I materialized outside Sophie’s suite, shaking. I had to get that navel string away from her father. I stank of fear and shock, and I ached from trying to force my body to move, struggling against its power.
Then I would have to stop myself from killing him. Crawl to me, Sophie’s papa had demanded. He should die for that. Her suffering, the shock in her eyes as she watched me stand there, helpless—it was my business to protect her.
I took the El back to the Lair.
I had to find Sophie and free her. After that, I had to neutralize her crazy father. Then—oh, Dieu, Mme Vulcaine waited for me at this very moment in the botánica! But that was not my only urgency.
In France awaited the Ministère de la Justice and a counter-suit I was not fully prepared to file, since I’d had no idea the matter would arise so suddenly. My precedents were incomplete. The line of my argument might work with certain of the judges with whose ruling records I had familiarized myself, but with others, not so much. I remembered the envelope my heir had flung at me so carelessly, which I had stuffed in my trouser pocket. I found it and tore it open.
It was a summons to defend my title, yes. Suit brought by Henri Philippe Clarence de Turbin, Sophie’s father. The judge—I groaned at the name. That one would pick my case to bits, if he allowed me to appear on my own behalf at all.
I beat my forehead with the heels of my hands.
What had I become? Was I some ill-formed monster created out of the mistakes of my parents, my foolish, boyish fantasy of power, Jake’s tutelage, and Samedi’s mischief? Why had Jake—and Samedi, I assumed—taken such pains with me?
And why had I let them?
I wished Baz were home. I was not good at soul-searching.
But Baz was off with his new woman. His new goddess.
Sophie was no goddess. Merely, she was the embodiment of everything I had lost when I fled school in nineteen-thirty-two. To smell her hair was to recall all the flowers of a French marshland. To taste her sweat was to feel its sunshine on my tongue. To follow her on her adventures was to thread the maze of my most sacred place—our sacred space.
She had convinced me that we were two lost children, separated by eighty years and several thousand miles from our true home.
Yes, I wanted her.
Dammit, where was Baz? He should be here with me, a bong in one hand, a beer in the other, helping me to distract myself.
As Jake had distracted me.
All that time I had thought he was leading me away from the things I feared. But he was leading me to them.
There would be no escape this time. Not without great loss.
It will cost you everything. Samedi had said that.
I flinched away from the memory of that rich, potent voice taunting me, the electrifying feel of his hands on me, changing me, making me somehow bigger.
I wanted Jake to come and lead me on a thousand-mile dance. I wanted Baz to smoke ganja with.
I wanted Sophie….
I just wanted her. I couldn’t give her up, but I had nothing to offer her. I wasn’t ready to confront the madman who wanted my title, nor the court where he might defeat me.
That left only one direction I could go.
Horribly unsettled, I called Jake’s botánica.
o0o
“Well, Clarence?”
We sat at Jake’s card table. A few crumbs of colored cornmeal still lay there.
“I want to know,” I said slowly, “what I am to you. What I was to Jake. And what you expected would become of me.”
“Finally, you ask.” She sighed. “What you are to me is an unproven investment. To Jake you were a duty and, I believe, a beloved friend. What may become of you is uncertain. You have left someone out.”
I breathed slowly. These were not good answers, but I had to ask the right questions.
Who else had had a stake in me?
“Samedi,” I said, shriveling inside. “The Baron. What did he do to me? What did they accomplish, he and Jake, by dragging me all over the Western Hemisphere? Why? Who am I to him?”
Her eyes gleamed. “You’re getting warm. But you must answer my questions, too.”
My back prickled. I’d let myself in for this. “Yes.”
“Why could you not give yourself to our way of life? At first, you found so much peace in it, so my aryè-granmè said.”
“At first.”
“And then you ran. What Samedi did frightened you.”
“Yes.” This was not easy for me, drilling down through layers of feelings I never wanted, testing the depths.
She grunted. “What did you want, when you thought to become a god?”
At this point, I couldn’t remember. So I tried to let the fifteen-year-old boy inside me speak. “I wanted what was mine. My place, my name.”
I remembered Henri de Turbin brandishing my navel string, bringing Sophie to her knees, turning me to stone. I changed the subject.
“Today I encountered something—some power I couldn’t resist.” Haltingly I told her what had occurred when Sophie’s father used the navel string to subdue me, how Sophie had freed me by connecting herself to it through him and mouthing a permission to escape.
The mambo made me go over it again, following the navel string from my old nurse to me to Jake to Sophie to her father.
Her probing surprised some truths out of me.
“I worry about Sophie,” I said. “Her father is crazy. He wants the title. He hopes to discredit my claim. He knows I care for her and she for me. I worry that he’ll use her against me somehow . . . or use me against her.”
“How could he have power over you?” Mme Vulcaine demanded.
I stared at her. “Surely that’s obvious. It’s my navel string. My nurse believed it had power. Jake, also.”
“So why did you give it away?”
The boy inside me answered again. “So I could do no harm. My powers were beginning to show. I had seen others serve the lwas during ceremonies. I saw the miracles they did. If this was how ordinary people could behave in ceremony, overtaken by the great ones, with the mambos and houngans on the watch, what might I do? I thought I was like Jake. I didn’t need ceremony to feel things no one should feel, to do things no one can do.” I put out pleading hands. “I knew I was no ancient, wise lwa. I was only a boy. I trusted Jake, and I wanted him to be there, to see that I did no harm.”
Put that way, it sounded foolish. But I’d spent my first fifteen years under close watch. My French family feared that their little black secret would make a word or deed unworthy of Montmorency. As much as I had hated that cold, unfriendly scrutiny, I had come to trust in it.
It humiliated me to realize this, but also freed me somehow.
