He woke before dawn on the morning they were leaving because he had not really slept.
Not from fear — or not primarily from fear. From the specific quality of attention that last nights have, the way awareness sharpens when something is ending and you want to hold all of it at once. He had lain in his bed and listened to the house: his father's even breathing from down the hall, his mother's lighter sleep patterns that he knew by now as well as he knew music, the house's own particular sound, the creak of boards that was different from any other house's creak.
He got up at four-thirty and went to the backyard.
The herb garden was sleeping — the quiet that winter held, plants conserving, the soil drawing in. But the shimmer was there. It was always there. Four generations of family attention and magic had saturated this corner of New Orleans with something that would not dissipate because one of the people who had contributed to it was leaving.
He sat in the garden in the pre-dawn dark and thought about all of it. The eleven years in this house, in this city. The music lessons and the capoeira and the coded notebooks and the crossroads and the hellhound in City Park and Mrs. Fontenot's blood pressure and Mr. Castillo's heart attack and Cece's red beans and Madame Moreau's altar and Aurelie's diary and his parents' hands on the kitchen table when he told them the truth.
He thought: I am leaving and I am not leaving. This is still mine. The city is still mine. I can come back.
He pressed both hands flat on the soil — the way he had the first time, that October afternoon at five years old when he had first made the basil shimmer — and he did something he had not planned to do and could not have entirely explained: he left something behind. Not an object. Something from the magic, from the Hecate-blood and the accumulated years of practice in this garden. A small deep warmth, pushed into the soil, which would express itself — he thought, not precisely knowing — as a continuity. The garden would still be cared for. The shimmer would still be here. The crossroads at the corner of the street would still be lit.
He was not leaving. He was extending.
He went inside and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table and waited for his parents to wake up.
✦ ✦ ✦
Cece came at seven with her mother, who brought biscuits and the most elaborate breakfast Kael had ever had, and they ate together in a way that had the quality of ceremony — not somber ceremony, vivid ceremony, the kind that acknowledges something significant without denying the ordinary pleasures of good food and company.
Cece held him for a long time when they said goodbye on the front porch. She was not crying, which he respected, though her grip was tighter than her usual.
'Write me letters,' she said into his shoulder.
'I will.'
'Real ones. Long ones.'
'I will.'
She pulled back. She looked at him with those direct eyes. 'I'm proud of you,' she said. 'I know I'm not supposed to say that because you're not doing it for pride, you're doing it because it needs doing. But I'm proud of you anyway. You've been getting ready for this your whole life and you did it right.'
He thought about what to say. He thought about the accuracy of what she'd said — the years of preparation, the patience, the building. He thought about what it meant to have someone see all of that and name it.
'Thank you for being my friend,' he said. 'In this life. I didn't have — in the other life I didn't have someone like you. You're a specific thing. I don't have a word for it that's big enough.'
'I know,' she said. 'Neither do I. That's what it is.'
Madame Moreau embraced him and said, 'The Baron's door is open. He won't interfere — that's not his way — but his attention is yours when you need it.' She looked at him. 'You come back to us.'
'Yes ma'am,' he said.
✦ ✦ ✦
He stood at the crossroads at the corner of his street for the last time. The morning was cool and the oaks were just beginning to bud and the shimmer at the intersection was warm and present and familiar.
He stood there and he felt it: both futures, briefly, the Crossroads Sight showing him the road back (always open, always there, New Orleans patient and enduring) and the road forward (long, uncertain, full).
He had made his choice at this crossroads already. He made it again, consciously, standing in the March morning.
He said, to no one in particular and to the particular presence that lived at crossroads: 'I'm going. I'll be back.'
The morning air smelled of magnolia, the first of the season, and something older and warmer that had no name in any botanical classification but that he recognized as belonging to this corner, to this family, to the accumulation of generations of magic practiced quietly and well.
He walked back to his parents' car, which was packed and waiting, and got in.
'Ready?' his mother said.
'Yes,' he said. 'Yeah. Let's go.'