To his credit, Gilles didn’t flinch. He merely dropped his hands, eyes tracing her face as if trying to memorize it, and brushed his lips to her forehead. “I love you too.”
They stared at each other. “Turn around,” Manon whispered.
“I have to stop her.” Tension radiated from every muscle in Reid’s body. Unsheathing Jean Luc’s Balisarda, he rose to charge forward, but I leapt in front of him—tears streaming down my own cheeks—and pressed my hands against his chest. Manon couldn’t know he was here. I had to hide him. I had to make sure she never saw. “What are you doing?” he asked, incredulity twisting his face, but I only shoved him backward.
“Move, Reid.” Panic stole the heat from my voice, made it breathless, desperate. I pushed him harder. “Please. You have to move. You have to go—”
“No.” His hands pried my wrists away. “I have to help—”
Behind us, something thudded to the ground. It was a horrible, final sound.
Too late—locked in our own sick embrace—we turned as one to see Gilles lying facedown on the cobblestones. Manon’s knife protruded from the base of his skull.
My breath left me in a painful rush, and suddenly, only Reid’s hands kept me upright. Blood roared in my ears. “Oh my god.”
Manon sank to her knees, pulling him into her lap and closing her eyes. His blood soaked her dress. Her hands. She cradled him to her neck anyway. Though her tears had finally stopped, she gasped as she rocked him, as she slid the knife free of his flesh and dropped it to the ground. It landed in the pool of Gilles’s blood. “This isn’t God, Louise.” Her voice was wooden. Hollow. “This isn’t Goddess, either. No divinity smiles upon us now.”
I stepped toward her despite myself, but Reid held me back. “Manon—”
“Morgane says sacrifice is necessary.” She clutched Gilles tighter, shoulders shaking and fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. “She says we must give before we receive, but my sister is still dead.”
Acid coated my tongue. I said the words anyway. “Did killing him bring her back?”
Her eyes snapped to mine. Instead of fury, they filled with a hopelessness so deep I could’ve drowned in it. I wanted to drown in it—to sink beneath its depths and never resurface, to leave this hell behind. But I couldn’t, and neither could she. Reaching slowly for the knife, her fingers swam instead through her lover’s blood. “Run, Louise. Run far and run fast, so we never find you.”
Madame Sauvage’s Cabinet of Curiosities
Lou
Heart still racing from Manon’s warning, I dragged Reid down the nearest alleyway—through a narrow, shadowed arch—and into the first shop I saw. If Manon had followed us, we couldn’t risk staying on the street. A bell tinkled at our entrance, and the sign above the door swayed.
MADAME SAUVAGE’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
I skidded to a halt, regarding the little shop warily. Stuffed rats danced in the window display, alongside glass beetles and dusty books with gold-painted edges. The shelves nearest us—teetering between black-and-white floors and starry ceilings—had been crammed with a motley assortment of animal skulls, gemstones, pointed teeth, and amber bottles. Pinned along the far wall, barely visible beneath all the clutter, were cerulean-blue butterfly wings.
Reid’s silence cracked at the queerness of the place. “What . . . what is this?”
“It’s an emporium.” My voice came out a whisper, yet it still seemed to echo all around us. The hair on my neck rose. If we left now, Manon might see us—or worse, follow us to Léviathan. Grabbing a brown wig from a particularly hideous marionette, I tossed it to him. “Put this on. The Chasseurs recognized you earlier. You need a new disguise.”
He crumpled the wig in his fist. “Your disguises don’t work, Lou. They never have.”
I paused in rifling through a basket of woven fabrics. “Would you prefer we use magic instead? I noticed you used it earlier to get yourself out of that little bind with the Chasseurs. How does that work? You’re allowed to use it when you deem necessary, but I’m not?”
He clenched his jaw, refusing to look at me. “I used it responsibly.”
They were the simplest words—perhaps spoken innocently—yet anger cracked open in my stomach all the same, like a rotten egg that’d been waiting to hatch. I felt it rising to my cheeks, enflaming me. I didn’t care that we were standing in a house of horrors. I didn’t care that the clerk was probably listening out of sight, that Manon was likely closing in at this very moment.
