He reaches for the grimoire and pauses, looking up at her. “Do you want me to show you?”
She swallows down her tears. Looking up through her wet lashes, she says, “You would do that?”
“If it would make you feel better.”
She gives him a sad smile. “Yes. I want to see it.”
He nods, pulling the grimoire toward himself. “This spell is interesting because you don’t see the effect—you hear it. The stars speak to you. But the language of stars can be maddening. You can only hear so much before you’re driven out of your mind.”
Glancing up at the sky, she asks, “Like in thePhaedrus? Divine madness?”
“Exactly like that.” He gives her an impressed smile.
“Could it make you see things?” That’s what Cassius had said about Odette. She was going mad, seeing things.
Lamour nods, his brows pushing up the heavy crease in his forehead. “See things, hear things, do things. It can be very dangerous. Don’t worry, I’m going to cast it on you so the voice will go through me. This way, you’re at no risk of madness.” He points over the desk. “Reach into that drawer and grab my needle.”
When she opens the drawer, she first sees a small note. She recognizes the handwriting immediately—Odette.
This is written in blood.
November 7th
“Claudia?” he asks.
She blinks, heart stuttering. What does that say? It’s madness. She needs to examine it, unscramble it. But she can’t take it now—not with Lamour right across from her. Why does Lamour even have this?
Is he—
No. Gods no, Lamour isn’t the killer. That’s a wild conclusion to make from this. Claudia has some of Odette’s diary entries, too, and she’s not the killer.
But the diary entries she’s found looknothinglike this.
She hands him the needle, trying to hide her trembling hands.
“This spell is unique in many ways. For one,” Lamour explains while he tests the weight of the needle in his hand, “it cannot simply be written in blood. It must be needled into the skin. The stars will hum, and the message will spill into the mind of the caster.” He centers the paper between them. “Roll up your sleeve and give me your arm.”
For a second, she can’t. Her whole body locks up as if her blood has frozen solid in her veins. She can’t stop thinking about the page in his desk. In another one of Odette’s diary entries, the girl was professing her hatred for Lamour. Is there more to their story? How did it end?
Lamour taps his needle on the desk twice like a conductor demanding the attention of a stubborn soprano. Claudia blinks herself back to the present moment and pulls up her sleeve, presenting her left arm to her professor.
She can see the rapid twitch in her pulse on her wrist.
“It will only hurt a bit,” he says, and with an artist’s precision, he needles the constellations into her skin. It takes less than five seconds for those twelve dots to turn into little red stars, glittering in the starlight that leaks through the glass ceiling.
Lamour’s eyes roll back in his head so all Claudia sees is their creamy, red-veined underbelly. He grips her wrist as his body trembles, and horrific gurgling sounds erupt from his open mouth.
This is divination.
This is like what happened to Olivier.
Panic rises in her belly when she fears he’ll see one of her many secrets—her bargain with Dorian, her affair with Cassius, her blade going through her father’s heart. She knows he’s not looking into the past, but the future is nothing but a consequence. He could see something that’s a direct result from one of the many horrible decisions she’s made. He could turn on her—back to the cold, angry professor he was when they first met.
Or worse—into the killer she now fears he could be.
But she uses this opportunity to snatch the entry from the desk, ball it up, and shove it into her pocket.
She stills before her professor calms and quiets down, his eyes rolling forward as his body relaxes. He releases Claudia’s wrist, and she drops her sleeve, belting her waist with her arms.
