Grim Lovelies

by Megan Shepherd

  But not tonight. Tonight she dreamed of birds with gold-tipped wings that spoke with human voices, their eyes not inky black but green and hazel and blue, the eyes of children. She woke up shivering.

  At dawn, she put on a fresh apron, climbed the stairs to Luc’s attic workrooms, and grimaced as she slaughtered and plucked the Corpus crows, her dream still too fresh; it was as though she were plucking fingernails off children.

  The flight and tail feathers went into a linen bag to be used later for one of Mada Vittora’s tricks. The wispy gray down feathers just made a mess all over Luc’s big wooden worktable. His presence in the room was everywhere: in the placement of the knives and mortars and pestles; in the chair’s indentation that fit his body, not hers; in a half-cut onion, now shriveled. She smiled as she brushed away a dry husk of onion skin. Luc must have been making more invisible ink—​onion, lemon juice, a pinch of bitter herbs. Not long after she’d become a human girl, she’d made a mistake—​too much bleach in the laundry—​and Mada Vittora had banished her to her turret room for a week with no contact from the others, no conversations, no notes, and Anouk had thought she would go mad. But Luc had slipped perfectly innocent blank pages under her bedroom door, along with a fresh candle and matches, on the pretext that she should write the Mada a note of apology. Only . . . the pages smelled strange, like citrus and onion. When Anouk lit the candle to peer more closely at the paper, the heat from the flame made words bloom across the parchment.

  Too bad you didn’t make the mistake of pouring that bleach in her shampoo instead. We could have called her the Bald Witch.

  A smile had cracked across her face. With those words alone, Luc had made everything okay.

  But where was he now, with his secret notes and silly jokes?

  She grabbed the last crow and plucked a handful of feathers. She’d asked Hunter Black that morning if he would kill the crows, but he had only scowled and told her to do her own dirty work. As if killing weren’t the very task he’d been made for. Magic Is Life; Life Is Magic. The motto of the Haute. In order to do their tricks and whispers, members of the Haute needed to take life; the more complex, the better. The magic from a single Pretty life could theoretically sustain a witch for a year. But magic was tricky. Take a life, and the spell had a way of turning on its caster, causing not outright death, but death in slow little pieces: a liver turned to stone, a heart into wood. It was called the vitae echo. And so Mada Vittora, like all the witches, consumed flowers, herbs, feathers, and blood to work her tricks—​smaller pieces of life that carried little or no echo. And if she needed to kill any enemies? Well, beasties couldn’t use magic, but they could use knives.

  It was a useful loophole.

  Anouk wiped her forehead with her sleeve and then shook out her apron and watched the downy feathers float away into the air, some catching in the light, hanging suspended as though time were frozen. She used Luc’s paring knife to cut out the crows’ pink-fleshed breasts, then arranged them in a glass baking dish and rubbed in oregano, rosemary, and sage from Luc’s stores.

  Ready to pop in the oven downstairs.

  She ran a cloth over Luc’s table, wiping it clean, then wrapped the carcasses in old newspaper, clutched the bundle under her arm, and picked up the dish.

  She padded downstairs and stopped at the landing. Listening. The ticking of the grandfather clock. Otherwise, no footsteps, no conversations. She glanced over her shoulder, Beau’s words in her ears. Spy on the house. Find clues about Luc.

  If any clues were to be found, she knew where to look: the scrying room. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. The scrying room had an irritating way of moving around the townhouse, appearing behind different doors at different times. Once she’d found it in the guest bathroom. Another time, in the upstairs linen closet.

  She walked down the hall, nudged the first bedroom door open with her foot, and looked in, her heart pounding, but it was still just a bedroom, untouched since the last time she’d cleaned it. The next two bedrooms too. The final door was open a few inches. She peeked inside.

  It smelled musty, not like a bedroom at all. The reek of old feathers and flesh. There was a chattering of machinery.

  Voilà—​she’d found it.

  She slipped inside, set down the baking dish, and closed the door behind her. She’d only ever glimpsed the scrying room from a distance, catching flashes of Luc’s curved back as he leaned over the desk, headphones on his ears, pencil in hand. This had been Luc’s job when he wasn’t tending roses—​not just a gardener, but a spy.

