Work Text:
Madame Tracy had not intended to be in Chez Mall for the first day of summer. Unfortunately, her electric kettle had given up the ghost, and she was too English to boil her tea in the microwave.
It tasted the same. Oh, there were a few who didn’t know how to use a microwave to make tea, and put the teabag into the mug before microwaving. That tasted dreadful. But boiled water was boiled water, whether boiled in a kettle or in a microwave. She knew that in her mind, but not in her heart.
After a quick browse of her thrift shop, she found exactly what she expected. No electric kettles. Americans didn’t use them, a sad fact that she would never understand. Such useful little appliances.
So, in spite of it being the first day of summer, Madame Tracy found herself in the Sears, gliding through the women’s lingerie, on her way to the escalator. To housewares.
A slight woman, all planes and angles stood in the middle of the lingerie department. Madam Tracy would have recognized her from her posture alone, but she did not have to. Not with little Warlock trailing her, his video game system in hand, looking bored.
Warlock. Another sad and tragic child that she kept acquaintance with. New Orleans had no shortage of them. Sweet boy, but not well supervised. Mostly raised by the other lost children.
Warlock was more Crowley’s child than his own mother’s.
Beelzebub DeVille had all but raised Crowley, in spite of Crowley being older by four months. Poor Beelzebub! That was the oldest child that Madame Tracy had ever encountered (with the possible exception of Gabriel DiAngelo--both contenders for the most neglected and miserable children that she knew.)
Beelzebub and Gabriel...Madame Tracy made a mental note to introduce those two children, in the event that they had not met yet. New Orleans was a big city, but it often felt like a small town. It was entirely possible that Gabriel and Beelzebub had met at some point--they travelled in somewhat similar spheres--but she doubted it. While they might seem to have very little in common (to the uninitiated, and Madame Tracy was not amongst the uninitiated), she felt certain that they were compatible.
No, if those two had met already, they wouldn’t need Madame Tracy to play matchmaker. Those two would have done it themselves.
At any rate, getting Beelzebub (or Crowley) with someone (and soon) would be a Very Good Idea. Madame Tracy knew that their shared abuse and proximity would eventually pull Beelzebub and Crowley into each other.
She’d seen it before, and didn’t want to see it happen with these two. Not after everything that she’d done to protect them. Not after forcing James DeVille to allow Beelzebub their carriage house and their orangery. Not after getting Anthony away from his pitbull of a father and his negligent mother.
The dear little doves. No, she did not want to see them fall into incest.
Madame Tracy did not think the same sad fate waited for Gabriel and his little brother, but they were raised Catholics.
Beelzebub and Crowley were in the same church that she was a member of. And the Satanic church considered incest a personal choice.
Without Madame Tracy’s intervention, it was (perhaps) more likely that that rotten Raphael Masters might manage to sleaze his way deeper into Beelzebub’s life. He’d already convinced the DeVilles to use him as Beelzebub’s personal physician. He was their tutor and coach, and the man was as mad as a March hare.
Raphael Masters was a problem which Madame Tracy thought that roughly 200 lbs of muscle with a rage problem could solve.
Warlock, the darling boy, was looking for a distraction. Something to give him enough time to slip away. Madame Tracy decided to oblige him.
“Harriet!” she said, letting her smile seep into her voice. “How unexpected!”
“Tracy,” Harriet Dowling said, in her polished way. “How are you?”
“Unhappy to be out today, let me tell you!” Madam Tracy replied. “Busy, busy day at the mall! But my poor electric kettle bought the farm, and so here I am!”
“Oh, I would have stayed home if not for the sales!”
“Ooo! And what are you buying today?”
Harriet Dowling went on a great list of things that she planned to punitively spend her husband’s money on.
Warlock, seemingly absorbed in his video game, waited until his mother reached the housewares that she would purchase and never use. He looked up, then around. Madame Tracy, who (she was pleased to think) he’d always known as an ally, winked down at the boy as his mother rummaged around her handbag for the sales circular.
The boy didn’t need any further hints. He slipped away through the racks of rainbow-hued silks and satins, past the heavy tartan night dresses and out of sight.
Madame Tracy listened dutifully as Harriet Dowling went on. Her ears pricked when the woman mentioned Alice Crowley, who might be joining her in the Food Court. To go with her to the Macy’s.
She’d make it a point to stop by the information kiosk. Crowley ought to know that his horrible mother might make an appearance.
Alice would ignore her son, of course. Madame Tracy thought that the last time that she gave the boy a moment’s thought was to push him into the world.
Now, however, her refusal to acknowledge him was more pointed. More vicious. He’d moved in with his cousin, and that meant moving in with her hated sister. He’d chosen a side in an argument that began before his birth, and Alice Crowley would be cross with him for the rest of his life.
