“Oh, me too!” Violette cried. “Except I want to wear a dress.”
Beau fumbled to unlock the cell. “Huntsmen will be part of the broken pieces, girls.”
“No.” Victoire shook her head. “Not a huntsman like they are now. We want to be huntsmen like they should be—proper knights, riding forth to vanquish the forces of evil. True evil.” She waved a hand at me—at the sick covering my front—as Beau slid the cell open. “Not whatever this is.”
I couldn’t help but grin.
To my surprise, she grinned back. Small. Hesitant. But still there. Emotion reared at the sight, and I stumbled at the strength of it. Violette wrapped an arm around my waist to steady me. To lead me down the corridor. “You stink, taeae. And proper knights don’t stink. How can you rescue your fair maiden if she can’t stand the smell of you?”
Fighting her own grin, Madame Labelle braced my other side. “Perhaps his fair maiden doesn’t need rescuing.”
“Perhaps she will rescue him,” Victoire called over her shoulder.
“Perhaps they will rescue each other,” Violette snapped back.
“Perhaps we will,” I murmured, feeling lighter than I’d felt in ages. Perhaps we could. Together. In a swift burst of realization, I saw things clearly for perhaps the first time: she wasn’t the only broken one. I’d closed my eyes to hide from the monsters—my monsters—hoping they couldn’t see me. Hoping if I buried them deep enough, they’d disappear.
But they hadn’t disappeared, and I’d hidden long enough.
Anxious now, I walked faster, ignored the pounding in my head. I had to find Lou. I had to find her, to talk to her—
Then several things happened at once.
The door flew open with a cataclysmic bang, and the four huntsmen charged back into the corridor. Madame Labelle yelled “RUN!” at the same time Victoire sliced through her binds. Chaos reigned. With the pulse of Madame Labelle’s hands, rock from the ceiling rained on the Chasseurs’ heads. A stone the size of my fists connected with one, and he collapsed. The others shouted in panic—in fury—trying to coordinate, to subdue her. Two tackled her while the third leapt in front of us. Shrieking a battle cry, Victoire stomped on his toes. When he reeled backward, swinging the blade of his Balisarda away from her, Violette punched him in the nose.
“Get out of here!” Victoire shoved him, and—already off balance—he tumbled to the floor. Beau cut his binds on her sword. “Before it’s too late!”
I struggled to reach Madame Labelle. “I can’t leave her—”
“GO!” Madame Labelle flung an arm out beneath the Chasseurs’ bodies, blasting the door apart. “NOW!”
Beau didn’t give me a choice. Flinging his arms around me, he dragged my weakened, useless body down the corridor. More footsteps pounded above us, but we took a sharp left down another corridor, disappearing within a half-concealed crag in the wall. “Hurry,” Beau said desperately, pulling me faster. “Mass has started, but the Chasseurs who remained in the castle will be here soon. They’ll search these tunnels. Come on, come on.”
“But my mother, our sisters—”
“Our sisters will be fine. He’ll never hurt them—”
Still I struggled. “And Madame Labelle?”
He didn’t hesitate, forcing me down another tunnel. “She can take care of herself.”
“NO—”
“Reid.” He spun me to face him, gripping my arms when I thrashed. His eyes were wide. Wild. “She made a choice, all right? She chose to save you. If you go back now, you won’t be helping her. You’ll be spiting her.” He shook me harder. “Live today, Reid, so you can fight tomorrow. We’ll get her back. If I have to burn down this castle myself, we will get her back. Do you trust me?”
I felt myself nod, felt him pull me along once more.
Behind us, her screams echoed in the distance.
When a Snake Sheds Her Skin
Lou
Wrapping my arms around my legs, I rested my chin on my knees and gazed up at the afternoon sky. Thick, heavy clouds had gathered overhead, shrouding the sunshine and promising precipitation. Though my eyes still stung, I postponed closing them just a little longer. Below me, Coco and Ansel waited in my room. I could hear their murmurs from where I sat atop the roof.
At least something good had come from this nightmarish day.
At least they were speaking again—even if it was about me.
“What can we do?” Ansel said anxiously.