Slowly, I removed my spectacles and placed them on the shelf. “Say what you need to say, Reid, and say it now.”
He didn’t hesitate. “Who was the man, Lou? Why didn’t you let me save him?”
My heart dropped like a stone. Though I’d expected the question—though I’d known this conversation to be inevitable after what we’d witnessed—I was less prepared to address it now than I’d been in Beauchêne. I swallowed hard, tugging on my cravat, trying and failing to articulate the situation without causing irreparable damage. I didn’t want to lie. I certainly didn’t want to tell the truth. “We’ve been fighting for days, Reid,” I deflected. “Those aren’t the right questions.”
“Answer them anyway.”
I opened my mouth to do exactly that—unsure what words would spill out—but an elderly woman with deep, leathery skin hobbled toward us, swathed in a burgundy cloak three times her size. Golden rings glinted on her every finger, and a maroon scarf enveloped her hair. She smiled at us, brown eyes crinkling at the corners. “Hello, dearies. Welcome to my cabinet of curiosities. How may I serve you today?”
I willed the old woman to go away with every fiber of my being. “We’re just browsing.”
She laughed, the sound throaty and rich, and began rifling through the shelf nearest her. This one held a collection of buttons and pins, with the occasional shrunken head. “Are you quite sure? I couldn’t help but overhear terse words.” She plucked two dried flowers from a bin. “Might I interest you in calla lilies? They’re said to symbolize humility and devotion. The perfect blooms to end any lovers’ quarrel.”
Reid accepted his in a reflexive movement, too polite to decline. I knocked it from his hand to the floor. “They also mean death.”
“Ah.” Her dark eyes glittered with mischief. “Yes, I suppose that is one interpretation.”
“We’re sorry if we disturbed you, madame,” Reid muttered, his lips hardly moving, his jaw still clenched. He stooped to retrieve the flower and handed it back to her. “We’ll leave now.”
“Nonsense, Reid.” She winked cheerily, returning the lilies to the shelf. “Manon won’t find you here. You and Louise may stay as long as you like—though do lock the door when you’re finished, won’t you?”
We both stared at her, alarmed, but she simply spun with unnatural grace and . . . vanished.
I turned to Reid incredulously, mouth parted, but he’d resumed glaring at me with a single-minded intensity that immediately roused my defenses.
“What?” I asked warily.
“Who was that?” He articulated the words slowly, precisely, as if expending extraordinary effort to keep his temper in check. “And how do you know her? How does she know us?”
When I opened my mouth to answer him—to tell him I hadn’t the faintest idea—he cut across me abruptly, voice harsh. “Don’t lie to me.”
I blinked. The implication of his words stung more than I cared to admit, rekindling my anger. I’d only lied to him when absolutely necessary—like when the alternative had been him burning me alive. Or Morgane chopping off his head. Don’t lie to me, he said. Just as sanctimonious and arrogant as he’d always been. As if I were the problem. As if I were the one who’d spent the last fortnight lying to myself about who and what I was.
“You can’t handle the truth, Reid.” I stalked past him toward the door, a flush creeping up my cheeks. “You couldn’t handle it then, and you can’t handle it now.”
His hand caught my arm. “Let
me decide that.”
“Why? You don’t have a problem making decisions for me.” Jerking away, I pressed a hand against the door, fighting to prevent the words from spilling out of me. To swallow the bitter vitriol that had settled in my bones after weeks of his disapproval. His hatred. Aberrant, he’d called me. Like a sickness. A poison. And his face—after I’d saved his ass with the ice in Le Ventre—
“I’m clearly not making decisions for you,” he said dryly, dropping my arm. “Or we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Hateful tears welled in my eyes. “You’re right. You’d be dead at the bottom of a pool with a frozen dick.” My hand curled into a fist against the wood. “Or you’d be dead in the remains of a pub with a burnt one. Or bleeding out in La Fôret des Yeux from a thief’s blade. Or in Le Ventre from werewolves’ teeth.” I laughed then—wild, perhaps hysterical—my nails biting into the door hard enough to leave marks in the wood. “Let’s pick a death, shall we? God forbid I take the decision away from you.”
