Part 1
I used to believe that magic was glittering, fanciful pretend.
Then I realized magic is real.
But it is dark and poisonous.
And the only way to hide from it
Is to not exist at all.
“Quell, are you listening?” Mom squeezes my hand as our car jerks to a stop outside the French Market on North Peters.
“Yes, get my pay for the week, in and out.”
“That’s my girl. Hurry now. I’ll circle.” She brushes my loose curls from my cheek with a cautious smile before I slip out of our ’99 Civic, a junkyard find, its blue paint dry and peeling. Before this car, it was an old yellow truck. And before that truck, it was the bus, everywhere. But Mom didn’t like not having a way to get up and go—run—at a moment’s notice. So she made sure to get really good at fixing up old finds.
Really good at hiding me.
Fourteen schools. Twelve years. Nine cities.
Every place is the same: a backdrop I blend into. Anytime Mom gets suspicious someone might know about the poison running through my veins, she stuffs our entire life into a tiny yellow, hard-shell suitcase. It’s perplexing that my entire existence can be tucked into something so small and shoved into the trunk of a car. At first, I’d stuff everything I could into my bag. Now, I just grab my tennis shoes, a phone charger, and my lucky key chain. The countless places we’ve moved and the blur of faces I’ll say goodbye to are the white space between memories, ellipses strung between unfinished sentences. I stopped asking where we’re going a long time ago.
Because running’s been a destination all on its own.
Humid air, thanks to the roaring Mississippi nearby, assaults me, sticking to my clammy skin. The back end of our rusted hatchback blares red before disappearing around a corner. With only two weeks of high school left, I’m trying to work as much as I can to save up enough for the big plans Mom and I have.
To finally move somewhere and stay.
If a caged bird sings of freedom, and a song can be a wordless utterance, a wish, a burning desire, then I sing of salty air and sand between my toes. Of a home that’s not a moving target. After graduation, our plan is to find some small beach town—a real beach, not like the muddy water we’ve been around these last six months in New Orleans—and blend in with the sand.
Only a couple more weeks.
I graft myself into the afternoon commotion of the congested Market, and it’s like slipping into a worn pair of shoes. I disappear into the throng of shoppers in the outdoor pavilion with my chin to my chest, hands tucked in my pockets.
Be forgettable.
Mrs. Broussard should have my money for my shifts last week. She is a local confectioner whose family has been in the business of pralines since there was such a thing. The Market buzzes with an energy that slows my steps. Too many people. The usual spot where Mrs. Broussard sets up her table of goods is taken up by a person peddling various levels of heat—hot sauces. My pulse ticks faster at the hiccup.
I weave in and out of the crowd, avoiding curious eyes and looking for a bandana covering a head of pinned gray hair. My fingers prickle with a cold ache, a familiar sign that this curse in my veins—my toushana—is stirring. I swallow, urging it back down, pleading with it to calm. It’s safer to be invisible; it’s safer to be no one.
“Quell?”
I flinch at the sound of my name.
“That you, girl?” Mrs. Broussard waves me toward her, and the line snaked at her table parts. My skin burns, feeling her customers’ stares. No eye contact.
“Tonta’lise got here before me, yeah. Had to set up my whole show ova here. She know damn well I use dat spot eva day. But here she come, tryin’ to get my customers.” Her hand rests on her hip. “You come for ya money?”
I nod and Mrs. Broussard pulls an envelope out of her apron. This is the first job Mom ever let me have, because we need the money and Mrs. Broussard doesn’t ask a lot of questions. She pays me in cash and has only ever asked my name once.
“You gone do extra hours for me next week?”
“Not until school’s out.”
“Very good. Don’t linger ’round these parts, che. Gone get outta here before it get dark, ya hear?”
The thick envelope in my hand soothes my nerves. I count it. Twice. My lips curl as I thank Mrs. Broussard and turn to go. The crowd has thickened like a nice roux. Be unpredictable. A cluster of tourists lodge in the entryway and I scan for another exit. Away from the vendors, near an abandoned pop-up tent full of fleur-de-lis candleholders, is a sign for the bathrooms. A red exit sign blares next to it and I head that way. Mom will worry if I take too long.
The winding hallway toward the bathrooms twists and the light bulbs overhead flicker. Small exit arrows glow red, urging me farther down the hall. I expect to spot the bathrooms but don’t see them yet. The Market pavilion is open to the outdoors, so there should be sunlight up ahead. The fluorescents flicker again and I walk slower. This doesn’t feel right. Worry bites at me and I turn to go back the way I came.
But there’s a wall there.
A shape of something, like a shadow or trick of light, forms a fleur-like shape on its stuccoed surface. I blink and it’s gone. My heart stumbles; my toushana unfurls in my bones, dancing with my panic, threatening as it does in warning that it might rise up in me soon.
