Lou was the target.
And if a small part of me hesitated, remembering Coco’s premonition, I ignored it. I moved forward. I threw an arm across Ansel’s chest when he followed the others to the door, shaking my head. “I told you to guard the tunnel.”
His brows furrowed. “But the tunnel is locked. No one is going through it.”
“Just stay here.” Impatience sharpened my voice. I didn’t care to soften it. Too much was at stake. At Modraniht, he’d proved more hindrance than help, and now we’d allied with enemies. Any one of them could turn on us in the tunnels. Ansel proved the easiest prey. I tried again. “Look, Zenna and Seraphine are staying behind too. Look after them. Keep them safe.”
Ansel’s chest caved, and he turned his burning gaze to the ground. Pink tinged his cheeks, his ears. Though he looked as if he wanted to protest, I was out of time. I could humor him no longer. Without another word, I turned on my heel and left.
There was nothing stiller than a cemetery at night. This one was small, the oldest in the city. The Church had stopped burying citizens in its soil long ago, favoring the newer, larger plot beyond Saint-Cécile. Now only the most powerful and affluent members of the aristocracy rested here—but even they weren’t buried, instead joining their ancestors in the catacombs below.
“The entrance is there.” Deveraux nodded to a statue of an angel. Moss grew on half her face. The wind had effaced her nose, the feathers on her wings. Still, she was beautiful. Words engraved onto the crypt beside her read Nous Tombons Tous. I didn’t know what it meant. Fortunately, Deveraux did. “We all fall down,” he said softly.
When I swung open the door, a gust of stale air rose to meet me. A single torch lit the narrow, earthen steps.
Beau stepped too close behind, peering into the darkness with unabashed apprehension. “Does the plan remain the same? Do we separate?”
Instead of looking below, Deveraux gazed upward at the night sky. Moonless tonight. “I don’t think that’s wise.”
“We’ll cover more ground if we do,” Jean Luc insisted.
Foreboding lifted the hair on my neck as I climbed down the first step. “We stay together. Blaise, Liana, and Terrance can lead us to Lou. They know her scent. She’ll be with Célie.”
“You place an awful lot of confidence in that witch.” Jean Luc shoved past me, tugging the torch from the wall and lifting it higher. Illuminating the path. The ceiling pressed down on us, forcing me to stoop. “What makes you so sure she’ll find her?”
“She will.”
Behind me, Beau and Coco struggled to walk side by side. “Let’s hope the Chasseurs don’t find her,” she muttered.
The rest filed in after them, their footsteps the only sounds in the silence. So many footsteps. Jean Luc. Coco and Beau. Deveraux, Toulouse, and Thierry. La Voisin and her blood witches. Blaise and his children. Each equipped. Each powerful. Each ready and willing to destroy Morgane.
A tendril of hope unfurled in my chest. Perhaps that would be enough.
The first passage wore on interminably. Though I thought the tight space inconvenient, it didn’t bring the sweat to my skin as it did Jean Luc. It didn’t make my hands tremble, my breath catch. He refused to slow, however, walking faster and faster until we reached our first split in the tunnel. He hesitated. “Which way?”
“The crypts should be just past the eastern tunnel,” Beau whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” Despite her objection, Coco whispered too. “And which direction is that?”
“East.”
“Left or right, jackass?”
“Cosette,” Beau said in mock surprise, “do you not know your—?”
A sudden wind doused the torch, plunging us into absolute darkness. Panicked voices rose. Swiftly, I reached for the wall, but it wasn’t where it should’ve been. It wasn’t there. “What the hell is going on?” Beau cried, but Liana interrupted, cursing violently.
“Something just cut me. Someone—”
Nicholina’s scream splintered the tunnel.
“Nicholina.” La Voisin’s voice pitched high and sharp. My own throat felt tight. When I brushed wool in front of me—Jean Luc’s coat—his fingers seized my arm and held on. “Nicholina, where are you?”
“Everyone stay calm,” Deveraux commanded. “There is strange magic here. It plays tricks—”
The torch sprang back to life abruptly.
Blood spattered the tunnel floor. A handful of panicked faces blinked back at me in the light. Too few. Far too few.
