The Shadow Bride (The Scarlet Veil #2)

Chapter One Reflection

Chapter One

Reflection

The simple chime of a music box is all that fills the silence.

I watch the trinket from across the bedroom, figurines turning in a mechanical dance, their painted wings sparkling in the glow of a single candle. Reid lit the taper earlier this evening while I feigned sleep. At dusk, Lou tiptoed across the floorboards to draw back the curtains, hoping to let in the moonlight, but storm clouds obscured the night sky and shadows crept through my window instead. They swathe me like a cloak as the fairies dance in their halo of light.

“Are you all right, Célie?” Mila whispers from the chair by the bed.

After the grotto, she found a tear in the veil near Saint-Cécile, slipping through it to linger near me in the realm of the living. Though she speaks very little—and asks me to speak even less—I cannot decide whether I appreciate it or not. I cannot decide whether I want her here at all.

“I’m fine,” I whisper back.

And the fairies continue their dance.

Lou and Reid brought the music box from my room in Chasseur Tower, along with all my other worldly possessions: beeswax candles and bottles of rose perfume, paste jewels and storybooks with cracked spines. An emerald-green quilt across my bed. A standing gilt mirror in the corner. The filmy, ridiculous nightgown I currently wear.

They meant to help by filling their home with my things.

They meant to remind me that I’m still Célie Tremblay.

They couldn’t have known I once coveted the fairies on this music box as much as I loved them. I longed to steal their wings and fly to their realm, to enchant wild creatures and court my own fairy prince. My nursemaid, Evangeline, gave me the box for my eighth birthday, and for an entire fortnight, I spoke of little else until Filippa—irritated—snatched the music box from my nightstand and smashed it to pieces.

She regretted it instantly, of course, and glued the fairies back together as best she could. I never noticed the newfound cracks in their smiles. Perhaps I was too young then—too busy dreaming of grand, sweeping adventures and heart-stopping romance—or perhaps I simply didn’t pay attention. I stare at those cracks now, quietly hating them.

I have dreamed so many foolish things.

Turning away, I sigh heavily before inhaling once more—an instinctive reaction, one that fills my body with air it no longer needs. Mistake. My stomach constricts at the sudden influx of scent, and fresh saliva floods my mouth. My head pounds. My gums throb. Though I close my eyes against the nausea, the darkness of my eyelids shifts in a sickening kaleidoscope of color, pounding in unison with the heartbeats in the living room. Two of them. My fists curl even as my teeth begin to lengthen, and the saliva continues to flow. My throat contracts without permission, and for just a second, my gaze flicks to the bedroom door. Everything stills to a knifepoint.

Lou and Reid move just beyond it.

I can hear them in the kitchen preparing dinner—the gentle clink of cutlery, the occasional brush of their shoulders as they pass each other. Lou’s heartbeat accelerates slightly when Reid brushes a kiss against her temple. He chuckles when she swats his backside in turn. They’re wholly absorbed in each other.

Wholly distracted.

They won’t notice you , a familiar voice whispers in the back of my mind. Not until it’s too late.

And it’s true. Though I close my eyes, I can almost see the blood pumping through their bodies now, and I can imagine how it would taste—thick and rich and hot on my tongue, decadent , like a feast of kings. Mila wouldn’t stop me. We spent my last moments together, and though she hasn’t mentioned it, I know she feels partly responsible for my fate. Perhaps if she’d somehow forced me through that wretched golden light, none of this would’ve happened, but she told me to choose instead.

She said if I didn’t, I’d lose my choice forever.

Ironic, that.

I swallow hard. No, Mila wouldn’t stop me—couldn’t stop me—but would Odessa? Tilting my head, I listen to her flick each page of her book as she pointedly ignores the sickly sweet humans. “They make my teeth ache,” she said yesterday before fixing me with her signature piercing stare. “When can we go home?”

Home.

To her, that means Requiem. Michal sent her here to watch over me, to guide me, but she never intended to stay in Cesarine. Deep down, I know Michal never intended it either. The last words he spoke to me still haunt my dreams—or they would if I ever slept.

Please stay.

He doesn’t know I heard him. I shouldn’t have heard him—not as my heart stopped beating—but I did. I heard him, and I can’t unhear him. He begged me to stay, yet where is he now? Why didn’t he insist I remain with him on Requiem? And if not there, why hasn’t he joined me here , in this miserable room, to help me through transition instead of Odessa? The questions sicken me—they’re ridiculous, pointless, the least of my problems—yet I cannot seem to let them go. To let him go. With little else to distract me from this scarlet haze, Michal has spread like a poison across my skin, and I cannot stop scratching at him.

Why did he bite me, only to abandon me? Why did he leave me to the care of my friends—leave me to hurt them?

I don’t realize my hand grips the doorknob until my palm starts to burn.

