I stared up at Sebastian. I could tell him what happened to me at the bottom of the oubliette, but I was sure it wasn’t me who came to him last night. I only transformed after Papa visited in the morning. If Sebastian saw a monster, it had to have been my sister.
“We need to wake your mother, Sebastian. Bring her out of whatever state she’s in.”
He paled in the low light. “You can’t.”
“We have to. She’s the only one who can read her book of spells . . . the only one with the cure to Ama’s curse.”
Sebastian shook his head, bit his lip. “She’s frozen in the moment before death. If you wake her, she’ll slip away.”
“It’s the only way, Sebastian,” I said, wishing it weren’t. “I need her to read the book of spells.”
“Please don’t take her from me.”
“You don’t have her now!”
His features broke into those of a child, a little boy looking for reassurance. But I couldn’t give it to him.
“She’s nothing more than a statue to you! You sit beside her the same way you’d sit beside her gravestone. Look at her! You haven’t saved her, Sebastian. You’ve only delayed the inevitable. If we wake her now, at least her final moments could save Ama’s and Lucien’s lives!”
“Lucien isn’t dying!”
“Not yet, but he will! Consumption will take him eventually. All you’re doing is waiting for that day.”
Tears ran unabashedly down Sebastian’s freckled cheeks and I ached to pull him to me. His sadness sat heavy in my belly, fighting against my anger toward him. He’d lied to me the whole time, and I’d given him so much of my truth. He knew about Ama, knew my greatest secret, and yet he’d kept his own from me. I didn’t want Lucien to die either, but I wouldn’t comfort Sebastian now.
I couldn’t know what went through his mind as he stared at me with wet, shimmering eyes. But after a shallow breath, he nodded.
“What do you think you’re going to do, Marie? Shake her awake?”
That stung a little. I thought he knew me better than that by now.
“Foxglove could start her heart back up.”
“Or it might kill her right away.”
Guilt washed over me as a look of pain spread over his eyes. “I need to talk to her, need her to read the book of spells or tell me how. It all comes back to her.”
The candles lighting the space flickered. Who lights them, I wondered. Sebastian? Madame Écrue? Does she know her mistress is suspended in this half a life? Probably.
Sebastian nodded and began walking toward the altar. He knew this room and the precise way to step around his mother without bumping any candles or accidentally touching her. He kept a space between them. I wondered if he was scared of touching her . . . of what he might, or might not, feel under her skin.
I pulled myself to my feet and followed him, finally really looking at the woman before us.
Her waxen skin had a gray tinge, as if the blood had drained from it. Her lips peeled and her dull curly hair spilled over her shoulders. Perhaps she had the same soft brown eyes as Sebastian, but veined eyelids covered them from view.
The same sense of the uncanny I’d had when washing Maurice’s body nipped at me with its sharp teeth. She was like us, but she wasn’t.
She was frozen, caught in a pocket of time while the rest of the world moved around her. Waking her wouldn’t be without its risks. What if time came to claim the year she’d been lying here, shriveling her skin and robbing her heart of the final beats it should have taken? But it was a risk I had to take. Waking her was the only way to figure out how to read her book.
“How did you do it, Sebastian?” I asked.
Magic clouded the room. This frozen half life could only have been achieved with a spell, and Sebastian hadn’t had the power necessary to stop the curse in Lucien when we’d tried. He couldn’t have done this on his own.
Sebastian was very quiet, as if afraid to disturb his mother. He glanced at me but wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I knew another secret was about to deepen the space between us.
“It was Aurélie.”
Shock numbed me for a moment, but I shook it off and thought back to our meeting with my aunt. I’d wondered why they’d stared so fiercely at each other. Now I knew it was because they shared this secret. I remembered Aurélie’s words to him: Even though I gave her to you? Even though she lingers on the cusp of time?
He’d kept it all from me.
“She helped you because she was your mother’s friend?”
Sebastian finally slipped his hand under his mother’s still fingers—touching her for the first time since I’d entered the room. A small ache thrummed in my heart for him, but I had to ignore it. He’d lied to me, more than once, and he could because he was a lord. There would be no consequences for him. Unless they came from me. I’d harden against Sebastian to show him he couldn’t do just anything to me.