“We can’t do anything.” Coco’s voice was hoarse from tears—or perhaps smoke. The honey had healed her burns, but it hadn’t repaired the bar. Claud had promised to pay the innkeeper for damages. “At least she knows now. She’ll be more careful.”
“And Reid?”
“He’ll come back to her. He always does.”
I didn’t deserve any of them.
As if trying to lift my spirits, the wind caressed my face, grasping tendrils of my hair in its wintry grip. Or maybe it wasn’t the wind at all. Maybe it was something else. Someone else. Feeling slightly ridiculous, I looked to the vast, ubiquitous clouds and whispered, “I need your help.”
The wind stopped teasing my hair.
Encouraged, I sat up and squared my shoulders, letting my feet dangle from the eave. “Fathers shouldn’t abandon their children. Mine was a shitty excuse for a human being—give him a kick from me if he’s up there—but even he tried to protect me in his own twisted way. You, though . . . you should do better. You’re supposed to be the father of all fathers, aren’t you? Or maybe—maybe you’re the mother of all mothers, and it’s like my own maman said.” I shook my head, defeated. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe you do want me dead.”
A bird shot from a window below me with a startled cry, and I tensed, peering down the edge of the building, searching for what had disturbed it. There was nothing. All was quiet and calm. Remnants of the last snowfall still clung to the corners of the rooftop, but now the sky couldn’t seem to decide between snow and rain. Aimless flakes drifted through the air. Though a few mourners gathered in the damp, narrow street below, most wouldn’t arrive until they finished with Requiem Mass.
Coco’s and Ansel’s voices had tapered off a few moments ago. Perhaps they’d gone to her room to resolve their own problems. I hoped they did. Whether together or apart, they each deserved happiness.
“Reid says I’m . . . lost,” I breathed. Though the words unfurled gently, softly, I couldn’t have stemmed them if I’d tried. It’s as if they’d been floating just beneath my skin, waiting patiently for this moment. For this last, desperate window of opportunity to open. For this . . . prayer. “He says I’m changing—that I’m different. And maybe he’s right. Maybe I just don’t want to see it, or—or maybe I can’t. I’ve certainly made a piss poor mess here. The werewolves left, and if my mother doesn’t kill me, they will. Worse, La Voisin keeps—keeps watching me like she’s waiting for something, Nicholina thinks we’re great pals, and I—I don’t know what to do. I don’t have the answers. That’s supposed to be your job.”
I snorted and turned away, anger spiking sharp and sudden in my heart. The words spewed faster. Less a trickle, more a torrent. “I read your book, you know. You said you knitted us together in our mothers’ wombs. If that’s true, I guess that joke was on me, huh? I really am the arrow in her hand. She wants to use me to destroy the world. She thinks it’s my purpose to die at the altar, and you—you gave me to her. I’m not innocent now, but I was once. I was a baby. A child. You gave me to a woman who would kill me, to a woman who would never love me—” I broke off, breathing hard and grinding my palms against my eyes, trying to relieve the building pressure. “And now I’m trying not to break, but I am. I’m broken. I don’t know how to fix it—to fix me or Reid or us. And he—he hates me—” Again, I choked on the words. An absurd bubble of laughter rose in my throat.
“I don’t even know if you’re real,” I whispered, laughing and crying and feeling infinitely foolish. My hands trem
bled. “I’m probably talking to myself right now like a madwoman. And maybe I am mad. But—but if you are real, if you are listening, please, please . . .”
I dropped my head and closed my eyes. “Don’t abandon me.”
I sat there, head bowed, for several long minutes. Long enough for my tears to freeze on my cheeks. Long enough for my fingers to stop trembling. Long enough for that window in my soul to slowly, quietly click closed. Was I waiting for something? I didn’t know. Either way, the only answer I received was silence.
Time slipped away from me. Only Claud Deveraux’s whistle—it preceded him to the rooftop—drew me from my reverie. I almost laughed. Almost. I’d never met a person so attuned to melancholy; at the first sign of introspection, he seemed to just appear like a starving man before a buffet of pastries and sweets. “I could not help but overhear,” he said lightly, dropping to the eave beside me, “your rather magnificent conversation with the celestial sphere.”
