by Lana Popovic
He would never understand how I could turn my back on all that we have been building and chasing together so assiduously.
And though I like to believe that he cares for me enough to not turn on me, I am well versed in Adam’s pragmatic nature, his steadfast devotion to his own interests above all else. No matter that he has guarded my back thus far, I cannot be wholly certain that he would not strive to curry favor by turning me in to the king. I do wish that I could give him a proper goodbye, for all the pleasure and understanding that we have shared between us. But there is no way to do so without arousing his suspicions.
Our partnership will have to end just as it begun, with trickery, deception, and mistrust. We were never meant for more than that, Adam and I.
So I say nothing to him, stewing instead in my own churning mess of fears, while Adam fairly scintillates with nervous energy. He insists on reviewing our steps again and again, though the entire Messe will follow the pattern of every other we have ever held—save for the very end, when I will place the coral snake instead of Alecto on the marquise’s chest as part of the sacrament. Once it bites her, Adam and I are both to kick up a dreadful ruckus, blaming the calamity on the marquise having fallen out of the devil’s favor. We have used my snakes in ritual many times, and none have ever bitten a participant. So its strike will indeed seem guided by some otherworldly power.
Adam is so singularly focused, so dedicated to the success of our endeavor, that I almost feel badly for him that all will not be going according to our plan.
The night of the Messe, I make my final preparations. I apply my cosmetics with an even more liberal hand than normal; once the time comes, they will disguise the healthy color of my lips and face. Then I tuck the poison I have prepared for myself into the neckline of my corset, nestling the phial that holds my hopes next to my heart.
Only then am I ready to begin the performance of my life.
When Adam and I enter the banquet hall, hand in hand, I am momentarily shocked by how many of the court have come to join our devil’s dance. More throng about the hall than we have ever hosted before, in vivacious little knots and clumps, chattering with each other in hushed tones. I see the Vicomte de Couserans, Madame Leferon, and the maréchale all clustered together near the Marquis de Cessac, who stands alone but meets my eyes with a knowing, complicit gaze.
We have invited everyone who has ever attended one of our Messes—the more witnesses to the marquise’s demise, the better. After all, if so many peers witness her death at something so forbidden and debased as a Devil’s Mass, who would be so bold as to demand an investigation into the affair?
Normally, I suffer from not even a jot of stage fright, but tonight I find myself unnerved by all these nobles’ oglingeyes. Their powdered faces glow a dreadful white against the dark swathe of their hoods, beauty patches standing out like pox marks against pale skin, as if they are the restive spirits I feigned for them so many times.
And though this is the same banquet hall I have presided over for so many a Black Mass, the very air in the room seems to have turned ominous and strange, somehow imbued with an unfamiliar horror. The twining vines of the wallpaper seem to surge and coil like unruly snakes, thrown into relief by the lick of candlelight, forming uncanny shapes like leering faces. Once again I am reminded of how often I have entreated darker deities, prayed to demonic powers for their favor in rituals both sincere and feigned. Who is to say that some of them did not hear me and choose to finally attend? Especially tonight, when my very life hangs in the balance as it has never before done?
Why should infernal creatures not teem behind my wallpaper to watch, to see if they may yet sup on my sinner’s blood?
What a rich meal my soul would make for them.
I stagger in place a bit, my head rushing with a bout of dizziness, feeling as though I am already halfway to somewhere else; somewhere beyond our mortal plane. Stranded between and betwixt, one foot already planted in hell.
As if he can feel the surging of my unease, Adam squeezes my cold hand, leaning over to brush a kiss across my cheek. I recoil from him a little, barely masking my twitch with a nervous shudder, somehow afraid he will sense my imminent betrayal as if it has a malodorous scent.
“Take heart, my priestess,” he whispers into my ear with genuine concern, and for a moment I feel that I will truly miss him. “Tonight will be nearly the same as all the others. And take no heed of their number, when they are as nothing to us. We all but own them already, do we not?”
