch over our precarious little town.

Us three. Witnesses to the darkness that lives, curses, and breathes.

We hold our vigil in near silence. Granmama sings the Magnificat quietly under her breath. I join along, praising God on this blackest night of vice and wicked delights, the full moon red with the alizarin crimson sin. It’s a blood moon by any other name, but to me, it’s a wolf moon, a rougarou moon, a full on hex moon bane.

Pharah checks her watch alarm. “Almost time for the main event, Mayday.” She gives me a good luck kiss for old time’s sake.

“Hell yeah, sister.” We do our secret handshake and I get my potions ready. A gris gris bomb is at hand in her small, lotus blossom palm.

The gold and oak grandfather clock in the foyer strikes near three. The dead await, and I can see them clear as day now. Those souls that disappear on the bayou every year make up their damned droves, lost girls and boys that became haints, ghosts, zombies, rougarou, and ghouls. Us Laveaus ourselves have a connection that is all too personal to the swamp stories of missing tracks and lost bodies that granmama and momma and pa don’t like to talk much about. Many families in Snake’s Hollow have ghosts of our own, as it were, and we have a generational curse – the Black Rider. But I hate thinking of Lailah Laveau: our family’s very own Woman in White who perished at the Black Rider’s hands and hooves over eighty years ago.

I’ve always been wary of the swamp for good reason, but on Midsummer, the mixing pot of America that Papa Legba tends overflows past the borders of Ghedeland, Rada Island, and the Petro Nation, spilling into the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi tributaries. The mountain springs from Sourmilk Hill carry blights like the Plagues of Egypt to our town, their silty waters of souls becoming the corrupt runoff of Snake’s Hollow. In Voodoo, we believe that water holds the power to carry the dead, and though spirits cannot cross running water, if you’re a human soul drowned in Lake Pontchartrain or lost in the bayou, the water claims your soul, mind, heart, bone and blood. Water, after all, has memory, and can take the shape of wicked dreams, if only one is unlucky in the shadow of the moon.

No wonder it begins to rain five minutes until three. Pharah weaves her hands through it and splashes some rain foam on me, and I give a nervous laugh. Granmama smiles like the statue of a fat and happy Buddha under her rose bush.

“Hear the rain speak,” granmama sings, beginning to rattle her asson. “It’s angel’s tears. It’s the Ghede’s prayers. It is our ancestors, from sweet old Gineh, speaking to us as if to say: you are right as rain, sweet Laveaus. You’re sure as fine as rain…”

“You’re right, granmama, I can hear the girls of our past singing,” I say loudly for her to hear over her hearing loss. She gives a crinkly tissue paper smile.

“You are a blessing, May Uriel Laveau and Pharah Jane Montanee.”

Water can carry ancestral curses, just as much as it can purify, and this rain is hot on this ninety degrees Fahrenheit evening. The thick drizzle is acidic, and red dead eyes watch us through the rising mist of the pavement under the trees.

Maybe I just know, in my heart of hearts, that someday the swamp will consume me, beyond Pharah’s burning love and safe harbor and granmama’s watchful eye, and I’ll end up a haint just like great granmama Lailah. I was born no less than cursed, after all – with a caul around my eyes, upside down. Granmama always said the womb was trying to keep me in mama’s belly and protect me from this wicked, evil world. “Hot” Pepper, always afraid of nothing, cut my witch’s caul open and unwrapped the strangling umbilical cord from my neck, then held me up to the light of the sun. Somehow, even though I was a newborn, I can still remember granmama’s seraphic whispers into my new ears like humming cicadas in June: “My blessed Mayflower Uriel Laveau, you will save us all.”

I jolt back to the present as a falling leaf skims my shoulder and my cell phone rings with my mom texting me to come in. I text back that I’m outside with granmama and Pharah, then shut the phone closed and smile at sweet as Southern spice granmama and my girlfriend, though I am frightfully deep in worry.

“Don’t be fretting, my Maybe baby girl,” granmama warns me. “You gotta focus. You’re seventeen, bolder than any boar in Bethlehem and wilder than any woman of the wild ox,” Granmama hands me her asson, her favorite ceremonial rattle, after setting down her knitting and needles and gives me a knowing look. She sings the last chorus of the Magnificat in boiling amber tones and gently rattles the asson with me, her lace hands etched over mine.

I hear bats screech sonar and rattlesnakes shake their tails in the backyard muck of our quaint little cottage.

Will o’ the wisps froth like Galilean foam on the shores of the mourning dusk. They form vespertine haloes on granmama’s, Pharah’s, and my proud brows.

It is time.

Granmama’s lips settle into a thin red lipstick line, Pharah’s knuckles tighten, and my stomach roils. Raff alights on the porch, and granmama hands him a caramel candy. His golden eyes are full of secrets as he pops the sweet into his mouth.

“How did Marie Laveau get rid of the damned, granmama?” I ask, my heart a sparrow stirring her wings as the blackness creeps in. The darkness that curses this town flexes like a forgotten muscle. The zombies and haints and rougarou all whimper and wail, on the border line, about to cross over as the grandfather clock strikes its final chime for the witching hour. On Halloween, the veil between the worlds is thinnest, giving the Dead the ability to cross over. If it weren’t for me, Raff, Pharah, and granmama, this town would be eaten up alive by the curse of Snake’s Hollow. Then, soon, all of Louisiana would succumb, and the curse of Snake’s Hollow would eat up this sacred state, then the country of our home, proud and wicked, then drown the entire world, alive.

Granmama twines the yarn of her knitting round her fingers and pulls it taut. She has made a poppet for blessings. She draws out oils and herbs to anoint the Snakes Hollow spirit doll with: “Oh May, you have her spirit, you know. Marie Laveau was a woman of wealth, leisure, and pleasure, and she dealt with the dead as we all do: buried them six feet down. That’s the best anyone can ask for. A railroad spike in their hearts so that they don’t return, the good old Laveau Midsummer protection ritual, and then the boundaries between the living and the dead are held fast. But people forget, and don’t bury them sinner’s corpses proper anymore, and hence the dead rise nowadays. We Laveaus are a long line of strong women with spirit, magic, and the sight, us three women hot as your momma’s jambalaya. You ever see the Dead without your asson, you either fight them, improvise, or you run. Now my child, my star girl, my honey crisp! Never forget to pray, for a prayer a day keeps the Dead away, and in time, your magic will bloom. In time I’ll teach you how to make bones roll in their graves and to dance the banda with the ancestors. When you come of age, even the silver boat of the moon over the Mississippi will not be out of reach for you.”

She gives the Dead a fierce look. They wail and clang, rotting. They’re all damn well scared of Snake’s Hollow’s rightful guardian, as Pepper Laveau has been for decades. Granmamma continues.

“I can feel the Ghede in my bones, at Legba’s crossroads, that cane knobby kneed trickster is stirring his spirit soup. Hah! He ain’t come down in a fete in seven years, not since the time you was ten. Children, I think it’s about time for us to go to sleep and get this wicked business over with. Don’t want no rougarou stealing you two away.”

“Won’t let it happen to May on my watch again,” Pharah says softly.

I flinch.

I remember the first time that granmama’s wards failed and the zombies came marching in, when the blackness swallowed me alive in the thick of the woods. Sometimes, even the best of our enchantments aren’t enough.

I first met Raff then: my angel of sunshine came like a gong out of the ether, with clarion bell wings and a face like a lion and his famous long, flaming broadsword. The nights are growing longer, and it is the decade long anniversary of when Raff came roaring into my life, and the cursed hours and hazy days began to drown Snake’s Hollow in the Devil’s blues.

It is a story I do not like to tell, but comes to haunt me each Summer Masque of Midsummer delight – and pain - all the same.

The curling shells of fallen leaves are orange gold and burnished like the brass of an old lighthouse. Just like that day seven years ago. Granmama catches a lion’s mane soft leaf, so tawny and intangible, and as the pages of my life spill into my seventeenth year, I feel like a tree shedding her own leaves. Raff is sitting beside Granmama, Pharah is palming her gris gris bomb, and then the darkness stretches like snakeskin across the firmament, and he coaxes granmama into sleep. She’s too old to hold back the Dead alone, and now it is my duty to make sure Pepper (for my granmama is spicy as gumbo, but that’s also her God given name) is safe, just like she always made me secure all these long years of my fresh clover life.

The hush over the town is palpable, for this is a night of wicked delights, when the demons come out to play, and the Man in Black – Mister Carrefour - spins dice, and the elusive, nameless Black Rider who brings the curse and killed Lailah Laveau rides as Mister Carrefour opens the shadow gates of the Petro Nation. Thank god I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting him in the peristyle, but Pharah’s parents Mambo Jacquie and Houngan Marc Montanee sure do have Carrefour stories… I shudder, trying to prepare for this accursed moment when bravery is demanded of the handmaidens of New Orleans, not fear of what was and shall be, which burbles ripe and sick in me like a poisoned brook, my terror palpable.

Like momma and granmama, I must be strong.

“Raff, is my family safe? Is the town secure and tucked in like a convent?” I ask, my spyglasses out. My spyglasses are spotted with blood, from when the alpha rougarou took their first bite out of me when I was seven. It was terrifying, to have tasted death like that, and I still have a scar in the shape of a wolf’s mouth on my right leg to prove it.

The Dead march forward, about to breach. Pharah throws a gris gris bomb at one, and the mucky corpses collapse into dust as her red gris gris powder melts it down to Abel. We better put our wards up fast, and right now, no time for hesitation!

The sight of the zombie triggers me. The scar twitches as I remember.

“Please, not like last time,” I whisper, frightened. “Not like a wicked decade years ago.” I grip my granmama’s decorated beaded gourd of a treasured asson with a death rattle, my heinous childhood trauma flashing across my mind’s eye.

“May, May?” Raff asks, but the flashback has already begun, ferried on by the damned Dead’s winds fast approaching -

I was lost after playing hide and seek with Pharah in the woods at the end of our cul de sac on Friday the 13th of the Summer Masque of Midsummer, crying out for momma and daddy, but suddenly granmamma had a heart attack, and thick darkness consumed the Spanish moss. The defenses of Snake’s Hollow fallen through my spasming granmamma, with me far too young to protect myself, I heard howling.

The dreaded rougarou pack that haunt the edge of town had broken through granmama’s wards and started out for her next of kin, chomping at the bit to come and get me. The werewolves of the swamps had been waiting all this time. One scrappy female rougarou cornered Pharah, and she cried out for me, but to no avail. The gigantic, vicious alpha male rougarou held me fast by his yellow foaming teeth. Granmamma, convulsing herself, was beyond helping me.

I somehow even at that lamb off the bone tender age, through my screaming and sheer determination, reached out to the Heavens and pulled Raff down like a turnip out of the air with my messianic hands. He came blazing out of the ether holding my hand, then sliced and diced the rougarou to midnight bits.

I’ve owed my guardian angel Raphael my life ever since.

I feel hot hands in my braids. A holy knife carves me back to the present. It is Raphael. He squeezes my shoulders and kisses my crown.

“You’re safe, May, your whole family is, please don’t worry, my flower springtime child.” Raff brushes granamama’s hair back from her brow: “It’s as safe as it’s ever been on Midsummer, sweet Mayflower, and you’re a thousand times stronger now then you were ten years ago. I’ve made sure of that. You’re now my partner in crime in all things holy. Don’t worry your braids into sailor’s knots. Through grace, I’ll drive back the darkness like I do every All Saint’s Day. All I need is your song and asson! Now, my little Cherubini, sing!” Raff declares mightily, voice like a foghorn on the Gulf.

“Land ho, Raff-ay-el!” Pharah cheers him on, rooting and tooting hog wild like a Mississippi train on the lam.

My archangel Raphael draws his flaming longsword from its scabbard and touches the hilt to set it alight, the heavenly effulgence of his blade shooting through the darkness. The zombies and rougarou howl at its glory and retreat, and Raff’s whole body glows orange like a citrus flavored dawn.

“I’ll do anything to protect you, my bosom girls. Your happiness and security is my duty. Now pay me in Summer Masque candy, little lady. I have a heaven-sent need for chocolate. You ready, May and Pharah?”

My reverie of my past injury lifts, and duty settles into my bones.

“Yessir!”

I hand him a Snickers, and then it’s off into the darkness my archangel Raphael goes, roaring the sacred names of God as if this is the War in Heaven. The Shem HaMephorash echo across the glen.

But Raphael isn’t alone. I sing a song in Kreyol granmama taught me to keep back evil, securing Snake’s Hollow even more, Pharah’s voice joining me as she throws my potions and her gris gris bombs at the haints, rougarou, and zombies:

Lafanmi o, an n rasanble nan demanbre a,

Oh my kith and kin, let’s assemble at the home ritual,

n pral fè seremoni an.

we’re going to do the ceremony.

Limen balenn nan – o an n rele lwa yo.

Light the candle – oh let’s call the lwa.

Sonnen ason an – rele Papa Legba.

Shake the rattle – call Papa Legba.

Nan kafou a, o nou angaje.

At the crossroad, oh we’re in trouble.

Papa Legba – louvri baryè pou lwa yo.

Papa Legba – open the gate for the lwa.

I shake granmama’s asson rattle and light a candle for Papa Legba, the gatekeeper of the spirit world and my best friend. Pharah cusses a haint down to hell, and eggs it with another gris gris dust bomb. This one turns the wicked corpse to smoke.

We continue to sing the Kreyol song of our kin on repeat, our silhouette voices lambent and wailing, like midnight wolves of God.

I can feel Leggie watching me, then I hear his precocious pet dog, a little yappy Pomeranian named Snoopy, bark and brush up beside me, and then there is the tap of his cane on my head then shoulders as if in blessing.

“You sing proud and bold, my lambent music box,” Legba whispers.

I smile and belt out the lyrics on repeat.

“Shine your little light of the world on that god dang darkness, my little spring chicken.” Bald Leggie squeezes my cheek. “Glow!”

My song carries out through the darkness, joining Raff’s fire, and I open the gate for the lwa, the saintly spirits serving in between humans and Bondye. The candle flame turns bright blue and I see images of the Erzulie Sisters, Damballah, Ogou, Baron Samedi, and Maman Brigitte – the leaders of the lwa – dancing to keep the darkness away from New Orleans and its small town guardians like Snake’s Hollow. The leaders of the lwa reenact cool Rada dances of the heavenly court, fiery Petro dances of the dark court, and the sensual Ghede dances of the dead court, forming a rainbow on the threshold between Earth and the afterlife that arches from my porch to the woods.

The kings and queens of the lwa’s dance crescendos, and the proud old orange tree by our fountain out front in momma’s rose garden gives off a citrusy scent. Raff returns, having driven the demons back, and my archangel picks an orange down for us from granmama’s gardens for us three to devour. With the lwa’s blessing, I close the gate, and I hear Leggie in my ear whisper in his creaky staircase voice:

“Bondye bless my fierce little gator girl, May. You done good, my bon chile of the springtime breeze.” He claps me on the back with his rickety hand.

I give Leggie a slice of the orange. He smiles and bites right in.

“Have some of my soup, my sweet bon chile!” Leggie urges, and I slurp some up from his big wooden spoon. It tastes like crawdads and Crystal hot sauce.

Bondye is God, God is Bondye, and Papa Legba is as close to Saint Peter as a lwa can get. He twists the celestial key over his otherworldly soup shut, the waters of the Dead retreat, and moonlight illuminates the cul de sac. The lwa eat etouffee and then, they dim from the apparition of St. John’s Day. Erzulie Danto and Erzulie Freida have fed them well.

“Well done, my little warrior,” Raff says lovingly. “Time to tuck your granmama Pepper in to the safe haven of sleep, and bid your beloved Pharah sweet dreams,” he says, tending to the rightful matriarch of the Laveau family line, “Hot” Pepper May Laveau.

Raff carries granmama upstairs to lull her further asleep to a hymn, and our Friday the 13th Midsummer duty is done. “Hot” Pepper smiles in her dozing peacefully, and I know that I’ve done her well and proud. Granmama used to do the same rituals as me to keep the curse back annually (Gabriel was her angel, not Raff. It cycles each generation, the archangels, and they leave us when we grow up and turn twenty one), and Pepper taught herself witchcraft from an early age on. The spirits of the forest were her only teachers, toadstools and moss and poisonous nightshade granmama’s soothsayers just like Marie Laveau learning wildcrafting and hedgewitchery from the backwoods over 200 years ago.

We have held back the darkness until the end of next year’s Midsummer, and saved Snake’s Hollow from drowning in the Dead.

I kiss Pharah goodbye.

Raff tucks me into bed and sings me Blue Moon to sleep. The only person to sing it better than him is Ella Fitzgerald, but you can’t expect an angel to compete with a goddess like her. I fall asleep to the cadence of my angel’s baritone.

I wake up an hour before sunrise, and I swear I can see a ghostly Woman in White hushing me from my bay window with a spindly rotten index finger. Lailah? I rub my eyes, bleary, but it is only the wind. Apparition or not, if there was one in the first place, she has vanished without a trace.

Jesus winks at me again. “Did you know I’m everyone’s dad? I’m my own grandpa -

“Shut it, Yesh,” I sigh, flipping him the finger at his Johnny Cash reference. Usually, the crucifix sings Cash or Cohen.

I sigh, rolling over, restless.

In the dark, the Dead can never remember how to use their voices, and when night comes bitter as black coffee to Snake’s Hollow, even witches like me and the Woman in White are lost.

Bondye forbid I ever become lost like Lailah May Laveau.

Chapter 3 Chapter Text

The pain is the only thing I laugh at

In these wicked nights

The winters come, the sun turns, and the dance of life brings me to young womanhood. Seventeen years old, and the burden falls on me now to save all of Snake’s Hollow. Darkness is my tale, and to the roots of the swamps all Louisianans return.

Tonight, Pharah and I keep watch on the ghost hill.

Granmama always says that the crawdad whispers in her mud chimney to her children, “Grow,” with the Queen of New Orleans speaking in the thick honey tones of the Louisiana breeze and the swamp song of the sinful southern nights to us Southern women.

But to grow here, where the generational curses of Creole and Cajun families abound, and gris gris dust blows on abandoned carnival winds, means that the tar pit years bring pain, and that the sins of Cain haunt witches like us.

Outside of Nod, our names are cursed, and no one ever does favors for a witch.

That blackness of my hometown backwater, Snake’s Hollow, has crept down our braided hair of the enchanted Laveau line of Naamah and Tubal Cain, through our mother’s mother’s mother’s Queen of Sheba’s coiled locs of generations. My ancestress, that African madrigal of a ruler, walked across a floor of mirrors in King Solomon’s court to declare her wisdom, only to reveal the fire in her rebellious legs down below on tiles of glass. King Solomon may have cheated her out of her magick, but Bondye didn’t, and the Queen of all of Sheba was a woman of power like us.

I got fire in my limbs too. Us Laveau woman, we are made out of the flames of the Ophanim, churning luminaries of the celestial spheres incarnate into sleek, curvaceous wildcats of women. We are women of magick. We are women of power.

We are women of Bondye, the Good God up above in voodoo in the promised land of Gineh, or our ancestral homelands of Heaven, served by angels and lwa – saint-like guardian spirits - alike.

The sins and triumphs and songs of those first Laveau witches in Haiti and Africa that sing in my blood sink through the thick black mud of Lake Pontchartrain. The curses and strangled cries and moans of pleasure of all Laveaus before me swim like pus into the creeping husks of cicadas on the swaying maidens of Spanish moss. The strangler fig and chokecherry are alive, and they are weeper’s woes that choke trespassers trying to take a gander at the pleasure dances that Marie Laveau’s ghost still leads on the bayou backwaters the night before Midsummer.

Marie Laveau, the fabled “Voodoo Queen of New Orleans,” and my most prominent ancestress, appears to this day each St. John’s Eve, the night before Snake’s Hollows annual Summer Masque, when the Devil walks the barren ground and crushes burnt July leaves for their sacred spice under his cloven heel.

Ghosts can be trapped in cycles of time, and they are believed in in Voodoo, with the spirits of those remembered and those we forgot replaying scenes of memories and taking possession of bodies during the Ghede dances, ripples across the water of fractaled years. The Ghede have unfinished business, and they never shut up at a fete unless fed the Dead’s favorite drink, piman. I brew it for them each fortnight, before Pharah’s parents hold the fetes. Fetes are like fancy parties for the lwa, decked out in the regalia of the cool Rada spirits, feisty Petro Nation, and lascivious Ghede dead.

Us Laveaus, we have many ghosts, my damned great granmama Lailah included. She hasn’t dared to show her face in the peristyle, or our house of worship, with pounded dirt floors that soak up the salutations of Snake’s Hollows families and bring us closer to Bondye. I’d never want to meet Lailah, great granmama be damned or not. I’m too much like her. She’d spirit me away to the wastes and ruins, an Anima Solas, and then even my bones would curse the soil, turning granmama’s garden fruit of the vine into twisted weeds of despair.

But Marie Laveau is a benevolent ghost and leads Damballah, the king of the sweet Rada’s, courts in the afterlife. The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans is about angelic as an ancestor can get, an enchantress par excellence and the beloved mother of American Voodoo to this day. It is this preeminent witch that Pharah and I have come to see like we always do, to pay homage to the first lady of the Petro and the Rada.

Marie Laveau, leader of my ancestral faith, is a swaying foremother of mine who looms high and bright and mighty over all of Snake’s Hollow, this shaded town of her and my birth. In the 1800s, she oversaw judges and juries, hairdressers and haints, in her little salon in the heart of the French Quarter.

Like the Biblical regent that was her ancient foremother, Marie Laveau was the Queen of Sheba of the dames and belles of Southern balls of the swamps, with girls of all classes and races coming to her to right abusive spouses, make young lads fall in love, and to keep their carefully coiffed beauty. But, to the rich French and English, Marie Laveau was the Black Madonna of the Damballah pleasure dances held at Congo Square - that stinking bed of snakes and sin where slaves fresh from the Atlantic were sold to the highest bidder.

Only, those so called “pleasure” dances were cryptic dances, and they empowered the slaves, not meant for prying eyes, making no sense beyond enchantment to the slavers, uninitiated into voodoo as the slavers were.

Granmama raised me on Marie Laveau’s stories, and my brilliant granmama, named Pepper for her honesty and furthermore, for her biting wit, never lies, come hell, high water, or the Devil playing the blues as Pepper Laveau sweeps the doorstep of his sins.

Granmama sure would sweep Satan’s ashes straight into Jesus’ fiery lake, bad back of hers be damned. She’s raised me on stories of Marie Laveau, and it brings me great honor to be considered the next “Marie” by Pepper and the Montanees. Momma and daddy are more skeptical, but they know that the faith of my granmama and Uncle Freddie is undeniable, and flowers bloom in granmama’s wake, her footsteps tilling miracles, so my parents have to believe in the spirits a little. Like any good family, they tend the altars to the dead, Christ, and the lwa anyways, skepticism aside.

Granmama raised me on Marie Laveau’s stories, and Pharah too. Nothing else to do on a hot Louisiana summer night than drink underage wine and listen to the stories of your elders over jambalaya on the swing on the porch as cicadas sing solemn songs.

A witch par excellence and self-made New Orleans royalty, queens and generals sought out Marie Laveau, from the Marquis de Lafayette to President Washington, and with a hot hot pepper, or a sacred rattler stuffed up with mojo juice, gris gris dust, and secrets, Marie Laveau could make the police dance circles on her porch in blazing confusion as they came knocking down her door for her potions, only for the blue pigs to run away. Marie Laveau could set hounds on her enemies’ heels, and she sure did hold all of Louisiana under her spell for generations. In court rooms, she would put hot hot peppers under her tongue, and command the jury and judge to rule her way no matter the case presented.

But unbeknownst to the hokey New Orleans tourist shops, there were two Maries – Marie Laveau’s daughter took up her mother’s mantle when she passed away, and I am named after her, May Uriel Laveau, as all my ancestors have been ever since. I’m the latest in a line of “Maries” – but that doesn’t mean that the first Marie is anywhere near gone. After all, Laveau dead have staying power, if that’s one thing right as rain in March, and sure as snow on Christmas Day, it’s that after death, we linger.

After all, each night, great granmama Lailah comes a calling. I do my best to avoid her poltergeist.

But there’s more to my old time faith than ghosts and ghouls. Here in Snake’s Hollow, the Dead take many forms, and bear many, many names. Tonight, they feast under the auspices of Marie Laveau and Dr. John Montanee, her rival of old, a bokor par excellance.

I’ve seen them with my own eyes, the monsters of the swamps, swaying to Marie Laveau’s serpent hiss and Dr. John Montanee’s donkey jaw rattle, with the Dead haunting my backyard every Friday the 13th. It happens every year on St. John’s Eve, as all hauntings do, cyclical swipes in time in the enchanted backwaters of the bayou. Then, restless, the Dead attack Midsummer, all for granmama, Pharah, Raff, and Leggie and I to drive them back to Hell.

In Voodoo, water carries ancestors, spirits, and Simbi Makaya, the sorcerer snake king of fresh water, summons the dead up to swampy grit normally, but on Saint John’s Eve, under the banner of Marie Laveau, the kindly snake lwa Damballah reigns supreme at a fertility feast for the ages, as the dead are the ones who fructify the earth with their bodies. Sex and death, those two sacred tenets of our country faith are always connected in Voodoo.

It is quite the spectacle, seeing the haints and rougarou and ghosts in these swampy lands of Canaan feast upon the flesh of Leviathan like the pure at the End Times.

“This, my dear, is the promised land,” granmama always says. “Ain’t nothing to it but that good old time faith and spirit.”

I sit in a tuft of heather and duckweed on a ridge by Lake Pontchartrain’s backwaters on St. John’s Eve, watching the fireflies form a wedding veil over the placid, mucky waters. The stars above are ghostly Spanish merchants sailing into port at New Orleans with spices, gold, and sugarcane.

My girlfriend Pharah Montanee, age 17, with a free-flowing burst of curls whose tendrils blossom like a rose, her baby hairs making Ss out of coconut oil slicked back on her dark amber forehead, sweats as she squeezes my hand, munching on one of my famous tomato mayo sandwiches from our picnic basket. She’s the daughter of our town’s houngan and mambo, Voodoo priests at our local place of worship, or peristyle, and Dr. John Montanee was once Marie Laveau’s rival, setting up a bokor, or sorcerer, shop across the street from Marie Laveau’s salon.

Our ancestors’ contesting and tricks and fights were like Simon Magus and Saint Peter’s rivalry from the Biblical times of old, always trying to outdo each other with their godly magick. However, in the afterlife, Marie Laveau and Dr. John Montanee have joined forces to preside over Snake’s Hollow as spirit king and queen.

Still, sometimes I think, if they saw Pharah and me kissing, our forefathers and foremothers’ clans would roll in their fancy, drunken tourist-frequented graves if they found out their great great great or so grandkids were dating!

A Montanee and Laveau, joined in love. Me and Pharah forever. Who in nine scorching hells would have thought that up in the eighteenth century?

“The revelry gonna start yet, May Day? You think that silly old overgrown seagull angel of yours, Raphael, was drugged up with enough milk and chocolate chip cookies by you and your granmama to let us “impressionable teenagers” sneak out to see the spook spectacular? Damn did Raff-ay-el’s canary yellow Sunday suit in church today sure look an awful lot like a pimp suit. He even had a little purple paisley handkerchief-”

“Ugh, please don’t bring up Raff’s fashion sense again, I swear that man is allergic to common dress rules, and is blind to his reflection in the mirror, everything always clashes,” I moan, rolling my eyes. “Hmm, smell that… piman on the air. Baron Samedi’s sacred drink.” I refer to the lwa of death and sex and one-eyed ruler of the dead. “Ghedeland’s grim reaper gates are opening up. I’m guessing the ghost dance starts soon. Bet you five bucks I’m right.”

“Bondye be willing. I’ll gladly pay. Oh, hey, get out the popcorn, it’s gonna be good girl!”

I hand her the chili powder popcorn we microwave popped in baggies before coming on down to the bayou here in will o’ the wisp lanternlight, and Pharah crunches away on the kernels like a beaver chowing down on balsa wood.

I take out my bloodstained spyglasses and take a peek at the snakes of the south gathering at the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, silent witnesses to the ghost of Marie Laveau’s St. John’s Eve Damballah dances. First, it stinks of Simbi Makaya’s rotting vegetation and sulfurous roots, then the gates of the Rada open, that cool white toned pantheon who favor sugar, sweets, and calm.

Damballah, the kind snake king of our spiritual homeland and the leader of the Rada lwa, with the lwa the guardians of Gineh, the Voudon spirit world of Pharah and I’s folk Catholic old time faith, begins to hiss under the sloe black waters.

A great albino rainbow serpent eye emerges, blinking hastily, under the muck of the hidden backwaters through the lens of my spyglasses. Damballah’s big old rainbow eye rolls in his white scaled head, the silver slit pupil narrowing, and it is the size of a car. Hot damn, it’s about to get interesting.

“Have a looksie, PharBear,” I laugh, ribbing her, tickling her elbow, and she guffaws, then swipes my spyglasses. The instrument is stained with rougarou blood from the attack where Raff saved me in the second grade, and Pharah’s jaw drops open a country mile as Damballah’s white serpent form emerges from the waters.

His albino rainbow scaled body is as big as a house, and he begins to knot his body into curious curlicues and S shapes like the ancient secrets stewing in Papa Legba’s gumbo pot. Then, Damballah forms a staircase out of his body of coils, and the ghost of Marie Laveau emerges from the water, candles in her hair like an ethereal halo, her skin sandalwood, her eyes light woodworked brown, and her bark brown curls done up in a pearl laced chignon.

Resplendent as a rose, Marie Laveau is dressed in a puffy purple, tiered damask dress and black ribbon corset. The ghosts of her court rise with her – the girls from her hair salon dance, the slaves she freed sing, the fancy Creole and Cajun “quadroons” as they used to be called twirl, all cavorting around the belle of the ghostly ball.

Marie Laveau stands on the crown of Damballah’s head, a radiant angel, blue light emerging from her ghostly, translucent form, with white starshine falling from her candle wreathed head as the summer solstice reaches its apex. The sun dyes the sky a sailor’s warning, and Pharah and I, the witch queen and bokor king’s favored descendants, are shipwrecked wanderers on the Gulf of Mexico, a formidable piratical caravan carrying spices of ancestral memory stranded ashore to Lake Pontchartrain.

“Wow,” Pharah whispers, leaning into me, and she pecks me with a quick kiss on my cheek, then her eyes widen like the bottom of a Hershey’s Kiss. “She’s beautiful. Marie Laveau looks just like you, you know: she has the same cheekbones, the same proud mouth, and exactly the same almond eyes.”

“And look whose got your pixie nose and rambunctious smile!” I point:

Dr. John Montanee emerges from the waters in a top hat and waistcoat, sauntering upwards full stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. He has a donkey jaw bone rattle and string of rosary beans like those we buy at botanicas, laced in raffia that he clasps tightly in prayer.

The spirits dance around the bokor and mambo, the most famous sorcerer and the most revered priestess of the American Voodoo faith, and the gooseflesh of the taint of the haints crawls across my skin. Pharah shivers in my arms, locked tight like a secret.

The rougarou, or bayou werewolves, howl, and Damballah begins to pound his tail on the muck, creating a syncopated, sensuous rhythm.

Marie Laveau sashays her hips, takes out a fan, and declares: “My court! Come my daughters and children, my sons of the honey wine of lavender fields: let us ripen the land of Louisiana for harvest for our sweet as cornflower descendants. Damballah, my kind snake king, bless Snake’s Hollow, the fields of New Orleans, and the orange trees and lemongrass, and reach down into the soil to our ancestor’s bones, drawing on that ancient, proverbial Prodigal Son power of those who tilled and toiled and lived true six feet below in order to weave our descendant’s and city’s fertility anew!”

Damballah hisses, and begins to sing in a serpentine tongue, his forked appendage flickering to the music of the dancing spirits, haints, rougarou, and ghosts. The dead ride the night wind of wicked yet blessed desire, and the music of the peristyle – the lwa’s seat of worship – is alive in this backwater wetland.

“Come! Haints, hauntings, and humble men. Take lovers and feast upon the flesh of Damballah, like the Leviathan fished up after Revelations and served to the penitent resurrected in New Jerusalem by Bondye himself! Erect the pillars of fertility to bless Louisiana under the banner of the moon of our ancestors that came from Haiti, France, and England! We are the watchers at the gate, mis amors!” Dr. John Montanee crows, taking playing cards and revealing an Ace of Spades. He offers it up to Marie Laveau, who takes his hand, and they begin to tango to the tune of the night.

The rougarou, or bayou werewolves, yip and bark and begin to descend upon Damballah, who lays out like Aslan on the Stone Table and offers up his godly flesh to his children.

The moonlight knit werewolves tear into the white, sparkling fluorescent flesh of the World Serpent, and eat of the sacred snake stuffed full with Marie Laveau’s herbs and secrets. The spirits laugh, the ghosts – who cannot cross water, but must remain on earthen ground at all times - begin to sing in angelic choruses, waltzing, foxtrotting, sashaying, as the rougarou feast upon their Father.

Damballah hisses beatifically, and his flesh regenerates wherever there is a wound like Christ’s Sacrament, for Damballah is the endless banquet of our sacred ancestors in Gineh up above. The ghosts and haints, or twisted dead who become scions of hollows and hills, their curses animating them from the Seven Deadly Sins, begin to partake of this Sacramental feast. The flesh of Damballah flushes the curses from the haints, bathing them in Pentecostal flames, and for one night, the haints are freed from their witherings. The blackness of Snake’s Hollow’s curse fades from their tempered flesh, and the wicked haints are born anew, like a snake shedding its sinful scaly skin.

Marie Laveau’s ghost laughs to high heaven, and the candles in her hair glow white blue hot, like my mother’s Swedish ancestors on St. Lucia’s Day, their hair braided with tapers. My ancestress Marie Laveau eyes Pharah and me, and she suddenly beckons with her fan for us to come penitent to her in prayer. Marie Laveau gives a ripe, jolly laugh and winks, then begins to flick her fan coyishly.

“Uh, Mayday, are we actually going? Did she – did she just invite us? Is there a frog on my face? She just pointed at me. A ghost of New Orleans most famous ancestor. Pointed at me.” Pharah looks at me suspiciously. “Marie’s never noticed us before. It’s my pimple, isn’t it. This damn spot may as well be the size of a frog…”

“Oh, girl, stop it with this pimple, you’re beautiful! She wants to bless us!” I insist, gathering my spyglasses and taking my girlfriend’s hand. “Gotta be a good thing, for their fertility dance, to have a blessing from our ancestors. Couldn’t hurt, right, PharBear? What, you spooked to Salem over a ghostie? We’ve fought off vampires, zombies, haints, and the rougarou before, no friendly ghost should frighten a scoundrel like you.”

Pharah purses her plump plum bottom lip and I nibble her mouth, laughing. She swats me away, hand on her petulant hip. “Flirt! And of course I’m not scared. We’re seventeen, in twelfth grade… I’m sure Marie’s just gonna give us a lave tet.” Pharah pulls me up from my vantage point and we go twirling and laughing out onto the grassy bank. Damballah rolls like DNA as his flesh regenerates, and it tastes like manna as a rougarou hands us some sashimi of snake.

We partake of the Eucharistic feast, and a haint pours us a glass of mulberry wine. Pharah hoots: “This is the swell life, Mayflower girl! Underage drinking! God, momma and daddy would ground me for months if they found out I been drinking ghost wine - c’mon, Montanee and Laveau girls, let’s go meet our great great great gramps and grandma!”

We giggle and go racing to the waters, swigging underage moonshine wine, through the frolicking frenzy of reveling spirits. Marie Laveau and Dr. John Montanee smile mischievously at us, pausing from their Slant Serpent Taniniver dance.

“Oh, my daughters,” Marie Laveau’s ghost welcomes us, pulling her old, hand-painted Tarot cards from her skirts pocket. “Oft times have I waited for you to come to my side and ask for my blessing, so this midsummer moon, I simply had to demand your presence. The damned blackness of the Petro grows stronger by the year. You two will save all of New Orleans.”

Pharah and I share a knowing look. “We will?” I ask.

Marie Laveau nods, her candle flames shifting to neon green, like a junebug’s mating dance in a sticky night of summer seraphs stitched in silk: “You will, but beware, the Man in Black, Met Kalfou, brings the obscured Black Rider, Lady of Bone Arms, who me nor my Petro or Rada flock know whose name or origin she is, only that she curses this town. You two have done well on your nightly rounds, fighting the darkness back. But soon, it will take all of Heaven and Gineh to hold back the putridity of the Black Rider.”

“How so? The haints are getting bolder, Mother Marie, is it cause of her?” Pharah whispers, spooked a lighter shade of sienna.

Marie Laveau lowers her fluttered appliqued fan and gazes at us with almond cocoa eyes, her irises like black pearls encased in the treasure trove of her skull, only to be outshone by her diamond mind. Marie Laveau elaborates: “I have seen, in the scrying crystals of the caverns of the Ghedeland, a marching darkness of some kind of ancestral stain. A being that the Erzulie Sisters, Damballah, and even Baron Samedi nor I can discern. There is an illness in the bones of this town, and it will take new life and new blood to heal it. The curse is rooted here, where I was born, where our ancestresses were born, where the first Laveau was brought over in chains. You two are the Tam Lin tithes to Hell. But unlike Bluebeard’s wives, you will illuminate the darkness, and drag the Devil and his accomplice back into the providence of god-fearing souls. The Man in Black, the ancient Horny Witchfather of old, and the accursed Black Rider cannot stand long with you two young, proud women shining as lambent and bold as the moon. You are stars after a rainy day. Blooming night jasmine in a forgotten enchanted garden. I would expect no less of a Montanee or a Laveau coming of age in her seventeenth year.”

Pharah and I share a curious look. “You think we can break the godforsaken curse, Mother Marie, after all these hundreds of years?” I ask, biting my lip tenderly. It is a question I have never dared to ask, or dream, would have a happy answer.

Marie Laveau smiles beatifically like St. Catherine of Alexandria spoked on a wheel: “My daughters, you will heal everything. Choose a card wisely,” Marie Laveau instructs, fanning her antique immaterial Tarot cards out.

I draw the Fool. “Thank you, Marie.” I gasp. “She looks just like me, down to the hair.”

Pharah draws Strength, a plump and lush Egyptian woman wrestling a desert lion bare-breasted. “Seems about right. Hey, look at my D cups, just like you Mayday. So curvy and cool. I’m a pipsqueak pixie jealous of this card…”

My Fool is a young Southern girl on the pier of New Orleans, about to walk off into the slick waters of the Atlantic rime, and gulls flock around her braids. “Can she walk on water, great granmama, or will she sink?”

Dr. John Montanee’s ghost traces the filigree of gold on the dawn of my card. He shakes his donkey jaw rattle, the rosary beans clacking like rain as the hinge of the jawbone shudders like a Southern Gothic novel. “That Fool can go anywhere she pleases. The Fool is the master of all, and the mistress of none. No sinking into the Gulf for this fabled lady: she swims through the air, alright.”

Marie Laveau gives a husky laugh. “Crack the sky, girls, like a skyscraper.” She narrows her black, black pearl eyes and anoints us with a lave tet with Florida water from a small perfume bottle, blessing us with both hands as she rubs the anointment water into the crowns of our slick curls. My halo of long red and black braids to my waist blows in the Southern breeze, the hot summer sweat sticky on my skin like a droplet on your lover’s breast, and I close my eyes as my foremother’s rose quartz petal energy buzzes a drunken headiness into my scalp in the Florida water anointment. The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans’ strong fingers massage benediction into Pharah and I’s crowns.

“What lives in the blackness, Marie?” I ask. “The Black Rider, right? Who is she? Granmama and Gabriel only ever met her once, and she nearly took all they had.”

“The Black Rider is the mother of all sin, of Lilith’s court, screech owls, bone arms, death, and anyone who meets her’s untimely demise right sudden, but her name eludes even me, seer of all of Gineh…” Marie Laveau says, looking peculiarly upon us. “That’s all I can see in my discernments. Thick curses, the curse that I fought back all my life, and all of my sweet descendants after me, has haunted our tortured women throughout the centuries, down the line of Naamah and Tubal-Cain. The curse swallowed whole your great grandmother Lailah, but it ain’t got me. No, I am of the party of the angels and Gineh, where I reside in my heavenly abode as High Priestess eternal of sweet, sweet Damballah.”

“Lailah – she up to no good?” Pharah asks, right plain and curious

Marie Laveau sighs, fluttering her fan like a monarch butterfly. “The ghost of Lailah Laveau’s regret will come knocking on Christmas, and then falls the spring months, with ripe florid blossoms, and the trial of your souls awaits. I am bound to St. John’s Eve: I cannot aid you beyond this blessing, but know that you may always call on Bondye, the angels, and the lwa, just as I did when I was your age. And Montanee girl, Pharah my dear, you are the heart of this whole operation… do not let my Fool stray too far from the hawthorn path and fall off into the Gulf below.”

Pharah nods her head jubilantly, taking a swig of the bittersweet mulberry wine. “I promise I’ll use my supposedly busty Strength to help May, though I ain’t even an A cup. Damn, this wine is good. Who made it?”

“Maman Brigitte,” Dr. John Montanee hollers, referring to the lwa mistress of the dead, the Irish redheaded wife of Baron Samedi, who is the jovial top hat trickster of Death. “You girls better be good to one another, you hear me? We’ll see you next St. John’s Eve. Here, a gift for you two darlings,” he sings. Dr. John Montanee takes out hot foot powder for me and a lucky rabbit’s foot for Pharah dangling jollily on a keychain.

