CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Cold air hit me like a wall, freezing the sweat on my palms and the damp fabric under my arms. I knew how to call the beast. I did it all the time. All it took was some honeysuckle mixed with a little lavender or rose oil. But I couldn’t tell Sebastian why I knew how to do it.

“You don’t know it’ll work,” he said as we trudged toward the village.

“I know some animals are drawn to the sweetness of honeysuckle. It’s not a big leap to think the beast will be too. I know I have some in my stores at home that I use for poultices.”

I couldn’t tell him the real reason I kept honeysuckle on hand.

“If you say so. And once the beast is near?”

Sebastian turned to look at me as we left the road and crunched through the stiff snow at the edge of the forest.

“We kill it,” I said with a dry throat.

Sebastian took a deep breath and nodded, clenching the musket he’d brought with us in his hands. I reached down, scooped up a bit of snow, and put it on my tongue to let it melt.

I wondered how important it was to Sebastian to be the one to kill the beast—if his hunger for revenge would be enough to keep him with me. It seemed it was. For now, at least.

The door to our cottage gave easily without a bolt to seal it. The emptiness of the place got under my skin and made me shiver. It wasn’t right. Ama should be here, filling the space.

“So, this is your home?” Sebastian said.

I nodded. What does he think of it? Sebastian may have never even set foot in a cottage like this before. He might really understand our differences now. Unbidden, I remembered the feel of his broad shoulders under my hands while we danced in front of his mother’s wardrobe. Though I couldn’t ignore the valley between us, between our lives here, I didn’t really want Sebastian to feel it too.

“Do you have a tinder box?” he asked.

I started and leaned heavily against the table. “Near the window.”

The cottage was dark in the pale, late afternoon light, but I knew it well enough to not need bright candles.

Sebastian fumbled with the flint and struck it against the fire steel. He then took a little stick from the fireplace and prodded it into the flames. The end caught and shimmered as Sebastian manipulated it in the dark. A clever puppeteer on a dark stage.

The low light made shallow shadows along the walls.

“We need to find the beast before anyone else does,” I said, opening the cabinet that held my tinctures. “Or anyone else dies.”

“Why do you think we’ll be able to find it just like that?”

“We’ll lure it to us . . . and then poison it.”

“And what will we use as bait?”

“Vivienne, the girl we found in the woods today . . . she wasn’t in as bad a state as Maurice was.”

“She was lucky.”

A shiver rippled over Sebastian’s body after he spoke, and he wrapped his coat around himself. I stepped closer to him because the cold began to nip at my fingers too, and I wanted to feel the solidity of his arm against mine. Sebastian returned the pressure when I leaned into him.

“I think the beast didn’t finish what it started,” I said, keeping my eyes on the gouged wood of the table in front of us. “It got interrupted. We take the body, lace it with honeysuckle and stuff it with poison, and leave it out for the monster to find. When it comes for the girl, it’ll eat the poison with her flesh.”

He took my mortar from the table and rolled it across the top. “And what if the beast prefers living flesh? We’ll be an easy meal.”

Something deep inside me still believed Ama would never hurt me—even when transformed into a monster. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t go after the warm, thudding pulse in Sebastian’s neck.

I pushed the thought away and took the mortar from him.

“It’ll be too distracted with the girl and then it will be sick with poison,” I insisted.

“And then I shoot it?”

“Yes.”

We stared at each other. The heat of his gaze made me want to drop mine, but I didn’t. I couldn’t—he’d see the lie in the shift of my eyes.

“And you just have this poison on hand? Why?”

“Rats,” I said. “We’re always trying to get rid of the rats.”

Two cut glass bottles, one with honeysuckle and one with foxglove, sat snug in the basket Ama and I had taken to market the day Maurice was found. I slipped them both into the deep pocket of my skirt and let the door bang shut behind us just to hear the noise.

“What if she already stinks?” Sebastian asked.

I placed my boot into a footprint left in the hard-packed snow between my cottage and the edge of town. The hard edges of the print crumbled under my weight.

“It’s cold. She’ll still be fresh.”

Sebastian’s lips pulled down into a grimace and I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t relish seeing the body again or feeling the sticky blood under my fingers.

Someone had draped a white canvas tarp over the wagon that had brought the body back from the woods so only the girl’s feet were visible. The streets had emptied near the church as the villagers rushed to evade the moonlit night and all the threats darkness might bring.

