And in that, Memphis heard, I’m trusting you, Memphis. Better not let me down.
Memphis closed his eyes. Come on, please, he prayed silently. The electric itch traveled along the tips of his fingers, then caught, crawling up his arms, faster and faster, until his whole body hummed with energy and he felt as if he were floating. Pressure followed—the soft weight of many hands pressed against him, receiving him, holding him in the land of spirits. And then the hands were gone. Memphis stood in a dark wood of denuded, ashen trees whose twisted limbs reached up and around, a cage of brambles and spindly, multi-tiered branches. The cracked earth was dry; nothing could grow here. The air was unnaturally still. Above, the starless sky groaned in turmoil. A diseased moon leaked its sickly glow, streaking the edges of the roiling, dusky clouds with jaundice while strange blue threads of static pulsed here and there, disturbing the clouds into further discord. When Memphis traced the origin of the clouds, he saw that they were manufactured—curling plumes of choking smoke pumped from the open mouths atop a row of ghostly smokestacks in the distance.
Something moved deep in the trees. A voice swirled around his head: “Memphis. My son, my son.”
The branches quivered and became the beating of wings. And then, his mother was walking toward him in her blue-black feathered cape. Her blinking eyes were all pupil, captured night; her movements were quick as a heartbeat.
“Mama?” Memphis tried to run toward her but found he couldn’t move.
“Memphis. Son. I must be brief. It doesn’t take him long to find me.”
“Who?”
“The King of Crows. I belong to him now. You must stop him, Memphis! Heal the breach.”
“How do we heal it?”
“More than this, I’m forbidden to tell you. He has a million eyes.”
And then Memphis saw the phosphorescent, sharp-toothed things rising from the charred ground, their mouths open in hungry growls. They shrieked their insatiable need into the night. Memphis took a step back. His heel came down with a squish on a three-headed slug covered in ghastly tumors. “What is this place?”
“It’s his place.”
There were eyes in the trees. Watching. “I can’t leave you here with those things—”
“I told you, I belong to him now. But I am also with you. Keeping close. Go, Memphis.”
“I’m going to free you, Mama.”
“You can’t bring back what’s gone, Memphis.” His mother coughed violently, spitting out two slimy feathers. They dropped to the ground and slithered into snakes. Her skin rippled with change that was too fast for Memphis’s eyes to register. He heard the flapping of wings and the echo of his mother’s voice. “Go to Seraphina. The time is now. Wake, my son!”
The shrieking of the dead increased, a storm building, and then, like a fast-moving train, the sounds of the nightclub rushed him: jazz, dancing feet, people talking. Just like that, Memphis was back in Owney Madden’s private room in the Cotton Club, everybody looking at him as he blinked and swallowed and tried to return to normal.
“What… how’s the patient?” Memphis croaked.
“Sleeping. Without a scratch on him,” the man with the matchstick in his mouth said, pointing to the gangster’s healed leg. He clapped Memphis on the back. “Congratulations, kid. You get to live.”
On the way out, Papa Charles handed Memphis a crisp twenty-dollar bill, pocketing the other one. “You earned it. And Owney’s backing us against Dutch. We shouldn’t have any more trouble with rabbits in our garden.”
“Yes, sir,” Memphis said, but he had the idea that trouble was just getting started.
Memphis was so tired he slept through most of his date with Theta at the lighthouse. “Come on, Poet. We better get you home,” she said after he’d nodded off a third time, and even though Memphis protested that he was fine, not tired at all, Theta insisted on putting him in a taxi.
Blind Bill was waiting up in the living room when Memphis let himself in. The old man sat on the sofa, still and quiet, in the dark. Memphis turned on the lamp. He was bone-tired and his mouth tasted of hot metal. “Evenin’, Mr. Johnson.”
“Told you—it’s Bill. You sound wore out.”
Memphis suppressed a yawn. “Suppose I am. Everything good tonight? Isaiah all right?”
“Fine. Fine. Octavia made a cake. Even put a little rum in it.”
“She did? What for?”
“For my birthday.”
“Gee, I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t make no announcement.”
“Well, happy birthday. You make a wish?”
“Mm-hmm,” Bill said without a hint of a smile.
“So, how old are you now, Mr. Johnson?”
Blind Bill’s shoulders shook with a silent laugh. “Feel old as Methuselah till a pretty girl walk by. Then I’m young as any man. And ’fore you ask, yes, I can tell when a pretty girl pass by even without seeing her. Go on. Get yourself some cake.”
Bill waited. He was good at waiting. When the boy returned, Bill listened to the scrape of his fork across the plate and sucked in a breath. “Been meaning t’ask you—you seen any more of that Walker woman?”
The fork stopped for a second. “No.”
“That the truth?”
“Why you asking?”
“Well,” Bill said with a heavy sigh, “little man been acting nervous. And then he said her name in his sleep. Had the feeling he mighta seen her, maybe she got him all upset again. I know we don’t want him having more fits.”
“We haven’t seen her,” Memphis said.
Bill could hear the guilt and worry lurking in the lie. Good. Let the boy chew on it along with his cake. He grunted as he pushed himself off the settee and reached for his cane. “Now I’m a whole year older, reckon I best turn in. You rest easy, now.”
Bill tapped his way to his small room off the kitchen. He undressed down to his long underwear and felt his way over to the cot, easing his aching joints down onto it. He wondered what his face looked like now. Wrinkled, definitely. Bill could feel the veins popped up on the backs of his hands. Could feel the cold and damp in his bones. That was what happened over the long years of birthdays. For Bill, though, it had happened much quicker; with every life he’d taken for the Shadow Men, another year had been sucked away from him, stooping, bending, and, finally, blinding him. Margaret Walker had let those men take Bill away. And now she wanted to mess with the Campbell brothers? Not if he could help it. Bill had made his birthday wish: First, a healing. And then, revenge.
“Happy birthday, Guillaume,” Bill whispered to himself.
He was thirty-seven years old.