Betrayed

by Lynn Carthage

  “Let’s try any of the places we’ve ever tripped to,” I suggest. “Maybe it will trigger something.”

  “Okay,” says Phoebe in a lackluster tone.

  “So . . . let’s skip the guillotine scene for now. How about Etienne and Giraude running through the trees?”

  “Sure.”

  “At least it’s outside. We last saw Tabby outside.”

  “You did,” she says, and there’s something unpleasant in her tone.

  I look squarely at where I know her face is. “I refuse to beat myself up for a kid wiggling out of my arms. I don’t know how toddlers act. I’m an only child.”

  She says nothing.

  “And if I were really a bastard, I might point out that if you hadn’t spent so much time looking morosely out to sea on a beach by yourself, you might’ve been the one holding on to Tabby.” As soon as I’ve said it, I wish I could take it back.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” she says, and I hear the tears in her voice. “Miles, have you ever really hated yourself?”

  “At times.”

  “You’ve gotten mad at things you did. Stupid things.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Well, the Sangreçu blood showed me that I was someone very unlikable. I hated what I saw. What I was.”

  “It’s not really you,” I say.

  “It’s me somehow. I’ve been fighting with who I am. I couldn’t bear to see you. I’m so ashamed at how I treated you after we—”

  She breaks off, too embarrassed to come up with a verb, it seems.

  “Why are you responsible for things some former self did?” I ask. “I was in some field fighting someone I don’t even know. It was like a dream.”

  “I don’t really understand,” she says. “But I have to undo some things.”

  “Like what?”

  “That man I trapped. I have to release him.”

  “Okayyyy,” I say. “And where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I think I have to drink more Sangreçu blood to understand. Don’t you feel like it’s already lessening?”

  Stunned, I realize she’s right. To test it, without thinking I reach out to touch her face.

  I hadn’t wanted to be so forgiving. But here I am caressing her face while her hand reaches up to cup mine.

  “We don’t have much time,” I say. “We’re wasting it as we speak. We have to find Tabby.” I pull her back out into the hallway. Maybe another door leads to Athénaïs’s room. I walk down the passage, trying to see anything familiar in the dimness.

  “How? How, Miles? I’ve been going back to that beach every time I try!”

  “We have to control something we can’t control,” I say.

  “That’s what’s so frustrating. It’s like we’re chess pieces on a board, and someone’s moving us around, but only when they feel like it. Meanwhile, Tabby’s all by herself in another century.”

  I look up at the ceiling. Not sure why: it seems like prayer always drifts upward, right? There’s some force nestled in the sky above us?

  “If you were waiting for us to get desperate,” I tell the ceiling, “we’re there now.”

  “I want my sister!” screams Phoebe, her voice filled with agony.

  I look at her, biting my lip.

  If there’s any vestige of human kindness, anything left of compassion or sorrow to the force that let Yolande steal her sister’s child, that let Yolande kill the children of Grenshire. . . this would be its moment to kick in and save the day.

  “I command it!” I yell.

  And the light changes.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Athénaïs was known to have consulted with a witch called La Voisin in 1665 to create love potions for the king out of the blood and pulverized bones of newborns. For thirteen years, she secretly plied the king with this foul concoction. This, and black masses, performed naked, kept her in his favor.

  —The Fine Art of the Concubine

  A slit of light appears under the door, growing, I imagine as Athénaïs lights taper after taper in her candelabra.

  “Miles, you made that happen,” says Phoebe in awe.

  “No, it was a coincidence,” I say. “My timing was perfect, wouldn’t you say?”

  I rap on the door.

  “Is she going to think I’m Yolande?” asks Phoebe, just as Athénaïs opens the door.

  She stands there outlined in a rectangle of light so bright I have to clap my hands over my eyes. I hear some kind of electrical zing, and an unearthly silence.

  I take my hands off my face to see that Phoebe is frozen, her arm raised in the motion of trying to stop whatever magic was thrust at her.

