That did not sound like the explanation she was owed. That sounded like a warning.
“How?” Ree shook her head, numb. “Just how is he going toset things right?”
“Oh, beloved…” Anabelle leaned back against the wall, chains rustling, her taunting face partially obscured in shadow. “How you will soon find out.”
When Ree woke again, she couldn’t be certain how much time had passed. There were no windows in her cell. She’d tried counting the seconds and minutes, but she quickly learned that was an easy way to go mad. She drifted in and out of a dreamless sleep. She’d caught Anabelle watching her, eyes misted over with some unnamed emotion.
Footsteps sounded outside her cell, drawing near. Then came the unmistakable jangle of keys and the molten glow of lamplight.
“Well, well, Laveau,” the officer said. “It seems someone took mercy on you. Bought out the rest of your bail.”
“Who?”
The officer frowned. “The fucking church, as luck would have it.”
He stepped aside, revealing a figure in a long blood-red robe, the hood drawn over a black lacquered mask, frightening in its eerie blankness. It was the mask of an Inquisitor.
Slowly, the Inquisitor pulled the hood down, black gloved hands removing the mask. Ree froze. She stared up at the face she’d seen only in her dreams—her nightmares too. The face of the boy, now a proper man, she’d thought she’d never see again.
“Henryk.”
At the sound of his name, Henryk Broussard pierced her with his cold silver gaze.
The years had whittled away the softness of childhood. He was impossibly tall and broad-shouldered, towering in the dark, his square jaw taut and lean. His hair was longer now, falling just above his neck, russet brown in the lamplight. Henryk held the bars with black gloved hands, and she fought the urge to reach for him. Years and years, countless pretty faces filling the space beneath her on her bed, and he was still the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
She should have been thinking of her next words, but Ree was thinking only of that day eight years ago, the day he should have found her waiting on that bridge ready to take his hand. Instead, he found but an empty space where she should have been.
Henryk scanned her face, the metal collar on her neck. Ree supposed even with all the divination in the world at her fingertips, she wouldn’t possibly be able to read into the faint tightness at the corners of his eyes, to pry some meaning from the way he pursed his lips at the sight of her. His eyes were the same pale gray, darkening now like storm clouds. For a second, she saw a glimpse of the old pain she’d caused him.
At last, Henryk spoke, the words a pocketknife cutting through her chest into her fickle, fickle heart. “Hello, princess.”
Part Two
No saints and No sinners
A man without sin counts himself not a saint but a fraud, and a saint who has sinned for which he has confessed considers himself forgiven. But of the man who does not confess his deepest sins? He must consider himself irrevocably and despairingly haunted.
—Antonio de Sedella, “Père Antoine,” from his sacred sermon “The Nature of Man and His Immortal Soul”
Chapter Ten
Marie
Twenty-five years before
Marie bent over a basin of clean water, muttering a spell of mending under her breath, holding off tears. It was funny work, healing. How could she stave off disease with a few magical words, keep her patients from the brink of death and misery, but she couldn’t find the strength to pry herself from her own grief?
Marie sponged a woman’s sweaty brow and checked her tongue for phlegm; there was none, only the remnants of lentil soup, the only food she could stomach in her condition. Marie knew this woman was horrible, had seen her prancing along the Quarter’s streets, her few house slaves in tow, carting her mountain of boutique bags. Marie had wondered if the plague had tempered her some, had given her some dose of humility. She was wrong.
“I know you,” the woman rasped suddenly.
Marie didn’t doubt that. Plenty of townsfolk knew her. To most, she was “that Voodoo girl,” apprentice to the Quarter Queen, Sanite Dede. To others, she was a hairdresser making her coin on Royal Street, a devout woman of faith who never missed a morning mass. Two years ago, she had been a plague nurse facing down buckets of mucus and piling sickbeds, nursing folks back from the maws of yellow fever. Now she found herself a nurse again, but this time, it was a plague of a different kind. Boils that blossomed across theskin like gray mushrooms. Black phlegm. Yellowed eyes where there should have been milky white. This was not yellow fever. Marie fought down a shudder. This was far worse.
Marie placed a cold rag on her patient’s brow, hot to the touch. She was staring intently at Marie, the whites of her eyes streaked with yellow. “I know you,” she said again.
Marie sighed. It couldn’t be helped. “That so?”
The woman smiled, slow and dreamlike, flashing rotting teeth—another symptom of this mysterious plague that must be recorded. Marie made a mental note.
