Chapter Nineteen Ree #2
Henryk knelt in front of her, then slowly took the mask off.
His face was before hers, so close they might kiss.
Close enough that she could smell the soap on his skin, the almond oil in his hair, see the lighter flecks of flinty color around the center of his irises.
It was hard to look at him and not see the boy he had been, the boy she had once so innocently loved.
He was Henryk again. Her Henryk, if she could call him that.
Or maybe this was another one of his tactics to pry information from her at any cost.
“Give me your mother,” he said coldly. “The Harbinger names a Laveau witch. When the tribunal arrives, we can attribute whatever magic you performed to your mother’s influence.
They would question you for a time. But you would be let go with your life intact.
This is the only move you have left, Ree. ”
He is trying to spare you. Because he cares about you, a voice said.
But then reality set in, cold and unforgiving.
No, he cared for his position, to sew up the bleeding before she caused any more damage.
And if he did care, if some small part of him had revived some warmth of feeling for her, then it was surely not enough. Not nearly enough.
“And my mother? What would become of her?” But she knew. She would meet a fiery end on a stake. “They would kill her.”
“Better her than you, Ree.”
Oh, she was Ree now, was she? She had not been Ree to him in many years. She was simply a witch in his way, another heretic he could do away with.
When Ree said nothing, she could tell something in him changed.
For a moment the room was silent, and they could hear only the hushed singing of the nuns in the sanctuary, their voices wafting eerily into the space between them.
A dark cloud passed over his features, and what she saw before her now was a face more frightening than the black mask.
“Do you want to know what will happen to you when they take you?” he asked softly.
Her heart struck a jagged rhythm. “You will be arrested and held in darkness. This will go on for a day, two, or ten. You will not know because there will be no light. No windows. Only you and the darkness you have brought upon yourself. And then they will come for you. They will undress you, force you naked in a room full of wonderfully inventive contraptions. And they will torture you with them. All manner. All means. And then, finally, because your body cannot handle the pain, you will confess. But by then it will be too late, and you will have begged for death.”
The Inquisitor’s words took frightening shape before her like a heinous Quarter puppet show. By the loa, she was terrified. And yet she forced herself to speak anyway. “And will you be the one to torture me, Henryk?”
Something in his eyes softened, and she knew it was not a part of their game.
It was the human part of him rising to the surface, clawing to get out.
And it did not matter, she understood at last. This was who he was now.
“I would hope not,” he answered, his voice taking on a strange note.
And then that tender glimpse vanished, his face cool stone before hers.
“Where is your mother? Where is Marie Laveau?”
Ree remained silent. The bindings tightened around her arms, squeezing painfully. The chair was alive, sentient with alchemy. It squeezed her flesh until she saw black spots dance in her vision. And still she did not answer.
“I’m going to ask you one more time: Where. Is. Marie. Laveau?”
“Away from the likes of you fucking hypocrites!” she spat.
“Do you want to know why I knew you weren’t coming that day on that bridge, Ree? Because of her. It was always her. The great Marie Laveau. More titan than mother. Her influence is so tangled up in you, you don’t even know where you begin and where she ends.”
“Stop it.”
His eyes flashed, cold steel that cut right through her, down to the quick.
“But it’s the truth, isn’t it? Even if you despised her control.
Even if you longed for your own choices.
Even as Marie sought to maneuver every aspect of your life for you, you could never leave her, could you?
” Was this the Inquisitor talking? Or was this Henryk Broussard, the quiet altar boy she’d saved with a kiss?
“Because she is my mother, Henryk. And I love her.”
“Perhaps you need to learn to love yourself more.” You could have loved me more, his eyes said. Or perhaps she was still a lovesick fool, imagining things that were not there. Things that had never been.
The door swung open, and Father Antoine stepped through.
The alarm on his face was more emotion than Ree had ever glimpsed in the old priest, more than she’d ever thought he might feel for someone like her, a heathen and a heretic.
“What in God’s name have you done? Enough! Henryk, enough! Let the girl go!”
Henryk rose to his feet. Antoine moved past him to Ree and quickly undid her bindings.
He helped Ree to stand, her legs uncertain beneath her.
She panted, weak with relief. The aurum had made her dizzy and depleted her magic.
When she looked up, Henryk had paused in the doorway, only his profile facing her, a single cold gray eye peering down at her, alchemical and all-seeing.
“You should have let me die that day, Ree,” he murmured, a strange husk to his voice. Some hint of old emotion. “I am the same as Marcel, in a way. An undead thing of a different kind. You didn’t bring back a man. You brought back a monster.”
Ree stared at him, quiet. Although he’d meant this little interrogation to pry truths from her, at last she’d pried one from him. This was the truth. Or maybe it didn’t have to be.
“No. You’re wrong,” Ree said, voice soft. “I brought you back because you were worth saving.” And even after everything, you are worth saving now.
Father Antoine stepped in front of Ree, his lined face set into one of grave seriousness. “I bid you leave her be, Inquisitor, and go from here!”
“Good.” Henryk slid that horrid black mask back into place. “We’re finished.”
He disappeared into the shadowed halls. When Antoine released her, Ree was shaking.
Fire burned in her throat, a knot that ached and trembled.
She’d held herself together as much as she could before Henryk’s best efforts to break her, but she knew some part of it had worked. Some part of her had broken after all.
“There, there, child. It’s all right.”
“No!” Ree wrenched herself away from him. None of this was all right. It might never be again.
She would not stoop so low as to be consoled by some guilt-ridden holy man.
Antoine and his empty sermons and benedictions.
Well, he was no more than a fraud on a street corner running a con like the rest. How could her mother not see him for what he was?
Or maybe she was a hypocrite too. Maybe the goodness her mother believed Antoine held was the same as the goodness she’d glimpsed in Henryk, the goodness she hoped might still be there deep down. But now, after this?
She hadn’t realized that tears had been building in her all along, stuck to the back of her throat. “Do you agree with this, Antoine? You claim to love my mother.”
“I do,” he said quietly. “I love Marie like one of my own.”
“Do you want to know what I think? I think you are a goddamned hypocrite! An old man who feels sorry for himself that he chose the wrong side, but you’re too weak to change it.”
“You must change it, Marie Laveau the Second. You must be a catalyst for change as I believed your mother might be. You must have Marie’s faith, child.”
Marie’s faith? What good would that do her? There was no saving grace in this city, and if there were, God hadn’t seen fit to spare it on the likes of her.
“Whatever has happened to him, whatever dark thing he has become…just know that I don’t blame him, not completely. I blame you. That faith you speak of? That corrupted him into what he is now. Tell me, will God forgive you for that in the end, old man?”
Furious, she felt the magic flood behind her eyes, the face of Voodoo that terrified so many others. But not Antoine. He was not terrified, only silent. Always so pathetically silent.
“Let us see where all of that contrition is now,” she spat.
Ree pushed past him. She was done with this. She needed to find Marie Laveau’s memory of her Veil magic, the final piece of this wretched puzzle. For her mother’s sake, and for her own.