I turn, but in every direction the walls have shifted or closed in. There are no bathroom signs, no blaring red light pointing toward an exit anymore.
“Memento sumptus,” someone says. The voice is coming from a narrow door that blends seamlessly with the wall. Caution tugs at me like a tether. Pressed carefully to the door, I listen, hands hooked behind myself just in case. Strained voices tangle around each other in a whispered argument. There are a pair of men, it sounds like. I listen again and hear several more. I teeter forward on my toes ever so slightly, pressing my weight against the door to ease it open a sliver.
Inside, dark-robed men encircle another bound to a chair. Around them are rows of stacked barrels marked with a thorny branch coiled around a black sun and words in a language I don’t understand.
“Go on, Sand,” one says after refilling a barrel with a pale liquid. “We’ll clean up.”
A blond fellow lassos his arm in the air and the dozen barrels tremor. A haze fills the air, rippling like rain on a window. It clears and he does it again, and this time the barrels disappear. I squint, my heart lodged in my throat.
I glare at my hands in confusion, and I can still picture the wisps of darkness that bleed through my fingertips when my toushana shows itself, destroying anything I touch. When I was little, I’d called it “the black.” Then as I grew to know its nasty nature, “the curse.” Mom finally corrected me a few years back after someone overheard me complaining about it. Toushana is its name. Some genetic malfunction, Mom had said. She’s lying. But Mom does that. I’ve heard her mutter to herself about this poison I have.
She called it magic.
But whatever these men are doing appears quite different. My nails dig into the door’s frame as I peer harder into the dimly lit room. I’ve never seen magic that isn’t my own.
“What was the order, Charlie?” asks Sand. The others in the room watch from the shadows.
“No prisoners. Not today.” Charlie plants his hands on his knees and glares at their captive, now at eye level. “May Sola Sfenti judge you fairly.”
“Screw you and your Sun God,” the bound man spits as Charlie pulls deep from a fat cigar. He blows smoke into the captive’s face. Then he does something with his fingers, too fast and too far away for me to make out. The bound man throws his head back, choking and contorting in pain, his wrists and ankles rubbed red from their hold on him. The smoke from Charlie’s lips hovers like a cloud around his face, consuming and suffocating. The man gasps for breath and in moments, his writhing stops. His head lolls and I stumble backward, lacing my fingers, trying to slow my hammering pulse. He’s . . . dead. That man, they . . .
“Fratis fortuna.” The voice comes from behind me. I turn and there is a man in a dark suit, same as the ones the men I just saw were wearing. But unlike the others, a gleaming dark mask slopes across this man’s brows, over his nose, its ornate carvings tapering off into his high cheekbones. His expression hardens at my silence.
I step backward, my back hard against the wall. There’s nowhere for me to hide. His brows knit with intrigue and my heart patters faster. My toushana’s ache deepens, my hands growing colder. I have minutes, maybe, until it will rip through my fingertips angrily like a spewing burst pipe. Pressure swells in my chest. Run. I step aside. His hand latches onto my wrist, but I feel it around my throat.
“What are you doing back here?”
My envelope from my job slips from my fingers, and I try to dash for it as it tumbles to the pavement.
“Ah, ah. Hold still.” His long coat is tightly buttoned all the way up to his neck, and a round piece of silver gleams at me from his throat. An image is engraved on it, a Roman-style column, with a jagged crack running across its front as if it’s been broken in half. I squint, trying to remember if I’ve ever seen that symbol before. Thick brows shade his narrowed expression. “Answer the question.”
“I got lost trying to find the exit. I thought it was near the bathrooms.” I tug against his grip, but he doesn’t let go. He glances just past me at what was a door, but is solid stone wall now. My heart hiccups. “I—I didn’t go in there, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“In . . . where?”
“There was a door, but I could tell it wasn’t the bathroom, so I turned around to leave. I swear!” A lie is too risky. People believe half-truths much more easily.
“What’s your name?”
“I—”
The answer sticks in my throat, magic fluttering around in me like a moth searching for a place to land. Mom changes my name each time we move, cycling through the same three or four. Quell Jewel. Not Quell Marionne. Who lives at 711 Liberty Street. Born in a small town outside the city. New to the area. Whose dad’s job requires him to travel a lot. Two parents means fewer questions. My script, the drill Mom has run through my head year after year, hangs on my lips. All lies seasoned with enough truth, the proper inflection, the warmth of a genuine smile, to make them feel true. To make the veneer of a life we’ve lived, I’ve lived, for as long as I can remember, real.
“I’m Quell.”
His mouth bows in suspicion.
