“It’s a ring,” she said.
“It’s a reminder.”
“Of what?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Try me.”
He sighed. “It’s a brand, of sorts. It marks me. As a dark angel.”
“Maurice says things are muddled. Good and evil are blurring. That you owe your allegiance to no one.”
“This is true.”
“Is that what that ring reminds you of?”
“No. It is a reminder, but not for me. For others. To remind them to keep away.”
Them? Itzy wondered. Or me?
Itzy stared at Nicolas, the charred bones—scars from the Petit Pont—avoiding Luc’s eyes. Luc turned to her, a great sadness on his face. He stared at her for some time, her stomach flipping over.
“You don’t look like an angel,” Itzy blurted.
This was met with some amount of amusement. “What does an angel look like, Itzy?”
“Oh, you know. Flowing white robes, for one. Brooding, another. A tendency to be lurking in a corner of a room, brandishing a harp.”
“Lurking?” Luc smirked.
“I’ll take you to the Met sometime,” Itzy said.
“Oh, you needn’t bother. I’ve seen them all. Many even as they were being painted. But, Itzy, I promise I’ve yet to meet an angel like those floating wastrels with harps in their hands. That was a result of too much opium in the pipes of the Renaissance masters. In fact, it is demons who love harps. Marie, in particular. I can’t stand the sound of them. And while we’re at it, demons are hardly red with pointed serpent tails and ears. But that, you already know.” Luc raised a glass. “Here, drink this. It’ll help you sleep.” The crystal goblet was filled with a thick, deep amber fluid. She sat up and sipped from it—it tasted complex on her tongue, warm and soothing. Liquid gold, like his eyes.
“Porto,” he said, examining the glass. The crystal looked like it was melting, the wine clinging to the inside of the goblet like tears. “1811. From a cave in Cima Corgo.”
“1811,” Itzy said thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you remember what you were doing then?”
“In fact, I do.”
“Tell me.”
“Feels like yesterday.”
“I bet.”
“Time is different, Itzy, for me.”
“1811?” she reminded him.
“That’s too easy.” He took a sip, placing the goblet beside Nicolas thoughtfully. “I already said I was buying this port.”
“Well, how about 1799 then? Harder?”
“Nope.”
“1897?”
“I was at the Ritz, in Paris. But you’re just throwing out random dates now.”
“Luc, you can remember what you were doing at all of those times?”
“Yes, Itzy.”
“That’s nice.” She yawned. “Tell me.”
“It’s very simple. I was waiting for you.”
Itzy kissed him now—a kiss quite unlike their first, with the rickety horse and carriage approaching. This kiss was long and dark, full of shadows that mixed in the back of her mind, sensations on her skin like sparks, the smell of the hearth from her childhood. A kiss that stretched out over time, tasting like the year 1811, when, although Itzy could not have known it, the summer’s cool temperatures combined with an early frost to produce the sweetest, most sought-after vintage in the history of tawny ports. High on a windy bluff, a young angel waited. The angel, in his dark greatcoat and white billowing silk scarf, stood on a rocky cliff against a gray sky, negotiating with a stout vintner. He produced a bursting billfold, purchasing the entire vintage and loading the wooden crates onto small ships in the nearby harbor. The ships, built for smuggling, would carry the thick green bottles to a cave in Corsica, to be stored for nearly two centuries.
Her hands ached as they brushed his jaw—the faintest stubble there against his smooth skin—and snaked their way into his dark curls. She opened her mouth and felt his smooth line of white teeth, tasted his faintly cinnamony tongue, as he pulled her closer. His lip—his perfect lower lip—was between her teeth and she bit down on it lightly. She felt herself tremble—the tremble of a slow, earth-moving machine, with a low rumble and infinite power. As if someone else had crawled into her skin.
The kiss did finally end, and Itzy held her head to his chest, feeling the rich Sea Island cotton against her cheek, waiting for the thudding of her heart to subside.
Elle est retrouvée!
—Quoi?—l’Eternité.