I swallow hard, but nod, as if I am comforted instead of even more dismayed.
Once we begin, some of my discomfort begins to slip away, soothed by the familiarity of our mock rituals, our wicked kiss before the altar, our well-worn chants. The first departure comes when the marquise goes to serve as the living altar, rather than Camille or me. Adam escorts Athenais to the center and helps her lie upon the table, her golden swoop of hair tumbling to the floor as he sets the chalice upon her chest, the apple on her navel. Then I make my customary rounds about her, tilting a dripping candle over her smooth-skinned form as Adam leads the group in a rousing chant.
She is so beautifully arrayed, so lithe and lovely upon the table, that for a moment I am filled with an incandescent burst of rage. How can the king cast aside something so beautiful simply because it has come to bore him; as if the marquise, capricious and vicious and halfway demented though she is, does not have a feeling heart and soul enrobed by that pristine flesh?
As if she is not a woman but merely one of Antoine’s pretty trifles, a thing Louis can simply dispense with on a whim, eager for some new amusement with which to divert himself?
It occurs to me that she is doomed no matter what, whether I stay my chosen course or falter enough to carry out the king’s original plan.
She will face the king’s fury either way, and die all the same.
And though it makes very little sense, for a moment I am desperately sorry to know that Athenais will soon meet her own impending end.
As if she can sense my misgivings, the marquise opens her eyes as I approach her head, my shadow falling across her face. Her eyes glitter against the dark, vivid and unafraid, almost gleeful with malice; as if she can barely wait for the satanic demise this ritual will ostensibly bring down upon Louis’s head. Terrible as it is, it centers me a little to be reminded of how lost she is, how utterly depraved.
The marquise is already far beyond redemption, but perhaps I can still save myself.
The remainder of the ritual proceeds precisely as planned. The devil rears in Adam’s faux mirror, while Adam’s devilmakers fling a diabolic bestiary across the walls, painting them with the monsters I already imagined to be lurking there. All of it perversely calming, remembered steps in a well-practiced dance.
When the chalice makes its way to me for communion, I apply some of Adam’s own legerdemain. Slipping loose the dainty phial from between my stays, I bring it to my mouth as I take a sip of wine, tossing its contents back as well. Then I pass the chalice to Adam and drop my hand to my side, letting the empty glass tube slide down the folds of my skirts and to the floor, where I crush it firmly underfoot.
Should some unaccountably upstanding guest think to summon the searcher to establish my cause of death, I do not want the phial found anywhere on my person.
The concoction is bitter as gall, so revolting I struggle to gulp it down. It will slow my heart down to almost nothing and chill my limbs, mimicking the appearance of death—so that when I goad my Tisiphone into inflicting her harmless bite on me, I will appear to perish from the same coral snake venom that Adam and I intended for the marquise.
Once the apple has been shared by all the guests as well, Adam announces that tonight, we seek our master’s most profound blessing.
“Just as the serpent twined around Eve,” he intones, “so will our priestess’s familiar circle our living altar’s neck.”
This is a ritual we have practiced before, often enough that the
more devoted of our guests will recognize it. I even presented it to the marquise as a choice: Did she wish to court the daystar’s ultimate favor, by allowing me to place my serpent around her throat? Of course she would never have said no, not when I phrased it in such an insinuating way. And unlike many, the marquise is no shrinking violet. She has never shown any fear of my snakes.
But as I move from the altar toward one of the vivariums, I notice something for which I did not prepare.
The substance is much faster acting than the grimoire led me to expect.
My fingertips are already numb and chilly, my lips tingling as blood rushes away from them. Worse still, my mind begins to cloud and my vision to blur, the flickering candles set all around the room coalescing into a single smeary haze. I should have had at least another five minutes before the concoction did its work; but perhaps I failed to eat enough today. Or I may, by some quirk of the constitution, simply be more susceptible than most to this toxic tisane.
