The Map of Moments (20 page)

Sitting in a research cubicle at the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library, Max should have felt at home. And simply being there amongst the books and the quiet did lend him a certain solace that the eerily vacant halls at Tulane had not. Yet he still felt out of place.

He knew he could have talked to librarians about the specific moments that interested him, perhaps even accessed special collections due to his prior connection to Tulane. But apart from the brief chat he'd had at the front desk—presenting his ID and congratulating the staff member behind the desk on their post-Katrina efforts, as though he had any idea what he was talking about—he shied away from contact. Those who weren't a threat to him might themselves be put under threat simply by talking to him.

Max wanted to be a ghost, moving unseen through the stacks.

A notice on one wall had laid out the current plight of the city library system. Eight of the city's thirteen libraries had been completely ruined by Katrina. Some of the others remained closed. But the city promised that the system would be rebuilt and upgraded to a 21st-century library system worthy of a world-class city.

After what Max had seen of New Orleans’ current status, this seemed awfully optimistic. But all that really concerned him at the moment was that the main branch had power, and Internet access.

The stacks could wait. He still wasn't sure where he'd be sleeping tonight, and time felt valuable to him. For speed, Google came first.

He sat in a wooden chair, fingers on the keyboard. The back of his neck felt warm and he glanced around, always on edge now. He wanted to laugh it off as paranoia, but that would be foolish.

The First Moment he'd already figured out: an Indian ritual conducted to end a terrible storm, strange magic witnessed by the French scout who'd first identified the area as a good place to build a city. Exactly what the ritual had been, he had no idea. The attempt to drown the child had disturbed him at the time, but in retrospect seemed largely symbolic, a gesture to whatever primal deities the Biloxi Indians had prayed to.

The Second Moment, the spiritual power of the priest's voice, raised in song, seemed self-explanatory. These were both occasions of positive magic that had had dramatic effects on the fate of New Orleans.

But the Third Moment presented its own mysteries. The behavior of those novices had been ritualistic, and the map had referred to their deaths as a sacrifice. Yet their suicide had not had any magical effect that Max had seen. Whatever they had been attempting, it had been hideously dark magic, nothing like the first two Moments. And yet Max felt that the Third Moment must have been significant, and he needed to know why.

There were a hundred ways he could have started a web search. But even before he began typing, he knew what his
first query would be. He tapped out the five letters, clicked on the search button, and Google went fishing in the pool of public knowledge for anything referring to the word “Tordu.”

The search turned up more than 107,000 results. A lot of the pages were in French, and there were music pages, a porn site featuring girls with extreme piercings, and a European horror magazine. A town in Estonia had the name.

Por Mireault, le Tordu.
He could still hear those young women at the Ursuline convent chanting.

He typed “Mireault,” just the way it had been written on the map, adding it to the search. Fewer than a thousand results appeared. Still too many. Max added “New Orleans” to his search. There were three results, and none of them was what he sought.

“Right,” he whispered to himself. “Did you think it would be that easy?”

The Tordu, whoever or whatever they were, kept people in fear by remaining little more than whispers and shadows …and yet sometimes, the opposite was true. They seemed able to
remain
shadows by sowing seeds of fear. At first he had believed that they were little more than a street gang, New Orleans style. But once he'd seen that Third Moment, Max had understood that they were far more than that. And far older.

That event had resonated through the magical history of the city enough to end up on the Map of Moments. There had to be some trace of it.

He stared at the search window, turning it over in his
mind. How to phrase the inquiry, that was the key. What words to include. Max added the word “Ursuline,” and then hesitated a moment before deleting “Tordu” from the search. The Tordu were a secret. But the convent was real.

There were six results. Max stared at the fourth one.
Haunted History of the French Quarter.
It could have been like a hundred other sites operated by ghost story collectors, “haunted tour” operators, and true believers. Perhaps it was. But his focus was on the words in bold under the title of the page. His search words. “Ursuline. Mireault.”

He clicked open the story and started to read, barely breathing as he scanned a written account of the suicide of five teenaged girls who had pledged themselves as novices at the Ursuline Convent. It had been discovered that Marie-Claire Bissonette, one of the girls, had been pregnant, though the Ursuline sisters tried their best to hush up this discovery.

Specific accounts of alleged encounters with the novices’ ghosts followed, but Max ignored them. His throat felt dry. He scanned what he'd read once more, first the words, and then again and again he came back to the photographs of the
convent, the Mother Superior, and a flock of black-habited nuns on the grounds. Black-and-white, grainy images.

