Ree went very still. She hoped her face betrayed nothing. She’d hardly had a moment to herself to process these new revelations in her life—Marie’s secrecy, Jon’s reputation, and her place in all of their twisted history. The last thing she needed was to give the Church some sign of weakness.
“Your mother had a very telling relationship with her most famous enemy,” Henryk continued. “One that intrigued the Vatican. It was a long-held position that you might be the daughter of the one they call Jon the Conjurer. Your bloodline makes you the bigger threat to the Vatican. The bigger—”
He stopped himself short, but there the word was, hanging between them unspoken.Enemy.“The only payment this city has ever demanded is blood. So play your games and have your fun, princess, so long as you understand, the city will demand a witch’s blood spilled before next dawn.” He moved to the door, their business done. “But they can’t spill what is already gone.”
This warning was not for her. It was for Anabelle. She couldn’t understand in the slightest why he was telling her this now, why he could possibly want to spare a witch from a fate his faction so easily doomed witches to. If he was warning her, there was only so much he could say, she knew. But what he could not tell her in words, he spoke with his eyes. She knew what she mustdo.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Henryk’s eyes held hers, silently willing her to understand. He hesitated. “I can’t forget what you did for me.”
She’d saved his life, pulled him back from the doom of yellow fever, even when her own mother had thought him beyond saving. And how? How had she done that? It was with her father’s magic, she knew now. Magic her mother had denied her and kept secret.
Ree knew that she shouldn’t—shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t even think of the possibility—but she couldn’t help herself. She was selfish. “And what of me? I don’t suppose you are willing to spare me in the end, Inquisitor?” questioned Ree, her voice cold. Her eyes turned toward the window, to the city that sang with music and spells, where dawn would wash the day anew.
Henryk stopped. And just like that, she watched him falter, saw the moment a crack had worked its way across the stoic lines of his handsome face.
For a moment, the room fell away. It was just the two of them. So many words unspoken. So many feelings kept carefully guarded. It might have hurt her less to know that he was furious with her. He’d be right to be. But it was his indifference that wounded her the most. She was just too stubborn a woman to dare tell him about her regrets. And would he listen, truly? She was not sixteen anymore. And he was no longer a simple parish boy.
Ree reached for the decanter beside the hairbrush and stiffly poured herself a drink, the sweet wine pooling in her glass, shininglike a ruby. She brought it to her lips and drank, the taste flat and cloying. Hollow. What was wrong with her? But she knew. It washim.Ever since Henryk Broussard had returned to New Orleans, she’d felt herself become unmoored, slowly coming undone at the seams, bit by bit.
“Did you become an Inquisitor because of me? Because I…did not go with you?” she said after a while. She didn’t know exactly why she asked, only that in that moment it seemed like she should.
He grunted, a bitter noise that twisted her chest. “You think too highly of yourself.”
The Inquisitor’s hand stilled on the door before he slowly turned to face her again. There was conflict brewing beneath the mask of perfect restraint he wore so well, a flash of longing, a moment of searing ache she’d become acquainted with in the long years since their final goodbye. After all, she knew that face well.
Because it was her own.
It was the one she’d masked beneath her games and lovemaking and petty ways.
“We fooled ourselves once, Ree. In the end, we both became what fate always intended. And the sad thing is…” Slowly, Henryk’s gray eyes met hers. There was some unnamed emotion in them. Some feeling she swore she’d seen before, long ago. “We were never going to be able to run away from that,” he murmured finally, and left.
The drink shook in Ree’s hand, and she stared down at it, stunned, silently relishing the cool weight of the crystal against her skin.
She hurled it against the mirror, fracturing the glass, dark wine seeping into the cracks.
Her reflection splintered into a thousand different faces: the witch, the failing daughter, the lovesick fool. Different masks, she told herself. There was only one problem now.
None of them quite fit anymore.
The sun was just beginning to set over Congo Square, a dark purplish-blue light creeping through the dark horizon like a vein.Henryk Broussard stood before a wooden stake, a woman shackled to it. She bucked against her bindings, rustling the aurum chains, a hood covering her head. But Ree would know her anywhere. Anabelle. A small crowd had gathered for the bloody spectacle to come.
Upon an overlooking terrace, Ree positioned herself for a better view. Her mother owned the room above the little café below, one of the handful of safe houses she kept about the city. Her name was not on the deed, of course, but the name of a man she’d long spelled under her command should the need arise. Ree had thought her mother’s tactics paranoid, but now, as she gazed upon the High Inquisitor below, she felt herself grateful for her mother’s farsighted strategy.
Other Les Magiques had taken great measures to put as much distance between themselves and Congo Square as they could. But not Ree. She needed to set things right.
Beside her, a redheaded alchemist was shaking on his knees, his hands bound behind his back. She crouched down, trailed her scarlet-painted fingernails along his back like a spider, deeply enjoying every quiver that racked his body.
He bucked against her, wild with panic. But there was nothing he could do. She’d thought to save some aurum from the vial she’d given Marcel. It had been easy enough to slip into this alchemist’s drink. And now that last little bit was inside his belly, spreading in his veins.
“Shhh,” she cooed against his ear. “Serves him right.You remember those words, don’t you, love?”
The stricken look on his face told her that he very much did. She saw grim flashes of Marcel swinging from that rope. It brought her some pleasure to know he was seeing it too. The alchemist was trembling. She hadn’t bothered to get his name. She didn’t need it, and he wasn’t worth the trouble. By her mother’s saints, she’d managed to snatch him from the floor of some alehouse without being spotted and had dragged his sorry ass up two flights of stairs. She didn’t need his crying. What sheneededto do was concentrate. The kind of magic she needed to work was fickle. It was what Marie Laveau might call reckless magic.
Ree slid a gold-tipped knife from the pocket of her satchel andcut crisscross into the alchemist’s back, quick, so the poor fool wouldn’t feel a thing, but he bucked and moaned, slobbering all over the rag she’d stuffed into his mouth. Ree ignored him and returned to her spell. She’d done this spell before, a variation of a road opener incantation, though it had been, like many other times, to suit her own whims. Pluck a few cards from a man’s hands, swap them out for others, gain a few coins. She figured a man couldn’t be much different.
Legba,she invoked.Lord of the Crossroads. The gatekeeper to all paths.