Whatever the case, I can feel that I have much less time than I planned before I fall into my death-mimicking faint. Unfortunate but manageable, I tell myself. I need only dispense with the quick prayer I was meant to lead, gather up Tisiphone, and then goad her into biting me with haste.
But by the time I reach unsteadily for the vivarium’s top, I am confronted with a much worse predicament.
Since Adam knows full well that I would never spend an entire ritual with a venomous and unpredictable serpent slung around my neck, I made my substitution by placing Tisiphone in the vivarium where the coral snake normally dwells. Tisiphone is the most mercurial, the least readily handled of my three king snakes; there are certain ways she dislikes to be held. She has even bitten me once or twice when I failed to take her up in a manner she deemed acceptable.
Her bite will do me no harm, of course, but it will leave a convincing mark. Enough to assure Adam and the gathered that I met my death by the coral snake’s lethal venom.
But somehow, caught up in sizzling nerves and all my trepidation, I have made a terrible mistake. When I put Tisiphone in the tank earlier this evening, I forgot to remove the coral snake.
I pause in front of the glass for a moment, struggling to gather my rapidly fraying self. The room begins to swim around me, and I have trouble focusing my eyes on the curled snakes below the glass. Were it daytime, this would still cause me no trouble, as I am deeply familiar with my girl’s pattern and her shape. And though king snakes and coral snakes are identically colored, there is also a subtle difference to the order of their red, black, and yellow bands.
But the banquet hall is only dimly lit, by firelight and the candle clusters strewn about the room. And with my glazed eyes and wheeling brain, I can barely even make out the snakes’ individual hues.
“Red touches yellow, death to a fellow; red touches black, friend of Jack,” I mutter under my breath, but it is as if the words have lost their meaning altogether. Their bands blur and waver in the dim light, until I can barely even tell where one color begins or ends. And though the two serpents sit a wary distance from each other, coiled against the vivarium’s opposing sides, I simply cannot tell which is venomous and which one my old friend.
I can feel Adam draw near to my elbow, puzzled by my delay. “What are you waiting for, Catherine?” he mutters in my ear, his voice warbling as if it reaches me through water. “Is everything well?”
I swallow hard, because this is my last chance. If I fall now without having feigned my snakebite, Adam is more than clever enough to guess that I took some pernicious substance—which will lead him to wonder about my original intent. Perhaps he will even discern part of my plan, enough at least to know that I did not mean to see our undertaking through.
He will certainly be far too suspicious to make any formal announcement of my passing—much less to allow Marie and Antoine to claim my corpse, once the Black Mass guests have scattered to the winds in their panic—until enough time has elapsed that he is certain of my true death.
Bodies are only given to the undertaker once they have lain for three days in their beloveds’ keeping, and I will wake from my deathlike stupor only two days hence.
And if the marquise should leave this Messe unharmed and the king learn that I am still alive, his murderous wrath will fall upon my head.
Only if I can convince them all that I have met my death of snakebite will I be truly safe.
“Of course it is,” I whisper back as clearly as I can, though my tongue has grown leaden and my ears shrill with a frightful hornet buzz. The inside of my head lists back and forth like a vessel on high seas. “Quite well.”
I reach into the tank, biting on my lip until I taste the rusty tang of blood, my hands drifting toward the snake that feels the more familiar. There is something to the shape of her head, and the way that she lies coiled, that makes me think this one is my Tisiphone.
I cannot be certain, but from the way my consciousness already pitches out of my grasp, I know that I’ve all but run out of time.
I must make my gamble now, or fail to ever win my freedom. Certainly I will not have the chance to become the mistress of my own fate again.
My vision rapidly tunneling, I pick the snake up and coil her around my wrists, letting the bulk of her body dangle in the precise way Tisiphone abhors. The snake objects at once, tensing against my grip. When I only allow more of her to go slack, she hisses furiously, then rears back and sinks her fangs into the tendons of my left wrist.