  “You’ve found her!” Athénaïs exults.

  “It’s not her,” I say. “It’s Phoebe, my friend. She’s an Arnaud descendant.”

  I see her eye go to the mole in Phoebe’s cleavage.

  “Look at her clothes,” I beg. “She’s from my time.”

  “And so she is, now that I look closer. Her face is very close to the twins’ face, but not precise. Just as you are similar to my king.”

  She takes her time, though, looking Phoebe over from head to toe. “She’s Sangreçu,” she says. “And does she have other powers?”

  “No. We’re . . . normal. Please undo whatever you did.”

  She hesitates, loath to release Phoebe, held in a defensive pose, her feet in their combat boots caught in the very moment of stepping backward.

  “She’s not Yolande,” I say. “Please let her go.”

  Athénaïs says a few words in another language—not French, I can tell, but something else. She makes an arcane gesture with her hands, and Phoebe is again in motion. She falters backward until I catch her.

  “Apologies, my dear,” says Athénaïs.

  “She doesn’t speak French,” I say, and turn to tell Phoebe in English, “She’s sorry.”

  “She can do whatever she wants,” says Phoebe in a wondering voice. “I’m hers forever. I saw her before, but I wasn’t Sangreçu then.”

  Uh, what?

  She steps closer to Athénaïs and they gaze at each other, frank, open, deeply interested.

  “Oh my sweet Lord,” breathes Athénaïs. “I feel it.”

  “What do you feel?” I ask.

  They ignore me, lost in each other’s eyes. “This is extraordinary,” says Athénaïs. “Perhaps we shouldn’t meet.”

  “It almost hurts,” says Phoebe.

  “You are pulling, and I am pulling,” says Athénaïs. They both close their eyes and look like they’re in ecstasy or a drug-induced state.

  “Hullo?” I say. “What’s going on?”

  They don’t react.

  “Open your eyes!” I shout, shaking Phoebe. “We have to get your sister.”

  Phoebe opens her eyes and seems to have to force herself to look away from Athénaïs. “Can you help us?” she asks in a purely docile voice. “My sister has disappeared into the past.”

  “Ah, that bright, noisy finch,” says Athénaïs. “She has certainly caused turmoil, running around the empty palace, calling for her mother.”

  “You’ve seen her?” Phoebe cries.

  “She’s here,” says Athénaïs. She steps aside and we can see past her, where Tabby sits at Athénaïs’s table, moving playing cards around and wiping her nose, which is running from all her crying.

  Phoebe makes a sound I’ve never heard her make before and rushes in to hug her sister.

  I rub my jaw, feeling the rough whiskers, as I see the reaction from Tabby.

  It’s the first time she’s seen her sister since she died.

  Her little body can’t seem to hold all the emotion inside; she cries and shrieks over and over as Phoebe kneels at her feet and gives her entire self over to her sister. They hug, Tabby twisting side to side with her emotions. She can’t sit still. She pulls away to look at Phoebe’s face. Her eyes are red with tears but she’s laughing.

  “Fee!” she yells.
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  “Tabby, Tabby, Tabby, Tabby, Tabby,” Phoebe says, her voice raw.

  “Love,” says Tabby.

  “Oh my God, yes, I love you, too!”

  “Love,” says Tabby. Phoebe runs a shaking hand over the cornflower fluff of Tabby’s hair. It springs back up when her hand passes.

  I feel a prickle behind my own eyes. I never felt this kind of love; I didn’t get a sister or brother. But it also means I never lost a brother or sister.

  Tabby’s eyes are full of adoration; she sits and gazes at Phoebe, drinking her in. The fervent, unselfconscious stare of a child.

  “I love you, Fee,” she says slowly, each word carefully framed. It’s the longest sentence I’ve ever heard her say.

  “Thank you, Tabby,” says Phoebe. “Thank you for saying that. I’ll remember it forever.” She kisses her sister’s cheek with her eyes closed.