I rolled my eyes. “You absolutely could’ve.”
“You’re right. I’m a filthy eavesdropper, and I have no intention of apologizing.” He nudged my shoulder with a small smile. “I thought you should know Reid just arrived, whole if not unharmed.”
A beat passed as his words sank in.
Whole if not unharmed.
Lurching to my feet, I nearly slipped and fell to my death in my haste to reach the stairwell. When Claud caught my hand with the gentle shake of his head, my heart plummeted. “Give him a few moments to collect himself, chérie. He’s been through an ordeal.”
“What happened?” I demanded, snatching my hand away.
“I did not ask. He will tell us when he’s ready.”
“Oh.” That one simple word echoed my heartache better than a hundred others ever could. I was part of that us now, an outsider, no longer privy to his innermost thoughts or secrets. I’d pushed him away, frightened—no, nearly crazed—that he would do it first. He hadn’t, of course, but the effect remained the same. And it was my fault—all my fault. Slowly, I sank back onto the eave. “I see.”
Claud raised a brow. “Do you?”
“No,” I said miserably. “But you already knew that.”
A moment passed as I watched mourners—the poor and bereft, mostly, with their tattered black clothes—trickle into the street. The bell tower had chimed half past a quarter hour ago. Soon, Requiem Mass would end, and the burial procession would wind through these streets, allowing commoners to say their goodbyes. The Archbishop’s body would pass directly beneath us on its way to the cemetery, to the Church’s tomb in the catacombs and its final resting place. Though I still didn’t like Madame Labelle, I appreciated her forethought in this location. If there was one person in the entire kingdom who’d loved the Archbishop, it was Reid. He should’ve been the one to prepare the body this morning. He should’ve been the one to speak over it. Even now, he should’ve been the one holding vigil beside it.
Instead, he was forced to hide in a dirty inn.
He would miss the Archbishop’s last rites. He would miss lowering his forefather into the earth. He would miss his final goodbye. I forced the thought away, tears threatening once more. It seemed all I did was cry these days.
At least here, Reid would have one last glimpse of him.
If Morgane didn’t kill us all first.
I felt rather than saw Claud studying me. He had the air of someone trapped in paralyzing indecision. Taking pity on him, I turned to tell him to stop, to tell him it was okay, but his resolve seemed to harden at something in my eyes. He removed his top hat with a sigh. “I know you are troubled. Though I have long debated the time and place to tell you this, perhaps I might ease your conscience by freeing my own.” He looked to the sky with a wistful expression. “I knew your mother, and you are nothing like her.”
I blinked at him. Of all the things I’d been expecting, that wasn’t one. “What?”
“You’re the best parts of her, of course. The vitality. The cleverness. The charm. But you are not her, Louise.”
“How do you know her?”
“I don’t know her. Not anymore.” The wistfulness in his gaze faded, replaced by something akin to sorrow. “In a different time—a thousand years ago, it seems—I loved her with a passion unequal to any I’ve ever known. I thought she loved me too.”
“Holy hell.” I lifted a hand to my brow and closed my eyes. It made sense now, his strange and unsettling fascination with me. The white hair probably hadn’t helped. “Look, Claud, if you’re about to tell me you—you empathize with her, or you still love her, or you’ve been secretly plotting with her all along, can you wait? I’ve had the shittiest of all days, and I don’t think I can handle a betrayal right now.”
His chuckle did little to reassure me. “Dear girl, do you really think I’d admit such a connection if I were in league with her? No, no, no. I knew Morgane before she . . . changed.”
“Oh.” There was that word again. It plagued me, full of unspoken pain and unacknowledged truths. “No offense, but you’re hardly my mother’s type.”
He laughed then, louder and more genuine than before. “Appearances can be deceiving, child.”
I fixed him with a pointed look and repeated my earlier question. It seemed important now. “What are you, Claud?”
He didn’t hesitate. His brown eyes—warm, concerned—might’ve pierced my soul. “What are you, Louise?”
