Madame Josephine Moreau was a small woman who made a large impression. She was forty-three, with her daughter's direct eyes and a still, considered quality that Kael recognized immediately as the quality of someone who spent a lot of time in genuine spiritual practice rather than the quality of someone who talked about it at dinner parties.
She looked at him when he came through her front door for the first time and he felt, clearly and distinctly, the sensation of being assessed by someone who knew how to assess. Not in the way gods assessed — there was no divine weight to it, no shimmer of inhuman power. This was human perception sharpened by practice, by years of learning to pay attention to what the Loa showed her. She was, he thought, quite good at it.
She said: 'Sit down, baby. You want tea?'
He sat at the kitchen table and drank hibiscus tea and ate red beans and rice and was asked questions that were, in their way, a more effective interrogation than anything Chiron would attempt when they met six years later. Madame Moreau asked what he dreamed about, whether he had any family who had lived a long time, what he thought about when he was sitting very still, whether he had ever felt like the city was listening.
He answered carefully and honestly and not more than the question required.
She looked at him at the end of it and said: 'You carry old things.'
'My grandmère's family did,' he said. True enough.
'Older than that.' She looked at him for a long moment. 'Baron Samedi has taken notice of you. He told me, in the way he tells me things. He said there is a boy in this neighborhood who walks between worlds and doesn't know it yet.' She paused. 'He said to be kind to him.'
Kael was six. He held his tea cup and thought: the Loa are real and one of the great death-and-rebirth deities of New Orleans has been watching me since before I arrived and has already decided to be kind.
'Tell him thank you,' he said.
Madame Moreau smiled — the full, specific smile of someone who has been validated in a belief most people would have doubted. 'I will,' she said.
Cece, across the table, was eating her red beans with the equanimity of someone who considered this a perfectly normal lunch conversation. 'Mama says Baron Samedi likes people who've been somewhere else,' she informed Kael. 'He's the one who guards the crossroads between living and dead. He takes notice when somebody comes through where they shouldn't.' She looked at him directly. 'He thinks you're funny.'
'Reassuring,' Kael said.
✦ ✦ ✦
The friendship with Cece built the way good friendships build — through accumulated time and accumulated truth. They walked to the bus stop together. They ate lunch at school. On weekends they went through the neighborhood together, and Cece introduced him to the city with the proprietary enthusiasm of someone who felt genuinely responsible for making sure he understood it correctly.
She showed him the courtyards of the French Quarter that tourists never found. She showed him the way the light changed in Jackson Square at dusk, which was, she informed him seriously, when the city was most itself. She showed him the cemetery on the edge of their neighborhood where the Moreau family had people buried, and stood at her great-grandmother's tomb and spoke to her quietly in a mixture of French and English while Kael stood back respectfully and felt the shimmer of something old and watchful in the stone-and-sun-baked stillness.
He showed her what he could show her. Not everything — not yet. He showed her the herb garden and its glow. He told her that his great-great-grandmother's family had had magic in their blood. He told her that he sometimes knew things about people's health before they did. He did not tell her about the system, about the transmigration, about what he knew was coming.
'My mama thinks you're a little bit like us,' Cece said one afternoon, sitting in his backyard while he worked with the garden. 'Not the same. We carry Vodou tradition — that's ours, that's from our family and from the Loa. But she says your magic and ours are both real, they just come from different roads meeting the same place.'
He thought: Madame Moreau is perceptive in ways that most people who haven't grown up in proximity to the divine world are not. He thought: Cece is going to be the person he can be most honest with, eventually, because she grew up understanding that multiple divine traditions can be simultaneously true.
'Different roads,' he said. 'That's a good way to put it.'
She looked at him with the expression she got when she was deciding how much more to push. She was already, at six and seven, learning when to push and when to let things sit, which was a social intelligence that Kael — who had been, as Jason Park, not especially good at reading rooms — genuinely admired.
'You know more than you're saying,' she said. 'About what you are.'
'Yes,' he said.
'Are you going to tell me?'
'When I'm ready,' he said. 'And when I can tell it right. Some things — you can't say them before you know how to say them well, or you say them wrong and then the person you told has the wrong version in their head and you have to fix it.'
She considered this. 'That's real,' she said finally. 'My grandmère says the same thing about talking to the Loa. You have to know what you're asking before you ask it.' She looked at the garden. The basil, where his hand rested near it, was distinctly more vivid than the rest. 'Can I try that?'
'What?'
'The thing you're doing with the basil. I can see it's different over there.'
He was quiet for a moment. Then: 'You can see that?'
'A little. Mama says we have eyes for certain things because the Loa have looked through us long enough to change how we see.' She shrugged with the supreme practical dignity of someone for whom this was simply family history. 'I see it a little.'
He moved aside and let her put her hand near the basil. She was quiet, concentrating. Nothing happened — her connection was to a different tradition, different frequencies. But she was trying in the right way: without force, with attention, with respect for what was already there.
'I can feel something,' she said. 'Not the same as what you do. But something.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'Different roads.'
She smiled at him — full, direct, pleased with the confirmation. 'Yeah,' she said. 'Different roads.'