He was there when Cece did her first formal working.
This was not planned — or rather, his presence was not planned. He had extended his New Orleans stay by two days, the road trip having left him in no particular rush to return to New York, and the working was scheduled for a Saturday evening that he happened to be present for.
Madame Moreau had been preparing the space since Thursday. The preparations were quiet and methodical, the back room of the house transformed through a process that was both practical and sacred simultaneously — candles, specific ritual objects, the proprietary arrangements of the Moreau family's particular Vodou lineage. He stayed out of the way and offered no assistance except the specific assistance of keeping the household running while the space was being prepared.
He had not been in the room for the working itself. That was not his place — the tradition had its own structure and he was not part of it. He had sat in the kitchen with Madame Moreau's oldest friend, a woman named Celestine who had been working in the tradition for forty years and who was present as a witness, and they had drunk coffee and talked about nothing important while the working happened in the back room.
He felt it. Not intrusively — he was not attending to it, not monitoring it with the Sight. But the quality of the house's shimmer changed, deepened, the way a room changes when something very real is happening in it. The Baron's presence moved from the ambient warmth he associated with the Moreau household into something more focused, more present, more specifically directed.
When Cece came out of the back room forty minutes later, she looked the way people looked after doing something that used the fullest version of themselves: present and tired and quietly radiant, like a lamp that has been at full brightness and is now running at rest.
She sat down at the kitchen table. She looked at him with her grey eyes and said, simply: 'It worked.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I could feel it from here.'
'What did it feel like from here?'
He thought about this carefully, because she deserved an honest description rather than a simple one. 'Like a door opened in a room that usually has walls on all sides,' he said. 'Not a dangerous door. A door that belongs there. Like the room finally looked the way it was supposed to look.'
She held this. Then: 'That's what it felt like from inside too.'
Her mother came in and put a glass of water in front of Cece and touched her daughter's hair very briefly and said nothing, which was the specific eloquence of someone who has watched their child do something they have been preparing for their whole life and does not want to diminish the moment with words.
He thought: this is what it looks like when someone becomes what they were always going to become. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Quietly, in a back room in New Orleans, with candles and intention and the relationship that has been built over years with a Loa who chose to work with her family.
He thought: she is extraordinary. He had known this for years. The knowing deepened, sometimes, the way things deepen when they stop being belief and become confirmed fact.