Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
In the dim moonlight, Emmy studied the locked door in the back of Clara Claremont’s dress shop.
“I could melt it,” Jack offered.
“No need.” Emmy pressed her palm against the heavy wood and, with a deep breath, gathered the brume. The particles arched
away from her like ripples from the center of a lake. Slipping her hand through the hole, she turned the handle from inside
the shop.
With a loud creak, the door opened.
“I’d say ‘ladies first,’ but I know you better than that.” With a quick glance behind them, Jack slipped into the dress shop.
A moment later, Emmy followed.
The hall was darker than the night, nearly pitch black. Like Grimsbane.
“The relic?” Jack’s quiet voice wavered nearly imperceptibly.
Emmy removed it from around her neck, and Jack kept his hand on her back as if the night would swallow her. That point of
contact anchored her as she fumbled in the dark, searching for his free hand. Their fingers grazed, his unmistakably warm
as he plucked the cool coin from her.
His flames unfurled like a beautiful, hellish flower, revealing the dresses around them.
Squinting in the shadowy light, Emmy tiptoed through the back room. Dresses, dresses, and more dresses. As she brushed one,
flower petals drifted across the luscious fabric.
“It’s not particularly useful conjury.” Jack held up a bolt of fabric with lace goldfish swimming across it. “She enchants certain aspects of the pattern into perpetual motion.”
Emmy ran her hand along cloud-soft charmeuse. “She claims they’ll move forever, but the embroidery on my debutante gown stopped
moving fairly quickly.”
“Charmlinking is always temporary. They can inject only so much power into ordinary materials.”
Charmlinking, Emmy was learning, referred to gifts that connected conjury to something else. Like Grace’s bridging. “Maybe
Clara has a relic?”
“Her mother has one. It’s possible Clara borrows it, but it still isn’t enough for all this.” He set down the bolt. “Ordinary
relics are only a fraction of the strength of Rose’s.”
Which was why Emmy could never let it out of her sight. Even now, as Jack wore it, she longed to snatch it back.
He never strayed far as they wove through a windowless storage room, where row after row of enchanted gowns hung from satin
hangers, order forms dangling from their necklines. The sheer volume of Clara’s business made Emmy want to pull out her hair.
Seemingly every single Society lady, along with the majority of men, was outfitted by the shop.
The workshop was next. It was an idyllic workspace, with fresh cut flowers in little jars at the centers of the vast tables.
Sewing machines were evenly spaced along both sides, accompanied by wicker baskets full of colorful spools of thread.
“Grace runs a charity out of Clara’s flagship store in the city.” Jack ran his hand along the picturesque table. “She teaches
poor children how to sew.”
“What an angel.” The acid in Emmy’s voice brought a dark smile to Jack’s lips. It was thrilling, catching one of Jack’s roguish
expressions in Nathaniel’s princely face.
At the end of the hall, Emmy searched for a seam in the wall. ”There are doors that appear only when Clara touches the wall with her palm.”
Raising his palm, Jack burned an enormous hole in the wall. Dark as his flames were, the sudden burst of fire brightened the
room, and Emmy glanced toward the far windows. No movement outside, though it was too dark to be certain.
“An hour until dawn.” Jack glanced out the window. “Let’s hurry.”
The serpentine fabric was still in Clara’s top drawer, the snake slithering as soon as Emmy touched it. After studying it
in Jack’s dim light, she searched through Clara’s neat drawers. There were ledgers and receipts and folders bursting with
cutouts of French gowns Clara had imitated. Copyright infringement, perhaps, but the Society wouldn’t mind, so long as they
benefitted.
Returning to the lady’s salon was like returning to the scene of a crime. Emmy trailed her fingers along the silks she’d been
admiring when she saw Grace for the first time. She meandered down the aisles she’d run through when her resolve had crumbled.
She searched in hat boxes and shoe bins and crates of fabric and underneath the rugs.
Nothing was amiss.
In a small workshop, two ornate cloaks and sashes hung on a pair of mannequins. Even in the dim light, they were exquisite:
thick ivory velvet with elaborate golden swirls that wound their way to the centers of the cloaks. Emmy ran her fingers along
one, but the swirls did not shift. Not yet enchanted.
“‘Prince of the Charmed,’” Jack read, his fingers trailing a golden sash. “The triumvirate must have commissioned Clara to
design these for the summer pageant. It’s our annual contest, a chance for the Society’s bachelors and belles to show off
their abilities.”
“They’re rather thick for summer.” Emmy picked up the matching sash, with Princess of the Charmed splayed across its front in elegant gold lettering.
“The winners wear them only for the victory dance. Clara probably fitted them to Grace’s and Oliver’s sizes.”
No part of Emmy wanted to dance in public—but she’d always hated to lose to Grace, even when they were the best of friends.
“You don’t think we can win?”
“As much as I’d love to dance with you, Vallillo, Oliver always cheats to get what he wants.” Letting go of the sash, Jack rummaged through the
back shelf. “When we were playing cards with him, I kept thinking about what a pompous ass he is. How the hell didn’t I see
that before?”
She placed a fabric crown on his head. “Because you were also a pompous ass?”
