“Où sont les portes vers la Guinée?” Martine’s question sang through the air, the operatic training of her human years ever-present in her voice.
Adele turned to her. “They’re gates to the Afterworld. Where the ancestors of the magical rest.”
“Is my husband there?”
Gabriel sneered. “She said the magical.” It was rare to see my eldest brother jealous.
“Supposedly.” Emilio smirked. “According to Voodooists.”
“Not supposedly,” Adele shot back. “The gates are real. Guarded by the Ghede.”
I indulged her idea, letting my mind wander to a ghostly scene, to caverns so vast and deep they made our Florentine catacombs seem piteous . . .
Pools of water luminous as drenching moonbeams surrounded a prodigious castle of midnight-dark stone, with towers that spindled high into the aether. The eternal figures of my mother, father, sister, and grandfather Cosimo greeted us along with all the other Medici witches who’d been immortalized in oil paint in the grand hallway of the palazzo where I was raised.
“What makes you so sure the gates are real?” Emilio asked, leaning over the table toward Adele. “The strata of magical myth this city is built upon rival those of Crete and Sicily.”
“Exactly,” she said. “A city where the dead walk with the living. Where the mundane go to mass and then have their tarot cards read. Where people dance at funerals, and paint their porch ceilings sky-blue to keep spirits away, and eat cabbage and black-eyed peas for health and wealth. Folks come here to find themselves and lose themselves and be themselves.”
“So,” my father said, his cheeks flushed from the pomegranate wine, “you’ve finally found someone who could occupy your mind more than magic can, Niccolò?”
“Only took four hundred years,” Giovanna taunted, taking Adele’s hand, pulling her along as if to show her something divine.
“It was worth it,” I said, and Adele glanced back to me.
“People see only what they want to see and believe only what they want to believe. What we want them to believe,” she continued. “We keep things hidden with masks and glitter and songs that steal your soul and drinks that steal your memories. We sing in the streets, cry in the streets, and bleed in the streets. New Orleans will be your muse. She’ll fuel your dreams and your vices and your kinks. She’ll tie you up and make you beg for more, all while you search for the je ne sais quoi giving you that joie de vivre, never knowing that the magic flows freely and the dead thrive and the witches rule, so you buy a fucking boa, slurp another Hurricane, and start telling your friends back home how they’ll never believe about this one time in Nola . . . Why wouldn’t the gates to the Afterworld be here? Hidden in plain sight amongst the living, guarded by the dead, covered up by stories of the magical?”
She loved her city the way the Medici loved Florence.
I realized what I’d said to Giovanna was true. It was worth it. Every vein I’d ever pierced, every drop of blood I’d ever stolen, the decades of Séraphine’s torture, the pain of León’s betrayal, and every subsequent century I’d spent scouring the Earth for him . . . it had all led me to a witch with whom I could share my secrets and family and dreams.
“For weeks now,” she said, “we’ve been trying to figure out the instructions, to separate the myth from the magical.”
Wait, weeks? While I was scouring the swamps for Callisto, she was trying to convene with the dead? Not just convene, but cross over? You did practically shove her back into her coven’s arms. My pulse rose, and Adele’s gaze flicked my way. Calm the hell down, Niccolò.
“Ritha Borges has taken extreme measures to keep us from finding the gates,” Adele said. “And Ritha never stops Désirée from pursuing magic. The opposite, in fact.”
“Pourquoi?” Lisette asked. “Before tonight, why were you all trying to cross into the other side?”
Yes, bella, why? And who were you trying to convene with?
“A couple of Ghede told the rest of my coven that there’s a place in the Afterworld where the spiritless souls can rest if they just deliver them.”
She wasn’t trying to reach Adeline, Nicco; they were just trying to solve the city’s soul-crisis. My nerves settled, but a noxious wave of jealousy crept through me—they evoked the lwa? The witchlings were further into their magical upbringing than I’d realized.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. The Borges most certainly descended from one of the Great African magical bloodlines and, whether I liked it or not, Isaac was clearly a descendant of the Norwoods of the British Isles. As for Codi Daure, before merging with the magical natives of this land, at least part of his family of psychics came from the Black Forest of Germany, and I’d put money on the Guldenmanns. Even Annabelle hailed from the Great French witches. Adele was the only one in her coven who hadn’t descended from one of the Great magical families.
Yet the pull of her magic was so powerful . . .
León was a puissant witch, but not like her, and Adele had barely scratched the surface of her magic. Then again, what did I know about Le Comte Saint-Germain? Maybe I was blinded by my love for him. Maybe I didn’t know anything about him at all.
“The gates are for the dead,” Gabriel said. “It’s been centuries since I’ve participated in any kind of African-rooted rites, but you can’t just sashay up expecting to take tea with dear old Granny in Guinée. That’s what the crossroads are for.”
“We’re not meeting Jakome at the crossroads. We have to catch him off guard.”
“I sincerely doubt that even Ritha Borges knows the way to Guinée. Not even the most elite of les sociétés secrètes do.”
Despite the night’s perils, warmth spread from the pit of my stomach listening to Adele and my brothers discuss various aspects of the witching world.
Adele shrugged. “I don’t know what Ritha knows, but I know the way.”
Emilio scoffed again. “Baron Samedi only imparts that information to the dying—”
“Then I’ll consider it a special invitation. If the Baron was so intent on me not knowing the way, he wouldn’t have given the route to a dear friend whose mind is being slowly eaten by a two-hundred-year-old Italian teenage ghost, especially when said person is the biggest blabbermouth in New Orleans!” She pulled a scroll from her bag and quickly unwound it.
Each of us held down a corner as her fingers slid across the city map, from one starburst symbol to the next.
“Lafayette, Valence, St. Patrick, Cypress Grove, Holt, St. Roch, and of course, St. Louis No. 1. These are the gates.” She looked straight at Gabriel. Smart. She knows he’s the one to convince and the others will fall into place. She uncapped a marker and began joining the symbols together with straight lines, until shapes began to form: two upright coffins flanking . . . a mausoleum.
Lisette brushed her hair from her face. “C’est le vèvè de Baron Samedi.”
Adele threw the marker down.
Gabriel crossed his arms in contemplation.
“Those are the gates, and these are the instructions to serve the Ghede at the gates.” She procured a scrap of paper from the pocket of her denim shorts and smoothed it out between her fingers. “Seven nights, seven moons, seven gates, seven tombs.” She gazed at me, anxious, as if speaking the words alone might summon the lwa.