Chapter Twenty-One Ree #3
“The side of victory?”
“No.” His voice was cold, all humor vanished. “Survival.”
Ree stared into the jester’s face, silently turning over his offer in her mind like a coin.
She had seen in her mother’s memories her brief meetings with Silas, how the alchemist had maneuvered her with the same toying facade.
But she couldn’t help but see now that something else might live beneath such a mask.
Something that scared her to know might be there, the side of him that had intervened aboard that steamboat to spare Marie, to slip Jon the code. But why?
“And if I do not?”
“Then I will be forced to change the rules of this game. And I told you once. I play to win.” His eyes glimmered from behind the dark hollows of his mask. “Always.”
“And what about your piece on the board?”
Silas smirked, eyes flitting to the back of the room, then away. “Needn’t you worry, little witch. That piece is already in motion.”
The song had ended. The brass band was changing tune. Ree wrenched herself away from him, but as she did, she felt a shock to her hand, the one that Silas had held in his.
A bright flare of light like a stroke of lightning.
No, not lightning, she realized. It was fire.
Something was burning. She was burning. She was Silas.
There was a house on fire, flames greedily eating away at every crevice, every morsel.
She kneeled before it, uselessly staring at the flames.
Someone was inside. Someone was on fire.
Someone, a woman, was desperately screaming for her.
For Silas. But she could not move. She could only stare and watch as the fire ate—
Ree was back in the theater, back beneath the twinkling lights of Corbin’s ball. People laughed and sang and drank around her. No one was screaming for her. For Silas.
“You are…not who you say you are,” Ree murmured. The man had two faces. She didn’t know more than that. Couldn’t even say why she’d said the words. But she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were true.
Silas watched her for a moment. Slowly, he lifted his mask, and she could see him fully at last. He’d shaven the goatee, and the face beneath it was surprisingly youthful. Cold. And he was not laughing now.
But suddenly Silas was smiling again, adjusting his mask back into perfect place. “In this city, no one ever is.”
Silas disappeared into the crowd, leaving her alone. Ree whirled, one hand clenching her gown, eyes going to the space along the back wall. But Henryk was nowhere to be seen.
The mausoleum rumbled open, and Ree stepped inside, into the eerie darkness of Jon’s tomb.
When she’d slipped away from Corbin’s ball, she was careful to keep to the shadows, to make sure no one was trailing her.
But the truth was, she was rattled. She might have said the worst of the masquerade was facing the mayor himself, the very real threat he now posed to her.
But she’d be lying. The worst had been seeing Henryk again, masked and cold.
It was a final reminder to her that he was the enemy, and to wish him to be anything less, anything different, was simply a danger she could not risk anymore.
She held out a hand, calling to the fire god.
A red-gold flame leapt into her palm, illuminating the mausoleum’s darkened depths.
Ree stepped forward, holding her burning palm out like a lantern until she came to the painting of herself, her mother, and Jon.
A golden sun glowed on her mother’s brow, a crooked silver moon on her father’s.
And on hers, a dark copper star, bright even in the shadows.
The words came to her mind at once: the Song of Three.
The words of the spirits after the demon’s Harbinger.
Ree pressed her glowing hand to the mural like she had seen her mother do in her memory.
Light spilled along the wall, moving into the pocks and edges that marked the stone until it formed a glowing veve in the shape of a large doorway, revealing the spell her father had hidden inside.
In the Old Tongue, it had a single meaning: Open.
Ree put an ear to the wall. Something was whispering behind it, pleading to her.
And then she heard it. She heard them. A hundred, no, a thousand voices demanding to be let out.
Open. Open. Open. Something thudded behind her.
Ree whirled to face the darkness. Something was slowly crawling out of it, edging closer to her.
She was reminded of the riddle the children chanted on Sundays on their way to mass: Banish the devil through the door and welcome in six more.
“Marie Laveau the Second,” came a slithering voice from the dark. “Daughter of Jon. Did you like our Harbinger? We’ve heard you do love a good riddle.”
The demon stepped fully from the shadows and into the light of her flame.
It took the shape of a man in the barest sense—the body tall and skeletal, but the skin sagged over the bones like withered fruit hanging from a dead tree.
The eyes shone like bloodied rubies in the darkness, irises thin like a serpent’s.
It was the demon who had visited her mother as a child, not an arch-demon. Snatcher of Gifts.
Ree took a step back, the flame burning brighter in her hand.
If she found it hard to think in the presence of the divine, being so close to the damned was far worse.