  “You have no idea how much I love you,” she whispers, and in Phoebe’s voice I hear longing that makes my throat ache with unshed tears. She won’t be in Tabby’s life other than the wraith without a voice. After the Sangreçu effect fades, she’ll just be a hunch that Tabby has that will make her twist around sharply in a seemingly empty room because she thinks she senses something.

  Their trance of union is almost like prayer. It’s so sacred, so private. I have no place here.

  I turn and catch Athénaïs’s eyes on my face. She beckons me to join her at the armchairs near the fireplace. She adds twigs so sparks catch and a new fire begins. She sits and we regard the growing flames while the two sisters behind us murmur and cry their gratefulness.

  “What is your connection with Phoebe?” I ask when I have schooled myself to be calm again.

  “She is me,” Athénaïs says. “I sit here marveling at the bending of the universe’s rules to see her in the flesh.”

  “She is you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “You will have to consult the universe.”

  “I don’t have that number in my speed dial.”

  She throws me an amused but perplexed look.

  “I don’t know how long we will be permitted to share the same space together,” she says. “It seems a fleeting gift.”

  “Is she your reincarnation?” It feels so queer to use that word.

  “How can she be? I am yet alive.”

  “So how is she you?”

  “We are sharing our soul. I feel the pull of her spirit and I am pushing some of myself into her at the same time.”

  I look over at Phoebe, happily talking to her sister . . . and apparently playing some invisible game of soul tug-of-war with Athénaïs.

  “Is this related to the prophecy?” I ask. “Do you know Eleanor?”

  “Not by such a name,” she says. “But what are names? I have had many myself.”

  “Eleanor’s a servant from the Arnaud Manor in England, where we all met. Yolande established a home there after she snuck out of Versailles with Giraude’s baby.” I’m talking quickly, nervous because our time together is momentary. “I don’t think you stopped her, did you? Is it the same evening as when we last met?”

  “It is. You were here a few hours ago. I wasn’t able to stop her. She was long gone.”

  “Does Giraude know yet?”

  “She hasn’t raised an alarm.”

  I rush through my next words. “Phoebe’s an Arnaud, and I have nothing to do with any of this except Phoebe and I met because we had both recently died—at least that’s what we think, but we’re not sure—and we fought Madame Arnaud—I mean, Yolande.”

  “You’re dead?” she repeats.

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re Sangreçu.”

  “I drank after I died.”

  She frowns and smiles at the same time, shaking her head. “It’s a marvel and a testament to the power of that blood.”

  “So it’s not typical for people to become Sangreçu after they’ve died?”

  “You’re the only one.”

  “Phoebe, too,” I say.

  “Phoebe can’t be dead,” she says.

  “She is very much so,” I say. “But she was always different. Even before drinking the Sangreçu blood, she could touch things at the Arnaud manor. She had more . . . well, I don’t know. She wasn’t wispy.”

  She smiles thoughtfully to herself. “She has a lot of power. She is special.”

  “How do you know? What are we supposed to do?”

  “I’m not certain about the details, although I understand the overall aim of your existence. My glass shows me a void for the future: Dark. Solitary. I don’t know what is going to happen to me. It is most unfortunate, when I have spent so much of my life obtaining sorcery knowledge. But this last important facet—my own fate—is lost to me.”

  The fire is talking now in its languid, bright tongues, so she stands to add a log. I turn around and grab a quick glance at Phoebe and Tabby. They are so quiet and motionless it almost seems they have fallen asleep in each other’s arms. Maybe Tabby has: she’s found solace in her sister’s embrace and can relax enough to do that most magic of tricks—falling asleep.

  “Is Tabby important?” I ask quietly. “It seems like all we do is save her.”

  Athénaïs sighs in a worldly way. “She is important in that her family treasures her. Throughout history, that has been the ambition most people strive for.”

  “But in a larger sense? In terms of the prophecy?”

  “She is not important in that way,” says Athénaïs gently. “She’s a very ordinary child. It’s her family’s love for her that makes her swell with seeming importance.”

