Chapter Seventeen
JEANNE
The night was quiet. Too quiet.
Jeanne lay in the dark of the cabin with Anatole's arm across her waist and his breath steady against the back of her neck, and she listened to the ship and waited for the pull to do what she knew it would eventually do.
It was there. It was always there now, the permanent resident behind her sternum, thrumming at a frequency that matched the door's hum the way one tuning fork matched another.
But tonight it had changed character. Not louder.
Not stronger. Closer, as if the distance between the pull in her chest and the door in the corridor had shrunk, as if the two ends of the connection were converging toward a single point.
Anatole stirred behind her. His breathing changed, the deep rhythm of sleep fracturing into something shallower, and his arm tightened around her waist. But he didn't wake.
The sound had gone through him the way it went through the ship, a frequency calibrated for something other than his body, and his wolf would process it as the creak of an old ship in the night.
Jeanne's hand was tingling.
She lifted it in the dark and flexed her fingers. The tingling concentrated in her palm, gathering like static before a lightning strike, and she knew with a certainty that bypassed thought and went straight to bone what was happening.
The key was coming to her.
She turned her hand over. Palm up. The tingling intensified, and then something materialized against her skin, cold and heavy, the weight of old iron settling into her grip the way a bird settled onto a branch.
She closed her fingers around it, and the shape was exactly what she'd seen in her dream and exactly what she'd seen in Anatole’s pocket.
The key had a long shaft, ornate teeth, a bow shaped like a wolf's head with tiny sapphire eyes.
The pull changed again. Not inward now. Downward. The key in her hand was a compass needle, and the door was north, and every cell in her body was being reoriented toward the same heading.
Now, the curse said. Not in words. In certainty. In the absolute, bone-deep conviction that she needed to go downstairs, right now.
This was how it had taken the others. Not with force. With timing. With the key appearing in their hands at the exact moment when resistance was lowest and the path was clearest and the man who might have stopped them was asleep beside them.
Jeanne sat up. The key was warm in her fist, warmer than iron should be, pulsing with the door's rhythm. Anatole slept on, his arm sliding from her waist as she moved, and the loss of his weight against her body was like the loss of an anchor in a current.
She could wake him. That had been the plan. Go to the room together, on their terms, prepared. She could shake his shoulder and show him the key and tell him she could no longer resist the pull, and he would be on his feet in seconds.
Leave him. The answer is inside. All you have to do is look.
Her feet hit the floor. Cold wood. The cabin was dark, the porthole showing nothing but starless sky. Anatole's breathing behind her was peaceful.
She took one step toward the cabin door. Then another.
Then she stopped.
Not because the pull released her. It didn't. The pull was a fist around her lungs, squeezing, and the key burned in her palm, and her feet wanted to keep walking with a desperation that had nothing to do with her own will.
She didn't have to do this alone. She turned back to the bed.
"Anatole."
He was awake before her voice finished forming his name. Instantly present, his body going from sleep to readiness in the space between breaths. She opened her hand. The key lay in her palm, the wolf's-head bow catching a trace of light from somewhere that had no visible source.
"The key came to me. And I almost walked out that door without waking you."
"And you stopped."
"Yes, the pull is the strongest it's ever been. If I go back to sleep, I won't wake up next time. I'll be in that corridor before my conscious mind catches up."
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. The moonless dark didn't diminish him.
"Then we’ll go now.” He held out his hand.
She took it.
ANATOLE
HIS WOLF WAS SILENT. Not the strained silence of an animal held in check.
A different silence. Attentive. Jeanne's hand was steady in his, her fingers laced through his, and her scent was layered in ways he'd learned to read over the past weeks.
The bitter almond edge of fear. Underneath, the electric brine that meant she was angry.
And threaded through it all, the deep honeysuckle that was simply Jeanne.
It didn’t surprise him when they got below decks that the guards were in a magical sleep. He gave a half laugh that had no humor in it. The guards wouldn’t have been able to stop her. The curse or Morvenna’s magic or both had taken them out of the battle.
The corridor stretched before them lit by nothing except the golden glow that leaked from beneath the door at the far end.
