The Map of Moments (38 page)

Max climbed the staircase, then and now and on a day yet to come, simultaneously, as though he existed in this place in all of those moments at once. The first time, Gabrielle had been leading him by the hand, smiling back down at him, her smile so gorgeous that he had been looking at that instead of her naked behind. The second time he had gone alone, because Gabrielle had promised that she would be waiting for him up there. True to her promise, she had, with a bottle of wine, and a hundred candles turning the attic into a golden dream. Several times after that blurred into one, all ending in the same passionate, sweaty embrace on the wooden floor. And the last time …when he had walked in on Gabrielle astride…

Joe Noone.

The name conjured images Max wished he could forget.

He walked slowly up the staircase, his progress masked by the sounds of Katrina's fury. As he reached the narrow door at the top and gripped the knob, he wondered if this would be the final time he ascended these stairs. He looked around at the shadows, searching for observers from past, present, or future, but he saw or sensed no one.

Alone, he opened the door.

Gabrielle sat on a mess of blankets piled on the floor. An empty wine bottle stood beside her, and another, half-full, was cupped in her hands. The attic was lit unevenly by a dozen fat, squat candles, and shadows danced around her. She was fully dressed in shapeless clothes that seemed to
match what she had become—a shape where a woman had been. Though the hands around the bottle's neck seemed clean, Max saw them stained with Joe Noone's blood. He'd never be able to look at her again and not see those stains.

“Hello, Gabrielle,” Max said.

Her eyes opened wide, then wider still when she saw him, and she let out a small, strangled cry.

He'd thought he might cry, that his heart would swell with hope. He'd sacrificed everything he had believed about the world to reach this moment, given up his own past and perhaps his future just to stand here, to be able to reach out and try to reclaim the happiness she'd stolen from him. Perhaps even the love she'd thrown away. At the very least, her life.

But the woman before him was broken and empty. He had seen what she had done, and felt a dreadful certainty that no matter what havoc magic wreaked on his memory after this, the sight of her plunging a blade into Joe Noone was something he would never be able to forget.

He silently cursed Ray yet again.
Why couldn't you even give us a chance?

“You went back to Boston!” Gabrielle gasped. Candle flames flickered and swayed, and the shadows seemed alive. “I made sure.”

“I did,” Max said. “But I had to come back.”

“Why?”

“For your funeral.”

“Max…” Her eyes sparkled with panic, and she looked past his shoulder at the dark staircase behind him.

“Don't worry, I'm alone. The Tordu don't even know I'm here.”

She gasped. “You know about …?”

“Coco? Mireault? The Tordu? Seddicus?” He saw her shiver as he uttered the demonic name, and for a beat he almost went to hold her. But this was an empty woman before him, someone who had already given her soul to the demon in return for …what? Power? If what Ray said was true, yes. But here she sat, more powerful than any normal person in New Orleans, yet still readying herself to die.

“You left,” she said. “I sent you away so you didn't have to know any of that.”

Frozen, he couldn't approach her. His hands ached to touch her but he stopped himself. Anguish stabbed him, twisted.

“What do you think is going to happen, Gabrielle?” he said, shouting to be heard over the howl of the wind and the trembling of the house. “You're going to die in the morning. And then Corinne will call me, and I won't be able to stay away—”

“You were supposed to—”

“I can't. You know I can't! So when Corinne calls, I'll come, and I'll find out everything. What you did, and what you gave up.”

“Why?” she screamed, voice matching the cry of the storm.

“Because…”
Because I love you?
If he said that, would it mean anything to her now? To this soulless girl with blood on her hands? “Because Ray tells me,” he said instead.

Gabrielle glanced away at the mention of the Oracle's name, but he could also see understanding in her eyes.

“What'll happen if you're both gone? You're betraying him if you let yourself die.”

“He betrayed me!” she spat. “He
destroyed
me! Said because I didn't have the same magic in my blood that he did, the only way to be strong enough was to be empty,
soulless,
like them. Ray said I had to be able to use all kinds of magic if I was gonna fight them. He
allowed
Coco to take me from him, turn me into what it is those sick bastards are, and I had to…” A single tear dribbled down her cheek, and she touched it as though surprised.

“He betrayed me, too,” Max whispered, realizing at last that this was always the moment Ray had intended returning him to. The bastard had wanted her to be tainted by the Tordu's dark magic, and he couldn't afford to let Max rescue her before she had given up her soul.

“I had to…” Gabrielle looked at her hand, fisted around the shaft of an invisible knife.

And then Max couldn't help it. To hell with the stakes, with what it meant for Ray or Gabrielle or the city of New Orleans. For just a moment all of his illusions about his motivations slipped and the only thing that mattered was what she'd done to him.

“Joe Noone,” he said. “I saw what you did.” He closed his eyes, and what Gabrielle said next could have come from the mouth of the woman he had loved.

“Better him than you.”

“Why would Ray let you do that?” Max asked, shaking
his head. “If you've given up your soul, how could he think you wouldn't really be tainted, that you wouldn't just hand the city over to Mireault?”

Gaby wiped away her tears, staring at the dampness on her fingers. “When Ray dies, I'll be the Oracle. I'll have the soul of the city in me. I guess he figured that would be enough. But in between, after what I did, what I gave up …I'm in Hell, Max. Maybe I'd feel different if I were the Oracle, but why would the city want me now? Like this?”

