AUNTIE ROUX

Casey wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he returned to Club Desire. Earlier that day, he had taken a step he’d been working up to without realizing it: He’d sketched Bee Sharp again. This time, Sharp was emerging from a hole in the paper, his bug-eyed face a mask of grim resolve. Instead of drawing him in the Marvel house style of the seventies and early eighties, Casey went for a little more realism. His musculature was light, his shoulders on the narrow side, and his Afro had been plaited into cornrows.

That motion effect had emerged again. Casey had employed it almost unconsciously, but once he noticed it he leaned in. He wasn’t sure how much control he had in all this, but he knew what he wanted, what he needed. He missed the wildness of creation, the feel of its mechanisms. It had been so long since he thought about it, but he had enjoyed dodging cops and rival taggers, the scritch of graphite on paper, the sizzle and smell of paint rushing from its can. He had to ask himself: If his art was becoming something that shaped the world, that behaved in impossible ways, was that so bad? He had worked so tirelessly to exert control over his own life, over his body, that he’d forgotten something important: some of his best discoveries had come to him when he let go and just clung for dear life.

But what if it brings the Storm?

Casey growled softly to himself. In times gone by, he would have chided himself for thinking so magically, for connecting ideas and events that had nothing to do with each other. The impression that the Storm was somehow connected to the weird things that happened with his and Jaylon’s art was only that—an impression. He couldn’t ignore it, exactly, but there was no point in letting it run his life.

He finished his sketch and stared at it, waiting for… something. He didn’t like the way Bee Sharp’s head was inclined to the left. He looked like he was listening for something. Casey stared hard at the page and willed the figure to take the pose he wanted. When it began to happen, the air of the room took on a hollow, breathless quality. As if it was waiting to be filled or broken. Sharp’s head tilted back, and his eyes—or were they sunglasses—appeared a little more faintly at intermediate points in the motion. For a moment, Casey had wondered if it was like a watched pot, if he needed to look away for the drawing to move—but no, there it was. Some small part of him wondered if he was hallucinating, but that voice was tiny, weak. He knew.

Waiting for night was the toughest part. He wanted to bust out of his apartment and run the streets with his gear, find the nearest blank wall—but there was only one place to go. One place where he knew for sure that his familiar world touched something other. So he distracted himself with video games until sunset, then got going.

So far out of the way, he was unlikely to catch any flack while he scouted the location, looking for the best place to put the mural. He wore gray-black jean shorts, a black-and-gray camouflage Henley, and a pair of black Chucks. He’d rummaged through the box of paints he’d moved with him ever since evacuating—he’d brought them to every new place, knowing that they represented his old life, something he’d forsworn, but that he still might need them someday. No. That wasn’t true, he’d known he needed them, that even if he was unwilling to use them, he needed the strange energy that radiated from them. He’d used it to keep going, to light his path. The path that had led him here, to this moment.

That was why he brought the things with him for what should be a simple scout.

Foxx King’s voice returned to him: First place to look for him would be in his work. His livest and most powerful, heard?

But Jaylon’s mural was gone. It wasn’t removed or painted over, it was just absent, as if it had never been. Something about seeing the wall in the light cast by his portable lantern—so pocked and scarred that nobody in his right mind would want to put up a mural here—enraged Casey. He started working feverishly, not even stopping to check his sketch.

Casey felt it happen the moment he finished Sharp’s face.

He hadn’t even begun filling in the outline of the lettering in his name, but a ripple spread from the wall and broke over him, knocked him backwards onto the lantern. With a crunch the light winked out and darkness rang like a shout.

The energy surrounding him was neither hot nor cold, but he recognized it as the same power that had surrounded him when he willed the sketch to change its position. The dark air danced with it, and even though he could see nothing at all, Casey was terribly aware of the trash, debris, and detritus, the vermin hiding and peeping among the rubble, the cast-off garbage and the wall, the wall, the wall where Bee Sharp’s invisible face had turned to gaze down at him.

Suddenly, Sharp was gone. Casey still couldn’t see him—his eyes were only barely beginning to adjust to the near complete blackness threatening to drown him—but he knew it just the same. Now the door through which he’d entered the ruin was visible away to Casey’s left. A silhouette appeared there.

“Who’s there?” Casey asked. His voice cracked.

You know who, baby.

“Foxx? You followed me?”

If it helps, I spose.

“I broke my lantern. I can’t—I can’t see.”

Can’t you?