C’est la mere mêlée
Au soleil.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Here was her life, her short life flashing before her. The seventeen years notched in her belt, each a battle-won victory. But there was something else, she was realizing. Something very different, a newness—a glimmer of something bigger, something vast. Bigger than she—bigger than Luc and the Carlyle, and his angels even. Something eternal within her. A door had opened in her very core and through it was her mother’s everlasting legacy. She need only to walk through.
“I’ve been waiting for you, too,” Itzy whispered. The stranger in the cottage in Brittany, the one who stayed too long and drank their wine. The one who saved her.
Luc studied her face.
“I tried to warn them, Itzy. I tried to warn your family.”
“I know,” Itzy said.
“I knew Marie, you see. I knew she would never give up. I told them to go into hiding, but it was too late. They came that very night. They took your mother, Itzy. But they wanted you.”
86
It was dark. She must have fallen asleep again. The sweet taste of Luc’s port had soured in her mouth, which was dry. She swallowed, feeling her throat rebel.
She had lain next to him, watching the Bemelmans clouds. Luc’s body. The memory of it beside her. Shyly, she had touched his ruined wings. They were warm, surprisingly so. Little patches of eiderdown had grown over the gnarled joints and sinew like moss. Here and there was a stunted, broken quill—a small calcification at the tip, sharp and curved. The talons were ruined, cracked and blackened like Nicolas’s skull.
On his face while she touched them:
Sorrow.
Loss.
“Do you trust me, Itzy?” he had whispered.
She nodded.
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
“Listen carefully—we have little time left. Itzy—you need to save me from myself.”
She squinted at the dim ceiling. Blue. Sighing, she tried to turn, to find Luc beside her on the bed, to feel him again.
She couldn’t move. Breathing, in fact, was difficult. Eyes wide this time, she stared at the ceiling, concentrating.
Not a cloud in the sky.
Her mind went numb. How had she gotten back here, to the Blue Bedroom? She must have fallen asleep. Where was Luc? Fragments of her conversation with Luc returned to her, but it was a blur. She squeezed her eyes shut, listening. Horrible screeching noises, some sort of hissing from somewhere further in the suite. And breathing—someone’s raspy breathing was closer. Much closer.
The itzy bitzy spider, crawled up the water spout.
A voice was in her head, and it was not her own. It was singing, garbling the words with a swollen tongue. After several attempts, Itzy managed to lift her head. Her body felt distant, shaky. Like the worst case of pins and needles. Little shooting stars popped across her vision. Someone had dressed her. She had been sewn into the silver dress, which bound her tightly and made even breathing difficult.
Down came the rain and knocked the spider out.
She felt a cruel shove, and all the air left her. Her head fell back on her small iron bed. She felt her back arch and contort as her body writhed.
Itzy heard a voice then, a real voice, from the head of the bed.
“Miss Nash,” came the sinister, velvety-thick voice of Dr. Jenkins, “so good of you to join us.”
The appalling shr
ieking had quieted, and there was nothing to hear but the thudding of her heart.
And then the footsteps. A click of a high heel. A thud, something dragging. A pause.
Knock, knock.
87
“Ged ub,” the Divah said. And then again, more spitefully, “I said, ged ub.”
Itzy was blinking up at the Divah. Her skin felt hot and prickly and the smell was back—overwhelming her lungs with the bitter tang of sulfur. The demon leaned forward, bending over her, sniffing, scanning the bed. Wads of gauze protruded from her nostrils, making her nose bulbous and misshapen. Her skin puckered and sagged from this angle, Itzy saw, all the newness seemingly gone. Around her shoulders was her Aunt Maude’s fox fur.
Itzy stole a look around the room.
“Your freds hab lept you.”
“Sorry?”
The Divah pulled the gauze from her nose.
“Friends. They’re gone—abandoned you. They always do. They scattered into the nearest cracks in the wall like the roaches they are.”
Itzy was hauled to her feet by some hot force.
“That’s right. What we do for beauty, yes?”
There were shoes, apparently, which Itzy’s feet had been wrenched into while she was asleep, and she wobbled on these unsteadily, the heel a solid spike of glittering steel.
