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“That’s dumb.” Theta opened the door and stuck her head out. “Hey, Evil!” She motioned Evie over. “Memphis has something to ask you. Go on, Memphis.”
“I was wondering if maybe you could read this wedding ring for me. It belonged to my mother. I was hoping…” Hoping what? He settled on a shrug.
Evie seemed to understand. “You bet-ski,” she said. She took the ring and cupped it in her fist, squeezing. Evie had read for many strangers. It kept things impersonal. It was quite another matter to read for her friends. Once she knew something about them, it joined her. It made her feel a responsibility toward them that she wasn’t always comfortable bearing. But the memories bubbling up from this ring were mostly happy ones.
Evie saw the Campbell family in their comfortable apartment in Harlem. It was as if she had entered the room and stood off to the side, watching but unseen. A ghost. Mr. Campbell was a handsome man, lithe and bedroom-eyed, with a trim mustache above a mouth that always seemed on the verge of a mischievous half smile. He spoke in a Southern drawl—hadn’t Memphis said his father’s family was from Georgia?—and it gave everything he said a bemused quality. Mrs. Campbell’s speech had the lilt of the Caribbean in it. There was music in this house, and laughter and stories.
Mrs. Campbell snuggled up on the bed beside Memphis, telling him stories while baby Isaiah slept in his crib. Memphis giggled—giggled! Though she didn’t know it, Evie was smiling as she pressed into the ring.
Another memory: Memphis cuddled a three-year-old Isaiah to himself as if his brother was the thing he loved most. Evie remembered playing hide-and-seek with James, the way he would indulge her as big brothers sometimes do.
“What do you see?” Memphis was asking Evie.
They were happy. This was what a happy family looked like. Even when her own family had been whole, before James went away, it had not been like this. With music and dancing and laughter. Her mother, always anxious and judging. Her love was a corrective love—“Evangeline, stand up straight. Evangeline, don’t do that; what will the neighbors say? Evangeline, don’t hug quite so fiercely, dear, you’ll take my breath away.” Her father, always distracted with work, kind enough but needing Evie to be his adoring little girl. Watching Memphis’s family now, Evie felt robbed. The sharpness pinched her breath. Her chest ached.
“Evie?” Memphis.
“Oh, um, nothing much yet,” she answered and pressed in harder.
Now the ring took on a different feeling. Darker. Like a fairy-tale turn into the woods. Viola stood at a crossroads under a full moon. After a moment, the King of Crows emerged.
Viola was confused. “You are not Baron Samedi.”
“I am not many things,” the man in the hat answered. He was not yet the King of Crows, but his power was growing. His rumpled coat was thinly feathered. Evie wished she could read something of his, something that would give away his secrets, but this was Viola’s ring, after all.
What she saw now came in small bursts, like a radio signal flaring and fading.
“I took bad medicine,” Viola said. “I feel it in my body! What if it harms my boys? And… and there are men who would come for them. Bad men.”
“You wish protection from this harm for your boys?”
“Yes,” Viola said on a whisper. “Please.”
“And what will you offer me?”
“I…” Viola removed her pearl ear-bobs. “These were my granmé’s.”
“Not enough. I would have your pledge. Take my hand.”
Viola reached out. In a flash of light, they were in the land of the dead. The sky was the purplish ochre of an approaching storm. The land was as desolate as the pictures she’d seen of the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme. There was a feeling of great emptiness. Even through the distance of an object, that terrible emptiness reached into Evie’s very soul like an infection of which she’d never fully be cured.
“Your son is a healer,” the man in the hat said, and Evie felt Viola’s terror as she peered into those sharklike eyes, now possessed of some new plan.
“Y-yes,” Viola said. “And my other son—”
The man in the hat interrupted her with a wave of his hand. “The other boy is of no consequence to me. He has shown no powers. The healer, though. He could prove useful to me. Or dangerous.”
“Memphis? He’s just a boy. He has no real p-power—”
The man in the hat glared. “Never lie to me.”
Viola’s heart beat so fast Evie felt her own thumping in sympathy.
“Very well,” the man in the hat said with a smile, as if he’d moved on. “I will shield your children for as long as you honor my terms: Upon your death, you will become my servant. You will be under my control.”
Viola bristled. She was a proud woman, Evie could sense. But she was also sick and getting sicker. The cancer moved through her blood. She wrote her name inside the man’s coat. Quickly, he sealed it shut. A nasty cough seized Viola. She hacked and hacked to expel something caught in her throat, spitting out at last a tiny feather fragment, coated thinly with blood.
“You are mine. Soon enough.”
