Mardi Gras in New Orleans always smelled like bourbon, sweat, and secrets. I step out of the limousine into the noise-soaked night, my heels hitting the cracked pavement like a declaration. The driver behind me barely has time to shut the door before I vanish into the throng, the heat of a thousand bodies pressing against me like a living wall.
The French Quarter breathes tonight. It always breathes — that low, wet exhale of a city built on bones and brackish water — but during Carnival the breathing becomes a pant, feverish, unashamed. Trumpet blasts ricochet off wrought-iron balconies. A trombone groans somewhere on Bourbon Street, the note so low it vibrates through the soles of my shoes. Beads arc through the air like cheap constellations, catching the neon and the firelight and the dull amber glow of gas lamps that have burned since before the Civil War.
I love this city the way you love a beautiful liar. Completely. With your eyes wide open.
My name is Vasia Morozova, and I am twenty-three years old, and I am wearing a dress that cost more than most people's rent. It is black. It is always black. Baba Yelena says black is the colour of the soil before it gives you something, and she has never been wrong about anything that matters.
The crowd parts and reforms around me like water around a stone. I am good at this — the walking, the moving through spaces that don't want me, making them want me anyway. It's a skill. Baba taught me that too, though she'd say it differently. She'd say, Vasya, the world is full of doors. Most people knock. We simply know which ones are already open.
She calls me Vasya when she's being tender. Vasia when she's being formal. And devochka — girl — when I've done something that makes her press her thumb between her eyebrows and mutter prayers to saints I'm fairly certain she doesn't believe in.
I check my phone. Three missed calls from Baba. I silence it and slip it back into my clutch.
That is my first mistake.
The party is on Royal Street, in a house that doesn't officially exist on any map the city keeps. I know this because I've looked. The address resolves to a vacant lot on Google Maps, a patch of nothing between an antique shop and a bar that serves absinthe the old way, with the sugar cube and the slotted spoon and the slow drip of ice water that turns the green spirit cloudy as a cataract. But the house is here. It's always been here. It just doesn't care to be found by people who haven't been invited.
The gate is wrought iron twisted into shapes that might be vines, might be serpents, might be something else entirely if you look at them from the corner of your eye while the light is shifting. I don't look. I learned a long time ago that some things in this city reveal themselves only to those foolish enough to stare, and I am many things but I am not foolish.
Usually.
A man at the door. Tall. Bone-white suit, the fabric too fine for the heat, which means he's not sweating for reasons that have nothing to do with air conditioning. His face is the kind of handsome that makes you check your exits.
"Invitation," he says. Not a question.
I pull the card from my clutch. Heavy stock. Black ink on cream paper. The script is Cyrillic — old Cyrillic, the kind they stopped printing three centuries ago — and it reads simply: You are expected.
He looks at it. Looks at me. Something moves behind his eyes, fast and dark, like a fish turning in deep water.
"Miss Morozova." He steps aside. "You are awaited."
Not expected. Awaited. Different word. Different weight.
I should have turned around.
Inside, the house unfolds like a fever dream. The foyer is marble — real marble, not the composite they slap on McMansions — and the staircase spirals upward into a darkness that the chandelier's light refuses to reach. The chandelier itself is crystal, but the light it throws is wrong. Too warm. Too amber. It turns everyone's skin to gold, their teeth to pearls, their eyes to something liquid and animal.
The guests are beautiful. Every single one of them. Not the ordinary beauty of genetics and good bone structure. This is the beauty of things that have had a very long time to perfect their disguise.
I take a glass of champagne from a tray that a woman offers me without meeting my eyes. The champagne is cold. The glass hums against my fingers with a frequency I can feel in my molars. I don't drink it. I carry it. Carrying a drink at a party makes you look like you belong. Looking like you belong is three-quarters of surviving anything.
Baba taught me that.
Baba taught me everything.
She taught me to read smoke — not the fortune-telling kind, the real kind, the way it curls and breaks and reforms, the tiny stories it tells about the air currents and the invisible pressures that move through a room. She taught me to listen to water, to taste rain and know whether it fell through clean sky or through something else. She taught me the old words, the ones that sit heavy on the tongue like river stones, the ones you don't say unless you mean them because they do things.
She is a vedma. A wise woman. A witch, though that word is so blunted by centuries of misunderstanding that it barely means anything anymore. In the old country — and when Baba says the old country she means it the way a cathedral means its foundation, something ancient and load-bearing — the vedmy were the ones who stood between the village and what lived in the dark. Not priests. Not soldiers. Women with dirt under their nails and fire in their voices and an intimate, terrifying knowledge of the things that grow in the spaces between.
