by Megan Chance
For my brother’s sake, for everything he’d said to me this morning, I tried to smile. It was all I could do to say, “Of course.”
“And you must call me Odilé. Sophie, tell me what you most want to do while you are in Venice. Make a wish, and I shall make it come true.”
“I want Joseph to be famous,” I said without hesitation.
“Yes indeed, we all wish for that. But surely there must be something you want for yourself?”
I shook my head. “No. That’s our dream. It’s the one we’ve always had.”
She raised a finely arched brow. “Ah, how lovely. Twins dreaming together. Inspiring each other. But . . . you do not have a dream that is just your own?”
I thought of all the stories I’d invented over the years, the things I’d wished for. Escape. Relief. Forgetfulness. But they were all too private to mention to anyone but Joseph, who shared them. And I would not tell her my only other dream, the one I hoped was coming true. It was not for her to know. “Not really. No.”
Odilé frowned—so small, nearly imperceptible, as if she were puzzled. It was fleeting, but I saw it.
Joseph smiled and said, “It’s not just for me. It’s for Sophie too. We’re together in this. In everything.”
After this morning, his words were reassuring.
Odilé looked at me and said, “ I think that is not quite true, is it? Perhaps it is what your brother wishes to believe, but I see something else in your eyes, my dear Sophie. Your friend has become your lover at last, and you think of him now.”
I felt my brother tense. She sensed it too; I knew it by the way she said to him, “Come, cheri, you mustn’t be so selfish. Your sister has given you everything, has she not? But the inspiration you require draws a great deal of strength. Perhaps it is time to release her to find happiness on her own.”
I felt a quick panic. “Oh no. No, I don’t mind it at all—”
“Of course you do not,” she said thoughtfully. “But a man recognizes when he is not singular in one’s affections. I cannot help thinking it is perhaps why you have never known the kind of love you yearn for. Your brother is in the way.”
The truth of what she said took me aback. The past fluttered at the edges of my vision. The look on my brother’s face reminded me of this morning, his head in his hands, his confusing reaction to my words, as if he saw something he had never before seen, an uncertainty and awareness that worried me.
Odilé went on, “Do you know there is a heart in the archway of the sotoportego of the dei Preti? Legend says that if two lovers touch it at the same time, they are destined to love forever. If a person alone touches it, he or she can make a wish to find true love. There is a story to go with it—about a pair of lovers, of course—but it hardly matters. The superstition is all that remains of them now. Perhaps you should go there, my dear. Or take your lover with you. Such a promise will reassure him.”
Joseph stared at me and I felt a surrender in him I didn’t understand. Outside the wind howled. The restaurant sign squeaked loudly back and forth. Odilé glanced toward the door, shuddering delicately. “This storm feels ready to break open the world.” She reached for the wine as if it were a restorative. “Ah, there is no more. Cheri, will you get us another? And tell the waiter it must be a Bordeaux—an old one.” She smiled at Joseph, who rose to do her bidding, and the moment he left the table, she looked at me, saying urgently, as if she meant to get the words out before he returned, “How much do you wish for his fame, Sophie? How much does he?”
Her voice had such power. My heart pounded as I heard myself say, “It is all we’ve worked for.”
Her eyes seemed to glitter. “What would you sacrifice for it?”
“Anything. Everything.” As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. I felt as if I’d confided some terrible secret. I felt as if I’d given her a way to imprison me.
“Ah.” She smiled a little, reaching for a crab, dangling it for a moment over her plate before she dropped it and picked up her fork, breaking the tiny crab apart with the tines, making a fatal cut, splitting the crab’s back. It was nothing now but scattered crumbs on her plate, crabmeat and bits of fried batter. She laid the fork aside and picked up a bit with graceful, slender fingers. Her bracelets slipped and gyrated about her wrists as she dropped it into her mouth. I felt the weight of her gaze. For a moment, I felt as if we were connected—fatally, perfectly.
And again I saw in her Miss Coring. The same gaze, the gleam of reflected lamplight. Come, Sophie. Come and dance for me and your brother. Take off your nightgown and dance. . . .
