But with a sick sense of certainty, I know she won’t be able to stop Yolande from leaving. Maybe Yolande has already left—I saw it happen, but time is so fractured, it doesn’t seem to correspond to a chronology. Or maybe something will happen to keep Athénaïs from preventing the flight.
Who knows.
“I need more information,” I blurt out. “I want to know everything. Tell me what the prophecy means.”
She stands up. “Would you like to look in my scrying glass?” she asks. “I can show you better than I can tell you.”
“Yes!” I stand up, too, and her eyes flick over my body with appreciation.
“So strong,” she says. “Always such a strong man.”
She turns and her movement makes the candelabra flicker—but that’s not it. It wasn’t her. It was the very air glimmering.
“No,” I cry, and the last thing I see is her look of shock as I vanish from her view.
I’m back in an abandoned section of the palace, dark and cold. I stumble my way back out to the hall. Why couldn’t I see? Why did I get whisked away just as she was about to tell me everything?
I punch the wall and it makes a satisfying dent. There. I ruined a national monument.
“Come back!” I shout as loud as I can. I realize I’m dangerous to myself: any guard who comes across me now can see me, can arrest me.
Using my corporeality to spend the night in jail would be an insane waste.
“Athénaïs?” I whisper.
These halls have not had living people dwelling in them for a long time.
Intention still works. I find Eleanor.
She’s in the hotel room where Phoebe’s mum is lying on the bed sideways, black mascara trails running down her face and staining the pillowcase. She must’ve cried herself to sleep. Steven sits in the chair, rigidly upright yet slumbering. Good thing they’re out of it or they’d lose their minds seeing a strange person suddenly appear in their room.
What a change, coming from the warmth of Athénaïs’s compelling personality. Eleanor stands and comes to look at me assessingly.
“Did you find Giraude?” she asks.
“No. Did Phoebe come back with Tabby?” Stupid, but I had to ask.
She shakes her head.
“None of the jobs have been done,” she says.
“I’ll go back out again. I just wanted to check in.”
“We’re fine. If you consider this fine.” We both turn and regard the monumental sadness that fills the room with grief so deep it is almost tangible. I swear the air is thicker in this gloomy room.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m off, then.”
“Good luck,” she says, but her voice sounds tinny and insincere.
I’m about to go, but I pause and look her deep into the eyes.
“Not like that,” I say. “Eleanor, I need to hear it like you mean it. Like you always used to mean it.”
Her face, a different face, her words of wisdom, her guidance for me across the stretch of centuries. She was once my advisor, my counselor, my head on my shoulders.
“Miles,” she says. “Good luck.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The trouble with prophecies is that if they give a timeline, often that timeline comes and goes without the world quivering or even pausing. Belief in divination becomes an act of fervent if misguided faith.
—Failed Prophecies throughout the Ages
I choose the part of the lawn where I last saw Tabby. She’s not there . . . but . . .
Around the corner of a bush, skirts are disappearing, thick and dragging on the moist night grass. I surge after them and catch up with Giraude.
“Hello!” I greet her.
She frowns and steps aside to allow me to pass as if I’m any other jerky tourist who stayed within the grounds past closing time. I can see the very instant she senses I’m Sangreçu. I’m full of blood and sensation—my veins roaring with the Sangreçu blood and the job I have to do.
“My God!” she says. “Who are you?”
“Miles Whittleby.”
“I smell it on you.”
“I don’t have it,” I say.
She looks me up and down, and in turn I stare at the black ribbon of velvet around her neck. I may be imagining things, but I think I see a slight crease in the middle where the velvet indents into her wound. “You are modern,” she comments.
“But dead.”
She reels for a second but then accepts it. She’s seen a ton of death already. The fact that I’m talking to her is probably not that startling given she lived through her own beheading.
“Where do you come from?” she asks.
“England.”
“I didn’t think you were French,” she says haughtily. “I meant, why are you here and where did you find the vials?”
“One vial,” I correct her.
“Where?” she demands.
There’s no reason not to tell her. “The chapel at Picpus.”
“Of course.” Her eyes close in a private moment of self-remonstration. “Athénaïs loved that little chapel. Why didn’t I think of that?”
She reaches up to touch the ribbon on her neck. I look away.
“Let’s walk,” I say. I enjoy seeing the indignation that crosses her face. She’s used to calling the shots, not taking direction from outsiders she encounters on the lawn.
“How did you find the vial?” she says, standing stock-still.
Eleanor was right; I am stronger than Giraude. She resists, but I am able to make her walk with me as I pull her along. It’s so heady, this sensation of touching another person. Her corset under the silk is stiff, and my hand marvels at how the fabric slides up and down over the corset.
She’s significantly shorter than I am and her hair is right in my face, practically up my nose. I smell the horrible powder that she uses to make it white, and I try to resist sneezing, knowing I may lose my grip on her if I do.
