VenCo(95)

Statues watched her pass from behind cast-iron gates. An old woman in a wheelchair by a window waved, but Lucky didn’t notice. The woman, witchy enough she could sense the potential of a new coven surfacing, chuckled and muttered, “The game is on . . .” And her old heart swelled with gratitude that she might just live to see them rise.

A flock of small birds, all shades of yellow and green, swooped across the sky, then curved up into a crescent formation that flew past Lucky’s head. She felt the beat of their wings as goose bumps up the back of her neck.

She cut through a parkette where a man in a straw fedora waited while his dachshund sniffed the grass. He lifted his hat to her and wished her a good evening. She couldn’t respond, so many new truths were running across her brain like ticker tape.

The man with the dog—his name is Marvin. He comes from money but wishes he could work at the market stacking melons and apples. He pays a man to strike the backs of his thighs once a month. His dog’s name is Faulkner, but sometimes he calls him Fucker and pretends he hasn’t.

She didn’t know how she knew, but there it was—knowledge, uninvited and insignificant. Was this what it meant to be connected to whatever reservoir lay under the ground of a place? The more she thought about it, the slower she walked. She had a mission, she had to put everything she had there, so she blocked out Marvin and the fact that she very suddenly understood that the woman who lived in the pink house on the corner had murdered her uncle. Shutting it all out but the spoon, her pace quickened and she continued on.

She turned onto a wide street, bordered by wide sidewalks overhung with trees. Beside a well-lit colonial with manicured gardens sat a grey mansion with white columns and climbing pink roses, sedate and still. The porch light’s gas flame jumped and gestured like a candle on a wooden birthday cake. At the front gate she stopped and turned towards it. The tension let go of her spine so fast, she almost fell.

“The spoon is here,” she whispered, scanning the lush gardens, the wide porch, and then the tall windows. “And so is he.”

She felt a bit nauseous. It was nerves and fear but also excitement. She had found him.



After hearing about Ricky, Lucky had called Claudia from the air-conditioned aisles of a Walgreens.

The Booker picked up with her same happy energy. “Well, good afternoon! You got Claudia over at the Moon. How can I help you today?”

“Hi, Claudia. It’s Lucky. I’m the—”

“Lucky, I know who you are. Did you get to the gator? Get your spoon?”

“Someone got there before me, and the spoon is gone.”

“What can I do to help?”

She’d explained about Rattler Ricky’s recovery spell. “I’m headed for the café to collect the wood I need. But do you think I can pull it off by myself?”

“Hells yeah, you can!” Claudia was actually excited for her. “But whatcha gonna do with the bugger that stole it?”

This was the problem. “I’m not sure yet. You mentioned how the magic is in the land, not the person,” she began.

“Well now, that was a bit simple on my part. It’s both. See, belief is something that makes change. It’s why prayer benefits people, as long as the people doing all that praying believe. It’s why people who get placebos can still get better, because they believe in the medicine they thought they got. And when something is constant on the land, like rain or song or even footsteps, the land soaks that in and changes. So there’s that. That’s true enough. But then you need the people who understand the ways to pull that soak right back up out of the land. That’s where study comes in, where the witchiness needs to be. And not all people can get to some kinds of magic. Around here the magic is Vodou Louisian, and it belongs to a very specific people. I’m not sure a lil Métis from all the way up in Canada could tap it, no offence.” Claudia chuckled to soften the blow.

“So, then, what do I tap?” Lucky was now in line at the self-checkout, having found nail clippers.

“Well now, this is where you need to be a witch of a certain power. You need to bring your own stuff.”

“I don’t have my own stuff. I’ve been a”—she looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping, but no one was—“been . . . what I am for, like, twenty minutes, with a ten-minute recess.”

Claudia gave a big laugh. “If Meena sent your ass down here, twenty minutes is all you need, baby. You just finished telling me you’re about to try doing a powwow man’s work. You gotta believe you can. Now think about what else you might have picked up along the way, maybe from the land and maybe from other powerful women.”

Lucky was silent.

“You there?”

“I’m here,” Lucky finally answered. “Can you do me a favour?”

“That’s what I’m here for, darlin’!”

“I need to know everything you know about the Benandanti.”

Lucky ducked out of the line, stuck her earbuds in so she could listen to the Booker, and headed back down the aisles. She needed Claudia’s knowledge, but if anyone had known how to deal with bad men it had been her mother. So she set out to collect the items Arnya had told her were “absolute fucking necessities.”

“Man is the most dangerous thing in the world,” Arnya had explained while packing her purse for a night out—matches, a pocketknife, and pepper spray. “Even if you think you know the fucker, hell, even if he’s smaller than you, you gotta be ready. No one is going to take care of you the way you would take care of you.” Arnya had showed her how to put a set of house keys between her fingers to make a punch more dangerous and the right way to deal with an unwanted penis showing up. “The trick is to get the balls—that’s the literal soft spot.” Most of Arnya’s techniques were more street fight than anything, but one night, she’d popped an unlit cigarette between her frosty pink lips and led Lucky out the door. “C’mon. I’ll show you one more deterrent, but we got to go to the park to do it. This one was handed down to me from my ma. It’s real old, so you know it’s a good one.”