“I need you, Sophie,” Odilé whispered, startling me from the memory. “More than you can know. If I were to ask you to . . . do something for me, would you promise to do it?”
“What is it?” I heard myself asking.
“Release your brother. Leave him to me.”
“Leave . . . Joseph to you? What do you mean?”
Her gaze held me tight. “Put Joseph in my hands, and I will make him a king. I will have the whole world lauding him. I will make him more famous than he has ever dreamed.”
I did not bother to ask how. I didn’t need to. The promise in her eyes burned. I saw truth in it. I felt her yearning calling to mine, her promise steeped in the pulse of my blood. And that promise felt as binding as the stories I’d told myself, years and years of story—spinning in my head as I danced in a nursery room for my governess and my brother as they lay entwined and writhing, the spell I cast as I held my brother’s gaze, my every twirl and dip embedding the charm deeper and more true. As long as neither of us looked away, we stayed in the world I made for us. Miss Coring did not exist. He was mine and I was his, and nothing could come between us. I was the princess rescuing both herself and the prince from the demon-queen in the tower. A golden bridge to salvation, crossing miles of river, of ocean, of canals that snaked through a city built of Faustian bargains and nightmares that did not frighten me because I’d put them there. I had made them. I will save us. I will save us. I will. Save us.
The urge to promise was overwhelming. I opened my mouth to say the words, to say Yes, yes—
And then Joseph returned. He sat heavily, saying, “He’s looking for a Bordeaux, but he doesn’t think he has one.”
“Ah.” Odilé made a delicately fatal shrug, very French, and threw me a glance full of meaning. “Well, then, perhaps it is a sign that the evening should end. How lovely it has been though, has it not? I must thank you both for sharing it with me.”
She paid the bill and we went out into the storm. The night was wild, the wind rushing, the rain blowing in torrents. Above our heads, the restaurant sign swung violently. Everything seemed strange—skewed, weirdly shadowed, off perspective. I put my hand to my eyes, feeling suddenly dizzy. “It all looks so odd.”
Joseph took my arm, a reassuring warmth. “It’s only the storm.”
But I wondered how he could not see it. How his artist’s eyes, which daily saw things I’d never noticed, could miss the sudden strangeness of the world.
We hurried to the gondola. Once we were inside, Odilé asked me, “Should we take you home, Sophie, or to your lover?” and it was only then that I realized that of course Joseph would go with her, that I’d felt his impatience to be with her all night and had not let myself acknowledge it. In this, I realized, she was not like Miss Coring. Joseph had never wanted another woman enough to leave me, but I felt that to be true now. Because Odilé was desire, more than any woman I’d ever known, and Joseph needed that. He needed to drown himself in it, to forget. But understanding why he wanted her didn’t make it any less painful. I felt afraid and abandoned. As if she sensed it, she put her hand to my cheek, leaning close so I smelled her perfume of almonds and musk, swirling about my nose, into my head, dizzying and sweet and wonderful, and whispered, “I will make him a king,” and I heard Joseph saying, as if from far away, “We’ll take her home.”
The journey was too quick; before I knew it the gond
ola stopped. I was unsteady enough as I disembarked that Joseph helped me while Odilé waited in the felze. He had my arm firmly in his grasp as we stepped to the door, and I turned to him, saying urgently, “Don’t go with her, Joseph.”
He gave me a chiding glance. “You know I have to. We need the money. There’s the commission to think of.”
“And you want to be with her.”
He glanced away uncomfortably.
“Why don’t you just admit it? You’d rather be with her tonight than me.”
His gaze leaped back. I saw a terrible, aching sadness. “What of it? You’re no better, are you? You’d rather be with Dane.”
“No, I—”
“You’re in love with him, Soph. D’you think I can’t see it? You’ve gone and done it despite everything I’ve said.”
He waited for me to deny it. I felt his hope, and I wanted to reassure him. But I couldn’t. “Perhaps I am.”