I climbed into the wagon and yanked the tarp back, trying to ignore the girl’s blank eyes.

“Grab her legs,” I said.

Sebastian clapped his hands on the dead girl’s ankles and pulled. I tried to catch the shoulders, but he was too quick and the body fell from the wagon with a sickening thud.

“Marie!”

“What? You pulled too hard!”

“Just hurry and help me turn her around. She’s stiff.”

I jumped down from the wagon and grabbed the dead girl’s shoulder. It was like rolling a log. Her blood-stained dress was still sticky—the blood not yet frozen.

“Here.” I handed Sebastian one of the delicate glass bottles. “Hold it steady while I pull out the stopper. Don’t let any of the poison touch you.”

I didn’t want Sebastian to become the bait himself.

He did as I asked and held the vial carefully. I pulled the cork from the mouth of the bottle and then took it from him. A little sprinkled into the ruined skin at her stomach should be enough to weaken Ama.

“It won’t be enough to kill it?”

“I don’t think there’s any poison that could kill something like that.”

“Good. I want to strike the blow myself, like you said.” His eyes shifted to the gore in front of him as he said it, and his mouth settled into a firm line.

He may want the revenge, but I wasn’t sure he’d really be able to shoot the beast when the time came—he didn’t seem like a person who’d ever actually felt the blood of an animal under his hands—and that suited me just fine. I wasn’t going to actually let him kill my sister. I just needed him to see her, to spark his fear so he’d try harder to remember whatever detail would be the key to the book. And I wanted to weaken the beast enough to be able to take her away from the town and lock her up before Emméline found her. She’d be safe in the cellar, chained up so she couldn’t kill anyone else. It would only be until I figured out how to make Sebastian’s mother’s spell book work.

Once I could make Ama fully human again, she’d be safe for good and everything could go back to normal.

A faint hint of lavender and sweet honey rose from the corpse where I’d laced it with honeysuckle. I hoped it would be enough to get Ama to come.

A handcart leaned against the church wall. I grabbed the handles and hauled it over to Sebastian. A chorus of voices rose from inside the nearby tavern in drunken song, and I prayed no one would get the urge to stumble outside to pee.

“Hurry! Let’s put her in this cart. We won’t be able to carry her all the way to the woods.”

Sebastian eyed the corpse and shifted on the balls of his feet. “We should be leaving her to her rest.”

His voice, laced with unexpected tenderness, softened the sharp reply that sprang to the tip of my tongue.

“She’s helping to catch her killer. Don’t you think she would want to save the others from the beast?”

Sebastian’s eyes filled. He didn’t even try to hide or wipe away the tears. He let them fall, fat drops that rolled down his cheeks and fell from his chin.

I stood still, not sure what to do. Part of me wanted to comfort him, to reach out and lace my fingers through his. The other part wanted to become invisible and leave him to his private grief.

It wasn’t just Vivienne. It was his parents. No one had saved them. We were too late—he was too late. And there was nothing we could do about it now. Even if he had his revenge, it wouldn’t bring them back.

He shook his head to clear the tears and reached to pick up the dead girl’s arms. Together, we lifted her into the handcart—but we couldn’t get her to sit naturally. Her body’s odd angles were just another reminder that whatever had made her her, the part that had made her human, was gone.

The song inside the tavern grew deeper and stronger and then stopped, leaving behind an eerie lull. I let go of the cart and pressed my ear to the tavern door. A familiar commanding voice rose out of the silence. Père Danil.

“We must prevail over this beast of the devil!”

“Kill it!”

“God will help us!”

Fear slid over me like a dark veil. We didn’t have much time before Père Danil whipped up the crowd enough to convince them to go out into the darkening night. I picked up the cart handles again as Sebastian stepped forward to take one side, panic brightening his wide eyes. We hurried away, trying to stay ahead of whoever was about to spill out of the tavern with the priest. The cart wobbled dangerously as we tripped over exposed roots and black patches of ice. At the mouth of the forest, we put it down and lifted the body from it. I chose a tree, wide and rutted with age, and we set the dead girl down at its base.

“Now what?” asked Sebastian.

The woods spoke to us, with the murmur of the wind and the rustling of a squirrel. Most children in the village were scared to come in here alone. I’d never been.

“We wait for the beast.”