by J. D. Horn
The nurse—Lisette had learned her name was Gabby—straightened and turned to face them. “Getting stronger every minute, this little one of ours.”
Lisette felt her heart begin to beat again, and she released the breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. The doctor, a young woman who didn’t look any older than Manon, turned back. “Hope you don’t mind,” she said. “We were admiring your granddaughter. She’s such a little doll.”
Lisette realized she was already halfway toward becoming one of those grandmothers who found every topic other than how perfect their grandchild is a complete bore, and she didn’t give a damn. “I must agree with you there,” she said, her arm tight around Manon’s shoulders, then remembered to add, “thank you.” She craned her neck to see the incubator better. “May we . . . ?”
“Of course,” the doctor said, stepping back to clear the way for the mother and grandmother.
Manon slipped free of Lisette’s embrace and went in first. Lisette waited, watching on as Manon approached the incubator and leaned over it, beaming down at her daughter. “Good morning, sweet girl. Mama’s here. Mama loves you.”
Lisette hadn’t been able to peel the smile off her face since last night. If anything, it had stretched even wider this morning. She stepped into the room and drew near to the incubator, gazing down, ready to get her first peek of the day at her beautiful Joy.
“I don’t understand,” she said, terrified and furious at once. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Is everything all right, Mrs. Perrault?” the doctor asked.
Manon turned back to look at her, confused. “You okay, Mama?”
Lisette stepped up beside her daughter to get a better look at the baby, sure her tired eyes had played a trick on her. But there was no baby in the incubator. What was there was a rubber doll, like one she’d spotted earlier beneath the giving tree in the hospital’s lobby.
Lisette looked up from the doll to Manon, then to the doctor, then to Gabby. They all were regarding her with concerned expressions. None of them realized the thing in there wasn’t alive, it wasn’t a real baby at all.
Gabby moved quickly, stepping around to put her arm around Lisette, already maneuvering her to the padded bench even as she said, “Perhaps you should sit down.”
“She had a stroke not long ago,” Manon said, panic dawning in her voice.
“When?” the doctor said, pulling a pen flashlight from her pocket and squatting before Lisette to shine it in her eyes.
“October.”
“I’m fine,” Lisette said, trying to rise. “The baby—”
“You stay calm, Mrs. Perrault,” the doctor said, reaching up to rest a hand on Lisette’s shoulder to encourage her to sit still.
The second nurse drew closer, looking at her over the doctor’s shoulder. Lisette’s eyes were drawn first to the pastel-yellow blanket the nurse clutched to her chest, then up to the monstrous gleam in her eyes. The strawberry blonde witch from the world of the cold fire now stood in the common world. She held the bundle she’d been clutching out and turned it around so Lisette could see one tiny hand poking through the blanket.
“Tonight,” she said, though no one else reacted to her. It dawned upon Lisette no one else was even aware of the witch’s presence. “Midnight.” She bent her head and kissed Joy’s fingers, then looked back to Lisette as she licked her lips. “You know where.” The witch’s laugh started as a low chuckle and ended as a mad, screeching cackle. In the next instant, she and the baby were gone.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The longest night had come, and a shadeless floor lamp’s unfiltered glare combated the darkness beyond the row of graceful bow windows opposite her, polishing their rounded panes into mildly concave mirrors. Fleur had removed the shade herself and dragged the lamp closer to the mannequin she’d used to drape Lucy’s dress.
Fleur hadn’t a single clue how she’d come to be kneeling on the floor of the oval room. She must have passed out, perhaps from low blood sugar. No wonder—she hadn’t slept the night before, and the only thing she’d consumed was a café au lait for breakfast. She glanced at the clock on the mantel to check the time, its swinging pendulum nearly hypnotic in her hazy state. She should grab a quick bite and some coffee, but first she needed to shower and decide what to wear to the procession. Fleur had put so much energy into finishing the dress for her daughter, she hadn’t given her own outfit a single thought.
I did finish the dress, didn’t I?