He froze. A long moment of silence passed between us. Then he said, “I don’t know when I’ll be back,” and kissed me. His lips were cold, wet from the rain. He stepped away, back into the gondola, and I stood there watching as he disappeared into the felze, watching helplessly as her gondolier took him away.
I heard guttural cries from somewhere, the rush of the rain, the snakelike hiss of the wind through cracks in the walls. In that moment, I believed that Venice was full of ghosts and devils, that demons haunted its shadows, that I was one of them. A spirit left to haunt the calli and rii of a city that was to make our dreams come true. I could not shake myself of the sense that I was fading, that in my quest to be special in my own right, I was losing Joseph, that I had already lost him.
Our rooms felt empty—more than empty, deserted—and the house pressed against me as if to say that I didn’t belong here. I went into the sala and lay down on the floor, staring up at the blackness that was the gilded-sunset ceiling, trying to remember how it had been to lie here with my brother, to watch the morning dance, but the memory would not come. I felt his absence as a hole in the world, something too big to feel, unfathomable. I closed my eyes, imagining an old, old story: a princess alone in a room, a prince returning from a battle, the demon-queen slain and her blood upon his sword, triumph in his eyes. Do you see what I’ve done? I’ve killed her, my love. I’ve killed her for you, for the both of us—
A scuffling broke into my imaginings. My eyes flew open. I jerked up, peering into the darkness, my heart racing. It was Joseph, returned. Joseph triumphant. But there was nothing there. Only silence, and just as my heart was settling, just as I felt the dullness of despair, I saw a movement, a shifting in the air, as if someone stood just beyond my vision, watching me in the darkness. I smelled cold and shadow. The hair rose on the back of my neck; I felt a quick terror, and then . . . calm. As if whatever stood there in the darkness meant to let me know it was not a danger.
I remembered what Odilé had told us about the ghost in the Moretta. The man who had thrown himself off the balcony out of despair and love. I whispered, “What do you want?”
My voice sounded too loud. The air shifted, only darkness again, whatever had been there gone, and I was shaken, my heart racing again. Impossible that I should have seen it. Impossible that the stories were true. And yet, I knew better than most that they were. I felt myself suddenly to be in the middle of one. The stories I told always ended happily, but the ghost’s lingering presence, his sorrow and his pain, reminded me that sometimes tragedy was the rule.
I thought of Joseph turning away from me on the stair, the goodbye in his kiss, his words I don’t know when I’ll be back, and Odilé’s: I will make him a king. . . . Release him, and with the ghost’s absence, the spell of Odilé snapped, and I knew that I had made a terrible mistake tonight in letting my brother go.
NICHOLAS
I could not have told you what play I’d seen at the Goldoni. I could not have given you a single character or scene had my life depended on it. I did not stay until the end; I could not bear to. Instead, I set out for home, sick and afraid, with visions of Odilé’s lamia-serpent tightening her coils in my head. I hurried through the pouring rain, thunder and lightning crashing around me, a foul wind blowing, the rainwater that flooded the streets seeping into my boots.
I did not sleep, and by the time the storm gave way to dawn, my fear had turned to anger and desperation.
I went to the Dana Rosti, to my place on that wretched fondamenta, where I huddled, shivering, waiting for him to emerge. The curtains were drawn, blocking light and movement from the windows, and I watched in frustrated dread. I knew he was there, just as I knew he must come out at some point, unless her hunger was so great it destroyed him. But I didn’t think that would happen—not yet. There was so little time now before she would turn, and she needed to choose. That she would choose him was inevitable. I had known it the moment I’d met him, hadn’t I?
The thought of what she would reduce him to—all that talent, gone. Nothing left in those deep blue eyes but misery and despair and madness. And what that would do to Sophie . . . what would she be without him? To think of their magic stripped, the two of them less than extraordinary. . . .