The glow was brighter than he remembered.
Two nights ago it had been a faint seepage.
Tonight it pulsed with the rhythm of a living thing, each pulse sending warmth up the corridor floor that he could feel through the soles of his boots.
"Can you resist it?"
She looked up at him. In the golden light her brown eyes had taken on an amber cast, and the scar on her collarbone was a white line against her skin. She looked nothing like the girl who'd been brought aboard in chains.
"I don't need to resist it. I'm walking toward it on purpose."
The door loomed ahead of them, old wood gone dark with age, iron hinges greened by salt air. The golden light pooled at its base like liquid. Up close, the hum was audible, a low frequency that vibrated in his back teeth and his fingertips and the place where the scar crossed his chest.
The key in Jeanne's hand was glowing. The tiny sapphire eyes in the wolf's-head bow caught the door's light and reflected it, two blue points burning in the dark corridor.
"I’ll go in first," he said.
He released her hand. The loss of contact was physical, cold rushing into the space where her warmth had been, and his wolf lunged with a snarl of protest. He overrode it. Took the key from her outstretched hand. The iron was hot, and the wolf's-head bow bit into his palm like teeth.
He fitted the key into the lock.
The mechanism turned with a sound like a bone breaking, a clean snap that echoed down the corridor. The door didn't swing open. It waited. As if whatever lived behind it wanted them to make the choice consciously.
Anatole pushed.
The door opened onto a room that shouldn't have existed in the hull of a ship.
Too large. The ceiling too high. The dimensions wrong in the way that dreams were wrong, close enough to reality to be recognizable but skewed at the edges.
The air was heavy and still, carrying a scent that was all the dead brides at once, six women's fragrances layered and preserved by magic so they appeared as they did on their wedding day, even though the curse had ravaged their bodies and he had buried all of them at sea.
He stepped inside.
They were there. Six women, arranged in a semicircle around a central point, each lying on a raised stone platform draped with white cloth. They looked like they might open their eyes and ask him why they had to die.
Marguerite in the center. Dark hair across the white cloth, her wedding dress a frothy confection surrounding her like a shroud. Her face was peaceful. He hated that peace because it was a lie. She hadn't died peacefully.
Celeste on Marguerite's right, in the leather trousers and linen shirt she'd been wearing the night she was brought aboard is ship. Isabeau next, then Vivienne with flowers still braided in her hair. Lucienne’s cheeks were still wet with tears the magic wouldn't let dry. And Adele.
Adele, with her hand resting on her belly. Three months along. She'd opened the door carrying hope, and the mirror had taken everything.
He dragged his gaze from the brides and looked at the far wall.
The mirror.
Tall, taller than him, framed in dark wood carved with symbols he'd never been able to identify. The glass was black. Not reflective, not transparent. Black like deep water, like the space between stars. It showed him nothing. The mirror had never shown him anything.
"What do you see?" Jeanne said from behind him.
"The brides. Preserved. The mirror on the far wall." He kept his voice steady because if he let it shake, she would hear, and she would come in before he was finished. "The mirror is dark. It's not showing me anything."
He turned to face the door. She stood at the threshold, backlit by the corridor's darkness, the golden light from the room painting her in amber and gold. The key was back in her hand. He didn't remember giving it to her. The curse must have moved it while his attention was on the brides.
She stepped across the threshold.
The room changed.
Not with theatrical fury. The change was a tightening of the air, a deepening of the stillness, as if the room had been holding its breath and was now exhaling. The golden light intensified, and the scent of the dead brides sharpened, six preserved fragrances cutting through the heavy air.
And the mirror. The black surface stirred. Movement in the glass, like something rising from deep water.
Jeanne walked toward it. Not pulled. Not dragged.
He positioned himself beside her, and turned his gaze back to the mirror.
The mirror looked back. The glass erupted with light.
He staggered, and his first thought was that the mirror had struck him physically, that the curse had some defense against alphas entering the room.
But the blow wasn't physical. It was the mirror opening, the black glass splitting apart like an eye, and what poured through was not light but memory, and it hit them both at the same instant.