Beautiful Chaos
Page 95

“What did you say?”
The bokor took a match and relit the candle. “Half your soul is with the livin’, and half’s with the dead. You left it behind.”
“Left it behind where?”
“In the Otherworld. When you died.” He sounded almost bored.
When I died.
He was talking about the night Lena and Amma brought me back, on the Sixteenth Moon.
“How?”
The bokor flicked his wrist, and the match went out. “If you come back too fast, the soul can be fractured. Divided. One part a the soul goes back with the livin’, and the other half stays with the dead. Caught between this world and the Other, bound to the missin’ half until they’re brought back together.”
Divided.
He couldn’t be explaining it right. That would mean I only had half a soul. It didn’t even seem possible.
How could a person only have half a soul? What happened to the rest of it? Where did it—
Bound to the missing half.
I knew what had been following me all this time, lurking in the shadows.
Me—the other me.
It was the reason I was changing, losing more and more of myself every day.
The reason I didn’t like chocolate milk anymore, or Amma’s scrambled eggs. The reason I couldn’t remember what was in the shoe boxes in my bedroom, or my phone number. The reason I was suddenly left-handed.
My knees buckled, and I felt myself pitch forward. I could see the floor rising up to meet me. A hand grabbed my arm and hauled me back to my feet. Link.
“So, how do you get the two halves back together? Is there a spell or somethin’?” Link sounded impatient, like he was ready to throw me over his shoulder and run home.
The bokor threw his head back and laughed. When he spoke, it felt like he was looking right through me. “Takes more than a spell. That’s why your Seer came to me. But don’t you worry, we have an agreement.”
I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water on me. “What kind of agreement?”
I remembered what he had said to Amma, the night we followed her here. There is only one price.
“What’s the price?” I was yelling, my voice echoing in my ears.
The bokor lifted his skin-covered staff and pointed it at me. “I’ve told you more than your share a secrets tonight.” He smiled, all the darkness and evil within him twisting itself into a human face.
“How come we don’t have to pay you?” Link asked.
“Your Seer will pay enough for you all.”
I would have asked him again, but I knew he wouldn’t tell us. And if there were deeper secrets than this, I didn’t want to know.
12.07
Cards of Providence
When I got home, it was way past midnight. Everyone in my house was asleep—except one person. Amma’s light was on, her room glowing between the two haint blue shutters. I wondered if she knew I was gone, and where I’d been. I almost hoped she did. It would make what I was about to do a hundred times easier.
Amma wasn’t the kind of person you confronted. She was a confrontation all on her own. She lived by her rules, her law—the things she believed, which to her were as sure as the sun rising. She was also the only mother I had left. And, most days, the only parent. The idea of fighting with her made me feel hollow and sick inside.
But not as hollow as it made me feel to know I was only half of myself. Half the person I’d always been. Amma knew, and she had never said a word.
And the words she did say were lies.
I knocked on her bedroom door before I had time to change my mind. She opened it right away, as if she’d been waiting for me. She was wearing her white robe with the pink roses on it, the one I gave her on her birthday last year.
Amma didn’t look at me. She looked past me, as if she could see something more than the wall behind me. Maybe she could. Maybe there were pieces of me scattered all over the place, like a broken bottle.
“Been waitin’ on you.” Her voice sounded small and tired, and she stepped out of the doorway so I could come in.
Amma’s room still looked ransacked, but one thing was different. There were cards spread out on the little round table under the window. I walked over to the table and picked one up. The Bleeding Blade. They weren’t tarot cards. “Reading cards again? What are they saying tonight, Amma?”
She crossed the room and started pushing the cards into a stack. “Don’t have much to say. Think I’ve seen all there is to see.”
Another card caught my eye. I held it up in front of her. “What about this one? The Fractured Soul. What does this one have to say?”
Her hands were shaking so hard that it took her three tries to grab the card from me. “You think you know somethin’, but a piece a somethin’ is the same as nothin’. Neither one gets you much a anything.”
“You mean like a piece of my soul? Is that the same as nothing?” I said it to hurt her, to bust up her soul, so she could see how it felt.
“Where did you hear that?” Her voice was shaky. She grabbed the chain around her neck and rubbed the worn gold charm hanging from it.
“From your friend in New Orleans.”
Amma’s eyes went wide, and she grabbed the back of the chair to steady herself. I knew from her reaction that whatever she’d seen tonight, it wasn’t me raising souls with the bokor. “Are you tellin’ me the truth, Ethan Wate? Did you go to see that devil?”
“I went because you lied to me. I didn’t have a choice.”