I forgot what I’d lost in my own encounter with Odilé. I forgot what I thought I would win with her destruction. I thought only of Joseph and Sophie. I waited impatiently for him, running my various persuasions through my head, an endless circle of pleas. I thought he would listen to me. And if I could not persuade him on my own, I would go to Sophie. I had rarely convinced a man to leave Odilé, but I’d never had so much at stake before—not just the fate of the world, but my own, most personally.
And so I waited, shivering with cold, as the morning dawned gray and overcast, with a breeze that rippled the murky waters of the Canal and a dampness piercing to my bones. I had begun to wonder what I would do if he never emerged when I heard the balcony door open, and I glanced up to see Hannigan step out. He wore only a pair of trousers and his shirt, which was open and fluttering as he came to the balustrade. He braced his hands upon it and leaned over.
She did not come out behind him—a blessing I didn’t think would last long. But I grabbed the opportunity and stepped from my hiding place, striding quickly to the center of the fondamenta, waving. I saw him see me and start.
“Dane?”
“Quiet,” I said. “Can you come out for a moment? I want to talk to you.”
Concern swept his expression. “Is Sophie—”
“Ssshhh. Come down. And tell no one. Hurry.” I stepped away before he could say anything else, hurrying to the narrow calle that separated this ruined palazzo from the Dana Rosti, and waited. I half expected to see Odilé come instead of him, her thin and nasty smile, a smug You’re not so clever after all, are you, Nicholas? and I was relieved when it was only Hannigan who stepped from the gate. His shirt was buttoned now, and he’d put on boots. Closer, I thought he looked tired, and I wondered how much Odilé was affecting him. I wondered if she’d chosen him yet. If she had, it was over and done; there was nothing left but to help him end his misery—which I realized I would do, should he ask. I would not abandon him to madness.
Hannigan frowned when he saw me and hurried over, saying urgently, “What is it? If it’s Sophie—”
“She’s fine, as far as I know,” I told him. “It’s not Sophie I’ve come about—or, not really, anyway. It’s you.”
He swept his hair back from his face, his frown deepening. “Me?”
“You’re in grave peril, my friend. Greater than you can know.”
“What peril is that?”
“I have some history with Odilé León. There are things you should know about her.”
“You’ve history with her?” He sounded frankly disbelieving—almost insultingly so. “What kind of history?”
“Just what you’d expect,” I answered, more sharply than I’d meant. “I met her in Paris about seven years ago. I spent some time with her.”
“Some time.”
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br /> I nodded. “Doing just what you’re doing. Making love. Creating art. She is the devil’s own inspiration.”
He frowned again.
I went on, “She looks for young men with talent. And then she destroys them. Each of them, and always. She’ll destroy you too.”
Now his mouth quirked in a wary smile. “You were with her, you say, and yet you don’t seem destroyed.”
He was like all the others. Caught in her spell. Not wanting to believe. I took a deep breath. “Because I escaped her in time. By the very grace of God, I suppose. But I’ve been following this woman for seven years, Hannigan. Seven years I’ve been watching what she’s done to other men. Believe me when I say you must stay away from her.”
I saw the suspicion come into his eyes. “So you can step back in?”
“I’ve no intention of doing that.”
“I see,” he said dryly. “So you follow a woman for seven years for no other reason than curiosity?”
I laughed shortly. “Dear God, if it were only that! No. In fact, you could say it’s a calling, of sorts.”
“A calling.”
I was failing. Desperately, I said, “I know what you’re thinking. You think I’ve never fallen out of love with her. You think I’ve been following her hoping that one day she’ll take me back. I can assure you there’s nothing further from the truth. She’s a demon, Hannigan. Literally. I’ve seen things . . . you can’t even imagine. I’ve made it my business to see that no one else falls under her spell. Especially a man I hope to make my brother someday.”
He went very still. His blue eyes darkened.
I wasn’t certain what I saw there, jealousy or anger or relief, but I plunged on. “It’s not Odilé I love, but your sister, and I think you know it, which is why I’m asking you to listen to me now.”
I had his full attention at last. “All right.”
“This is going to sound absurd—like a fairy tale.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m used to fairy tales.”