He pressed forward, so close now I felt his chest against my back. “What happened in the blood camp, Lou?”
I couldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t look at him. Never before had I felt so stupid—so stupid and callow and unappreciated. “A funeral,” I said, voice wooden. “For Etienne Gilly.”
“A funeral,” he repeated softly, planting his hand on the wood above my head, “for Etienne Gilly.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you didn’t need to know.”
His head dropped to my shoulder. “Lou—”
“Forgive me, husband, for trying to keep you happy—”
Snapping his head up, he snarled, “If you want to make me happy, you’d treat me like your partner. Your spouse. You wouldn’t keep secrets from me like a foolish child. You wouldn’t play with memories or steal Balisardas. You wouldn’t turn yourself to ice. Are you—are you trying to get yourself killed? I don’t—I just—” He pushed away, and I turned, watching him drag a hand through his hair. “What is it going to take, Lou? When are you going to see how reckless you’re being—”
“You churlish ass.” My voice rose, and I fought the urge to pound my fists and stomp my feet, to show him what a foolish child I could be. “I have sacrificed everything to keep your ungrateful ass alive, and you’ve scorned me at every turn.”
“I never asked you to sacrifice anything—”
I lifted my hands to his face. “Perhaps I can find a pattern to reverse time. Is that what you want? Would you rather have died in that pool than lived to see me become who I truly am? I’m a witch, Reid. A witch. I have the power to protect the ones I love, and I will sacrifice anything for them. If that makes me a monster—if that makes me aberrant—I’ll don the teeth and claws to make it easier for you. I’ll get worse, if that justifies your twisted rhetoric. Much, much worse.”
“Goddamn it, I’m trying to protect you,” he said angrily, flinging my hands out of his face. “Don’t turn this into something it’s not. I love you, Lou. I know you’re not a monster. Look around.” He extended his arms, eyes widening. “I’m still here. But if you don’t stop sacrificing pieces of yourself to save us, there won’t be anything left. You don’t owe us those pieces—not me, not Coco, not Ansel. We don’t want them. We want you.”
“You can cut the shit, Reid.”
“It’s not shit.”
“No? Tell me something, then—that night when I robbed Tremblay’s townhouse, you thought I was a criminal, not a witch. Why?”
“Because you were a criminal.”
“Answer the question.”
“I don’t know.” He scoffed, the sound harsh and jarring in the stillness of the shop. “You were wearing a suit three sizes too big and a mustache, for God’s sake. You looked like a little girl playing dress-up.”
“So that’s it. I was too human. You couldn’t fathom me being a witch because I wasn’t inherently evil enough. I wore pants and ate sticky buns and sang pub songs, and a witch could never do those things. But you knew, didn’t you? Deep down, you knew what I was. All the signs were there. I called the witch at Tremblay’s a friend. And Estelle—I mourned her. I knew more about magic than anyone in the Tower, loathed the books in the library that denounced it. I bathed twice a day to wash away the scent, and our room smelled permanently of the candles I stole from the sanctuary. But your prejudices ran deep. Too deep. You didn’t want to see it—didn’t want to admit that you were falling in love with a witch.”
He shook his head in vehement denial. It was as good as a condemnation.
A sick sort of satisfaction swept through me. I was right, after all. My magic hadn’t twisted me; it’d twisted him, taking root in the space between us and wrapping around his heart. “After everything, I thought you could change—could learn, could grow—but I was wrong. You’re still the same as you were then—a scared little boy who thinks all things that roam the night are monsters, and all things that rule the day are gods.”