All of his scrutiny was merely to avoid focusing on the one photograph that troubled him most. It revealed a well-dressed man whose features and hue favored his Caribbean ancestors more than any French heritage. His dark hair implied a man of youth, but his face had a hardness and his eyes an awful gravity that spoke of age. He was stooped, his back crooked, and his arms and tiny, bent hands were held twisted against his body.

Monsieur Henri Mireault.

Mireault, le Tordu.

Nearly two hundred years had passed. It should have been easy for Max to brush away the connection. A 21st-century gangbanger named Coco couldn't have anything to do with a wealthy Creole aristocrat from the beginning of the 19th century. But the sick feeling in Max's stomach said otherwise. He was way too deep into this thing to allow himself to imagine, even for an instant, that the two could not be connected. Maybe the people Coco worked for, the ones he called “the Tordu,” were the remnants of whatever organization Mireault had established in those dark days. Or perhaps they were just inspired by him, the way so many freaks in Europe seemed to worship the memory of Aleister Crowley.

Either way, he was looking at the man who had brought a terrible, dark magic to New Orleans and tainted the Old Ursuline Convent. Perhaps that was the significance of the Third Moment, a tilt in the balance between lightness and darkness in the city.

He needed to learn more about Mireault.

Max pushed back from the computer and glanced around for a librarian. He hadn't wanted to have contact or draw attention, but he needed to know where to begin searching for books covering the goings-on in the city during the 1820s.

As he stood, he felt heat flush the back of his neck. He turned around.

The man staring at him from across the room did not look away.

Max froze. The guy wore an elegant leather jacket. His hair hung in beaded cornrows to his shoulders and he had the biggest hands Max had ever seen. He stared with unblinking, stone-cold eyes, but did not make any move to approach.

Tordu,
Max thought.
Has to be.

He glanced at the computer screen, thought of pausing to wipe his search history, but fear seized him. He took a step away from the cubicle …and the cornrowed man took a step as well.

Max started walking, slowly, toward the front of the library. The man matched his progress with longer strides.

Max broke into a run.

The man came for him, the beads clinking in his hair.

An attractive fortyish black woman pushing a metal book cart emerged from behind a shelving stack. Max dodged around her and sprinted for the front desk, but his pursuer slammed into the woman and the cart, spilling books and knocking her down. She cried out, but Max didn't turn to see how badly she might be injured.

At the front desk, someone shouted at him as he ran between the security sensors and crashed through the doors. He leapt down the front steps, the sun glinting off of the railings. Cars passed by in both directions on Loyola Avenue. On this block, north- and south-bound sides of the street were separated by a thin grassy island.

The RAV4 sat at the curb just down the street. Max careened toward it. He heard the library door slam open behind him, glass shattering with the force of his pursuer's exit.

“Fuck,” Max muttered. He repeated the word in his head as a mantra. Images of Corinne flashed in his mind and he could practically feel the cold, sharp metal of a Tordu knife splitting the skin of his belly. Desperation opened before him, an abyss into which he felt he might plummet forever.

He kept running, fishing the car keys from his pocket. He could not let terror seize him. If he surrendered to desperation, the knife would not be far behind.

He'd locked the car, of course. For a moment he panicked, but his thumb found the button on the key chain, and he heard the beep that signaled the locks disengaging.

An engine gunned to life nearby. From the corner of his eye he saw an old black Mercedes pull away from the curb maybe fifty yards farther up Loyola.

Max ran around to the driver's side and opened the door. He heard heavy footfalls and grunting breaths, and glanced up just as the guy hit the sidewalk and jumped. Those huge hands outthrust, he came flying over the RAV4's hood. Max dropped into the driver's seat and tried
to slam the door behind him, but the man managed to get one hand on the door as he scrambled off the hood, half hanging from it.

“Nowhere to run, teacher.”

Max used both hands and his left foot to ram the door open. The guy was still off balance and the door mashed his face, glass striking skull, blood blooming from one nostril. Then Max tried again to haul the door closed, but the bastard hung on with three fingers. Max dragged it closed anyway, even with the guy's weight on it, and slammed his fingers in the door.

With a shout of pain his attacker let go, falling backward into the road. Max hit the locks and started up the car, engine purring.

The impact from behind took him by surprise. With a crash of metal the RAV4 squealed forward, and Max whipped back in his seat. He swore and looked in the rear view, and there was the old black Mercedes.

He blinked, forcing himself to focus.

The cornrowed guy got to his feet, and Max saw him in the rearview mirror, signaling to the Mercedes with those huge hands.

“You not goin’ anywhere, teacher!” the man called.

And he was right. If Max drove off, they would follow. And they knew the city better than he did. Heart pummeling so hard that it blurred his vision, Max slammed the RAV4 into reverse.

Just a nudge. Just to put him down, block the road in front of the Merc, give me time to—