Déjà Vu & Gin
Heather R. Blair
Trampled Herb Inc.
DEJA VU & GIN
By
Heather R. Blair
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
© 2017 Heather R. Blair
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Created with Vellum
Dedicated to my readers, because otherwise my stories are just words on a page.
You are the magic.
<3
Contents
Preface
Prologue
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part II
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Afterword
Also by Heather R. Blair
Au clair de la lune,
Mon ami,
Prête-moi ta plume
Pour écrire un mot
By the light of the moon,
My friend,
Lend me your quill
To write a word . . .
Prologue
Tyr
The gypsy thing is not a story, though I know people like to speculate that I made it up. My mother was pure Rom. A princess of her people. As a child, I thought that made me royalty, too. My mother encouraged this fancy, letting me pretend to be a prince, fashioning me little crowns with bits of sticks and old fabric. She even had a necklace of moonstones that she let me use as my crown jewels.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so fucking pathetic.
I loved her, crazy as she was. How do you help loving an angel—even a broken one?
My mother was definitely broken, and it was my fault. She loved a man of the ton. He didn’t love her.
He was my father.
I’m still not sure how they met. She told me lots of different stories, each more fanciful than the last, but I’ve never known which version was closest to the truth. A tavern is most likely. My mother was beautiful and had a voice like none other. Her face has faded from my memory over the long decades, though I can still remember the shape of her profile, bending over me under the wagon where we slept. The graceful curve of her dusky cheek, her big dark eyes like the does I’d sometimes startle in the Queen’s forest.
But her voice? That I can still hear as clear as day. She sang me to sleep every night, most of the time out under the stars, her father’s wagon nearby.
It was like being serenaded by heaven, except her songs didn’t try to make light of the sin and darkness in the world. She sang of broken hearts and lovers lost. I know my father kept her as a secret mistress for a while. He told me so himself, many years later. Right before I shoved a knife through his throat.
A very secret mistress indeed. My mother was light skinned for a gypsy, but there was no mistaking what she was. He turned her out when she got pregnant with me. Four years later, he came back, trying to entice her with sweet words, gifts and even tears, saying he’d missed her so very, very much.
I was there. I heard it all. My mother may have lost half her mind from the stress of being nearly ostracized by her own people for having a mixed babe, but she was not a fool. She didn’t jump at his first offer, or his second, but he was a persistent man, my father.
Day after day, he came back to the caravan with flowers and food and clothes, even toys for me. He offered to buy me a pony of my own. I was obsessed with horses, all sorts, even the old mule that pulled my grandfather’s wagon. A pony of my own was about the best thing I could imagine, but my mother held firm.
I was furious, throwing a tantrum like only a four-year-old can. After days of tears and sullen looks and gods know what else, I wore her down where my father could not. She agreed to go with him just for an evening, to see the house he was offering.
She underestimated his capacity for evil. There was never any house.
I didn’t know then that the whole farce had been merely to get her alone with him and his cronies for a night of twisted fun and games. I didn’t know his wife came home unexpectedly and caught them carrying my half-dead mother out of the house. Or that he managed to play off the whole thing as an attempted robbery and that his barrister and the other men there corroborated his story.
No, I didn’t know then why my mother was thrown in Newgate Prison, but I did forget all about my pony when she didn’t come home. Over a month she was gone. I started to starve. My grandparents let me stay at the caravan, but their mercy didn’t extend to meals. My mother had never been subjected to the Kris and outright banishment, but things had changed.
I didn’t know that.
All I knew was that I missed my mother and I was tired and my stomach hurt all the time. Only one thing had the power to distract me.
I loved magic. All kinds, the sleight of hand that made baubles disappear and reappear at a whim, the gift of prophecy that drew the white gaje to our caravan despite the way their faces soured when they looked at us. Magic was the great equalizer.
The gypsies called it dook. The old drabarni in our caravan was one of the few who didn’t shun me. His eyes weren’t kind, but they were assessing. He rarely shooed me away when the gaje came to his wagon to get their fortunes read. He let me watch and sometimes he even tossed me a bit of bread in the morning or set out a piece of dried meat before bed. The drabarni was the only reason I didn’t starve outright, but his small tokens weren’t enough to keep me from fading. I was skin and bones the day my grandmother ordered me into their wagon. I didn’t know what was going on and at that point I was too far gone to care.