Even if the only reason he’d moved in with Beelzebub was because his father kept beating him. Which Alice neither prevented nor even seemed to acknowledge, (except once, to force Alexander to promise not to hit Anthony in the face after the very expensive surgeons at Tulane had reconstructed his nose following The Wasp Incident.)
Not far from the lingerie section, there was a raised platform in the area where the main aisle split men’s clothing from tools. Gleaming in the fluorescents, a dune buggy waited for some parent to think it was a good gift for a child.
This model was not a Wasp Stinger, but it looked similar.
It had been cold that Christmas, ten years ago. So cold. Colder than home, that year, and damp. How strange, that the memory was always there, just under the surface.
She wondered, as Harriet Dowling droned on about some women’s separates at the Macy’s that she thought would be worth their rather exorbitant prices--Madame Tracy wondered if the memories came onto Beelzebub and Crowley like that.
She had just wrapped up Christmas breakfast with Mr. Shadwell. Mr. Shadwell had been nursing a nasty flu, or rather, Madame Tracy had been nursing him through a nasty flu. He was feeling well enough for a good nosh, and Madame Tracy obliged him. He’d been so ill, it looked to her that he’d lost about a stone.
But his fever had broken, his complexion was not the frightening grey color that it had been, and his appetite had recovered, so Madame Tracy had made eggs Benedict. He’d eaten it, declared her to be the finest cook that ever walked the Earth, and not that bad for a witch and a temptress. Then, he’d staggered to her couch, where he’d been convalescing, and wrapped himself in the quilts that she’d left there for him.
She’d been washing up when a flare of red caught her eye.
Madame Tracy’s Psychic Readings and Olde Tyme Thrifte and Curiosity Shoppe was situated on Magazine Street, specifically where the Upper Garden District met the Lower Garden District. In front of her, down a small side street that met Magazine Street right in front of her Shoppe, a comet blazed. She remembered the sound of children laughing, and the sudden knowledge that they were moving too fast. Way too fast.
There was no way that Crowley could have avoided the pothole. It launched the dune buggy up, and Madame Tracy would never be able to pinpoint the place where the children’s laughter turned to screams.
The Wasp made an unholy sound as it smashed into the curb of the banquette in front of her Shoppe.
“Wot wuzzat?” Mr. Shadwell had asked, sleepily.
But Madame Tracy was already out the door and down the stairs. She pulled the handle for the heavy wood door that opened out to the children.
It refused to budge, and she remembered her heart sinking helplessness, and then her own fear. Absurdly, she thought she was trapped inside her own Shoppe.
A small, bloody hand reached up and smeared carmine across the colored glass of the window in her door. The hand waved in the air, falling back weakly.
That sight would likely haunt Madame Tracy for the rest of her life. A small, white hand, smearing the blood of two children across the windowpane of her Shoppe.
“REMIEL!”
It was a very young man who had screamed the name, and Madame Tracy saw him sprinting across Magazine Street, from the fine old Painted Lady across the street and kitty-corner from her. His long, dark hair was unbound, and his dark blue eyes were as frightened as Madame Tracy ever saw them.
He pulled the children away from the door, and she opened it.
“What happened?” The young man demanded, cradling the dark-haired child to his chest, and leaving the other curled up on the pavement.
The dune buggy continued to flicker in the gutter. The child on the pavement, who Madame Tracy thought was a little girl because of the length of his scarlet hair, still had her harness on.
“I’m not certain,” Madame Tracy said. “They hit a pothole, I think.”
“I’m fine, Raph,” the child in his arms said, in a posh Upper Garden District accent. “It’s not much my blood. Where’s Anthony?”
When the little child’s bright blue eyes found Madame Tracy, she knew who she was looking at. James DeVille’s child. The Baphomet. Born both male and female, onto a black marble altar as Walpurgisnacht passed to the start of Beltane. Remiel DeVille.
The Bishop’s child.
And the other one, the little cousin. Anthony Crowley, in whom mixed the blood of the Crowleys and the Gardiners.
Raphael was the youth from across the street. The Masters were another old-blood family from the church. Raphael was the one who was tutoring the DeVille child.
The younger Masters boy, the blond, stood in the doorway.
“Raph, what is it?” he called.
“Call Mr. DeVille!” he hollered at his brother. “Tell him to come right away! It’s Remy, and Anthony! They need a hospital!”
The blond boy disappeared inside and closed the door.
“Where’s Anthony?” Remiel asked again.
“Don’t move. Your shoulder is dislocated,” Raphael replied.