“Hot foot powder, that’ll come in handy,” I whisper, tucking it into my jeans pocket. Pharah laughs, tickling the paw of the severed, dried rabbit foot.

“Hey look Mayday, an extra limb!” she says grotesquely, swinging her keychain at me.

Damballah rouses, done offering his chest up for an arcane feast of the vittles of Bondye. “My children,” he hisses in beautiful tones. “The moonlight dawns, and the sun goes down, as the dance of life goes on. It is time to return to Ghedeland, with my blessed dead and in the esteemed company of my eternal High Priestess, sweetest Marie.”

Marie Laveau smiles softly, patting our shoulders. “Have faith, that old time faith, May Uriel Laveau and Pharah Jane Montanee, but know that true magick is all about grit, sweat, and spit!” she intones, then in a ruffle of skirts, and a tinkling of bells, the spirits evaporate, and Pharah and I are left with swamp water in our hair and dirt on our knuckles and knees.

Damballah’s flesh turns into cornmeal in our hands, the wine is a wooden burl cup filled abrim with spunk water, and only the hot foot powder jar and lucky key chain are left of the enchanted revelry.

Pharah lets out a whole two minute long breath she was holding in. “Damnit girl, what the hell? They talked to us! Our ancestors talked to us! And we ate the food of the dead! Check me, hot, check me out, real thick and quick, am I a godforsaken zombi?”

I hug my jokester of a girlfriend close and we laugh, dancing off into the glade, our feet in the water. “It really happened, PharBear! Marie Laveau and Dr. John talked to us! They blessed us! We can finally beat Snake’s Hollow’s curse back! You heard what she said – Lailah Laveau is the key, and we’ll beat the Black Rider this spring!” I holler, lifting 4’9 pixie Pharah up in my arms. “Maybe I’ll use the hot foot powder to get Raff to stop snoring on the roof… I can slip it into his sandals when he’s listening to Biggie or De La Soul and he’ll go screaming for the hills.”

Pharah wrinkles her nose. “You don’t mean that, jokester. You love Raff more than life itself. You love Raff more than okra.”

“I don’t love anybody more than my granmama’s garden okra and roasted tomatillos!”

Pharah sticks out her tongue, then before I can react, licks my nose. “Tastes like okra. You had too much gumbo…”

“Oh my god, you’re such a ham,” I laugh up strong to high heaven in the stars, and we go dancing off into the swamps, exploring the spunk water and hoodoo hexes and zombie bones of Lake Pontchartrain. I feel like Erzulie Frieda’s stabbed Mater Dolorosa heart, weeping at the adventures to come. Two parts pain, one part gain, all parts mystery, await our tremulous souls.

“This will be the year of our lives, Phar,” I say as we walk on into the watery abyss, following will o’ the wisps that dance ghostly plies, with the childish trickster spirits as thick as molasses in the muggy mosquito air.

I touch a dainty will o’ the wisp and place it gingerly in Pharah’s hair. “You’re glowing tonight, babe. Let’s go ask Raff what all this nonsense of ghost prophecies means.”

Pharah kisses me sweet and quick like a butterscotch candy, her lips sugar. She lingers a moment too long, then pinches my side. I squeal, batting her hand away, a wreath of damask blush blossoming thick like strawberry cream and buzzing hot across my cheeks. Pharah continues: “And your granmama. They’ll have ideas, they always got ideas. Anyway, they’re making us beignets. I could use a beignet. In fact, I could live entirely off of your granmama’s beignets-

“And then you’d become a pillar like Lot’s wife, but instead of salt, you’d be frozen in powdered sugar, and when I’d kiss you, you’d melt,” I chastise, ribbing her. She flips me off and instead goes dancing, a Calliope madrigal of Apollo’s muses, out of my arms.

“At least I’d be sweet, through and through, unlike your old wicked bones.” She winks. “Okra bones are flimsy.”

“Shut it!”

We banter and baste mischief like a honey baked Christmas ham, and the heaven-sent pair of us go sauntering like Dr. John Montanee back up the path to my parent’s cottage. It is an old Victorian cottage with red trim and the perfect little front porch in the cul-de-sac backwaters of Snake’s Hollow. It takes two hours of wanderlust, wonderful wandering to return home to the Laveau cottage, and when we do, the lights are on in the porch, and my granmama is waiting, a hot plate of beignets in her hand, as Raff reads one of pa’s old automotive magazines.

“My honey pie daughters, you be out up to no good up on St. John’s Eve, stealing hearts from the haints with your woman’s charms, just like Gabriel and I used to do back when we were young on Gabi’s Harley?” granmama teases, her white curls in an updo, wrinkles on her skin like earthen tracks in the sod her father worked for little reward, the land in our flesh, and her big brown eyes brimming over with sweetness. They always reminded me of the gaze of a barn owl.

She hugs us close to her red plaid dress and ample bosom and wipes the mud from our brows. Voluptuous just like me. I get my birthing hips from her, and my heart shaped face. “Oh, my girls, you be smelling of your ancestors and Florida water. I see the Montanees and Laveaus’ blessing especially strong on your souls. Our ancestors wreathe your halos. Whatever mysteries did Marie and John have to say?”

“They blessed us!” Pharah blurts, swinging her lucky rabbit foot. “And gave us tourist shop trinkets they probably swiped straight from Bourbon Street on one of their dead people dates.”

“Sound about right for your old folks,” Raff laughs, closing his car magazine on a red Camaro and mumbling to himself about chrome plating and engine oil. “Ooo, Pepper, are those beignets all for me?” Raff begs, his golden eyes protruding wide like a puppy dog.

“Hell no, you overgrown seagull!” Pharah yelps, swatting Raff’s large white wings away and grabbing the plate of piping hot beignets.

“Mind your manners, lil lady… I once locked the demon Azazel in Dudael for all eternity for stealing my food,” Raff teases, reaching over my girlfriend’s acrobatics of elevating the plate – she’s too damn short – and swiping the biggest beignet for himself.

“Pretty sure that was the Book of Enoch and pretty sure that was the Watchers you flooded out of existence, not my seventeen year old girlfriend,” I say.

Granmama laughs. “Settle down your ruckus you lot, and let’s have a proper meal while the beignets are still hot, girls, and boy.”

“Boy? I’m as old as the universe!” Raphael’s chest puffs out and he simpers, his canary yellow Sunday suit still on. I wince at the purple flower on his lapel and his banana yellow top hat. He looks like a fashion sin. “Robes, Raff, or you’ll mess up your precious suit.”

“Oh, yes, that would be quite inadequate and highly inappropriate for enjoying Pepper’s famous beignets,” Raff mutters, switching into a Roman tunica, his wings wide and loud and proud, and his fresh brown leather gladiator sandals on like an extra from daddy’s old movie Spartacus.

I munch on a beignet, the creamy, buttery goodness delightful. Raff steals the rest of my pastries when I get distracted by a rough staccato rougarou howl. “Hey, you stupid seagull!”

“Snooze during prayer, you lose on an angel’s dare. Sorry, Mayflower, but I’m a growing sweet, according to Hot Pepper over here.” Powdered sugar sticks to his black stubble. Kinda weird that even angels get five o’clock shadows. “Marie Laveau, eh? Never heard of her talking to a human descendant, or Dr. John Montanee for that matter… you two sure are something special, May Uriel Laveau and Pharah Jane Montanee…” he murmurs.

We sit on the porch swing, the hot plate of beignets between us, and granmama eases out my braids of the swamp muck. The will o’ the wisps have multiplied and are fluttering in Pharah’s hair, as if she is the Lighthouse of Alexandria we learned about in World History last year. I put one little flare out with my thumb, and it warms me up right and good as it dissolves on my thumb. “What do you mean, Raff?” I intone. “How are we any different from any other Snake’s Hollow girls?”

“I mean that Bondye works in mysterious ways…” Raff says, then crosses himself and draws holy fire and smoke in the air, his saffron eyes glowing warmly. “You and Pharah are strong, just like Gabriel and Pepper were back in the day, taking New Orleans by storm. Only time will tell if you two can break the curse that has thwarted Snake’s Hollow for generations and that my Father has set me up as the celestial watchdog over.”

We shiver as the blackness rolls in at the strike of 3 AM. The witching hour. Tomorrow is the Midsummer Summer Masque, and the curse will bubble over, so our preparations are ready, Pharah’s gris gris bombs at hand, and my potions spread throughout the porch.

The damned wail and scream, coming crawling forth from the muck. No one can see them, no one can see any of this, or even see Raff, except for me, Pharah, and my sweet old granmama. Magick skips generations often, and my parents were sandwiched as Muggles in the middle of me and Pepper, good old time believers in our ancestral faith, but without the Second Sight in their heart flesh.

Granmama crosses herself like Raff and takes out her asson. She begins to sing a hymn, and soothes the Damned spirits, who crawl back just like the crawdad into the dust.

“They be getting rambunctious,” granmama intones. She shakes a calming rhythm with her asson that settles the dead right down to their marrow sweet bones. “Well, girls, best you two get off to bed. You got volunteering at Adoration tomorrow. And then you gotta help out the Montanees at the peristyle for my son Freddie’s maryaj lwa to the Erzulies. Must be Bondye’s joke, cursing my son with a spirit marriage to two harsh, saintly mistresses. No wonder, cause he ain’t ever bowed down enough to take a simple human wife and get out of his bachelor ways, that the lwa would sweep him right on up. It’s Frederick’s own damn fault for not giving me any sweet grandbabies!”

“Oh, a maryaj lwa, they’re my favorite!” Pharah peaks up, excited. “Okay, May, I’ll go back home, see you tomorrow bright and early to prep for Adoration, then the peristyle!”

We kiss goodnight, and she mounts her cherry red fixie bike and cycles off. I think of her lips and shiver.

“Bye cutie…” I whisper, my heart melting as her petite hips work the gears of her bike and her flowered helmet shines in the moonlight.

“I got a lucky rabbit foot! I’m a lucky girl! Ask me to blow on your dice, you Kings of New Orleans!” Pharah calls, triumphant, as she rounds the corner of our cul de sac and cycles off into the promenade of Main Street where old French architecture still stands and the fancy folks live to this day.

Raphael squeezes my hand. “She’s a good girl, Mayflower. Well, off to Father’s evening prayers with me… that last beignet you have, May… I’m taking quite a holy heavenly liking to it. Why, not giving it to your favorite archangel would surely be a sin in the eyes of my Father -

“Oh fine! God, it’s no fair angels don’t gain any weight, I’m a size sweet 16 and it goes straight on down to my hips, but I can’t help myself with granmama’s soul food,” I harrumph, handing him the last beignet on the plate. He hoots in triumph and rockets off like a drunk seagull to the rooftop with his automotive magazine. We can hear him intoning the names of sports cars as if it is the lineage of Christ and their specific horsepower through a mouthful of buttery pastry and powdered sugar as bright and white as his eagle wings.

Granmama smiles like a Gospel singing Southern saint. She sure has a voice like her idol, Ella Fitzgerald. She says she sang her songs in Birmingham to soothe her long nights in jail after she’d had dogs sicced on her by the blue pigs. That’s how she met dearly departed grandpa Luther. Same cell, same Blue Moon, and eventually, same last name.

“Hot” Pepper smiles like a creaky staircase, clear wrinkles knitting like her fresh made blankets that decorate our cottage to this day: “You sure have been blessed by our most powerful ancestress. You are a blessing, a darn precious blessing, my Maybug sweet of a girl,” my jazzy foremother “Hot” Pepper – who used to play the sax on busker’s corner with her archangel Gabriel on the trumpet and grandpa Luther on the bass - intones, hugging me hard and smelling faintly of the jasmine perfume that she presses fresh from her 80 year old garden with ambergris and bottles with rainwater each spring. It’s my favorite smell in the world. When I turned 17, she gave me a vial. I dot it behind my ears when I want to take Pharah out on dates to the drive in movie theater by the brackish bay.

“I love you lots, old granmama,” I whisper, helping her arthritic form into bed. After I tuck her in, I sit at my window, watching the black of Snake’s Hollow’s original sin paint the town midnight blue.

The church bell tolls on its own, even in my dreams, but no one can hear it but me.

I keep my witness, I the sole Magdalene watchtower. Raff says Mary Magdalene is Jesus’s scribe up in Raff’s starry abode. She also makes good challah. Once, he brought me some of Mary Magdalene’s bread. It tasted like lightning, manna, and dew.

That’s what Magdalene means. Migdal Eder. Watchtower of God. Raff does the best Bible studies, that’s for sure. Can’t get closer to the mandible of God than an archangel that once helped Tobias save Sarah from Asmodeus in the Bible, that’s right for sure. His favorite dish to this day is fish. Better to scare off the Devil with its fumes.

I look at the hot foot powder, and put it on my witch’s shelf with the lwa’s altars and my potions.

Jesus winks at me from his crucifix. Literally, or if it’s the mulberry ghost wine going to my head, I’m never quite sure. Jesus, it turns out, is a winker, Temple table turner, and trickster. When we went to Israel and I whispered to the wailing wall on one of daddy’s professorship trips, I heard Christ tell me a riddle. “What is God’s true name?”

I said “Bondye.”

He said “It’s every child’s first word, wrapped into one chorus. I am. I am. I am.”

He’s not the only one that whispers in the walls:

I hear Lailah Laveau whisper to me from the hanging ground of Sourmilk Hill each night. I groan, turning in my sleep, the curse hard as nails through Christ’s hands as it hammers Snake’s Hollow hard.

“She’s calling again, Bondye…” I mutter, spooked as all Hell. I look up at the boat of the moon. Maybe Mark Twain is steamboating it onto better shores. “Lailah, damnit, go away!” I roll over and groan, shuttering my eyes closed hard against my nightly hauntings. Her papery voice is like sin.

“Suck. Suck, mon petit, my rotten breast, my poison milk, my weeper’s woe -

“Shut it!” I yelp, burrowing into my pillow. I turn on my windup radio to the old timey station to drown her out with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.” Tenderly, as the spirit of the music fills me and his prankster, humorous voice granmama always laughs at, I smile.

In the dark, we all crawl on our knees, blind dumb beggars, and no matter how many beignets one eats, even an angel is starving at God’s door.

In the dead’s lips, we all got different names.

My true name of God?

It mean fresh hellraiser.

Chapter 4 Chapter Text

What am I waiting for?

What there is left is little.

I am tired,

My body aches.

Save me again, Sinnerman…

Raff takes Pharah and I down to the backwaters of Snake’s Hollow’s outskirts to conduct our nightly watchwomen rounds on Saturday at 8 PM sharp, as granmama makes sweet as summertime strawberry jubilee awaiting us for desert as a reward for our daily town patrol. The mangy ragtag three of us – two plucky seventeen year old summertime lovers, alongside a boisterous archangel too big for his britches – are still busy cleaning up the damage from Midsummer Day’s Friday the 13th Summer Masque that roused the damned souls up from the muck of Lake Pontchartrain. This is typical of the St. John’s Day magick that Marie Laveau and Dr. John Montanee summon – balance for life, blood for rain, bones to dust in the Main Street churchyard we all go to six feet deep in time, until Resurrection brings us up fresh and plucky just like spring roses as saints marching on to Revelation Day.

The bayou is brackish, mucky, and full of “neer do wells not worth shucking my daddy’s corn behind the back porch”, as granmama always says. Some college students from Tulane are out smoking menthols. They don’t see Raff of course, so Pharah and I pretend to be out drinking. We tip them off to avoid the backwaters where the haints are, saying there’s gang activity. But for real, this time, the three of us have tracked down a wicked posse of haints. We want to exterminate them Ghost Busters style before a lost child disappears to the clash and slash and dash of their ogrish, duckweed teeth.

Bells chime on the summer breeze as my archangel cuts back thick vines and mosquito buzzing Spanish moss with his flaming, heavy longsword. I can never lift the damn thing up. Maybe like Thor’s hammer, I’m not worthy enough to wield an instrument of Bondye. Or maybe I’m not a six foot seven inch tall celestial man built like a black bear.

My guardian angel sure does eat enough raspberries during our spring vacations in the Appalachians to be Yogi Bear, daddy’s favorite cartoon he always would watch with his grandpa on the oldies station and thus subjected me to a generation later in the twenty first century, and Raphael always hibernates on the roof after stealing all of my beignets. Next thing you know, Raff will dig a hole in the backyard and fill his den with Tupac tapes and daddy’s hoarder’s pile of automotive magazines.

Sometimes when granmama gets drunk, she lets us go out for rides in daddy’s Mazerati that my parents always drive down the road to Tulane, where daddy teaches archaeology and mama is an accountant, but instead no parent is in sight, and an archangel is the one getting speeding tickets.

With granmama sitting shotgun cheering him on, Raphael cruises behind the wheel, driving like a demon, nothing saintly at all about him. Granmama says that all angels are speed demons, and that sports cars and souped up bikes remind our archangels of flying out to fight Samael. Gabi still rides a Harley. Sometimes she takes “Hot” Pepper out for jazz nights, where Gabi plays the trumpet and granmama shimmies. I can never get in cause I’m underage, ugh.

“But think, if we all pooled our money together, we could get a Camaro. I could drive it. I’m an excellent driver,” Raphael prattles on.

Pharah gives him the stink eye.

“Cause we three are so rich, Raff,” I sigh, using my spyglasses to peek around a bend.

“This old song and dance,” Pharah mutters.

Raphael blushes plum. “I’m just saying. I don’t technically have a license. But I am an excellent driver.”

“Not happening! We’re getting a Jeep!” Pharah bursts.

I giggle.

“You two don’t fight fair, making ten times as much money as me. Goddamn Yeshua making me work for fish,” Raphael grinds his teeth.

Raff is trying to convince Pharah and I to split the cost of a used Camaro so he can fix it up for us both. Archangels are constantly broke. Jesus makes the seven of them work for pocket change and fish dinners, always fish, as “a rich man and needle can’t thread Joseph’s coat of many colors, like the Dolly Parton song,” my drunk crucifix always says. And Raff spends all of his money on chocolate anyways. That’s why he’s always begging for me to buy him Peabo Bryson tapes for his busted cassette player he painted yellow with spray paint and his Grimoire of Armadel insignia in black. Damn him for not being able to gain weight…

Raphael only makes $40 a month. Something about forty days and nights for Noah’s ark being worth the day’s bread. Mother Mary pities him and makes him outlandish suits to his exact specifications because she’s a sweetheart for twenty bucks a pop.

Once, for my sweet sixteen last year, Raff got Mother Mary to sew me a dress made of starlight. I wear it when the moon is bright, and it makes me feel like I could walk on air. No one’s a better seamstress than the Virgin Anointed.

Raff’s salary isn’t much. I make more in a day babysitting the local rabble-rousers or dog walking Leggie’s yappy Pomeranian, Snoopy, on Friday nights. I even make a little bit more just helping out the Montanees at the peristyle, our pounded dirt floor house of the lwa where only the funnest of fetes, or parties and celebrations for every Voodoo occasion, are held. Today was extra special sauce. Uncle Freddie’s wedding this morning was bright and clacking like a cowbell. We danced up a Galveston hurricane.

Freddie now has two spirit wives who will make him spoil them, spend thousands of Benjamins on them in offerings and gifts, and make him impotent if he doesn’t follow strict rules, like reserving nights for them, or sleeping in their special head coverings, or wearing his wedding rings. In voodoo, practitioners will often marry “hot” Petro spirits and “cold” Rada spirits in order to balance their human souls out. For example, a typical woman might marry the iron fury warrior Ogou of the Petro, the humble farmer Zaka to bring grounding, and sweet, cool Damballah the snake king of the Rada in order to cultivate the spiritual fruits of success, peace, and harmony in the devotee’s life.

Me? Maryaj lwa ain’t it. I like horsing better. I horsed Erzulie Danto and stomped around going ke ke ke! as her possessed chwal, or horse, today, and got offered goat soup and dressed in a jean apron. My mind always blacks out when that happens, and I’m too rough for Erzulie Frieda to ride. She likes riding girly, precocious Pharah. Figures, since Mother Danto is granmama’s head, or main, spirit, that I would inherit her tendencies.

I now fear for my lusty Uncle Freddie, getting himself into this mess cause he’s a sauntering big business talky pushover. Meek yet bold, spending too much money on gambling, failed romances, and wine, always trying to please his string of girlfriends. Now he’s got two girls that won’t budge. Uncle Freddie had better hesitate to bring back a busty broad from the French Quarter to his apartment from now on. He also better cover up the Erzulie Sister’s altars on his amorous nights bringing girls back home.

Disrespecting a lwa with sex is taboo. Then again, Uncle Freddie is definitely not the shiniest penny in the pail. Still, the maryaj lwa ceremony was a barrel of monkeys full of fun for our societe, or spiritual kin. Pharah and I kissed out back in the offerings courtyard by Erzulie Freida’s altar. Sister Freida fluttered her fan in her chwal, or possessed human, and anointed us with rose water in blessing. My heart muscle has been tingling ever since. Then, Sister Freida went off to flirt with my granmama’s Unprodigal Son, her newly betrothed Uncle Freddie. Ugh. Men.

I sure as hell never want to marry a lwa. You couldn’t pay me four times four times forty dollars for that. Not even hourly salaries of that much moolah. I’ll stick to taking Snoopy around town for sniffs and licks and leaks and taming the neighborhood toddlers.

But Pharah likes Maman Brigitte and La Sirene. Maybe she will marry those feisty mistresses, someday. Marriage to a lwa – being joined bone, body, blood, and soul to the guardian spirits – brings about powerful spirit alliances. No one takes care of their wives and husbands like a lwa does. That is, if you don’t piss them off to Gehenna’s backyard barbecue. Then they could ruin your lives!

We draw close to the haints as my mind wanders, with Raff tracking them down with the nose of a bloodhound.

I have granmama’s asson at hand as my weapon, and Pharah has a sling with her gris gris dust bombs at her waist.

Raff narrows his eyes, his irises a golden blazing yellow like honey on the underside of the moon. Raphael suddenly motions for us to duck behind a wild rose bush.

“Haints are right around the bend, my girls. They’re probably stragglers from last night that didn’t bother approaching the cottage, out looking to feast on something precious. They look stronger than usual, probably bloated from Damballah’s sacrifice,” Raff mutters, hugging me and Pharah close to his broad, tunica clad chest. He smells of sandalwood.

We smell the stench of the haints’ curses of Judas Iscariot on them. Haints are wild spirits who have melded with the land after death, corrupted by the Seven Deadly Sins like murder and rape. Unlike ghosts, who can be good, bad, or in between, and cannot travel over water, haints are curses of the land, haunting hollers and creeks, and they only eat human flesh. If you hear of a little girl or lost boy disappearing into the muddy backwaters of the bayou, or vanishing in the blue green swamps, it means a haint got them, their telltale scarecrow sounds just like the withering bull of the Devil.

“Raff, why do you always dress up like an extra in Spartacus?” Pharah curls her nose, her brows beaten gold and her red eyeliner on her umber skin pointed sharply like a fox’s mask. “That’s the only one of Mr. Laveau’s movies you ever watch.”

My guardian angel looks taken aback, like a puckish deer in the headlights. “What are you playing at! It’s a classic look, girl. I mean, angel wings, tunica, armor, blazing sword, sandals – what, do you think I’m cheap in my dress?”

“Yes, Roman thrift store cheap. You saving these outfits for 2,000 years from the time Sweet Jesus was nailed?” Pharah pushes my guardian angel like a maniac with an angelic cattle prodder.

Well, it works. Raff sure is electrocuted. Anger twinges his brow. “This tunica was handsewn by Mary and the armor was cast by Deborah the Judge like the Mandalorian! It cost me all of last month’s salary!”

Pharah stifles a snort. “You look like an actor for a B movie filming in downtown New Orleans for Hallmark about a Southern Christmas miracle starring Denzel Washington. I can see it now: Miracle on Bourbon Street, starring Raff-ay-el! Hey, why don’t you make the next Sister Act 3 and you can sing for the Pope and inner city kids with Whoopi.” Pharah makes bright light imitations of flashing Hollywood signs with her basket weaver hands. “Pop! And pose! And sing! And strut it on the red carpet, you overgrown albatross!”

“I am not an albatross! You’re as bad as Samael!”

“She’s got a point, Raff, and don’t get me started on your Sunday suits,” I admit, laughing to high Heaven where ladies from church’s Sunday hats upon their proud, proud hair are as high as Babel, pinning God to his throne with their flowers, feathers, and dead looking plastic birds. “It’s overkill. Can’t angels wear, I don’t know, jeans and a t shirt and sneakers?”

“Michael does that. Michael has no class. And all Gabriel wears is something she calls “Gothic Lolita” style dresses. Gabi and her weird fashion phases. I’ll never understand that girl.”

“Ain’t this the archangel gossip hour. Sin against your brother, sin against your sister like a gossiping wife, and you’re the Devil’s brood, Raff-ay-el –“ Pharah begins.

Raphael claps his hands over her mouth and noogies her. “I’m Heaven’s party, a saint, not Satan’s, and you are mouthy as Salome, Pharah Jane Montanee! I look like Idris Elba!”

“No you don’t. We watched The Wire too much this summer, ugh,” I sigh, puckish at the thought of giving Raff ideas about my favorite actor.

The haints, dumb as rocks and made of swamp bits and bobs and decaying flesh, idle about, munching on bones in their horde. They remind me of ogres. One eats a half-dead rat and wails, clanging his corpse and branches. Suddenly, out of left field Robert Johnson blues, Pharah throws a gris gris dust bomb into their midst.

“Strike one, foul haints! I’m gonna drive y’all back to Hell rooting like a thunderstorm!” Pharah hoots, arming herself with more gris gris dust bombs. She brandishes her lucky rabbit foot from Dr. John Montanee and kisses it. “Today’s my lucky day!” she whelps, galloping on her short, slim legs into the haints’ midst.

“PharBear, wait!” I crow, racing after her. “We weren’t ready yet! I haven’t set up the candle!”

“These are all mine, Mayday! Like Rose Tico’s sister sacrificing herself for the Rebellion!” Pharah hoots, and a haint charges towards her, while the others guard their piles of grisly bones.

“Girls, stick to the god damn plan! I’m the muscle, not you, you short little brash Montanee!” Raphael says, charging forward, his longsword ablazing.

As Pharah is bloodlust drunk like Samson slaying the wilderness, Raphael forms a protective barrier around her as she dispatches her gris gris dust bombs like Holi dust. They explode in colorful pigments, a menagerie of spice and anatomy. There are a dozen haints, and they reel in confusion, bubbling, boiling, melting, dust from the gris gris wreaking havoc on their flesh.

“My girlfriend is as hotheaded as a boiled potato, and she ain’t even five foot nothing. I could break her like a toothpick,” I harrumph, taking out my trusty Zippo lighter and drawing a cornmeal veve for Erzulie Danto, who deals with the accursed spirits we send her on our nightly rounds and locks them up in the African savannah of the Petro Nation. Her heirloom breed chickens peck at the haints’ enchanted bones for all eternity as they try to unsuccessfully regrow under the hot savannah sun.

“Okay, okay, asson, I’m counting on you!” I mutter, beginning to rattle nervously as my vial of cornmeal draws Erzulie Danto’s veve. Erzulie Danto is the Black Madonna of the lwa, mother of all, friend to all, loser to none, and all find safe harbor at her breast. She is granmama’s head spirit, right as rain, that’s for sure.

“Whoo, that was close!” Pharah calls, throwing a green gris gris bomb that turns a haint into water. “Raff, on your left!”

“By the might of Adonai, know the wrath of God, you sinful lot!” Raphael bellows, fancying himself Spartacus, slicing a haint to shreds. It crumbles to dust, smelling of rotten vegetables and mothballs.

“Corral them up like Texas longhorns!” I say. “Alright, I’m casting the circle!”

Pharah and Raff take opposing sides and bully the howling haints into a tight, claustrophobic circle. I light the candle over Erzulie Danto’s sigil of a sword through a heart. “Ready, girlfriend!” Pharah calls. The chains of my magick are lit ice blue by Erzulie Danto’s signature, and they bind the last five haints to the ground as roots grow up glowing cerulean around their wicked legs. They kick and buck and howl, to no avail or deliverance.

I begin to sing, rattling my asson in ragged time, and I pour my potion of Crème de Cacao out as her sacred drink that I brewed especially for Mother Danto up above in Gineh:

Erzulie fanm Ti-Jean metres kay la,

Pa rele, se ou pote Houngan nivo,

Pa rele, so ou pote wanga pi fo,

Erzulie fanm Ti-Jean metres kay la,

Paket mwen a tout mare.

Erzulie Ti-Jean's woman, mistress of the house,

Don't cry out, it's you who carries the new Houngan,

Don't cry out, it's you who carries the strongest spells,

Erzulie Ti-Jean's woman, mistress of the house,

My paket is all tied up.

I take out her Petro paket and pour it over her blue candle, setting sparks in the air. It smells of Reve d’Or perfume I coated it with as an elixir, one of her sacred scents.

“My daughter, why, do you have wayward flocks of wild stallion souls for my sweet little chickens to feast upon in my humble yard?” a galaxy skinned, sailor style tattooed, tall Haitian woman in a jean dress, Timberlands, and red headdress appears. She is stately, tall, and statuesque, and she smiles, her famed barn cats wreathing her feet.

“Yes, I bring an offering for the Petro Nation, Mother Danto,” I say in reverence. I close my eyes, use my magick to gather together the souls of the destroyed haints, and take the orbs of their ghosts into my hands, then slip them into Erzulie Danto’s jean apron pocket.

“This pleases me right might good,” Erzulie Danto croons, letting her cats play with a stray haint’s soul that looks like a witching glass orb. “I’ll feed them to my chickens, as always. But my girl, you have a question for me. Ask, do not swallow bitter vinegar. This is not the Crucifixion.”

I sigh in the liminal space of the savannah of the Petro Nation, a warm sub-Saharan breeze making my braids move like Cleopatra’s asps, Medusa ready to strike. “My greatgranmama Lailah… I always wondered, do you have her in your prisons, is she a haint too?”

Erzulie Danto shakes her head no. “No, my sweet dumpling, she is of Mister Carrefour’s flock, sold away by the mysterious Lady of Midnight, the Black Rider. The Black Rider’s armies in the wastes grow, and that foul spirit, the first of my daughters, has hidden her face so long from sweet Bondye I no longer know her name, cannot divine her intention, or unravel the curse of Gineh that creeps like strangler fig into Snake’s Hollow to this day. She has cast a spell, so dark and powerful, it has made all of Gineh forget her name, I her mother included. All I know is that this curse has followed the Laveaus from Haiti on. Marie nearly unraveled it, but even she was not strong enough. That burden falls upon you, dear handmaiden of Bondye.”

I sigh as Erzulie Danto pulls the Crème de Cacao and places it on my tongue. “So it’s all up to me, like they always say, like everybody always says?”

“You think Jesus had it any easier?”

“He was the Messiah.”

“And many girls and boys have held the mantle since. Your temptation in the desert comes soon. My brother Carrefour will call…”

“Ugh, this is awful. I’m so scared, Mother Danto. I’m not nearly strong enough…”

“Swallow the Crème de Cacao, and have my goat stew to fortify yourself. Speak plainly everywhere, and always carry a Sicario dagger like Judas before he swung. Machetes are always better. But a dagger? A dagger will do,” she says, reaching into her pot, and feeding me a chunk of broth, goat, and onion.

I swallow both the Crème de Cacao and goat stew, and heavenly effulgence flows through me, like Erzulie Freida’s blessing at Uncle Freddie’s wedding earlier.

“Go meet Lailah. In her lay your answers. But do not tell Raphael,” Erzulie Danto sings. “Remember the peristyle, remember your one true love, and remember my girl Pepper, dear Laveau.”

And with that, Erzulie Danto closes the gate, and claims the wayward haints for her chicken scraps.

I find myself in a pile of Raff and Pharah, mosquitos buzzing over our sweaty limbs, the three of us covered in florid gris gris dust and cornmeal and candle wax, smelling of spice and musk.

“Strawberry jubilee?” Pharah pokes me, making puppy dog eyes, her pupils wide as the moon. Raphael clears the altar. The pile of bones turns to dust.

“You rushed into battle!” I chide, secretly relieved.

Puppy dog eyes from my beautiful waifish girlfriend.

“Alright, alright, strawberry jubilee!” I sigh, and Raff carries us into the sky in his arms.

“Idris Elba can’t fly,” he mutters, and we join “Hot” Pepper just in time for dessert.

That night, Jesus has his one liners, and Lailah is nowhere to be seen.

I look to the specter of the hanging ground of Sourmilk Hill.

“Come Christmas Eve, seven stabs of the sword, vomiting blood like Mother Danto’s song, to the ghost hill I go,” I whisper to myself as Raff snores like a foghorn.

Something wicked and red stirs in the cul de sac beyond my window. A saxophone wails on the breeze like a fat cat in heat.

“Something wicked this way comes, eh, Bondye? It Bradbury’s Illustrated Man we gotta read in English class.”

Bondye winks at me with his eye the moon.

My crucifix burns blue.

I sleep, and I dream of an eye.

The great big eye of Bondye.

Always, always watching me.

What He means by the tears in his socket, only Raff knows.

And Raff ain’t telling anyone soon.

Chapter 5 Chapter Text

Who is the Night? –

My guardian and my rood.

He believes that I can save myself.

I am not helpless.

But when I am broken by others,

He is a terror.

A nightmare.

The slash of the sword whipping through flesh is His song.

A pool of blood that feeds the ground is satisfaction.

That is who the Night is.

And I am his only Keeper.

“Raff, hurry up!” I call from the swing porch, my blue backpack on and ready with a big old tackle box inside to collect rocks and fossils with for daddy’s archaeology class at Tulane. It’s August, and accursed yellow August in the countryside of Louisiana is hot and muggy down here in the lowlands. The thick, pungent Spanish moss is in full green brilliance like an elf’s emerald eye in our garden, clinging to the old maples and the sycamores fronting the historic Laveau country cottage that Marie Laveau spent her winters in resting and hexing.

“Okay, okay, May-flower. Hold your horses, my springtime child.” Raff flies down from the rooftop. “You ready to go to the quarry and rustle up some mudcats?”

“Yessir! For old time’s sake. I’ll sell the ammonites to the grad students at Tulane and give the good ones to daddy.”

My precocious archangel makes a hoop of his arms and I near tackle him, laughing. It’s seventy degrees outside, perfect swimming weather, and I have my swimsuit on underneath mucking shorts fit for crawdad hunting loose around my waist, and some old sandals tickling my toes. I jump into my angel’s embrace, Raff holds me at the hinge of his waist, and then he spreads his wings and we rocket off into the sky. My neighborhood cul de sac looks like an assembly line for ants way down yonder.

The trees are green tufts like sassafras candy, and we fly into the glacial hills that soar high to the sky by Calf Springs, where the old abandoned quarry that unearthed fossils and rare stones fifty years ago has filled up with spring water over the decades and sits proudly atop Sourmilk Hill. The quarry pool is always warm and makes the perfect swimming hole. Pharah and I hooked up an old rope swing to a bluff five years ago on a willow, and I have full intentions of using it today.

“What are you going to collect today? Trilobite fossils? Ammonites? Old shells from when I was in diapers and this land was sea?”

“Something like that, air captain. Hey, pay attention to where you’re flying, Raff! You ain’t a seagull!” I smile as he holds me fast, the wind rushing in my hair like Mary Magdalene’s tears and playing a bird melody across his wings. The amber eyed archangel’s pinions are all golden white and buttery like the best of my chili popped popcorn, and they always feel like a cottontail bunny.

“Please don’t call me a seagull, May, I’m an eagle. That’s what my wings are, anyways, golden eagle, in fact,” he grunts.

Men like to grunt a lot, especially when their pride is wounded. Same for the burly high school jocks I play at the arcade and skateboard with. Tons of grunting and strutting about. Thank Bondye I got Pharah to skate with and play PacMan when the guys in our group are full of testosterone.

Momma says a man without his pride ain’t nothing. That’s why they are always strutting about the French Quarter in outlandish clothes and hats, drunk off their lousy style and Hurricanes. Luckily daddy and Raff dress sensibly – when Raff ain’t auditioning for an Elizabeth Taylor movie set in Egypt. Raff does wear canary yellow suits to church, though. Kinda looks like he manages ladies of the night, but I don’t have the heart to tell him that.

Not yet, anyways.

Maybe I’ll tell him when I’m dead so he automatically can’t kill me.

“Alright, Mister Eagle. Fly faster, you’re getting fat off my beignets.”

“That’s better! Respect well deserved! I’m an eagle-

“An eagle in seagull clothing.”

“Don’t make me out to be a wharf bird begging for fries.”

“But you do beg for my food. All the time.”

“A man’s gotta eat.”

“You don’t even pay rent. You sleep on the roof. And granmama spoils you with soul food. And I always make you jambalaya.”

Raff gives a belly laugh. “Hey, as an angel, I can’t gain weight. And Pepper lives up to her name: great spicy food, great jazz voice full of soul like Nina Simone, hot as a hot pepper. She makes me Creole through and through.”

I laugh too. “Pretty sure you’re not supposed to be any ethnicity, if angels are everyone’s helpers across countries, war zones, and faiths.”

Raff shrugs. “I yam what I yam,” he says, joking.

I roll my eyes. “Sure you are.”

We summit the quarry pool. His arms tighten around me as he descends. No one can see us flying when he veils us in his Pentecostal glory. We look like a sunspot or bright cloud.

“We’re here, May-flower!”

We alight on Sourmilk Hill and I eagerly climb up the boulder trail to the flat top of the hill where the quarry pool is, making careful sure to avoid the cursed backwoods of the hanging tree where none too pleasant things occurred to the French colonists that practiced witchcraft, and to the thieves and Indians, and the innocent escaped slaves and rebellious Creole girls. That place is like a stain, a blight like an oak bole caused by invasive wasp larvae, parasitic and weathered with age like sour wine in the corrupt Temple. Calf Spring’s swimming hole is much prettier, but in Louisiana, things are often a double-edged sword of grit and sweetness. Light can’t exist without the dark, as Raff loves to say, after all.

Calf Spring feeds into the abandoned quarry and there is bubbling from a rock face where the spring forms a waterfall and fills the manmade excavation site. It used to be a gravel quarry, but now it’s a local swimming hole. I go to the sandy shore that has formed over the decades from the moon’s tides and dig about with a stick for fossils, scaring a crawdad that runs to its round mud chimney. I’ll scrounge up some good old ones for daddy’s grad student’s, that’s for scarecrow sure.

“Raff, where’s Leggie?” I ask, speaking of Papa Legba’s years long disappearance. “I only see him on St. John’s Eve these days. He don’t come down in fetes anymore in the peristyle. He ain’t horsed anyone either since I was a kid. Makes invoking the lwa awful hard, Mambo Jacquie and Houngan Marc gotta improvise. They’re growing sick of it…”

Raphael’s face darkens as he’s stretching like a basking cat laid out on an outcropping, dipping his toes in the clear blue water. He shivers at its lukewarm liquid. His earthen toes curl in his sandals, their glossy nails glowing with divine fire.

“Legba is a ways away. The Black Rider has been getting bolder. Leggie’s all about holding the old spiritual mixing pot at bay, so he brews his stew, manages the pathways between worlds, and makes sure no bad spirits come in through the gates of the Petro, Rada, or Ghede. I promise Papa Legba still talks about you in Heaven and will come back when he can.”

“Like you came when the rougarou got me? And who exactly is the Black Rider?”

Raff sighs and kneads his brow. “You know too much already: if you keep asking us, you’ll end up like your great grandmother Lailah, dead at eighteen. She was my greatest failing… not like you. Nope, don’t press this with me again, sweet May-flower. It’s best if I say as little as possible about the Black Rider! Us old archangels, we watch thing, we’re guardians. You sure will find out who the accursed Black Rider is on your own unless I act fast: the last time Leggie let his evil twin Mister Carrefour tell a Laveau woman where to find the Black Rider, not that Legba even knew who the Black Rider was, obscured in Petro armies as that damned Anima Solas is, your great granmama Lailah gambled away everything to face the curse of this town, and left a one year old behind – your granmama Pepper – and a husband of only twenty years of age alone to raise Pepper May Laveau. That’s no way to exit a life. With not a soul left to pass on the family magic to. What your granmama Hot Pepper learned of voodoo, she taught herself in the backwoods and swamps of Lake Pontchartrain like your ancestress Marie Laveau used to do in the 1800s, when she had her Simon Magus contesting with Dr. John Montanee, which she won all piping hot like a bowl of your granmama’s Crystal Sauce souped up gumbo. Marie Laveau and your granmama Pepper spent the girlhood seasons of their lives gathering herbs, witching in wells, hedgecrafting something wild. Gabriel helped out Hot Pepper as best as that trumpeting Annunciation archangel could, but us angels are never good candidates for teaching earthly magic: we’re beings made of all things holy, not arcane. It wasn’t like Pepper could learn our magic anyways – it takes a special soul to do practical angelic magick. Only Marie Laveau has managed that in recent times, and the Queen of Sheba before her, and in ancient times, Naamah, the first witch of the line of Laveaus! All of those moonlight ladies are your ancestresses, proud and bold as the boar of the Lord. But, there’s always a sharp edge to the supernatural, ain’t there? As Lailah learned, magic always comes with a cost, but the price of the Black Rider is too much to bear. So don’t you dare go looking for her, little Missus Mayhem. That damned Black Rider kills.”

I fume, my heart shaped face hot as I blush a grapefruit ruby. I twist away like a lion in Daniel’s den, or an arrow shot straight through in Saint Sebastian’s saintly side. “Oh Raff, just forget about it! I don’t give a chicken scratch about who the Black Rider is, not with you around, wailing and whining on about the Laveaus. You’re preaching to the choir, you overprotective seagull. I ain’t exactly twelve anymore. You’d never tell me anyways, who the hell am I kidding? The haints are getting worse, the zombies are roaming, and the bizango brood of the Black Rider and her damned rougarou keep taking kids. I held off all the monsters this Saint John’s Day with my magic songs and my granmama’s hoodoo asson. If you won’t tell me who that Petro bitch that murdered Lailah is, I’ll find out for myself, your help not included.”