  The contraption that took up the entire rear wall of the scrying room was a type of switchboard, only this switchboard wasn’t used for two-way communication but for spying: a scryboard. Its operator would connect wires to specific slots in order to listen in covertly on the network of whispers that came from crows and, sometimes, even lowly insects like dragonflies. Scryboards were illegal in the Haute, of course—​hence the reason why Mada Vittora had charmed it to keep changing locations around the house—​but that didn’t mean that every witch didn’t have one hidden away somewhere.

  Anouk took a step closer, apprehensive. Unlike the Pretties’ switchboards made of wood and wire, Luc’s scryboard was conjured out of more . . . organic materials. The glossy black wires that connected to different hookups were actually dark, ropy veins. A few malformed black feathers grew out of a row of gears near the top. The whole switchboard seemed to be pulsing slightly. In. Out. Breathing. Not alive, exactly, but not entirely lifeless either.

  She sat on the stool, blowing dust off the log of meticulous notes that Luc kept, the record of who he’d been spying on and what he’d overheard. But that was only the official record he kept for Mada Vittora. He had another log. A secret one.

  She felt under the desk until her fingers brushed a pad of paper, held there with a latch. She freed the notebook and flipped through the pages, looking for anything that might tell her where he’d disappeared to and why. But it was simply records of conversations he’d overheard—​gossip about Goblins, trouble with a former witch’s boy turned jewelry broker. She had no idea what she should be looking for. She picked up his headphones, turned them this way and that. Glossy black feathers grew from both earpieces, which were connected by a band of curved bone. She put them over her ears, and when she caught her reflection in the window, she thought they looked like wings on the sides of her head.

  For a moment there was only the faint sound of whispering. A man’s distorted voice. Nothing she could make out clearly.

  . . . These people . . .

  She adjusted the headphones.

  . . . These people with their little dreams and their little desires . . .

  The transmission dissolved into static. She traced the wire. It led to a slot marked 444, and she flipped through the log until she found the corresponding number. The account for Mada Zola, the Lavender Witch, was 444. Just the night before, Beau had mentioned her banishment. She cocked her head. Who was this man on her wires now, whispering about dreams?

  In the official logbook, there were no records for account 444. But in the secret log, Luc had scrawled this:

  8 August  Zola speaking to a man at her estate. A disgraced Royal? Her witch’s boy?

  9 August  Zola speaking to same man again. A partner of some sort. Romantic? Scheming how to break her banishment and return to Paris. Talk of a queenship.

  11 August  I personally attempted contact. Requested help. No response. Will attempt again.

  Anouk felt a chill. Luc had not only listened in on the Lavender Witch privately—​he’d tried to contact her.

  Why?

  She heard a stair creak downstairs and slammed the log closed, then took off the feathered headphones. She hurried down the hall with the baking dish of crows, headed for the kitchen stairs.

  “Anouk,” a voice called. “Stop.”

  She winced. It was Viggo. She’d just walked by his bedroom. She went back and pushed his
door open a few more inches. Viggo looked up from his armchair, meeting her eyes. A tube snaked into his left arm’s inner elbow, connecting him to a glass pump that was filling steadily with blood, drop by drop. She quickly looked down; he hated for anyone to watch him during a blood harvest.

  “Did you want something, Viggo? Water? Tea?” He shouldn’t even have been home now. He harvested on Fridays, and it was only Wednesday.

  “Come here.”

  She kept her eyes lowered as she took a step into the bedroom. Viggo wasn’t Mada Vittora’s real son, of course. Witches didn’t have children. The exact reason why was murky in Anouk’s mind, but she knew it had to do with the vitae echo: withered wombs, organs turned to stone, nasty things that came with the high cost of doing magic. In any case, witches had no use for children. It was blood they were after. Fresh young blood in copious amounts. Almost every trick and whisper demanded it. And so each witch adopted or stole a baby boy—​only ever a boy—​to raise. A lifetime of blood siphoned off, pint by pint, in exchange for an upbringing fit for a prince.