“You’ll get the hang of it. Although it hardly matters. Soon enough you won’t be needing those shoes. Soon enough you won’t be needing those feet!”
The Divah’s nose leaked, and she wiped it angrily with the back of her hand.
“Come now—follow me. Time to do your face.”
To Itzy’s great horror, her feet moved on their own.
The Versailles living room had been ransacked, as though by angry peasants. The Divah led the way through the incomprehensible mess. Gilt mirrors were cracked, shards lying dagger-like on the marble floor. Itzy picked her way across the rubble—broken ashtrays, plates of putrid food, parchment scrolls torn and discarded, befouled with scarlet paint. Something black and unsettling oozed across the low hearth, pooling upon the floor.
“Nearly there.” The Divah smiled. With each step, her knee bones ground together.
Soft cartilage is the first to decay, Itzy. A body is such a fickle thing.
Cold fingers crept down Itzy’s spine.
Itzy’s feet were moving of their own accord. Passing the sooty mirror above the hearth, she saw herself as if in a dream, pale and shimmering. Her reflection peered back out at her, and where the glass had cracked, a jagged line distorted her left cheek. Her hair, cloud-white at the brow, fell in a shock about her face. On her forehead was an unimaginable symbol, painted in blood.
She felt a shiver of annihilation.
She had skin, which was plainly her own. And beneath that, nerve endings, she supposed. And it was as if those synapses had been hijacked, like the electric feeling from the doctor’s mallet when he had tested her reflexes. Her hips swayed, and she sashayed—entirely against her will, her long silver dress dragging out behind her over the chaos of the room, the debris catching in its hem.
I cannot escape myself, Itzy realized with a jolt. How can I run from the terror when it’s inside me?
Aunt Maude’s bedroom had not been spared the ransacking.
An operating theater of some sort was arranged in the room, a long metal table and rolling carts with hooked blades and scissor-like clamps, beakers of amber fluid. Bright spotlights hung over the platform, their unforgiving light pooling on a wrinkled and stained sheet.
“This way, poppet,” the Divah was saying. One wall was devoted to a huge mirror, framed with glowing bulbs, the narrow table beneath it littered with pots of makeup, tubs of sparkles, sharp little brushes like fans. Blank, faceless heads wore wigs of various styles, whispers of the French Revolution. Flesh-colored powder had spilled and was streaked across the entire work surface. Pencils with coal liner were blunted; lipsticks broken and smeared from their casings.
Throughout this mass of refuse, thin, gleaming ampoules were everywhere, some bearing teeth marks, other cracked open like peapods, their contents long gone. Bent and fouled syringes were scattered like pine needles on a forest floor. Itzy recognized them from the doctor’s office. From his bag. They bore some sort of medical label.
BOTOX.
A shower was running from somewhere back in Aunt Maude’s bathroom, and the air was warm and misty.
Itzy sat—or rather, her body folded itself back upon the stool of its own accord.
“Yesssssss,” the Divah hissed, taking Itzy’s chin in her hand. She leaned in, inspecting. Itzy could smell her putrid breath.
The Divah grabbed a brush, and licked it, then plunged it into a cake of black paint.
“Still now,” she said, applying a black line above her eyelid.
Itzy felt her stomach recoil. Her face was smeared with something cool; her cheeks were brushed with shimmery powder from a cracked tub—and then her shoulders as well. A small comb was run through her eyebrows, and Itzy felt the pinch of the tweezers as the Divah pulled at them. Long, black, spidery things were glued atop her own eyelashes, a mole worked onto her cheek.
Itzy watched the Divah’s eyes with a morbid fascination. They were just inches from her own, black and dead. When she turned, the light caught them, and they flashed with a deep, fathomless depth—portals to a corrupt and tormented place. A dark place. A place beside a hearth.
Fear of the dark coursed through Itzy’s body like a current.
Here was the very darkness she feared—here was its source, the place of torment. She understood now why she hated the dark. The Divah was the dark.