With a hiss, I release it and leap away, glaring at the silver chain around the knob. Lou didn’t think such a precaution would be necessary. She argued when I insisted, but in the end, she honored the request by digging out the only silver jewelry she owned: an ugly, tarnished necklace that once belonged to her great-great-grandmother. In the kitchen, she now pretends to retch as Reid offers her a carrot, and I curl my injured hand into a fist.

“Hold your breath,” Mila says softly.

They won’t notice you , that terrifying voice repeats.

I stop breathing instantly at the sound of it, and after several seconds of hard-fought self-control, I force myself to back away from the door. Disappointment echoes faintly from wherever—or whoever—the voice comes. You’re going to starve.

It sounds like my sister.

“No, I won’t.”

I shake my head fiercely at the shadow in the mirror while Mila watches with wide eyes. And why wouldn’t she? I’m having a conversation with someone who isn’t here , and none of this— none of it—is real. Filippa cannot be in this room with me. Even if Frederic’s ritual somehow worked, even if she returned as a spirit or—or as something else, I would still see her. Mila would hear her too.

My resolve hardens at that. More than anything, Mila’s silence proves that Filippa is still dead, and this is just a hallucination. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard voices, would it? I glare at the mirror. Faint cracks in its silver surface refract the light in a strange way, but otherwise, the glass stands still and silent. There is no tear in the veil, no echo of laughter. No flash of an emerald eye.

I still stare at the mirror hungrily.

I know better than to do this again. I know better than to hope.

I still stalk forward until I stand in front of the wretched thing, however, gazing at where my own reflection should be. Praying for the hundredth time—the thousandth—that this is the moment the dream ends. That the fairy prince will kiss me awake now , and the two of us will live happily ever after.

Please.

Though I stand there for several more seconds, waiting, nothing happens. I close my eyes again. Open them. Bitterness courses through me when the mirror remains empty, and I turn without thinking, seizing the music box and shattering it against the floorboards. The lullaby ends with a violent, satisfying crash , yet my fury doesn’t abate—instead it rises up my throat like vitriol, and I curse as the porcelain pieces settle. The princess’s vapid smile remains whole and intact. With an unfamiliar snarl, I stomp on it with all my might. I stomp on all of them—every single shard—until nothing but glittering dust remains, until my bare feet should bleed and ache. I want them to bleed and ache.

Before I can seize the silver chain, however, low voices sound from the entry. The front door opens with a soft swish, joined by the rustle of woolen pant legs, a silk gown. The steady beat of two more hearts. Two, not three. Light footsteps cross the threshold in the next second, and the door closes once more. “How is she?” Coco whispers.

“Did we miss anything?” Beau asks.

Jean Luc’s voice should join theirs now, but it doesn’t. He didn’t come.

Hard to keep them straight, isn’t it? that voice croons. Jean Luc, Michal... Michal, Jean Luc...

I struggle to ignore it, and the soft, wet sounds of Reid’s knife pause as he murmurs, “Nothing has changed.”

He’ll never love you.

I cringe and glance down at the residue from the music box.

“We didn’t want to wake her until dinner.” Lou stumbles slightly as Melisandre winds between her feet, and a sonorous purr punctuates her next words. “She seems... exhausted.”

Mila floats closer, lifting an arm as if to wrap it around me. To comfort me. When I tense, however, dreading the contact, she drifts to a halt, her arm falling to her side instead. “It’ll go better tonight, Célie,” she says softly as Coco and Beau unlace their boots. “Don’t lose hope.”

I resist the urge to scoff at her optimism. “And on what basis are you making that assumption? Last night? The one before that? How about last week ?”

Mila doesn’t answer. She cannot answer—not truthfully, anyway—and instead we both listen as Beau asks, “Has she eaten anything else?”

Sometimes they forget I can hear them. Sometimes they pretend nothing has changed.

Reid continues his work with the knife, dicing meat and vegetables with an expert hand. The scent of them—gamey, earthy, perhaps venison and peas with the carrots—drifts beneath my bedroom door and congeals in my stomach. “Not since dinner yesterday.”

“And tonight?”

Reid doesn’t hesitate. “Deer. We’re hoping a larger animal helps.”

A larger animal. I stifle the urge to retch.

“I told you”—Lou lowers her voice, at least, but I still hear every word—“her body doesn’t want deer. We should’ve—I don’t know—found a bear, or—”

“Do we have bears in Belterra?” Beau asks abruptly.

Sighing in exasperation, Coco hangs her cloak, and the scent of her blood —my vision tilts again. I seize a bedpost for balance as she says, “How do you not know this? You’re the king —”

“I’m not the king of bears , Cosette.”

Odessa snorts from the corner.

“ No , Beauregard,” Coco says in a long-suffering voice, “we do not have bears in Belterra, but if we’re being honest, her body doesn’t want animal at all. She needs to feed—really feed, this time. I told her we could help her hunt, but she refused.”

Closing her book, Odessa says rather puckishly, “Oh? And do you have experience hunting humans?”