Casey could see. His surroundings were just as visible as they would be by daylight, lit by a moon that must have emerged from the clouds. The figure at the door was still just an outline, becoming more visible by the second. Casey looked hastily away. “I’m looking—I’m looking for Jaylon. They—he’s supposed to be dead, but they—they never found his body. Not even a scrap of him.”

Heard. Lemme ask around see what I find out. And thank you.

“For—for what?”

Now, Casey clenched his eyes shut. Don’t say it, he thought. Don’t don’t don’t. I’m not ready!

“For helping me.” The figure paused. “Out.”

Casey didn’t answer. His eyes were still shut, and now his hands were plastered to his face. That rippling energy was still around him, bathing him, tickling his skin. Then, as with the flip of a switch, he lost consciousness.

Yvette Graves told her husband over the phone that she’d let the kids go out on their own while he was away at work. The manufactured calm that he’d cultivated since his father went missing disappeared from his voice, replaced by a full-blooded shout. “Woman, have you lost your mind?” he’d bellowed into the receiver. “Now I gotta look for them too? You can’t just—! You can’t just let them go wherever whenever!”

“Now, listen, Deke, I know you upset, but you gotta hear me on this,” she said. She had called and explained the situation to him as best she could because she knew that if he came home to find the kids had gone, he would have been even more frightened, even less understanding than he was now. Deacon was used to musical magic—everyone in Nola was. It kept the streetlights running, powered the electricity in their homes, and kept the trolleys in the sky. Slowly, over time, Yvette had told him about the Wise Women of her family, revealing a darker seam of sorcery that ran through their world. He’d been reluctant, at first, to allow Perry to take piano lessons, but Yvette had convinced him that it was a safer, less demanding alternative to the sorcery she’d tried to learn.

When Perry had come to them, clearly upset, and demanded to transfer to a different school, Deacon couldn’t hide his relief. He had explained to Yvette that their son wanting to be a normal boy made it ten times easier to protect him, give him space to thrive. Yvette argued that they needed to question Perry, or take him to a psychologist who could ferret out the reason for their boy’s change of heart. Deacon hadn’t liked that idea at all.

“Yvie,” he’d said, “if he was sick, if he was hurt, I’d be all for it. But what he’s asking us is utterly sane. Why would he want a session spot at the Sewerage and Water Board, or an apprenticeship at Young Money with all those gangbanging rappers? I’m not saying we should let him switch because it’s easier, but I know in my bones it’ll be healthier for him in the long run.”

Yvette couldn’t help remembering her own lessons. Mama Lisa had started early, teaching her small spells at home: heating bathwater, helping to weatherproof their house on South Lopez Street, keeping the house plants healthy—but by the time she was ten, Yvette began having migraines. Magickal workings only made the pain worse, and finally Mama Lisa had had to concede that Yvette wasn’t meant to be a Wise Woman after all. When the lessons ended, the migraines had disappeared, and an enormous weight had lifted from her shoulders. How could she deny her son that same relief? Mama Lisa had told her before disappearing that Perry had a sorcerous destiny, but she’d failed to predict her own disappearance. So… maybe she’d been wrong.

The night Doctor Professor appeared out of season, Yvette had seen her babies dancing in the street and felt a pang of regret. What if she’d made a mistake?

She shut her eyes against the memory. “They’re with Peaches,” she said. “She’ll keep them safe if anyone can.” She thought it best not to mention that the children were armed or how they’d got their weapons.

By the time Deacon arrived home that night, Yvette felt ready to explain. Leaving aside her telephone conversation with her dead mother, she would instead focus on how proud she and Deacon should be that their children cared so deeply about their family and their city.

When Deacon’s car purred quietly into the driveway, Yvette positioned herself in the hallway outside the kitchen, where she had a full view of the front door and its stained glass. She took a breath as her husband’s key scratched in the lock and held it as he stepped inside.

“Aw, honey!” she said without meaning to. She couldn’t help it; her husband looked ten years older than he had this morning. His shoulders, usually squared with confidence, sagged in his jacket. He looked like an overgrown little boy. It occurred to Yvette then that, in some ways, that’s exactly what he was. What they all were—children stumbling through the world, bowing their shoulders underneath the pressures of responsibility and fear.

“I’m only here to change clothes,” Deacon said. “After that, I’ll go out and look.”

“Deacon. Deke.”

“I’m sorry I lost my temper. I just—sometimes I feel like we’re up to our eyeballs in crazy, and we’ve got to stick together, because… because what do we have if we don’t have each other?”