“That’s not true. You know that’s not true—”
But with one realization came another. This one bit deeper, its thorns drawing blood. “You’re never going to accept me.” I stared up at him. “No matter how hard I try, no matter how much I wish it weren’t so . . . you’re not my husband, and I’m not your wife. Our marriage—our entire relationship—it was a lie. A hoax. A trick. We’re natural enemies, Reid. You’ll always be a witch hunter. I’ll always be a witch. And we’ll always bring each other pain.”
A beat of silence passed, as deep and dark as the pit opening in my chest. The mother-of-pearl ring burned a circle of fire into my finger, and I tore at the golden band, desperately trying to remove it—to return it. It wasn’t mine. It’d never been mine. Reid hadn’t been the only one playing pretend.
He marched forward, ignoring my struggle and gripping my face between his hands. “Stop this. Stop. You need to listen to me.”
“Stop telling me what I need to do.” Why wouldn’t he just admit it? Why couldn’t he say the words that would set me free? That would set him free? It wasn’t fair to either of us to continue this way, aching and yearning and pining after something that could never be. Not like this.
“You’re doing it again.” His thumbs stroked my cheeks anxiously, desperately, as my hysteria built. “Don’t make a rash decision. Stop and think, Lou. Feel the truth in my words. I’m here. I’m not leaving.”
My gaze sharpened on his face, and I reached deep, searching for something—anything—that’d force him to admit he thought me a monster. To admit the truth. I thrust the ring into his pocket. “You wanted to know about the man. Gilles.” Though somewhere inside that pit a voice warned me to stop, I couldn’t. It hurt. That revulsion in his eyes when he’d seen me in Le Ventre—I could never forget it. I’d done everything for him, and now I—I was scared. Scared he was right. Scared he wasn’t.
Scared I’d get worse before I got better. Much, much worse.
Reid’s thumbs stilled on my cheeks. I forced myself to meet his eyes, to speak each word to them.
“He was your brother, Reid. Gilles was your brother. Morgane has been hunting your siblings, torturing them to send me a message. She murdered two more at the blood camp while I was there—Etienne and Gabrielle Gilly. That is why La Voisin joined us—because Morgane murdered your brother and sister. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to distract you from our plan. I didn’t want you to feel pain—guilt—for two people you’ve never known. I stopped you from saving Gilles because it didn’t matter if he died, so long as you lived. I did it for the greater good—my greater good. Do you understand now? Does that make me a monster?”
He stared at me for a long moment, white-faced and trembling. At last, he dropped his hands and stepped back. The anguish in his eyes cleaved my chest in two, and fresh tears trickled down my cheeks. “No,” he finally murmured, brushing them away one last time. A farewell. “It makes you your mother.”
; I waited several minutes after Reid left the shop to break down. To sob and scream and smash the glass beetles from their shelves, crush the calla lilies beneath my boot. When I finally cracked the door open a half hour later, the shadows of the alley had vanished in the afternoon sun, and he was nowhere in sight. Instead, Charles waited at the threshold. I breathed a sigh of relief—then stopped short.
A small piece of paper had been tacked to the door. It fluttered in the breeze.
Pretty porcelain, pretty doll, forgotten and alone,
Trapped within a mirrored grave, she wears a mask of bone.
I tore it from the door with shaking fingers, peering down the alley behind me. Whoever had left this here had done it while I was still inside the shop—either when Reid and I had argued or after Reid had left. Perhaps Manon had found me, after all. I didn’t question why she hadn’t attacked, however. I didn’t question the morbid words of her riddle. It didn’t matter. They didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered at all.
A Change of Plans
Reid
My heart beat a painful rhythm outside Léviathan. Though I could hear the others inside, I paused at the back entrance, hidden from the street beyond. Breathing heavily. Light-headed with words. They careened into my defenses like bats out of Hell, wings tipped with steel. With razors. Bit by bit, they sliced.
Lou is going to get worse before she gets better. Much, much worse.
Deeper now. They found each crack and cut deeper.
This will always be your life with her—running, hiding, fighting. You will never know peace.
We were supposed to be partners.
Louise has started her descent. You cannot stop it, and you cannot slow it down. It will consume you both if you try.
Blood & Honey Page 29