Fear sunk into her bones like a cold bayou wind, the rotten smell choking her, the glowing eyes that could turn her limbs to stone with a single glance.
“You should be careful onto which doors you knock, little girl,” said the demon with a rattling laugh that made her skin crawl. “You never know who might answer.”
Death is but a doorway. She didn’t have her mother’s training. She didn’t have a teacher like Jon who’d known how to guard Marie against what evils death might bring. She had only herself.
The demon studied her surprise with barely contained delight. She knew better than to show fear in the face of a demon. But she couldn’t help it—they had a special way of coaxing the worst out of you.
“Begone,” said Ree. “I will cast you out.”
“You should try,” it hissed, its tongue flicking from its mouth.
“I do love a good game. Don’t you, Marie Laveau the Second?
We in hell hear you love games. There are many we might show you someday.
” It moved closer. Something moved at the hem of its dark cloak.
Ree froze. A horde of snakes coiled around the demon’s legs, hissing at her.
“You are your father’s daughter. Special, no doubt.
But did you think he could ever truly love you?
You silly, silly girl. And your mother is the sssssame. ”
All fear evaporated, fury prickling over Ree’s skin. “Don’t you dare say her name—”
“You are a tool to them, child. A weapon. A useless weapon, but a weapon all the same. You can’t stop what’s coming.
The Inquisition will return to this city, as the Lord of Chains has decreed, and the streets will run with blood, and we will drink of it.
That blood will be on your hands, Marie Laveau the Second, but do not fear.
” It smiled, that tongue flicking like the thundercrack of a whip.
“We shall gladly lick every last drop from them too. Allow me to show you.”
The demon seized Ree, and at once she saw a flood of horrendous images before her: Rows of charred corpses hanging limp on jutting spikes.
Nan. Ory. Fabrice. Claudette. Brotherhood.
Countless Les Magiques dead. Jeering crowds, faces twisted cruelly as they hurled stones and curses at long processions of heretics being marched to their doom.
The black-lacquered faces of Inquisitors watching through twisting dark smoke.
And through the smoke she saw the most horrifying image of them all—herself.
There she was, Marie Laveau the Second, naked and shackled before a crowd, writhing in the agony of a slow death as she burned on a pyre. And burned. And burned…
“If you open the Veil and save your mother, you will forfeit your own life,” snarled the demon. “This is the fate you will damn yourself to. This is what will become of you!”
A horrendous wail tore into the air, the frenzied sound of a thousand animals slaughtered on stone altars for sacrifice, a chorus of torture and long suffering.
The sound of the damned. It was Ree. She was screaming.
She couldn’t take it anymore. But the demon held her firm, holding her in that terrible vision. Its power all-consuming.
A hand seized her by the arm, shaking her. She’d expected claws and horribly scaled flesh, but these hands were oddly warm, and very much alive.
“Come back, Ree,” a rough voice commanded. “Come back to me.”
Come back to me. Those had been her first words to Henryk Broussard, the words she’d used to coax him back to life. It was Henryk Broussard who spoke them to her now.
But she couldn’t come back. It was as if she were split between two places at once, in that terrible vision of sulfur and ash and fire, and now in the tomb with Henryk. She was caught between them, and they both pulled at her, threatening to tear her in two.
Henryk was shaking her fiercely now. “Damn it, Ree! Wake the hell up! You’re going to die! The demon is possessing you!”
And then his lips were upon hers. It felt like a stroke of lightning had hit her right in the spine, the feeling traveling down through her blood and into her bones.
It was torture. It was heaven. She drank from his power greedily, stealing it for her own.
Somewhere in the midst of her muddled thoughts, Ree understood what he was doing, what shouldn’t be possible.
But she felt herself kissing him back, channeling that dark feeling into her body, giving her strength.
Ree’s eyes flew open, and the nightmare shriveled away at last. The demon was gone. The tomb was empty, and she was on the ground, kneeling in the darkness. Henryk had folded his arms around her, holding her close, interlacing his hand in hers. Ree’s eyes fluttered, sleep creeping over her vision.
“What was that?” she whispered. He’d given her something of his own, enough to fight the demon off. Something an Inquisitor of the Church should never possess. Ree slumped against him, fighting back the weight of darkness tugging at her.
Through the fog, she saw that his eyes were alight. Not gray, but silver.
He smiled. “It was magic, of course.”
And then the Inquisitor lifted her into his arms, and she allowed herself to drift away into the blessed quiet of oblivion, far away from the smell of burning flesh and bone.