  Viggo’s hand tensed and released, tensed and released. The blood pumped steadily. “Have you seen Cricket recently?”

  She shook her head quickly, relieved at such a simple question. “She hasn’t come by the house in a few weeks. Your mother’s kept her busy with tasks around the city. Thieving books for the library, I think. The last time I saw her was at the Goblin gathering.”

  Viggo kept pumping his fist.

  “Did she say anything about me?”

  Anouk paused.

  Cricket had had plenty to say about Viggo at the Goblin gathering, all of it heavily laden with profanity. Something about a closet, Viggo making an unwanted confession, breathy whispers of You’re beautiful and I hate that I love you, though he’d never admit to doing it, of course. Viggo was human and young and handsome and richer than a god. Lusting after a beastie girl was beneath him, even one with cinnamon curls and rosebud lips and an easy strut that turned heads as if by magic. Luckily Cricket was a thief with quick reflexes and a quicker wit; she’d gotten back to a roomful of Goblins before his hands had strayed too far.

  Maybe being beautiful was a curse, Anouk thought. Beautiful got you cornered in closets with pawing witch’s boys. While cleaning the parlor once, she’d overheard two Goblin girls in the next room debating whether Anouk was pretty or ugly. Pretty: her heart-shaped face. Ugly: the unfortunate nose. Pretty: long tawny hair, though it was often a mess. Ugly: the heavy set of her jaw.

  Ugly, they had ultimately decided.

  She’d always been self-conscious about her jaw. It gave her the look of some half-starved creature, she knew, a look that, every time she glanced in a mirror, she feared betrayed her deepest secret:

  Animal. Creature. Thing.

  An involuntary shiver ran down her spine. “No,” Anouk told Viggo. “She didn’t say anything else.”

  Viggo grumbled in the armchair. His face was pale; the jar of blood was nearly full. He’d be in a foul temper the rest of the day, moody and drained.

  “I want you to send her a message. Tell her my mother wants her here tonight to help with the dinner party.”

  “But the Mada didn’t say—”

  “Tell her.”

  Anouk’s jaw clamped tight. Mada Vittora possessed their pelts, not Viggo. And yet refusing him was dangerous. One word to his mother, and Anouk might be locked in the cellar for days.

  “I will,” she said quietly.

  She escaped back to the hallway, only then realizing she was still holding the tray of herbed crow breasts and the paper-wrapped carcasses clutched under one arm. She tossed the bird entrails out into the courtyard, calling to the stray cats, trying to entice them. But they never came close.

  Anouk exchanged her dirty apron for a fresh one and tied her hair back in a ribbon. She started with the feather duster, humming through each room on all seven stories, and then took the mop and polish to the ballroom floor. She’d read about contraptions the Pretties used, vacuum cleaners and blenders and something called a Mr. Coffee, but those things used electricity, and electricity interfered with Mada Vittora’s magic.

  The afternoon passed in a cloud of dust motes and wood polish. Only once did Anouk pause; while cleaning the windows, she stopped to gaze out at the city beyond and remember the magic of being on the roof last night with Beau.

  She heard Beau and Mada Vittora return sometime in the late afternoon while she was buried under mountains of potatoes and carrots, the cookbook splayed open, apron streaked with peels.

  Beau came in, carrying a cardboard box. “Cupcakes from Coquelicot. Lady Metham adores them.” He bent over the pot bubbling on the stove, sniffing. “Hot as hellfire in here. Is this a bouillabaisse?”

  “Yes. And scamper off, I’m running behind. They’ll be here in an hour.” It was an old kitchen with poor ventilation, and steam made her hair cling to her face. She pushed it back as she attacked the pile of carrots.

  Instead of leaving, he leaned in. “Were you able to find out anything about Luc?”

  She paused, knife in hand. “His room was just as he left it. I found the scrying room and a few odd notes in his log, but I don’t know what they mean. And then Viggo saw me.” She shivered at the memory of the snaking tubes. “He was doing a blood harvest.”