“Possibly.” He flipped the crown upon her head. “What about Grace? Did you ever suspect she might turn on you?”
In Grimsbane, Emmy had tortured herself with this very question ad nauseam, turning over each memory like a stone. “There
was this one thing, in retrospect. On my birthday.”
“January sixteenth.”
“Your intimate knowledge of my life is entirely unsettling.”
His grin widened. “Not intimate enough.”
She flicked a ribbon at him. “Papa always made a big to-do about our birthdays. He’d bring home a little gift from work—a
figurine someone had whittled for him, or a twine bracelet. And he’d treat us to our favorite supper.”
“Dumplings, from Chatham Square,” Jack supplied.
Her hard look did nothing to quell his amusement.
“On my thirteenth birthday, Grace fell down the stairs. My father spent the night healing her broken wrist.”
Jack glanced up from a rack of swirling ties. “You think she fell on purpose?”
“Not at first,” Emmy said carefully. “But the next year, she burned herself on the stove. And the following year, she had a stomachache so severe, she was doubled over in pain for hours while Papa tried to heal whatever ailed her.” Speaking of that night made Emmy feel strangely disloyal.
Real tears had fallen down Grace’s cheeks.
“It was probably a coincidence. Why would she hurt herself on purpose?”
“Because she was competing for your father’s attention.”
“But he loved her, too.” And he’d died without knowing the truth about her.
As Emmy trailed her fingers along a spool of ribbon, sending reeds blowing in a phantom wind, Jack muttered, “I don’t understand
how she did it.”
“Did what?”
His lips twisted as if fighting back his words. “Convinced you that you’re inferior to her.”
Emmy whirled to face him, snap at him, something. “I was better than her at school. And at magic.” Emmy had always been able to access the brume quicker—and hold on to it
for longer.
“But you watch her dance like she’s some sort of savant. And even though you’re breathtaking, you laugh at the mere suggestion
that Oliver might find you attractive.”
He had a way of hurling a compliment like an insult. “Winnie may be beautiful, but I spent the last two years hardly feeling
human, let alone pretty. It’s an adjustment.”
“And it isn’t for me?”
“This is your world. You’re used to lavish parties and palling around with the Stratton heir.” She removed the fabric crown,
fiddling with its edges. “Did you ever make a servants’ bet?”
He froze.
Deny it. It struck her with surprising strength, her need for him to be different from them.
Color rose in his cheeks even as he shrugged. “They were commonplace. I never questioned them.”
“You never questioned cruelty toward the people who looked after your well-being.” She could not hold back her ire.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m one of the good ones, Vallillo.” His haughty smile was as vexing as ever. “Servants’
bets are hardly skimming the surface of the things I’ve done.”
This was precisely why she should not have even asked. They were not friends. They were never going to be friends. “No need
to worry about that.”
He blocked her path at the end of the aisle. “Then why do you look so furious?”
“Because your casual indifference toward your own life is infuriating!” She ticked a list off on her fingers, one by one.
“You speak of your death like a welcome holiday. You were thrown in jail when you might have avoided it because ‘Oliver has
a face that just begs to be punched.’ And you humiliated your staff because everyone else was doing it!”
His eyes blazed, his lips twisting with whatever comeback he was considering. But he said nothing. For once, she’d rendered
him speechless.
They were, objectively speaking, rather nice lips. Not quite plump, but full nonetheless. A tiny V marked the center of the upper one, its plunge endearing, especially while he was pouting. She ought to pat herself on the
back for giving him such a nice mouth. Unless these had been his lips all along and she’d never noticed them.
They looked quite soft, too.
Emmy spun on her heel, returning to the cloak she’d already examined.
What had gotten into her? She did not care about lips, especially his.
“Would you like me to be more action oriented?” The faint hiss of his flames crackled behind her. “Should I burn down this
shop and all the dresses in it?”
“It’d be a start.” Fiddling with the cloak, Emmy tried to swallow her anger.
Of course Jack had been cruel toward his staff.
He was a Society darling. And if they managed to finish what they’d started without him dying, he’d return to being a Society darling.
“On second thought, don’t burn anything. That’ll only make a martyr of her.”
The shadowy light dimmed. “What about petty revenge? Is that beneath you?”
Petty revenge had kept her alive in Grimsbane. Like when she’d bitten that guard. “Not at all.”
“Then let’s do something tonight.” He flexed and unflexed his still-smoking palms. “What is the worst thing that can happen in a dress shop? Everything
shrinks?”
“Spoken like a true rich boy.”
“I doubt the poor enjoy ill-fitting clothes, either.”
“We don’t mind them nearly as much as lice or—” Emmy stilled.
Jack’s teasing smile vanished, and he swiftly moved between Emmy and the door.
“It’s not that.” Emmy waved him off, her mind buzzing with possibility. “I have an idea.”
Jimmy would help, of course. Between the two of them, they’d find what they needed.
Jack tore his gaze from the closed door. “Well?”
Excitement raced through Emmy. So many new orders. There had to be one for every mansion in Avalon-on-Hudson, save Mistfield.
“We infest the gowns with pests. Tiny ones, like lice or bedbugs. Lots of bedbugs.”
A slow smile curved Jack’s infuriatingly perfect lips. “I’m in.”