My fingers hurt as my toushana yawns like a cat stretching itself awake from a nap. Its claws run underneath my skin, sharp tendrils of ice scratching my bones. My breaths quicken. The mask on his face fades into his skin, seeping into his pores like dry soil soaking up rain. I blink and stuff down a gasp. But he doesn’t even flinch.
“Your heart is racing. Your pupils are dilated. And if you move, that bile in your stomach might come tumbling up your throat. Something wrong?” He peers harder at me as if sussing out a question, but after a moment the crater between his brows disappears.
“No, nothing’s wrong. May I go?”
He releases me.
“Better get a Retentor out here to take a look,” he mutters to himself before smiling at me. “My apologies. I thought I knew you from somewhere. The exit is there, behind you.”
I turn, and sure enough, behind me where there was a stone wall is now an arched exit that opens up to the avenue. That was not there a moment ago.
“Right. Thanks.”
He smiles, turns, and I book it onto the street, grateful to put more distance between me and whatever that was. But my breath hitches.
My envelope.
I turn back, but stone has reformed where the archway just was. Some mangled mix of irritation and sorrow burns through me. That money was supposed to feed us for a week!
“Hey, let me back in, please?” I beat on the wall, and the icy chill of my toushana, already on edge from this whole tirade, seeps into my bones in a fury, rushing into my fist before I can pull it away. I groan at the burn of what feels like daggers tearing through my skin. The stone blackens under my touch, its facade crumbling with rot, brick by brick, inch by inch, until I’m standing before a decayed expanse of building that looks singed. What have I done? What have I done!
Muscle memory urges me into motion. I run. Back up Ursulines, right on North Peters. Blue, Honda. A horn blares and Mom is waving behind the steering wheel. Seeing her is a balm to my toushana. The chill in my bones retreats as I dart between traffic, yank the passenger door open, and duck inside.
“Go!”
“Did you get the money?”
“Go, Mom, just drive, go!”
Mom slams the gas, and the French Market grows smaller behind us.
I’m still grasping for my next breath when Mom tosses me one of those cheap disposable hand warmers and my rice pack. We keep one in the car and two at the motel. My toushana has worn off, but the throbbing ache that comes before and after lingers. Those people. They used magic. They killed a man!
“What happened?” She eyes her duffel bag on the back seat and white knuckles the steering wheel. Creases hug her eyes. Her pulled-back hair has grayed in spots, like threads of silver in a bushel of black wheat. Memories are buried in the folds of her skin, mysteries I’d give anything to understand. Like why I have magic and she doesn’t. Who are we running from? But the curve of her lips as she merges into the thoroughfare tells me precisely what she’s worrying about—whether it’s time to leave again.
I bite down and find something outside the car window to look at so Mom cannot see the frustration on my face. I’m so close to graduating, which means some semblance of freedom. No more truancy checks. No more teachers breathing down my neck. Mom and I will just be able to be, hide in plain sight, much more easily in two short weeks.
“Well?”
“It was nothing.” Those men at the Market didn’t see me watching. And the one who caught me let me go. He didn’t actually see my toushana destroy that wall. I’m not adding fuel to her fire.
“Do not lie to me.” Her stare burns.
A shiver skitters up my arms. I’m just so tired of running. Mom exhales and snatches up a box of cigarettes from her purse and lights one as a string of museums I’ve only seen from the outside rush past us in a blur.
“You know that everything I do is to protect you?” Her expression softens. “We may not have much, but we have each other.”
I look away. A house swallowed in flames flickers in my memory. I can still taste the smoke. We left our last place after this guy’s house was burned down because he and I’d hung out after school. Even then, Mom offered no explanation. I know she loves me. But that’s not the same as understanding. I could have been killed back there. If I knew more, I could be smarter. If I knew more, we could be safer. Maybe she thinks I’m too young to get it. She reaches to rub my shoulder, and I want to pull away. But I don’t. I sit there and smile, so Mom feels like her best is good enough.
We continue the rest of the drive in silence, and I try to lose myself in one of the library books in my bag. But the car jerks to a stop in the parking lot of the motel, the latest spot Mom was able to secure for us, and I hurry out of the car.
Once inside our room, I can’t hold it in anymore.
“Mom, I want to understand my magic. To understand why we’re doing this.”
She takes off her shoes, after setting her duffel bag right beside her, and for a moment I wonder if she heard me. “Quell.” She takes a deep breath and the weariness carving her expression deepens. “I’m not even sure where to start, how to—”
“Just tell me the truth. I can handle it.”
“You assume.”
“I can. I’m seventeen, not a child anymore.” My tone grates with irritation. “Please,” I say, softer. She stills and sighs again. A long moment of quiet passes between us. And I sit in it because this time there’s more than silence in response to my questions.
“Your grandmother is a very powerful and influential woman, Quell, in an entirely different world than we live in now.”
