Chapter 37
Zina
Later that day, I arranged for Baba Valya to give her statement to the police at the French café down the street where Katya and I liked to breakfast.
I told Gabriel it would be too painful for her to speak about the attack in the tearoom, where it happened, and he believed me. She had also developed a worrisome cough, maybe due to the broken windows and the resulting drafts. I implored her to call Dr. Misha, but she refused.
After the interview, I supported my grandmother as she rose creakily, unsteadily, groping for her cane and coughing until she couldn’t breathe.
I had the wild urge to weep. I had never seen her so weak or so old.
I hung back, watching her hobble toward the tearoom, feeling watched myself, that prickle hot and rashy on my skin.
“Is there any sign of them?” I asked Gabriel, when his squad of inspectors had dispersed and we were alone on the street. We slowly made our way to the tearoom.
“None.”
It was the transition between the morning and afternoon rushes. The temperature was so mild I barely noticed it. Bright, but not sunny. In other words, the perfect day for conversations, maybe for confrontations. I itched for both, aggravated by that feeling of being watched.
“I am sorry…about all this,” Gabriel said clumsily.
His energy was timid, slightly cowering.
It tasted earthy brown and savory, like the rich aroma of eggs just fried up in a pan.
But the sea salt, and the rot, were still there.
“You didn’t just drink too much at that chateau, did you?
” I hesitated, then shook my head. He gave a solemn nod. “And how is your grandmother, truly?”
“Better, thank you.”
After listening to his questions for the better part of an hour, I was in a thoroughly bad mood.
While it didn’t seem that Gabriel was sniffing around the tearoom anymore, her statement could still be some ruse to get inside anyway, to catch Baba Valya in some perceived lie.
For all I knew, Gabriel was still working for Olga.
My only comfort was that my father was a chief inspector and his superior.
Though I hadn’t yet fully processed that Lucian was my father, or the role he had played in my mother’s death, this was one small mercy.
“Will you tell me what I did?” Gabriel’s eyes were a strange pearl gray. “I…don’t understand it.”
Zefir, who had come along for the excursion, let out a vicious hiss.
I leaned down to brush a hand along her back, playing for time.
We had reached the tearoom. Aside from the itchiness, I was edgy, buzzing with nerves.
The grave, the dagger, the danger of Gabriel this close.
But I couldn’t let him see my fear. I leaned against the tearoom casually, inviting back everything I had bottled up since the morning I found Olga’s letters.
The betrayal, the rage, the pain. When it finally burst out, it was sudden and loud and accusatory.
“I know she paid you to look into what happened, to get close to me. You’ve been taking bribes and lying to me the whole time. Maybe you’ve had me followed, too.”
Zefir hissed at Gabriel again. A growl was starting deep in her throat.
I glanced about, as if Olga was lying in wait in the shadows, watching me, us.
He blinked, evidently stunned. His eyes darkened to the blue of ocean depths. “H-how do you know?”
At least he wasn’t trying to deny it. Though his energy would betray him. It was the deep blue of his eyes and salty, guilt-ridden, tinged with regret, like Lucian’s. “I am a psychic. I know much more than you think.”
But Gabriel didn’t buy it. “The letters—you read them.”
“So what if I did?” I crossed my arms tightly at my chest, feeling extremely vulnerable. As though I stood on a jagged cliff, alone, a vicious wind pressing me down.
He put up his hands. “Let me explain, Zina, please.” But Zefir swiped a sharp, clawed paw at him, tearing into his pant leg. “Ow!” he yelped. “That will leave a mark! Rein in the evil creature, please!”
I smiled a little, giving Zefir a nod that told her she was free to go. She let out a satisfied meow, then hopped across the street and through the open cathedral doors.
“Once. I took her money once.”
“And that’s supposed to make it better?”
“No, it’s just that…I never agreed to spy on you.”
“You are such a gentleman, thank you so much for bedding me instead.”
Gabriel crossed the space between us and took my face in his hands.
They were warm and rough, bringing me back to our night together.
I hated how our lips were centimeters apart, his breath hot and smoky on my cheek.
“Listen to me, Zina, please. I only took that money because I thought it would help my sister, Marguerite, with a new treatment. I mentioned her to you before, how she wants to become an artist. Well, she is also fighting consumption. It might not have been the most respectable thing to do, but she was on her deathbed, and I was desperate. You see, we had another sister, Marguerite and me. Her name was Marthe. She died of the same disease, and I swore I would save my last remaining sister, my only sibling, my beloved, beautiful girl, whatever it took.”
I recalled the shadowy blue-eyed spirit of his dead sister saying he could not move on. And I knew he was telling me the truth.
“I never meant to deceive you. As I told you, I have not heard from Olga. She might have reached out to me initially, but from the start, this investigation has been mine, not hers. Whether or not I accepted the first payment would have made no difference. Everything I have done has been in the furtherance of the two cases. I never spied on you. Never. My feelings for you are genuine.” Gabriel lowered his face to mine, our lips a breath apart.
“I’ve missed you, Zina. It is criminal how much. Please, believe me…”
I wanted to give in. To touch him, to comfort him.
His mouth was right there, to meet, to kiss, to forgive.
But something within me balked at that. I had strong feelings for him, pictured us together despite it all, but I couldn’t bring myself to forgive, or forget, what he had done even for a moment.
I could not trust him. I never could. Maybe love was a dagger to the heart after all.
Because I felt something sharp twist in my chest even now.
I drew back, the sharp, knifelike thing digging in deeper.