“Where is Nicholina?” La Voisin seized Blaise’s coat and slammed him against the wall, baring her teeth. I’d never seen her exhibit such uncontrolled emotion. Such fear. “Where is she?”
Blaise shoved her away with a snap of his teeth, charging down the tunnel and shouting for Liana and Terrance. A quick glance confirmed they too had vanished—along with the majority of blood witches. I searched the remaining faces, weak with relief when Beau and Coco nodded back at me, clutching each other. With a start, I realized Jean Luc still held my arm. He released me at the same instant.
Deveraux’s face was drawn. “Thierry has disappeared as well.”
“I swear I saw—” Toulouse started, but the torch extinguished again. His voice went with it. Forcibly. When Deveraux called after him, he didn’t answer. Blaise’s snarls echoed through the narrow tunnel, amplifying, heightening our frenzy, and something—something snarled back. La Voisin shouted, but I couldn’t hear over the blood roaring in my ears, my own shouts for Beau and Coco—
Then she and Deveraux went silent too.
Forcing myself to focus, I summoned the patterns. Sifted through them on instinct, discarded them at the slightest touch. I needed fire. Not as a weapon. As light. Anger, hatred, bitter words—they’d all provide the expedient. I cast them aside without hesitation, searching for that single spark of energy. Something simple. Something . . . physical?
There.
I chafed my palms together—just once, with just enough pressure. Heat sparked. A flame flickered to life, illuminating the newfound blister on my finger. Like I’d rubbed actual kindling instead of skin. The air took care of the rest, and the fire grew in my hand.
Only Beau, Coco, Blaise, and Jean Luc remained in the tunnel with me.
The latter stared at the fire with an inscrutable expression. He hadn’t seen it yet. My magic.
“They’re gone.” Beau loosened his grip on Coco, face pale. “They’re just gone.” He glanced up and down the tunnel with wide eyes, hesitating at the blood by our feet. “What do we do?”
Jean Luc answered for me, relighting his torch with my fire. Turning to the eastern tunnel. “We continue.”
Paradise Lost
Lou
Torches lined the earthen passages, casting the faces of passersby in shadow. Fortunately, few wandered this part, and those who did walked purposefully toward something—La Mascarade des Crânes, if their jewel-toned masks were any indication. They took the left-hand tunnels. On a whim, I took the right. The floors sloped gradually at first—the stone below smooth and slippery from the tread of many feet—before dipping unexpectedly. I stumbled, and a man lurched from the shadows, knocking into me and clutching my shoulders. I let out an undignified squeak.
“Where’s your mask, pretty lady?” he slurred, his breath nearly burning the hair from my nose. His own mask covered the upper part of his face, jutting out in a cruel black beak. A crow. In the center of his forehead, a third eye stared down at me. It couldn’t have been coincidence.
And I swore it just blinked.
Scowling—face hot with embarrassment, shoulders tense with unease—I pushed him away. “I’m already wearing one. Can’t you tell?” I resisted the urge to flick my wrist, to lengthen my nails into razor-edged knives and score the porcelain at his cheek. Though the magic to lock Reid out physically had also locked him out emotionally—temporarily, until I lifted the pattern—I still heard his voice within my mind, if not my heart
. I needn’t harm this man. I needn’t harm myself. Forcing a wicked grin instead, I whispered, “It’s the skin of my enemies. Shall I add yours?”
He yelped and scrambled away.
Exhaling hard, I continued.
The tunnels wound in a labyrinth of stone. I wandered them in silence for several more minutes, my heart pounding a wild beat in my chest. It grew louder with each step. I walked faster, the hair on my neck lifting. Someone watched me. I could feel it. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I breathed, hoping to bolster myself.
At my words, however, a strange wind rose in the tunnel, blowing out the torches and plunging me into darkness. Familiar laughter echoed from everywhere at once. Cursing, I grappled for my knife and tried to find a wall, tried to anchor myself in this insidious darkness—
When my fingertips brushed stone, the torchlight sprang back to life.
A flash of white hair disappeared around the bend.
