Chapter Sixteen #2
As she speaks, a glittery white sheen of magic flutters over her features.
Her hair shifts from blond to dark, her eyes from blue to brown.
The scent of her magic that comes off her in waves is overwhelmingly familiar, pungent lilies, the smell of the worst moments of my childhood.
I am glad Bastian’s standing next to me, stinking of salt and ocean.
Bastian, I notice, has gone slack-jawed and wide-eyed, instinctively looking at her hands, expecting to see a ring and movement, and finding none, he looks even more impressed.
I glare at her for this ridiculous overt display of exactly how shapeshifters should be able to manage their power, to fluidly alter their bodies at will. Making me look bad, as usual.
“Yes, Haitian, my dad grew up in Quebec,” he says eagerly. He can’t take his eyes off her, I think with disgust. “You know French?”
“I was there during the war,” she says smoothly.
I could roll my eyes at this veiled boasting; everyone knows that the main thing shapeshifters were utilized for in the war was spying, and it’s clearly worked.
Bastian is looking at her—the flawless skin, the high cheekbones, everything about her that doesn’t look a day over fifty-five when, really, she’s over a hundred—with such awe.
Then he looks at me, and I know he’s trying to work out what makes me so completely shit at all this.
Mother smiles, as if she sees his exact train of thought. Her perfect eyes rest on me.
“Still refusing to settle in a form, I see, Orlando,” she says, then clicks her teeth when she touches my wet hair.
I can’t help stiffening under her touch.
She sighs heavily, as if my turning up looking like a drowned rat is a deliberate fashion choice designed to irritate her, and spreads her fingers in the triangle position.
Panic surges through me, tasting like tannin on the back of my tongue.
The jerk of adrenaline thunders painfully in my jaw and is accompanied by a singular, all-encompassing thought: Fuck, no.
I stagger backward, bumping into Bastian, my heart racing as I try to get away from the magic inside her, the ominous white light gathering in her palms. She has an expression of such powerful disappointment that I have to look down at my soggy boots.
“It was only going to be a drying spell,” she says.
“I’ll just change and sit by the fire,” I mumble. The awkwardness stretches. She always makes me feel this way, ungainly and clownish, naive and overly sensitive next to her implacable veneer of smoothness. Mother looks at Bastian.
“Forgive my daughter,” she says with the politest of smiles. The one she uses to humiliate me. “She’s always been uncomfortable with magic. If you could credit it.”
“They,” I say forcefully. “And I wonder why.”
She simply looks at me, as if I am a puzzle piece that refuses to fit and she didn’t cover me with the anger of her unmet expectations every day of my childhood.
“Your father was disappointed that we needed to send you the shroud,” she says softly. “There is a new tutor in Paris, up and coming, in fact. He would be more than happy to—”
“No,” I say firmly. No more tutors or specialists or tortures they call “techniques.” I won’t go back. “I’m working it out. On my own.”
We stare at one another. I can feel Bastian starting to fidget, because she is always the one who brings an air of etiquette to every situation and my bluntness, my rudeness, is like a social burr in the cogs of this exchange.
This is what she does, turning even the most brash of witches into bumbling courtiers, cordially offering her back phrases they would never normally use—“Oh, thank you ever so much” and “Quite kind of you to offer”—and then every cruelty she gives me, every delicately crafted embarrassment can only be met with pleasantries.
I won’t do it anymore. I refuse to say thank you, even if they raised me that it was the only correct thing to do.
This was a house that esteemed politeness, all the way until the front door closed.
Then, behind it, there was nothing but frosty recriminations.
Finally, she blinks, and I know it’s over.
This is how battles are won here, with a protest of silence.
“So I see.” Her eyes slide to Bastian and then back to me. There is a barely perceptible lift of the corner of her mouth, the edge of a sneer. “Another witch.”
It’s so rude, so unnecessary, and yet Bastian says nothing, because why would he?
She’s an enchanting shapeshifter, she can get away with anything, but I know that comment wasn’t for him.
I remember the look on her face the one time she came to the hospital after my suicide attempt, when Counselor Cooper explained about Elizabeth.
The utter disdain, bordering on disgust. I won’t take the bait.
Instead, I look at the clock in the hallway.
“You should meet your taxi,” I say. “You know they get the house number wrong.”
She gives me a steady look, as if to tell me I will not be the one to dismiss her.
“Get warmed up,” she says softly. “There’s kindling for the fire. There is food in the house. Your things are under the stairs. We turned your bedroom into a reading room, but the sheets in the guest bedroom are clean. Please set the alarm when you are done, the code is the same.”
She pulls on a brown trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat. She looks like a movie star, but then she always did. She nods to Bastian. “Good evening, Monsieur Chevret.”
“Nice to meet you,” he mumbles, helping me shuffle to the side as she picks up her suitcase and opens the door. I think she’s going to leave without saying another word to me but she turns, shimmering, as her eyes turn back to blue, to look at me.
“Read your emails, Orlando,” she says finally. “It is not too much to ask.”
Then she is stepping out into the darkness, holding her hat to her head as she walks down the driveway to the waiting taxi.
It’s only when I’ve seen her get into the car, when I know that I’m safe from any final recriminations and I begin to feel the tiniest bit of blessed relief, that I let the door slam in response.