“This is the end for you,” I say. “You’ve had a good couple hundred years, right?”
She snatches herself out of my grip and whirls away. “Who on earth are you?”
“I told you. Weren’t you listening?”
I smile at her and her eyes mark it uneasily. “Why do you threaten me so? I am Sangreçu and can never die.”
“Not quite right,” I say.
“Absolutely right,” she proclaims. “Not even the guillotine could kill me!”
“I know, I saw,” I say, and she looks up at me, surprised. “Well, whatever you’ve gone through, it’s over now. You killed a man just for being in your way—what’s wrong with you?”
She doesn’t even react. “I value very little. There are some whose excellence shines, but he was a peasant.”
“Peasant or prince, he didn’t deserve to be killed.”
I resume walking, pulling her with me. I need to get her somewhere concealed so I can complete my mission. Plus, it feels amazing to walk. I can actually feel my lungs getting tight from the effort. I haven’t felt anything strenuous since . . . well, since I died.
Because my skin is hypersensitive, I immediately notice when she runs her fingers down the arm that’s pulling her along. What’s that about?
“Come into my chamber,” she says. “We can talk there in comfort. Sangreçu should offer hospitality to other Sangreçu.”
I get it now. The coquette never stops believing in her charms. She thinks she can seduce me out of killing her.
Good luck with that.
“I’d like to tell you some things you should know, as one of our special assembly, those who have tasted of the vials. I have been the victim of the most despicable deceit. I have been wronged in the worst way possible. My only hope now is to achieve my destiny, to fulfill the prophecy.”
“What destiny is that?” I ask. “Can you fill me in?”
“I’ll tell you everything,” she says, “because I’m meant for great things. I just need more elixir from the vials to sustain me until the conditio
ns of the prophecy are met.”
I say nothing.
She looks up at me, and her face is suddenly coy. She looks like her sister when she spoke to Athénaïs, using her sexual power as a ruse. “And if you help me,” she says, “there will be great reward for you, too.”
“I don’t want that kind of reward,” I say.
We’re now at the wall of the chateau, a facing of weathered blond stone. “Press the second stone before you,” she says. “This was an entrance Athénaïs created for herself. Did you know Athénaïs?”
“A little,” I say. “Which stone?”
“Unhand me, and I’ll show you.”
I let go of her, knowing she can never outrun me. My hands feel bereft suddenly, without the heat of her waist. Maybe I’m not as immune to her as I think. The minute I think that, my body responds and I’m angry at myself. That is not what I need to be thinking about now.
She reaches out a hand that I’m now noticing is graceful, and presses a stone that is shaped slightly differently from the others around it. I hear grinding rock, and a door reveals itself, ajar with minimal space between it and the wall.
“Come in,” she says, throwing a certain look over her shoulder at me. Can she tell, does she notice? Crap. Suddenly I sense Eleanor behind me.
I turn my head and smile at her. Even if Giraude can’t see her, she’ll keep me on the straight and narrow.
We enter a hallway of heavy stone . . . so medieval, it must be part of the earlier architecture of the chateau. Two of our three sets of footsteps make a muffled thud. She leads us until the darkness is almost unbearable, and we reach a door.
“This is my chamber,” she says.
Inside, there is welcome warmth and light. Her room is lavish, with carpeting and tapestries of rich maroon hues. Her bed is draped with fabrics, and a fire flickers in her fireplace, with a few lamps of flame behind glass globes set on different tables throughout the room.
“Please look,” she says, and leads me to a cradle tucked between her bed and the wall. The blankets within are in disarray. “I haven’t changed anything since that day,” she says.
“What . . . what do you mean?”
“My child was stolen from me,” she says. “By someone you might’ve trusted.”
It takes me a minute.
When Yolande met the carriages in the dark of night, she was not holding her own child. She plucked her sister’s straight out of the cradle and fled.
“A woman who steals a child,” she says, “is the most despicable of women. You cannot trust her.”
Pity rushes through me. The cradle is painted with lambs and fleur-de-lis, and the blankets appear to have been ravaged in distress by the mother who woke to find her beloved baby gone. I see a withered rose lying in the panic of linens—her memorial for the child whose fate she never learned.
“Is she the one who gave you to drink of the vials?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
“Then who?”
“Phoebe,” I say truthfully.
“Who is that?”
“The person you told that you would murder ‘everyone you care about.’ ”
She doesn’t even flinch. “The one who looks just like my sister. And thus, like me. Only clothed from another era as you are.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“And how did she gain access to the cache?”
“I told her where it was.”
Her eyes widen. “And how did you know?”
“I stumbled on it. So what happened after Yolande stole your baby?”
“I sent messengers to all corners of the world,” she says. “I was never able to find my baby.”
“Did you send messengers to the north corner of England?”
“Every corner!” she says fiercely.
“I think they missed one.”
“What do you know?”
“I think your sister raised him, and he lived to have his own children. I think Phoebe is his descendant.”