“You got a temper, don’t you, little Missus Mayhem, but of course you do, just like Hot Pepper Laveau in her younger days, before the calling of Cronus mellowed her out, and Old Father Time marched on…” Raff sighs, rubbing his forehead like kneading clay in consternation. “Well, there won’t be any spirits crossing over until next Saint John’s Eve and Day anyways, now that you’ve come into your full bloom power as protector of this little old backwaters town. There was a stretch of a decade or so where your granmama was too old and you were too young to defend Snake’s Hollow properly with witchcraft. Then it was up to me and Leggie alone to keep the Laveaus and Montanees safe. That’s why the rougarou got through eight years ago and attacked you. It’s wonderful to have backup now. Here’s a sweet little fossil, an olive branch to you, my girl,” he says, throwing me an opal laden ammonite that is quality size and shimmering blue just like a king of ancient crustaceans. I catch the large, kindly ammonite and smile despite my perturbance with my guardian angel. Raff whistles like a steamboat, then gives a mournful, long winded sigh like a breeze through the reeds on the Gulf of Mexico watery blues train onto the Atlantic. “I hate it when we argue, May-flower. The sweetness of youth is replaced by the strength of Deborah. You are a Judge through and through. Or maybe, more of Yael, tent spike for the Black Rider in hand…”

I twirl the fossil in my muscled hands, ripe from swim practice. “This thing is massive!”

“Like your personality?”

“You’re full of cat clawings and sawdust. I love you anyways.” The fossil sings in the summer sun, whispering Pre-Cambrian ooze. “What a plucky ammonite, it’s big and fits in my palm! I love this place. It’s the bees knees.” I add the ammonite to my tackle box encased fossil collection, then shuck off my shoes and shorts and climb the rope swing. “The one, the only, master diver, May Uriel Laveau! Michael Phelps can eat dirt, yip yoop!” I call, climbing up high all scrounging scree and wild braids like the mane of a lion to the top of the hill with the taut rope. “Watch me, Raff! I’m gonna do a backflip!” I call. “This will get me onto the diving team for Tulane when I audition for coaches next year. For sure. Full scholarship, yahoo!”

The golden archangel Raphael removes my spyglasses from his pocket and zeroes in on me. “En guarde, Olympian! Swimmers, clear the quarry for Michelle Phelps!”

I let out a hoot and a holler, then with my curvy, muscled body coiled like a winding clock spring, I jettison off the tallest boulder of Sourmilk Hill. The rope twangs and carries my 200 pounds of iron and flesh into the thick muggy air. Junebugs dance as I release the rope full bright and bold, then gallivant through the air, backflip perfect as pie. The water is lukewarm as I make a big splash, refreshing as La Croix on a stroll through the French Quarter with my girlfriend sweet on my hips, then I bob to the surface of the placid quarry pool. “Hah!” I call out, swimming the breaststroke around a rocky outcropping located in the middle of the pond in tight, sinuous circles.

The water looks like my old obsidian scrying mirror I use to divine homework answers, and granmama has always said from my youth of yesteryear that bad spirits can’t pass moving water, for water carries the pure. “Hot” Pepper May Laveau also taught me scrying last year when I turned sixteen and gave me Marie Laveau’s old obsidian witching glass, and a rude idea bus stops into my head like the last pit stop on the ride down to Sheol, the intrusive, commanding thought burning bright in my brain like Lucifer’s gutter fire barbecue roasting Judas alive. Only, I guess Judas Iscariot is eternally nibbled on by Satan, if my English teacher who loves Dante’s Inferno would have anything to say about that.

The thought blares like my morning alarm ungodly greeting me to board the bus at 7 AM.

I need to act, now. Before I chicken out…

I need to show Raff I’m worthy of knowing everything about the curse of this town, spirits never lie when I seek them out, and this little stunt will scare Raff-ay-el straight silly into telling me whom the Black Rider being haunting Snake’s Hollow is. Rotting arms, black rooster blood, and all.

I clap my hands and sing, then swim in a pentagram circle:

“Simbi, Simbi, montre m kavalye nwa a,” I call, asking the treacherous Simbi water snakes of the watery voodoo underworld to show me the Black Rider. Simbi Makaya is a great sorcerer and one of Erzulie Danto’s husbands, and he is the lwa guardian of all waters of magic outside Met Agwe’s, our Poseidon’s, salty seas. The great sorcerer Simbi Makaya has shown me many things before. But they were trifling things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, like physics homework answers, or the best places to pick raspberries, for granmama always says you should never ask the Simbis to show you your heart’s desire, or they will drown you down to the depths of Rahab’s deep. I’ve never asked Simbi Makaya to show me anything that important, but this time, the curiousity is too tempting, taunting, and tormenting, an itch I can’t scratch in my mind.

“May, no!” Raff starts at the sound of my voice and pentagram laps, alighting rocket bright and bold into the air like a jet plane, wings crooked as he swings towards me.

Old fool. It’s too late, hah! The Simbi snake kings don’t frighten me at all, not since I was a wee little girl staring into the quarry pool, unable to swim yet. Nothing bad can happen when it’s not St. John’s Eve with lost souls, I can hold back any spirit nowadays, Simbi Makaya or not. Just look at the haints I took out with Pharah and Raff in July! I’m blessed by Marie Laveau, after all: that’s gotta count for something, ain’t it?

“Too late, scaredy cat! The old Simbi slithers below and answers the Laveau,” I laugh as Raff circles me over the waters like a vulture, ever vigilant and poised to strike like a harpy. “It’s just old Simbi Makaya, Raff! Erzulie Danto’s husband. I talk to him all the time to get homework answers in my scrying mirror!” I tread water, laughing.

“This ain’t funny, May! Stop the invocation, right now!” Raff hollers, skimming the water with his toes as he hovers over me.

“No! Go back and eat my granmama’s beignets and get fat off being a coward! I’m sick of you telling me what to do, Raff!”

“Teenagers!”

“Men!”

“Ugh! Fine, entreat the treacherous sorcerer snake, nothing by my Father’s Grace could possibly go wrong, now could it? You dug this pit of asps, now deal with the bite!”

“You’re useless, you loud, puckish, overgrown seagull,” I mutter, finishing the pentagram swim lines. The strokes ripple out, and the water bubbles.

The surface of the quarry pool burbles, and immediately, I feel thick wet, snakeskin like mud on the moon and ridges of duckweed brush against my feet. Suddenly, the blue water turns black, and a figure on a skeletal black horse with red eyes comes a-galloping towards me, the nightmare steed’s evil spirit rider shouting ke ke ke!

I zero in on the vision in the middle of the pentagram, focusing as hard on my magick as a carpenter trimming wood.

“Simbi! Simbi! Kiyes le yi?” I yell, asking the mother of all questions

Who is she, Simbi Simbi?

Putrefaction bubbles from the surface of the water, and I smell a corpse. Pennants of flesh hang off bone arms. A banner of rot covers her breasts. Her eyes are collier coals, and her hair is a mane of flame.

The reflection sharpens into focus. I can nearly make the Black Rider out as I tread water, almost there… Raff extends a hand, screaming to high heaven above, but I swat him away, indignant at him spoiling the spell. “Go away, Raff, I’m done letting you protect me! You just broke my concentration – you’re gonna upset Simbi Makaya!”

MANJE, comes a voice from the depths.

FOOD.

“Huh?” I yelp, looking around like I’ve seen a ghost. “He talks?”

“No!” Raff roars. “May, swim away! Right now! Immediately!”

The snakeskin tightens around my ankles, then Simbi Makaya drags me down to the depths of the quarry pool. Unknowingly, I have angered him by breaking the pact of our spell with Raff’s intrusion, and now he is exacting his price.

I scream, then draw in breath before I go down, down, down into Leviathan’s shoals of lost souls. Raff dives in right after me. The water is cool, treacherous, and we sink.

“MAY!”

I writhe in the grasp of Cleopatra’s suicide asp: Simbi Makaya looks like a great sea serpent, all coils and hideous claws. There is an iron crown above his yellow belly eyes, his ridged back is covered in pond muck and duckweed, and he hisses underwater, his vicious dinner plate eyes slits. How Erzulie Danto tamed this beast, is a secret only the dead in their bed tell.

MANJE?

His stomach rumbles. I let out a silent scream, then lose all my air, and begin to thrash for purchase on the rocky outcropping in the center of the quarry pool Simbi Makaya is coiled around.

But Simbi drags me down, under the freshwater sea, and as I scramble away, Raff comes to my defense, as Simbi is about to eat.

I kick the snake lwa in his car sized slit nose, but his tail thrashes Raff away as my archangel uses himself to shield me from Simbi’s throbbing fangs. Raff’s wing bends the wrong way and he hollers out like hosannas of the drowned, then swallows water, voiceless bubbles escaping his mouth in the clear blue depths of the quarry pool. Golden blood trails from Raphael’s tail thrash wound.

Oh damn. Oh damn, Oh damn.

Chapter 6 Chapter Text

Petro Nation, Haiti.

Clang of guns and rebellion:

A victory that is unsettling

I adore my beautiful Kin.

The love that could reach the star

The breast of Erzulie Danto,

O my revolutionary Mistress:

Nobody has what You brought to me!

O my revolutionary Mistress!

Lady of my creed!

So You can have my love scarred body

to feed.

“My May Rains girl, you be out dancing with the devil on Sourmilk Hill? For shame! That’s the old colonial hanging qhill and Indian drowning grounds! It’s cursed to high hell,” granmama tsks and tatters and takes me to task, stirring gumbo in the kitchen and adding okra as momma and daddy are out on date night at a movie at the local art house theater. It’s some crusty Fellini replay the two of them love. Dolce Vita, maybe?

“Hot” Pepper Laveau adds some Crystal hot sauce to the gumbo, stirs the chopped okra in, and slowly but surely like Charybdis, the pot bubbles and clears my sinuses with the spice, a she-beast full hog wild, ready to sear our stomachs and devour our appetite, and granmama stirs the good red stuff right on in. Crystal, Crystal, Crystal, oh how I love you Crystal.

Pharah showed up on the porch while I was gone, antsing about to take me on a date. We love to make out on Lover’s Lane, behind Sourmilk Hill, in the sweet summertime swing dance of amors.

“You did heckin’ what?” Pharah demands, her cheeks bloated. She hugs me tight, her chipmunk face pressing into mine. “You wanna die, girl? And why wasn’t I invited! I coulda beat up Simbi Makaya with mommy’s spells! I’m the mambo, anyways. You’re more a witch! Lwa listen to us Montanees.”

I rub dirt and pond muck from my face, sighing, and hug Pharah close. “Did Raff rat me out to the entire gang as I was cleaning up outside?” I pick 4’11 Pharah up and swings her around. She’s wearing a jean dress and has her curls in a chignon and lotus print headwrap. She smells like a summer storm, and I bite her ear. She laughs.

“Damn you, May Lavau.”

“Save me, you mean.”

“Girlchildren, settle, settle, the gumbo about done,” granmama says sweetly, doting on our heads.

“Can I try a lick?” Pharah takes a gander, licking her lips. Granmama dollops some onto her wooden spoon. Pharah takes an ice cream cones worth lick of the gumbo and is sent to cloud nine with the old rambunctious angels. “Oh, I see stars! Nirvana!”

“Pipe down,” Raff laughs, reading an automotive magazine as he leans onto the edge of the kitchen hutch that has seen generations’ use of Laveau men and women chopping vegetables and fruits for the canning, jamming, and dinnertime feast. I oil it every weak with flaxseed oil, and it smells like a fresh meadow always, with a bit of garlic thrown in. Herbs hang from the board above it, and the spice rack is lambent and bold like a music box.

Granmama squares her hips and ruffles my braids. She pulls one of Raff’s feathers out of my wet baby hairs, then purses her lips:

“Raff tells me you summoned damn Simbi Makaya, my soul mother Erzulie Danto’s f*ckless lover. You trying to leave this world a teenager like Lailah did, Mayhem? That ain’t a good ways to go, my little sugar sweetling. Think better with that big wise head of yours, my girl. You got smarts, so use them. Just like I did when I took on Ti Jean Petro in 1969. Ain’t seen his damn hot soul since then.”

Pharah and I are cutting garlic now at granmama’s behest, leeks, and onions.

Pharah’s eyes glimmer wickedly, and she squeezes my hand. “My girl may be book smart. Street smarts, though? She sure ain’t the brightest penny in the pail. Scrawniest fish in the well. Moves like leaky oil in a car-

“No granmama and Pharah!” I protest, cutting garlic quickly for the gumbo, tears in my eyes as I think of how I had to carry Raff home in pieces for granmama to heal him. Frustration at their ribbing and consternation blows through my mind like a carnival wind. The spice of the white herbs stings the underside of my nails. I suck on my thumb that I scraped carrying Raff back as garlic gets under the scab from the treacherous forged asson.

Raff is worse for the wear, dressed in goldenrod robes and sandals, a stern expression on his face, his head crooked to the side, bones patched up where granmama tended to his wounds with gauze and poultices. He pins a picture of a Lotus car to my face. “You’re this dragster, May. Fast, furious and full of hot fumes.

I swat it away, reproachful. “Look, you three, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt Raff! I just needed answers. We all need answers about the Black Rider.”

“But you don’t gotta die!” Pharah says fiercely, spicily grabbing my garlic and tossing it into the boiling gumbo pot.

I sigh, downtrodden, stooping low as the Devil descending to Hell. When I speak, I speak through tears, and my voice is weak and falters. “Please, just understand, I didn’t mean to make the border between worlds fracture even further! If Raff hadn’t interrupted my spell, Simbi Makaya would have behaved, and the pentagram wouldn’t have loosed him into the quarry pool. Now… now he’ll bring the watery dead up after him. We barely made it out alive.”

Pharah hugs me tight. “It’s okay, May-flower. We all make mistakes. I still love you, my lion of Bondye.” She kisses me softly, and her lips taste like sugar plums, cotton candy, and sin. I give an inkling of a smile, inhaling her lavender perfume.

“Thanks, PharBear.” I burrow my head in the crook of her shoulders, we break apart, and I dare to look up at the guardian angel I nearly killed. Angels can die, after all. Just look at Paradise Lost.

Raff shakes his head and sighs, his arms crossed and his veil of golden eagle wings folded. My angel’s scar ridges atop his brows knit together in concern. He sets to peeling crawdads on the kitchen hutch silently like a sentinel, their little legs sticking up in surrender to God as he shucks them with a hint of anger. “Pepper, our dear May’s magic is growing. She made an asson out of a rock and was able to scare off Simbi Makaya with her own witchcraft. I was merely helpless, useless, like a damn mortal fool despite all my heavenly powers. If her magic gets out of control, what will happen? It’ll boil over. She’ll be eaten up alive by that power like my Lailah was.”

“Then it’s time I teach her what I was saving til she was eighteen and a rose of young womanhood, a year early, now isn’t it, dearest angel food cake?” granmama drawls slowly, adding a dash of pepper to the bubbling gumbo. Pharah takes a swallow and smiles like sunshine. “Alrighty, girls and boys, into the gumbo pot your ingredients go!”

We toss in my chopped vegetables and Raff’s crawdads and make a feast of it on this lukewarm November day. I slurp up the gumbo and chew the meat of the seafood with my molars and Raff makes quick work of his dish, watching me furtively over every bite, only to steal my cornbread when he is done.

“Hey!” I swat his hand away but miss. Into his mouth my cornbread goes. Then, my beignets. “Not the beignets!”

“Typical overgrown seagull. Eating food not meant for him like a begging wharf bird,” Pharah teases.

Raff guffaws.

“You owe me, Mayflower,” he winks, pointing at his bandages. “C’mon, hand the plate of beignets over.”

Guilt assuages me like burnt butter sticking to the bottom of a pan. “Alright then, yessir I do,” I sigh, releasing my hold on the beignet plate. White powder sugar gets stuck in his stubble. “It raining on your beard, Raff?”

“Shut your mouth, you little haint.”

“I ain’t a haint, and I ain’t a saint! I’m in the middle and I don’t have a complaint!” I say, rapping like Cardi B.

Raff groans. “My ears. I hate modern rap. Why isn’t your generation raised on Biggie and Tupac and the Wu Tang Clan?”

“Ok Boomer,” Pharah sighs, gazing out at the hot mist.

I squeeze her hand and lick Raff to his seat with my judgment. “Only daddy likes those songs – you’re an old man like him that steals granmama’s beignets!”

Raff laughs. “Who you calling an old coot?”

“Momma’s got it right, she listens to jazz. That’s the real classy stuff right there. Not this old man rap crap.”

“Ain’t nothing unfancy about Wu Tang Clan you lil troublemaker. Don’t you call it crap in an attempt to rap! I’ll put a cap on your clap! Hah.”

“Well, I’m never talking to a Boomer again,” Pharah says, trying to ignore our argument.

“You can’t rap like me either, old man. I got the music. All you can do is sing hosannas and drone on in church.” I continue, heated, old anger rising from the way he held me back against Simbi Makaya, and because he didn’t trust me, I had to save him.

We engage in a death glare match. Raff’s wings puff out in challenge, a swan V.

“Did you like the soul food?” granmama asks, interrupting us wisely as Raff and I are about to bicker again.

“Hell yes!” Pharah says.

“That was wonderful granmama!” I chirrup

“Hot” Pepper Laveau’s black eyes sparkle like collier coals.

“Yes, darling Pepper, so good!” Raff agrees. Finally, something me and my silly old archangel can agree on.

“Nice song, May, just like all your songs. You have the banda beat in you, girl. That’s why your Kreyol words and makeshift asson worked against ol’ Simbi.” Granmama savors her gumbo. “Food is magic, Maybe baby doll. And magic is just a recipe from Legba’s ol’ cook pot of America. Cooking up these dishes with you and St. Raphael pleases God – that’s why our ancestors gave the lwa food, and it’s why us Louisiana folks throw big old fetes with the Montanees and Laveaus for the Rada, Petro, and Ghede. For, you never know if a humble soul such as my old silly fool of a self is entertaining angels unawares.”

Raff guffaws. “Angels awares, you mean! Oh Pepper, you are quite the flatterer. May’s getting there with her cooking – that apple pie she and Pharah made for church last Sunday with the seared brown sugar and tart Granny Apples had Pastor John raving. Even my Father and esteemed brother Yeshua wanted more when I brought the leftovers up to Heaven to share with Mike, Gabi, and Az.”

“There you go, stealing my food again, from a sacred place like a church no less.” I tease. I bite into a boudin ball and top it off with some remoulade. I split it with PharBear. “I wanna be as good a cook as granmama is! Pharah and I can have a food truck at our brewery near Tulane,” I say brightly. “Oh Raff, have you forgiven me, finally?”

He smiles as wide as a racing freight train on the horizon. Chugging towards me, he hugs me, lifts me up, then spins me around. “I suppose a literal saint can forgive a wayward teenager.” He winces on his wounded leg, and I hug him hard.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper in his ear.

“It’s alright, us saints are, well, quite saintly.”

“Don’t butter up your ego, old man!” I hoot, pulling out his tailfeather. “If you’re a saint, I’m Mother Teresa.”

“No you ain’t! Pride goeth before the fall,” Raff cries, tickling me under the chin. “Apologize to God! Only apple pie can save you now, May! Quick, bake it before the Devil gets you and drags you down to Hell for talking smack to your guardian angel!”

“No, you overgrown seagull!” I tickle him with his tailfeather and howl. “Hah!”

“You guys sure are embarrassing as a TikTok video,” Pharah mutters, filming us. Only, Raff will be invisible, and the phone won’t work, as anytime we film of photograph Raphael, the video and camera funk out. Prime Directive and all that jazz.

Raphael hoots and hollers too, and soon we are tussling in a tickle match on the ground. Granmama laughs and slaps her knee.

“You sweet folks sure do keep me young,” granmama says softly, cleaning the dishes. “May, I’m going to teach you a very special song, and a dance I learned from my sweet Gabriel. This will get rid of evil spirits for good and summon the very forces of Gineh themselves to protect you. It was a song my father taught me and that I am now passing on to you. Come, child! Out to the orange tree we four go.”

Raff relents tickling me and places me on his shoulders, limping out to the orange tree under my weight but determined to carry me despite his wounds. He sets me down in the old swing and pushes me so high the rope twangs. Granmama takes a vial of cornmeal out of her skirt pockets and draws Damballah’s cornmeal veve – veves, the summoning sigils us voudousiants use to welcome in the spirits. Each lwa has one, like a personal calling card. I study the fine linework of the twin serpents amongst the trellises of Damballah’s cornmeal signature.

Granmama pulls a white candle from her pocket, lights it, then clutches over in prayer. She opens her clear eyes and then gestures for me to take my asson from my pocket and Pharah to ready herself with inviting gris gris and ru,. We do.

“Move like the wind under angel wings, girls,” granmama instructs. She undulates despite her arthritis and flows in a powerful dance, clapping out the beat of her song on her wrinkly earthen hands. I follow suit, and she raises her voice in Kreyol praise:

Jan w wè m piti an, m sèvi gwo lwa.

Nan demanbre m lakou lakaygranmoun:

granmoun, timoun, timoun.

You may see me as puny, but I serve great lwa.

In my family’s Vodou ceremony in the home yard

of the elders: elders, children, children.

Twa Patè, o twa Ave Mariya, nou kwè nan

Dye a ki ban nou lavi a, men gen Ginen.

Nan Ginen, o genyen lwa, genyen lwa o,

nan Ginen lafanmi o, an nou met tèt

ansanm pou n ka sove peyi a.

Three Paters, oh three Hail Marys,

we believe in the God who gave us life,

but there is Ginen.

In Ginen, oh there are lwa, oh there are lwa,

Oh the family is in Ginen, let’s put our heads

together so we can save the country.

We repeat the song thricefold, and suddenly a great whirlwind blows out the candle, knocking it over, and scatters the cornmeal veve into dust.

“Sorry, Damballah couldn’t pick up the astral phone, so I hope I can suffice, like lucky dice.” Standing under the twilit shade of the orange tree is Baron Samedi: “I am the gatekeeper of Gineh, my lovely Laveau and Montanee ladies. Lilting petals of melody called me forth, echoing the lwa’s names, and was I dancing under Ave Maria’s skirts or was I searching for gold in her hips? I’ll never know. I tend to get up to a lot of business under ladies’-

“Bawan, shut it!” Raff growls. “May’s a young woman, not a lady of the night.”

“Am not! I can be just as sassy as Dolly’s girls in the House of the Rising Sun!” I pipe up.

“No you ain’t, not under my watch,” Raff mutters. Pharah high fives me.

The Bawan, dressed in a purple pimp suit, feathered black top hat with jewels, pocket watch, and skull headed cane taps a banda beat and begins to thrust his hips. “What you want, my proper pealing pipedreams of femininity? Your voices like music, your moves like the wind. A lwa is only happy to serve the great Gineh on behalf of a Laveau daughter.”

“This song is for my granddaughter, dear Bawan,” granmama says fiercely, pouring the Bawan some rum from a flask she had in her pocket into an offering cup.

He takes a swig and hoots. “Needs more chili peppers!”

“Promise me, sweet lily white Bawan, that you will come in your corpse paint beneficent to May when she needs you most. That all of Gineh will answer her calls, when she sings this song of the blood,” granmama prays, struggling to kneel in supplication to the Bawan. Raff helps her gently down onto the ground, and I follow suit, as we raise our hands up in prayer.

Bawan Samedi pulls four dusty butterscotch Werther’s Originals from his endless pockets and places them gingerly in our upturned hands. “I shall answer every one of May Uriel Laveau’s calls – and so shall my sisters and brothers: Damballah, the Erzulies, Legba and Ogou. We are eternally in the Laveaus’ service. Thick black darkness will drown Snakes Hollow, sooner or later someday. Your answers lay in the swamps, and they can be found by May alone – and only her, dear Raff and curious Montanee. Now, I have Maman Brigitte to go please as a husband tends to his wife’s garden, sowing dead seeds in her lap, and my Ghede children are calling. Adieu, mis amors!” He tips his hat, thick ghost mist shrouds the orange tree, and to the spice of hot peppers and rum, the Bawan is gone.

Raff and I help granmama stand. “Keep these candies, May. Sing this song. And you, my Mayflower, will never be lost.”

Raff looks endangered. “Not the swamps,” he whispers. “Never the godforsaken swamps.”

Pharah looks at me, perplexed, almost suspicious.

I know, above all, I have my own path to take through these cursed backwaters of Lake Pontchartrain.

Chapter 7 Chapter Text

She wanders in the darkness

Searching...

She looks up as though the answer is above,

Pitch black as the ground.

Reflection of Gineh in her eyes.

When I was a girl, even just five years ago, plastic light saber in hand, life was simple. I thought I could stop the darkness easily, without punishment or danger, or even a toll. Life ain’t so simple now.

All things come with a cost.

The fall comes and goes, and I grow up even more. There are more secrets than answers between Raff and I, nowadays, and granmama’s been teaching me everything she knows, veve by veve, spell by spell, powerful ancestral song by powerful ancestral song.

I long ago traded in my crayons for pens, puffs in butterfly clips for free-flowing braids that blow like a lion's mane. Raff doesn't age at all, but that's to be expected.

I'm seventeen, finally in twelfth grade, and nothing has changed much since the summer, when the border loosened, on me and Pharah’s rounds. Something like peace is fighting back the curse, and perhaps we will get a respite, when things are said and done. Then again, Bondye’s chosen always end up martyrs.

It’s almost Christmastime. We have a moment of small respite from Snake’s Hollow’s curse. I haven’t touched my scrying mirror since my encounter with Simbi Makaya. No more answers to math homework from the watery snake for me. I seemed to have scared the haints away this Halloween, at least for a little while.

Granmama's sitting outside on the front porch, watching the swaying orange tree and cold roses. I lounge in the bay window, inky papers in my hands. It's pa's legal pads, all stacked together with my stories, and the smudges bleed over the edge like some great battle scene.

Raff smiles, watching me scribbling my next great novel. I know writers are supposed to wait until their thirties or something to pen the Great American Novel, at least, that’s what pa says, but we all start somewhere, right? Even angels and Zora Neale Hurston – my momma’s favorite author, who maybe I shouldn’t be reading now at such an impressionable age, as granmama says – she thinks the infamous pear tree scene is too much for a seventeen year old, but I don’t - were in diapers once. Well, angels wore something, because diapers probably weren't around back then.

Granmamma used to say I was full of antics as a kid. Knowing no better, I thought she meant I was made of ants.

Like an ant, I’m quite small but strong, really short (I’m 5’0 and the doctors say I won’t grow more than three more inches in my twenties), and family is the most important thing to me, Raff and Leggie included, though Raff is a damn fool for keeping his secrets from me. Also, his taste in rap stinks like sour milk. Boomer like Pharah said indeed.

Sometimes, I find him jamming and lip-syncing to daddy’s old cassettes and have to run upstairs to my room to laugh my bottom off. He would never live it down! He may not notice, but I save up my peristyle allowance from helping the Montanees out in fetes and the like to buy him vintage cassettes from the thrift store that I hide in daddy’s collection, so Raff always thinks he has discovered a new gem to listen to. Dad helps me pick them out. My tastes lean more Lizzo and Normani and Yola. I love my archangel Raphael mighty, though, with ant-like strength belying my small spry body.

It's the little things that count.

Raff’’s given me one of his feathers to write with, a different one on each of my birthdays. This is the largest yet, and let me tell you - it's impossible. Impossibly beautiful, that is. All long and plumy-white like something from a dream. The nib etches little streams of golden ink, and I have no idea what that is if it isn’t a goddarn miracle.

Raff sits crunching some sunflower seeds. “What part are you at, May?”

“The part where Keisha raids the moon base. She's freeing the rebel aliens from their prisons so the revolution can start. It’s like Star Wars or X-Men in space, but better. Instead of light sabers, Keisha has a light arrow, and she’s an experimental lunar mutant. Light arrows are more precise, like a laser beam, with a hundred percent casualty rate when aimed exactly right.”

“Sounds exciting. Want edits?”

“Sure thing, sweetheart.”

He always blushes when I call him that. But I'm old enough to give Raff nicknames too now, May-flower or not. I like watching him squirm. Nearly eighteen year old women oughta fight back, eh? Angels don’t have anything on me, after all. For one, I got free will. For two, I don’t dress like a frat boy at a toga party.

We skirt around Simbi and have for months now, just dealing with haints and the like on our daily patrols, for some things are best left unsaid, and I hurt Raff’s pride by not listening to him. Men without pride, they may as well be ants, and I ain’t talking about strength this time.

“You promise me you’ll never go to the swamps alone, right May?” Raff says, concern shining on his face.

I cross my fingers behind my back, then face him and smile wide despite the pain of knowing my doom lays where I must go – in the Louisiana backwaters. “I promise.”

If lying to an angel is a sin, I sure am destined for down below.

The room brightens with mirrors hanged in string.

Reflections of her loved ones above her,

The halls of the dead below.

Moving on with their lives,

Moving through veils of glass.

Looking forward,

She sees herself standing in the tremulous moment,

Dazed yet still,

Done with crying.

In the ancestral halls of Gineh,

No one girl ever weeps.

Granmama comes in that morning after my hands are stained with ink and Raff is upstairs on the roof saying his midday prayers. She is dressed in a jean dress and paisley shirt. Her small black pumps are prim and a little bit sassy, just like my sweet and spicy family matriarch.

“May-child, can I talk to you for a bit?” she asks, a plate of brownies at hand that she sets down at the table.

I pull out a seat for her and help her sit down. “Of course granmama, you can tell me anything!”

She has made rosehip tea and it pairs with the mint chocolate chip brownies as good as a saint pairs with miracles. Granmama lowers her beaded reading glasses and they dangle over her breast. “I used to be even fiercer in my youth, Maybe baby doll. I longed body and soul for my momma Lailah – it ain’t right for a mother to die young, not while I was still in the cradle. Your great grandpa tried his hardest, but it was never enough. Sweet Gabriel – now she’s a firecracker, her horn and her Annunciation motorbike and all – and I got into a lot of trouble in the swamps and downtown. We used to ride Gabi’s Harley to New Orleans and sip Sazeracs, watching the fancy young men, flirting like storms of femininity. That’s how I met your grandpa. Gabi had a few boyfriends here or there too. But still, it wasn’t enough. It was never enough, not really.”

“What wasn’t enough, granmama?” I ask, imagining her rebelliously aback an archangel’s bike. What a snazzy fox.

“Time. I never had enough time, not enough of it, and I still don’t. I always wanted to hunt down that big old Black Rider and face down the Man in Black too and say, you foolish haints, who do you think you are, messing with me? I am Pepper May Laveau, and I do not take good for nothings lightly! Gabi had her saber, I had my asson and songs, and we slayed every damn ghoul, goblin, and ghosty in site that ever haunted Snake’s Hollow in my time. We even got as far as boisterous Ti-Jean Petro back in ’69. Only, the Black Rider never came. And the Man in Black went missing – Met Carrefour was too scared of me. And still, as a young woman, I longed for lost Lailah Laveau body and soul.”

“So what did you do?” I inquire, shuddering at what would come next.

“I went to Sourmilk Hill on Christmas Day in my twenties, to see the ghost of my mother, the Woman in White, rocking my rotten cradle – I was twenty three, a few more years older than your current age, and none the wiser, with the world’s burdened blood upon me, coming full into my magic powers like the generational legacy. But the ghost of momma was blind with tears that Christmas Eve, and she did not recognize me at all. All that cursed banshee could do was cry for her lost child and husband. Her rotten breasts she lamented, her poison milk was her woe. Her eyes were plucked out like carrion. Still to this day, my mother has never witnessed her God-fearing daughter. I pray for her cursed soul every day – maybe someday, sweet child, our ancestress can repent in Purgatory, an anima solas. But, I fear the Man in Black will come calling for Lailah in his carriage of bones. I fear she is too far gone for even God’s golden grace.”

I am weeping now, and there are tears in granmama’s eyes too. She pulls out a pale blue linen handkerchief from her breast pocket and wipes my weeper’s woe from my face, then smiles bright as day.

“I’m so sorry granmama, you’ve had a hard life.” I struggle to calm my cries. “I don’t know what I’d do without my momma growing up.”

“Your daddy, his wife, and you made it all worth it. Now my son Freddie, your uncle – he’s a bit sideways. Ain’t giving me no grandchildren, married to two gosh darn lwa! But I love him mighty still.” She hugs me fiercely like a tiger at midnight. “I could not break the curse on Snake’s Hollow, for Bondye did not choose me and my messenger angel to be the harbingers of freedom. That role goes to a select, blessed few.”

“Like who?” I ask, knowing in my heart she means me. But who has come before me? Who else was like Marie Laveau? We go as far back as Sweet Sheba, as far back as Naamah and Tubal-Cain, but could there have been more “Maries?”

Granmama looks out the bay window onto the swaying Spanish moss and her eyes sharpen, hunger abreast in her soul:

“Once, long ago, a young beautiful mambo sacrificed everything she loved to bring freedom to our ancestresses in Haiti. She was a Laveau too. That’s why the lwa chose our family, to honor the sacrifices of our brethren in the Laveau line. I fear I am growing too old, and you will have to face the Black Rider that killed your great-granmama Lailah without me. I fear that you are too young, my May, bold and wild like Gabi and I were, and that you will clash with Raphael. He loves you to the bone, but he is too protective of you and old-fashioned. Not like Gabi was. To let a girl grow, and come into womanhood, she must be given full trust. For you, you are almost eighteen. Raphael still views you as the little girl he saved from a sinful rougarou, reaching out for his fatherly hand for salvation Maybe Gabi can give Raff some pointers on how to let go, one would think.”

I knit sweet Pepper’s hands in mine and squeeze them tight like a promise. Granmama continues: “Be patient with sweet Raphael. And love your parents mightily, like the strong ant that you are, able to lift a burden a thousand times heavier than herself. You must be the ant to lift up all of Snakes Hollow, my sugar plum starlight girl. Now, I have said all I know, and let’s enjoy this rosehip tea. It was always Gabi’s favorite. I shall greatly enjoy her company and that of my dear husband Luther in Heaven when I go, Bondye be willing.”

There are tears in my eyes, and I hug her close. “Granmama, I’m never gonna let you go. And I promise I will live up to the Laveau duty. I’ll save everyone, including Raff. But first, I need to learn how to save myself. The swamps are always calling me, and on Halloween, I saw great granmama Lailah – the Woman in White. Despite Raff’s Godly blessings every night, I can hear Lailah screech in a beggar’s tongue in my dreams, asking to be let in past the threshold. I don’t let her in, no way in hell… but sometimes, I want to. I want to know what she knows.”

Granmama smacks her mouth then spits on the ground, crosses herself, and throws a pinch of salt over her shoulder. “Out with her evil spirit! Out with this curse of the Laveaus! Leave my precious May alone Lailah, you hear me, momma?” She pulls a small vial of Florida water from her breast pocket and sprinkles my hair, then rubs it into my scalp to anoint me in a lave tet.

A ghost train sounds in the distance, and then there is the screeching of nails on the window. We look to find claw marks from rotten hands on the bay window.

Granmama shakes her head. “Go to the swamps, May. It’s nearing your time. Find your answers. Sing your songs. You don’t have far to go, girl –

“You don’t have much at all.”

This is what I know of the Night:

The mirrors are gone from his cage.

Surrounding me is nothing but a faceted room of illusion.

Whose mind was I living in?

Was it Mine?

Or was it His

all along?

“Hey, Pharah?” I say over my cell phone to my ripe as rain homegirl and steady love like Southern Cross the Dog.

“What’s up, girl? You up for a video game or some skateboarding?” she says, smacking on some gum, my best friend since kindergarten and hopefully wife and brewery partner in crime! We applied early decision to Tulane together, and with daddy’s professorship, I’m hoping we have the upper edge.

“Nah, girl, I wanna go exploring. Bring your bike and meet me at the town limits.”

“You’re spooky, you know that? Whatever you say, May Day. Mayday. Over, commander!”

She hangs up and I laugh at her usual pun on my name.

I go out to the woods with Pharah on the edge of town later that afternoon, remembering granmama’s near-prophecy of what answers await me in the depths of Lake Pontchartrain.

My destiny. I would face it with no other than a Montanee by my side.

“Hello Mayhem!” Pharah belts, hugging me hard and pecking me on the cheek. I pick her up and swing her around, and we are a mountain of giggles.

“Heya girl!” I hoot, smacking her on the back in our familiar greeting. We do our secret handshake and then twist around to make it official, dancing like African madrigals in each other’s arms.

I drink my vision of a lady love in, and softness flows my bones like melted butter. Oh, the power of love. Pharah’s an even shorter little pixie of a girl with freckles and a beautiful free-flowing afro like the old pictures momma showed me of bell hooks (“A woman’s power is her hair, dear heart, like Samson and Delilah. She knew better than to let her man have better hair than her.”) Momma’s taken to educating me about strong women like her and me and granmama ever since I was a youngin’, like Sojourner Truth, Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Coretta Scott King, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Tracy Chapman, and Marsha Johnson. We’re skipping stones on the warm water of Calf’s Spring when a rougarou calls.

I freeze, remembering my childhood bite. My scar tingles. My haint sense is working, like a Spidey Sense on Miles Morales, but way more useful than knowing bugs. Raff is nowhere in sight. The rougarou shouldn’t be out in the woods this time of year. Not with the banishing Raff and I did on St. John’s Day. Haints, sure, but nothing as powerful as a rougarou.

The peace of our standstill, that little reprieve of the seasons, has rotted like the Crucifix.

Raff’s warning and voiced concern is right, the border around Snake’s Hollow really is falling apart, nearly as dead as my great granmama Lailah was at eighteen, stone cold, soul lost for eternity in the sinful swamps.

Pharah shivers and bundles up in her pea coat. She can’t hear the rougarou call clear as me – sensing spirits has always been harder for her - but they still send chills down the spines of normal people anyways. Ghosts may be invisible to normal people, but they can haunt them just the same. Pharah sees them, all the time, but I feel them in my bones! And we all know that in the depths of the swamp, people tend to disappear each year. The trackers can’t find the dead trail of their footprints that vanish like a turkey’s eerie cry as they give up the ghost, and the truth is, in Louisiana, you don’t ask where the missing go in the bayou.

Some things are better off left unanswered.

I ain’t gonna let Pharah in on the wickedness I’m about to do. She would either kamikaze the bayou wolves, try to drown them, or wrestle them with her bare hands. Ain’t know way I’m putting my hotheaded girlfriend in danger. This Laveau Sword of Damocles is meant to hang only for me, swiping my limbs and any options left and right. Sometimes, I gotta do it alone.

“May, let’s get home,” Pharah says. “This place is giving me the heebie jeebies. It ain’t safe here at night.” She kicks a quartz stone up from the dirt nervously and looks up at the sky. It cries with cold wet tears. “Hmm. Freezing rain. Our bikes will slip. Let’s go quick before it gets too frozen.”

It’s time to face my fears. Raff can’t protect my always, and I’m a young lady now. My town’s new hope. I gotta be Snake’s Hollow’s guardian now, come hell or high water. Like my granmama Pepper always says, I have Lailah’s spirit in me. That’s what great granpa Luther said when I was in diapers. I got a bit of the special spice of Laveau in me, an extra sprinkling of hickory from Heaven, or maybe, paprika from Hell. I’m not too sure where witches go to when they die.

“You go on ahead, Pharah. I got business to do.”

“Is it a haint? Do I need –“

“No, just the wind.”

She opens her brown eyes all wide and swallows me down in those too-large orbs, just like the bottoms of a Hershey Kiss. “What business you got in the woods without backup? No haint, no problem, stop hedgecraft wandering in the wilderness like you ain’t got no elders! You always say that! It’s creepy, that’s what it is, you little haint.”

“Nothing much, just curiosity. Local wildlife sighting, I guess.”

“Hah, you sure are twisted. Okay, whatever, May Day. Those coyotes scare me. Seemed almost like a rougarou, but no way they’d be out this time of year. Don’t make your granmama worry too much.”

“Sure thing, girl.”

Not coyotes, I think. More dangerous than Simbi Makaya, and not scared away by an asson.

I pull out my spyglasses and peer into the forty degree fog.

Pharah skips on ahead with her cherry red backpack, back to her bike, and cycles off. I pick up a maple stick and clear spider webs outta my way as I walk on through the underbrush to the source of the calls.

It gets swampy real fast, and I’m glad I’m wearing my bright blue rain boots. The air is thick and muggy as winter molasses. Splish-splosh, duckweed and rotting roots and bulbs, and the froggies are jumping this way and that. Crawdads scurry into their mud chimneys as my shadow approaches to obscure them. My fear is bridled by blazing bright curiousity, but my scar from that first bite of misfortune stings as if it is an omen, reacting to the siren call of the rougarou.

I reach out to Leggie. He speaks from the doorway to my heart: “It’s okay May-be, baby doll. Have faith. My bon chile.”

With his go ahead, I approach.

I come to a clearing, where the ground is high and a wolf-shaped shadow bleeds out into the grass.

I sprinkle my hot food powder from Dr. John Montanee on her paws. It finally came in handy.

Yip yip yip! The wounded rougarou girl calls, ferocious and coiling as she springs at me with gleaming moons of fangs, her silver blood coating the muck.

I pull out my asson and lighter, creating flame and a melody to tame the fierce rougarou. Opening my mouth to belt out granmama’s song, the rougarou falls silent, entranced, her last death throes of defense rattled like a wooden rollercoaster on its last legs:

Depi m piti, m ap chante pou lwa yo.