She pushed herself up to her feet and started toward the windows, slowing as she approached a shadow stretched out along the floor. It was the toppled mannequin. Fleur gazed into the reflection in the window.
Fleur blinked, then craned her neck. She could see the room behind her, the shadeless lamp and a gilt frame on the wall, but the spot where she should appear in the reflection remained blank. She wasn’t in it. Only when she moved to step over the mannequin did she realize it wasn’t the mannequin. It was her own body.
Fleur’s mouth gaped as she studied her form, lying supine before her, her limbs gracelessly akimbo, her head turned to the side so Fleur viewed it in profile. Her head rested in an asymmetrical pool of blood that conjured the image of the French Marianne and her scarlet liberty cap.
Her face was nearly unrecognizable—swollen, bruised black. She looked away, horrified, confused. Her gaze fell to the globe-shaped paperweight, and she remembered.
Lucy. Her Lucy. Kneeling over her. Intent on crushing her skull. Fleur spun around, her horrified eyes scanning the room for her daughter, but Fleur was alone . . . alone with herself.
She wanted to scream, but didn’t, not because she was afraid Lucy might hear her, but because she feared she might not hear herself. A wave of desperation washed over her, its undertow grasping at her, preparing to pull her under. It would be easier to give in than to fight. Certainly no one could blame her.
But she was Fleur frigging Marin.
She forced herself to calm, to begin to take inventory of the situation and find a rational path out of the madness. The first horrible step was to determine if the body before her was dead.
It helped this was far from Fleur’s first out-of-body experience. She had once been adept at astral projection, capable not only of projecting her awareness, but of interacting with the physical world as if she were in corporeal form.
She felt sorry for the woman before her. Though she couldn’t remember the attack, it must have been agonizing . . . She surveyed the trauma to her temple from that first blow. Perhaps the second, too. She hoped she’d been knocked unconscious by that second strike, as it appeared several others had followed.
She knelt beside the body. So still. She had to face the facts—too much damage had been done. Fleur bowed to the inescapability of death and began calculating a different next move, one that would prevent the thing that had once been her precious daughter from harming anyone else.
She cast her mind back, trying to pinpoint the moment her Lucy, the true Lucy, had been taken over by the thing in her now. Fleur would have felt it, wouldn’t she, if the change had occurred all at once? It must have been gradual—Lucy’s spark slipping away a bit more at a time, a shadow moving in, little by little, to take her place.
She should have sensed it anyway.
A slight movement, perhaps a shallow breath. Had she imagined it? She reached out with a quivering hand to touch the body’s neck, to seek out a pulse. She gasped. There was a pulse, so thready she feared the pressure of her own touch might cause it to fail, but all the same, it was there.
To survive, Fleur’s consciousness would have to return to her body. That was simple under most circumstances—the body and psyche longed for each other. It should only take a tiny push. But in her current state, the homecoming would be a risky and, Fleur was sure, agonizing proposition. The shock to her physical system might end her before she could even complete the journey.
If she could muster the power to heal the body, even slight
ly, it would improve her chances. But she no longer felt as if her magic were fading. It felt instead as if it had been snapped off like a branch from a tree. Fleur grasped a hard truth; Lucy had not only brutalized her, she had laid claim to her power. A difficult task, even if she’d killed Fleur outright. Her daughter’s occult knowledge was at best cursory. She couldn’t have garnered this degree of arcane knowledge, let alone descended to the level of depravity it would have taken to use it.
Fleur perceived movement to her side, and she spun in time to witness one of the fabric bolts she’d propped against the entrance to the hidden passageway wobble and fall with a muffled thump.
Of course. All that’s left is the forgetting.
Thoughts of Hugo’s sigil had been floating through her mind from the first stroke of his brush to the moment she’d fallen unconscious, but she wasn’t the one who needed to forget it for the magic to work. If she knew her nephew, and she felt she did, he was already intoxicated, weaving his way through the Quarter to Crescent Park to meet the other revelers for the Longest Night procession. His spell would be far from his conscious thoughts.