Anthony sat up. His face was bloody, and when he opened his mouth, Madame Tracy could see that he was missing some teeth. The boy spat a stream of blood onto the pavement.
“Thanks for checking on me, Raphael,” he said.
“I’m not paid to look after you,” Raphael snapped.
“He’s my cousin! Help him, if you can. Please,” Remiel said, reaching a bloody hand up and leaving streaks down Raphael’s cheek.
It might have been a slap if the child had been stronger. Instead, it was a caress, and Raphael grabbed their bloody little hand and kissed the top of it.
“As you wish,” he said, and laid Remiel on the concrete.
Madame Tracy could see that this child was also still in a harness. Both harnesses must have failed.
Anthony’s eyes got very big as Raphael turned his attentions to him.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Leave me alone, pedo.”
Raphael looked ready to scream something inadvisable to Anthony, when the door slammed open.
“Move, you lot,” said Mr. Shadwell, appearing with his frankly enormous fire extinguisher. Raphael and Anthony watched him put the fire out, and Remiel drifted off.
Mr. DeVille drove up and collected the kids, and Raphael Masters. There were police, and Mr. Crowley showed up to take the pictures that he would require for the lawsuits.
Mr. Shadwell hosed the blood off of the sidewalk and Madame Tracy cleaned her windows.
The bloody handprint would remain in her memory, though. An indelible mark, made by one or the other of them, a cry for help. One that she would heed, over and over, in the next decade.
The rest of the story came to Madame Tracy in bits and pieces. Most of it, she got from a Satanic nun (very accurately) named Sister Mary Loquacious. Apparently, the dune buggy, a Wasp Stinger, was a Christmas gift from Alexander. The kids, not knowing anything about dune buggies, didn’t recognize that it was going too fast. The engine was supposed to be artificially slowed down with a governor, but the governor failed. Anthony couldn’t steer around the pothole, and the harnesses failed.
Anthony walked away without four of his front teeth, and with a severe concussion and whiplash. His nose was broken and required reconstructive surgery. He’d been launched into Madame Tracy’s front door, and left a smear of blood in the wood where he’d landed.
Luckily, he only lost baby teeth.
His cousin was slammed into him, but clipped a balcony support on the way, dislocating their shoulder. Besides that, they’d gained a bruised spleen and some scrapes and bruises.
The Wasp Company was sued by Alexander Crowley, and paid a significant amount of money to the children’s college funds. A national recall of all the Stingers, predictably, followed.
Madame Tracy got to know the kids after that, and the more she knew about how they were being raised, the less she liked. Anthony was a brilliant boy, with parents who could not care less for him if they tried. Beelzebub’s father’s work, courting (and corrupting) Christian lawmakers, put his child in constant danger.
And Raphael Masters, always circling like a hungry shark. Trying to destroy Anthony. Trying to seize Remiel, who started going by their middle name at twelve. Who changed their pronouns at the same time.
She would never have children. She couldn’t. So she opened her home and her Shoppe to these two, and all the other lost children of the New Orleans Satanic community.
And to the ones who weren’t Satanic, as well. Warlock, for example. And, of course, sweet Anathema and her dear young man.
In this way, Madame Tracy built the family that nature denied her. And if it meant dealing with the inane prattle of Harriet Dowling, so be it.
“I was thinking that we might look at these slacks for Warlock. He’s growing so fast,” Harriet said, pointing at another ad. “Warlock, sweetie, where are you?”
“Oh, boys will be boys,” Madame Tracy said. “There’s a toy store just down the hall from us. I’m sure he’s fine.”
“Oh, Jesus, that kid,” Harriet said, rolling her eyes. “Anyways, were you heading up to housewares?”
“Yes, my dear. I certainly was,” Madame Tracy said. “Did you want some company?”
And Harriet did. So they found the escalator together, and as it rose up to the second floor of the Sears, Madame Tracy thought that Harriet Dowling might have been a lost soul, too.
An old axiom drifted through her mind. Hurt people hurt people.
Well, it was far too late to mend Harriet from whatever hurt her, but Crowley and Beelzebub had done a fine job patching up her son.
Perhaps that’s why Madame Tracy didn’t worry about Warlock, now well on his way to Crowley’s kiosk. Why would she? What was the worst that could happen to him at Chez Mall?
She stepped off the escalator and walked with Harriet towards a display of small appliances. Near the top, a shiny chrome electric teakettle winked in the lights of the store.
For some reason, Madame Tracy thought she saw a smear of blood over the surface of it, in the shape of a child’s hand. Just for a moment, she could smell the smoke...
She shook her head, and the phantoms of decade-past blood and fire dissipated. Madame Tracy smiled at Harriet, and reached for her new electric kettle.