“We have—”

Yvette’s voice stopped in midsentence as a snatch of song rang out from the kitchen. It was a high, sweet alto: “My first name is Yve-e-e-e-tte!”

Yvette answered without thinking, “Y-V-E-T-T-E!”

Yvette turned as Mama Lisa stepped out of the darkened kitchen, and they sang together:

Cuz that is my name, and it can’t be tamed

There just ain’t nobody like me!

And my first name is Yvette!

It wasn’t much of a song—Mama Lisa had adapted it for Yvette from a church hymn neither of them remembered. She had used it to teach her little girl to say and spell her first name, but as Yvette grew, they had held on to it, singing snatches every now and then. Every time they did, a tingling warmth spread through Yvette’s body, and she felt as she had when she was a toddler and her mother would rub Yvette’s belly and fold her against the comfort of her mother-ness. Hearing and singing the song again, Yvette felt five years old: small but fiercely alive. Safe. Protected. Joy and relief coursed through her, and her knees wobbled as she stood.

“Thank you for your apology, Deacon,” Mama Lisa said quietly. “My baby girl shouldn’t be spoken to just any kind of way.”

Now Deacon sounded like a little boy. “Mama Lisa?” he asked, his voice cracking high in his throat.

“Yes,” she said. “Here I am.”

The strangest thing to Yvette was that now, fully grown, she was physically larger than her mother. The woman was small boned and dark-skinned—five feet tall if she was lucky—but her influence on Yvette, the bond between them, was so strong that whenever Yvette thought of her mother, whenever she saw her mother in her mind’s eye, she towered.

Yvette tried to speak, but the only thing that would fit through her throat was a sort of pained babyish squawk.

Yvette rushed to her mother, grabbed her off her feet, and squeezed the smaller woman with a force that surprised even her. She clenched her eyes shut, and for a moment there was no hurt, there was no danger, and no questions came to mind. Mama Lisa’s warmth, her solidity, soothed an ache Yvette had harbored quietly for all the years of her mother’s absence.

After some time, when she was ready, Yvette set Mama Lisa back on the linoleum floor and just stared at her.

“Don’t goggle at me like that,” Mama Lisa said, smiling slightly. “I’m not a two-headed dog.”

“I don’t understand,” Deacon said. “Where have you been?”

“Away,” Mama Lisa said. “I didn’t want to go, I didn’t mean to leave, but it was time.”

“Where?” Deacon asked. “Where?” It was as if that was the only word he knew.

“I’ll explain later if I can,” Mama Lisa said. “I promise. Right now, Yvette and I must go to Congo Circus. Stay here. Don’t leave the house. Lie down and rest. The children will be back before long, I promise. The two of us will return even before they arrive. Now, tell me what you are to do.”

Deacon opened his mouth and just stared at the small woman. “I’m to— You want me to stay here. Try to sleep. The kids are coming back soon? Are they?”

“They are. They’re unharmed. Peaches has kept them safe.”

“What about my father?”

“He’ll be found before long, but not by you,” Mama Lisa said. “Yvette and the children need you here.”

“Is he…?” Deacon couldn’t finish the question.

“Dead? No. He’s imprisoned. Captured by the rebel song.”

“That’s what Perry said,” Deacon said. “He said someone stole my father.”

“You two have done well with him. With all of them,” Mama Lisa said. “Go upstairs, shower, and sleep. We have a lot to talk about when the children arrive.”

Casey Bridgewater finished his torrent of words but did not close his mouth. It hung open in the post-midnight darkness of the bedroom, and while his sobs made no noise, he could tell from the wetness against his cheeks and palms that he was crying. This weeping reminded him of the way he had cried as a young boy—when his voice would leave him and he would wail without sound into the uncaring air.

Naddie rested her small, sincere hand on his left thigh and sat silently until Casey could speak again. He breathed in her scent—honey and melons—and let it calm him.

“That’s why I was so late coming home,” he said. “I had to walk here cuz I gave that monster my last five.”

He lay in the depression at the center of the king-sized bed they shared, both hands covering his face as if even the late-night gloom was bright enough to hurt his eyes.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Naddie said softly.

“I’m not okay,” Casey said. “And neither is Nola. Something bad’s going on.”

“You really think so?”

Casey paused to examine the fluttering unease at his center. It had been so long since he had felt anything like it that the sensation was almost unrecognizable—but it was the same guttering orange flame of anxiety he felt anytime he saw on the news that a storm was headed through the gulf. Storm coming. Storm coming. Wind, flood, fire, and—

“I know so,” he said. “I know it.”