My chest tightens with anticipation, hearing Mom mention Grandmom. I haven’t thought about her—seen her—since I was little. Hope bubbles up inside me at finally getting some answers. “Does she have magic, like I do?” Mine must have come from somewhere. Maybe it skips generations.
“Growing up, our house was a training ground for a magical secret society.” Mom wraps and rewraps herself in a blanket. “The Order.” A smile wafts between us. “And life there at Chateau Soleil even in the off-season was . . .”
“Chateau Soleil?”
“Grandmom’s estate.”
“Estate? How big does a house have to be to have its own name?” We lived at my grandmother’s until I was five. I can’t remember it, really, or picture it. I have one cobwebbed memory. I was little. She pulled me up onto her lap. She smelled like birch and juniper. Sunlight poured into the room and everything seemed to glitter. She handed me some toy to play with. I felt safe. But Mom came thundering into the room, snatched it out of my hand and me out of her lap. The rest is a haze.
“Their magic is different from yours, Quell. They move in the world in a way that you never will because of your toushana.”
My shoulders sink.
“All that glitters, darling—”
“Isn’t gold. I know.” Another question pokes my thoughts. “Does Grandmom know about my toushana?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
Thunder claps quietly in the distance and the lights flicker. The suddenness silences both of us. Mom’s brow pinches as if she’s focusing hard on something. I know that look in her eye. That spark that won’t die.
“Pack your things.”
“Mom?”
“I need you to tell me everything that happened at the Market, Quell, right now. Please.”
She grabs her duffel and something inside me fractures.
I tell Mom everything, about how I got lost leaving and saw them kill that man, that I ran into a guy with a mask that bled into his skin. How I dropped the envelope, and how my toushana rotted a hole in the stone trying to get it back. The longer I talk, the more her grip on her duffel tightens.
The far-off sound of thunder rolls again and her expression darkens. Mom stuffs the few clothes she has into her bag and my resolve falters.
“Mom, please.” Hot tears sting my eyes.
I can’t. Not again. We’re so close. Two weeks.
She hands me the blue savings jar we made six years ago when we settled on our beach plan. I can practically see the house I built for us in my dreams. Two stories, a plain square shape, cozy with shutters. Salted air blowing through an open window.
“One more time, I’m sorry.” She tugs on her coat.
It’s always one more time. “I don’t believe you!” I hate this. I hate it so much. How do I convince her I was careful at the Market? I got away! We’ll be fine, like we always have been, for a few more weeks. I lock my knees and try to find a big voice.
“No.”
“What did you say to me?” Her tone is sharp, but the grip on the bed rail says it’s fear that strains her words, not anger.
“I said no, Mom.” My tone is stronger this time, my song rising up in me. Magic prickles my fingertips, and I tuck them away to warm them, unsure of what it could do. I’ve never had it flare up when I’m this upset. The anger in her flickers, then morphs into something else, her eyes red with tears. She puts out her cigarette, then leans in so close I can taste it on her breath.
“You want the truth? That isn’t thunder. It’s magic.”
My heart stumbles. “I don’t understand.”
A tear steals its way down her cheek. She wipes it away so fast I almost miss it.
“Those Draguns you saw . . .”
“Draguns?”
“Assassins for the Order. They’re in charge of executing anyone with toushana.” Her nails dig into my arm. “If anyone finds out your secret, they will kill you, Quell!”
Her words knock the wind out of me. I try to steady myself on a wall as the world sways.
Someone would kill me for a magic I don’t even want or use.
“What if someone saw you at that Market?” She shakes her head. “We can’t take that chance. One more time, Quell, please?” She curls her hand in mine as if holding on to it keeps her world in orbit. I know what I have to do, but that doesn’t make it easy. If she’s right, if this is the one time this so-called Order actually has found us, I have no choice. I empty the beach fund jar onto the bed and whatever pieces of me are left crumble.
“Okay,” I breathe, taking on the yoke of her sorrow and blinking away my own. One more time. “I’ll go to the convenience store and grab the necessities. Give me five minutes.”
“That’s my girl. And—” She lifts her skirt. Strapped to her thigh is a gold-handled dagger, covered in scrollwork and flecked with gems. She shoves it in my hand. “Just in case.”
I blink in disbelief. The metal of the blade is twice the length of the handle, but somehow as light as air in my hand. Its ornate handle gleams gold and sparkles with jewels. I had no idea Mom even carried a weapon, let alone something so . . . exquisite.
“If I’m right and one Dragun has found us, there could be more.”
I glare at the weapon in my hand. It’s cold, like her words. Easily the most beautiful and dangerous thing I’ve ever seen. I meet Mom’s eyes and finally, to some degree, understand the weight that hangs there.
“Five minutes,” she says again. “No more.”
I tuck the dagger away and hurry out the door.