I am her granddaughter. I am her student. I am the last Morozova, as far as either of us knows, and tonight I am walking into a house that smells like gardenias and something underneath the gardenias that I do not have a name for yet but that makes the small hairs on my forearms rise like a field of wheat before a storm.
The main room. The party opens before me like the jaw of something patient. A jazz trio plays in the corner — piano, upright bass, a clarinet that weeps notes so clear they leave a taste like burnt sugar on the back of my tongue. The music is perfect. Too perfect. It moves through the room like a living thing, curling around conversations, slipping between bodies, making everyone move just a little slower, a little more languidly, as if the air itself has thickened to honey.
I see faces I recognize. Aurélie Desmarais, who runs a gallery on Magazine Street that sells paintings no mortal hand created. Cassius LeBlanc, who owns a restaurant in the Bywater where the food is so good that critics who eat there forget to write their reviews, forget their names, forget whole years. And others — the ones I don't recognize — the ones who stand very still at the edges of the room with champagne they never drink and smiles that don't quite reach the muscles around their eyes.
Something is wrong.
I've been to strange parties before. Baba used to take me, when I was younger, to gatherings in the bayou where the attendees were not entirely human and the refreshments were not entirely safe. But this is different. This has the texture of a trap that hasn't sprung yet, a held breath before a scream.
The air changes. A shift in pressure, subtle, the kind of thing you'd miss if you hadn't spent your childhood learning to read a room the way sailors read the sky. The jazz trio falters — not much, just a beat, a hitch in the clarinet's breath — and then resumes. But the song is different now. Darker. The piano's left hand drops into a register so low the notes become vibrations in the floor.
A woman is watching me from across the room.
She is tall. She is dark-skinned and dark-eyed and her hair is a crown of black coils that defy gravity in a way that has nothing to do with product. She wears red. A deep, saturated red, the colour of arterial blood, the colour of garnets held up to firelight. And she is smiling at me with a mouth that knows things I haven't learned yet.
I don't smile back. I look away. I look for exits.
Two doors behind me. One ahead. Windows that are painted shut — I can tell from here by the way the paint ridges along the seam. The staircase. The corridor to the left that disappears into shadow.
When I look back, the woman in red is beside me.
She didn't walk. She didn't cross the room. She was there and now she is here and the space between those two facts is a void that my brain scrambles to fill with something rational and fails.
"Vasia Morozova." Her voice is smoke and molasses. "Yelena's girl."
"I'm nobody's girl."
She laughs. It's a gorgeous sound. It's the most terrifying sound I've ever heard.
"Oh, child," she says. "You're everybody's girl tonight. That's the problem."
My fingers go cold. The champagne glass cracks — a small, bright sound lost in the music — and a line of blood opens across my palm. I don't feel it. My body is doing something my mind hasn't approved yet: flooding with adrenaline, pulling my weight to the balls of my feet, opening the channels Baba taught me to open when the world goes sideways.
The old words rise in my throat unbidden. I can feel them there, heavy and hot, ready.
"Don't," the woman says softly. "Not here. Not with what's listening."
"Who are you?"
"Someone who was in your exact position a very long time ago." She glances toward the centre of the room, where the crowd has thinned, where a circle of bare floor gleams like a coin under that too-warm light. "They'll come for you through there. The way they came for me. The way they've come for every one of us who carries a debt she didn't make."
"I don't have any debts."
Her smile falters. And in that faltering I see something terrible: pity.
"Your grandmother does."
The floor shudders.
Everyone in the room stops moving. The jazz trio keeps playing — they can't stop, I realize, they're not choosing to play, they're trapped in the music — and the clarinet's voice rises to a keen, a wail, a sound like a woman crying in a language I almost understand.
The centre of the floor is opening.
Not cracking. Not breaking. Opening, the way a mouth opens, the way a wound opens, wet and deliberate and impossible. The marble peels back like skin and underneath is not foundation, not earth, not the rational geology of a city built on river mud. Underneath is light. Red light. The deep, throbbing red of something alive and vast and ancient, and the heat that rises from it hits my face like the blast from an open furnace and smells like iron and burning myrrh and the first gasp of something waking after a very long sleep.
I run.
I don't think about it. My body decides and I agree and I am moving toward the door behind me, the one on the right, the one closest, and I am fast — Baba made sure of that, years of running the levee trails at dawn, years of her voice behind me saying faster, Vasya, the things that hunt us do not tire — and I reach the door and I pull it open and—
It's the same room.