He didn’t know how the thing he’d seen at work was related, but he knew there was some connection he was too ignorant to parse.

Naddie’s fingers grazed his wrist, then closed around it. She pulled his hand gently away, and he moved the other himself. In the darkness, his girlfriend was little more than a collection of shapes—her red-blond hair shining in the streetlight that crept into the small room from the blinds on the east window.

“You’re safe,” she said.

“We gotta get out of here. We gotta go.”

“Go where?”

“I don’t know,” Casey said. “I don’t remember. Grand Isle, maybe? Somewhere.”

“If you really think something bad’s about to happen to the city, we should tell Auntie Roux.”

“What she gonna do for us? She don’t even tell fortunes no more.”

“No. She doesn’t. But she knows Doctor Professor.”

“Doctor—? She don’t know him. Nobody does. He’s like a— Is he even a person? I never seen him.”

“He’s real,” Naddie said. “And if something’s wrong with the city, he needs to know.”

“And you wanna go over now,” Casey said bitterly. “I don’t even know if I can leave the house.”

“What do you think that man—that thing—you saw is doing down in the bayou?”

“Nothing good.”

At least they didn’t have to walk this time. He sat in the passenger seat of Naddie’s car, watching the city scroll by as they made their way from Gentilly, headed for the French Quarter. Naddie swerved to avoid a graffito, and not for the first time since they’d left the apartment. There was more of it tonight than usual. Casey had seen four or five tags at least on his way home. That overwhelming sense of something big and bad and wrong with the city returned to him again, and Casey shut his eyes against it. It felt as if the night were a bubble of soap and the pressure from outside could easily destroy it.

Naddie guided her little white Bug off Esplanade and onto Rampart Street. It’s okay, Casey told himself. It’s fine. Everything’s going to be fine.

The houses on Rampart Street stood mostly silent. Here and there, orange light flooded through doors and windows, adding its glow to the streetlights that splashed over the car. No other vehicles were out at this hour, which, to Casey, seemed more than a little strange. Casey breathed his relief as he saw the open doors of the Powder Room. When he had lived in this neighborhood, it had been his favorite bar—and if it was open and serving, then things couldn’t be so bad.

They reached Armstrong Park, and Naddie found a parking space outside the Ninth Circle. She drew the car to a halt and made to go off alone.

Casey had made it clear in the past that he was extremely uncomfortable around Auntie Roux. He didn’t understand her magic, her bizarre personality, or honestly, her importance to Naddie. That fluttering in his chest told him what to do—he had to go with her this time instead of waiting in the car. He felt like he’d been waiting in the car all his life.

Casey unlatched his seat belt and climbed out onto the street. Naddie paused, and they shared a look across the car’s roof. From here, Casey could smell the caramel apples and cotton candy of the Square circus, and the steamboat calliope piped up from the Missus Hipp. Until just now, Casey hadn’t realized how much he’d missed its strange no-song.

“Let’s do this thing,” Casey said.

Even at this hour, the circus was still going strong. Ninja clowns sparred just inside the gates of the park, and fortune-tellers in poet’s blouses and pirate hats waved their hands, selling silly predictions to people from Away. Here and there, a giant crawfish, a nutria, or a zombie sat selling trinkets or rubbing the rims of crystal glasses, adding glassy hums to the sound of the pipes. The entire scene reminded Casey of one of the old Jacques Cousteau specials, where the Frenchman drifted through a drowned garden full of jeweled fish and tubeworms like feather boas. Casey had always wondered what kind of music could be heard down there.

Naddie reached for Casey’s hand, and together, they made their way toward the circus’s grandest tent. It was a broad, lacy structure striped in lavender and white. It smelled of cinnamon and oils from far away.

Inside, the sound of the circus died away, and an atmosphere of peace pervaded the scene. At the center of the tent, instead of a pole, a statue, weathered beyond identification, raised its cornet toward the sky. A pelican sat preening on the statue’s shoulder, and as the light shifted just a little, Casey realized he could see through the bird. He’d never seen an Animal haint, had no idea such things existed—but why wouldn’t they? If nutrias, crawfish, and gators lived lives and did business, why would all that activity cease at death?

Auntie Roux sat at a kidney-shaped table, holding the hands of a heavyset light-skinned woman with short hair and perfectly arched eyebrows. Another darker woman sat by her, and watching them, Casey couldn’t tell which was the older.