I tore after it like a fool, unwilling to be caught alone in that darkness again, but it was gone. I kept running. When I burst into a long, shadowed room lined with coffins, I stopped short, panting and examining the nearest one in relief. “Father Lionnel Clément,” I said, reading the faded name scratched into the stone. A yellow skull sat on a ledge above it. I glanced at the next name. Father Jacques Fontaine. “Clergymen.”
I crept forward, pausing every so often to listen.
“Célie?” Though soft, my voice echoed unnaturally in the tomb. Unlike the absolute silence of the tunnels, this silence seemed to live and breathe, whispering against my neck, urging me to flee, flee, flee. I grew increasingly jumpy as the moments wore on, as the rooms grew in size. I didn’t know what to look for—didn’t know where even to start. Célie could’ve been in any one of these caskets, unconscious or worse, and I never would’ve known. Still . . . I couldn’t shake the feeling Morgane wanted me to find Célie. There was less fun in a game I had no chance of winning. Morgane wouldn’t have liked that. She wouldn’t have just chosen an arbitrary grave, either. Her games were methodical, every move striking hard and true. Her notes had led me this far, each phrase a riddle, a clue, leading me deeper into her game.
Forlorn within her pall . . . alone but not alone.
Trapped within a mirrored grave, she wears a mask of bone.
It all pointed to here, now, this place. Only her use of the word mirrored made me pause.
Lost in thought—certain I’d missed something—I nearly didn’t notice the dais in the next room, where hundreds of candles illuminated a gilded coffin. Winged angels and horned demons flickered in shadow on the lid, locked in an eternal embrace, while roses and skulls wove together in macabre beauty on each side. It was a masterpiece. A work of art.
Unbidden, I stepped closer, trailing my fingers along the cruel face of an angel. The petals of a rose. The letters of his name.
HIS EMINENCE, FLORIN CARDINAL CLÉMENT, ARCHBISHOP OF BELTERRA
Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in Paradise
Florin Clément. I’d laughed at the name once, not knowing it belonged to me. In a different world, I might’ve been Louise Clément, daughter of Florin and Morgane. Perhaps they would’ve loved each other, adored each other, filling our home in East End with sticky buns and potted eucalyptus—and children. Lots and lots of children. An entire house of them, little brothers and sisters with freckles and blue-green eyes. Just like me. I could’ve taught them how to climb trees and braid hair, how to sing off pitch outside our parents’ room at dawn. We could’ve been happy. We could’ve been a family.
Now that—that—would’ve been Paradise.
With a wistful sigh, I lowered my hand and turned away.
It did little good to imagine such a life for myself. My wine had been drawn long ago, and it was not a bouquet of hearth and home, nor friends and family. No, mine smelled of death. Of secrets. Of rot. “Are you in there with him, Célie?” I asked bitterly, mostly to distract myself from such wallowing thoughts. “Seems like the sort of thing Morgane would—” Gasping, I whirled around, eyes wide. “Mirrored grave,” I whispered. An entire house of them, little brothers and sisters with freckles and blue-green eyes. Just like me.
Holy hell.
I knew where she was.
A Necessary Evil
Reid
The others’ disappearances became a presence of its own. It hung over us like a rope, tightening with each small noise. When Beau kicked a pebble, Jean Luc tensed. When Coco inhaled too sharply, Blaise growled. He’d half shifted, eyes glowing luminous in the semidarkness, to better scent Lou—and to better fight whatever roamed these tunnels.
“This doesn’t end with Célie and Lou,” Coco had said fiercely when he’d tried to leave, to search for his missing children. Curiously, he hadn’t been able to smell where they’d gone. Where any of them had gone. They’d just . . . vanished. “It ends with Morgane. This has her clawed hands all over it. Wherever she is, Liana and Terrance will be too. Trust me.”
No one voiced what that meant. Everyone knew.
Even a moment spent under Morgane’s mercy was too long. Too late.
“Are her hands clawed?” Beau had muttered a few moments later.
Coco had raised her brows at him. “You were at Modraniht. You saw them.”
“They weren’t clawed.”
“They should’ve been. She should have a wart and a hunchback too, the hackneyed bitch.”
