Père Lachaise was home to some very unusual ghosts.
The cemetery sat in Paris’s twentieth arrondissement and had been swallowing the bones of its citizens for over a century. Politicians and paupers and priests… Their graves had been built with the same care as houses, fitted with doors and stained glass windows. It was prime real estate. Peaceful too. At six o’ clock, when mourners were ushered out, you could find the edge of silence.
You could also find Céleste Artois wandering through ivy-throttled graves, saying the strangest of prayers.
She’d grown up with a crucifix hanging over her bed—the hallmark of a good Catholic girl—and even though that cross had gotten left behind when she’d run away to the City of Light, she was still in the habit of confession. Well, confessing. She supposed it didn’t count when there wasn’t a priest to listen to the list of sins. It also probably didn’t count when you weren’t really sorry for the crimes you committed. Céleste was no longer good. Nor was she Catholic. She wasn’t even a girl anymore… It had been nearly seven years since she’d started her new life in Paris. A life built with brushstrokes and white lies.
“I sold one of my paintings this afternoon!” The cemetery had plenty of crosses for this ritual, but Céleste paused by a stone saint instead. “I told the buyer I was cleaning out my dead uncle’s estate. I also led him to believe it was a genuine Eugène Delacroix, so I’m getting better…”
At lying? At painting? Or both?
Both was the hope. It was more than hope, really. In order to pull off a good confidence scheme, you had to believe the fantasy you were selling. Céleste had needed to become the artist. She’d immersed herself in the palette of the Romantic master—Eugène’s stark lights and dramatic darks. His revolutionary reds. The paint had gotten trapped beneath her fingernails, but this didn’t pose much of a problem, since Céleste had pulled on black gloves to turn herself into a bereaved niece.
Leftover tears still clung to her lashes as she stared up at the statue. “Is it truly stealing if someone hands their money to you?”
A priest would have said yes.
The marble saint said nothing.
Céleste smiled as she knelt by the base of the grave he guarded. Her coin purse jingled. It was a good take. The mark had been willing to spend five hundred francs on her canvas—and he’d been smiling too, when he’d paid the sum. Mostly because he was under the impression that he could turn around and sell the painting for ten times as much.
“You’d think rich men wouldn’t be so greedy…” She peeled off her gloves and began digging through moss. “But there’s always more to be taken. It doesn’t matter if you’re six feet under or on top of the goddamn world. Corpses can be stripped, and kings can be beheaded. There is always more to be taken, so it’s best to be the taker.”
The saint still did not look convinced.
Céleste dug deeper. The hole wouldn’t be fitting any coffins, but it was enough for her to wedge the francs inside and cover with a cluster of ivy.
More leaves rustled on the far side of the grave.
“Hello?” she called out.
Nearby tombs yawned. Vines continued their slow crawl over names and dates and epitaphs. The hairs on the back of Céleste’s neck whispered that someone was there… someone who should not be. The cemetery gates had been locked for over an hour now, and Père Lachaise’s guards didn’t dare walk the lanes this close to dusk. Ghosts came out in the gloaming, they claimed, spirits of the underworld rising closer and closer to the surface.
Céleste Artois did not believe this, mostly because she was the one who haunted the grounds. She was the pale woman who wandered through the graves every evening. She lit the candles that flickered through the windows of division sixty-two’s largest mausoleum. She slept over dead men’s bones. She brought new legends to life—stories of plague victims and noblewomen caught up in the Revolution’s guillotine—never mind that it was Napoleon who’d opened this cemetery, well after the heads had finished rolling. The central figure in each of the guards’ tales was a young lady with shock-white hair. If you see her strolling the roads of Père Lachaise, beware…
Also, if you see her rummaging through the conservation office for toiletries and bathwater, ignore that too. On pain of termination.
The senior groundskeeper was the real reason Céleste could squat there. Her campsite remained undisturbed because he ordered his underlings to look the other way. He did this because after Céleste had bribed some keys off him, she used the incident as blackmail.