Silently, Grandfather drove us down into the city. By and by, I noticed a large crowd and behind them, a great stone building.
Without warning, my grandmother shoved me out of the wagon. “Gajengi baxt.” She spat on the ground before they drove off.
I wasn’t as fussed as you might expect. People were laughing and joking around me, and one woman even gave me a bit of sticky bun. The sweet revived me a bit and I remember smiling as I looked around. It seemed like a party. I never got to attend the parties our
people held frequently, as my mother and I were not welcome. We could only listen and watch from under the wagon.
This time I was right in the middle of the fun.
I didn’t know the party was because they were going to kill my mother.
It was execution day at Newgate Prison. People were excited because it wasn’t often a woman was executed, even a filthy gypsy. Some were dancing, mocking the Romani style, gyrating their hips obscenely. I didn’t notice the ugliness, not at first. I was distracted by a man in front of me.
A fine man. Like my father, but without the too-pale eyes and the pinched look to the lips. This man was also tall and black haired, dressed with a gentleman’s elegance, but he had a trickster aura that called to me. I found myself standing right behind him, with a group of other children. These were not well-dressed children. Oh, all were certainly in better shape than I, but none were of his class. Not even close. I didn’t note that until a long while later. He turned suddenly and grinned. His teeth were very white. Several in our little group jumped, but not I. His gaze wandered over us all before settling on me. His smile widened.
It seemed to say, “There you are!” Somehow he shooed the others away, or perhaps they wandered off on their own. In any case, he winked at me, then proceeded to make a coin dance over his fingers. It flashed in the sun, golden and bright. I laughed and grabbed at it, but he darted away, calling, “Come chava, chava.”
I chased him through the crowd, until he led me right to the rickety steps set in front of the prison.
Still laughing, I looked up—straight into my mother’s eyes as the hangman put the rope around her throat. For the first time I noticed how quiet the once-rowdy crowd had gone. Beauty can make even the cruelest hearts soften, at least for a moment or two. I knew what was going to happen now. I’d seen hangings before. Death was common then, not like in this modern age, where it’s hidden behind gleaming walls and antiseptic smells, far from the innocent eyes of children.
I’d seen the bloated corpses hanging with their tongues out.
“Daj,” I screamed. “Mama!”
She smiled at me, and though she must have been horrified to see me there, her eyes were bright with love. Then the hangman pulled the lever and she fell.
“See the pretty light,” the man with the coin whispered in my ear. “Watch how it fades away.”
“Make it stop.” I grabbed his arm. “Make it stop.” Instinctively, I knew he had the power to save my mother, the power to stop it all.
He looked at my too-thin hand on his coat, then up at my mother’s purpling face, and for a heartbeat, I think he considered it.
Then he laughed and brushed my fingers away. “No, it’s better this way, gypsy child. Learn the lesson now. Chaos is the master all must bow to in the end.”
When it was done and I’d sunk to my knees in the dirt, he got the attention of the guards and told them I’d stolen his coin, the bright coin that had somehow found its way into my dirty pocket. They threw me into the prison my mother had just left, but I barely noticed.
I’d watched her die and I’d been helpless to stop it. I vowed that night never to be helpless again. Chaos would never be my master. What fate I had, I would control.
A hopeless vow at the time, of course.
At least until I could grow in strength and cunning and will. So I grew. Eventually I escaped Newgate’s dreary walls.
I killed my father when I was fifteen, the barrister who he’d bribed to accuse her when I was sixteen and every single one of the bastards that had touched my mother that night by the time I was seventeen. It wasn’t enough.
It will never be enough. I still want what I’ve wanted since I was four years old.
To kill a god. The god who took such delight in my pain that day.
Loki.
And I’ll be damned if any witch is going to fuck that up.
Prologue
Ana
The first time I laid eyes on the Firebird Prince, it was the start of the season, my first at a fairy-tale creature court. My mother had made the mistake of waxing on a little too much about a visit to the Inferno Palace with Jett. I insisted Mom finagle me an invite as well and pull me forward in time for a night. I was twenty, an old maid by Versailles’s standards, and feeling neglected. I missed our world and hated concealing what I was. Not only that, I had hatched a plan to get my family back, and Viktor Vasilisa was a part of it.
