een reaching up to fill May’s senses with her every crunching step. The smell tugged at vague memories—the sound of bees buzzing, a tall man wearing a stovepipe hat, harsh words from her mother—unrelated to the present moment, and at this moment unnecessary, perhaps even detrimental.
The haint-blue light flashed, then dimmed, nearly going out, warning May that she needed to stay focused on finding her grandchild, not on the dim ghosts of her past. As soon as she returned her concentration to the bobbing spark, it began to glow with a renewed incandescence. She knew nothing of how to use magic, and her mother had refused to share even the slightest insight, lest May be tempted to claim the dangerous power available to her. Still, she intuited that it was indeed her attention that was keeping the turquoise glint alive, and if she let her mind wander too far from her purpose, it would be extinguished, leaving her alone in the night, with Jilo lost to her, perhaps forever.
“I’m right with you,” she addressed the spark, and it reacted to her words with both an increase in speed and brightness. May sharpened her focus until the spark was at its center. Though she did not like the woods, she picked up her pace, trying not to worry about exposed tree roots that might cause her to take a tumble, and allowing herself only the slightest shudder at the thought of the snakes, spiders, and hundreds of other creatures who made their home in this sap-sticky world. She wondered at her mother—the outside, the night; this had been Tuesday Jackson’s world. Not so for May.
The spark carried on, heedless of her very human fears, until it reached the edge of a clearing, where it stopped and hovered in place. As May drew near, another scent, a marriage of smoke and tar, began to overtake the sharp spice of the pines. Fear and worry confounded May’s ability to estimate the distance she had come. Even though her common sense told her she couldn’t be more than a quarter mile from her own property, her sense of direction had deserted her, leaving her without the slightest idea of where her own house lay. It was almost like the natural world beyond her tree line had transformed into a vast and fearsome forest.
May slowed and softened her footfalls. The scent of smoke grew even stronger, and the sound of distant voices, their words indiscernible, reached her ears. Had the light led her to someone’s home? The spark moved again, passing just beyond the tree line, then faded away. May crept forward.
She stopped cold the instant she slid beyond the cover of the trees, and her heart very nearly stopped, too. There was a gathering of white-clad figures at the far end of the clearing, and the silver light of the moon was losing its battle with the darting flames licking at the cross standing in the center of the gathering.
May felt her pulse pounding in her neck and her temples. Surely, she’d been betrayed. This—this was where the magic had brought her. She took a cautious step back toward the trees, keeping her eyes fixed on the sight of the burning cross and the linen-draped monsters who paraded around it. She’d move carefully. Quietly. Draw no attention to herself, until she was safely within the cover of the trees. Another step back, and then she heard it. A baby’s cry. Jilo. It was impossible that it was her, and yet it was undeniable.
“Oh, Jesus,” the words came out as a shorthand prayer, as the world around her started to spin. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed to the earth.
The flames from the cross illuminated a scene she knew would remain forever burned into her vision. One of the men lifted a small and struggling burden over his head as the others burst into a raucous laughter. May had to rise. She had to go to them. Plead with these demons to return the baby to her. Beg them to simply let her and Jilo leave in peace.
But her body seemed frozen to the ground where she knelt.
The child cried out again, and the man who held her began walking toward the flaming cross. The light from that obscene blasphemy illuminated the goings-on all too clearly. The man was laying Jilo down on a table. No, May realized, an altar. Another man moved around the altar, blocking May’s view. Jilo shrieked, a high, anguished cry that pierced the night. Somehow May found the power to stand, and managed to take a few stumbling steps toward them. She lifted her voice to cry out to them. To call to Jilo. To tell her not to be afraid. Nana was coming. But her voice failed her as surely as if she’d been born mute.
She took another step forward, trying to shake the concrete from her limbs, but a hand descended on her shoulder, stopping her in her tracks. A small gasp escaped her at the touch. The hand released her, and a woman dressed all in black, her head and face obscured by a heavy veil, circled around in front of her. May could only make out the dimmest suggestion of features beneath the thick lace; race and age were inscrutable. The figure was a bit shorter than May herself, but ample, suggesting a healthy and mature woman rather than a waif.