I caught the pain that bloomed across Gabriel’s features in splotches of patchy, embarrassed red.
“Thank you for telling me. Truly. And I am sorry about your sister, both of your sisters. I hope Marguerite recovers soon and becomes the artist she dreams of being. But you lied to me, Gabriel. You betrayed me.” I shook my head.
“I am not certain I can move on from that. I am sorry.”
He nodded, now looking ghost white. “I understand. Thank you for listening, for giving me the chance to explain. I will notify you when Olga and Alec reappear, or if we have any other information regarding your mother’s case.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, and, Zina?” There was a hint of his old smirk at his lips. “Take care of yourself, will you? Don’t go looking for trouble.”
I nodded, hiding the beginnings of a smile, thinking of Sergei the medium. And before I could do anything I would regret, I hurried back into the safety of the tearoom, even if it was haunted.
But that night, after Baba Valya had retired and Katya had gone home, the tearoom didn’t feel safe at all.
I locked the door as securely as possible, careful not to disturb the nails hammered in.
The canvas with which we had covered the still-empty, glassless windows rustled uneasily.
Wind whistled through the gaps, whipping up more drafts.
I heard my grandmother’s cough from upstairs, the phlegm and wheeze in it.
Night streamed blackly, eerily in. I shivered, imagining somebody across the street watching the tearoom and me.
When I turned from the door, a cloud of thick, noxious air swarmed into my face. It droned in my ears. Tasted of decay as it tangled with my tongue. Something, or someone, must have disturbed the wards.
A creak—in front of me.
“Zefir?” I peered ahead, only to be met with a darker-than-I-remembered tearoom.
An inky curtain had descended upon it, turning everything the purplish brown of bruises, the rippling tree branches outside whisking the shadows into motion.
I caught the flick of Zefir’s tail at my feet.
I crouched to stroke her back, finding comfort in her silky fur, its white color lighting our patch of darkness.
“What is it?” I whispered, but Zefir had gone rigid.
Her eyes fixed on the turn in the hall where one veered right to the kitchen or continued straight and up the stairs.
Another creak. The give of a floorboard beneath an unseen foot.
I rose slowly, holding my breath in my mouth like a hot coal.
The shadows deepened, the floorboards continuing to creak, an invisible presence striding toward us.
Zefir hissed and thrust out her paws.
I had to get to the kitchen. My amulet was there, as well as the salt and garlic.
In one quick motion, I swept Zefir up into my arms and sprinted forward.
It was like diving into very cold, odorless water.
I brushed against something—a shape, a body, there and not there.
Felt fingers caress my cheek like a puff of air, knuckles first, as in a tender gesture.
But it left me feeling violated, worse because I couldn’t see him.
Now that I knew the Grand Duke wasn’t my father, his spirit frightened me, froze the blood in my veins.
I kept moving with a wriggling Zefir in my arms until I reached the kitchen.
Once inside, I slammed the door shut behind us, breathing hard, and set my cat down.
I had to take steps to protect us. Now. I grabbed the amulet (we hung them off metal hooks amid the pots and pans) and hastily threw it on.
Then I seized the garlic and salt. Just in time—as the spirit materialized by the door.
A hole was forming in one sepia-hued cheek, another in his chin, the skull there peeking out bone white and naked.
I swallowed my disgust and rubbed the garlic into the floor around Zefir and me in a clumsy circle.
But the spirit kept walking toward us, his orb-like eyes brighter, stronger, seemingly unaffected and undisturbed by my attempt at the wards.
Tsk. Tsk. Tsk, came his scratch of a voice.
I could barely breathe, rubbing the garlic into the floor harder than ever, as my cat nearly went out of her mind in panic, bounding up to me, scratching at my legs, yowling so loud that I thought for certain we would wake the entire neighborhood of rue Daru.
The walls can hear. I can hear. I heard everything the old woman told you.
I caught the edge of the spirit’s smile, which was in the process of being swallowed up by another quickly forming hole. I sprinkled a generous handful of salt around the perimeter of our garlic circle.
I heard it. All of it.
My hands were shaking, the salt pouring out messily, everywhere.
You aren’t my daughter.
“That is the best news of all.” I smiled back, teeth gritted. “Murderer. You and your family. Thank God I do not share your tainted, spoiled blood.” I spit at him. “Rotten to the core, just like my grandmother said.”
Lies. The spirit let out a snakelike hiss. It was the only thing saving you from your grandmother’s fate, girl.
“What did you do to her?”
You haven’t noticed? She is weaker, more scattered, more frightened.
Sick, too, though that was but a happy consequence of the attack.
Either way, she is going mad. Like you will.
If all goes according to plan, both of you will end up in the same place that my daughter languished in all those years ago.
A fitting punishment, a poetic end to the Lenormand bitches that ruined and stole my life.
The same place. A warning bell chimed noisily in my head. What place? I had no time to puzzle it out. I swung the container at the spirit, and salt scattered like snow, passing through his body as though through air.
His face contorted. A growl roared out of him, tearing at the black hole of his mouth until half his face was gone, then the rest of it, along with his head, so he appeared like the headless horseman.
The headless body lunged at me. All I could think to do was throw my hands up, prepare for the assault. But I felt nothing.
When I dared to open my eyes, realizing I had shut them in my terror, I was alone in the kitchen with my cat.
Gasping and sobbing, I dropped the salt and clutched Zefir’s little body to me so hard, I felt her own erratic heartbeat through her fur. For once, she didn’t pull away.