The same party. The same music. The same red glow bleeding up from the floor like dawn through stained glass. I slam the door. Try the other one. The same. The staircase leads up and then somehow leads back down into this room, this room that is folding in on itself like origami, like a prayer, like a fist closing.
The woman in red hasn't moved.
"I told you," she says. "Not here."
My phone vibrates in my clutch. I tear it open. Baba's name. I answer.
"Vasya." Her voice is steady. Baba's voice is always steady. But I can hear behind the steadiness something I've never heard in seventeen years of loving her: fear. "Vasya, listen to me. Don't fight it. If you fight it, you break and they keep the pieces. Do you understand?"
"Baba, the floor is—"
"I know what the floor is doing. I know what's coming through it. Listen." A breath. A long, slow breath. "I made a deal before you were born. Before your mother was born. I made it to save us, and the price—" Her voice cracks. Mends. "The price is you, my love. The price has always been you."
The red light is climbing. It licks at the walls. It paints the beautiful, frozen guests in shades of carnage and cathedral glass.
"I don't understand."
"You will. You're smarter than I ever was, and braver, and you have everything I taught you sitting right there behind your ribs like a coal that won't go out." I can hear her crying now. Baba Yelena, who did not cry when the flood took the house, who did not cry when they buried my mother, who does not cry. "When they take you, Vasya, remember: fire serves the one who feeds it. Not the one who starts it."
"Baba—"
The phone dies.
The floor opens completely.
And the hands that reach up from the red are not hands. They are long and jointed in the wrong places, and they are the colour of coal that's been burning for hours, and they wrap around my ankles with a gentleness that is worse — infinitely worse — than violence, because it means they are not in a hurry, because it means they have done this many times before and they will do it many times again and I am nothing special, I am just the next thing they are pulling down into the—
Heat.
Light.
The sensation of falling through something thicker than air, hotter than fire, darker than the closed eye of God.
The last thing I hear before New Orleans disappears above me like a light going out is the clarinet. That one, perfect, weeping note. Hanging in the air where I used to be.
And then the dark.
And then the silence.
And then, somewhere far below, something that sounds like a door opening, and a voice I don't recognize saying, very calmly, very quietly:
Welcome home, Morozova.
I don't know how long I fall. Time doesn't work here — wherever here is. There's just the heat and the dark and the sensation of being swallowed, of moving through the throat of something so vast that the walls are abstractions, that the distance between my body and the edges of whatever is consuming me might be measured in miles or in millimetres and there would be no way to tell the difference.
I hit bottom like a dropped stone.
The ground is warm. Smooth. It feels like obsidian under my palms, polished by centuries of bodies landing exactly where I'm landing now. I push myself up. My dress is torn. My heels are gone. The cut on my palm has sealed itself — not healed, sealed, the way wax seals a letter, with something dark and glossy that isn't a scab.
I stand.
I look.
And I understand, in the way that a match understands the dark — by existing inside it — that I am no longer in New Orleans. I am no longer in any place that breathes the same air as the living. The sky above me — if it is a sky — is the colour of a bruise at its deepest, that terrible purple-black that means the blood beneath has nowhere to go. And the city that spreads out before me — because it is a city, impossible and enormous and wrought from materials that have no names in any language I know — burns.
Not with destruction. With intention. Every fire is placed. Every flame is tended. The light they throw is not orange, not yellow, but that same arterial red I saw through the floor, and it pulses with a rhythm that I realise, after a long and horrible moment, matches my heartbeat.
Hell.
I'm in Hell.
The word arrives in my mind without drama. It's a fact. Like gravity. Like the cruelty of chance. I am in Hell and my grandmother sent me here — no. My grandmother couldn't stop them from bringing me here. There's a difference. There's a difference and I will hold on to that difference with everything I have because if I don't, if I let the rage and the grief and the white-hot screaming unfairness of it take root, I will collapse right here on this smooth black floor and whatever lives in this city of red fire will find me and I will never get up again.
I breathe.
In. Out. The air tastes like char and copper and something sweet beneath it, something floral and rotting, like jasmine left too long in water.
I check my body. I check my mind. I check the space behind my ribs where Baba's teaching lives, the coal that won't go out.
It's there. Dim, but there. Warm, but there.
Good.
Vasia Morozova stands up in Hell, and the first thing she does — the very first thing — is smooth what's left of her dress, push her hair out of her face, and start walking.
Because the things that hunt us do not tire.
And neither do I.
Be the first to share your thoughts on this chapter.