Her despair tore at him. This was what Ray had done, manipulated her into murder and ruin and black magic, and if he had some greater plan for her, full of hope, in her current state she could not believe in it.

Max opened his eyes and leaned against a support beam. “You die in here. Katrina's worse than anyone predicted. The lake surges, the levees break, thousands die. You're just one of them. They leave you up here for weeks, even though someone sprays a message.” He stepped forward and tapped the dormer cheek. “Outside. It says
1 in attic.
That's you, Gabrielle. One in attic. You die alone.”

“It's what I deserve,” she whispered, surrendering, drinking more wine. Abruptly she turned to focus on Max, as if seeing him for the first time. “What time of year is it where you are?”

He shook his head, threw his hands open. “I'm here. Right here!”

She smiled through her tears. “For a moment.”

So she understood. Of course she did. Ray had taught her well. The conjure-man Matrisse. How strange to think that when Max had first met her, all he'd seen had been a
nineteen-year-old girl, and already she had been one of the most powerful people in New Orleans.

“It's November,” he said, barely able to hear himself over the storm. “Your body's in the ground. The city's a disaster. The government isn't doing shit. The people are on their own.”

“They always are,” Gabrielle said.

Max stared at her, thinking back, now, to their first meeting. She'd walked in this shadow world that ordinary people could never see, knew ancient secrets that would shake the world. And finally, he thought he understood.

“Is it because I was normal?” he asked. “Is that why you fell in love with me?”

“Love?” she asked, and for a beat he was terrified that she was about to laugh. How that would change things. How that would knock out of shape everything he thought he understood. But instead she looked at him, her eyes now dry, and a great sadness exuded from her. “Max, I can't remember what that means anymore.”

“But you did,” he says. “And I still do.”

“Even after everything?”

“What Ray did to me …I
saw
you kill Joe Noone!”

Gabrielle turned her eyes away.

“It repulsed me,” Max said. His voice was low. Over the storm, neither of them should have been able to hear the words, but they were strangely loud. “But I know why you did it, and I can only begin to imagine what it cost you, what you gave up for me…” He shook his head, and the house creaked and groaned as the gale strove to tear it away. “I've tried telling myself I can't love you, but it isn't that simple.

Whatever you did to yourself that day, you did it to me as well. We've both got blood on our hands.”

Gabrielle looked so lost. “So you're here to rescue me?” she asked.

“To save your life, yes,” he said.
I wanted so much from this Moment! Once, I even hoped…
“But we both know it's too late to rescue you. I couldn't go back that far.” As he said this last, his voice broke. “That Moment can't be changed.” God, how he wanted to go to her, to hold her and try to lend her solace. But he had none to give. “You've got to get out of here, Gaby. Get to high ground. I don't know how long you have, but we're talking hours. You need to go right now.”

“And do what?” she cried, and in those three words he heard the despair of falling angels.

Max steeled himself to take her out of there by force if it came to that. “You've got to go back to Ray. You've got to be what you promised, otherwise Coco and Mireault win, and what they made you do—”

“I can
never
change that!”

“No, you can't. But you can stop it being their victory, and make it yours.”

“I'm so tired…”

“You're nineteen!”

She laughed, but it was bitter and sharp. “What, I have my whole life ahead of me? All two centuries of it, fighting the Tordu? The conjure-woman, Gabrielle? What kind of life is that, Max?”

“What kind of death is this?”

She snorted, but did not answer. She drank more wine,
her eyes distant, and the storm made itself known once more. Something smashed against the side of the house and was lifted, scraping, across the roof.

“Some of the wards are damaged in the storm,” Max said.

“Seddicus …?” Her eyes were wide and filled with terror.

Max shook his head. “Not this time. But if you die here, and Ray dies, then they won't worry about Seddicus anymore. They'll have the city for themselves, and they'll grow strong and fat on its people. Then they'll be able to keep their demon at bay forever.”

“You sound like you care.”

“I do,” Max said. And he surprised himself by meaning it. He hated Ray for what he had done to Gabrielle, and what he had steered Max into. But he also understood why the old conjure-man had done it. He remembered a scene from a film his mother had loved,
The Cruel Sea,
where the captain of a destroyer steered his boat through a group of shipwrecked, drowning men so that he could depth-charge a U-boat. He'd known the U-boat would sink many more ships, and kill many more men if he did not destroy it there and then. But the expression on that captain's face had stuck with Max for a long time. The pain, the hopelessness, the shame. His mother had cried every time she watched the movie, and as a kid Max had needed to ask her why.

But he lived, and he learned.

He wondered whether he should go to sit beside Gabrielle, but decided against it. So he watched her finish
the bottle of wine, and then stand, and when she came to him he remained leaning against the wall, hoping against everything he had seen and heard that she would reach out and stroke his face, just once.

But this Gabrielle was a stranger.

She walked to the stairs and started to descend.

Max went after her. “Ray's waiting for you at—

“Cooper's,” she said. “Yeah. Ray's always waiting for you at Cooper's.” She smiled back up at him, and when she next spoke, he tried hard to hear something more than her words suggested, more than sorrow, and regret, and something approaching love. But there was nothing.

“I'm sorry for what I did to you,” Gabrielle said. She disappeared from view, and moments later Max heard the front door open and the storm blow in.

Then silence descended, and Max swayed, disoriented, and slumped to the floor of a very different place.