She cast a cautious glance at the door that opened onto the main hall. It stood ajar, open about halfway. Fleur crossed to the opening, shielded herself behind the door, and paused to listen. Above, she heard footsteps, soft clack-clack-clacks of Lucy walking in flats across an uncarpeted stretch of the hall. The movement directly overhead surprised Fleur. Lucy’s room was at the opposite end of the house. The room above had belonged to Celestin.
Fleur darted past the opening, only then wondering if Lucy would even be capable of seeing her in her disembodied state. Even if she couldn’t “see” Fleur, there remained a strong chance she could still sense her presence and realize she hadn’t as yet finished the job.
She moved with caution to the wall panel that could be pivoted on a center hinge to reveal the house’s hidden passage. Nine bolts of fabric remained propped against the panel. With a bit of concentration, Fleur could ease them, one by one, to the floor. Lucy hadn’t seemed to take notice of the noise from the bolt that had fallen, but nine more thumps, muffled or not, might be enough to draw her downstairs.
Fleur lay a hand on the nearest bolt. To her surprise, it shifted easily, almost as if an unseen force were helping with the effort. In no more than a minute, she had slid all of them to the floor.
She willed the door to ease open, and light from the lamp rushed into the hidden room, piercing the darkness and setting fire to the comic sparkle of Hugo’s sigil, its glint having nothing to do with magic. She focused the entirety of her will on the symbol, commanding it to do what it had been designed to do, pass the bulk of Hugo’s power to Fleur.
She waited, she willed, but nothing happened. No fiery rush, no quiet whisper. From beyond the painted sigil, at the far end of the passage beside the panel that opened into Celestin’s former study, she could sense her father’s dark, delighted amusement in her failure.
Ma belle bécasse. The thought reverberated down the passage, the length of the hidden room acting like the strike on a matchbox, causing the gibe to spark and ignite Fleur’s long-suppressed rage.
Her anger focused her. She would no longer wait for power to come to her; she would reach out and claim it. She entered the shadowy room and approached the sigil. Pressing her palms against the symbol, she curled her fingers, piercing both lathe and plaster to pull the sigil itself, integral, from the wall.
Another Fleur would have taken a moment to cast a self-satisfied glance at her father’s no-longer-gloating face, but this Fleur no longer gave a damn what the old man thought. Instead, she focused on the sigil, watching as it squirmed to life and began unwinding itself, revealing its essence to her. Thought by thought, letter by letter, it shared a story—Hugo’s story—with her. The letters followed one after the other, each catching the tail of the one before it, melding into a fiery cursive strand. The strand wound up her right arm, over her shoulder, and rose up like a serpent to dive at her forehead and pierce her third eye.
The power yanked her from the passage and slammed her without ceremony back into her physical body. She sat up with a jerk, pulling in a raspy, burning breath of air. She flung her hand to her forehead, stopping before touching the wound gingerly. She placed her index finger against her temple. There was no pain.
She turned her legs to the side, then shifted up onto her hands and knees. She stood, her legs at first wobbly, but they regained strength with each step she made toward the flawed antique mirror over the fireplace. She still looked a mess, her face sticky with her own blood. Bruises remained, but they were light, superficial. She had healed herself.
The grievous injuries were gone, but so was Hugo’s magic. It had taken the rest of his power to mend her.
An old-fashioned tune, one Fleur felt she should recognize, drifted down from above. Lucy was humming—no, singing wordlessly, loudly—as she moved back and forth down the hall, soft carpeted thuds alternating with clacking as she stepped from rug to wood and back again. The pacing stopped, and Lucy cried out, her voice wild and filled with fury. The cry was punctuated by the sound of shattering glass. Something heavy crashed to the floor above. The chandelier swayed.
The house fell silent, and the singing began again.
Soon, the tune was punctuated by a creaking on the stairs. Animal instinct kicked in, and Fleur grasped the fireplace poker, her grip tight enough to whiten her knuckles. She slid away from the fireplace over to the door, positioning herself behind it and peering through the crack into the hall.