I shared these thoughts with Mme Vulcaine.
“But Jake let you make miracles.”
I laughed. “He forced me to. He would do some wild thing, get us into trouble—get us arrested, or chased by an angry husband, or lost in the mountains. He would look at me, and he’d look away, and he’d jump into a fire. Or punch someone in a bar. Some crazy thing. A hundred times I thought nothing could save us. I had to do something.” I reflected. “I always did.”
“Your powers have increased.”
I nodded. I said nothing about the business Jake had established here in Chicago, easing the complaints of women. “What can I do about this navel string?”
Mme Vulcaine countered, “Why should this man have power over you? Jake, I could see—you were bound three ways, by friendship and long association, by pledge to the same vodou house, and most importantly by blood, for you are related to him and everyone in my house through your mother. But who’s this fellow who has your navel string? He’s no houngan, no bokor. How can he use it against you?”
“He was born in the same place where I was born. He is descended from my father’s brother.”
“Ah.” Mme Vulcaine sat back, her gaze moving around the botánica’s back room, her lips closing and opening on unvoiced words.
“What’s the difference?” I demanded. “The navel string is powerful.”
“It’s nothing.”
I stared. “I thought—”
“You thought a lot of superstitious nonsense.”
“So why—”
“Why,” Mme Vulcaine interrupted me, “did he take it with him? Why not destroy you then and there, if he believed in its power over you?”
“DNA. He took it for a laboratory test. That can destroy my claim, if it doesn’t match.”
“Then he must have another sample to compare.”
“Oh.” I realized she was right. “So he must.”
The botánica phone rang. I nearly leaped out of my skin.
“Veek, is that you?”
“Sophie! Where are you?” I demanded.
“Where have you been? My father has tested that navel string. It’s dried beef liver.”
“What? What did you say?”
“It’s not real.”
Shock doused me. I stammered, “How—how can that be?” Time and again Jake had commanded me with it.
“But you must be very careful! He has this other thing, it was like a veil when you were born, and he can use it against you. That’s what controlled us at the hotel. It’s making him crazy. He uses it on everybody and I’m scared.”
I swore in English, Kreyol, and French.
“But don’t worry. I know where to get help,” Sophie said.
“I’m with Madame Vulcaine right now,” I said. “She’s no help.”
That got me a sour look from the mambo.
Sophie said, “No, this is much better. But I don’t know if she’ll help us. She may be a little angry with me,” she admitted in a small voice.
“Who? Who will be angry with you?”
“I can’t talk. Someone’s coming.”
“Sophie, wait!”
The call went dead.
I threw my hands in the air. “She needs a keeper! Her father is hopeless with her. Where can she be hiding, and who will be angry with her?”
Then I realized.
Yoni. That musician, Baz’s nascent goddess.
I swore again.
I was half out of my chair when Mme Vulcaine seized my wrist. “Tell me.”
I yanked my wrist free, but I told her what Sophie had said about the navel string and the veil. “And now I have to go find her before she’s put in jail for stalking this rock star.”
“I think I know what sort of god you may be,” Mme Vulcaine said.
Nothing else she could say would have halted me.
I looked back. “What?”
“There is a lwa, a spirit, a thing like a gede, but not so great. We call him djumbie, jam bois. That may be what Samedi made of you.”
I took a step back toward her. “‘Forest devil?’” My heart thundered.
She put up a finger. “More correctly, a spirit of a place. It belongs to a piece of land. It has deep roots in that one place, though it may go many places. It is the sacred soul of its home.”
I sat back down with a bump. Only an hour ago I’d thought of the sacred place Sophie and I shared.
Her eyebrows went up. “This make sense?”
“Montmorency,” I said. Sacred soul. I had never felt real except when I was there—not in the house, but on the land: the fields, the trees, the marshes, the imitation Petit Trianon with its ponds and its maze.
“This is the French estate where you were born?”
“It—it’s my home. I belong there.”
“Ah. All becomes clear. This is why there is a tie between you and the ti kouzen. This is how the man who would be your heir was able to command you. If you are the jam bois of your birthplace, and if it is also his birthplace, then he has a claim on you. He can ask for your support.”
“My obedience,” I countered. “He commanded me. I couldn’t take a step.”
“He can ask,” Mme Vulcaine repeated. “You have the right to refuse.”
My thoughts raced. “He had the navel string. I was sure he commanded me with it.”
“Beef liver,” she reminded me.
“But all the time his other hand was in his pocket. I thought maybe he had a gun. But he had this other relic, this veil!”
“He can only ask,” she repeated. “It was your choice to obey or to refuse.”
My head hurt, trying to fit Jake and the birth veil into the picture. “What?”
“It can’t harm you unless you agree to let it harm you. Is this man’s will stronger than yours?”
“I don’t know.”
She leaned forward and shook my arm. “That’s how a voudouisant can direct the greater powers of the spirits. He must know how to ask, and he must have the will to command. One of you must rule!”
“What if I don’t want to rule him?” I complained.
But I thought, Oh. That’s where Jake fit in.
I had so much wanted his guidance, I’d been willing to yield to him. I gave him my navel string because I trusted him with my power more than I trusted myself.
Mme Vulcaine said grimly, “You have no choice. When you are vizavi with someone who would control you, you must either rule him or obey him.”
I thought about Montmorency.
I didn’t want to give it up.
My name, if I could make them all admit it was mine, granted me the right to be there.
If I reclaimed my name, that would give me the right to woo Sophie, too, I realized. Even her family would be helpless to part us if they acknowledged who I was.
I was halfway to the door again when the mambo called after me, “You can’t run away anymore, Clarence!”
“I’m not running away!” I bellowed, and banged out the door.