Chapter 8 The River That Remembers

The Mississippi had always been a mouth that swallowed sins.

Bodies disappeared in its depths. Secrets drifted in its current. The river didn't forgive-it only carried the weight of memory in silence.

But tonight, the water whispered.

And it remembered Isadora Bellerose.

Beneath the black sky, she stood at the river's edge in a gown the color of a bruised moon. The night hummed with cicadas and the hiss of rising fog. She'd brought the Book again-bound in the stitched hides of oath-breakers, inked in bile and sorrow. The spirits in its pages rustled with anticipation.

Her next target was near.

Mayor Emile Dulac.

The one who smiled wide as he signed the execution order. The one who stood at the foot of the fire with his fine coat, clean hands, and empty eyes. The man who'd washed his guilt in coin and bourbon.

Now he would pay.

Isadora raised the Book and began to chant.

The language was older than the city, older than the world. Her voice warped the wind. The trees along the riverbank groaned. The water shivered.

And the dead began to wake.

First from the muck-skeletal limbs reaching like drowned roots. Then from beneath the reeds, faces bloated, twisted, rotted but still conscious. The souls buried in the water's mouth. The forgotten.

She summoned them not with pity, but with purpose.

"I give you names," she hissed. "Give me justice."

From the darkness, the Ghede Na Rouje stirred, laughing softly.

"Feed us more."

Isadora sliced her palm and let the blood drip into the river. The water hissed. Boiled. Accepted.

---

Downtown, Mayor Dulac slept in his marble house surrounded by guards and silver crucifixes. None of them mattered.

At midnight, every mirror in his mansion cracked.

At 12:03, the walls began to bleed.

By 12:15, he was awake-screaming.

The guards were gone. Not dead. Not fled. Just... gone.

The air had turned cold as a crypt.

He ran to his study, only to find the fireplace roaring with blue flame. Inside it, a figure sat in a wingback chair, legs crossed elegantly.

Isadora.

She didn't smile. She didn't move.

"You... you're not real," he stammered, backing away. "You died-years ago. Burned."

"Some burns don't kill," she said. "Some purify."

"I-I have protection. I'm the mayor. I have rights."

"You had power," she said, rising. "And you spent it on slaughter."

The floor beneath him rippled like water. The air thickened with rot.

"I was doing my duty!" he shouted.

Isadora extended a hand-and the shadows dragged him by the legs, flipping him onto his back.

The floor opened like a mouth.

And below it-the river.

Flowing, black, endless. And in it: the dead.

They called to him in choking, gurgled voices. Men he'd bribed. Women he'd ruined. Children left to rot in orphanages. The forgotten.

"No-NO!" he screamed, clawing at the floorboards.

But the river pulled.

And it did not drown him.

It made him part of it.

His body twisted, stretched, and broke until he was no longer man, but mud. His soul joined the current, bound in eternal motion, reliving his sins with every tide.

---

Back at the riverbank, Isadora exhaled.

Another name scratched from the Book.

The Ghede Na Rouje purred.

"Two remain."

Sister Colette.

Marshal Bex.

Isadora closed the Book.

But tonight, she felt no peace.

She felt the pull.

Something ancient had noticed her.

Not Maman Chantelle-though she was drawing her circle.

Something deeper.

From beneath the riverbed, beneath the bones, beneath time.

She knelt and touched the water.

And it touched back.

A vision surged into her mind: a city with no sky, streets paved with skulls, children laughing with no mouths, only teeth.

The Ghede Na Rouje wanted more than revenge.

It wanted release.

And she was the key.

---

Back at Harrow House, the walls pulsed. Mirrors shrieked. The soul of Mayor Dulac screamed silently as it bled into the house's foundation.

The front door opened without a hand.

And Maman Chantelle stepped inside.

She held a blade of bone. A pouch of salt. A candle carved from human fat.

Isadora turned slowly to face her.

"No more warnings, child," Maman said.

"I don't need them."

"You're breaking the balance."

"Good. Balance let them burn me."

"They feared your power," Chantelle said. "They should have. But you are not the only one who pays when the world tips."

Isadora's hands sparked with shadow. "Then maybe it's time the world burned."

The two women stood in silence.

And the house-watched.