  “On a Wednesday?” Beau’s face darkened. “He harvested twice last week too. Why does the Mada need that much blood?”

  They heard footsteps in the hall. Anouk jerked her head toward the door. “You should go. I’ll keep looking.”

  “You’ll be careful?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  Beau brushed a curl off her forehead and sauntered out, unbuttoning his chauffeur’s uniform. She finished the bouillabaisse and portioned it into teacups with rosemary woven around the handles; for the second course, she’d have a summer salad, for the third, the Corpus crow breasts stuffed with Gruyère and plum, and then the cupcakes and coffee. She laid out the table settings, polished the silver wearing white gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, and was lighting the candles just as the doorbell rang.

  “Anouk, the door!” Mada Vittora called from one of the upper stories.

  “Yes, Mada!”

  She hurried to light the final few candles, took one last look at the ballroom table, and grinned at the beautiful spread. She ran downstairs, expecting Lord and Lady Metham. She hadn’t ever met them but felt as though she had; she’d often seen them, their hair threaded through with glittering silver, their clothes gauzy as spider’s silk. Their faces had watched her cleaning daily from the portrait above the drawing-room fireplace. Not just watched her—​spied on her. The portrait was enchanted. There were real eyes behind those painted ones, though Anouk knew chances were slim that they’d ever bother to spy on a maid when they had hundreds of Goblins and witches and Pretty associates throughout France to keep an eye on. It was a requirement that every magic handler in Europe hang the portrait of the Shadow Royals in the most prominent room of the house. To remind them all of whom they served within the Haute. And to ensure no secret meetings escaped the Royals’ ever-watching eyes.

  She opened the door and paused, surprised. It wasn’t the Methams. A young man waited on the steps, his back to her, looking down at the sad little tree in the front garden.

  He wore jeans and a jacket with the collar pulled up against the night breeze, a wool scarf around his neck, and a hat that hid his hair. For a second, hope pulled taut in Anouk’s chest. Luc had a hat like that.

  He turned.

  Pale skin, not Luc’s black-brown complexion. It wasn’t him.

  The young man tugged off the hat. His hair was honey colored, slightly mussed as though he’d combed his fingers through it distractedly.

  He wasn’t wearing gossamer silks. There was no sign of silver in his hair. But he had the same dark eyes that had watched her from the portrait while she swept and polished the drawing room. His was the devastatingly handsome fac
e of the figure in the very center, flanked by Lord and Lady Metham and the other lesser Royals, a golden crown of briars resting on his perfect hair. Once, she’d even hesitantly dusted some fuzz off his pale painted face, half afraid his beautiful mouth might come alive and bite her.

  Now his eyes caught the light, flashing dark tapeta like an animal at night.

  “Hello.” His voice was deep and not at all unpleasant. “I take it I’m at the right house.”

  Anouk found she couldn’t quite speak.

  She hadn’t expected the dazzling Prince Rennar ever to wear jeans—​or to be standing on her doorstep.

  Chapter 4

  Prince Rennar’s gaze dropped to Anouk’s midsection, and with a blush, she realized she was thoroughly sprinkled with flour. She took a step back, holding the door open with lowered eyes.

  He looked at her expectantly. It took her a moment to remember that the house’s ancient protection spells required an invitation every time the Royals wanted to enter.

  “Your Highness, yes. Welcome to Mada Vittora’s home. Please, come in.”

  He stepped in, uncoiling his scarf, taking in the grand foyer with mild interest. But then his eyes slid back to her with the same eyeshine that sometimes reflected in the drawing-room portrait. It always gave her that neck-crawling feeling of being watched.

  She reached back now, rubbing her neck. Came away with an errant carrot peel.

  “So it’s true.” He regarded her with an odd expression. “Vittora does have beasties serving her.”

  His eyes were too sharp, too piercing, as though they could see through her skin to the bones beneath.

  She wasn’t sure how to answer this, so she stuttered, “May I . . . take your coat?”

  He shrugged out of his jacket and laid it over her waiting hands, but before she could turn to the closet, he grabbed her wrist, quick and firm.