May lifted a trembling hand and pointed in the direction of her granddaughter’s keening. She tried to speak, managing only a few unintelligible sounds. The woman held a finger up to the veil, near where May felt the lips should be. She wanted May to keep quiet, that much was clear. May nodded to show she understood. The woman turned and took a few steps toward the distant crowd, the hem of her long and old-fashioned gown trailing behind her. And then she fell away, her body disintegrating before May’s startled eyes, and transforming into a swarm of a thousand or more angry yellow jackets.
May watched in disbelief as the swarm advanced on the group. From the outer circle working in, the hooded figures’ casual milling about and occasional saluting turned to panicked gyrations and flailing arms. Their laughter and jeers turned to yelps and cowardly screams. The distance was too great for May to make out the individual insects with her naked eye, but she could guess that many had found their way up under the men’s robes to sting their bare flesh. The men began throwing off their pointed hoods, tugging the robes up over their heads. Others gave into panic and rushed away from the congregation. May heard car engines revving up, saw headlights coming to life and illuminating the ongoing riot of those who didn’t or couldn’t move quickly enough.
A pair of beams shot across the field, betraying her presence to anyone who wasn’t caught up in the chaos. May fell back into the shelter of darkness, but not before she felt hostile eyes graze her. She’d been too dazzled to notice whose eyes had picked her out from among the shadows. The light had illuminated her face for only an instant, but intuition told May that the person who’d spotted her had, in fact, been watching for her. Jilo had not been stolen at random. Someone had taken her to make sure May would come looking.
As May’s eyes recovered from the flash of the headlights, she realized that the swarm was returning toward her, coalescing at first into a dense yet frantic cloud of insects, and then the form of the woman. The creature, whatever she was, drew near, but she seemed to be almost dancing—like the cloud of wasps she had been—rather than walking.
The creature held Jilo in her now humanlike hands. The sight of the child caused May to forget all danger. She broke free of the tree line, hiking up her skirt, and raced toward her granddaughter, only to stop dead as the moonlight attempted to light up the creature’s features. Blurred though they were by her heavy veil, May could now see the moon wasn’t reflecting off the creature’s skin; rather it seemed to be swallowed whole by whatever lay behind her veil. Still, May could feel the creature’s eyes piercing the mesh of the veil, searing through it to take her full measure, inside and out.
The veiled apparition rocked Jilo until the toddler cooed with happiness, using such obvious care and gentleness May’s heart nearly broke at the sight. Then she transferred the child to May’s anxious and trembling hands.
“That will teach those filthy sons of bitches,” the creature said. Then she reached up and brushed back her veil, showing May the utter hollowness that lay behind it. The features May had imagined were nothing more than a trick suggested by the veil and her desire to make this creature into something she could someday understand. The emptiness within unwound to envelop the shell that had contained it, until the strange being was no more.
NINE
May was walking north on Ogeechee Road the next morning as the sun’s first rays reached her, a warm and comforting caress that brought to mind the sense of serenity that had descended on her when her own hand brushed that of the odd veiled woman the night before. Her touch had felt like that of an old friend, someone May had never known but had missed her entire life.
No. May knew the creature who’d saved Jilo was not a woman at all. She had seen the illusion of her humanity fall away before her own eyes. If anything, she was a demon. One sent to tempt her into using magic, into breaking the vow she’d made so long ago.
Only once before had she been truly tempted by magic. On that long-ago night, she had gone crawling to her mama’s door, banging on the wood and begging her mama to come out and do something, anything to heal Reuben. The memory still tugged at her.
Her mama had met her at the door. Tried to bring her in. Knelt beside her. Pulled her close to her bosom. But she didn’t waver in her refusal.
“No, baby. You don’t know what you askin’. You don’t know,” she said as she tried to rock May in her arms.
May pushed herself up and shoved her mama away. And as her mama stood, May did something she had never thought she could do. She reached out and struck her own mama. But Mama didn’t fight back. No. She took May’s hand and pressed it to her lips.
“It’s all right,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It’s all right. But Mama cannot do this thing for you . . . she loves you too much. She loves your Reuben too much.”
With that, she gently pushed May back over her threshold, turning her away. “You go on. You get back to your husband.”
Her trembling hand pressed between May’s shoulders, but as May started to stumble away, her mama’s hand reached out and snatched hers, causing her to look back. “You leave what’s gonna happen up to God,” she said, pointing to the heavens. “You trust God to do what’s right for our Reuben, whether it breaks our hearts or not. Magic, it ain’t what you think, baby. Least n
ot the kind I got. Don’t you ever let it tempt you to force your own will on things.”