“I’m not making you any promises until you start being honest with me,” I shoot back.
“Well, I guess that’s fair.” She studies her cereal for a moment. “Okay. To start with, I’m guessing that what you saw in the cemetery was a zandara ceremony.”
“A what?”
“Zandara. It’s a kind of magic only practiced here in Carrefour.”
She stands up from the table and takes her bowl to the sink. I stare at her in disbelief as she washes her leftover cereal down the drain then turns on the disposal. When the rumbling is over, the silence feels dead and all-encompassing.
“Aunt Bea?” I prompt.
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“How about at the beginning?”
She nods slowly, and when she speaks again, her voice is firm and steady. “At one time our ancestors were very powerful practitioners of voodoo. But in 1863, they, along with Peregrine’s and Chloe’s ancestors, struck their own deal with the fates because they felt voodoo was getting too commercialized. The final straw was when your great-great-great-greatgrandmother learned that a Confederate general was purchasing potions and using them to defeat union soldiers in battle.
“Our ancestors didn’t want any part of that,” she continues, “so they sought out a powerful spirit named Eloi Oke, who agreed to serve as a gatekeeper between this world and the world of the spirits, and—”
“That’s the name I heard them say in the cemetery,” I interrupt.
She nods. “He agreed to help in exchange for letting him and some of his friends possess them once a year on Mardi Gras so that they could experience life in human form again. A small price to pay for the power he opens them to.”
“Oh yes, being possessed by a ghost,” I mutter to myself. “Such a small price to pay.
Aunt Bea ignores me. “So zandara developed as a way to trade for what the queens wanted through communication with different spirits. All the magic centers around living things that grow from the soil, because they’re a direct link between life and death. Zandara queens just need to find a spirit who’s willing to help them channel the power of those plants, once Eloi Oike opens the gate to the nether.”
It feels like my head is spinning as I try to keep up. “What’s the nether?”
“The world between life and death, where some spirits are stranded for a while. It’s people who did something wrong in their lives and can’t move on to a peaceful death. They long for human comforts because they’re closer to the human world than most spirits. That’s how queens barter with them, by providing those things through occasional possession ceremonies.”
“And you’re saying zandara only exists here in Carrefour?”
“It’s where the queens decided to make their home, for their own protection.” Aunt Bea’s expression grows serious. “Just before the turn of the last century in New Orleans, seven French immigrants who believed the magical arts were evil founded a group called Main de Lumière. They zeroed in on zandara and began a ‘Crusade of Light.’ ”
Aunt Bea draws a deep breath before going on. “They started murdering practitioners who were part of your great-great-great-grandmother Eléonore’s group, claiming they were cleansing the world of evil.
“In early 1903, a Main de Lumière soldier killed Eléonore’s younger daughter, who was three years old at the time.” I gasp as Aunt Bea continues. “If he’d killed her firstborn, as he believed he was doing, he would have destroyed zandara forever. You see, only the firstborn daughter of each of the three queens inherits power, generation after generation, so that the balance of power will never change, so killing a future queen would have ended that family’s magical bloodline.
“Eléonore and the other zandara practitioners had to leave New Orleans immediately if they were to escape Main de Lumière’s bloodlust,” Aunt Bea continues. “They chose the land we’re on now because it was out in the middle of nowhere. Crossroads are very powerful in zandara—symbolic of the intersection between this world and the nether— so the queens built a crossroads in the cemetery and performed the founding ceremony of Carrefour there, imbuing the town with power and protection.
“Over the years, the queens and their descendants have let in a few thousand carefully screened outsiders to ward off suspicion,” she says. “If they had kept Carrefour to only themselves and their sosyete—the small group of trusted insiders they practiced their magic with—a town so tiny would have looked odd. But allowing the town to grow slowly in a very controlled manner has let Carrefour look from the outside like a typical small bayou town. Most of the families here have no idea that magic is keeping Carrefour afloat, so for a long time, the town existed without raising Main de Lumière’s suspicions.”