Even Jean Luc cracked a grin. His Balisarda weighed heavy against my chest. At last—when I could stand it no more—I unsheathed it, handing it to him. “Here. Take it.”
His smile slipped, and he missed a step. “Why—why would you give this back to me?”
I curled his fingers around the hilt. “It’s yours. Mine is gone.” When I shrugged, the movement didn’t feel forced. It felt . . . right. Light. A weight lifted from my shoulders. “Perhaps it’s for the best. I’m not a huntsman anymore.”
He stared at me. Then the dam broke. “You’re a witch. You killed the Archbishop with . . . magic.” His voice dripped with accusation. With betrayal. But there, in his eye, was a sliver of hope. He wanted me to deny it. He wanted to blame someone else—anyone else—for what had happened to our forefather. In that sliver, I recognized my old friend. He was still in there. Despite everything, he still wanted to trust me. The thought should’ve warmed me, but it didn’t.
That sliver was a lie.
“Yes.” I watched as his hope shriveled, as he physically recoiled from me. Blaise’s gaze touched my cheek, curious—studying—but I ignored him. “I won’t deny it, and I won’t explain myself. I am a witch, and I killed our forefather. The Archbishop didn’t deserve it, but he also wasn’t the man we thought he was.”
Visibly deflating, he scrubbed a hand down his face.
“Mother of God.” When he looked up again, he met my gaze with not camaraderie, exactly, but a sense of resignation. “Have you known all this time?”
“No.”
“Did you enchant him to receive your position?”
“Of course not.”
“And does it . . . feel different?” At this, he swallowed visibly, but he did not look away. In that small act of defiance, I remembered the boy who’d befriended me, cared for me, the one who’d always pulled me up when I fell. The one who’d punched Julien for calling me trash boy. Before the greed had hardened us to each other. Before the envy.
“I’m not the same person I was, Jean.” The words, so different than before—so true—fell heavy from my lips. Final. “But neither are you. We’ll never be what we were. But here, now, I’m not asking for your friendship. Morgane is near, and together—regardless of our past—we have a real chance to finish her.”
“You thought she’d attack at the funeral. You were wrong.”
Unbidden, more truth spilled forth. I felt lighter with each word. “I thought whatever I needed to think to attend the Archbishop’s funeral.” I hadn’t realized it at the time.
Perhaps couldn’t have realized it. And though I’d thought wrong, I didn’t regret it. I couldn’t. He started to argue, but I pushed forward before the next words died in my throat. Forced myself to meet his gaze directly. “Jean. I . . . I never knew about Célie.”
He stiffened.
“If I’d known how you felt, I would’ve . . .” What? Not accepted her love? Not accepted the Archbishop’s? Would I not have fought him in the tournament or taken my oath? Would I have given up my dreams because he wanted them too? “I’m sorry,” I said simply.
And I was. I was sorry life had dealt us the same cards. I was sorry for his pain, for the suffering I’d inadvertently caused him. I couldn’t take it away, but I could acknowledge it. I could open the door for us. I couldn’t, however, force him to step through it.
A tense moment passed before he dipped his chin, but I recognized that nod for what it was—a single step.
Without another word, we continued our search. It took another half hour for Blaise to catch Lou’s scent. “She is close.” He frowned, creeping toward the tunnel ahead. “But there are others. I can hear their heartbeats, their breaths—” He skidded backward abruptly, eyes wide as he turned. “Run.”
Chasseurs rounded the corner.
Balisardas lifted, they recognized me immediately and charged. Philippe led them. When Jean Luc leapt in front of us, however—shoving me backward, out of their line of fire—they staggered to a halt. “What is this?” Philippe snarled. He didn’t lower his blade. His eyes fell to Jean Luc’s own Balisarda. “Where did you . . . ?”
“Reid returned it to me.”
Those behind Philippe shifted uncomfortably. They disliked this new information. I was a witch. A murderer. Confusion, unease flitted across their faces as they took in Jean’s protective stance. “Why are you here, Captain?” Philippe jerked his chin toward me. “He is our enemy. They all are.”
“A necessary evil.” After a single, hesitant look in my direction, Jean Luc straightened his shoulders. “We have new orders, men. Morgane is here. We find her, and we kill her.”
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