A pause as everyone reluctantly turns to her. Though they’ve done their best to avoid her presence, they never ignore her outright—because of me, I think. Yesterday, she chastised Lou for feeding Melisandre cheese—“Do you have any idea what dairy does to a cat’s digestion?”—until Reid intervened, at which point she chronicled the history and mythos of red hair for nearly an hour. Coco takes a deep breath now. “Of course we don’t have experience hunting humans, but—”

“I do, actually.” Unlike Coco, Reid doesn’t bother to hide his distaste for the vampire in his kitchen. Somewhere between Odessa’s suggestion that Melisandre stank and that, historically, his hair meant he should’ve been sacrificed at birth, Reid lost his social graces. “Together, we could help Célie feed without harming anyone.”

“Ah, yes.” I imagine Odessa examining her nails with a polite lack of interest. “The huntsman . Tell me, darling, with all of your ineffable experience, how do you imagine that scene unfolding? Would the four of you—three of whom govern the whole of Belterra—descend upon the streets at nightfall in search of Célie’s dinner?”

“We wouldn’t descend —”

“And what would happen if you found it?” Her voice deceptively light, Odessa continues without acknowledging him. “Perhaps a lovely young man hurrying home from a late night at the shop—would you corner him in a dark alley and politely ask him to offer a vein? Would you enchant his acquiescence if he refused? Hmm... no.” She taps a nail upon her chin in contemplation. “You are a huntsman, after all. Instead, you would probably incapacitate him while Célie took his lifeblood by force. Either way would result in harm. Probably even death.”

I stare at my feet, unable to truly see them, and listen to the soft disturbance of air as Reid shakes his head. “Célie would never hurt anyone.”

“Have you ever seen a newborn vampire feed?” Odessa’s voice grows unusually grave when no one answers. She cannot pretend to ignore my heightened senses; she wants me to hear every word. “You might’ve known Célie once, but she isn’t human any longer. She won’t be able to control her impulses, and that makes her dangerous. Especially to all of you. She is drawn to you, clearly—even loves you—but all emotion strongly felt turns to hunger in a newborn vampire. She needs to be among her own kind on Requiem. I cannot fathom why Michal allowed you to bring her here, but—”

“Célie didn’t want to live on Requiem,” Lou says irritably, interrupting her as my gaze snaps upward once more. “She told us just before she died.”

“And slaughtering her friends?” Odessa asks. “Is that what Célie would want?”

“That won’t happen.”

“If she smells your blood while feeding, Louise le Blanc, it will.”

“Well, then,” Lou says as she stalks down the hallway toward my door, “let’s hope she feels strongly about deer.”

A moment later, she knocks, and my knees seem to grow roots as the door cracks open. She pokes her head inside with a gentle, “Célie? Are you awake? I thought I heard—” Her eyes fall to the smashed music box and widen slightly. I swallow hard. “Is... everything all right?”

“My music box broke.” Though I say the words quickly, feverishly, the bedpost begins to splinter in my hand because I can’t—I can’t hold my breath and speak at the same time. I can’t prevent the scent of her magic from becoming a literal taste on my tongue, and—and— I choke on my next words. “But I—I think I can fix it. I think I can—”

Whistling under her breath, Lou crouches to swipe a finger through the glittering dust. Her lips twitch. “Damn. I don’t think even I can fix such an admirable fit of temper. Good for you , Célie, but—it is a shame. I had plans for this creepy little music box.”

I blink at her, nonplussed. “What?”

“Oh, I was going to hide it next to Reid’s pillow after he falls asleep tonight.” She waves an errant hand, and at once, her enchantment sweeps over me, dulling the sharp edge of my hunger. Her own stomach emits a deafening rumble in response. She pats it fondly. “He tried to scare me the other day—hid under the bed and everything, bless him. He thought it’d be enormously clever to grab my ankle as I walked past.” A devious grin. “He has no idea what he started.”

“Why—why would he do that?”

“I might’ve dyed his eyebrows blue last week.” Eyes glittering impishly, she stands and dusts her hands against her pants before offering one to me. “Come to dinner, Célie. You shouldn’t stew in here alone.”

“I’m not alone,” I say reflexively.

Filippa’s laughter echoes around me again, and the hair on my neck lifts. My eyes dart to Mila, who frowns.

“Right, of course. Mila is invited too.”

Though I hesitate, staring warily at her outstretched hand, Lou grins and wriggles her fingers. “Oh, come on. Are you going to make us beg for your company?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer this time; she simply seizes my hand and pulls me down the candlelit hall toward the others. “Stop dragging your feet, would you? It’s just dinner . Nothing to fear among friends.” She glances back when I don’t respond, and Mila’s silver face reflects in her eyes. “Isn’t that right, Mila?”

“Quite,” Mila says with a valiant attempt at reassurance.

She doesn’t hear the faint laughter tinkling from the mirror behind us, however. I resist the urge to turn, to glimpse my sister spying on me in the glass. Yes, Célie , she seems to croon . Nothing to fear.

It’s just dinner.