I had planned to cry out for effect, but I do not have to feign my scream.
The pain is so piercing, so agonizing and vivid, that for a moment it bursts right through the encroaching gloom gathering in my head. It hurts so badly that I wonder if I was indeed mistaken; if what I feel is the fiery venom of the coral snake coursing through my veins.
If my life is truly coming to an end.
“Catherine!” I hear Adam cry out, his voice faint and tinny in my ears. “Mon Dieu, Catherine!”
Then the darkness closes ranks inside my head, and my last thought before my body strikes the ground is whether I have finally succeeded in damning myself.
EPILOGUE
There is darkness all around me. An impenetrable black, clammy with cold, as if I have already been interred. Am I dead or dreaming? I wonder dully, my mind plucking at the meaning of the word. And if I am dead, where have I landed?
In le paradis, or l’enfer?
I know which one I believe I deserve, and it makes me terribly afraid.
But then I think I hear the chiming of a beloved and familiar voice, and smell the bright scent of citron and sandalwood. It cannot be hell, then, not if Marie is also here.
I turn toward the sound and risk opening my eyes. The gloom around me is so dense that for a horrible, panicked moment, I fear again that I have perished and found myself trapped in purgatory rather than perdition. But as my surroundings drift slowly into focus, I realize that it is only night; real and very earthly night. And that the squalor around me is a familiar one—the sparse and dusty shambles of Marie’s little garret apartment, lit by the few faltering candles she can afford.
I have never felt such joy, nor such heady liberation, to find myself so far away from anything that even remotely smacks of wealth or influence.
Then Marie’s face hovers into view above me, warm brown eyes latching onto mine. The relief that overtakes her face would melt even a heart of ice, much less one so battered and tender as mine has become.
“Ma belle,” she breathes, leaning down to tip her forehead against mine. “It has been so long since you stirred, nearly four days. I was afraid you might not find your way back to me at all.”
I reach up with weak and trembling hands, already pricking fearsomely with pins and needles that have only just begun their torment; the plunge back into life from the chilly depths of a mimicked death is not a pleasant one. I can feel by the feebleness of my muscles, my all-encompassing lassitude, that I have not moved for days and days. As
it is, I am only strong enough to briefly cup Marie’s cheeks, then slide my arms to wreathe around her neck.
“I would not disappoint you so,” I murmur, in a wheezy, creaking voice that truly sounds as though it has ventured beyond the veil before returning. “Never again.”
I can see from the fear that still writhes in her eyes that she does not quite believe me. I must have given her a dreadful scare, lying still as cold stone and nearly dead for even longer than expected.
“Swear it, Catherine,” she demands, gripping my shoulders and giving me a gentle shake. “Swear you will not be so faithless as to actually die on me.”
I eke out a breathy laugh, though even the slow spread of my smile hurts my stiff and chilly cheeks. “I swear it. Not even I would dare be so impudent.”
And no matter what lies in store for me, I already know I will never discover any freedom or salvation greater than Marie’s answering kiss.
Acknowledgments
This book was a tough one to write, coinciding as it did with some of the hardest moments I’ve ever had to live through. I would never have made it without the unstinting help, support, and shoulders to (extensively) cry on, lovingly supplied by my tireless support network. I owe the most heartfelt thanks to:
Everyone at Abrams, especially Anne Heltzel, who was beyond kind and understanding throughout this long and unusually grueling process.
Taylor Haggerty, and the whole Root Lit team of ferocious wonder women. I could never have lived any of this dream without you.
My lovely, lovely friends: you know who you are, and I hope you also know how much I love you.
And always, always my family—especially my husband and my mom, who took care of my newborn baby for many hours while I all but tore at my hair like a Victorian madwoman as I furiously wrapped up edits on this book. And above all, my lionhearted little boy: I promise to teach you everything I know about Assassin’s Cabinets in due time.