Se pa ti nèg ki te montre m chante o.

Adje, kite m montre chante Bondje!

Depi nan vant manman m,gwo lwa m yo reklame mwen. Bilolo!

Since I was small, I have been singing for the lwa.

Oh it wasn’t a little guy who showed me how to sing.

Oh heavens, let me teach God’s songs!

Ever since my mother’s womb, my great lwa have claimed me. Bilolo!

Bawan Samdi met simitye.

Eske gen moun sou late k pa ka mouri?

Moun yo mache pale yo di se towo.

Nan sekey la, Bawon, n a we longe yo.

Bawan Samedi is the master of the cemetery.

Is there anyone in the world who can’t die?

The people go around saying they are bulls.

In the coffin, Bawon, we’ll see how big they are.

The rougarou girl licks her wounds and smiles as death settles his veil over her, a corpse-like shroud of white mist settling over her as I sing her the song of her ancestors and the grave.

I will give her a peaceful death, this little lost soul of the swamp.

Si pa te gen Lwa, nou tout nou ta neye!

Si pa te gen Lwa, nou tout nou ta peri o,nan peyi letranje.

Nou soti nan Ginen,men nan men, pye nan pye!

Nou prale yon kote, lè n rive, n a va posede!

Anba kal negriye, nou prale yon kote,tou benyen, tou poudre ak Gwo Lwa a,

n ape navige!

If there weren’t Lwa, as for us, we’d all drown!

If there weren’t Lwa, as for us, oh we’d all perish in foreign countries.

We come from Ginen, hand bound to hand, foot bound to foot!

We’ll go to a place, when we arrive, we’ll own it!

In the hold of the slave ship, we’re going somewhere,

all bathed and powdered with the Great Lwa,

we’re sailing!

My fear dissipates. The beast is wounded like I was eight years ago, the wolf girl quickly dying, a shabby scrap of the cosmos black as night. I can’t help but feel empathy, for rougarou are lost souls that died in the bayou and become wholly something arcane, stained, and lost - beyond Heaven and any hopes of salvation. Where the dead’s tracks disappear, and the missing become more lost than the providence of God’s grace, then they become the damned. Even Bondye can’t save them.

In a sense, the zombies, haints, and rougarou: they’re all victims of misfortune just like great granmama Lailah. Searching for something in the swamp, just like me right now. Our stars, they always point North, to the land of ice and shadow.

Not to the warm Southern hearths, or the Gulf, or anywhere resembling a home.

I put my asson and lighter away, and I linger in this god-shadowed place. I tend to the rougarou girl’s wounds.

“It’s okay there, honey pie. You’re safe with me. I’ll give you your last rites – I watched granpa Luther get his, and I’m sure I can figure out a way to send your soul straight on to the train of heaven, where the sweet Southern saints go marching on. You’d like that, sweetheart, wouldn’t you? You don’t gotta fear nothing anymore...”

I rock her, half-asleep as the young rougarou is. I wonder if she’s never known a kindness in her life – to die like this, in the swamps, no grave, no descendants, no one to put flowers on her coffin.

Dying in a strange girl’s arms.

Might be me, one day?

My face darkens at that thought, but it passes through me like a ghost.

The rougarou girl purrs: Heaven, where meat on the bone is the sweetest. Heaven, where the hunts are plentiful. Heaven, where I am not chained to the curse of the moon. I would like that, human girl.

She eases into my embrace, and I let her silver blood stain my shirt.

I have never really thought of how unfair that was, the fate of the bayou Dead, but watching this ghost of a lupine girl can make me change my mind, almost. Was she a slave that ran away? A dead Indian that got cast out of a colonist’s war? A little Creole girl lost in the woods?

What were all the haints, before they were cursed? Why are things not black and white anymore like in middle and elementary school, now that I am near my eighteenth sun merry-go-round on Bondye’s blue and green Earth?

And why, oh why, does my angel lie to me?

I sit next to the shadow on a rock and watch the little lost rougarou. She is nothing like the mighty male alpha wolf that bit me in my youth. The rougarou girl is whimpering and has bits of starlight in her fur’s inky black depths. Half-human, she is shaped like a wolf below her lower half, with paws instead of hands and a black void nose. The thick darkness that taints this town radiates off her, for she is a creature of Snake’s Hollow’s blues train curse.

Rougarou, rougarou, I have found you. Whoever sent you is beyond my power to keep the darkness away. Someone I should be afraid of.

Deathly, deathly so.

Like pressing puss from a wound, I press on.

“Who did this to you?” I ask softly, stroking the fur of her hair.

My mistress the Black Rider be marchin’ towards Lake Pontchartrain. She killed meself as a warning: challenge her, lose your life. All I did was ask to be set free of the moon. The damned mistress moon, the damned mistress Black Rider.

I am afraid.

As if there is the Mark of Cain on me, and I am cursed from any halcyon harbor, forevermore.

I veil my fear, and continue. It’s like the highest, hardest letter on a video game, only the Black Rider is the final boss.

I ain’t ever been too good at video games, to my doom…

“Who’s your mistress, sweetie? This Black Rider?” I ask, staunching her misty silver blood with some damp moss. I can’t help but think back to my younger, desperate self, bleeding out in Raff’s arms and crying just the same as this beauty.

The furry blackness yips as I dab at her wound. Yes. She be the mistress of the haints. She be dry bone arms and rotten marrow gristle and pennants of putrid flesh. Hot and cold, cold and hot, queen of swords, revolutionary rebel, girl of guns.

The rougarou’s blood is mist, the mist is the blackness, and the black fog becomes part of the bayou, entering waters that will wind up in Lake Pontchartrain many miles away downstream. The stars inside her die off one by one like God putting out the Milky Way with his thumb.

I pet the fur of the dying rougarou. “Is she coming soon, your midnight lady?”

The rougarou mewls. My mistress already here, with her people. She never left them, y’know. She watches over her people, whether they in the motherland or beyond. But I see the Ghede, and I must go.

I sing Baron Samedi’s song and draw his veve in cornmeal, as granmama had taught me, and Laveaus have taught their daughters for generations, offering a handful of Halloween Werther’s Originals to give this rougarou safe passage into Gineh.

I hear banda drum beats and smell the cigars of Baron Samedi and drunken rose perfume of Maman Brigitte, the married guardians of the afterlife. Their smell is nearly cloying, like a perfumed corpse at a wake. The lwa of death, cemeteries, and romance have arrived.

A cane pommel shaped like a gaping, top-hatted skull touches the rougarou girl out of thin air.

The black wolf dissolves and is not there, not at all in existence anymore, like a candle flame quickly snuffed out of this realm.

Baron Samedi pokes his skull corpse paint face out at me, then winks.

“How you doing, Missus May?” he asks, white paint on his face and one foggy gray glass eye swirling in his left socket. He’s got on a dusty black suit, purple tie, and black and violet hat with a pheasant feather stuck like macaroni in it. Baron Samedi twirls his cane in his hand. He hands me a dusty old strawberry candy like you find in those old folks homes. A stale Halloween candy ancient people pass out and no trick or treaters like or something such.

“Scared, Bawan. Why is there a rougarou here?”

He furrows his brow. “That I don’t know, my little flower. Not the season for rougarou to be roaming around town. My realm of knowledge is death. Any goings on beyond that be outta my domain. Keep your eyes peeled, and your soft parts guarded. That’s always my advice, even in sitches I don’t know a stitch about! Something is going on. Stirring in the gumbo pot soup of old Legba. I’ll tell Damballah one rougarou got loose past Halloween for you, but Bondye knows what’s up. Some things be mysteries even to us great, suave, powerful lwa.”

“Be straight with me, not coy, please. Erzulie Danto says she doesn’t know, but you seem to know all of Gineh’s secrets, seeing as how Death touches all. The rougarou said she had a mistress.”

“There be a lot of mistresses, May. Some of the Rada, some of the Petro, some Ghede. From the Erzulie sisters to my sweet Brigitte to La Sirene, they have many names. Scores more than those four, too. But you ever in trouble, you invoke your Papa Legba. You got it? Raff says you got into a damn mess with Simbi Makaya. What was you thinking? Don’t think us angels and lwa don’t be talking, cause we all do. You don’t wanna be no Lailah, now do you? Cursed to haunt the swamps on Christmas Eve. That ain’t no way to leave a life.”

“Uh, yeah. I mean, no. Yessir!” I salute him instinctively, fumbling my words.

His glass eye rolls in his head, and he glances over his shoulder back into the ghost nation from whence he came. “I best be on my ways. My wife Brigitte be waiting for me. Goodest of nights, and don’t go crawlin’ around these woods looking for trouble like a haint, you hear me, my little bloom? The dead are cursed here. Each year, scores of girls and boys and adults go missing in the bayou, and then they become something else entirely, more than just simply dead. You don’t want me to harvest you before your time, and your ancestors are all worried about how bold you are becoming. Your great granpa Luther has worried his curls into Gordian knots watching over you! Some things are best left hidden in the darkness, as you best know. Like whoever this Black Rider is, and where Lailah went. Trust me on that one, little missus.”

I pick myself up from the rock and wipe the rougarou’s blood off my hands. The thick clotting silver hemoglobin washes away into Lake Pontchartrain’s tributary. Gone just like the little rougarou girl’s ghost. “Sure thing, Bawan,” I say, completely not meaning it. After all, a girl’s gotta meet her ancestresses whether she likes it or not, for that is where my witchcraft comes from, my mother’s mother’s mother, and Lailah’s got the answers I need.

Erzulie Danto said so herself, after all.

Men, even immortals. They all are much too cautious, and underestimate what us women will do for justice – and the truth.

“Good night, girl.”

“Night, Bawan.”

I salute him, he nods, disappears, and the last thing I hear is Maman Brigitte’s tinkling laughter. I pop the Wether’s Original into my mouth, and it tastes like a mothball and stale dreams. I spit it back out into the water.

I’m late getting home, but Raff doesn’t suspect a thing.

I’ve been talking to the blackness for a while, after all.

It tells me that she is coming, whoever the rider of the darkness is - rotting flesh, night hair, bone rider, and that she is escorted by the Man in Black. Mister Carrefour, who the lwa only speak about in hushed cursed tones. Mister Carrefour is the dark lwa of curses, blacker magick, and Papa Legba’s tricksy, youthful twin of evil. I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting Mister Carrefour, as the lwa and Raff have kept me safely guarded from Mister Carrefour even after all these years. It’s said if Mister Carrefour does ever come down in a fete, everyone closes their eyes and silences their mouths shut and turns away to avoid the evil radiating off him. At least, that’s what the Montanees say. They ward him from their peristyle. Mister Carrefour opens the gateway to all misfortune, as no gate Papa Legba opened would ever let in the Black Rider, but this Mister Carrefour is just her type. Evil, it runs like blood. The more evil, the thicker the clots, and the harder to cleanse the wound.

My angels and lwa are silent. But this mistress that the darkness speaks of, whoever she is, is coming. I can feel it in my young bones. I met the rougarou girl for a reason: to provide a testament to how dangerous this Black Rider is.

Raff would hate me for my detective work, but he’s too stuck in his ways to talk to that self-same darkness: he just burns it all away with his fiery light. That’s not the path of true magic. That’s the way of the warrior, not a witch like me. We know darkness has its place in this world, but Raff’s head is full of celestial clouds and thunder, rain, plasma. Sometimes, I dream he is covered in eyes and wings. Barely a man at all, haven forgotten the humility of being. There’s no way he’d ever get me…

Sometimes, you gotta listen to the seeds of evil to know the paths back to God. Seeds of Eve’s apple, sin. Sin is at the heart of darkness of us all. Original Sin.

There ain’t no lights on in Snake’s Hollow at night here, not even the moon is brave when the darkness comes calling like a kill of mangy crows and the spirits grow thick and stinking as clotting blood.

Guns against ghosts, knives against haints, daggers against zombies, and me against the darkness of the world.

I gotta save Snake’s Hollow if it’s the last thing I do.

Suddenly, the ghost of the rougarou girl appears to me, howling at the moon:

Come Christmas-time, yip yip yip! To the dead hill you must go. To the hanging ground, to the hanging ground, to the hanging ground, to meet your surly fate.

The rougarou girl smiles at me, unfurling large hidden angel wings, and a moony halo glows above her brow.

Thank you for saving me, soul sister, the rougarou angel whispers, proceeds to lick my brow with a wolf tongue to bless me, and ascends a Jacob’s Ladder of angels into the foggy Lake Pontchartrain tributary sky.

Maybe I’m not so lost after all, but now I know what I need to do:

Meet Lailah Laveau on the day she haunts Sourmilk Hill wailing for her lost family:

A Christmas Eve ghost, the day she died decades ago.

Chapter 8 Chapter Text

The Night has called me, Beautiful -

Covered all over like stars.

It shimmers against my skin.

So beautiful and connected like webs:

My first love and only

Enemy

has changed.

Granmamma believes in ghosts. As the guardians of Snake’s Hollow, we deal with them. Can’t cross water, can stir up trouble, caught in cycles or loop in time. Haints too. Those are the real troublemakers, the ones Pharah, Raff and I patrol, and Gabi and “Hot” Pepper used to too.

More than ghosts, granmama believes in righteous old Bondye and his many, many servants. Saints by one name, vestiges of African gods by another. The tricksy, temperamental, benevolent, and sometimes contrite, lwa.

I don’t have to believe in the lwa, she don’t either, no – we meet them every week, and sometimes my granmama is a vessel for them too. Beyond just appearing as angelophanies, they can ride us, possessing us to do our will. It is holy as hosannas, and as fun as a New Orleans Mardi Gras. Only, the party comes to the peristyle every week, and the food stuffs you up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and the memories I’ve made here with the Montanees? Priceless.

So, to our kinsfolk, salt of the earth lot, the lwa aren’t something to be believed—they just exist. But we still have to pay them respects. So each week Granmama takes me to the peristyle, a voodoo temple in the center of town, where Houngan Marc and Mambo Jacquie Montanee—our priest and priestess—throw parties for the lwa

Pharah’s leading this one. But what is a fete, friends at school ask, watching American Horror Story and thinking we have black rituals with snakes. I want to smack them upside the head. No, it’s a celebration. The Montanees are famed throughout the entire Gulf for throwing big old fetes with yam and rice and beans and Florida water anointments, lave tets, and spicy chicken and stews galore.

As granmama raised me believing, the lwa are a bit like saints, a bit like angels, and they all serve Bondye, the Good God, up above. Raff serves him too in his own way. Raff’s a saint, after all, and an important one at that. The whole Book of Tobit is about him, after all. But granmama’s also a god-fearing Catholic, and she goes to Mass every single darn day. Her sweet mac and cheese casserole is the best in five counties, and she cooks it up despite her arthritis every Sunday morning bright and early before the weekly church picnic with me as her helper. The secret idea for her award-winning recipe, counterintuitively, is a pinch of salt alongside the sugar and melted cheddar cheese. Now, I’m a master at it, and I make it every chance I get.

Those are some of my favorite days – quiet and steady cooking with granmama on slow Sundays. She always teaches me magic she fought to learn in Lailah’s wake, but it’s the food we make together and spirituals we sing like choirs of off key angels that I cherish the most. Raff joins in on our hosannas and alleluias with his baritone, and then Heaven enters our kitchen on the Lord’s first day of the week, and all is well with the world.

We’re at the peristyle the week before Christmas Break, and Houngan Marc Montanee is spreading the veves – intricate cornmeal symbols of the lwa – on the floor and lighting candles, Pharah is singing and beating the drum, looking like a doll, and Mambo Jacquie Montanee is pouring out Florida water onto the pounded dirt floor. After opening the gates with Leggie, who refuses to appear in the flesh and has for many years, Erzulie Freda, the lwa of love, comes down into a sweet bloom of an older girl and dances, swaying her hips and smiling. They tie a pink scarf around her, put three big sparkly rings on her fingers for her lovers: Met Agwe, lwa of the seas, Ogou, lwa of war, and Damballah, the Rainbow Serpent of the sky, and then the Montanees take her back to the special room where she will be given sweet treats and pampered.

The Montanees ask me to lead the invocation of Damballah, so I sing loud and proud!

Danbala, men lwa koulev la ye,

Danbala, men lwa koulev la ye, ba li siwo!

Damballah, here is the snake lwa yeah!

Damballah, here is the snake lwa, give him some syrup!

Pharah laughs and dances around Damballah, who comes down in my Uncle Freddie, slithering about on the floor doing the worm, completely the Rainbow Serpent as he hisses and is dressed in white. He plays with Pharah as Pharah decorates him in white lilies and puffs his skin with flour. We give him sweet syrup to sip from.

Granmamma gets ridden by Erzulie Danto, the mother of the fiery Petro Nation and fierce helm of Haitian revolution, and she dances like she isn’t sick or old at all, flipping a jean apron they put on her as she spins around in mad circles, going ki ki ki. Slavers cut her tongue out, so in chwals, she don’t speak a word. Granmamma loves to tell me the story of how Erzulie Danto appeared to our ancestors in Haiti when desperation, blood and tears were all they had left. Danto promised them freedom for eternal devotion, and my ancestors were only too happy to serve her. A Laveau girl invoked her, became the first mambo, got ridden by Erzulie Danto, and led the troops alongside her husband possessed by Ogou with machetes into flames to fight the French.

No white man’s ruled Haiti since.

It brings tears to my eyes, seeing my granmama, such a quiet woman in church, breathed life into by Bondye. “Hot” Pepper Laveau indeed. It’s like the wildness of her youth have infected her. She slip a bit out of the trance, allowing Danto to communicate beyond the ki ki kis a bit.

She talks to me a tad, but really it’s Erzulie Danto talking. Under normal circ*mstances, Danto wouldn’t talk to no one: “Be wary of the Man in Black, dear child of Bondye, Mister Carrefour isn’t to be trusted. He brings the Black Rider through his necromantic gates.” She threads it through the spool of her husky voice in a low whisper so the other humans don’t hear.

The lwa have been warning me since Leggie left about the Man in Black besides the Black Rider – Met Carrefour is a known threat, but the Black Rider is like the mystery belle of the demon ball, and if Raff would ever let me out of my darn room at night, I know I could beat the up Mister Carrefour and the Black Rider real good with my baseball bat, or even my silly little plastic light saber. “That’s all I can say, my daughter of iron,” Danto says in her staunch way. She marches onto the dance floor and lounges with Ogou’s horse.

Desperate for answers, I pull the older girl with Erzulie Freda riding her aside as my granmama goes back to dancing in quite a lascivious, warlike way with Ogou, the lwa of iron and war.

“Who is the Black Rider, pretty pretty Freda?” I ask her. “Danto won’t tell me anything.”

Freda huffs and simpers, then touches the magnolia blossoms in her hair. She plucks a stem down and inhales the white petals, the beautiful flower smearing her nose with pollen and honey.

She looks at me with honeyed cough syrup eyes: “The Black Rider is Petro stock, my dove. But beyond that, I don’t know. It’s a Petro Nation secret, and I’m the flower of the much more cultured and cultivated Rada, queen of the white Rada Island scene, as it were. Danto is uncultured and rude. Whatever is my sister doing with Ogou? I cook for him better! Hmph. I would never ask Danto who the Black Rider is for you. And don’t go expecting me to lay my pride on the line for Lailah’s rash line and ask Danto the Black Rider’s identity for you either. You serve the lwa well, true – you Laveaus and Montanees always do. And Danto damn well won’t tell you who the Black Rider is: she would never betray a Petro. I don’t think she even knows. I’m afraid it’s a lost cause between both my sister and I. Farewell, little sunshine! I spy a handsome niblet on the dance floor just awaiting to a-dote on me.”

I curse inwardly as vain and flighty Freda flaunts back onto the dance floor, completely ignoring me, and proceeds to flirt with several handsome young men. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she proposes a maryaj lwa to one, and I roll my eyes at that old song and dance. Marrying a lwa costs an arm and a leg, and with a mistress like Erzulie Freda, if the man displeases her, they can face disease, misfortune, impotence, or worse. Good riddance to that dumb bubbly blonde!

After Erzulie Danto is done riding Pepper May Laveau, my granmama is exhausted but happy, and rocks content in an old wicker rocking chair. She still wears Danto’s denim and doesn’t remember a single thing. None of the horses ever do. That’s how the lwa retain their secrecy with their devotees. Spirits ride the horses like they’re going to a fancy party, and it’s no wonder they are as tired as ancient trees bending over in a storm after their exuberant possessions.

The houngan and mambo call the other lwa down, the ancestors come with the Ghede, the court of the dead who are blessed, not ghosts, rougarou, or haints, last and make colorful jokes and smoke, they do their dances, and afterwards there is a great feast.

Baron Samedi struts over with his cane and winks at me. “Stay outta the swamps, mystery girl,” he warns. “You don’t wanna be a Scooby snack, now do ya, my Mayflower child of spring?”

I glare at him, and Baron Samedi cackles. “Whatever, Bawan,” I simper. “I didn’t know you watched kid’s cartoons. And you keep warning me of the darkness, but never give me a straight answer. To the Devil’s pitch with you.”

He howls with laughter and pumps up his chest. “Ain’t much to do in Ghedeland except rot your brains on TV, sex, and wine. And sorry for my obtuseness – I never have been a man of straight answers: Death is a mystery. Just like sex. Or, the mind of a woman.”

I blush crimson. The Ghede are always lewd. In voodoo, sex and death are entwined. Cycle of life, as it were. That’s why the Baron’s got one eye. Granmama loves to joke about that. Makes me blush every time.

Baron Samedi guffaws and his eyes roll in his hand. He takes a bold swig of rum. I pray no one heard his lascivious words. I look to Pepper:

Granmama is too deaf to hear. She just smiles and nods. She’s getting weaker by the day… I steel myself and refocus on Death: Baron Samedi tips his hat her way then thrusts his pelvis back onto the dance floor to a banda beat, his horse’s muscled body following the Bawan’s thrusts. Granmama rocks in her chair happy as the sun after a summer rainstorm.

“You keep on coming to these fetes the Montanees put on after I leave this world, May-be, my baby doll,” Granmamma says as she eats sweet potato pie with melted marshmallows on top and ruffles my thick curls. “It’s time… you hear that? The Ghede are calling me. I don’t got much time left. Time. Time. Time.” Her eyes are deep pools of mire. “I’ve taught you all that I know. But you keep that old time faith! For shame on those that forget!”

There are tears in my eyes – granmama has heard the Bawan’s call, and I know in my bones, soon the Bawan and Maman shall come to collect her penitent soul.

“You know momma and daddy don’t like it,” I say quietly to my sweet as sugar grandmother. “Vodou, that is.”

“Your silly parents ain’t got the whole picture, girl. The peristyle, church? They all the same to good old gracious Bondye up above. Look at your Uncle Freddie, my other son got it. That old time faith. Too bad he’s an eternal bachelor and ain’t giving me no grandkids.” Granmamma laughs. “The lwa loves us something mighty, May. Never forget that, my dear sweet girl. They raised us all up as free men and women and broke our chains, and, when fed the best of tasty things for offerings and given treasured gifts, they answer all of our prayers, just like the saints and them sacred angels. Just like our dear Raphael, who happens to be a saint and angel all rolled into one archangel that likes to eat my etouffee and beignets. There ain’t never too many ways to pray to God, my sweet Pilgrim ship of a Mayflower.”

I eat some roast chicken and smile at my precious girl Pharah, the daughter of Houngan Marc and Mambo Jacquie. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a daughter of the priests, especially the famous Montanee bokors, but I know what it’s like to be raised in a place of spirit. Laveaus and Montanees, we got all the gold of California under our thumbs, only our panning river is the Mississippi, and those gold flakes? Sparkling magic aflame. Our magic burns the witch up, it does, if one doesn’t know how to wield their powers carefully. Just like the Woman in White: damned Lailah Laveau. Granmamma’s saved me many a time. Raff too. But I’m getting older, basically a woman, off to college soon, and they can’t keep saving me anymore.

Too much Lailah in me, after all.

“Granmamma, why doesn’t Leggie – er, Legba – come down anymore to fetes or sit in the pews in Pastor John’s church?”

Granmamma adjusts her purple hat with a kinda dead-looking plastic bird on it. “Hah, your old pal Legba. You used to say you could see him reading the funnies at the back of church on Sundays.”

“God says the funnies are the best thing about Sunday, just ask Leggie. They’re old poker buddies”

“Oh you precious child, what I’d do with an imagination like that! Leggie was saying his prayers, my love. Not reading the Peanuts. And he’s holding the mixing pot of America at bay – I’m afraid Lailah saw to it that our Laveau guardianship over the centuries, sentinels of Louisiana, was weakened when she made that mysterious Black Rider bold. I’ve been fighting the Black Rider and rowdy backwards Petro, not like the good Danto and Legba, back all my long god-fearing life, but I never quite could figure out who she was, or even what it is she supposedly rides. A horse? A donkey? A buck? A llama?… oh well. Some mysteries you stop picking the meat off of eventually, after a while and the wine at Cana sours and you’re more Nicodemus than Lazarus, no longer fresh from the grave but walking towards it.”

“It’s okay, granmama. You kept our town real safe for decades. I love you as much as the lwa love us! Maybe even more! I may be small, but my heart’s as big as a silver pear from Heaven, and the sweetness you and momma and daddy instilled in me are the fruits of my life, if we’re speaking in Biblical terms. I can talk the walk and walk the talk as any strong woman of faith.”

Granmamma looks up at the painted rafters and pounds the dirt floor with her callused feet. “Crooked Legba, you old fool, watch over my precious, precarious girl. Bring favor to the Laveaus, like you always have, and let my sweet descendants prosper. Don’t let May end up headstrong like Lailah. Let her take after your darling Pepper, Papa Legba dear. Like me, let May be steadfast, wise, and true.”

Granmama looks down at me again and strokes my shoulder with her veiny hands. “You are quite the blessing, you know that, my dearest heart? You must temper that temper of yours, though, whether with steel or water, it’s all up to you. That’s how you make a blade. Raff and I are both trying our very best, feeling around in the darkness for what the lwa are keeping secret from both the Laveaus and angels alike. We can’t see much in the darkness anymore, that Judas thick blackness is just so swampy.”

“Sometimes I feel like Raff is stuck in his ways and just will never understand me. Why won’t he tell me what he knows about the Black Rider?”

Granmama sighs. “Did it ever occur to you, May-be, baby doll, that maybe he doesn’t have the faintest clue who she is, and that he is trying to protect you from what killed my momma? That maybe he is just as terrified as you and I of the mysterious Black Rider? No, I reckon only Danto has an inkling, but not much, of her identity, and that only truly Mister Carrefour plays dice with the Black Rider’s crowd, but the Petro never give up their secrets til seven basins of blood and seven stabs of the bayonet to Danto’s heart, just like her summoning song. I bound Ti Jean Petro, but that did me no good, he didn’t talk a lick, and there’s not much a human can do, even a Laveau, to make a lwa of iron talk.”

“Oh…”

Granmama sighs, then soothes me. Her eyes spill over in tears. “Raff doesn’t know who or what the Black Rider is at all, but like me, he doesn’t want you to find out. Ain’t nothing good comes of meeting the demoness of the swamps... Raff was Lailah’s guardian too, you know, as I’ve told you. Raff wasn’t like my lackadaisical Gabriel. Raff’s strict with you cause he was lax with Lailah, and one night she sneaked out of his watch, just like you do, and died in those swamps a haint. When the Laveaus and the Montanees die, we sometimes get eaten up by magic if we’ve sinned, and then we become the most powerful ghouls of all. Snake’s Hollow’s own Woman in White; Lailah Laveau. You stay away from those swamps. Stay away, junebug, stay away. You already got all the answers you need from them. Oh, but you will go, you will go, despite a grandmother’s worried hair. You shall find it all, on the hill, in the hanging ground, on Christmas Eve. I wish I could stop you, but that is beyond even God’s own pasture and pale.”

I need to know. If granmama and even Raff don’t know who is threatening Louisiana, I need to know Lailah’s killing moon secret.

“It’s okay, granmama, I get that you guys are just trying to protect me…”

I better pick up scrying again in my magic mirror, Simbi Makaya be damned.

There are answers that will cost iron and blood.

Iron, and blood, alone. Like nails on a cross too big to bear. I won’t bleed water and wine. All I’ll have left is darkness…

I furrow my brow and cry. Granmama hushes me softly, rocking me sweet as Babylon in her arms. Babylon, Babylon, a Babylon candle – with her, I can travel the moon.

“You precious young child. You do well listening to me and Raff. But like I did with Gabi on her Harley, you’re a young woman now, and you gotta set out on your own.”

I snuggle close to her, and she smells like the roses in her treasured daughter’s garden, the last of the fall oranges, and of overripe lavender perfume. “I’m blessed to have you, my own dear granmama.”

Granmamma hugs me and smiles. “I love you too, May Uriel Laveau. I sure as sweet cinnamon spiced hot cocoa on a cold winter day do.”

Chapter 9 Chapter Text

I hold court with the Night.

I freed Him from our Cage.

We’ve reached equilibrium, you see.

So quiet and content.

Don't know if it's for the better or worse -

I've changed.

Determined and soft,

No longer the one who quivers.

Needed for this situation.

He sits on His throne.

Not able to travel very far.

I am the only one attending,

The rest have gone to the stars.

He asked me questions about my happiness,

(As if a Moon Girl didn’t have

Craters.)

Wonders what's on my mind.

I understand now:

He needs a song.

Other lwa appear and disappear like passing breezes, but the Papa of my heart is as elusive as snow in New Orleans.

That’s because Legba knows all the secrets, he knows the most of all the lwa, for in his old American cook pot, he sees even the mysteries Damballah can’t see in the rainbow of his serpent scales and the farmer lwa Zaka can’t grow from the fertile soil of the Southern ground.

Leggie left a while ago, when I turned eleven, got too big for my britches (according to my momma and Raff and granmamma,) and started asking questions.

Momma and pa tells me that only kids can see Papa Legba and the lwa in general, but I'm not so sure about that. Pharah and I disprove that, at least, on St. John’s Eve I still hear and feel him these days. Granmama used to see him just as well as me, and she ain’t no child at all. Quite the opposite down the river of time.

Sometimes, outta the corner of my eye, I swear I can see the old lwa Leggie sitting in the pews like usual, bald and moony and holy, St. Peter through and through. It’s on the rainy days, when there's a stillness about the place some would call holy, and granmama's soft snores touch the lights. Sounds can touch lights, you know. Raff explained that everything's just a wave, like in physics, except his explanation is more poetic.

“It's all a dance, May. Like butterflies in an Indian summer. Everyone has their time.”

He draws out his words like a painter. His time stretches on forever.

I'm old enough now to see the scars behind his eyes. Like a war vet. Pa says grandpa came back from Vietnam and was never quite the same. He died with that same bruisiness Raff has, the poky bits like a cactus. Once I cut myself after falling at the quarry when I was swimming, and Raff tore off his robes below the knee and bound it with the fabric, then flew me right on home.

His legs were crisscrossed with scars, like train tracks over his skin. Under the wounds, were thousands of burning, tiny gold eyes like broken glass, patchy and bleeding and red, and tufts of ingrown angel wings. Like he was bleeding God. He quickly hid them, ashamed, and I never looked again.

Every angel is but the beginning of terror, terrible, as sweet old Rilke would say.

I never dared ask him about those old wounds, and the terrible blinking eyes under his flesh, but I have nightmares, sometimes, about what they mean. With those eyes, ells tall, sacred, can Raff see all of my sins? What is he hiding from me? The more I grow, the less human he gets, and more distant, just like the sun…

I'm old enough to read the Bible all the way through now, after all, Revelations included. It’s a war story something mighty fierce, and I can only hope for a happy ending for humanity and Second Coming, and on a lesser scale, New Jerusalem and rivers of gold for myself.

There’s the war for Snake’s Hollow, and most of the time, it feels like the greater War to Come, spilling out onto the borders of Earth like a sword from Christ’s mouth and rivers of winepress wrath. Often, I feel like a soldier whose general is too cautious, and I gotta scout ahead of Raff to protect us both from certain doom.

Lieutenants are always braver and riskier than cautious Washington, after all, and I’m more Paul Revere on his midnight ride, screaming out my warning.

“Raff?” I ask, one day as I'm waiting alone at the bus stop in the rain, Pharah is at home sick, and he's hovering beside me, whistling to a bird in his hands.

“Mmm?”

“Your legs. The scars. Those… eyes. Do they hurt at all?”

He's silent.

After a while, he asks: “How’s your story going?”

“Good. Keisha liberated the mutants from Io and now she has a galactic confederation of rebels at her disposal. It's all about a war. You ever seen a war? One is coming to Snakes Hollow, that’s for sure.”

Tears prickle his eyes, and I feel like I've kicked a puppy in the gut. I instantly regret my prodding.

He looks down at his legs, faintly touches the scar thigh, and smooths the fabric, distant.

Fire smolders on his robe. His wings droop, and he sighs.

“Yes,” he says faintly. The bluebird in Raff’s hand trills sadly as my guardian angel hangs his head. Raff shields me from the rain with his bright white wings. “But that’s something you already knew…”

I reach for his shoulder, but he turns away. “I'm sorry I asked. I’m not scared, I promise. You’re holy. Every warrior… has scars.”

“No. It's alright. You have a right to know.”

“About the blackness?” I ask. My blue shoulder bag suddenly seems ten times heavier. “Do you know who the Black Rider is, even the tiniest littlest bit? Is she the Devil’s wife?”

“Yes, but not in the way you would think. She’s beyond what I can see or even comprehend. All I know is that she’s Petro, that she makes the dead go missing in the swamp, and that she wants blood and death above all. Some things, and beings, are too scary for even veterans of eternal war to contemplate. Even us with scars. Some sprits want to eat Creation alive and let all that is good and light fester in their gullets. There are spirits that are hellmouths incarnate. I won’t let what happened to my girl Lailah ever happen again.”

He begins to cry. “Oh Lailah… damnit, my greatest failing. You’re too much like her, my child. It will be your doom if you don’t start listening to me, May-flower!”

Raff lets the bluebird go in anger, anger at himself, anger at Lailah’s death, anger at this cruel world that always curses Lavaeus. Suddenly, his flesh blooms with a million golden eyes, and he burns, and cries out for deliverance.

I hold my scream in, and witness him like Mary at the food of the Cross.

He collects himself, tears streaming, and his flesh knits back together, brown and warm, not eldritch and… unknown.

“I’m, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Raff, I don’t mind. You’re beautiful as you are.”

The small bird, unstartled, shakes itself free of rain and hops down his wing and onto my shoulder. I pet its head tuft with Raff’s gentleness and the bluebird croons. Birds act strange around Raff, more friendly, like he’s Snow White or a Disney princess from the silver screen brought to life.

Raff clears his throat and excuses his crying, looking up at the sky to staunch his tears. “And then, of course, there’s the actual Devil. Mister Carrefour, as you know him. Samael. Satan. Old Nick. Old Scratch. Lucifer. Direct opposite of Papa Legba, but like him in that he opens certain gates. Only, his are infernal.”

“How come I never met Mister Carrefour in the peristyle, if he’s a lwa?”

Raff sighs. “He doesn’t come up in fetes, and all evil passes through him. The Montanees guard against him every night, and do a right fine job. Not someone you want to invoke with a veve, after all. Carrefour’s a custodian of sorts. I think you're old enough to understand what angels do. We clean up after people and take care of them. Well, he deals with the less fortunate souls. Some people are lost, May. They've fallen by the wayside in life. He gives them a second chance, but their souls are at stake. He’s a gambler through and through. Us angels call him Samael the Black. He goes by many names: Old Scratch, Nick, Sam Hill. You know Johnny’s fiddle of gold. Blues magician Robert Johnson selling his soul for the gift of music at Mister Carrefour’s crossroad. That kind of stuff. He reigns over heinous bets with dominion over souls and eternal life. That man makes a mockery of my Father’s gift to humanity of eternal life. Souls are nothing meant to be gambled away. Ever.”

I shiver. “That whole process doesn’t sound very pleasant. And Mister Carrefour sounds like the worst of haints.”

“Some people can be downright nasty, May-flower. It takes a hard man to help harsh souls. I’ll take a quantifiable evil like Mister Carrefour, someone I know, over a stranger danger like this Black Rider woman any day. The truth is, you’re growing up, and I know you go to the swamp for answers. Just like my girl Lailah Laveau. You’re going to die there one day soon if you’re not careful. I can’t protect you at all times, fearsome as I may be. sh*t, you’re just like Tobias. You always remind me of him, trapped in Asmodeus’ embrace. That’s beyond even my powers.”

I blush scarlet. “I’m sorry, Raff. I’m not Lailah, or – or Tobias, even. I just… I gotta know who the Black Rider is. It’s my duty to defend Snake’s Hollow, New Orleans, Louisiana... everything and everyone is at stake if I can’t set the blackness right! It’s so damn hard to shoulder this burden alone. Some “Marie” I make. When she blessed me, I thought it was a good thing, but now, I just feel… lost?…”

Raff gives a forlorn smile and flexes his wings. He hugs me close and tight as a straitjacket. Maybe I’m mad as Alice, thinking I can win. “That’s alright, Mayflower. You’re nearly a woman now. You gotta make your own decisions, to play it traditional like Pepper and live to a ripe old age, or to thrive on the wild side like Lailah Laveau and risk it all. Both paths come with costs, and both come with rewards. The truth is, the Laveaus are the true guardians of Snakes Hollow, and there are only so many things that Papa Legba and I can do.”

I squeeze his waist hard. “I love you anyways, my guardian angel, even if you can’t always keep me safe anymore, and in the end, I have to save you.”

“Oh sweetheart, you are my reason,” he whispers, all full of heavenly paternal love. He smiles truly this time.

“I know,” I whisper in return.

He glances up at the sky: “There may come a time when I have to leave you. Like before I entered your life, but was surely still watching over you. I can be many places at once, you know. I promise not to leave for long, but sometimes. I want you to know that you'll be safe on the nights the darkness comes, just as long as you don’t leave your room.”

Just as he speaks, the bus rolls up. I sit at the back where I can whisper to Raff.

“You're leaving? When?”

“In a while. Before you were born, I was a doctor. I help heal souls and the dying. Your grandmother: she's nearing her end.”

“Angel of healing… right.” I stare out the streaky window to the gutter swollen with leaves. Granmama’s been in the hospital for a while, and I knew it was coming sometime – sooner, rather than later. “Darn it. She is, ain't she,” I say quietly. Raff pats my shoulder in an effort to comfort me. I stifle a sob. “She had so much left to teach me about my heritage and magic. Everything she taught herself. Every summoning beat and asson rattle and hoodoo spell and knuckle bone divination and donkey teeth rattles and hedgecraft. What will I do without her? Who will teach me? Who will make chicken – sob - chicken noodle soup from scratch for me when I’m sick! Raff, you can’t let her go alone to Heaven! Promise me, please, on Jesus’ sword.” I end up sobbing into his arms. He soothes me, throat humming. I can feel his fast hummingbird heart pulse under my ear as I bury my crying face in his goldenrod robe’s breast.

“I'm going with Pepper to Paradise, you can damn well bet that stubborn nose of yours, May. Whoever’s important to you is important to me as well. Anyways, Pepper is my kin. She’s as close to me as my own funny bone, which you may not believe it, but I have one, and it’s my favorite thing in the world, just like you Laveaus. And there are those waiting in the wings to teach you. Like your granmamma’s Gabriel, in fact. Just as we taught Pepper, and Lailah before her, and Marie Laveau generations ago before that. It’s time to ring in the celestial bells at Heaven’s gate and summon the seraphic host of might, righteousness, and holy power. But first, your granmamma giving up the ghost, passing peacefully, and sailing away in my arms into the afterlife, to great granpa Luther and her husband. Now that’s a happy ending.”

“Can't I go too? Please, Raff. I gotta know that my granmama’s safe. She can’t go to Heaven all alone, she’ll try to reorganize everything and clean the entire Heavenly Kingdom with that cursed bad back of hers!”

He smooths my hair just like when I was younger. “I promise on my sword that she won't come into any harm's way. And the rest of the Laveau family is waiting for her, going back to the dawn of time. Pepper's a god-fearing, righteous good woman, May Uriel Laveau. There’s completely no need to worry about her. Ain’t like she went missing in the Black Rider’s realm like Lailah, only returning once a year to haunt Sourmilk Hill on the anniversary of her own death as Snake’s Hollow’s Woman in White. I wouldn’t wish that fate upon Mister Carrefour himself. Now finish that math homework of yours. I'm off to work up above.” And like a firecracker he disappears. I slump into my seat and sit crying for the rest of the ride. I hard wish my rock of a girl Pharah was here, but I’m all alone, and don’t come by friends easily: I’m too wild. No one on the bus even notices I’m sad.

Ever since I've gotten older, Raff’s been leaving me alone more and more often. Just like when granmamma was all trained up in voodoo and became a woman at 21, and sweet Gabriel left her to take care of herself. We aren’t the children of Heaven forever, after all: childhood ends, and we become Daughters of Zion, Migdal Eder watchtowers. The rightful guardians for God.

Still, Raff being gone is like having a missing limb, and I’m still far a ways away from 21.

So I slug through school, and slug through the day, mournful and alone. I can’t even muster up dribbling a basketball in gym.

It’s times like these I wish I could be innocent forever.

But roses in May grow, and with every May flower, a thorn.

The price of magic is pain, and with the price of knowledge, comes the burden of growth and the road to the Stations of the Cross, just like Eve and Adam’s first sinful bite.

I’ll learn it all in time, played out on a rattler’s fiddle.

I just wish my victory would come before the darkness preluding dawn.