I stared at my hands, deliberating. I’d been called many impolite things in my life. Most didn’t bear repeating, but one had stuck with me, slipping beneath my skin and moldering my flesh. He’d called me a liar. He’d called me—
“A snake,” I replied, breath hitching. “I suppose . . . I’m a snake. A liar. A deceiver. Cursed to crawl on my belly and eat dust all the days of my life.”
“Ah.” To my surprise, Claud’s face didn’t twist in disgust or revulsion. He nodded instead, a knowing smile playing on his lips. “Yes, I would agree with that assessment.”
Humiliation hung my head. “Right. Thanks.”
“Louise.” A single finger lifted my chin, forcing me to look at him. Those eyes, once warm, now blazed with intensity, with conviction. “What you are now is not what you’ve always been, nor is it what you always will be. You are a snake. Shed your skin if it no longer serves you. Transform into something different. Something better.”
He tapped my nose before rising and offering me his hand. “Both blood witch and werewolf will stay until after the funeral. Cosette spoke rather passionately to the former on your behalf, and with Reid’s return, the latter are eager to repay their blood debt. However, I wouldn’t expect a bouquet of roses from either party in the foreseeable future, and—well, I might also avoid Le Ventre for the entirety of my life if I were you.”
I accepted his hand, rising heavily. “Reid.”
“Ah, yes. Reid. I’m afraid I might have omitted the teensiest, tiniest of details in his regard.”
“What? What do you—”
He pressed a kiss to my forehead. Though the gesture should’ve been jarring in its intimacy, it felt . . . comforting. Like a kiss my father might’ve given if . . . well, if things had been different. “He asked for you. Quite insistently, in fact, but our stalwart Cosette insisted he bathe before seeing you. He was covered in vomit, of all things.”
“Vomit?” Each rapid blink only heightened my confusion. “But—”
The door to the stairwell burst open, and there—filling up every inch of the frame—stood Reid.
“Lou.” His face crumpled when he looked at me, and he crossed the rooftop in two strides, crushing me into his arms. I buried my face in his coat, fresh tears dampening the fabric, and held him tighter still. His frame trembled. “They took her, Lou. They took my mother, and she’s not coming back.”
The Funeral
Reid
The first drops of rain signaled the start of the burial procession. The droplets stung my hand. Icy. Sharp. Like tiny knives. Lou had flun
g open our room’s window to watch as the crowd thickened. A sea of black. Of tears. Few bothered with umbrellas, even as the rain fell harder. Faster.
Constabulary lined the street in somber uniforms, their faces and weapons drawn. Chasseurs swathed in black stood rigid among them. Some I recognized. Others I didn’t.
Somewhere down there, the Dames Blanches and loup garou lay in wait for any sign of Morgane. Toulouse and Thierry hadn’t joined them. My fault. My own stubborn pride. Deveraux, however, had insisted on helping. He’d also insisted Lou and I remain out of sight. Though he claimed our absence might dissuade her from foolish action, I knew better. He’d gifted us privacy—me privacy—to watch the procession. To . . . mourn.
“Therewithal,” he’d said, matter-of-fact, “we can’t very well allow the king or Chasseurs to spot you in the crowd. Chaos would ensue, and our dear Lady thrives in chaos.”
In the room beside us, water gurgled through the pipes. I assumed it was for Coco’s bath. Like us, Deveraux had banished her, Beau, and Ansel to their rooms, asserting, “Your faces are known.” It felt silly, after everything, to hide away while the others endangered themselves. This hadn’t been part of the plan.
I couldn’t bring myself to protest.
Ansel probably watched the procession from his window. I hoped he did. He wasn’t a Chasseur, but he might have been, once. He might’ve grown to love the Archbishop. If not loved . . . he certainly would’ve respected him. Feared him.
I wondered if anyone below had truly loved our patriarch.
He’d had no siblings, no parents. No wife. At least, not in the legal sense. In the biblical, however, his had been a woman who’d tricked him into bed, into conceiving a child destined to destroy him—
No. I stopped the thought before it could form. Morgane was to blame, yes, but so was he. She hadn’t forced him. He’d made a decision. He wasn’t perfect.
As if reading my thoughts, Lou squeezed my hand. “Sometimes it hurts to remember the dead as who they were, rather than who we wanted them to be.”
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