“Aurélie loved my mother and Maman loved her back,” he said. “Papa knew, I think, but he ignored it every time Maman took the path into the woods. When Maman and Papa were hurt, I rode into the trees, down the same path I saw Maman take. I knew I’d find the friend I’d seen before . . . I wanted her help, someone to heal Maman, who cared for her . . . not with magic but with love. Aurélie came back with me and that was the first time I ever saw magic. She couldn’t save Maman from her injuries, but she used a spell to freeze her before her death.”
Aurélie and Madame LaClaire. When we were playing hide-and-seek, Lucien had said he used to hear and see things outside his windows. It couldn’t have been Ama, because she was still at home with me then. Lucien was seeing things before she was turned into the beast for the first time. If Madame LaClaire cursed her, and maybe me, to protect her sons, there must have been a threat. People have always died in the woods, long before Ama became a monster. Maybe whoever was killing people now was responsible for threatening and scaring Lucien all those years ago.
But if Madame LaClaire chose Ama and me as protectors—monsters to fight a monster—Aurélie must have known. And she did nothing.
The betrayal was dulled by the time that had already passed. My aunt had never come to us anyway, never tried to be part of our lives after our mother died.
“Sebastian, did your mother ever tell you who she was protecting you from when she made the curse?”
He stared at me, eyes lighting up a little. He might have taken my talking to him as forgiveness, but it wasn’t. We were so close and I wasn’t going to give up now. I still needed him.
“These huge wolves would come out of the forests and right up to our windows, especially the ones in Maman’s bedroom. They’d paw at them and whine and scare Lucien. I always thought they were just animals and a musket blast would do away with them if we needed to protect ourselves. But Maman was terrified. She never let us outside alone and none of us could leave the house after dark. It was then she started spending more time with Aurélie.”
“They came up with this curse together,” I said. “Those two sacrificed my sister to protect you and your brother from a few animals?”
Sebastian rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. “I don’t know, all right? She never told me what she was doing. All I have are guesses because she was dead before I could ask.”
He bent his head and rested it on his mother’s arm. I wondered if she still smelled the same to him.
“We need to do this, Sebastian. For the people we have left.”
He nodded and pulled away with a sob. Pooled tears left shining spots on Madame LaClaire’s dull skin. My heart ached again. I couldn’t help it.
“What are you going to do?” Sebastian asked. “Will it hurt her?”
“I don’t think so,” I lied, and the familiar heat of guilt squirmed in my belly.
“There’s some foxglove blossoms down in the kitchen,” I went on, hoping he wouldn’t ask how I knew that. “I can extract the nectar.”
“All right.” Sebastian nodded and stepped away from his mother’s body. “Go get it.”
I went quickly, opening the door from the chamber and propelling myself down the hallway, past the family room and grand staircase until I came to the servant’s door. I hurried into the kitchen, into the hidden workroom. The stem of foxglove was right where I’d left it, and I squeezed out a few more drops of nectar with the flat edge of a knife. I collected them on the steel and ran the knife along the edge of the mouth of a little glass bottle. The nectar pooled inside, and I gripped the bottle in my fist so I could run all the way back to the chamber.
Sebastian sat with his back to me, head bent over his mother. He pulled in a deep, audible breath as I stood next to her and tipped the little bottle to her lips. Foxglove juice ran down the glass and slipped into the woman’s barely open mouth.
Nothing happened.
I studied Sebastian’s mother’s chest. It didn’t move up and down at all, but at the hollow of her throat, just above the square neckline of her dress, a pulse beat under her skin.
“It’ll take more, I guess,” I said.
Sebastian paled even further, a tinge of green shadowing his skin. I almost wanted to reach out to him, comfort him, but the sharp betrayal, his secrets and lies, kept my arms at my sides.
A shiver ran through me, and I had to suck a breath in through my teeth to keep myself steady. I couldn’t help thinking this was magic I didn’t want to be a part of. It was wrong. My teeth worked the inside of my lip, and I relished the pain when I bit too deep—the pain was real, understandable. Normal. I ached for normal. What we were doing here made my skin crawl.
“I’ll try again,” I said, unnecessarily, to give myself a moment before approaching the body for the second time. I tipped the bottle to the woman’s lips again and held my breath.