There’s a War coming to Snake’s Hollow, and even my light saber won’t illuminate that dark this time.

Chapter 10 Chapter Text

Down I go.

Falling into Night’s darkness.

No strings.

No rope.

Not even a safety net.

Worse that that, I have a blindfold on.

Trapeze off the Moon.

All I have is His hands guiding me,

The ground won't break my fall…

Sinking in deeper, underground.

Dry air and through the sea.

In space, there’s nothing

To breathe.

The next afternoon I visit granmama's bedside. I bring her a bouquet of daisies from the soccer field where I had practice and a few tomato sandwiches I fixed up at home especially for her, with mayo for her aching joints – a silly family recipe I made up in kindergarten when granmama busted her back for the first time when I didn’t know how to cook, but I swear it works. They say it’s an Appalachian tradition, but I like to think of them as my own.

The moment I step into the room, I see Raff stroking her hair and massaging out the kinks in her shoulders, caring for her like a nurse. He wears bright canary yellow scrubs just like the hospital staff does and looks pretty handsome at that, like a doctor from one of momma’s soap operas. I stand speechless and nearly drop my flowers. My throat burns with a kind of gratitude that is too dang hard to even put into words. Holy, holy, holy is he.

Granmama has grown too frail to see spirits or even hear them now, on the verge of death, with metastasized cancer that is in her blood, brain, and bone. Despite her unbearable pain, she’s still sharp as a whip, and the rise and fall of her chest eases up as Raff works out the knots and kinks in her frail creaky shoulders, where she carries nearly a century worth of the Laveau’s family burdens. He smiles at me all gentle and angelic as he looks up from his work. “Hey May-flower,” he says quietly, then leaves the room to give us privacy. I mouth a “thank you” to him, swallowing back a tsunami’s load of tears. Granmama looks at me with rheumy cataract eyes.

“May-be, baby doll. Is that you?” she asks, her voice all soft and fragile like crumpled pink tissue paper. She reaches out with a trembling spidery hand. I take her withered palm and hold it to my cheek, biting back my crying.

“Yeah, granmama. How you doing?” I ask all forced bright like a false star. Lucifer, even. False, false light. I ain’t got no brightness left, not with her, suffering like this…

“Just fine, baby doll. I could’ve sworn on Moses' staff an angel of the Lord just visited me. Is that that old fool Raphael? Hah. Say hello to your guardian angel for me. I even found a bit of white down in my bedsheet, that silly old winged thing, shedding everywhere like a cat. If it was Raphael after all healing me, I feel light as a feather cause of him. You scraping by at school, junebug?”

“Yes ma’am. I aced a test on geometry today. Pharah and I studied really really hard. And look! Tomato mayo sandwiches, just for you.”

We eat them together in companionable silence. I talk about how handsome Pharah has gotten in her new winter outfits and lick bits of mayo from my fingertips. It's hard for granmama to eat so I help her in little bits, proceeding to wipe the crumbs from her neck. One of those nasty IVs is a thorn in her skin and she near cusses it to Hell, invoking the Lord in a whole lot of creative ways I’ve never even heard of before.

“Pray for me, baby doll,” granmama says with faint determination, her rickety voice all outta breath. I do, the Lord's Prayer, followed by an invocation to St. Michael, and then a petition to St. Gabriel for healing. Granmama's been collecting prayers all her life, no matter if they’re Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Anglican, Methodist – it doesn’t matter to her. She writes them all down on dainty notecards as if they were recipes for some heavenly cook book. I guess, in a way, they are. From what I can tell, there’s a prayer for nearly everything.

“I got one, granny. To Raphael.”

“Which of his aspects, baby doll? We talking Book of Tobit? Patron of travelers? His artistic side?”

“The angel of doctors, m’am.”

“That sounds downright perfect, child. You're a darn precious thing to have around. It’s always good to be raised up in the faith: you done me proud and will long after I’m gone, when I’m watching down on you from Heaven high above, standing guardian over your steel magnolia soul. I hope there are magnolias in Heaven. They’ve always been my favorite flower.”

She smiles like a dream.

I dab my eyes and hold back a sob. “Raff’s paving the path to Heaven for you, granmama.”

“Darn right he is. I’ll even see my sweet missus Gabriel again. I do so miss her shine. We can go riding on her Harley together in fields of wheat and gold. There ain’t no chaff in Heaven. Only psalms and songs.”

Together we pray. With a fragile hand, she pats a curl back on my head.

“I did good teaching you magic and raising you up in the faith. It’s up to you to keep that blackness back now, baby girl. I know you’ll do well, not like my wayward, sinful mother. You’re more Pepper than Lailah, or maybe you’re more Lailah than Pepper, but through and through, you’re a Laveau. Now, remember, take my old asson when I go. It was my mother’s mother’s mother’s, given to her by Dr. John Montanee himself. It will always protect you. And remember, forever serve the lwa – if you serve them, they protect you in return, from the Bawan and Maman to sweet Damballah to the Erzulies to fiery Ogou. The entirety of Snakes Hollow is in the balance, my child. All of Louisiana is. It’s always been about so much more than us when you’re a Laveau or a Montanee.”

“Granmama, who was Marie Laveau? All I know are the folktales. And her St. John’s Eve Damballah dances. Big tall stories that attract tourists to New Orleans. Not who she actually was. I want to know where I’m from.”

“Look in the books in pa’s library. Zora Neale Hurston. Mules and Men. In there, you’ll find all your answers, my love.”

With that, granmama rattles to sleep with a yawn. The cardiac monitor heart rate thrums peacefully.

I sit there watching her, holding her hand, crying. She’s gotten extra gaunt from the damn cancer, and I hate to see my poor, indomitable granmama this fragile.

Momma picks me up in a thunderstorm after I'm done visiting. I'm glad that the rain hides the tears on my face.

“She's looking better, momma. That cancer’s been nearly whipped into submission, hasn’t it?” I ask.

Momma smiles half-heartedly. “Sure. Nothing beats your granmama, not even Death himself, that thorny Grim Reaper of stone and bone better watch out. Old Azrael would hightail it to the mountains once my mother-in-law got out her knitting needles and used them as pokers for his bony white behind.”

“Sure thing!”

We entertain each other with tall tales of granmama's Lordly wrath late into the night. Raff sits around munching on granmama’s oatmeal raisin cookies, entertained by all the talk, and pitches one to me:

“Your grandmother's tough as nails. With a look she'd staple the Devil to his throne so he couldn't move a lick.”

“That's right, sir. Raff, what's the derivative of – oh, never mind. This is a fool’s errand, this math stuff. I’m gonna be an English major through and through, and write cyberpunk space operas… I gotta talk to Leggie about this math stuff if he ever gets back, it just ain't right. He should tell God to change it up so it makes at least a lick of sense. God messed up Calculus big time! Newton was a fool.”

Raff helps me, and it's a great distraction from what's really on my mind. He notices later on, of course. Nothing is quick enough to fly by Raff, not even those falcons that go hundreds of miles an hour. Peregrine falcons, I think.

“She'll go peacefully, May.”

“Oh can't you tell me when! Please! I’m literally almost eighteen. You don’t need to keep secrets from me anymore.”

“You know darn well I can't! I’m not a prophet, just an angel. I already told you far more than was proper for me to divulge.”

“It's not just that though, Raff. It's the other angels I was wondering about. I haven’t ever seen any of them but you. I got to thinking, you can't be the only winged man in the world. There ought to be other angels. Angels of music, and traveling. And - and of... of death.”

He sighs like an old wind blowing through an empty carnival. “In time, May, just wait. You'll meet them all eventually.”

I raise my brows. “I will?”

“I just wish it would be later rather than sooner...”

I trust You, Night: I trust You.

If this is what it takes: your Darkness.

Then I trust You with all my heart.

I just need to believe...

It’s Christmas Eve, but I can’t sleep.

I can never sleep on Christmas Eve.

Not on the night Lailah died.

Raff is deep in meditative prayer, repentant for my family’s one sin, nearly somnambulant, and this is the perfect chance to summon the dead. When good spirits roam past midnight, and the bad ones stay outside town’s limits.

One Laveau has met the Black Rider.

One woman went to the swamp to face her fears, and all of Louisiana’s sins, on Christmas Eve long ago.

One ancestress of my line still wanders the swamp this very night that, meaning that the most holy of days that should be a happy occasion, the birth of our Savior, is mourned in my family and has been for three generations.

We always keep a candle lit in the window to guide the Woman in White home, in case she ever repents, but she refuses to cross over, living deep in the sin of abandoning her husband and child, clinging to her stains.

And though it cost her her life, Lailah is my ancestor, and in voodoo, our ancestors become the Ghede, the sacred dead, and well, we can talk to those that have passed on in my good old time faith. As long as they don’t cross water. Lailah ain’t a Ghede, she’s a record scratch in time. But she’s close enough.

I’m the owner of granmama’s asson now, I have my scrying mirror and matchbooks and ghost peppers, and this time, I know how to placate Simbi Makaya. I’m sorting through pa’s library and have been since November, trying to find something on Marie Laveau, Zora Neale Hurston or not, and though I haven’t stumbled across her yet, I’ve found out more about the lwa than I ever dreamed I would know. All the books on Google are behind paywalls anyway. I have unearthed the sacred diaries of other Laveau women, notes on what offerings to give to the lwa, how to do rituals, songs, purifications, spells, exorcisms, journals and treasures only 200 years of Laveau family secrets could ascertain. Even Pharah hasn’t learned that much from her momma and pa, and she’s the darn daughter of the Montanees’ houngan and mambo. I can keep Simbi Makaya, the guardian of the depths of Sourmilk Hill’s quarry, at bay now, in order to talk to the dead he guards atop Sourmilk Hill.

I wish that Pharah were here. But this, I must face alone.

They never found Lailah’s body, but I know the exact spot she disappeared: where the trackers hired by the government say the footprints vanished into thin air, leaving just a few spots of blood.

The back bluff of Sourmilk Hill is a half mile away from the quarry pool: she vanished underneath the old Colonial hanging tree up the hill that may well be a mountain. The hanging tree is in a grove that the teenagers always like to set on fire as a prank, and because it’s surrounded by puddles from the swimming hole, a virtual island in the quarry pool backwaters, the fire never spreads. Its filled with the charred husks of old oak trees. Somehow, the ancient colonial hanging tree never burned down. It’s a wicked old thing, and it’s always said a Woman in White appears on Christmas Eve there at midnight, each year like clockwork, wailing about her baby like a banshee.

The ghost has appeared underneath there, rocking a rotten cradle, since Lailah disappeared Christmas Day there over eighty years ago, and she’s a teenage ghost, nearly my age, cursed to walk behind the veil of all that is good and the depths of hell, standing guardian in her own lost way over all of Snake’s Hollow, harrowed in her own eternal Hell.

I’ve been wanting to go visit Lailah my whole life and find out how she died, but I’ve never been desperate enough for answers. I’ve never been brave enough either. But Pepper, my granmama, faced her – and from the rougarou’s portents to the Bawan’s words, I know it’s where I gotta go. Momma and granmama were always forbidden to go by great granpa Luther himself. Not that my family ever did believe in those things, at least, momma didn’t, and granmama knew better than to visit a dead mother that wanted to shove her back into a cradle ten sizes too small for her, more like a coffin than a nursery, when she was my age. No, she waited five more years until she was twenty three to confront the Woman in White.

Call me an early bloomer. Still, I’m late on arrival, a stillbirth wandering soul.

For in the Laveau family, we know that Lailah’s soul is cursed. Even momma and pa hold it to be true, at least, in their heart of hearts. My great granmama Lailah: a cursed witch residing on cursed ground. That’s what the Black Rider does, corrupts souls into zombies and ghosts and rougarou. I think of how she tortured that rougarou girl and nearly dry heave at what I might face.

Eyeless Lailah Laveau. Just like an infernal Saint Lucy, Black Rider’s sword through her throat, holding her eyes on a plate.

Though momma and pa just think it is just a tall tale granmama tells and family superstition, Lailah’s Woman in White, my family still always tell me never to go to Sourmilk Hill at night during winter. In my household, we stay indoors, wait for Santa, and pray for Lailah Laveau’s lost soul. Let evil pass over the Paschal lamb on the lintel stone.

I’m going anyways. To Sourmik Hill on Christmas Eve, when Raff is locked deep in prayer and won’t miss me, singing “O Bethlehem,” and momma and daddy are asleep. It’s finally time for answers, and the church bell doesn’t toll on its own, after all.

Only girls can ring it.

I gotta pay the piper, and I have all the right hoodoo offerings. May be a Pied Piper, but the gates demand blood.

I’m more Lailah than Pepper, in my bones. In fact, in my darkest imaginings, I fancy myself Lailah’s carbon copy, with my forest wanderings. Her callings to me in dreams have become clearer and crystalized as the months have gone on, and she is beautiful – a New Orleans beauty queen in a pale white dress and headwrap. She resembles what she must have looked like before the Black Rider took her.

Is it any wonder that I see myself in Lailah? There’s something beautiful about being the cursed black sheep of the family, like an overripe tangerine on the tip of my tongue. Raff was my great granmama’s guardian angel too, after all – and I am risking the same fate as Lailah, with the blackened path I’m traversing as Snakes Hollow’s curse grows larger and larger like an omen swallowing the entire country town, drowning it in a mangy sea of crows.

It’s something even Raff won’t talk about. The curse that the Black Rider put on Lailah. No one even knows how Lailah really died. Even Leggie doesn’t know who the Black Rider is, and Danto ain’t telling me any clues, as she guards all the Petro with her life, trouble or not they be. She said herself the Black Rider had veiled herself with a curse and removed her memory from all the lwa, even inklings of her name. Danto probably doesn’t even know who she is, just has a vague suspicion.

There are hundreds of Petro, after all.

Some things are beyond the scope of God, Raff would say, some souls between the Ghede and Hell. I contemplate the possible early grave that awaits me as I’m scrambling down the frosty shingles and out the widow’s walk, careful not to slip on the ice. My coat wrapped tight around my petite curves, I shiver at the cold. I scurry down the drain pipe, jump into the winter rose garden momma tends carefully that granmama started to cultivate a generation ago, then prick my thumb on a snowy briar and lick the blood just to remind myself that I am alive.

Not dead. Not dead. Not dead.

Not another Woman in White. I am May, May, May, and May Uriel Laveau is my God blessed name, not damned Lailah Laveau.

I’m alive, I’m alive, and ghosts are just ghosts. She can’t hurt me! I have more power here on this Earth as a living being than her. And Lailah, despite her damnation, better like me. I’m her spitfire rebellious clone, after all. She may scare the local teenagers away, but I figure she’s got a reason to tolerate me, at least for a little while. I’m good, if anything, at placating the dead.

I’m Lailah’s family, after all, and the first one to visit her after all this time since Pepper confronted her eons ago.

“Here goes nothing, and something right stupid as a jackalope, as sweet granmama would say,” I mutter to myself, pulling out my flashlight and mounting the elevation behind our cul de sac out into the swampy backwaters of Sourmilk Hill. It’s a long hike uphill through thickets and thorn trees, and it’s freezing cold as the lowest circle of Hell. In order to assuage my fear, I sing a Kreyol song, Erzulie Danto’s war song on the hot ride to Haitian revolution, and the fierce Kreyol invocation my people still sing in the peristyle during her ceremonies:

Set koud kouto, set koud pwenyad

Prete’m dedin a pou m’al vomi sang mwen

Sang ape koule

Seven stabs of the knife, seven stabs of the sword

Hand me that basin, I am going to vomit blood

the blood runs down.

I never said my family’s spirituality, the one of human liberation at the cost of shackles rusted and cut through and a whole social order of oppressors and slavers as sinful and evil as Satan ended in bloodbaths, came without songs of violence. But Erzulie Danto’s song is my rally cry, and as I repeat it in lilting Kreyol, it makes me a little bit braver and braver.

Jou ma’ koule

Map vomi sang mwen bay yo.

The day I am run down

I will vomit my blood and give it to them.

I need a bit of Danto’s indomitable strength now, to go and confront the black sheep of the Laveau family herself. The weeping wailer.

The Woman in White.

Lailah Pepper Laveau.

Sourmilk Hill looms, and I climb the scree-laden path as mist seeps up from the ground. There is a cold mist, like a ghost’s wedding veil of cobwebs. I shiver despite my brave song, but that only makes me sing louder and prouder.

I will vomit my blood and give it to them.

I come to the quarry pool where I nearly drowned a month ago. I cannot cross this to the back bluffs of Sourmilk Hill without placating the Simbi Makaya sorcerer of the depths who now stands guard over this hollow. After all, I accidentally unleashed Simbi on this swimming pool as Raff’s and Leggie’s protections broke. With Simbi Makaya’s mercurial protection, I might stand a chance against the Woman in White that is Lailah, tainted by the Black Rider as she is, just like that dead rougarou girl. They were both claimed by a force far more wicked than Mister Carrefour and sour as hell’s bells ringing to the Devil’s trill.

I lay out some red ghost peppers by the water side on the ammonite shore of the quarry pool, light a floating tea candle with daddy’s stallion embossed cigar lighter and send it sailing out into the water, ferried by a ring of red peppers, then take out my asson and start rattling along in tune to Simbi Makaya’s summoning song:

Simbi Makaya, m pral nan Semetye,

Rele Malolo, elmi barre mwen!

Simbi Makaya, m pral nan Semetye,

Rele Malolo, elmi barre mwen!

A hey Simbi Makaya, a hey! Elmi bare mwen.

Simbi Makaya, I am going to the Cemetery,

Call Malolo, Enemies bar my way!

Simbi Makaya, I am going to the Cemetery,

Call Malolo, Enemies bar my way!

A hey Simbi Makaya! A hey! Enemies bar my way!

There is a Medusa stirring coming from the depths of the quarry pool, and suddenly, Simbi Makaya appears – he is drowning in duckweed hair, with an iron crown, smoldering yellow eyes, and is covered in green scaly skin that ends in serpent’s tail.

MANJE.

He clutches the offering close to him and plops the ghost peppers into his mouth with bloody talons.

“Yeah, sure, I’m food, whatever,” I mutter, crouched down by the water now far too cold to swim in. He was never scary, just annoying. He’s given me too many math homework answers over the years for me to be afraid, anyways. Our little scrap in August nonwithstanding.

He laughs: yi yi yeep!

“I want to cross the water, great Simbi Makaya, husband of Erzulie Danto, swampy king of sorcerers. To go to the hanging tree where the Woman in White waits. I can’t cross safely without your protection. So what do you say, Mister Simbi Makaya? Were those ghost peppers good? Yummy, right? They’re straight from Pepper’s and momma’s gardens. You like the Laveau food that I always give you in return for math homework answers, don’t you?”

Simbi Makaya nods his head and tips his iron crown off to me with his T-rex hands. His duckweed hair smells like sulfurous, rotting wetland vegetation. Simbi Makaya lets out a hiss, his thick forked tongue gray and grassy, and suddenly he forms a curling spiral staircase out of his wet coils atop the bluff of the spring for me to climb.

MONTE.

“Ride you?” I ask, incredulous, pocketing my lighter and my asson with measured caution. “I was going to climb, but sure.”

Simbi Makaya nods, his slit eyes dilating like gibbous moons.

“Here goes nothing,” I mutter, holding onto his sloping tail as he begins conveying me up his slippery coils to the two story tall back bluffs of Sourmilk Hill’s cursed ground. “Guess you liked me having offerings for you this time around, and not asking to see my heart’s desire, eh?”

Simbi Makaya hisses a yes: WI.

I scale the bluff where the spring waterfalls from, and Simbi Makaya lets me go, then slithers down into the depths of the quarry pool where I unleashed him from.

I feel utterly alone, looking at the burned half mile trail downhill to the hanging tree. There are charred husks of oak trunks from truant teens that came before me, and the blackness like Snake’s Hollow’s curse on St. John’s Eve and Day is starting to form a thicket around my ankles, having penetrated the faults in Earth’s already shaky borders. I kick the shadows away from me scrappily and the black clouds slide off like Cleopatra’s asps. I reach into my bag and take out my old glowing plastic light saber, turn on the light switch, and illuminate the Christmas Eve dark.

“Good luck charm, eh?” I whisper a bit frightfully, mostly to myself, then walk down the overgrown ashen path to the hanging tree at the very back of the bluffs that reigns over a stiff scree plummet three stories down the mountain.

I wave my light saber around a bit and its battery operated whooshing sounds kick in. That lightens the mood a little, but only a bit. The moon is freezing alive in her prison in the sky, just like me. I’m not faring much better cold wise even in my downy winter jacket and thick wool leggings.

There comes a voice from behind the hanging tree on the horizon with a timbral like my own. It’s the same honeyed mezzo soprano, and in the far distance, a white shift over ghostly translucent blue flesh waves in the wind.

The Woman in White. The Christmas ghost. Plain as day, glowing pus, in this godforsaken yet holy place.

Lailah May Laveau.

I stop in my tracks. She’s tall, taller than even pa, with willowy limbs and wild dirt-matted braids down to her waist, set with dusky red roses, thorns tearing at her brow. Her hair has twigs in it and her limbs and white shift are covered in blood, from her torn open breasts to the gaping wounds over her thighs. It’s like she was put through a lumberjack’s chainsaw and came out the other end broken and splintered open, like rotten twigs, atop the other side of the bandsaw.

She is holding an empty cradle, rocking the open space where a baby should be, and sings a lullaby.

It’s granmama’s old cradle her father carved that went missing from the attic decades ago. I guess Lailah wanted a memento from her mothering days, short-lived though they were.

As Lailah sings, she sobs black grimy green sheen tears like old oil spills, her torn bloody dress ruffling in the harsh wind:

Nwa kavalye, Nwa kavalye,

vin pran ti bebe mwen an ale.

Nwa kavalye je m ', Nwa kavalye,

Nwa kavalye, touye m', e kounye a,

mwen kriye pou pitit mwen an,

kounye a mwen plen regrèt.

Black Rider, Black Rider,

come take my baby away.

Black Rider blinded me, Black Rider,

Black Rider, slayed me,

and now I weep for my child,

now I am full of regret.

“Great granmama Lailah?” I call in an unusually mousy voice, unsure of myself as she rocks the rotting cradle with a vengeance.

Lailah’s eyes glow like bellows over hellfire coals. “May…?” she says, and her fiery eyes settle to empty blackness, and I can tell the globes of her eyeballs have been completely plucked out like hors d’oeuvres on toothpicks by the Black Rider. Demonic Saint Lucy indeed. The black grime is like a gasoline spill of tears over her gaunt, blue cheeks. “May, May, my girl, I can’t see. Why hasn’t Pepper visited me? Where has my sweetheart Theodore gone? Where has my baby girl gone now? My breasts are full of rotten milk for my baby. I must, I must, I must give poison suck!” Her form blips like a glitch, she vanishes, fades in and out like La Llorona, and then the cradle is rocked once again by her as she resets, and Lailah Laveau scream-cries:

Mwen kriye pou pitit mwen an,

kounye a mwen plen regrèt.

And now I weep for my child,

now I am full of regret.

The shriveled dead of the hanging tree from four hundred years of use begin to manifest on the limbs, swaying like strange fruit. Lailah wails like a banshee, poking at the holes in her eye socket and licking the rotten runoff of her corpse tear ducts. I wince at the body horror of our family’s cursed dead ancestress as the bloated purple faced corpses of the damned sway above. Strange fruit, strange fruit, strange fruit. Billie Holiday’s record skips in my mind, a stranger uninvited.

“May, May, let me feel your face so I know if you have my strong nose and curls. Then I will tell you who killed me… the Black Rider’s true name, who cursed our family’s town…” she whispers, sinking to her knees and pressing her chin against the old abandoned cradle. She lets out a strong sob. The damned hanged corpses moan above, doing their deathly hangman’s jig. “I have waited, waited, waited for my great-granddaughter to visit me. May, May, May, may you please me and may I please you. Raff couldn’t save me. Not my own dear guardian angel. He cannot save you. He will never save you. Nothing is safe, not from the Black Rider.”

I gather all of the little courage I have left and approach the Woman in White that was once my own flesh and blood. She holds out withered hands, and I place my face in her fingers. She crawls with her clammy translucent claws across my cheekbones, eyebrows, lips, and scalp, and then, she laughs like a madwoman.

“Who is the Black Rider and her retinue?” I breathe, my voice demanding yet effervescent.

“It’s simple. She’s the Laveau’s ancestor that came before Marie Laveau: Maria is her name. Maria and her boy Jean. Ha ha ha ha! Ke ke ke! They mangled my flesh. They ate my eyes! Their rougarou girls grizzled and drizzled my honey bones. Oh, May, May, May, my May, be careful my girl, don’t be eaten alive like me!”

Lailah Pepper Laveau gives one last scream, then my great grandmother gives up the ghost with a rush of chilly wind that blasts my face like a morgue. The hanged colonial men and women disappear, and the cradle turns to dust.

I hear the laugh of the Man in Black – the Black Rider’s herald - come to collect Lailah Laveau’s soul, and I see Mister Carrefour’s bone carriage approaching like an evil red aureole under the wicked moon. The deathly carriage has snakes for tires – the serpent spokes hiss at me - and I run away so Samael the Black doesn’t drag me down to sulfurous Hell too.

I let out a loud scream and run back down to Simbi Makaya, who is far less scarier than my now put to rest great granmama and Mister Carrefour, the Man in Black.

MANJE. MONTE!

“Yes, yes, ride you stupid Simbi Makaya! Go!” I cry, scaling fast and furious down his back and hightailing it off of Sourmilk Hill.

I don’t stop running the many miles home until I am blistered and bruised in my front yard. I sink to the ground exhausted and sob, pressing my cheek to the dirt, and kissing the grass as if I have received divine revelation and God’s salvation at the hands of Bondye Himself high above.

Who the hell are Maria and Jean? What ancestors send their armies of rougarou to eat their own descendant? Those aren’t the names of any Petro lwa or family I know! I risked my life and hainthood for nothing! I’m just left with mental scars from my crazy great granmama and the feeling of dead hands withering on my face. Even worse, I just have more questions than answers now. I rock back and forth in front of the statesman old orange tree, my body toppled over like Jack’s beanstalk by an angry axe.

“May, May, where are you?” Raff cries, waking from his Christmas prayers. “What the heck are you doing outside? It’s freezing! My girl, my precious little girl, whatever did you do? I can’t lose you! Not again.”

I sniffle and push him away. “You’re gonna hate me, Raff, I’m so sorry.”

He sighs, again clutching me close despite my protestations. “I could never hate you, even if you did exactly what I think you did. The dead are meant to rest on this holy day: any dead soul that travels the night a star shone over Bethlehem and illuminated Yeshua’s manger has no love for Bondye up above and His only begotten Son. Lailah is damned, May. She gave up her husband and newborn child in the rash pursuit of answers. Oh May, thank God you’re okay! Lailah was my charge, as you well know and I curse myself for, and losing her was my greatest failing. I can’t lose you too, to that damned Black Rider, like a bad record skipping itself on repeat!”

“It’s okay, Raff, I’m okay!”

Raff is crying now too, and we sob together, our thick salty tears fructifying the hard, frozen ground.

“I know their names Raff, the Black Rider and her man, but it makes no sense.”

He plaits my hair out of my sweaty face. “Yes, you brave little fool?”

“Maria and Jean. Lailah said they were our ancestors. The first of the Laveaus. What ancestors kill their descendants, Raff?”

Raff sighs, scrunchies up my hair real good, and kisses the crown of my head. “There’s rotten fruit on every family tree, Mayflower. Cursed figs, withered vines. Chaff. I would imagine it is a pair of two of your less than savory Laveaus. Ones that gave up their humanity long ago for the power of the Petro. Now, many Petro are beneficial, like Erzulie Danto and Ogou, but those like Simbi Makaya and Mister Carrefour usually mean nothing but harm. I’ll try to talk to Papa Legba. Maybe between us, we can figure out who this Black Rider that curses Snake’s Hollow and her partner in crime are, now that we have their names.”

“Let’s – let’s go to bed, Raff. We got presents to open up tomorrow and granmama to visit in the hospital on Christmas Day. Thank you so much for comforting me even though I did exactly what you warned against.”

“I’ll always be here to comfort you, I promise you that, my Mayflower.” He flies me up to my window. “Hey, my girl, you’re your own woman now, and you got answers I was never brave enough to get. You were a hero tonight. That’s gotta count for something. Sweet dreams, my only May,” he says, and tucks me in and kisses my forehead.

The crucifix weeps, then sings “Riders in the Sky.”

“Night, Raff, I love you,” I murmur, falling into troubled slumber.

Jean and Maria, Maria and Jean?

Who, oh who, are these Petro Laveaus?

Chapter 11 Chapter Text

The ghosts of the Night are still crying…

How can one live within war?

I stay late after we visit granmama in the hospital, and she looks at me with all the light and fondness God has for the descendants of Abraham. Raff is massaging her shoulders, and he has blown light into her eyes so that her spirit sight is restored and she is prepared to cross over. She will have a beautiful passing – I know already because a silvery platinum halo now glows over her gray hair, and her skin has a veil of gold on it, like an intricate Celtic knotwork of scripture, the names of God entwined in her ascending flesh.

“My time be coming to board Bondye’s train to Gineh, Maybe baby doll,” granmama sings in her now rickety voice, crossing herself feebly.

I squeeze her hand lightly.

“Granmama, you raised me up to be a strong, fierce gator of a woman. I put Lailah to rest. I did as you said. I have all the puzzle pieces now, but I can’t seem to figure out how they all fit together. Raff, granmama, what comes next?”

Granmama smiles beatifically: “War, as it always comes when a young woman’s flower blooms. But what would be beauty and love without struggle and pain? When I marched in Birmingham, the world was against us. Now see how it has turned! – our people have gone from the cotton fields like my sharecropper father to the highest offices of this blessed land. We sing our songs across the radio, dance our dances for millions, and the world celebrates what I fought for all those years ago: Freedom! Sweet freedom! Where I’m bound for, there ain’t no racism, there ain’t no yoke to weigh me down. I’m bound for Gineh, and I have left you with all that you need. For that, I can go on in peace.”

“Oh granmama!” I sob, hugging her hard. “I know Heaven will be beautiful with you in it!”

“I’ll carry you to Heaven, sweet Pepper, where Luther and Gabi are waiting,” Raff says in a honeyed voice, tears sparkling in his eyes and falling hot onto my brow as he closes the hug between the three of us. “It’s always been us three against the world ever since I came to you, my dear May. The dance changes, but the song stays the same. You are my own child, and where Pepper watches over you in Heaven, I will give her a prime view of your life as I do the same here on Earth.”

“You are blessed by Bondye, my child. Special. Always remember that.”

Granmama smiles, and it is the last time.

She closes her eyes, and enters a deep sleep, only to be awoken by the sound of angels.

Raff carries her off to Heaven, and I am left alone in the sterile hospital room, weeping for what I have lost, and what I have become.

You don’t have far to go, girl.

You don’t have much

at all.

Granmama's funeral is a stately affair, with the entire church gathered on the village green to pray for her immortal soul. It's just how she would have wanted it, with eloquent speeches and an ocean full of tears. Only I don't cry. It's like a plug has been put in my throat to stopper the sorrow. All I can do is stare down at the coffin and gaze upon her empty face. Raff is hidden like the sun behind a storm cloud. I can feel him, but I see nothing, just darkness in the shadow of Spanish moss swinging on the trees in a storm. I wonder if Gabriel is cradling granmamma’s sweet soul in Heaven right now, without me or the snow.

Granmama passed on in peace with us by her side. Raff gave her her last rites. Pastor John never understood when I told her an angel gave them to her, but it’s no matter anyways.

For days after her death, Raff was gone. I make the trek down Main Street, up the church hill, out to the graveyard each day, carrying brier roses cut from granmama’s favorite bush out front and early white orange blossoms from the premature heat. It’s gotten weirdly hot since Lailah Laveau passed on. Probably my doing, if my suspicions are right. That, or Papa Legba’s old cookpot of American spirits is overflowing and burning Snake’s Hollow up alive in the good lwa’s gumbo pot.

Sunday afternoon is dark as the Devil's pits. It storms as I walk to the graveyard. The trees lining the iron fence stand like daggers against the sky. The graves go back to Colonial times, as Snakes Hollow used to be a kind of resort town and healing retreat in Louisiana, a home away from home for the New Orleans elite, fabled for its mineral springs that can cure any ailment, or so the stories go. The tourist shop even sells bottles of the mythical spring water. Now it’s just another small town, but the mystique remains, and in this hundreds of years old graveyard with stone angels and mausoleums, I can believe in the water’s magic, almost as if it has the power to revive my sweet granmama.

Water has memory, and the dead do not cross it. But will it be enough to stop the Black Rider? Can the spring waters of Snakes Hollow help me break its spell? I don’t have granmama to save me anymore – not even Raff right now.

All I can hope is that my magic is enough to save all of Louisiana, and New Orleans.

I come to my granmama’s grave – as humble as the woman that shaped my life in so many ways, but stately, elegant, godly, and wretchedly beautiful, now that she ain’t here. It’s a Celtic cross with roses embossed on it that says “The Lord is My Shepherd.” Granmama always did love Celtic crosses, as we are half Irish from momma’s side, and daddy’s also got Irish roots from granpa Luther. We’re back swamp gator and catfish eating Cajun Irish, but from Paddy’s green shores nonetheless.

“The sky's crying for you, sweet Pepper Laveau” I whisper, my lashes wet with rain. The stone in my throat dislodges and the tears that pour forth are as thick as the Red Sea. Heaving, I sink straight like a hook to the ground, my knees muddy as I kiss her rain-slicked grave stone. “Granmama, there's so much I wanted to tell you. So much I don't understand. I feel so, so alone.”

Lightning illuminates the plot. “Raff?” I cry out, sobbing in earnest now. “Where are you? God, oh my dear, mighty Bondye, why did you let her leave me all too soon!”

An engine starts in the distance. A motorcycle radio turns off. I steady myself, shaking like the Tower of Babel. The cemetery gate creaks open.

“Hello?” I call. I rise carefully, bunching my coat close around me for a little warmth to spare. Four figures peter in, hidden by the Spanish moss. My hairs stand on end as I hide behind a stone angel. Through the vegetation I can see them walk forward like a quartet of noblemen and noblewomen. Wings drape around their shoulders like capes.

My jaw drops open a country mile wide as they approach.

“May?” Raff calls, his face brilliant as the sun. His golden eyes are like momma’s shimmering citrine wedding earrings. “It's okay, Mayflower. You're amongst friends now. There's no need to be afraid anymore. As we say, please, be not afraid. ” The clouds part above and his companions step out into the light. A shaft of sunshine wreathes them in glory and glances off the halos above their heads. I sink to my knees in wonder.

For a moment, they are covered in eyes.

“Raff?”

“We're here to take you home,” he says quietly, coming to me and picking me up off the ground, cradling me against him like he did when I was young and fulsome bright. He hushes me as I sob into his shirt. The other angels stand back at a respectful distance. “But first, hot cocoa. And answers.”

“You’re what?”

The four angels look at me like I'm Kingdom Come.

Raff watches me closely, blowing steam from his mug of cocoa and skimming off the whipped cream to lick off his thumb.

We sit in a booth in a small country town diner on the outskirts of Snakes Hollow, in the heart of the sticks, Raff’s coat over my shoulders as I stare wide-eyed at the three strange angels. One has hair like saffron threads, another almond eyes rich as loam, and the third skin like sandstone. Their wings are tucked into their backs, and somehow the waitress can see them for once. The four angels have a gravity Raff usually doesn't, a presence like they're actually here, walking the earth as angelophanies, with their white wings hidden from view.

“The archangels,” Raff says quietly, a strong arm around me as he hugs me right and tight. He pushes a slice of apple pie my way. “Eat, May. You need to refuel. You’ve had a grueling few days.”

I pick at the apple pie aimlessly, unable to concentrate on the steaming dessert, my jaw dropped too far open to chew. If I've learned anything from Raff, it's that angels are many things, none of which are subtle. I could kick him halfway to Heaven right now, springing his Lordly, impossible friends on me in a graveyard of all places, like surprise daisies pushing up from a coffin.

“Jack's rabbit you all are. That's impossible! You only appear in ones to the Laveaus as our guardians, not all four of you at once! Unless it’s the End Times or something. Is it the End Times?”

The angels laugh. “No,” Michael says, his voice rich with maple sugar. He smells of palo santo and cologne.

Michael's stern face is softened by a smile. He's the one with the ruddy hair, the general of the angels. A wicked set of scars like claw marks juts over his brow, making his face thick with ridges, just like a mountain. “Each generation, there's a child raised by angels. We’re their teachers. Soon, May, you’ll inherit the Earth. The darkness around here is getting blinding, after all.”

“But why? Why, after all these centuries of the curse, now do you come in full glory?”

“Because of destiny. Call it whimsy, call it fate, but our Father has plans.”

“But that makes no sense! I'm just a Southern girl that doesn’t know cat clawings from chicken scratch. That’s what granmama always said, anyways. The Laveau burden is enough, and I almost died on Christmas Eve. I’ve got my head in the clouds, so far up I’m in orbit! I’m spacy! I write space operas – I’m a dreamer, there’s not a hint of common sense about me. How am I supposed to help someone as mighty as Bondye? I’m only seventeen!”

The one with earthy, almond eyes and beautiful pale skin takes my hands into hers. Gabriel - the messenger angel, I think - whose smile is like a birch bark whorl. Granmama’s own guardian angel. She rode here on her Harley with me aback her motorbike. It was a wicked ride! “God’s old, May. Older than you can know. He has places waiting for Him. He needs someone to look after the world while he's away. That's why you've been raised by Raphael. The time will come when you’ll help others as He helps them. You are the final guardian of Snake’s Hollow. The curse ends here with you: you are the bravest of all Laveaus.”

“How? How will I end the plague of Snake’s Hollow that even Marie Laveau couldn’t fight off? This whole thing makes no sense!”

“By restoring balance, May,” answers the sienna, Arabic angel. Azrael, the angel of death. Weirdly enough, I feel no fear under her swirling, hollow Grim Reaper eyes. Just peace. “Every human answers prayers in their own ways, some more than others, some rarely, and some only once in a lifetime. You shall answer many in your time.”

“But I'm not an angel. Not at all. I’m just a human girl, a Plain Jane, and a Southern belle I’m definitely not. There ain’t nothing saintly about me – I’m all rough around the edges and rebellious. Now, granmama,” I bite my tongue to stave off my piping hot tears. I choke a bit on my words, but continue: “She – she was a woman of the Lord. Nothing like me. I could see Pepper Laveau as a saint, but May Laveau? No way! I have magic, yes, but I don’t have any holy power. I ain’t got the grace of God about me at all...”

“Oh, my girl, but of course you do – you got that saintly glow around you, just as sure as Pepper did,” Raff says, licking his fingers clean of the remains of my pie. With his free hand, he wipes my tears clean. “Angels were created to serve humanity. We bowed down before God's Creation out of love long ago. Well, all but one.” His face darkens. “Mister Carrefour was a bit too proud for that. Anyways, the point is, while we can do many things, we can’t interfere with occurrences directly. We can help, of course, like I did with your grandmother, but we cannot change things outright. I could ease her passing, but I couldn't prevent her from dying. As angels, we must respect the order of things. But mortals can make choices, and we can influence them. That's where you come in.”

“Why? What can I do?”

“You can make choices.”

“But what about God? Couldn’t He just puff away the curse of Snakes Hollow with a breath of His heavenly fresh air and get rid of the Black Rider and Mister Carrefour for good?”

Gabriel grins, her cat-winged lined eyes glimmering with amusem*nt. She nurses a tall coffee that's black as sin, dressed in a biker jacket and a Goth Lolita dress like a girl fresh off the streets of Harajuku. “And therein lays the problem of free will, my sweet Pepper’s scion. Lwa have free will. Humans have free will. Angels even. And God can’t do everything – that’s why Bondye created us angels and the lwa. Even the old man needs a break! We help Father take care of his righteous business. We're all different parts of God. For example, I'm God's strength. That's what Gabriel means. Michael is God's general, Raphael is God's healing, Azrael is his help. It goes on and on and on. And when you were made, sweet little thing that you were, we put something special into you.”

I tap my fingers on the table, completely anxious and nervous. I feel like Heaven’s spotlight is glaring down upon me. I glance at Raff in suspicion. “And what exactly was that? Tabasco sauce? Is that the secret ingredient of my soul?”

Michael's golden green eyes focus on me. “It’s God's love for the world. It will give you the ability to take on the pains of this world, people’s suffering, and turn them into joy. We blessed you with angelic magic. We gave you powers even beyond a Laveau.”

“Wow,” I breathe.

Gabriel giggles. “I still remember you up in Heaven, cooing away as I held you in my arms, my Pepper’s son’s daughter.” Gabriel smiles like the moon. “You know the old wives' tale that the indentation above your lip is God's thumbprint? It's actually mine. I cradle all babies before they're born and whisper God's Word into their ears. I press life into their lips and shepherd them on their merry little ways. You were delightful, and your soul shined just so, thrumming with God's beauty! To meet you again, all grown up, why, it's just wonderful as Pepper’s mac and cheese sweet cream casserole! We cooked so much when she was a girl like you. Your apple pies are just the match to my old girl Pepper’s! Whenever Raff brings them to Heaven, I hoard all the slices for me and Snoopy, Legba’s dog.”

Gabriel takes my hand. She runs her fingers over the lines of my palm like she’s a fortune teller. “I can feel it in you, the angelic magic - your blood is full of Father’s love. It courses like lightning through your veins. Raphael, you've been selfish, keeping May all to yourself. She's too precious to bear.”

Raff squeezes me with his arm. “She's darn precious alright,” he grins, pulling my ear. I fight him off, smiling despite granmama’s passing.

