Beautiful Chaos(98)

“What’s watching me?” My voice was shaking, and my hands—every part of me.

The bokor lifted a snake, its body ringed in black, red, and white. The snake coiled around his arm, but the bokor held its head as if he knew it might strike.

“I’ll show you.”


He led us to the center of the room, close to the source of the nauseating smoke, a huge pillar that resembled a candle. It looked like it had been made by hand. Lucille crouched under a nearby table, trying to avoid the fumes—or maybe the snake or the crazy guy carrying what looked like eggshells over to a bowl at our feet. He crushed the shells with one hand, careful to keep his other hand on the head of the snake.

“The ti-bon-age is meant to be one. Never separated.” He closed his eyes. “I will call Kalfu. We need the help of a powerful spirit.”

Link elbowed me. “I don’t know if I like the sound a that.”

The bokor closed his eyes and started to speak. I recognized traces of Twyla’s French Creole, but it was mixed with a language I’d never heard before. The words were muffled, as if the bokor was talking to someone close enough to hear him whisper.

I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to see, but it couldn’t be any weirder than Aunt Prue outside her body or the Lilum inside Mrs. English’s.

The smoke started to swirl slowly, growing denser. I watched as it curved and began to take shape.

The bokor was chanting louder now.

The smoke started to change from black to gray, and the snake hissed. Something was forming from the smoke. I’d seen this before, in Bonaventure Cemetery, when Twyla called my mother’s Sheer.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the smoke. The body formed from the bottom up, just as my mom’s had. The feet and the legs.

“What the hell?” Link tried to back up, but he tripped.

The torso and the arms.

The face was the final element to emerge.

It stared back at me.

A face I would have known anywhere.

My own.

I jumped away, scrambling backward.

“Holy crap!” Link shouted, but his voice seemed far away.

Panic gripped me like two hands wrapping themselves around my neck. The figure started to fade.

But before it did, the Sheer spoke. “I’m waiting.”

Then it was gone.

The bokor stopped chanting, the sickening candle blew out, and it was over.

“What was that?” I was staring at the bokor. “Why is there a Sheer that looks like me?”

He walked back to the terrarium and dropped the snake inside with the others. “It doesn’t look like you. It’s your ti-bon-age. The other half a your soul.”

“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.