  I feel guilty thinking it, but maybe that’s why we had such a hard time finding Tabby. She wasn’t important to the prophecy, so it wasn’t cooperating in helping us locate her.

  Until I commanded it.

  “But you rescued her and brought her to your chambers,” I say. “She could be with any common nursemaid now, but you took her in.”

  “There are no nursemaids,” she says. “The chateau is vacant. Yet you’re right. I have a sympathy for children, especially those found far from home without protection. Decades ago, I was talked of, accused of despicable acts regarding poison and children, but it was nothing but falsehoods. My heart is tender toward children, although it can be as a stone to adults.”

  “Then you didn’t instruct Yolande to drink children’s blood?”

  “Great God, no!” She looks genuinely disturbed. “She developed theories and misinformation on her own. I won’t confide my knowledge to her because she is not the firstborn. Yet she insists on vying for the chance of filling her basket with half-heard admonitions.”

  “She will terrorize a small English town for centuries,” I say bleakly. “For no good reason.”

  “That sounds like her. Most unfortunate for your countrymen. I’ll go to England and stop her.”

  I stare, face hot from the fire, mind spinning. It was all a mistake, Yolande replenishing her powers—so she thought—by draining the village children of their blood.

  “Don’t go to England,” I say abruptly.

  “I must right the wrong,” says Athénaïs. “Collect Giraude’s child. Stop this bloodshed you tell me of.”

  “I’ve been told you disappear.”

  In the silence that falls between Athénaïs and me, I hear again the delighted babble of sisters reuniting.

  I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing.

  I stand up. “Phoebe,” I call across to her. “We need to go. Our powers are waning. If we go back before we lose them, you can tell your parents everything.”

  She stands. Tabby clings to her like a koala bear. They’re fused together and I don’t think either will ever let go so long as their touching is possible.

  “I don’t know if I could do that to them,” she says, coming over to me by the fire.

  “You have the chance to tell them Tabby’s okay and that she’s been okay the whole
time she was missing. To tell them you’re missing, too, in a way.”

  “I can’t tell my mom that Tabby has time-traveled,” says Phoebe. “It’s too much.”

  “She needs to know. What if Tabby does it again?”

  “It never happened in England. If we can just get her back there, she’ll be safe.”

  “Phoebe, you have a chance to explain everything without trying to get your message through Tabby’s mouth.”

  She looks down at her sister in her arms, who has a look of bald worship on her toddler face. “I know! I just . . . wasn’t expecting it. I’m not prepared. Up until a few minutes ago, the only people I could talk to were you and Eleanor.”

  “Where might we find this Eleanor?” says Athénaïs to me, recognizing the name in the babble of English. “I should like to meet her.”

  “She’s on her way to the chateau in another time frame,” I say. “Eleanor was never able to trip with us. We tried.”

  “And she is also dead?”

  “Yes. We’re a great team. The Power Corpses.”

  I snicker, but Athénaïs looks appalled.

  “Well, anyway, we should return Tabby to her parents before we do anything else. We’ve got to put them out of their misery,” I say. I turn to Phoebe and ask in English, “Are you ready to go?”

  “Ready!” says Phoebe. “So let’s go!” She looks brightly, sarcastically at me.

  “Athénaïs, can you help us?” I ask in French. “Send us back to our time?”

  She smiles regretfully. “I have no idea how to do that or I might’ve changed my own luck several times.”

  “So you’re not the one sending us back and forth?”

  “No.”

  She kisses Tabby in Phoebe’s arms. “Au revoir, ma petite. In case you leave abruptly, I’ve enjoyed our time together,” she says. Tabby smiles, understanding the kindness underneath the foreign words.

  “What do you think the force is?” I ask Athénaïs. I feel like every moment before we trip is a chance to learn more.

  “The ancient ones.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “The old rule. My king.”

  “Louis?”

  “That fool? No. May God rest his soul, but he was a buffoon with negligible power.”