“Now we ready, babies,” Auntie Roux said. “Our final piece of information is here.” She looked up at Casey and smiled. “What it do?”

Auntie Roux swore she was five feet tall, but Casey had his doubts. She was perfectly proportioned, so she must not be a dwarf, but Casey was certain that if she rose from her seat to stand at her full height, the top of her head would barely reach his shoulder.

Instead of proper jewelry, she wore rubber bands inset with sequins and plastic stones—the kind of things you could buy out of dispensers at Rouses Market for ten cents a pop. Wind chimes hung from the fringes on her puffy sleeves, and jingle bells lined the hem of her diaphanous skirt. Roux was given to broad, flowing gestures, so most of her movements were accompanied by music.

Her complexion was difficult to process. In low light it looked a bit yellow, but having rarely seen her by day, Casey wasn’t sure how she would be categorized by anyone interested in race. Her hair was a rich royal purple, locked into dreads hung with puka shells and hammered brass crescent moons. Faded blue tattoos stood out on her face—crosses, diamonds, moons, and even a Star of David or two. Two bright spots of color stood out on her cheeks, making her ageless face both childish and comically wise.

As always, she was attended by a squadron of sewing moths—little diamond-shaped squares of fabric made from the sewing together of two triangles—who flapped their tips, wheeling around her to chase each other or dart toward bystanders before zipping away. No one but Casey ever seemed to acknowledge their existence—to the point where Casey was unsure anyone else could see them.

In his dealings with Auntie Roux, Casey had heard her say little that made any practical sense—not that she blathered about spirits, fates, or symbols. Most of what she said related to cooking or sewing. Casey would nod and smile at her advice, just like everybody else. He wondered whether he was the only one who simply humored her.

“So,” Auntie Roux said. “Ladies, you have stirred yo gumbo just right! Arming dem children was the best decision you coulda made. But no mistake, chits and chitterlings, it ain’t through the strength of arms that they gonna prevail at last. It is through the clearness of dey voices and the purity of dey affections.”

“Roux,” the dark woman said. “Settle down and talk straight for a change. I taught you better than this. My daughter and I need your skills. Where are my grandbabies?”

“I can locate and contact anyone or anything in this world,” Roux said, speaking more clearly and with more care than Casey had ever heard from her, “but I have checked and double-checked and checked again, and they are nowhere to be found.”

The other, heavier woman rocked back in her seat and took in a deep breath, as if ready to shout.

“Yvette,” the darker woman said sharply. “Hold on. This isn’t the first time they’ve left this world.”

“They are nowhere to be found among the living or the dead,” Roux said. “In which case, they must be elsewhere entirely. I don’t know where they at, but I know someone who might. Fess can tell us what we need to know.”

“Good,” said the dark-skinned woman. “It’s time I had words with that one.”

“You’re not the only one. My Naddie and her boy have news he needs to hear.”

“We do?” Casey asked. “I do?” He hated the way he sounded—ignorant and out of his depth.

“Tell what you come to tell, boy,” Auntie Roux said.

Casey told his story. This time, he took his time, taking care with every detail as well as the sequence of events. All eyes rested on him, and nobody liked what they were hearing.

“This is worse than I thought,” the dark woman said. “You produce that old haint right now, Roux, and I’m going to tell him about himself.”

“But—” Casey began.

“I will call and he will come,” Auntie Roux said, “but best you remember his value to us all.”

“Roux.”

“Wait a minute,” Casey interrupted. “What’s going on? Somebody gotta tell me something.”

“That wasn’t a man you saw,” the dark woman said. “His name is Stagger Lee Shelton. Way back when, he murdered a man named Billy Lyons in an argument over his Stetson hat, and the dealing of death got good to him. He started off killing anybody who did him dirt or disrespected him, and he moved on to killing other things—animals, words, days of the week. With the power of his gun, he was even able to murder ghosts.”

Casey opened his mouth.

“Don’t interrupt. You asked and I’m answering. Now. The only way the Wise Women were able to stem the blood-red tide of Stackolee’s murderous intent was to immortalize him in song. His essence was drawn out of the world to reside in what for many, many years was a harmless tune, but it seems it ain’t so harmless now. He’s out on the street killing again, and it’s Fess who’s to blame. Does that answer your questions?”

“He— Days of the week?” Casey asked.

The dark woman ignored him. “Roux. Summon him!”

Rocking in her seat, Auntie Roux began to sing.