A sense of déjà vu came over Fleur. She flashed back to a long-ago game of hide-and-seek, although it had been her tiny Lucy hiding behind the door and Fleur herself descending the stairs, passing by the ajar door, pretending she didn’t know her daughter stood behind it even though Lucy couldn’t stop giggling. Fleur placed her left palm against the door and eased it forward until she heard the soft click of the latch.
She froze and waited, grateful for her raspy breath even though it seemed to thunder through the house. The tread on the stairs stopped, and Fleur’s heart nearly did, too. She rushed to the windows, cursing the man who’d designed the lady’s parlor so its curved windows opened not onto the exterior world but onto an interior courtyard. Still, she could attempt to take cover in the overgrown greenery. Perhaps the reflection in the windows would turn Lucy’s mind away from the space. She lay the poker at her feet and grabbed the sash of the nearest window, trying to force it open.
The window wouldn’t budge. Nor would either of its companions. Perhaps the two centuries of paint or humidity anchored them in place, or maybe the jam was related to the cracks in the house’s foundation. Either way, they offered her no escape. Rather they contained her even as they put her on display.
Fleur reached down to retrieve the poker, then rose and turned slowly, suddenly aware of footsteps passing by the door. Panic gave her heart a jolt. Her gaze darted around before landing on the game table she’d been using as a workstation. There, poking out from beneath a large swatch of porcelain-blue upholstery fabric, sat her phone. She raced toward the table and snatched the cell up. If she could only reach Nicholas, he’d be able to do something. She tapped her finger on the screen, but it didn’t wake. The screen remained black, reflecting her own desperate expression back to her like an onyx mirror. The phone was worthless as anything more than a weak projectile she could launch as a last resort.
Fleur heard the loud pop of a champagne bottle.
The old melody started up again. This time it was a recording being played in the main salon. The music came from her parents’ old console stereo, so outdated it had shamed her when she was a teenager, so outdated now it would be hipster chic.
Outdated. A flash—the image of the old landline phone that still sat on Celestin’s desk. She’d considered having it turned off—it only ever rang when a caller misdialed or the number came up on some telemarketer’s list—but she’d never gotten around to i
t.
Lucy began singing along, this time picking up on the lyrics, joining in on some words, singing “la, la, la” to cover for those she didn’t seem to know . . . or remember. It would be too risky to creep along the hall, of course, but there was no need. She could use the hidden passage to reach it.
She imagined what she must look like—covered in blood, fireplace poker in hand, creeping along with exaggerated, almost cartoonish steps. The image didn’t stop her. She slipped into the passage, then eased the panel closed behind her. Each side of the panel bore a rustic iron slide-lock at the bottom. As far as Fleur knew, they’d never been shot even once in her lifetime; perhaps they never had been. Still, they turned easily in their mounts and dropped down into the sockets in the floor. Foolish, perhaps, to even bother, but the locks might buy her a few more precious seconds than it took to set them.
She averted her eyes as she pushed past the relic and eased the panel on the other end of the passage open. She stepped into Celestin’s darkened study.
“You always were resilient,” Lucy said, saluting her with a raised champagne flute. Her daughter stood before her, dressed in the gown Fleur had been working on.
Fleur flung herself backward, stumbling into the passage and knocking over the pedestal that held Celestin’s head. Fleur heard the awful thump as it hit the floor. She jumped forward and shot the bolts to lock this panel, too.
She found herself lost in utter darkness, certain her eyes would never adjust, until she noticed a thin line of light surrounding the panel on the other end of the passage. The dimmest glow illuminated Celestin’s head, his face turned toward it.
A sound like a battering ram slammed into the opposite panel. Fleur scrambled backward and lunged at the other wall, tugging on the bent handle of the iron bolt she herself had shot, now cursing herself for having done so. Another explosive boom. The wall before her shook. She pushed away and began dragging herself with the heels of her sweating, slick palms.