“My baby was a daughter,” she says.
Dark emotions cross her face, and this time I can’t read them. “I can’t even focus on what you’ve told me,” she says, sitting down on the large bed framed by thick tapestries. “All I can think about is the smell of the Sangreçu blood in you now.”
“Right, the vials.” I bite my tongue.
“Athénaïs told me I’d have my due someday, and not to worry. But she’s been gone, too, all these many centuries.”
Hm.
“I have seen everyone go,” she says. “My responsibility has been even mightier than that of a king. I have borne my duty without complaint and held my head high, for the prophecy is awaiting that . . .”
“That what?”
“That perfect moment,” she says.
She looks up at me and her eyes hold such strong belief that I feel compassion for her for this as well. I’ve hated her since the moment I saw her and mistook her for her twin, but I haven’t been able to acknowledge that she’s been duped by fate, too.
She thinks all this suffering is going to pay off. She’s going to have a grand ascension to the stars, just as soon as that prophecy kicks in. She’s lost her child, was so forlorn she wanted to be beheaded, and she’s lived alone in a back hallway of Versailles for hundreds of years. But she thinks it’ll be worth it.
“And what if you’re not the one?”
Her eyes immediately fill with tears and I feel like a jerk.
“Look, Giraude,” I say. “I saw you kill someone just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And you’ve threatened to kill others.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask. “You’re dangerous. You’re unpredictable.”
A single tear rolls down her cheek, and I stalk off, catching Eleanor’s bewildered face from about five paces off. I open the door and stand in the dark hallway, trying to master my emotions.
How am I supposed to strangle a woman who’s crying?
Eleanor’s at me in an instant. “Miles, don’t let her fool you,” she says. “Her tears are manufactured to bring you under her spell.”
I keep my back turned to Giraude in case she’s watching through the open door, so that she doesn’t know I’m having a conversation with a ghost she can’t see. “I know, I know,” I whisper. “I wanted to step away to clear my head.”
“She’s evil. As bad as her twin.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“Maybe?”
“Okay, she is! It’s just I haven’t heard legends about any silver straw connected to her!”
“If she were plain as dishwater, you’d have your hands around her neck already,” she mutters.
Not fair. Giraude is pretty and she looks like Phoebe, but that’s not why I’m loath to kill her.
It’s because she’s a person. She’s real and she has emotions and vulnerability and her destiny is a great, monstrous downfall.
“I’d happily hand her over to you if I could, Madame Executioner,” I say.
Her jaw sets.
Ouch. Bad move, Miles. The reason I can’t hand her over is that Phoebe was a total glutton with the vials.
“I’m not bloodthirsty,” she says. “But I accept my duty.”
I look over my shoulder back into the chamber. Giraude has risen from her bed and is standing in the doorway, staring over at me. She’s no longer crying.
“Miles, you can do this,” Eleanor says. “You are strong, you are right. You must lead us.”
“I . . . what?” I whirl back around, my attention firmly on Eleanor.
“You must be strong and do this,” she says.
My head spins. She’s told me this before, with other words in another voice.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“I’m okay,” I say in a hushed voice, pushing around the corner so Giraude can’t see me. “I’m just having another one of those memory blips. It’s like a déjà vu, you telling me that.”
“How odd,” she says quietly. “Me telling you things. The most powerless advisor you have ever had.”
“No,” I say. “You were powerful.”
I hear encouraging words from a husky, low voice, and see afresh the glint of silver flashing into the sun, a roar of pain from me or my adversary. The Sangreçu blood in me is trying to clue me in, help me remember the once-lived life.
I am physically strong, but it’s my mind that needs fortification. I need to believe in my own worthiness to lead.
Eleanor’s simple face, broad and honest, pins me with its expectation. “She is dangerous. You must act now.”
I square myself up, feeling residual emotions from that other life. I can do this. I almost feel for the scabbard at my hip. No, I don’t have a scabbard; he did. That other self.
“I shall,” I say, and she narrows her eyes at my antiquated language. “I mean, I can do it.”
“Yes,” she says resolutely. “You can.”
“Okay, then,” I say. I turn around and take a deep breath. From the doorway, Giraude gazes at me with a plaintive look of deep longing and sadness and perplexity, all at the same time.
My strength could so easily overcome her. If only there were a way to make her kill herself, in essence. I could take a page out of Phoebe’s playbook. Trickery.
Phoebe was always good at trickery.
How might I trick such a woman as Giraude? She’s got hundreds of years of experience on me. She’s seen it all.
She’s lost more than I ever even had.
Oh yeah.
I think I know what might work.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
And so it is that ancient man dangled his head back upon its broad neck to survey the pantheon of stars and began to form loosely woven connections between them. He imaginatively straightened the jagged to become the shaft of an arrow or the belt of the archer, doing his best to impose some sense of familiarity onto the vast incomprehensibility that terrified him.
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