“Heyo, mister! I'm too old for that nonsense, Raff. I'm fierce now.” I look at the archangels, wary: “You guys better watch out. Keep calling me precious and I might smite you with my supposed angelic ‘powers.’”

“You sure are brave,” Gabriel laughs. “Just like your cat, eh? Raff keeps coming to work covered in calico hair. He won't shut up about how much it sheds.”

“If he'd stop petting Coco so much, maybe he wouldn't get so messy, eh?” I say evenly. I eye Raff with merriment in my eyes, and he winks back, my bad mood finally broken by the angelic choirs. “So what do you do up there, anyways, all day long when you’re gone, Raff-ay-el? Angels must be awful busy. I don't see how Raff has all the time to spend with me.”

Azrael smiles serenely. “We have many roles. I'm the angel of death: I transport souls to the next plane.”

“I'm Heaven's general,” Michael says. He absently touches the scar on his forehead. “I protect the world from demons, Mister Carrefour included.”

My heart races at the mention of demons, and I remember the blackness that terrorizes my nights. I mask my fears and nod.

“I'm the angel of souls,” Gabriel says cheerily, drumming her thumbs on the table and sipping at a co*ke bottle. “And I’m the leader of Heaven’s motorcycle club and choirs. I pluck new spirits from the Tree of Life on my Harley and send them off to their birthing. We all do a lot of things: odd jobs. Answering prayers, for the most part. I also play the trumpet pretty well.”

The table collectively groans. “Not that stupid thing,” Raff teases. “Gabi never shuts up, May.”

“Gotta practice for the Apocalypse!” Gabriel says. She winks at me. “All hell might break loose pretty soon - you're growing up to be a head-turner, May, and women are the devil around pretty girls. Just look at how pretty my Pepper was. It got us into loads of trouble – two pretty gals like us!”

“I'm not letting anyone touch her except for Pharah Montanee, of the party of Father,” Raff mutters. “I have a flaming sword reserved especially for uncouth womanly suitors.”

I roll my eyes. “I don't need two dads, Raff. Ain't no way you're gonna tell me what to do when I’m dating Pharah, yikes. You’re already up in our business!”

Michael laughs. The sound shocks me, all deep and rich like dark chocolate. I can't imagine what it's like when they all sing with their sweet as honey voices in the heavenly choirs.

“You've got a fireball on your hands, Raff,” Michael finally says after his laughter subsides.

“Yeah, he does,” I say. “I ain’t worth anything if I’m not trouble.”

“Keep that spunk.” Azrael smiles. “It’ll help you further down the line.”

Raff ruffles my hair. “You're a headache, a precious, precious headache, my only Mayflower in spring.”

“I’m not precious!” I protest. “My cat's precious. You're precious, in your silly yellow Sunday suit and top hat in church. I got better fashion sense than you by a mile.”

The angels laugh at Raff's expense.

I continue: “You’re all chivalrous and fluffy winged. You don’t have a bad bone in your body! But I got a temper, and I know how to use it. There ain’t nothing precious about me at all, Raphael. Not since I was ten.”

Raff sighs. “Whatever you say, Mayflower. Whatever you say.”

Did you know Night’s stars

Are bodies?

War is the food for the good of all.

Comfort comes after

With a price…

That night, I hear a voice at the window, while Raff is snoring like a chimney:

“Sweet damselfly, come dance with the Devil in this cold July.”

“It ain’t July. Anyways, who are you?” I say, sleepy-eyed as I groggily walk to the window.

Outside is the Man in Black dressed like an old fashioned Southern gentleman in seersucker and a black velvet vest and red undershirt. He plays a whining melody on a saxophone and sashays around my cul de sac like a fertility god.

“Come waltz with Old Nick to the six of spades!” he calls after a melody, then bows. “Come haunt the haintlands in the Devil’s maze!”

“Will you shut it!” I throw a rock at him. It knocks his top hat off his head. “First Lailah’s ghost, now you? Can it, you’re as bad as Bawan Kriminel! I ain’t got no time for your tricks, Mister Carrefour!”

His saxophone disappears, and is replaced by an expensive Cuban cigar. He shrugs like swaying grain. “It’s simply an invitation, mambo of a black mamba. Take me up on it when your precious Raphael is otherwise occupied.”

I flip him the bird, slam shut the blinds, and turn on the radio to drown out his wailing sax.

Ain’t no way I’m messing with the Devil of the crossroads – at least, not yet.

After all, he’s always been waiting.

Chapter 12 Chapter Text

I can't stop asking Night

Of His stars slain in the sky.

"Why this much suffering?" I sing.

I've asked so many times.

No answers

But this alone: "It's their price to pay

For love."

Christmas comes and goes, the haints get closer, and Pharah invites me over to her house on New Year’s Eve.

“We can watch Star Trek reruns, your favorite girlie!” Pharah smiles in class that day. “It’ll be a Wrath of Khan Mayday to Captain Kirk, over!”

We stay up late, way too late, and braid each other’s hair with silk flowers from the craft store, talking about girls on the silver screen and comics, but mostly comics and Shuri’s new run as Black Panther in place of T’Challa.

“May, why are you always going into the woods? Don’t you know that Snakes Spring and Sourmilk Hill are cursed? Without Raff on our rounds, it ain’t safe… without me, you’ll get hurt.” Pharah asks, smacking on some peppermint gum. “We ain’t some dumb New Orleans tourists looking to get cursed by a bokor, but you sometimes act like it.”

I finish plaiting her hair and scrunchie that sucker up real good. “You believe in curses now too, eh? Not just Montanee curses – Hollywood style stuff?”

Pharah laughs like I just cracked open an egg on my skull to fry it with my hotheadedness. “You’ve seen my parents at the peristyle each week! You think they just do blessings? Priests of the lwa have to do everything: blessings, marriages, curses. Your granmama did the same. My parents were trained by a bush priest in Haiti all the way through kanzo, you know. And our family’s been the houngan and mambo here in Snake’s Hollow ever since New Orleans was colonized, just as the Laveaus have always been the wise women. To say I feel pressured to enter the family business is an understatement! But I don’t have the sight as strong as you, eh, nope, not me, I’m just good for a spell or two and swarming haints with gris gris pakets. Us Montanees ain’t got the same blessings of Bondye as the Laveaus.”

“Hey, you’re pretty good at casting a spell on me,” I wink.

She twirls around on her crossed knees and flips her hair. “It’s all about the good old sass game. And that’s the magic I got, so I work it!”

I laugh. “You know any more magic than love spells and flirting?”

Pharah waggles her eyebrows playfully. She grabs my hands and squeezes. “Wanna work a wanga, sister?”

“What’s that?” I say, shifting in my bean bag. “Granmama never got to teach me that one.”

“Dolls for protection and luck. And, well, curses, but we’re sure as heck not messing with those. I got some old Barbies… wait a sec.”

She pecks my cheek and grins.

“Oh my god, are we making voodoo dolls? You’re kidding me. This ain’t a hokey tourist shop in New Orleans aimed at idiots drunk on Hurricanes and Sazeracs with big bucks.”

Pharah fishes out two dolls that sort of look like us, only in their twenties with wasp waists and impossible proportions – a Doctor Barbie and a Soccer Barbie. As a size sixteen, I never quite fit in with the elementary doll crowd, but Pharah did. I liked American Girl.

“Your granmama’s right, girl, you gotta start believing. Why else do you come to the fetes?”

Belief is hard when the lwa and angels are real. They’re more like concrete, cold, hard reality to me. “I like your momma’s soul food,” I mutter. “Shrimp gumbo, etouffee, red beans and rice, jambalaya… she should have her own cooking show.” I touch my braided silk roses, nervous for some reason.

Pharah busts her butt laughing. “You’re silly. Remember when you used to say that you could see Legba at church? That was a hoot. He was praying, not reading the funnies.”

I sigh, looking out at the stars past the deck. Venus glows bright and cold. “Sure was. But I did see him. Still do.”

“Sure you do! Who am I to question a Laveau’s sight? All I ever see is your Uncle Freddie hitting on all the single ladies when Pastor John is mumbling on about Heaven or whatever in his homilies. Oh, and haints. Again, weaker spirit sight. Hmm, here we go, let’s see what we got here…” Pharah goes to the craft closet and pulls out bolts of fabric, herbs, spices, Florida water, and dollar bills. “We gotta dress the wangas and bless them. What kind of magic do you want to work?”

I see the blackness rolling down the hills past the porch screen. It keeps coming at night now and choking this damn town, no longer limited to just All Hallow’s Eve.

“Truth.”

“White, then. I want love. A certain May Uriel Laveau is real cute.” Pharah wraps her Soccer Barbie in red cloth with pink sparkles.

“You goddamn ham.”

“Pucker up, girlie!”

I miss her kiss by a country mile.

I scrunch up my face like a prune. “Eww. I never want to kiss a girl. Better than men, though, and smarter, except for our dads and Raff. He’s only kinda dumb.”

“Oh, that old “imaginary” friend of yours – an angel that ain’t white. Right. Haha, just kidding, he’s a Spartacus wannabe, and a Boomer. Okay, here, comb some Florida water into their hair and put the dollar bill wrapped on their chest in string. I’m kinda improvising – mom’s not gonna teach me real magic until I’m fully initiated in kanzo in Port au Prince, but it’s all about intent.”

“Okay, here, my silly voodoo doll is done.”

We hold our dolls up to the light. Soccer Barbie and Doctor Barbie once, voodoo dolls now.

“Okay, say your spell!” Pharah urges, transfixed. “In Kreyol, please!”

I eye the blackness.

Then I raise my voice in haunting soprano song:

Moutre m 'kavalye Nwa a.

Maria a kache nan menm nasyon fantom.

Metrès la nan haints.

Moutre m 'kavalye Nwa a.

Show me the Black Rider.

The Maria hidden from even the ghost nation.

The mistress of haints.

Show me the Black Rider.

Pharah shivers. A gale rouses up like new sin in the cold basem*nt and scatters our materials for the dolls.

My doll’s head twists backwards, and the limbs of the wanga Barbie tangle like the Exorcist.

“You feel that cold?” Pharah says, quick to scare. “Ah hell, look what you did to the medicine kit and dolls. Damn Laveau girls, daddy always says. Spicing up the peristyle with their hot, hot songs. What the heck is the Black Rider doing here, May? I thought she couldn’t get in-”

The winds pick up outside, the rougarou yip, and I hear thunderous hooves like the Devil’s own steed. Closer, neighing, Satan’s bells, there’s red lightning flashing across a sky weeping blood, abyssal wolves at her heels-

“NO!” I scream, throwing my doll across the room.

The magic leaves.

Pharah is spooked to Salem.

“What the hell just happened? Did you hear a voice?” my best friend asks me, rattled.

I breathe in and out. Steady, steady. Hold on to your soul, May!

The neighing and hooves vanish. I ground my magic and reach my roots deep into the earth, cementing myself to the present reality and this corporeal space.

“No. Huff. No. What did it say?”

Pharah looks haunted, her too big eyes in tears. “Mwen se Mouri a, epi mwen pote dife: I am the Dead, and I bring fire.” She begins to cry. “That wasn’t one of the Erzulies or La Sirene or Maman Brigitte, or even Damballah’s wife. I don’t like her, I don’t! Forget magic, I’m waiting until momma and daddy train me!”

Pharah and I burn the ashes of our Barbies in the fire and never touch the voodoo dolls or medicine kits in the house again.

I don’t sleep a lick that night, and for many days to come thereafter.

In my own impossible world

In the realm of Day

I am a Goddess.

I hold the power to take the world’s suffering

Away.

Bring my Night to me

So His sorrow

can be

extinct.

Each of the angels, I learn, is a gear in a clock: put them all together and the hours of the universe turn. As the weeks go on, they teach me – to sing in Heaven’s language, to dance the steps Jacob’s family circled in the desert, to revel in the beauty God planted on Earth. I go biking aback Gabriel’s Harley to New Orleans and she takes me out for boudin and jambalaya. My soul thrums with the archangel’s devotion, and I feel pure as a mountain spring.

I start working in soup kitchens with momma and daddy in honor of Pepper May Laveau, her dying wish for us to feed the poor, and in the meantime I fill piles of notebooks with prose, imagining words plucked from the Tree of Life. I give back the love the angels pour into me to my small Louisiana town, and it’s hard to notice, but sometimes a flower will creep up through the snow where I step, and jiminy cricket if that ain’t something true.

Finally, the strange angelic magic I always knew was in me springs up like a wild rose pushing through the last of the winter snow, and I have tremendous beauty, and I also have glorious thorns. My magic now is kind, but I know, that when it meets the blackness, it will prickle like stinging nettles and shock the Black Rider straight on down to drown in Hell.

The haints are howling, the nameless Dead wander, the zombies moan, and the rougarou serenade the moonlight.

My days are bright, but my nights are even darker.

For all that glory of the angels comes blackness. Pain drawn to me, like I’m some candle in the pitch black gloam. We read a Rilke poem at Sunday school about angels again, my favorite: beauty is but the beginning of terror. I wonder if Rilke walked with angels, too.

Raff and his thousand burning eyes, skin scarred, bleeding doves.

The darkness comes every night now, swirling outside my window, calling me. May, it says, I see you. I hide under the covers in a cold sweat.

Raff takes to sleeping at the foot of my bed to protect me even further, always snoring like a foghorn, his flaming sword at his side like a nightlight. He doesn’t even bother to cover his scars up now – as if he is trying to warn me of what will come, and god dang it if he won’t tell me how the despair knows my name. I can always hear the Devil singing at three A.M. and playing his stupid saxophone loud as a busker. “Don’t worry about it, May-flower. Mister Carrefour won’t hurt you. It’s just like a moth to a flame. After all, you’re bright as the sun. Just stay in and get some rest. You’re safe as long as you don’t go outside,” Raff will say wearily – he hasn’t been getting much sleep. He sounds like a broken record: “I’m always here to protect you, May, my only girl.”

Too bad Raff ain’t that smart. He should have known by now that giving me orders makes me do the exact opposite of his Godly, strict instructions.

On the coldest night of the year, with freezing record temperatures, with the December warm snap gone, the darkness thrums outside my window. I just get this overwhelming feeling that whatever out there is waiting, Mister Carrefour and his saxophone be damned to Old Scratch. Which, I guess, is his royal jackass self.

The only way I can get the darkness to stop taunting me is if I give it a good thwacking. That’s what Finn did to the First Order, after all. That’s what my OC Keisha did when she freed the rebel lunar mutants on Io. That’s what Nichelle always did to studio execs, too, according to sweet sweet momma.

I take my dusty plastic light saber out of my closet for old time’s sake, put on my Lieutenant Uhura Star Trek pin (I sure as heck ain’t gonna do her fan dance, though!), and climb down the gutter when Raff is comatose and asleep. Maybe it was a sin, but I stuffed him full of chocolate chip cookies and milk to get him to pass out as thick as fog. I probably ain’t a godly person with angelic magic after all: I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t manipulate his guardian angels with dessert. He just met them in the desert and turned down their temptations. I’m nowhere near as strong as the Lord to resist at least talking with the Devil – and maybe breaking his saxophone that keeps whining on and on and leaves me awake while I’m at it.

The darkness of Snakes Hollow’s curse is so thick I can’t even see nowadays. I switch the blue glow of my lightsaber on and use it to illuminate the despair, earning scratches and bruises as I slide down the shingles, over the roof fronting the door, and slip down the gutter.

Mister Carrefour, the black magic lwa of the crossroads, who for so long has been watching me is there in the center of the cul-de-sac, leering like a lone wolf. The tall demonic figure is waiting by a flickering lamppost, puffing on a cigar in a bowler hat like one of those villains in pa’s old noir films. He sure can pull off a suit and Cuban heels. Shadows cling to him like a caul, and I can’t tell if it’s silk or bits of night that have attached to his devilish yet suave aura. I taste coffee grounds and iron on my tongue.

Mister Carrefour breathes out a snake of smoke. It squiggles up to the stars. For however dark he is on the outside, there’s fire in the depths of his mouth, like there’s a bellows in his lava lungs.

I hesitate. This isn’t the Black Rider, after all, and he was never human. This is someone else entirely. The crossroads have flipped into a Satanic Cross and summoned the Devil.

I rattle my asson. “Hey, you! Sax attack!”

His slit pupils dilate. “Oh? We coming up with nicknames for Sam Hill now?”

The Man in Black laughs. He licks his chops fierce hungry with a forked tongue, like he’ll unhinge his jaw and swallow me alive like an unholy basilisk.

Be strong, I think, like Uhura or bell hooks or Maya Angelou or Zora Neale Hurston. This is a smart woman’s world, after all, and smart women always win. Momma always says so, ever since I rode hobby horse on daddy’s knees.

I point my lightsaber at him. “You lost, Sax Attack? This ain’t even a crossroads: it’s a cul de sac. Stop playing your god-despising music and get outta here, come hell or high water. I don’t have any deals to make or a soul left to sell. Raff made that pretty clear a while ago: I’m owned, basically Heaven’s property. Not that this angelic magic thing doesn’t come with its perks.”

The shadows condense around Mister Carrefour, leaving only flickering pitch eyes and a hooked nose that looks like it’s been broken a dozen and a half times. The cloying black fog that wreathed him gone, I can see beyond my lightsaber’s bulb now, illuminated by Mister Carrefour’s eyes. I turn the toy weapon’s electric buzz off.

Mister Carrefour chuckles all deep like a drilled gorge, the kind I go swimming in in quarry pools with Raff below Sourmilk Hill. He sure is as cursed as that hanging ground Lailah used to haunt.

“Hey, so you traded shifts with Lailah after you dragged her to Hell, and now you’re haunting me, is that right, you Blues Brother wannabe?” I cross my arms. “Not much of a talker, are ya? You ain’t much fun at parties, I bet. It’s either your music or your riddles, but now, tabby cat got your tongue.”

The Man in Black takes another drag from his cigar, then blows smoke through his scarred lips in the shape of a beautiful woman at my face. She dances in a flamenco dress and heels like a Roma seeress, then dissolves at the tip of my nose.

I swat the fumes away, boiling over with irritation. “You’re not a gentleman, neither. You’re dumb as a doorknob, Sax Attack – don’t you know that smoking causes cancer? Granpa died that way. You don’t want to go out like him, with sticky needles in your skin, hooked up to rattling machines and IVs. That is – if a lwa can die. I’m antsing to find out for myself…”

Mister Carrefour stamps out his cigarette with the clack of a Cuban heel. I didn’t even know Petro lwa wore men’s heels. Ogou, for example, only wears boots. “Poison’s in my nature. Anyways, a few cigars never hurt anyone. Say, little dancer, want one?”

I draw back, raising my fists like a caged lion. “I’m not a smoker or a dancer. And dancing with the Devil is the last thing I want to do. You’re really offering a fourteen year old tobacco?”

“Gotta start inhaling the fine stuff someday, the sooner the better young lady.” Mister Carrefour fixes his cufflinks. They’re shaped like cobras, just like his serpentine eyes. “Joker, smoker, midnight broker – you will be one day, ballerina, adoring poisons, dealing in magic in societes for the sick, broken, and the poor. The desperate will flock to your light – someone that burns as bright as you can’t avoid it. And oh, the music of your angelic witch’s soul! You’re dancing already: your heart’s a drum. Every movement is a step closer to your grand finale. In the end we bow together, go down together. We’re counterparts, you and me, my dear. Twin players in the same old jazz rag. Don’t you know how it goes, lamb?”

I cross my arms and assume a defensive stance, as if he is a scorpion about to strike. “I think all the fumes have made your head squiggly. You don’t make a lotta sense, mister… mister…?” I forget his name, under his cobra spell.

“Mister Carrefour, lwa of magic leaves through which all curses pass, spirit of the crossroads at your service.”

I surface a bit from his Santana black magic guitar haze. “This is a cul de sac. You get confused about the definition of crossroads, Sax Attack?”

He shrugs and gives a shredding laugh, like meat through a grinder. “Cul de sac? Crossroads. Close enough. Everything moves in circles anyways – life, songs, psalms, waltzes. We rise and we fall, us musicians take new names, us pitchers play new games. Well, want to make a wager? That’s what I’m best at, after all. I made a bet with Lailah to meet herself the Black Rider and face the tormentor of this town, and oh, did I deliver! That’s why I got sweet Lailah Laveau’s soul, after all, and she’s dancing with my demons in the inferno that heats the Petro Nation right now.”

My veins ice. So he is Lailah’s death, this Devil worse than the grave. Still, I hold my ground.

I poke Mister Carrefour with my light saber to see if he is made of more than just shadow or if he is as substantial as smoke. The plastic light saber doesn’t touch him, just slips through him like a sword through a waterfall, like I’m the Lady of the Lake with Mordred. “I don’t make deals with strangers, much less bets, Mister Carrefour. Momma raised me to be a proper Southern lady, after all. We don’t go gambling away our fortunes with tall, dark, dangerous men.”

Mister Carrefour looks up at the sky with finely ground pepper eyes, the irises of his sclera bloody red. “Your too-many-greats grandma did. Bet with Mr. “Sax Attack.” Mistress Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. She bet her soul for power on my snakes – she could bend judges and the jury with a hot hot pepper, stroke the Marquis de Lafayette’s ego, and dance with Damballah at the bayou on St. John’s Eve to bring blessings to her people. Marie Laveau struck a deal with me and my dear brother for the betterment of all of New Orleans – and Louisiana to boot. After all, all magic passes through me and my magic leaves, my May flower child. You’ve got the same voodoo blood in you as Marie, little girl. Most Laveaus do. Walking the thin line between the angels and the lwa in service of good old Bondye up above. Now don’t ask me if it’s gris-gris dust a-flowing or a fete you’re throwing, but a strange wind’s blowing your way. Kanzos comes, lave tets go, but the song remains the same. Dancer that I am, I hitched a ride in on your tailwind years ago. I like this place: Snake’s Hollow. Little country town outside New Orleans. It’d be a shame to see it go to the dark side. It’d be a shame to see it disappear.”

I stick up my nose in defiance. Hold your ground, May. Stand your ground. “What exactly are you saying, sir? You wanna drown Snakes Hollow? I won’t let that happen, Sax Attack.”

Mister Carrefour lets the blackness thread through his fingers like lucky fish. He plucks a ghost of a goldfish and squeezes it with a watery, shimmering pop to its death. “I ain’t making any threats. Simply making a bet: that the blackness in this town has a taste. My older brother saw to that. Sweet, sweet angel cake, and a little bit of devil’s food cake from you. Legba built up the wards strong around the people of Snake’s Hollow, nearly taking it off of my map. The haints can’t get in, the zombies are poor outlawed posses, and the rougarou gotta stick to the woods. But are Legba’s wards strong enough, I wonder, when my spirits come out to play and hassle and tempt the Reaper? Even Jesus in the desert couldn’t resist me in the end, he came three days to Hell to test himself against my playground. The Ghede, the Kalfous, the Ogous – we be a mean bunch, not as tame as you would think. Outside the peristyle, we’re even fiercer partiers. Life’s a playground, after all, and my Petro crowd likes nothing better than drums that hum like sin.”

I put the glowing light saber under my eyes so my face looks scary and ghoulish. (At least, I hope it does.) “Snake’s Hollow is my home, Mister Carrefour. Ain’t no magic to it, and there isn’t anything you can do to destroy it, not with me and Raff as its guardians. And you missed Leggie by almost three years. He doesn’t come down to fetes anymore ever since I started asking too many questions about Bondye and the meaning of it all. Leggie is dust in the wind like that song.”

Mister Carrefour laughs like black coffee grounds and simmering ghost peppers with blinding steam. He takes a drag of his cigar and blows it in music notes of smoke into my face. I cough and wave the fumes away. Pretty gross, but what else to expect from the Man in Black? At least he’s got style. Bet he listens to Satchmo whom he seems to style his music after.

The lwa of the crossroads gives a crooked smile: “Legba ain’t gone, little girl. All you needed to do was call him down from Rada Island with a special veve. I can show you how.”

I narrow my stubborn eyes. Momma says I look like a mule when I do that. Maybe it will make him go away. Mules and Men, which I still can’t find in daddy’s dang enormous library. Mulish May Laveau. “I don’t know about Marie Laveau, and I don’t know about black magic. Mess with that stuff and it bites you like a gator. Leggie will come back when he needs too. I ain’t calling him down for no reason other than to placate my ego and annoy him with his evil twin.”

Mister Carrefour chuckles again. It annoys me. A lot. “All it takes is some cornmeal and some rum and some candles. Didn’t your mother teach you that?”

“Duh, I know veves. But momma’s a good Christian, not a witch. And I leave the veves up to the Montanees. Ain’t right to summon the lwa outside a proper peristyle without their food and adornments. I ain’t that rude. Granmama could do it because she was a woman of God, but I don’t presume to have that power.”

“I bet she is. Your mother, at least, all nonreligious and prim as a proper Southern Irish belle. Maman Brigitte’s Irish too, you know. All blondes be the same. Dumb blonde broads. You’re mother’s probably ditzy and beautiful as a blonde broad of the Southern cotton kings-

I raise my hackles. “Shut your darn trap mouth about my mother, sir.”

He laughs like a jackal. Damn fool. Speaking of my momma that way! “Whatever, your mother ain’t nothing to me. Too bad you kids forget about us sweet, sweet lwa. Even the Montanee heir Pharah can’t see me when I bid her bon voyage into her cursed sleep. I curse all your sleeps, mis amors. Now what are us spirits of Gineh to do, when our descendants forget about us? The lwa are hungry, you know. Why else do you think I eat the blackness in people’s dreams? I don’t get enough offerings these days. Nobody likes Mister Carrefour. Not even little missus mambo.”

He pulls a buffalo nickel out of his pocket and flips it. It lands heads up.

“You’re making decisions with forgotten change, typical,” I say, narrowing my eyes.

He chuckles. “I just made a bet with myself: whether I should help you out or not, little missus black mamba. Guess I will. I got some fiery rum and some old cornmeal left over from last night’s fete in the Petro Nation. Even got a St. Peter candle somewhere in my cliff-deep pockets. Gotta pay the piper, I’d wager.”

I step back, swinging my light saber on to my side as a shield of sorts. “Is it okay to watch black magic? Or is that a sin too, according to saintly you?”

“Ask dear Raphael. Or don’t. I sent my spirits to his dreams each witching hour. Ever wonder why he cries out at night? He’s your shield.”

I wince. “I think you’re right evil, Mister Carrefour. You killed Lailah, and you’d kill me if you could, too.”

“I ain’t debatin’ that – human sacrifice is much better than a black rooster for my ego and kingly powers.” Mister Carrefour draws out the materials to summon Leggie, slithering like a serpent down to the ground as he sets up his makeshift altar. His body seems to be completely double-jointed. “I’m a lotta things, child. Angel, devil, lwa, loser. Ain’t nobody likes Mister Carrefour.”

“You said that already. You’re a damn broken record.”

“Hoo hoo hoo, ju ju ju!” He finishes drawing a veve – the kind in those hokey Voodoo shops on Bourbon street, not simple and useful, but all for show. When Mambo Jacquie or Houngan Marc draw veves, they’re less perfect, more flowy and natural. Holy, human, not devilish with extra squiggles and fancy flourishes and lilting lines.

He shrugs. “I’ll admit I’m a bit bitter about my popularity. Humans won’t even look at me when I come down in a fete. Guess I’m a lucky man then. They don’t bother me or my friends unless they want to curse somebody. Now that’s a fun time indeed.”

“It don’t sound so great to me.”

“Guess it isn’t, then. Alright, here’s Legba’s veve. A lot prettier than mine. Legba likes to be fancy, a dapper gent with crutches and a cane. I wonder if he’ll bring that little yappy Saint Lazarus dog.” Mister Carrefour lights candles and chants in Kreyol. He spits rum onto the flames and they combust. I take shelter behind a dumpster.

“You sure this’ll work, Mister Carrefour?” I call, half-ready to scale the gutter and go get Raff. What am I doing, working with the Devil? Probably even Lailah wasn’t this stupid.

He fans the flames. “As sure as sin, ballerina.”

“I got two left feet.”

“It’s a metaphor, black mamba. Mambo, mamba, what’s the difference?”

“Isn’t a black mamba a kinda venomous snake? From Africa or something?”

“You got bite like one, little missus. Mambo, mamba, like I said, one and the same – you’re a dangerous little thing. A trickster snake like me. Us two are killers, you and I.”

“Only one I’m aiming to destroy is you, Sax Attack.”

“Oh boo, you.”

Mister Carrefour opens his bass voice in vibrating, sinful song:

Vanyan Legba,

set Legba Katawoulo yo.

Vanyan Legba,

Alegba-se, se nou de,

ago, ye!

Courageous Legba,

the seven Legba of the Katawoulo.

Courageous Legba,

Alegba’s divine power, it is the two of us,

ago, yeah!

Snoopy, Leggie’s fluffy white Pomeranian, barks, then comes bounding out of the flames at me, her pink rhinestone collar sparkling. Out of the inferno steps Leggie in a bathrobe on his old creaking crutches.

“Carrefour, you idiot! Why’d you wake me up?” Leggie looks around, scritching his bald head as he examines my cul de sac. His rheumy umber eyes widen and he smacks his whorled cane on the ground. “You stirring up trouble in my May’s neighborhood, twin? To the depths with you, you crooked, crooked fool!”

I pet Snoopy, who hides from the flames behind me. She’s shivering and yappy. I come back out from behind the dumpster.

“The angels and I got a deal, Legba. You know I like deals. Especially ones done humming at crossroads-

“Cut it out, Carrefour. I’m too old and wise for this damn ruckus of a circus. You’re a one trick pony, younger brother, you boy. You heed my words! You touch a hair on sweet May’s head and I’ll beat your hide with my cane all the way back to Gineh. May, May, my bon chile, you there?” Leggie shields his gaze from the flames, trying to find me.

“Over here, Papa,” I call, scooping Snoopy up into my arms. She smells like summer grass and licks my face.

Relief washes over Leggie’s face. “You had me scared to death, May,” Leggie says, pushing Mister Carrefour – or the Man in Black, I don’t even know, what a geeky freak! – aside with his crutches as he hobbles over to me. Leggie adjusts his straw hat then hugs me, real hard. “Didn’t Raff tell you never to leave your room when the blackness comes to haunt Snakes Hollow?” Leggie asks; his voice is stern.

“Raff didn’t tell me a lotta things. Like where you went. Or that I’ve got magic angelic superpowers.”

Leggie sighs, then brushes a lock behind my ears. “I like the curls, baby doll. You make me Godly proud. I knew this day would come.” The keys to the Heavenly Gates jangle-jing on Leggie’s cane as he turns to his supposed brother. Mister Carrefour? I bet the Man in Black has a lotta names, none of them very savory.

Frosty grass crunches under my feet, but Leggie is hot as jambalaya. “You do this again, brother, and I won’t be so lenient. You’re overstepping your bounds, brother.”

“Boundaries shift, older sibling. And they’ve been broken for months since dear little Maybug here summoned Simbi Makaya. May needs me, now more than ever. Me and my spirits. Just like Marie Laveau did. I taught the Voodoo Queen all her tricks, I’ll teach her too-many-greats granddaughter. Pepper ain’t around to train her anymore, and I have secret lessons. How to dance with snakes, to command the lwa to her will. She’s already met half her celestial family. The angels can’t keep her all to themselves. Us lwa, we got our claim. She’ll need all of us, when the time comes.”

“What time?” I interrupt. “The time you wake up the whole town with your gosh darn broken saxophone?”

Mister Carrefour licks his lips like he’s at a barbecue pit in Tennessee. “Bondye be calling you, little dancer. You gonna fight for him? For us? Us lwa, we in bad shape. Marinette wants you dead. But you’re the key to our survival. Marinette ain’t thinking straight. She’s all fire, death and blood. Black swine, black roosters, rougarou amassing in the swamps on her side. She’s setting out for Snake’s Hollow soon. She don’t much like angels and the lwa working together. She don’t much like Bondye – your God – at all.”

“Maria – Marinette! Oh my god!” I breathe.

I’m in deep poop. Marinette I’ve only heard of in quiet, hushed whispers amongst pa’s centuries old Laveau journals. She hasn’t been seen in 150 years, and all I know is that she is a lwa of the night and owls, like Lilith, but even more frightful.

Ti-Jean Petro and Marinette. Maria and Jean. My ancestors cursed and bone char bold, painted in stark history amongst Snake’s Hollow’s sins.

A blood curse passed down through the line of Laveaus.

The wicked ancestors that ate Lailah alive.

I get no sleep that night, not even after Leggie shuffles off with Mister Carrefour.

Things just keep getting worse, and I’m not ready to face her, and I don’t know what to do, not with sweet granmamma gone.

I stare up at my blue ceiling without sleep, insomnia gripping my mind.

“Granmamma,” I cry softly so as not to wake Raff. “Please, oh please come back. Somehow, anyhow, hear me. I met the Devil. Nothing, just nothing, is safe without you anymore. I feel so alone…”

The crucifix above me weeps blood.

Chapter 13 Chapter Text

Night looks at me with nothing

His starry face stone-cold

Yet my heart continues to burn

Because my lips whispered His name out of love:

Two Lwas

Opposite and rivals

Yet complete each other

Like Erzulie Freda,

I pour my tears of empathy to all

Like Erzulie Danto,

I have to move on like a warrior.

I let the wounded Night

Go.

I sit with Raff at dinner the next day, almost blue from shame. I don’t dare tell Raff I went out into the darkness. I ain’t gonna tell him that we summoned Leggie, or that Mister Carrefour gave me his card. I didn’t even know the lwa had business cards, much less the Devil incarnate.

“You hold this card over a candle flame, baby mambo, and I’ll be there,” Sax Attack had hissed.

It’s monogrammed with a swirly M and C in the shape of two snakes.

I ain’t raring to try it out soon, if ever. Jesus scorned Satan in the desert, not summoned him.

Legba fixed me up with a hug and made his dark horse of a brother go away after some firm convincing. “You ain’t gotta worry about Mister Carrefour, baby doll. Tell Raff I said hi. Things be a bit busy up above. Your Papa Legba’s gotta hobble on home and sleep. C’mon, Snoopy. I’ll tell you more about Marinette later, May-flower.”

Who’s this Marinette, I wonder?

That’s the problem with the lwa, and spirits in general – especially angels.

They sure do leave a lotta things unsaid.

I’m chewing on a green bean that’s real stringy when momma comes into the room, dressed in a paisley skirt and pretty blue top. She’s got high heels on and is singing Frank Sinatra tunes as she places a steaming bowl of mashed potatoes in front of me and pa. Her blonde hair is up in a chignon, and dad’s curls are like Prince in his purple tie. Momma always says pa looks like Prince, anyways. Love softens the eyes, and the decades make you fond.

Raff is reading the newspaper, but he looks over the front page at the steaming taters, salivating even though he doesn’t need food as an angel. I better sneak him some later. We all sit down, say grace (I was eating before that, whoops) and dinner begins.

I’m cutting up some barbecue chicken when I catch momma outta the corner of my eyes.

“Momma?”

“Yeah May?”

Pa looks up from his taters. Raff closes the paper and adjusts his reading glasses. I doubt angels really need glasses, just like they don’t really have human bodies. For Raff, it’s all about keeping up appearances.

“Who’s Marie Laveau? I mean, beyond granmama’s tall tales – who was she really?”

Momma and daddy share a look like they just stepped on an open grave. I swallow a piece of chicken, one of the good bits without gristle.

“She’s our ancestor, sweetheart, on daddy’s side,” momma says slowly, looking worried. “It’s where our family name comes from: it’s French. She was a very famous woman in New Orleans back in the day: she led the Haitian spiritual community and danced in Congo Square, liberating many in her time. There’s a lot of fiction about her. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” I mutter, stuffing my mouth with the taters so I don’t have to talk anymore. I absently touch Dr. John Montanee’s vial of hot powder in my jeans pocket.

Raff clears his throat, then elbows me. I ignore him.

My parents give each other another look then go back to talking about pa’s legal practice and how momma’s winter garden in granmama’s old greenhouse is.

“May,” Raff whispers, even though he can’t be heard. “Did you go outside in the black!”

My kitty slinks up and purrs, rubbing against Raff’s leg. I cross my fingers behind my back for old times’ sake and look at the floor. “Uh, well, no.”

Raff narrows his honey brown eyes, petting the cat Coco who purrs like an engine in her favorite angel’s lap. “May Uriel Laveau, are you lying to your guardian angel?”

The blueness of shame creeps up again into my neck. I blush. “Umm...”

Raff rubs his brow all exasperated-like. “You met Mister Carrefour, didn’t you. And he told you. Things. Things about the Petro.”

“Leggie saved me! Snoopy was there too! I was just making sure we were safe, Raff. I even had my light saber on me, it’s as good as a bat!”

“That won’t protect you, Mayflower! Carrefour’s a nasty trickster and a smoker to boot. Stay far away from that scoundrel.”

“Then why does he got all of Snake’s Hollow as his playground? His blackness is like a sinful smoke all over the dang town!”

My kitty mewls for attention and bats Raff’s thumb. Raff pets her in worry.

“The lwa are strong in Louisiana, May. They’re intercessors like angels, saints by one name, the vestiges of African gods by another. God, Bondye, whatever you call Him - we serve the same Man Upstairs. Some lwa are friendly with the angels, like my good man Legba, but some are downright hostile, like Marinette.”

“Who is she? That’s who Maria is. Marinette.”

“So her enchantments of obscuring her identity over the lwa didn’t work on Carrefour. Hot jambalaya hell!” Raff lets out a stream of heavenly curses. “I’m a damn idiot. Not her! Marinette, or should I say Maria, is where the legend of Lilith comes from. She’s one of the leaders of the lwa. She led Haiti in the revolution against the French masters. She doesn’t think straight half the time, too drunk off black rooster blood, and the same thing she did to the French, she wants to do to the angels. Marinette, and some of her unsavory friends like her husband Ti-Jean and their bloodthirsty Bizango children and rougarou servants, think there’s only room enough in Gineh – or Paradise – for one kind of spirit, and it sure ain’t angels. And any mortals the angels mentor – and who keeps the angels tied to the lwa – well by my Father, Marinette wants them gone. Danto and Ogou banished her to a fiery prison in the Petro Nation long ago, but her evil influence can still penetrate the worlds. We should have known. She’s been haunting the Laveau’s town all this time through a blood curse, and Mister Carrefour must have set her free to devour Lailah. Damn it!”

I shiver and grab my kitten. Not really a kitty anymore, just a fat tabby, but boy does Coco act like one. She paws my legs and nestles into my lap, so heavy, as fat as Garfield. I gotta stop spoiling her with cream. Will she get skinny when I go to Tulane?

“She sounds scary. Terrifying What can I do?”

“Don’t go out in the blackness, May. Listen to me, for once in your seventeen years, please.”

I sigh and try not to roll my eyes. “Alright Raff, I promise.”

The body always forgets,

but the spirit

is eternal.

I’m gathered with Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Azrael in their favorite practice field – a forgotten crumbling church and clearing in the midst of Calf Forest. It is a Spanish moss veiled green space: rushing reeds and cattails by a creek at the edge of the property, wildflowers, and grass that reaches up towards the sky.

The air is thick with celestial magic, and leftovers from weeks of practice scatter across the field: rebuilt graves and marble angels from need magic pieced together cracked stone by stone. Azrael taught me that. The curse of the fig tree, little deaths that lead to further life. Inside the roofless church, there is a carafe of grape soda I transfigured from clear creek water – transfiguration is, besides need magic, one of their main lessons, and Gabriel’s specialty, what Jesus used at the wedding of Cana. Raphael taught me to mend my bruises and scrapes from climbing trees and sliding down the gutter. His mastery is healing. What raised Lazarus.

Next up is Michael’s lesson.

Flight. What Christ used at his Ascension.

“Flight is quite easy, actually. It comes when all your other powers are balanced,” Michael begins, dressed in jeans and a green button down. His wings are wide and golden, and as we sit on an abandoned picnic bench, the other archangels are devouring a packed picnic lunch Gabriel made – deep fried manna. It tastes like fried cheesecake mixed with a banana split, with the fluffy texture of frosted funnel cake from Snakes Hollow county fairs.

Michael takes a firm bite and licks his fingers clean. “But first, let’s review.”

Angels are big on review.

“Kay,” I say, wiping my hands clean of the airy crumbs.

Azrael smiles her golden song at me, then pulls a broken photo frame of my granpa and granmama out of her dress pocket. “Raff found this in your attic, I thought it would be good practice of need magic.”

I smile at my beautiful granmama in a matching dress and lacy hat, laughing in granpa’s arms, he in his Air Force uniform. They’re at Snake’s Spring’s annual carnival, cotton candy shared between them in the old black and white vision of the past in front of a carousel. The photo frame is peeling gilt gold, the photo has water damage at the edges, and the glass is cracked.

I picture the image whole and remade, and need magic crackles in my palms as I embrace the photo. The gilt smooths, the photo is shiny and clear and new, and the glass seals back together.

Raff ruffles my hair. “Great job, my girl!”

I smile. “Transfiguration, hmm…”

I want to see them dancing and walking, so I transfigure movement into the photo. My granmama and granpa are twirling and taking bites of pink cotton candy as the image comes alive and suffuses with color, just like a miniature movie as the carousel melody plays.

“Now how would you heal something so perfect?” Raff asks.

“Yeah, this is gonna be tricky, sweetheart,” Gabriel chirps, her cheeks chipmunk puffed with too much manna. She awaits my answer with anticipation.

“I would give it away. I don’t need any healing magic to do that part and heal a part of granmama’s soul – I’m going to bury this at her grave. Somewhere, high above us all, she can look down upon it and smile.”