The Divah caught her own reflection in the mirror and turned to it. The skin of her neck was uneven, and a waddle jiggled beneath her chin. Her cheekbones and jowls were puffy with excess fluid. Pulling at her neck, she tightened the skin against her windpipe and a mass of tendons, inspecting herself from all angles. Her hands moved to her face, pulling, prodding. Her fingers played over the crowded countertop, finally alighting upon an unopened ampoule. The Divah cracked it with her teeth and sniffed at the contents.
“Ever think of getting work done, Itzy?” She readied a syringe, tipping the bottle to meet the needle. “Don’t bother. It’s a slippery slope. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
The Divah pulled the skin beneath her eyes taut, and stabbed it with the needle. “What we have here is an inferior body.” She gestured to herself, to what lay beneath Aunt Maude’s fox fur coat. She pulled at the other eye, pushing at the sagging skin. “Not like my last one, mind you.” She straightened, examining her face anew.
A small drop remained at the tip of the needle, and the Divah collected it on the tip of her finger, dabbing it behind each ear.
“Humans—there’s a lot of mediocrity out there.”
The shower had been turned off, Itzy realized with some surprise.
A drip sounded, plink, and then another, as the showerhead emptied onto the marble tiles. From the corner of her eye, she could see someone moving about in there. A shadow on the wall, the mundane sound of water running in the sink, mirrored cabinets opening and closing.
“Darling, come see,” the Divah called over her shoulder, razor-sharp nails running through Itzy’s hair.
Itzy saw a flash reflected in the bathroom mirror, as an immense ivory wing unfolded, the talon on its tip gleaming gold. An angel rounded the corner, an angel of such incredible beauty but wearing nothing but a hard, foul malevolence upon his proud face. He was unabashedly naked, save for his astoundingly beautiful wings that draped all the way to the floor, and he moved with transfixing power and grace. Itzy flushed and tried to look away from him, straining impossibly to move on her own accord.
“Laurent,” the Divah said—only it was Itzy’s mouth that moved, Itzy’s voice that spoke. Her body coursed with fear. “What do you think of my handiwork?”
88
The door to Bemelmans Bar was of curtained-glass, a
ccessed by both the street on Madison Avenue and to the residents of the Carlyle through a small, low hall that bespoke of speakeasies, of rare secrets. Itzy stood before it, hesitating. She wore an oval mask the color of opals.
Mustn’t keep our guests waiting, the Divah had said in Suite 1804. And then, as if the puppet master abruptly left the stage, Itzy felt control return to her body; she felt the exquisiteness of the control of her own movements, and she promised herself that she would never take that for granted again. As the Divah turned her attention to her own ravaged face, Itzy found she could take small steps on her own—away from the horrible scene of the Divah preparing for the party.
Itzy heard a piano inside Bemelmans Bar.
She paused before the curtained-glass threshold, gathering her strength. In his bed, beside Nicolas and beneath the ceiling of clouds, Luc had told her his plan. Only with her help could he get his feather.
Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
A laugh—sharp and shrill—of some nearby guest ended abruptly as Itzy threw open the heavy door. The room reeked of the twang of flint and musk.
Bemelmans Bar was a low-ceilinged affair, the walls and ceilings the color of custard. Immediately before her stood a polished baby grand played by someone in a tuxedo. A coat check was in a corner where pitchforks and furs were gathered. Dark leather banquettes lined the walls, and at the far side of the room was a small, gleaming bar. Miniature lights dotted the corners here and there, and the tables held lamps—their sulfurous pools of yellow providing little illumination. But the defining feature of the room was the eerie paintings upon the yellowed walls, the low light rendering them like cave paintings.
Just as Johnny had said, Ludwig Bemelmans had chosen rabbits for his subject matter. Not as much painted as smeared upon the walls, the rabbits stared out at her, frozen. Scratches from an unsteady hand—a frightened hand. Rabbits in human dress, busy at human pastimes, visiting a zoo, roaming among caged humans. On another wall—a guillotine. A marauding band of bunnies, heads on spears.
Bemelmans was a scholar like my father, Itzy remembered Luc telling her. He went mad after his family disappeared.
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