Excerpt: Book I – Merle: Bayou Wizard

Part One - Ends and Beginnings

I knew it was going to go wrong the moment I agreed to teach Nathalie the Secret Arts. I saw the end of it all as clearly as I had seen all of the good and horrible events that I had foreseen in the long wonderful misery called my life, but I was under a spell more powerful than any I had ever cast, the spell of hopeless love.

But of all the questions I thought she might ask to begin her tutelage (“How do you become a bird?”, “Can death be stopped?”, “Can gold really be made from lead?), I could not foresee the one she asked. She only wanted to know my middle name. I hesitated for a moment, remembering one of the first things Madame Cormier taught me, “Hidden names are powerful names, never let an enemy know everything.” But love blinds us to many things, and what could I gain here in the beginning by having Nathalie distrust me?

“Lyndon,” I answered, hoping I hadn’t hesitated too long, “The whole thing is Merle Lyndon Boudreaux. Not much of a name is it?”

She scattered flattery my way, softening my self-deprecation, and continued to ramble of non-magical things, admiring the view from our island, either not seeing the truth or pretending that I had done a wonderful job of replacing the thick stands of cypress that obscured everything around the island, or that I had managed to erase the stench that arose from the Louisiana swamp. I don’t know how well I had managed the deception or how much see saw through the lie I had surrounded us with, but all things would soon become known.

“How shall we begin?” she asked.

I looked into her eager eyes, wondering how much truth I would find there, then realizing I didn’t care. My first real instruction in the magic arts came during a time of fear and anger for me, very different from what Nathalie was feeling. But, like all things in life, this situation was what it was – or it was something else. Time would tell. I answered, “At the beginning, I suppose.”

* * *

From my earliest days, I lived with my mother in a row house on Royal Street in New Orleans. She moved to the house a short while, perhaps a few months, before I was born.

“Who was she,” Nathalie interrupted softly, “your mother?”

Her name was Nivia, I began. The quick intake of Nathalie’s breath let me know that she had heard of Miss Nivia, for my mother had been a well known voodoo queen. I held up a hand and quickly added her full name, Nivia Lavinia Sonnier, before Nathalie could interrupt again. She settled onto the rock shelf I had devised in our cave, and lowered her gaze and waited. At that point I believe she understood that I would have to draw the story out from within myself, at my own pace.

New Orleans is the first place I remember, I continued, but I wasn’t there long. I returned to her – both hers – both my mother and the city, but that wasn’t for a number of years after . . . well, I ramble. Let me begin again.

I was born in New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot, sometime between the first two World Wars, closer to the second than the first, and I hope to not be around for the third one – the one that humans have been stirring in the pot ever since the second one was settled. My mother, who was the daughter of a freed quadroon farmer, moved to the city after her father discovered her pregnancy. He beat her for days and refused to give her food and water, but she never told him who my father was, just saying she didn’t know or that a demon raped her. One night when her father was drunk asleep, she slipped away and made her way to New Orleans, nearly a hundred miles away.