Raff beams. “You’re the smartest person I know, Mayflower, and I know a lot of smart alecs. Just look at Gabi.”

Gabriel swallows hard. “Hey!” she says playfully, batting Raff with her sleeve. He laughs to high heaven.

“Alright!” Michael says, bouncing to the balls of his feet with a bright pump of his wings. “No more teasing, time to get serious.” His smile softens his scarred face. Raff help me get up, not that I need it – he just has a habit of doting on me like I was still a silly little kid.

Michael takes my hand and guides me to a clearing, Raff by my side. They both spread their wings in a circle around me, and the air crackles with divine energy.

“You’ve mastered the three holy magics: need magic, transfiguration, and healing. All that’s left is travelling between worlds. That’s what our wings are for, transportation devices,” Michael declares, his voice deep and cracked like the earth. “With this gift, you can become the metaphorical guardian angel of your town, my dearest lady, and safeguard Snake’s Hollow from the blackness. You can nip the rot of Marinette in the bud and prevent it from engulfing this world.”

My eyes widen. “That’s an awful mighty task.”

“Hey, girl? You got this. You’re standing on the shoulders of giants – giant angels, I might add. My true form is light years tall, covered in wings and eyes and flames,” Raff adds, twirling me in a circle. I feel a bit dizzy as he spins me around and around like we’re at a father daughter dance, and I bust out laughing.

“You’re a nut, Raff. I’m too old for this.”

He smiles like a willow bough bending in the breeze. “You drove me crazy a long time ago, Mayflower. You’re quite the firecracker, you know. Just like my dear Lailah, all her good parts mixed in equal measure with Pepper’s sincerity and your momma’s salt of the earth spice.”

Michael and Raphael begin to sing in angelic, and the air buzzes. A pillar of golden light bursts from the circle their wings form.

My back itches, and my soul is like a tuning fork in time with their melody. Michael is a soothing baritone, Raff a powerful bass. Gabriel joins the circle, a soprano, and finally Azrael locks wing and hands to complete the miracle, her alto voice like caramel.

Holy fire wreathes me in a halo, and I can feel the magic inside me afire. Those flames form bright phoenix wings on my back, the world around us shifts, and I give a great flap of my wings to find the ground out from under me, replaced by verdant green aether.

The angels are circling me, light pouring from their mouths and eyes, and I panic, not knowing where I am. The sky is the kind of blue you see in dreams, too perfect to be real, and there are young angels playing on the clouds. I am standing but not really, more like there is no gravity here, so I float up instead.

I can make out rolling green hills with verdant flowers that exhale alleluias with each whisper of their petals, bell trees filled with memories, and a reflective silver pool that unicorns frolic by, those forgotten marvels drowned in the Flood. Angels, angels, angels everywhere – flying through the sky, dancing with wreaths of ivy, carrying prayers from far off corners of the universe to the Throne of God.

There is music stitched into every thread of this place, and my wings have a mind of their own. I lose myself in the chorus of praise, my body alight, only to have a familiar voice pull me back from the archangel’s power:

“Baby doll, this is close enough to Heaven: now that you’ve seen the true ending of Gineh, you know what we all be fighting for.”

Jangle-jing of keys on a whorled staff, the clack of crutches and wind through a straw hat. Leggie touches my forehead, the angels and Paradise are gone, and it is just me and my guardian lwa in a waterfall grotto overgrown with tropical ivy and vines standing by a crumbling stone gate.

“Angels be pushy as sin, with all their stubborn righteousness. Us lwa of the sweet red earth, we are grounded. Legba knows small doses be the best way to settle magic into them bones,” Leggie grins as his yappy Pomeranian Snoopy licks my ankles. “Your heart pulled you here – no one is safe when they fly, dear bon chile. Leaving the ground and your childhood behind requires curiousity, and yours is burning you up.”

I look down at my hands, and it’s true: there’s fire in my palms, magic in my veins underneath the skin. But here, I’m on soil barefooted, and there’s water, so I splash my hands, wings, and face with the crystal waters of Paradise. Something inside me – is it my fear, my longing for normalcy and the blackness to be gone? – is whetted by the cool liquid.

“I don’t know if I can do it, Leggie,” I say, ruffling my phoenix wings. I’m just half his height, but he stoops down so we’re level and hugs me hard. “Kill Marinette, I mean. Marinette was just a girl like me once…”

“No one gotta make the choice but you, sweet sister. Be honest and brave, that’s all we ever ask of the Chwals.”

“How can I find you when I need you?”

“Remember, I’m the true crossroads, there at every turning point in your life. You can fly now, baby doll, and travel between Earth and Gineh. Let that hopeful bird in your heart sing my name, and I will appear to prevent any evil from entering your world.”

Legba kisses my forehead, and it ricochets through my body. I’m thrust back into reality – but what is reality really, when the lwa and angels can use it as a chess board? – and am in the middle of a circle of angels, my feet wet with dew.

Raff looks bewildered. “Where did you fly to, May? You go so fast even an archangel can lose track of you.”

“A secret place. I – I think it was my heart.”

Raff smiles and hugs me close. “Then it was sacred. That’s all you need to say.”

Chapter 14 Chapter Text

“Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own.”

- Ella Fitzgerald

Marie Laveau, Marie Laveau… I think to myself, going through pa’s law office library in his man cave late at night when my parents – and Raff – are upstairs asleep. He inherited all of granmama’s books and has yet to sort through them. Marie Laveau. The name is like music in my ears, and I sing to myself, Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. All I know about her are local tall tales, granmama’s gossip, and her yearly Damballah dance at the swamp.

I know Zora Neale Hurston did anthropological work in New Orleans during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal – she’s gotta know something about my famous ancestor that gave our family its name!

Just when I’m climbing the rickety shelf behind pa’s desk, my hands grow warm, and the divine energy that flows through me that the angels have been teaching me to master grows piping hot like a tea kettle, leading my fingers to caress a worn paperback. There - an energy zing like an electric socket! I pull the book down and climb off the shelf:

Zora Neale Hurston: Mules and Men. I gasp. The pages light with my magic and open to a specific passage, where Zora Neale Hurston had visited Marie Laveau’s supposed nephew, now an ancient hoodoo doctor – he’s obviously now dead, a vestige of an old age where magic still bubbled under the skin of New Orleans. Now it’s all just hokey shops in the French quarter and drunken smelly tourists on Bourbon street. The real magic is only left in Snake’s Hollow.

I smooth the page and read from Zora’s journals. Zora speaks to me like an old friend:

I made three more trips before he would talk to me in any way that I could feel encouraged. He talked about Marie Laveau because I asked. I wanted to know if she was really as great as they told me. So he enligthened my ignorance and taught me. We sat before the soft coal fire in his grate.

"Time went around pointing out what God had already made. Moses had seen the Burning Bush. Solomon by magic knowed all wisdom. And Marie Laveau was a woman in New Orleans.”

"She was born February 2, 1827. Anybody don't believe I tell the truth can go look at the book in St. Louis Cathedral. Her mama and her papa, they wasn't married and his name was Christophe Glapion.”

"She was very pretty, one of the Creole Quadroons and many people said she would never be a hoodoo doctor like her mama and her grandma before her. She liked to go to the balls very much where all the young men fell in love with her. But Alexander, the great two-headed doctor felt the power in her and so he tell her she must come to study with him. Marie, she rather dance and make love, but one day a rattlesnake come to her in her bedroom and spoke to her. So she went to Alexander and studied. But soon she could teach her teacher and the snake stayed with her always.”

"She has her house on St. Anne Street and people come from the ends of America to get help from her. Even Queen Victoria ask her help and send her a cashmere shawl with money also.”

"Now, some white people say she hold hoodoo dance on Congo Square every week. But Marie Laveau never hold no hoodoo dance. That was a pleasure dance. They beat the drum with the shin bone of a donkey and everybody dance like they do in Hayti. Hoodoo is private. She give the dance the first Friday night in each month and they have crab gumbo and rice to eat and the people dance. The white people come look on, and think they see all, when they only see a dance.”

"The police hear so much about Marie Laveau that they come to her house in St. Anne Street to put her in jail. First one come, she stretch out her left hand and he turn round and round and never stop until some one come lead him away. Then two come together she put them to running and barking like dogs. Four come and she put them to beating each other with night sticks. The whole station force come. They knock at her door. She know who they are before she ever look. She did work at her altar and they all went to sleep on her steps. “

"Out on Lake Pontchartrain at Bayou St. John she hold a great feast every year on the Eve of St. John's, June 24th. It is Midsummer Eve, and the Sun give special benefits then and need great honor. The special drum be played then. It is a cowhide stretched over a half-barrel. Beat with a jaw-bone. Some say a man but I think they do not know. I think the jawbone of an ass or a cow. She hold the feast of St. John's partly because she is a Catholic and partly because of hoodoo.”

"The ones around her altar fix everything for the feast. Nobody see Marie Laveau for nine days before the feast. But when the great crowd of people at the feast call upon her, she would rise out of the waters of the lake with a great communion candle burning upon her head and another in each one of her hands. She walked upon the waters to the shore. As a little boy I saw her myself. When the feast was over, she went back into the lake, and nobody saw her for nine days again.”

"On the feast that I saw her open the waters, she looked hard at me and nodded her head so that her chignon shook. Then I knew I was called to take up her work. She was very old and I was a lad of seventeen. Soon I went to wait upon her Altar, both on St. Anne Street and her house on Bayou St. John's.”

"The rattlesnake that had come to her a little one when she was also young was very huge. He piled great upon his altar and took nothing from the food set before him. One night he sang and Marie Laveau called me from my sleep to look at him and see. 'Look well, Turner,' she told me. 'No one shall hear and see such as this for many centuries.'”

"She went to her Great Altar and made great ceremony. The snake finished his song and seemed to sleep. She drove me back to my bed and went again to her Altar.”

"The next morning, the great snake was not at his altar. His hide was before the Great Altar stuffed with spices and things of power. Never did I know what become of his flesh.”

I flip ahead, anxious but excited by the power Zora spun into the words of this hoodoo doctor and the majesty of Marie Laveau, who seems to have never truly died, but lived on in the minds of her family, of New Orleans, and the lwa she befriended – and whose Gineh angel still haunted the swamps. Had she been right all those months ago – would I save Louisiana for good?:

By the time that Turner had finished his recitation he wasn't too conscious of me. In fact he gave me the feeling that he was just speaking, but not for my benefit. He was away off somewhere. He made a final dramatic gesture with open hands and hushed for a minute. Then he sank deeper into himself and went on: "But when she put the last curse on a person, it would be better if that man was dead, yes."

With an impatient gesture he signaled me not to interrupt him

"She set the altar for a curse with black candles that have been dressed in vinegar. She would write the name of the person to be cursed on the candle with a needle. Then she place fifteen cents in the lap of Death upon the altar to pay the spirit to obey her orders. Then she place her hands flat upon the table and say the curse-prayer.”

"'To The Man God: Oh great One, I have been sorely tried by my enemies and have been blasphemed and lied against. My good thoughts and my honest actions have been turned to bad actions and dishonest ideas. My home has been disrespected, my children have been cursed and ill-treated. My dear ones have been back-bitten and their virtue questioned. O Man God, I beg that this that I ask for my enemies shall come to pass: "'That the South wind shall scorch their bodies and make them wither and shall not be tempered to them. That the North wind shall freeze their blood and numb their muscles and that it shall not be tempered to them. That the West wind shall blow away their life's breath and will not leave their hair grow, and that their finger nails shall fall off and their bones shall crumble. That the East wind shall make their minds grow dark, their sight shall fail and their seed dry up so that they shall not multiply.”

Turner again made that gesture with his hands that meant the end. Then he sat in a dazed silence. My own spirits had been falling all during the terrible curse and he did not have to tell me to be quiet this time. After a long period of waiting I rose to go. "The Spirit say you come back tomorrow," he breathed as I passed his knees. I nodded that I had heard and went out. The next day he began to prepare me for my initiation ceremony, for rest assured that no one may approach the Altar without the crown, and none may wear the crown of power without preparation. It must be earned.

I nearly cuss. “Zora was initiated?”

Thoughts bubble in my head: that the angels have kept Mister Carrefour, have kept Papa Leggie, have kept half my heritage from me all my life – the Laveau blood that flows through my veins. I want to be ready when Marinette comes, and though I can perform small miracles – parlor tricks the angels have taught me, water into wine slipped into the carafe at dinner for my momma and daddy, bread multiplied for the homeless’ soup, spring flowers to bring joy in the harshest winter months to the people of Snake’s Hollow – I suddenly know in my bones that true magic awaited in the secrets of the peristyle still kept from Pharah and I until we are initiated into kanzo, in what Leggie had told me long ago was the holy house voodoo societes practiced in in Haiti. And the root of that power? The home of the lwa: sweet Gineh itself. True, I can do the hoodoo Pepper taught me, but what Marie Laveau knew is black magic, what Mister Carrefour taught her. Learned straight from the Devil’s tongue himself.

Legba will never take to Gineh, the source of all voodoo power. Neither will Raff. They only like me seeing the lwa on their own terms. Danto’s fierce, Ogou’s wild, and Freda’s flighty as all get out.

But I just might know a dark horse that will take me directly to the source of the lwa: Gineh itself. Paradise, sweet chains broken at last, though it come by hell’s hands opening the gateway, Mister Carrefour be damned.

I steel myself. As I’ve been doing this past year, I take destiny into my own hands.

I go straight to the kitchen. I take fresh cornmeal and pour it into a jar. I grab a matchbox and go to the center of the cul-de-sac, the families all asleep now that it’s midnight. I make two intersecting lines with diagonal snakes in a makeshift cornmeal veve. Taking the lighter, with the blackness thick as blood, I turn it on, take Mister Carrefour’s fancy business card, and let it burn.

The smell of Cuban cigars and cayenne pepper washes over me. Cuban heels clack. Florida water, which granmama used to get from the store and sprinkle on the porch to keep out supposed demons and the Montanees use in the peristyle before invoking Papa Legba and for lave tet ceremonies. Overwhelming, smoky cologne.

Mister Carrefour spreads his fingers wide like spider webs and waves them by his head like a circus freak orb weaver trapeze artist. “Didn’t think you’d come calling so soon, baby mambo.”

I square my shoulders and place my hands firmly on my hips: “Take me to the other lwa. I want to learn about my heritage: about black magic voodoo. Not the good magic of my granmamma, but what you taught Marie Laveau. Pharah’s momma won’t teach me cause I’m too young even though she works curses. If it’s good enough for Zora, it’s good enough for me. I need to know about Marie Laveau, and what the angels are using me for. I need to be ready for Marinette, whenever the true Black Rider comes calling. I need to learn about my original Haitian ancestors so cursed they became the bane of the lwa themselves.”

Mister Carrefour twirls a dreaded lock between gloved fingers and laughs like gunpowder water. “Alright then, little missus, to Snakes Spring we go.”

“Wait, what? But that’s in the middle of the woods. Pharah said it’s haunted – that Indians used to drown people there. That’s not the good spring – the good spring is Calf Spring. That’s where the tourists buy their dinky water from. Where the quarry is. Snakes Spring is cursed. More cursed than Lailah’s rougarou eaten bones. It’s full of cottonmouths and rattlers. A nesting ground for poison!”

“All the better for me. I do love a biting good bone-rattling curse, and death, though the Baron’s forte, is also my especialty.”

Mister Carrefour claps his hands. A giant black draft horse-drawn carriage appears. The wheels are writhing black snakes biting onto their own tails like ourobouri, their scales round and smooth like tires. The spokes are femurs, old and bloody and cracked.

“That thing looks downright awful. Ain’t no way I’m riding in that clap trap,” I say, listening to the wheel snakes hiss. The Devil’s carriage is about as horrid as him and smells just like rotting meat.

Mister Carrefour adjusts his black top hat and snickers. “Now now now, ain’t well for Bondye’s Chwal to be afraid of anything. Come on, bless your little heart my sweet sugar plum fairy and hop inside, off to the woods we go!”

I muster up all of my courage that I can. I climb into the haunted, sickly carriage and Mister Carrefour takes hold of the reins. the draft horses gallop off, their mouths foaming as they whicker. The wind is wild as a woman shaking dust out from under a country cabin rug.

“What do you mean, Bondye’s Chwal? Chwals horse the lwa when they possess them in the peristyle, not Bondye.” I call over the gale. I grip the seat as the steeds’ hooves start crushing velvet night under their keratin and we gallop off into the air. It’s nothing like Raphael’s flying, all shaky, and for the first time in my life, I’m actually afraid of heights.

Mister Carrefour’s eyes flash alizarin crimson. “Vessel, vassal, Vaseline – you’re the Chwal, a balm to the world, a healing force, Bondye made flesh with Voodoo blood to spice things up. All my blackness and darkness, Marinette Dry Arm’s fire, Ti Jean’s iron shavings – you could swallow them all down and spit up spring water and rainbows. It’s a little like being a prophet, but less Apocalyptic, and more what happens every few hundred years: the angels choose Bondye’s successor, fill her with angel blood and Bondye’s glory, and she brings balance to the spiritual realms. It’s always a young girl that knows too much and speaks too often and is too darn stubborn for her own good. Like Naamah or the Queen of Sheba or Deborah or Esther or Ruth or Mary Magdalene or the Virgin herself, take your pick. She’s also brave beyond her years, just like you. No doubt about it, baby mamba, you’re Bondye’s Chwal. His spirit rides you. He be your head spirit. You got great magic about you, deep wanga at work.”

“Oh,” I say softly. It all makes sense now. Bondye being my head spirit. That explains a lot, of how I’ve been so protected, delving this deep into the curse this past month.

I will be the Laveau, finally, to break Snakes Hollow’s curse and not succumb to it like Lailah or grow old before her time like granmamma or be obscured in myth like Marie Laveau herself.

The stars are so close together above the carriage I could pull them fresh from the sky like onion grass bulbs after a rainstorm. The femurs rattle and the demonic horses neigh. The moon is a great big steamboat on the Mississippi and Mister Carrefour is the Devil I dance with in the pale moonlight, only the dance is our words, our wits clashing.

“Doesn’t Chwal mean horse in Kreyol? The name for humans ridden by lwa at fetes?” I ask, recalling granmama’s stories of the rituals of the peristyle in Kreyol about what we witness each week. I’ve been going with Uncle Freddie ever since granmama left God’s green earth all too accursed soon.

Mister Carrefour glances back over his shoulder into the open carriage. He smirks, and I wanna wipe that stupid grin from his face, what a jerk. “Yup my girl, that’s right. You’re a quick learner, ain’t you?”

Below, the forest spreads out like hobnobbed toothpicks covered in leaves and Spanish moss. There it is: Snakes Spring, a bubbling hot spring, and a murder of ravens flocks in throngs above us. I catch one of their falling black feathers and pin it behind my ear, like the Indians that drowned colonists here. Serves those colonizers right.

Mister Carrefour whips the reins and we land in a clearing. He holds out a gloved hand to help me down, but I choose to jump instead, landing squarely crouched on my feet.

It’s almost spring, and there are wild yellow daffodils blooming, with reeds and stone around Snakes Spring. I close my eyes and breathe in the mineral water and wildflowers and run my feet through some bluebells by my ankles. Reaching deep inside me, to the magic at my heart, I call up new buds to demonstrate my newfound angelic magic.

Dandelions push through the grass – momma and pa would consider them weeds, but they’re my favorite flower for their strength.

Like an ant.

Mister Carrefour laughs: “Nice parlor trick, baby mambo. But Marie Laveau could do much more than that. The snakes are waiting in their hollows, resting away from a long winter. Why don’t you wake those slitherers up?”

I know it’s a dare, but I want to show the Devil that is Mister Carrefour that I’m not afraid of anything, not him, not even Marinette or Ti-Jean Petro themselves. So I do. I reach deep into the earth, into the crevasses around the spring and shout to the sleeping scaly secret keepers that gave the pure waters their name, and suddenly great hissing and the feeling of coiled muscles come pumping up from holes in the ground along the waterside, just like Simbi Makaya.

A dozen black Eastern hog-nosed snakes dig their way out of the ground, some striped Diamond-backed water snakes dance out from the reeds, even a coral, black, and white milk snake slinks from under a log.

I think of the rattlesnake Marie Laveau danced with then cooked up and stuffed with her secrets. The one that called her into her hoodoo power when she was but a girl. The snakes slither over each other, piling up, and they whisper in quivering words into my mind, and I know what to do. It’s like I can speak Parseltongue, maybe Sax Attack is Voldemort. I direct the snakes to my nemesis Mister Carrefour, and soon they are climbing the Man in Black, twining around his suit, circling his limbs, and he laughs so hard I think the sky might just fall, his shadowed belly rumbling.

“You good, little girl. A prankster just like me. Choose one of them scalies, why don’t you: we’ll need a gift for the Erzulie Sisters. Every entrance to Gineh has a price.”

“What’s Gineh exactly? Is it like Narnia or something else from Sunday school?” I ask, eying the milk snake, which unspools from the log towards me.

“Much more lively than Narnia. Home to the lwa. There’s the Petro Nation, Ghedeland, and of course, Rada Island. That’s where we be headed. Freda be having a party, and boy does she love her some jewelry. A snake will make a nice necklace for Sister Freda. Maybe pick some flowers for Maman Danto while you’re at it. The girls get jealous of each other, one always a mistress, one always a mother. Ogou tries to please them both but he ain’t very good at appeasing demanding women, and sisters often hate each other if they are sharing the same man. That’s an old polygamous custom like you’d find in the time of Jacob and Leah and Rachel, not much practiced anymore, and it causes all sorts of strife of the heart. That’s why their hearts are stabbed, and their faces cut – from arguing with each other over men!”

Ogou, Erzulie Danto, Erzulie Freda – I’ve heard their names all the time around New Orleans in Voodoo shops and of course from Leggie and in the peristyle, where they come ride my family and friends. Ogou is the lwa of war and strength, Danto the mother of the Petro and fierce leader of the Haitian revolution, and Freda is the lustrous lwa of love and beauty. I’ve always wanted to meet them in the flesh as I have Leggie, not just through a horse’s vessel or in the liminal space when I summon Erzulie Danto to take back the haints from our nightly patrols.

I eye the pretty milk snake. She dances just for me, and I beckon her forth from the shade of an uprooted tree. She presents herself to me and I drape her over my shoulders like a necklace. I know she won’t bite – as long as I tell her not to. It’s something I just know now, as clear as the sky is blue. I summon the snakes away from Mister Carrefour, and he looks sad to see them go.

“Au revoir, mon amis,” Mister Carrefour salutes the slitherers. “Well then, May, shall we be going? Grab some flowers for Danto.”

I think Danto would like the sturdy daffodils, strong as her, so I grab a handful of stems and pull them sweet and florid from the earth.

Mister Carrefour chants in Kreyol, spills some cornmeal onto the ground in the shape of a labyrinth, then hops over it. The cornmeal catches on fire, then a great portal to lush Caribbean-like tropics opens up.

“Well, in you go, Chwal. Don’t mind the clowns and the hounds and the jokers to the left and right.”

I can smell tropical flowers and see manta rays swimming in coral on a beach.

“You sure about this?” I ask, petting my milk snake. “Is it safe? I ain’t ever heard of a human going to the otherworlds.”

“Ain’t nothing safe in Gineh. But nothing’s as powerful as Bondye, and you got His blood in those bullheaded veins of yours. Look at you, with a little Damballah on your shoulders. How plucky. Come on in, before the entrance to Rada Island closes.”

I walk through, not at all sure what to expect, but knowing that past this portal, I’ll find the strength and answers I need.

I smell the spice of vanilla bean, the swirl of sweet coconut juice, and a breeze like providence blowing through the palm trees and vines. Mister Carrefour throws his shadow arms wide open to greet the island and hugs the setting purple and yellow sunset.

“A splendid day for a splendiferous feast, don’t you think, baby black mamba? Know what Sister Freda say about Rada Island? You can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

“Pretty sure that’s a song by the Eagles, not the words of the lwa of love and beauty,” I mutter, tired of Mister Carrefour’s nonsense. I hug the milk snake close around my shoulders and whisper to her in angelic, causing her to circle my forearm and rest her sweet head on my shoulder in a kind of twisty torc.

“Freda got a lot of pretty boys that she calls friends –

“Would you please stuff it, mister Sax Attack? You’re like a broken radio station, I swear to the sweet Lord above!”

My feet hit wet sand and green-blue waters teeming with clownfish and angelfish and every other colored fish of the rainbow swim by my ankles. In the distance is a larger than life peristyle of stone and cemented sand, decked out in gold and pink, smelling of expensive perfume and roasted goat. There are pearls strung from the rafters, a braided palm leaf roof, and roses climbing the walls. I hear the quick tempo of a Rada summoning song and vivacious laughter echoing from within.

Mister Carrefour spreads his arms wide and beckons for me to follow. I walk cautiously up a path through the sand made of cemented together shells and blue and green sea glass. Orange paper lanterns hang from the vines, and pink candles in green bottles frame the entrance, veiled by a beaded curtain of diamonds strung together with rubies. The opulence and decadence is like white chocolate mousse – enough to make me sick off the sweet, sweet sugar the Rada so love.

“Sister Freda, I brought you a baby Laveau. She be a tiny dancer and brought you a beautiful necklace fit for the richest of mistresses!” Mister Carrefour declares.

Oh great.

Skirts of chiffon swish. The diamond and ruby curtains part. A beautiful, buxom, freckled woman with golden-brown curls done up into a chignon and flawless fall oak leaf skin appears. There are brilliant hibiscuses in her hair, and a pale white corset laces up with pink ribbons along her spine to billow out into a tiered rosy skirt. Her eyes are the color of the ocean, Freda smells like sweet kisses and the perfume of fancy department stores, and her cheeks are painted with red rogue. Her sea eyes open in surprise, then sheer delight, as she takes me in.

“Oh you fool, silly Carrefour! What a beautiful girl you have brought me! Why, my little May on my humble little island, what a dazy dream!” Erzulie Freda sings. She takes a pearl necklace from the dozens of necklaces adorning her bosom – she is so heavy with jewelry that she could be mistaken for a Tiffany store – and drapes it around my waist, then begins to dance with me, swaying her hips like a song. She’s as bountiful with curves as Lizzo, with a face that is like the divine. “Come in, little Laveau! Damballah and Met Agwe are here delighting in my roasted white goat kid succulence and red beans and rice and, of course, my signature décor and food for Bondye: angel food cake.” A darkness makes pause on her face. “Ogou is a bit preoccupied with my sister Danto, but, well, it is no matter. I do not care about her at all! Danto can sleep with her swine. Ogou loved me first and loves me more, after all.”

I’m twirled through the entrance into the candelabra lit interior of the living peristyle. And by living, I mean the music comes from the rafters drumming with tropical birds and the fluting and the rattling of magical flora and fauna.

A man with scaled white skin decked in the sheen of rainbows is sipping wine – Damballah, who always finds favor in Uncle Freddie. His slit nose – no bridge, just two oval holes – flares, and he sings in a nasal hiss: “A Laveau! How wonderful! I would shed my skin but to dance with one of her kin in Congo Square once again. Carrefour, usually you bring drunken antics, curses and malevolent intent, but for once you have done something right by the Rada. I have not seen May since St. John’s Eve!”

Other lwa murmur, but it is too dark for me to make out their faces in the sweet musk of the peristyle. Behind Damballah is plate upon plate of succulent white kid meat, shank and flank and the like, decorative mints, and angel food cake.

Mister Carrefour bows. “This is May, may her pleasure be my pleasure be forever your pleasure. One must know when to hold them and when to fold them, but I would hold onto the likes of this whip-smart mamba of a mambo if I were you, dearest Freda – snakes are slippery things.”

Freda gleams in the candlelight and hugs me. “Oh my dear heart, welcome to my house of sweet nothings. You are just like your foremother Pepper, I can see the spunk and sparkle in your eyes. And you even brought me a necklace? Here – keep my pearls in return for your precious darling snake, sweet Laveau.” She coaxes the milk snake from my forearm and it replaces one of her pearl necklaces, which she in turn loops around me like cake frosting, layer upon layer until it rings me from my midriff to my collarbone.

“The pearls are my tears over my unfaithful lovers. I string them together on silken threads as I weep each night by the sea shore,” Freda laughs. She gives a quick glance at Ogou, who rumbles reluctantly, then one at Damballah. She sniffs and smooths her skirts. “Hmph! Useless men! But tonight I do not cry, tonight I dance with joy! A Laveau is here to ask for my blessing!”

“Actually,” I begin slowly. “I was wondering about learning black magic and picking up where Pepper left off. The angels are teaching me miracles, but it isn’t enough. I need to be ready for when Marinette comes to Snake’s Hollow. I need wanga. I need curses. I need grit. The Black Rider cursing Snake’s Hollow turned out to be no one less than Marinette and Ti-Jean Petro.”

The music stops, if but for the slightness of Freda’s breath. “Oh, why, Marinette. So that’s who she was all along. Her obscurity and dark veilings have finally come undone, and she stands in the light of day, to be judged by Bondye in due time. I suppose she would concern you. That wild woman has no manners and absolutely no fashion sense. I do not allow her on my island, and she is far from Earth, in the depths of the wild Petro Nation, hiding, abiding with hounds, dancing with her wild rusted machete and rougarou girls, biding her time. My servants have done battle with her as of late, as she is cooking up something absolutely devious, but her true intentions are lost to the burning winds of the Petro outskirts.”

“Black magic and the freedom of her people, the girl says?” comes a voice like cool water and wet leather. I smell the scent of a mother – a mother that is as strong and tough as nails. It is too difficult to describe the sensation of the Madonna-like presence in mere words. A stately woman with midnight skin, a brilliant red head wrap bright as spilled blood, denim dress, jean apron, and belt with a sword walks forward in sturdy, muddied, brown leather boots. My adoptive mother, Erzulie Danto.

There are two scars as if from a blade on her face, from her scufflings with Freda, who has scars on her heart, but still, her black eyes are beautiful and deep like mine, and I feel such peace under her gaze. “I will teach this daughter of the lwa true hoodoo magic, for all children of Gineh are mine to love and nourish, come seven sword stabs to the heart and basins of blood. I will not let Marinette tear you from my breast despite her hounds and jackals and haints.”

Freda sniffs. “Sister Danto, do not barge in. You are so uncultured, hmph. The Laveau girl is my pupil! Who better to teach her enchantments than the lwa of illusion, beauty and love! What will you teach her, hmm? How to dress plainly and stomp around in an ungainly fashion like an overfed giraffe?”

“Oh Sister Freda, you bubblehead. I will teach her the magic of mystery, war, and darkness. In essence, how to wield a blade of enchantment and danger. She needs it much more than your sweetness and frippery.”

Erzulie Danto places one calloused hand on my shoulder, and Erzulie Freda takes hold of the pearls around my neck. Both their hands tighten as they glare at each other.

“Bubblehead? Then you are a bellow’s head, all full of anger and steam! War is uncouth for a young lady to learn!”

“The opposite is true, you vain idiot! It is improper for a girl not to know how to fight!”

“Sisters, please, soften,” Damballah hisses. Mister Carrefour looks on at the chaos in absolute sheer delight. I feel like a pincushion, my nerves stinging my follicles to make my hair stand on end all over my crawling skin. The Rainbow Serpent’s garnet eyes fix on me with kindness. “You can both teach her – Freda during the sweet afternoon, and Danto during the cold night. Enchantments of illusion and glamour are just as important as offensive magic. She will need both to defend her world from Marinette.”

“Thank you,” I say softly. “Why can’t you all fight Marinette before she starts her revolution?”

“The lwa are family, and she is one of my Petro daughters, the first in fact, however wild. I never in a thousand eons suspected the Black Rider was her…” Danto says slowly in her deep, chilly voice. “But the bloody years must have driven her to insanity. The best we can do to defend both Earth – and the balance of Gineh – from her night terrors is to raise up a worthy adversary.”

“That would be you, black magic woman you be becoming in time,” Mister Carrefour whispers, dancing a little on his Cuban heels to an imagined Santana song.

A lonely wind keens through the peristyle. The other lwa come to watch, too many to name. Freda’s eyes are fire and Danto’s are ice.

“Very well,” Freda sniffs. “I will teach her during daylight hours on the first day of spring and not at night. I do need my beauty rest, after all.”

“And I shall instruct her in the moonlight, on that day when new blooms awaken from a long winter,” Danto says slowly.

Damballah smiles, gently prying their hands from me. “Good, sweet sisters. Then it seems that we have a bargain!”

Chapter 15 Chapter Text

The Night

Has stolen

My name.

I climb up the gutter and into my room and – oh, dang it all to heck.

Raff’s eyes are bloodshot and he has his sword drawn and resting between his legs as he sits at the end of my bed, keeping a vigil, waiting with his blade in one hand as the other strokes my tabby cat Coco.

“I can no longer protect you from your greatest enemy: yourself,” he says somberly.

“Well you were never very good at protecting me anyways, sir,” I shoot back right away. “My whole town’s under attack, and all the angels have me doing is parlor tricks! How will that stop Marinette? Mister Carrefour is already here, and his haints are with him! Just imagine what a rougarou army would do!”

Raff grits his teeth, his amber eyes like a wolf. He strikes his sword into the wood of my floor. I reel. “I die each night from Carrefour’s terrible curses for you, shielding you so you have time for the most important thing any human could ever possess: innocence.” He rubs his temple and dislodges his blade from the maple panels. The wood heals instantly.

“I love you from the bottom of my heart, Mayflower, but it breaks me to see you sneaking out and summoning that curse! First Simbi, then Lailah, now this? Each time you call on Carrefour, his hold on this town gets stronger. Never trust the Devil at the crossroads. Your curiousity will damn us all. Just like ill-begotten Eve with the Devil’s own fruit!”

I choke back tears. “It’s not fair, Raff! I don’t want anyone hurt, especially you, that’s why I had to go out. I’m a Laveau! I need the lwa on my side. Can’t you see that?” I slump against the wall. My fat tabby cat mewls and slinks over to me. I pick her up and bury my face in her belly. She gives a damp whuff.

“I’ve been up all night May, having no idea where you were. I’m… sorry if I scared you, but I can never let anything happen to you. That would stain my soul.” His sword disappears, as does the wound in the floor. “I’ve seen it end badly for other Chwals. Hot spirits and cold spirits balance each other out, the Ghede are good for a party, but too much magic and wanga can make young girls insane. Too much Rada, too much Petro, and you end up dead – or worse off. Far worse off. That’s why the angels were brought in. To stop the last Chwal. And safeguard all that came after.”

Tears prickle my eyes. “Others before me, the last Chwal… who was she? Now that you know it was Marinette, who is Maria?”

Raff squeezes my cat. “I did my research in Metatron’s books, and Papa Legba and I pieced her story together. Her name was Maria. The first Chwal that started the Haitian Revolution, but her tale ended in terror. She disappeared to the Petro nation, and neither lwa nor angel except Danto really knew what happened to Maria and her husband Jean. Blood drunk off her power and prowess, the magic burned away Maria’s mortality, just like it did Lailah, and all that was left was the most powerful of haints. Every Chwal that was before her, too consumed by their miracles and curses, has ended up in her army as damned rougarou girls. She corrupted them all the way up the ancestral line, and now, she’s got it out for you. That’s why you are the first Chwal since her in hundreds of years: giving girls God’s fire is always a gamble. A bet against the Devil. Prophet or Jezebel. With any luck, you’ll break the curse of the Chwal bloodline, once meant as a blessing, and be the last one, freeing Earth from Maria’s armies and releasing the souls of all your poor predecessors from the fiery hell of the Petro Nation badlands.”

My jaw drops open, and I begin to sob. “Marinette. She was the last Chwal before me? I don’t want to be like Marinette! I never asked for any of this, Raphael! I’ve been haunted by the blackness all my god-fearing life. And you could never make it go away!” I let loose a loud, raw cry.

Raff is crying too, and he holds hard and fast me to him, smoothing my braided hair. “It’s beyond my power, May. Great magic was awoken when Mambo Maria summoned Erzulie Danto, the first of the lwa to appear, in those thick midnight jungles in Haiti, waving her machete with black rooster blood. It drove her insane and she became a damned lwa, a cursed lwa, and many a cursed Laveau has followed her since. That is why I didn’t want you meeting that black stain of a man, Mister Carrefour.”

“I’m gonna end it,” I say, squeezing my guardian angel tight. “I’m gonna end it all! This whole god-shadowed tragedy. I’ll put Marinette and Ti-Jean Petro to rest. I’ll set this whole town free.”

I sleep

Among

The stars.

It’s finally spring in fullness, dandelions and sassafras everywhere.

It’s the full moon tonight, and the first day of spring – my long-awaited evening of magic lessons from the Erzulies – but Pharah and I lose track of time as we collect specimens for our rock collection in Calf Forest, the boggy part where they say you can find leftovers from the Civil War and Revolutionary War: buttons, flasks, bullets, and Indian arrowheads in the muck.

We’re keeping track of each other and our rock strata with good old Marco Polo in the thick cypress swamp, and just as I’m about to call “Marco!” to find Pharah, a blue haint of a wounded Confederate soldier in tattered grays walks out from behind a tree with fire brand eyes, clearly not Pharah.

A haint’s never dared come this close to sacred Calf Forest before, much less in the daylight. They always stick to the swamps in our nightly rounds, but they’ve been getting more aggressive lately, thanks to me breaking the border between worlds.

Cold dread laces a corset around my ribs. The haint, consumed by the hatred of his former life, screams at me in furor and loads his ghostly rifle, then aims. I run as fast as I can, but a brimstone bullet is headed towards my heart-

“Tsk, how undignified!” comes a wedding cake voice. Freda appears dressed in a yellow sundress, her hair in twin tawny braids, and shields me from the bullet with her fan. “Shoo!” she yells in a shrill voice, waves her lacy golden fan, and when the breeze hits the haint, he dissolves into dust.

“Now now, dear Laveau girl, it is unladylike to run from haints. Strong women resolve their problems with grace and steel wills. Southern Belles are iron roses after all.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Sweet baby Jesus, I almost died.”

“Hmph, well you didn’t, so thank Bondye for that, dear Lord that He is, may He always provide!” Freda chuckles. She twirls around daintily and takes in the last rays of sunlight that play like a golden symphony on her fawn skin and dress. The skirts bell out as she spins. “You didn’t forget about me, little May Laveau?” Freda sings. “I do like to dote on my dear peach girls, and who better to learn magic and illusions from me than a descendant of my sweetest Marie, who I sent my two-headed snake Henry to so long ago?”

“Wow, so you called my great-great-great grandmother into her hoodoo powers. Can I-

I hear dead groaning, and a high scream.

“What the heck?”

Freda’s black eyes open and look suspicious. She fans herself as if she is sweaty from walking the war path. “Trouble. A trifle, but trouble nonetheless. Carrefour’s meddling with Legba’s wards have let the haints in. Seems like your bosom friend is in need of saving.”

“No, not Pharah!” I yell, racing off to where the screaming is coming from. “Marco!” I scream

“Polo!” comes a tattered shriek.

I round a mossy dale and end up in a mud pit. In a tangle of cypress roots are at least a dozen Confederate haints like the first one, their mouths frothing as their rotten flesh hoists Pharah high. They have so much power here they are visible and vicious to the naked eye. Pharah screams as they tear at her hair. She throws gris gris pakets to no avail.

Anger boils my blood. These racist sons of guns have held on to their hatred long after death. I feel Freda’s hand dig into my shoulder.

“The scoundrels,” she hisses. “Shall we dispose of them, little Laveau? Go ahead and show me what the angels have taught you, darling.”

“I’ve got you, Pharah!” I yell.

Like becomes like, Gabriel had said, and mud has water in it. I transfigure the watery surface to ice and break my legs free of the muck. Undeterred by the crystalline slippage, I race and slip slide towards the Confederate haints, skidding on the ice and crashing into one of them. He’s about to drive a bayonet into my breast when I tap into the need magic, deep in the cypress tree, and have the roots strangle him. The haint curses and turns black, dropping his rifle.

The other haints, angry, try to follow me as I back onto the ice, tussling over Pharah. She is kicking and biting, and the haints slip on the ice in their deathly shuffle. I raise my arms and direct the cypress roots to knot around them until finally, they are stilled, their fire brand eyes a mockery. They tear at the wood but it is no use, the tree holds them steady, with Pharah in a leafy bower.

“Girl, I got you!” I scream, panicked still as I climb the pile of the dead and help a bruised Pharah down from the trapped haints. She catches my hand, slides down the Confederate ghosts, and hugs me hard, crying.

“My lousy magic wasn’t enough,” Pharah sobs, burying her head in my shoulder. “Those curses were gonna strangle me! They came out of nowhere, out of some kinda fiery shadow world. Oh May, if you hadn’t heard me, I’d be dead! I’m sorry I made you worry...”

Pharah sinks with me to the ice and rocks back and forth, tearing at her hair. I’m crying in earnest too, comforting her like granmama and Raff comforted me many times before. “It’s okay, Pharah. It’s okay. I’d sure as heaven never let those dang monsters hurt you!”

Freda walks around the haints with disapproval, fanning them so they turn into dust. All that is left is an empty castle of cypress roots, built from my need magic. She smiles wistfully as the clouds part and the hopeful sun shines through.

We kiss.

“I see Dr. John Montanee’s kin is still close to the Laveaus, little mambo. A rivalry that in the descendants blossomed into sweet friendship,” Freda says softly to my girlfriend, lifting Pharah into her arms and rocking her back and forth. “There there, sweet Pharah Montanee, you are safe in the arms of the lwa of love. Your family has served the lwa and Gineh faithfully for generations. I return that protection sevenfold with the sweetest of all Rada blessings.”