The Vasilisa family has ruled elementals and most lesser FTCs in the Old World for several centuries, and with good reason. Blessed by the Firebird long ago for saving one of her kind, every first-born male of the line wields her magic. It’s a magic so strong it’s said to make Odin himself leery.
A man so powerful even the gods are in awe of him? This I had to see.
Wigs were already out of fashion in the FTC world by then, and while disconcerting at first, the absence of them allowed me a clearer view of the man I’d set my sights on.
He was rather rakish looking for a prince, with hair that hue they call dirty blond nowadays, cool grey eyes and a beard that had clearly defied his morning visit with the razor, leaving him with a perpetual shadow on his lean jaw.
I’d have pursued him if he’d been bald and paunchy, but finding him attractive was a pleasant surprise. Pleasant, but wholly unnecessary. It wasn’t his looks I was after.
And it certainly seemed I had gotten what I came for. Viktor couldn’t keep his eyes off me that night. He sent my mother and I an invitation to join the court the very next morning.
Having him return my interest, and so forcefully, was not only flattering but empowering. My plan was working and I was heady with hope and youthful arrogance. My mother was forced to bring me forward a few years early or risk the Firebird Prince’s wrath. Jett was already there, of course, so we stayed in London. I had one sister back and my plan for reuniting us all way ahead of Mom’s schedule was on track.
Viktor and I were engaged in less than a fortnight, a scandalous thing in those days. The prince wanted an immediate wedding and I, of course, concurred, but his less-than-enthusiastic uncle insisted we wait the summer out for propriety’s sake. King Evgeni, like most royals, always looked at me with something of a curled lip, as if he’d caught a whiff of something foul.
Not so, Viktor. He was nothing like his uncle and never seemed to care in the slightest that I was a witch. Even the Firebird Prince had to bow to the king’s will, though, so we waited.
Four months. I thought it was the four longest months of my life. I’m sure Viktor agreed, though for entirely different reasons.
I wasn’t a virgin. Oh, I was far from experienced either, but under Madame de Pompadour’s tutelage, I’d learned much. One of her urgings had been to rid myself of my innocence as soon as possible. There were ways to fake such things on a wedding night, she had assured me. Things that would ensure a new husband’s ego remained intact. But by no means, the king’s mistress had advised me before she died, should I go into the marriage bed without knowing exactly what to expect.
I arranged a discreet liaison. It was messy and not particularly pleasant, but it got the job done. I was forewarned.
Viktor was a decided improvement on that score when I finally let him wear me down a scant week before the wedding. We were at the family’s countryside estate for a summer holiday. Everyone was relaxed and happy, full of well wishes, and I was full of champagne, giddy with having my plan so close to fruition. When he took me out for a walk in the gardens and dismissed my chaperone to escort me to his private boat . . . Well.
What did it really matter at that point?
Turns out I would be very, very wrong. When I didn’t see him the next day, I was a little concerned. When it stretched to two days, I started to panic.
On the third day, I demanded an audience, surprised when he immediately agreed, not sure whether that was a good sign or not. It wasn’t.
It was the first time I’d actually seen him on the throne. Viktor may have
been the crown prince, but at the time, his uncle was very much the king. I’d always wondered how my fiancé would look in that chair, the golden wings outspread at his back. I’d a feeling it would suit him well and it did. Too well. Viktor was regal, cold and utterly dismissive when I kneeled before him. He was also succinct.
“I’ve decided you’re entirely unsuitable, Ana.” His handsome face was as stiff as his shoulders. “The idea of wedding a witch was a youthful impulse and one I have come to regret, especially since you have proven yourself of such questionable character.”
“Questionable?” I echoed. I will never forget exactly how small my voice sounded in the huge room, the way that one word pinged off the stone walls.
His voice hardened, his hands tightening on the arms of the throne. “We both know exactly what I’m referring to. I’m dismissing the court today to reconvene in the palace proper within the fortnight. You will not be welcome there again. I’ll give you until sunset tomorrow to take your leave with the others. I will wait to announce my decision until we’re back home.” I didn’t say a word, only stared straight ahead, trying to absorb this sudden crumbling of everything I had so carefully planned. I’d never felt so foolish. So crushed.
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