A tiny flicker of her chest under her thin white chemise. A small beat of life. The poison had shocked her body and shaken off the spell.
A glow rose under her deathly pallor and returned the look of life to her cheeks, her chest, her hands. All at once, she trembled, and her chest rose up and down. She was breathing.
Sebastian threw himself at his mother, touching her hands, the pulse at her neck, the curve of her forehead and sweep of her hair.
“Maman!”
Pain broke his voice in two, and I couldn’t keep the sadness from welling up in my chest and pushing a lump into my throat. Sebastian loved his mother so much he found a way to bind her to the earth when she’d been on the threshold of death. It must mean she loved him too. She had probably held him close when he cried. She might have taken his hand in church and played secret games with him while the priest droned on. Perhaps she saved him treats—his favorite petit fours or a pinch of special tea—just to see him smile. She had probably been a mother to him in all the ways mine never could be to me, and I tried to keep my jealousy from souring my stomach.
How could I think these things when he’d lost her? When she’d been as good as dead for a year?
I shook my head to clear it of these dark thoughts and bit the inside of my lip again. Sebastian’s mother’s mouth moved, and her hands shook as she tried to raise them. Sebastian soothed her, but her breathy grunts soon turned to a keening wail. Her fingers fluttered over her stomach and the fabric of her blue dress started to change. A deep red cloud devoured the pale blue silk, the spot starting in the middle and weeping to the sides of the embroidered stomacher.
“No, no!”
Sebastian looked to me, frantic, and I broke from my frozen stance. I ripped off a piece of fabric from my chemise, and used it to staunch the blood. I held it tight to Madame LaClaire’s belly and pressed down while she gasped and sputtered.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
Sebastian’s stricken eyes flew to mine. “This is what I was afraid of. We did the spell after she and my father were attacked. She was injured then, but the magic froze her injuries too. Now she’s awake and bleeding.”
“She can’t survive like this,” I said as her blood ran between my fingers. “Get me a needle and thread, quick!”
Sebastian looked startled but he nodded and ran from the room. With him gone, I tried not to look at the eyes of this long-dying woman, but she drew my stare with a low moan.
“You,” she whispered. “I feel you.”
I dropped my pressure on Madame LaClaire’s stomach and stepped away from her. Sebastian saved me from answering by flying back into the room holding a long needle and a spool of white thread, but her words lodged in my mind. Of course she could feel me. Her magic ran in my veins.
“Here.” Sebastian thrust the sewing supplies into my empty hands and threw himself over his mother’s belly once more. He pressed the cloth into her and tried to steady her quivering.
She stared at him now and her mouth opened again. “Bastian?”
His eyes lit up with such hope I couldn’t help a little piece of my heart breaking off for them. They’d never truly be together again, but at least they had this stolen moment to say goodbye.
“We need to take the stomacher off,” I said.
Sebastian looked up at me with a bloody streak across his cheek where he’d wiped away tears. “Will this save her?”
I thought about lying. I’d have done it before, just for the few moments of happiness it would have given him. But in the end, a lie would be much more painful than the truth.
“No. If I sew her up, I think it will buy us a little time, but she’ll still die. She’s hurt inside, Sebastian. No one can fix that.”
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, as if tasting my words and deciding whether or not he could swallow them. Finally, he nodded, and I had to think that somewhere deep down he’d known her death had been inevitable from the moment the beast took a swipe across her belly.
We got to work. Sebastian held his mother’s shaking body while I pulled her laces free and pried the blood-soaked stomacher away from her. Sebastian took the knife from his belt and tore her shift away from her stomach so we could see the damage. The gore brought bile into my throat, but I did my best to detach myself from all of it. I tried to think of it like I would a chicken or a pig that Papa had slaughtered. I’d butchered animals and cleaned bodies before. Seen others mauled. This didn’t have to be so different.
Madame LaClaire’s arm slipped from the altar. She pointed with a long finger at the little blue book tucked under Sebastian’s arm.
“Pain,” she rasped.
Sebastian seemed to understand at once because he picked up the book and turned to one of the first pages. The woman read the lines in blurred haste. Slowly, her brow smoothed and her lips lost their grimace. Sebastian breathed a sigh and closed the book.
“A spell against pain,” he said.
“She might not feel it, but she’s still dying.” I didn’t want him to raise any hopes to the contrary only to have them crushed when she finally left him for good.
But he nodded. “I know.”
“Good, let’s get on with it.”
I threaded the needle while Madame LaClaire stared at her son and rubbed the skin of his hands over and over again with her thumbs. The pain spell had been incredibly effective.
“You’ve grown,” she said to Sebastian. “I hardly know you. You’re a man now, mon étoile.”
He smiled, and the blush I’d come to know so well bloomed on his cheeks. I bent over my work so as not to intrude. Once I pushed everything back in, the skin was easy enough to pull together. My needlework was as good as any and I made neat little stiches across Madame LaClaire’s belly while she gazed at the child she’d lost and would shortly lose again.
“What’s happened?” she asked Sebastian.
“Lucien is sicker now.”
“Nothing worked. I tried so many things,” Sebastian’s mother said. “I never had the right magic to save him.”
“I know,” Sebastian said. “We’ll keep trying though, all right?”
“I never told you what I was . . . what Aurélie taught me to be. I’m sorry.”
“A witch,” Sebastian said.
His mother gave no acknowledgment to the word. Her eyes slid to me as I tied off the thread and cut it with my teeth.
“I feel you,” she said, repeating her words from before.
“Yes, I imagine you do,” I said, glancing up at Sebastian. He was going to find out somehow, and I didn’t have time to be cryptic. “You cursed me and my sister.”
“Cursed?” Her thinly plucked brows furrowed. “Is that what you think of it?”
I bit back a laugh. “Well, you turned us into beasts and now Ama is killing . . . children, so yes, I do think that.”
“Not a beast. A savior.”
“Us?” Sebastian cut in. “What are you talking about, Marie?”
He didn’t deserve my honesty, but it was easiest to give it. “I turned while in the oubliette, into a beast like Ama. That’s how I escaped.”
“But you’ve never . . . you were here all this time,” he said. His eyes glistened with fresh tears. This day had offered him so much pain, and I couldn’t help feeling the hurt along with him. Caring for someone isn’t an easy thing to stop doing.
“I woke up on the lawn once. I thought I’d just gone through the windows in my room in my sleep. Another time the windows were open and I woke naked with scratches all over my legs. Now I wonder if I went out to turn on both nights.”
“But you don’t remember it?”
“Some memories came back when I turned today, scents, sounds . . . but I’m not sure. I never knew I was doing it.”
He stared into a candle flame, wrestling something inside. “It could have been you.”
“It wasn’t.” I didn’t need him to elaborate to know what he was talking about. If I’d been turning into a beast without knowing it, I might have killed those children, the seamstress. I might have attacked his parents. But it wasn’t me.
“My thoughts were still my own while I was turned. Ama may have lost herself to the animal inside her, but I didn’t. And if I’d turned and been the beast you saw last night, I would have stayed out of the oubliette. I wouldn’t have climbed back in just to turn back into a girl.”
He nodded quickly. I wasn’t sure if he believed it like I did, but we didn’t have time for him to mull it over, because Madame LaClaire was dying again.