Pharah’s big eyes widen even more. “Erzulie… Freda? God bless me, why, I never thought when May said she saw Papa Legba, that the lwa could come down in the flesh and walk the Earth as men and women beyond horses and liminal spaces during our nightly rounds or St. John’s Eve. Please, mistress, thank you!” She cries into Freda’s ample, pearl-laden bosom. Freda and I walk to higher ground, filled with flowers and grasses. Freda lays Pharah’s scraped and bruised body down in a patch of heather and springy grass. Pharah winces as her limbs smart. Freda looks to me with knowing owl brown eyes.

“And that last bit of magic handsome Raphael taught you, May,” Freda encourages.

I do the laying of hands like Raff taught me on Pharah. My golden phoenix fire flows from my palms to her cuts, and the Pharah’s skin renews itself, the wine blossom bruises in the shapes of dead hands disappearing.

Pharah gives a sigh of relief. She opens her doe eye and look at me deeply. “You’ve got magic now, how cool. I suspected so when we worked our first wanga. What a team we’d make, May – Dr. John Montanee’s and Marie Laveau’s girls. If there are haints marching on Snake’s Hollow, zombies and rougarou are next. I want to help you in any way that I can. I’m done just doing night patrols with you. I want – I want to help more!”

Freda smooths Pharah’s curls. “Today was a horrific kerfuffle that I completely abhor. I shall teach you both how to save Louisiana, girls. My magic is beauty and illusion, but also truth. To get rid of a haint, you must show it it’s truth, like this:”

Freda lifts her fan and draws it like a butterfly across the air: it forms a reflective fairy dust trail like a mirror, and my truth stares back at me. The phoenix in my soul spreads her glorious wings, and Pharah is a strong lynx, its tail whipping.

“Wow, those are our souls,” Pharah says softly, touching the reflective trail.

“Haints must see something mighty awful,” I say.

Freda nods. “They see their corruption, and it is a poison that turns them to dust. I have gifts for you both, tokens of my favor.” Freda reaches into her pocket and pulls out two delicate, magical fans that match her own golden one: red for me and green for Pharah. They are brilliant as beetle shells, trimmed with white lace in fleur-de-lis patterns.

“Thanks,” Pharah and I say in unison.

Freda laughs like a bell. “But of course, gentlewomen. Keep these in your pockets at all times. It is the surest way to defeat haints, and keep one cool on a hot spring day. Now today’s lesson: the language of fans. Fans were used in all sorts of signals back in the grand old days of yore. A fan placed near the heart means “You have won my love.” Open and close the fan rapidly, and it is an indication the gentleman is quite cruel. Oh! My favorite: putting the fan handle to the lips means “Kiss me!...”

And so we learn the language of love from the lwa of romance and beauty, all told through the dance of fans.

(Night)

Is grains

Of sand.

Freda walks Pharah and I to the abandoned church in the midst of Calf Forest where the angels and I have been practicing magic for months. She dusts off the spring heat with the sway of her fan and bites her berry stained lips.

Pharah and I use the fans to bat away early bayou mosquitoes that are raring for our blood, the moon is swollen with light, and the haints are hungry. We can hear them prowling and growling outside the holy space of the church grounds, for once sanctified, the undead and unholy cannot enter these sacred grounds.

“Your light is shining its brightest now as you fully realize your powers, sweetest Laveau. That is why the haints are so bold – they want to steal that light away,” Freda opines, taking us to the forgotten graveyard. “Well, it is my rough twin’s time to shine with the stars, I suppose. I am a woman of the sun’s golden opulence, after all, and my sister Danto is darkness and velvet moonlight. Despite her scars and crooked gait from work boots, she can bloom like night jasmine under the lunar jewelry of the night.”

I hear the rustle of leaves and the hum of moth wings. “The night is my time indeed, gentle Freda. Seven stabs of the knife towards midnight, two strokes of the sword from Hell, and my blood runneth over and spills red.”

A sword flashes in the darkness, slick with starlight. Atop the graveyard hill, in the shade of a willow by the creek, is Erzulie Danto. She is dressed in jeans and a green camo shirt, muddy brown combat boots at her feet with her braids held back in a red head wrap. Her black eyes sparkle and the two ridges of scars that stretch from her nose to her right jaw are like mountains seen through the thick spring mist.

Pharah gasps, then bows her head out of respect. “Erzulie Danto in the flesh? Not just in May’s summonings? It’s an honor.”

Danto crooks an eyebrow and smiles softly. “Sweet Pharah Montanee? It is my pleasure, dearest daughter. The Montanees have served Snake’s Spring for centuries and played host to my hot Petro children and myself for generations. And all in an unbroken lineage of caretakers of the Montanee Peristyle. You are more than deserving of my blessing, future mambo. Come, Pharah, kneel before me. You too, May. For every mambo, a mamba to strike at her will. Perhaps Carrefour was right: May is the blessed snake, and you, Pharah, are the priestess. You two will make quite the pair in the war against Marinette.”

Danto spins her sword like a baton in circles and gives a wild cry, takes a warrior’s stance, and smiles. “Welcome, my blades of wonder.”

There is a tinkle of somewhat sharp laughter. Freda fans herself. “They are not just weapons, dear Danto, they are girls. Remember to make sure this whole waving around blades business is not too unbecoming of young ladies!”

Danto chuckles. “You think I was not wild during the Revolution at the front lines, sweet Freda, while you were off comforting your husbands? Women are the instruments of every war, the vanguard and battalion and support. Off to your evening rose petal bath and perfumery. I have Petro matters to attend to.”

“Hmph, uncouth, as usual!” Freda sniffs, then fans the fabric of reality open and returns to Rada Island.

Danto chuckles. “Fare thee well, fair frippery of a woman. Now girls, kneel – finally, I bestow my blessing.”

Pharah and I walk up the stone path through the headstones I healed to where Danto stands poised like a general, proud sword over her shoulder. Her eyelashes are like black spider webs and there is a healthy carmine flush to her cheeks from what I imagine is the exertion of practice. Her smile is thick and holy.

“Kneel, sweet mambo and mamba.”

We do.

Danto takes her sword and knights us, then washes our hair with Florida water from a canteen in her deep pockets. She rubs the water into our curls and begins to plait our hair, singing a lullaby of feeding hungry children and bringing in fruit and vegetables for the harvest. With each stroke of her hand, the Florida water pools on the ground before us and soon, on the damp stone, are two pools in which we see swords reflected, floating in a dark moonlit fog.

Hair braided in thick coils, Danto ruffles our crowns then kisses our foreheads. “My sweet as tupelo honey daughters, I give you my blessing. Reach into my waters and take your birthright from La Sirene’s ocean.”

My sword is red gold like my phoenix wings and Pharah’s is a serpentine green. We gasp and laugh at how light they are in our hands.

“Thank you, Mother,” we say in unison.

“Hold them steady and straight,” Danto says with a voice like the ocean’s calm doldrums. She pricks her middle fingers on the blades in a twin movement and her red blood makes the magic steel flare bright and hot in my hands.

“We will practice the art of swordsmanship tonight, my dear children. By midnight, you shall both be warriors,” Danto says, ruffling our hair. “Now, the parry and thrust…”

We practice thrusts and stabs until the moon sails high in the sky. Danto shows us the perfect point to slide a blade between ribs – up and to the heart in a vicious stab. How to deflect a blade with the flat of your sword, how to crush a head open with the pommel.

It is nearing 12 o’clock, and Mother Danto gathers us in her arm and lifts us up to the stars, our swords thrust high.

“My beautiful daughters,” she declares. “Your blessed swords can cut through any enchantment Marinette, Ti-Jean, or their Bizango brood may have. Be strict with Marinette, but she is my first daughter, so remember – the sacredness of every warrior is mercy. Be kind in your deliverance of Marinette’s haunted soul.”

A rustling in the branches. Mother Danto sets us down, and we peer into the blackness, trying to scrutinize the new arrivals under the pale, wan moonlight.

“Guess we’re not alone then,” Pharah says slowly.

A banshee scream, the eyes of the dead.

I startle.

Groans, shuffles, the horde emerges.

Outside the blessed cemetery is a horde of zombies. Mister Carrefour has a cane with a snake on the pommel. He pounds it into the ground.

The zombies begin to dance and howl.

I tremble in my sneakers.

“Well, if it isn’t missus mambo and the mother of Petro monsters, moonlight lady Mother Danto. And what do we have here, a Montanee? Why, you blustery ladies were all strangers when we met, brought together like revved up deuces, blinded by starlight. My runners in the night are hot off the Petro presses. Ain’t that right, my squalls and thralls?”

The zombies rattle their bones in response.

Danto steels her gaze and points her sword dead on at Mister Carrefour. “I am Queen of the Petro and your ruler, you crooked, wayward child. What could you possibly attempt to do to us in this sacred space?”

Mister Carrefour chuckles, and his gunpowder eyes flicker like flintlock. “Well, I can wait. You’re trapped, sweet Mother Danto, and the girl are earthly, in need of food and water and shelter. They’ll need to come out eventually. My zombies rare for flesh, they be a mess of death and a feast for motley fools. And once I eat little missus mambo, my powers will increase exponentially – I’ll be strong enough to unseat even you, Queen Danto dear. Just like I ate Lailah’s soul!”

Danto grits her teeth. “Betrayed once again by the duplicitous Petro joker. I suppose you awakened May’s power to feed off of her, just like you have been making Snake’s Hollow your feast with your darkness for centuries, using Marinette and Ti-Jean Petro’s anger to your own ends. Very well then, I have no other course of action, you shadow side reject.”

I scowl at Mister Carrefour. “I’m not the snake, you idiot, you are. Going and biting me on the heel like this. I’m not your suckling pig, and I ain’t gonna give you any of my powers, you haint.”

Mister Carrefour cackles. “Ooo ooo ooo, we both be snakes, slippery venomous things. You little fool of a girl. Run while there’s still moonlight – I opened the gateway for Marinette and Ti-Jean. Pretty soon you’ll become just another one of her rougarou ghouls as the magic eats you up and I devour you limb from brain from bone.”

“You evil sucker!” I scream, making to charge at him with my magic, sword, and fan.

“No, daughter! I will not let you lose yourself to the darkness,” Danto says, her voice steel like a broadsword. Danto clutches me and Pharah to her breast.

“Be careful, May,” Pharah whispers and takes my free hand. Her eyes are wide as saucers as the rotting zombies beat at their breasts and advance. They carry sharp splintered bones in their hands as weapons, which they beat to create rattles on their rib cages. I’ve never seen the haints this galvanized and angry, not even on cursed All Hallow’s Eve.

“The ball’s in your court, Mother Danto. My darkness strangles, or so I’m told…”

The black sickness of Mister Carrefour is choking the trees, poisoning the air, drowning the exterior of the abandoned church and graveyard. The zombies howl and swell with power. Mister Carrefour hums a jazz rhythm and taps it out with his cane. His red eyes glow like sirens.

He takes out his busted sax and plays the devil’s trill.

“Where do we go?” I ask, my voice hard.

Danto smiles softly. “To the Petro Nation. We need backup, and my husband Ogou happens to be having a party with the lwa at hand.”

“Not without me you don’t!” comes a bellowing that is familiar as the bells of our Catholic church.

“Raff!” I cry in relief.

There he comes, chopping down zombies, taking cuts from their sharpened bones, razing a path with his flaming sword to Mister Carrefour.

Mister Carrefour draws a slim, razor-sharp blade from the snake pommel of his cane – it’s a swordstick!

“Enchanté, dear angel cake. It’s been a long time,” Mister Carrefour says, positioning his blade.

“You power hungry scourge. Get out of my way.”

“Ah, haste, you won’t fight the Eggman? Leaving the Walrus alone? Koo koo cachou, what a terrible pity. Suppose I shall just have to murder a conscientious objector. Tell me, how long do angels bleed like stuck pigs until they die? A century? A thousand years?-”

“You vile worm!” I scream, breaking free of Danto’s embrace and racing towards Raff, guns a blazing. “I hate you!”

Mister Carrefour twirls and strikes at Raff. He parries, but does not deal a blow back.

“You’re not worth it, dirt chowder,” Raff spits at his feet and flies over the graveyard wall to come to our side, safe in sacred space. He picks me up before I can throw myself over the wall at the mad bad miscreant Mister Carrefour.

“May-be, baby doll,” Raff sighs, lifting me up and sailing through the sky to the top of the hill. “Carrefour is just a distraction. Marinette is our true enemy. Save your strength while we gather our troops and resources. In the end, it comes down to you and her.”

Raff deposits me next to Danto and Pharah. He smiles at my best friend. “Pharah, sweetheart. You’ve come full bloom into your powers too.”

“You too, Raff,” Pharah laughs, hugging him. “I guess you ain’t exactly just a Spartacus extra,” she laughs despite the chaos, winking.

“May,” he looks to me. “It’s time to fly.”

I nod in understanding. “Next stop, Petro nation.”

My inner fire flourishes, illuminating Mister Carrefour’s wicked darkness, and through Legba’s gate I go, to the Africanesque savannah of the Petro Nation, carrying Raphael, Pharah, and Danto on my flaming wings. Legba hobbles on after us, closing the leafy gate of my heart behind, and at Mother Danto’s estate we arrive.

Ready, finally, for war.

Chapter 16 Chapter Text

I do not believe in

Dawn

Anymore.

But still, I look

To His

Moon.

Hope is often

Sold

For the highest

Price.

The Petro Nation is like sub-Saharan Africa, a lush savannah with acacia trees, lions, elephants, and rhinos, with watering holes and a hot yellow sun. Mother Danto’s estate is a humble but expansive rambling wooden hut flanked by a chicken coop and cattle ranch, with alley cats roaming everywhere, all standing guard. There are calicoes, Siamese, Norwegian forest cats, Persians, Maine coons, even hairless spynhxes. They mewl as Danto approaches like a woman regaling her subjects, graceful yet rugged with the duty of ruling a land at war. Soon the cats are following us like shadows into the plain but fine hut, made of polished rosewood like one would find on Madagascar amongst the lemurs and chameleons hanging from thick vines where the fossa and tree frogs roam.

Raff holds my and Pharah’s hands and leads us on inside. Ogou is beating the air with his machetes, dancing a war dance as Baron Samedi drums. Maman Brigitte, the lady of death, and La Sirene, the mermaid, drink rum with Met Agwe, lord of the seas, and Zaka, the humble farmer. Damballah holds court over the lwa with his splendid wife, Ayida Wedo, the queen lwa of fertility, rainbows, and the elements. Erzulie Freda stirs the cookpot, with freshly slaughtered bull in a simmering stew. She smiles guardedly as Danto’s cats practically carry Danto into her abode.

Danto draws her sword and drives it into the ground, standing firm and proud. “Carrefour has betrayed us, whether for his own gain or Marinette’s, I am unsure, but the two of them are attacking Snake’s Hollow as we speak.”

Damballah’s rainbow skin fluoresces. His slit nostrils flare as he clutches his dear wife Ayida Wedo’s hand, who strokes her husband’s scaled shoulder in turn. “Oh my, it is as I feared,” Damballah hisses. “Ogou, Danto, I expect you to take the offensive ranks, while Freda works on her masking illusions and Samedi tries to get a handle on the dead that Carrefour has raised. The rest of you know your positions. This isn’t the first war the lwa have fought – why, one was only two centuries ago – freedom for our people is imperative, and that selfsame mission now awaits us in Louisiana.”

Raphael spreads his wings so wide they occupy a corner of the room. “Our alliance still stands, Damballah. I will be at your service along with the other archangels.”

Damballah nods and smiles. “Then there is no reason that we should not prevail.”

Leggie beats his crutches on the floor, and Snoopy howls. “The night is dark, but the day is longer. Let this crooked dance finally begin!”

Pharah comes up to speed with the battle between the angels and lwa versus Marinette, Ti Jean, and their Bizango brood, and the undetermined allegiance of Mister Carrefour. Our training continues, summer ripens, and school lets out. Mister Carrefour has not been seen for months and everyone from Leggie to Raff has something to say about the scoundrel. His zombies remain, and the gates between worlds are broken thanks to his tampering.

“I bet he bailed because he was on Marinette’s side all along,” Raff growls as he bites into a buffalo chicken wing as the archangels and Pharah and I are at a greasy spoon for lunch. “Bloodthirsty Devil. The haints and zombies and rougarou advance every night into town, at Marinette’s beck and call, and it’s taking all my energy to patrol.”

It’s true – Raff goes out to conquer every night with the other angels and keep the undead from entering Snake’s Hollow.

I sleep with the night light on now.

“My brother be a tricksy snake-headed fellow, sweet blossom. Yellow bellied as a hornet with a liver cowardly as a rabbit in its burrow come winter,” Papa Legba opines at the waterfall entrance to Heaven he guards, on one of my journeys into the depths of my heart.

“I don’t know how to beat him, Leggie, and whenever we advance on Marinette or try to trap her, she retreats.”

“The time will come, dearest daughter of Bondye. Everything in its own time. That is the lesson of Papa Legba.”

We are doing drills most of the time, or we are out in the afternoon tracking Marinette through her hideouts – she weaves in and out of worlds on her black stallion with Ti-Jean Petro at hand, spreading fear throughout Snake’s Hollow. Erzulie Danto discovered Mister Carrefour had let both Ti-Jean Petro and Marinette out of their prisons, that bloodthirsty sucker, long ago.

Momma and daddy notice. They say the town’s gone to the Devil. There’s bad omens like lightning striking the Baptist church, people speaking in tongues on the streets and having to go to the hospital from glossolalia, and a two-headed black calf born at midnight in Billy Chang’s barn on St. John’s Eve.

The darkness at night is ravenous, locking everyone but me and Pharah under its comatose spell, drawing screams and self-inflicted bruises from our families and friends as they sleep in Mister Carrefour’s poison and bump and scratch themselves, allergic to his snake oil and venom.

School fades to dust, and the memory of the girl I was is gone, replaced by a blade, a fan, and wings.

I am burning my magic up alive.

“I can’t go on much longer like this,” Pharah confides in me one day as we are in her basem*nt, working a spell to strengthen the protection around Snake’s Hollow that we’ve been building up together – at least, what little wards are left. We make gris gris pakets and place them at strategic places in the town’s borders, but eventually Marinette’s rougarou girls sneak up on them, gnarl them whole, and destroy the gris gris charms.

“Yeah?” I encourage Pharah. “Me neither. It’s wearing me down to the bone.”

“Exactly! We’re living this half-life with Marinette’s shadow over the whole dang town.”

My eyes light. “What if we summoned her! Every lwa, be they Rada, Ghede, or even Petro, has to answer a voudousaint’s call. And though Marinette is crazed, she’s of the Petro nation.”

Pharah’s eyes widen like onyx scrying balls, and in them, I see an uncertain, rippling future. “May, that’s crazy talk! We have to listen to the lwa and angels. Baby steps, sister, and then we’ll win this war.”

I sigh. “I’m sick of playing defense, just like in our soccer games when the team has an aggressive forward. We got an aggressive forward too with Raff, Ogou, and Danto, and strong defense in Freda, Samedi, and Damballah. But a midfielder that can do offense and defense that the offensive never suspects and slips past the defense to the goal?” I determinedly tie the last of Pharah’s specail gris gris pakets with a red silk ribbon and anoint it with the war water I made from last year’s hurricane. “That’s us, Pharah, and that’s gonna be our kicker. You and me, Dr. John Montanee’s and Marie Laveau’s girls? We can win this whole war. After all, Marinette was a Chwal once: a mambo like you, and a fighter like me. We’ll be matched perfectly. I say we make medicine kits, sharpen our swords, flutter our fans and stop waiting for the adults to save us!”

“This is not going to go the way you think,” Pharah says gravely, making the sign of the cross over her chest. “You’re always brave, May, but you gotta be careful. We could die, or worse – turn into one of Marinette’s rougarou girls. That’s what will happen if the magic burns us up!”

I take Pharah’s hand in mine. “Pharah, you’re the bloodline of the Montanee priests, and I’m a Laveau. There’s nothing we can’t do together!”

Pharah squeezes my hand and sets her packet of gris gris dust down. “You’re right, Mayhem. I should have trusted you a long time ago. Okay, my love, if you think we can end this together, we will. But I’ll be in charge of our backup plan.”

I smile and hug the girl of my heart real hard. “We have all the lwa and angels as our infantry, girl. I can open gateways with my heart and pull them through. Do you trust me, Pharah?”

“With my life.”

“Then let’s burn this black legacy to the ground, sweetest of sacred soul sisters.”

Darkest before

The Day.

“You’re doing what, May?” Raff says as I sit him down in my bedroom with Leggie, who is rubbing Snoopy’s ears. It looks like a familiar scene, but this is my war council, just like Black Panther leads Wakanda to glory.

“I’m fulfilling my destiny, Raff,” I say, somber. “That’s what heroes have to do in the end.”

“What has gotten into you? Zombies are roaming, rougarou are ready to swallow you girls whole, and you want to summon the queen of the haints Marinette herself? Never. I will not allow it. You must’ve cracked your skull open on the hot summer pavement and fried your brains open like an egg.”

Leggie smiles and crinkles his bark whorl face, thick eyelashes like rain. “Ah now, brother, Little May has a heart of gold. Listen to the children and in them find the path to Gineh.” He pats Raff on the shoulder. “You have to let your child grow. Just like Gabriel did Pepper.”

Raff puts his head in his hands and lets out a sob. “May, I never wanted any of this for you. You’ve had to grow up too fast, and there is no justice in this world for anointed ones. We never should have made another Chwal, not even to break Snake’s Hollow’s curse. You could die, and if you died, I just couldn’t go on. I’m your guardian angel, Mayflower. You’re my light. Losing Lailah was enough, but not you.”

I hug him real hard as I sit next to him on the bed. Raff cries in earnest now, shaking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa as I smooth his back. “Raff, words can’t contain how much I love you, but you gotta let me grow up, just like Leggie said. I turn eighteen next week. I know how to save Snake’s Hollow. But I need you and Leggie to lead the lwa and angels in the charge behind me. It will only work if Marinette and Mister Carrefour don’t suspect an attack. My heart is a gateway, and besides traveling, it can seal things into Gineh too…”

“I won’t let you be the Scapegoat for Marinette’s sins, baby doll,” Raff winces his words, like the thought of it is a fresh wound. “May, please, trust us. Let the adults lead. There has to be another way. We just haven’t found it yet.”

Leggie smooths one of his crutches and looks Raff dead in the eye. “In May’s veins runs the legacy of the Chwals, dear brother under sweet Bondye. She be our last hope at ending this unfortunate tragedy. My bon chile came up with a happy ending, while all us adults can only think of is war and revolution and blood. That’s what angels be: soldiers, and that’s what lwa be, renegades dreamed into place by the desperate. Ours is not a way of final peace. Kill Marinette, and another hot-blooded girl will take her place. There are a hundred rougarou waiting in line. But save missus Marinette? Now that has gotta shake the foundations of Ghedeland. Angels are gonna love a redemption story. And us lwa, why, we always be cheering on the underdog.”

Raff gives a heavy sigh and squeezes my hand. “Fine, you firecracker girl, I’ll go along with your plan, but the very second it gets nasty, I’ll take over, guns blazing, with the Erzulies, angels, and Ogou, and Papa Legba will seal you shut!”

Raff dabs a tear from his eye. He can’t help but let loose even more loud sobs. He grips me hard as a surly king holding his regent’s orb.

“Raff, thank you for trusting me.” I say, leaning into him and fitting just like a puzzle piece. “Pharah and I have got this all figured out.”

Leggie smiles like a sage. “We be a Magnificat team, us three wise men – well, two supposedly wise old codgers and our little missus Mayflower the genuine genius.”

I hug them both as hard as I can. “You’ve always saved me, from falling swimming in quarry pools to being led astray by Mister Carrefour to crossing the street when I was young and granmama was asleep on the porch. Raff, Leggie – it’s my turn to save you guys, finally. Stick to my plan, and we’re golden.”

“Wisdom belies sweet youth, that’s just the way things be,” Leggie murmurs, stroking my curls. “Bondye comes as bread to the hungry, and as a brave Southern Creole Irish-Haitian girl to Louisiana when the darkness of the Devil be spreading.”

“Tomorrow, then, Mayflower,” Raff says slowly, squeezing me tight, like he’s gonna lose me to the dusty ether and stillborn stars. “Tomorrow this chaos ends.”

I smile bright as a jack o lantern. “Tomorrow, a new chapter, just like in the books I always write.”

Leggie rattles his crutches like a donkey’s jawbone. “There’s always time for a new song and dance card, baby doll.”

Mister Carrefour has the whole town under his spell. People forget to go to the peristyle, momma and pa’s prayers fall on deaf ears, and there are thick clouds every day, blocking out the sun. Mostly it just rains and weeps lightning and thunder, like the sky is sliced open and bleeding.

The town is under a trance, and it we don’t work immediately, all of the world will fall under Snake’s Hollow’s spell.

“You ready for this, girl?” Pharah asks me, dressed in jeans and a worn t-shirt, prepared for exertion.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I say, lining the pockets of my jacket with medicine kits, a poppet shaped like Marinette, or at least, what I imagine the Black Rider looks like, and gris gris pakets galore. Pharah is armed with cornmeal and a red candle and lighter, with shots of Florida water in vials. Our swords and fans are at our disposal, and we are ready to carve our way through the woods, cutting down haints and zombies and rougarou, all to get to Marinette and Mister Carrefour at the holy ground we will have the advantage on: the cemetery hill in the abandoned churchyard behind Sourmilk Hill.

It’s nearing midnight, and we have headlamps on and sturdy boots fit for the swamp. We’re on the porch in my backyard, and momma and pa are sound asleep. Raff blessed them with good sleep so they wouldn’t suspect a thing.

Pharah and I do our secret handshake, then it’s off we go, our swords drawn, fans out.

My house backs out into the woods, and it isn’t long until the Man in Black comes. Zombies crawl from the ground, waving their sharpened bones, and Mister Carrefour is smoking a cigar, his smirk like a tiger shark.

“Little missus mamba, war pigs we all be on Luke’s Wall, and her ever faithful mambo. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He swallows some ash from his cigar. “Can’t you see Snake’s Hollow is mine now? You are my sweet tupelo honey subjects and owe me eternal devotion. No longer will vodousaints close their eyes and curse me when I come down in the peristyle. I will be king of the lwa, I shall replace Bondye and rule over Gineh with jazz, jambalaya hot improvs, and jumps! It’ll be a drag summer, a rag summer, and ragtime and vaudeville zombies will run Snakes Hollow to the ground. I say again, May Uriel Laveau, surrender while you can! You’re like my Lailah, dog meat!” Mister Carrefour stomps his swordstick. “This be my town now, little girl, so run on back to your dear Raphael and wave the white flag! Or should I devour you like I did your great granmama?”

“You already played your ace, Mister Carrefour, and you gambled wrong all along! You’re just a jester in the end,” I say coolly, raising my shining ruby sword. Pharah does the same with her emerald blade.

The zombies low like diseased cows, then we cut them down, just as we’ve been training.

“Pharah, watch out!” I say as a tall zombie grabs her by the shoulder and tries to chow down. I throw a gris gris paket at him like a bomb and it explodes, deadening his limbs. Pharah, recovering quickly, slices the zombie clean through.

“Oh, you think a queen of chess can take down the king? But the king has an army, and a queen just has her fancy tricks. You’re all show and no bite, you damn little mambo and mamba!” Mister Carrefour snaps his finger and ten new zombies crawl out of the soil, ready to devour us. Louisiana’s grounds have an endless supply of the dead.

I think back to my most important angelic lesson: the art of healing. Zombies are just wounded souls under dark magic, and by backwards Cain if they can’t be put to rest.

“Got it! Pharah, you guard me, I know how to get rid of these suckers for good!” I shout, taking out my fan.

“I got your back, girl!” Pharah shouts, forming a defense circle around me with Florida water that the zombies can’t cross as Pharah guards the perimeter. The cursed dead keep coming, burrowing up from the ground, but Pharah is mighty resilient, and she keeps on cutting them down like chaff, holding the dead at bay.

I wave my crimson fan. The air is perfumed with Erzulie Freda’s coconut and angel cake perfume.

Mister Carrefour’s siren eyes ring red. “What are you doing, you insolent little snake?”

I hide my lips busting a smile with my fan in an insult to the Devil of the Crossroads. “Watch me work my magic, sir. Bless your rotten heart.”

“You’re outnumbered! Out armed! Drop that attitude, you witchy woman, the Eagles were right after all. Witchy women be all raven hair and ruby lips, fans flying from their fingertips, but they all talk and no action. You ain’t got a head for war games, puny girl!” Mister Carrefour draws his swordstick from his cane, and the snake pommel glints in the moonlight.

I pour all of my healing energy into my fan and flutter it in a dance, just like Lieutenant Uhura’s fan dance after all. I am a girl of magic, a Maya Angelou woman of pure light, and I unravel Mister Carrefour’s deathly curse on all the zombies, sending their souls straight to rest.

Still, I rise. I rise!

My phoenix fire magic wraps around them, the zombies smile serenely, the whole horde of them is blessed, then turn to dust as they pass on.

It’s a simple magic, one the angels never would have thought of. They’re soldiers, after all, but me? I’m a healer just like Marie Laveau.

Mister Carrefour roars, and his forked tongue flies with bloody spittle. “You beast! You slug! You worm! You will pay!” He clacks his Cuban heels and races abreast towards me, guns a-blazing.

“Drop the barrier now, Pharah!” I scream as Mister Carrefour charges at us.

“Gotcha!” Pharah says, fanning away the Florida water circle.

“Come to me, wayward son of Bondye.” I open my wings wide, my inner portal, and Legba reaches into my rib cage.

“Louse!” Mister Carrefour spits.

“Bless your heart, Mister Carrefour. I offer mercy where you offer pain. Just like Bondye.”

Mister Carrefour strikes me through the heart. His blade slips through me, harmless, for now I am a being of light, an Ascension portal that can fly to starry skies. Papa Legba grabs the snake pommel hilt and pulls Mister Carrefour in, in, and I feel like I have wicked indigestion as his poison washes through me.

“Off to Ghedeland with you Carrefour, you crooked, dumb as a hangnail fool!” Leggie reprimands his shadow side twin. Leggie’s voice comes from within me, and then, when Mister Carrefour in turn is poisoned by my own light, and we meet in equilibrium between sunshine and darkness, I close the gate of my heart.

I barf, real hard, and up comes momma’s green beans. Of course. I always hated green beans.

I shudder, having exorcised Snake’s Hollow of the Man in Black.

No one escapes Ghedeland and Baron Samedi’s bone fist, after all.

Mister Carrefour is trapped for good.

My head is riling with speed, and the world is a carousel.

“May, May! Girl, stay with me!” Pharah pleads, rocking me back and forth. She kisses my sweaty forehead and cries.

“Mmmm, sweet baby Jesus, I’m okay… ouch. Hurts to be a door to the dead,” I mutter, wiping away sweat from my brow, and the tears from her starry eyes. “They gone, all the zombies?”

“Yeah, thank god,” Pharah whispers, as if the night will grab our souls and take us down to the Pit. Something like that, anyways.

All that’s left is dead silence, an open grave. Marinette watching on, in curiousity. Even the rougarou girls hold quiet vigils, their drooling muzzles clenched as they drown in moonlight.

The darkness of the final hour remains. Where Mister Carrefour is fire and illness, Marinette is death and ice.

“The path to Cemetery Hill is clear,” I breathe slowly, recuperating. I use my sword as a crutch to stand. My ribs pound, and my heart flutters fast like hummingbird water.

Like Marinette, my magic is a burning thing, and surely but slowly, it is eating up my humanity, just like it did bloodthirsty Maria and Jean during the Haitian Revolution.

The woods are dead quiet, the crawdads shudder in their mud chimneys, even the streams and bogs refuse to reflect the starlight. The squirrels and fish don’t chitter, the frogs don’t chorus, and the whole wood is under Marinette’s spell.

Everything but us is dead.

The darkness roils like a leech latching onto blood.

Pharah and I scale Cemetery Hill and come to the willow tree where we were blessed by Erzulie Danto. There is a big stone at its base, perfect for an altar.

Perfect for an old school Voodoo summoning.

Pharah draws Marinette’s veve in silence, and lays out salvia flowers, black pepper, and lavender from her mother’s herbal storeroom in the peristyle. Pharah sanctifies the space with Florida water and calls in the quarters of our ritual circle, invoking the four archangels.

We prick our fingers on our swords and let drops of our blood suffice for black roosters or black swine lit on fire by being doused in gasoline, as is done in a proper Marinette invocation.

Evil reeks from the altar, and I place the poppet of Marinette in the center of the altar, soaking up our blood.

The holy boundaries of Cemetery Hill and the weathered church are broken. The rougarou girls slink in slowly, confused by our invitation. Ti-Jean Petro, Marinette’s husband, looks like a washed out rapper, chains around his neck and black tattoos of curious and raunchy scenes on his bare skin.

Marinette rides a black draft horse out of the darkness, her bloodshot eyes wide in surprise. Her arms are bone, and flesh hangs from her in pennants, revealing rot under the skin, just like I saw in Simbi Makaya’s divination. There are maggots and worms in her organs, but she is a regal lwa of death and blood, and the putrid magic that stitches her flesh together is a sickly green like goblin fire.

Her bony face smiles, and her black hair is in tattered dreads. She waves her rusted, blood-soaked machete in the air.

“So, last of the Chwals, we finally meet,” she rasps, for her lungs are more bone than flesh. Ti-Jean Petro punches his fist and grinds his hands together, his eyes like an oil spill.

Pharah lets out a shuddering cry.

“They’re horrible, May. Completely horrid,” Pharah whispers, panicking.

“Why did you summon me, daughter of Bondye? I am far from holy. I am damnation, werewolves, and screech owls. The soul of Hell,” Marinette’s dry rattling voice comes slowly, in wheezing breaths. The rougarou girls circle around us, yipping at the base of cemetery hill.

“And I am the soul of Gineh,” I say, my voice firm. “Just as you once were.” I offer up a rose I have plucked from one of granmama’s bushes in the greenhouse. “I offer you peace, finally, since the rise of the Haitian revolution, you have been in pain, Maria.”

“Peace is a fickle thing,” Marinette laughs carelessly, taking my flower and putting it in her hair. “You will die, little Chwal, just like a hundred young girls before you. You will join my army, look! The sickness of Bondye’s blessing is already eating you up. Girls were never meant to be God. Girls were meant to know innocence and roses.” She plucks a petal from her wild mane. “That is why I abhor angels, for each generation, they curse another girl of my bloodline, making them lead a half-life of fury and fire, all in service of who? Bondye? Please. We are their tools. Nothing more.”

“Every word you just said was true, but it was also the lies you delude yourself with,” I say. I don’t even come up to her chest. Her black horse’s mouth froths as he chomps at his bit. “Without the lwa, I wouldn’t know my roots. Without Raff raising me, I wouldn’t know unconditional love. They are my greatest blessings. I am Bondye made flesh, at least, a piece of Him. His love for the world, at least, that’s what they told me. I offer you love, Maria. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

There are tears in Marinette’s eyes. “Love? What use is love, when there are wars, endless wars? Love is a weakness, dear blinded girl. Blind as when I plucked Lailah’s eyes out as punishment for summoning me. Lailah was a selfish girl, leaving a baby behind. I abhor the selfish. After all, I am sacrifice.”

“Again, I offer you love.”

“What of it?”

I give her my sword. I give her my fan. I give her my blood on her poppet.

“I am yours, Maria. Do with me what you will.”

Marinette’s sickly eyes bulge. “What trick is this? I’ve murdered every questing Laveau since me that sought out the black swamps to break my curse and turned them into my army. None has ever come to me willingly without the anger of fury or selfishness.”

I summon the magic eating me up, the spirit of Bondye, and it forms a brilliant phoenix flapping its feathers in my hands.

“Wars don’t end with fighting or armistice,” I say firmly. “Wars end with love. I return Bondye’s original blessing to the strongest Chwal, Maria. All my powers, all my claim on this world, my very magic, was borrowed all this time. In the end, it always belonged to you. The woman that freed my people.”

My soul’s phoenix flies to Marinette, and now she has my wings, the gate in my heart is gone, and I am just a girl. Balance, as the angels told me. Beyond the polarities of darkness and light? There is love.

Absolution.

Grace.

Marinette weeps. “I have not felt the touch of Bondye’s love for two centuries. Who are you! To forgive me, the worthless daughter of Danto, to absolve me of my egregious sins?” The Black Rider falls to the ground, her flesh mends itself, the rot leaves, and she is just a scared Haitian girl my age dressed in a denim dress splattered with the blood of the first offering to the lwa.

Ti Jean is a young farmer, his scars, edges, and tattoos gone, dressed just like Zaka in a straw hat. He gives a mighty sob. “What wondrous magic is this?”

To be human again, at last. Transfiguration, need magic, healing, flight – I poured all the angel’s lessons into my final blessing.

It was worth a thousand Ginehs to see the look on Maria and Ti-Jean’s face.

Maria looks at her fine hands in wonder, flexing each finger. “You have saved me?” she asks in wonder.

“What else would we do? You’re one of us, after all,” Pharah says quietly, cleaning up the altar.

Maria looks to be just nineteen, twenty at most. She cries, and her tears melt the rougarou girls. Their souls dance, young women that came before me in this cursed bloodline of the Laveaus, now horses freed to ride winds to the sweet Ghedelands. Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte have a feast waiting just for them.

The darkness, finally, dissolves.

The villagers of Snake’s Hollow wake from a wicked dream.

Dawn comes, bathing us in light.

And we finally know the nature of our better angels at last.

God comes as bread to the hungry, and comes as girls to America. So many young girls of Maria’s bloodline, asked to bear a cross not theirs.

Now the cross? It is burned. All that is left is a phoenix in the ash.

Pharah and I hold Marinette’s hands and offer her tissues and a water bottle.

“Where do I go from here?” Marinette whispers.

“You are our sister,” Pharah says, and we hug her. Young Jean joins in too, weeping.

I was only afraid of the Black Rider because I did not know her story could have a happy ending.

But now that I can see truth past the wicked darkness, all I see is a frightened girl, a little bit older than me.

All she wants is love.

Chapter 17: Epilogue

Chapter Text

Night, oh Night, my Night.

Here, I give you

The Sun.

Now, You are no longer

Alone.

Time passes as it will, and the angels do not know what to do without a war. The lwa take a liking to Snakes Hollow, and Erzulie Danto sets up a restaurant, while Erzulie Freda establishes a beauty school. Baron Samedi is a mortician, Maman Brigitte is an Irish musician that plays at local bars, and sweet Damballah opens, well, a sweets shop.

Humans don’t notice a thing.

“We’ve taken a liking to Snakes Hollow,” the Erzulies explain to me and Pharah over tea at Rada Island. “We used to only come down in the peristyle, but Jesus walked as a human, so why can’t we!” Freda giggles, curling her hair around a finger.

“Providing food and hearth and home for my children has always been my greatest comfort,” Danto says with a voice like water, eating a hearty bite of steak. She is housing her first daughter and son, Maria and Jean, and raising them as any loving mother would. They’ll be going to college with me next year.

Pharah and I get into Tulane, and we make plans for the rest of our sweet lives together.

“I love you more than life itself, May Uriel Laveau.”

When she says it, she sparkles like a diamond.

Time passes as it must, but Raff does not age. Instead, he counts his days with me, each one a blessing indeed. When I’m twenty one, he’ll leave like Gabi did Pepper. So I treasure this time.

We fly across Snake’s Hollow, searching for forgotten orchards, and Legba joins us at a wild apple tree patch.

The fruit is glorious. But not as glorious as my guardian spirits.

“May, my baby doll, you taught us all a lesson,” Raff says poignantly after a few apples in.

I cuddle up between him and Leggie. “Yeah, what’s that?”

“To find our humanity again. But above all, forgiveness. We all thought Marinette and Ti-Jean Petro irredeemable. But in the end, she was just another girl afraid of the dark. Just like you. But you braved the darkness, and after the long night, delivered the sun. A great future awaits you, full of love, family, and friends. And me? I will be there every step of the way, even when you can’t see me. This is the next chapter of your book, Mayflower. Make of it what dreams are composed of.”

“Sing some songs, baby doll” Leggie whistles, caressing Snoopy.

“Write new lines in your stories, May,” Raff adds, cradling me with his wing.

“Oh, what’s this?” Legba says, his tattered pant leg rattling. “Someone at the gateway of Gineh would like to see you, Maybe baby doll.”

My heart leaps. “Will you guys take me there?” The slightest yearning for my wings returns, but I know I will have wings and more after I am old, ripe with living and pass into Gineh for the final time.

Raff gathers me into his arms, and Leggie opens the gateway to the waterfall paradise of my heart.

There she is, young as the Fountain of Youth with granpa, in a matching dress and hat, cotton candy in hand as she tries not to get some on granpa’s Air Force uniform.

“Granmama!” I cry, rushing into her arms.

“My darn precious girl, you blessing among men and women,” she says, cradling me against her.

“I’ve missed you guys so much!” I sob.

Granpa Luther puts his Air Force hat on me, and granmama gives me her fluffy purple coat.

“We were always with you, in your heart of hearts, my love,” granmama sings, stroking my hair. “I loved what you did with our old picture at the carnival, baby doll. Just perfect, my beautiful baby girl.”

Raff and Leggie join in on the hug, and in that moment, time slows to a whisper.

Perfect, a perfect ending. My angel, my lwa, my family, my roots.

What more could I ask for, after all, than love?

The Night is Full of Haints - alcifer_darling (2024)

Chapter 1

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Chapter 2

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Chapter 3

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

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Chapter 6

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Chapter 7

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Chapter 8

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Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

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Chapter 11

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Chapter 12

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Chapter 13

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Chapter 14

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Chapter 15

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Chapter 16

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Chapter 17: Epilogue

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References