It was cheaper than rent. Safer than most houses too, thanks to the gates and the guards and various traps set up by the other members of her gang. Céleste wasn’t the only “ghost” in Père Lachaise. She wasn’t the only Enchantress either. It was a shared title—divvied up into three equal parts, just like these buried francs would be.
“Hello?” Céleste called again. “Sylvie? Is that you, ma rêveuse? Honoré? I’m not in the mood for an ambush—”
Leaves parted for a flash of fur. It was just a cat, one of the many who prowled this place. They were always slipping in and out of crypts, too busy with their own secrets to bother with Céleste’s…
She coughed and patted the saint statue’s foot. “I’ll be back for this, so don’t go anywhere.”
The marble felt cold. Her joke, clumsy.
It had been a long day, made even longer by her button-up heels, so Céleste shucked them off and wandered barefoot down one of the cemetery’s windier lanes. This corner of Père Lachaise was more overgrown than the rest, left to its own devices by junior groundskeepers. Ghosts weren’t the sole reason. There were other hazards there: pits filled with broken glass and trip wires tied to stumps. Céleste was usually good about avoiding those, but that night her toes snagged an alarm strung with bells.
“BEGONE, OR I SHALL HAUNT THEE UNTIL THE END OF THY DAYS!” Honoré Côte leapt out of a tomb inscribed with the exact same name, brandishing a cheese knife. It was Camembert—not blood—stuck to the edges.
“Céleste!” The young woman blinked, looking vaguely disappointed that there was no one to stab. “You didn’t say the watchword.”
“Ab Aeterno.”
“That was yesterday’s password.” Her friend scowled.
“Cocorico?”
Honoré crossed her arms.
“‘I’m exhausted and all I want is to eat cheese’?” Céleste snatched the knife, which was dull enough to make the Camembert taste sharp when she licked it. “What were you going to do with this anyhow?”
“If you don’t know how to serve death with a cheese knife, then our défense dans la rue lessons have been in vain.”
Céleste couldn’t tell if the other Enchantress was joking or not. Honoré’s humor went well past the gallows, but self-defense was a serious matter for a gangster’s daughter. Défense dans la rue was nothing to laugh at either. It was street fighting. It was boxing. It was jiu-jitsu. It was using every dirty trick you could to keep your opponent from slitting your throat.
It was something Honoré Côte was very, very good at.
One swipe, and the knife was hers again. “No more cheese until you tell me today’s watchword!”
“What if I told you we made five hundred francs today instead?” Céleste asked.
“Really?” The other Enchantress’s blade lowered. Her face brightened—enough to highlight the angry welt where a moustache had been pasted to Honoré’s upper lip. “Five hundred?”
“Our mark was practically salivating when I walked back into the restaurant. Your disguise worked wonders!”
Céleste couldn’t take sole credit for this sin. Truthfully, it had been Honoré who’d led their mark to believe that the painting was a Delacroix. Even less truthfully, it was “Monsieur Alexandre Dumont, purveyor of fine art” who’d stopped by the man’s table and commented on the quality of the canvas the “bereaved niece” had left him to guard.
“I wasn’t sure…” Honoré tugged at her shirt’s high collar, the one that hid her distinct lack of an Adam’s apple. “My voice slipped a few times, but I suppose he paid more attention to the words than the tone. I told him he could sell the piece for six thousand at my shop.”
Somewhere in the other Enchantress’s tailored suit was a case of calling cards, inked with Céleste’s oh-so-sharp fountain pen. The address for Monsieur Dumont’s store would lead their eager mark to an empty street corner. The painting he’d purchased wouldn’t take him much further… Any other purveyor would be quick to point out that it was not, in fact, fine art.
It was a fine forgery.
“Well, you were man enough to fool him,” Céleste said.
The other Enchantress nodded at Céleste’s bare feet. “I’m sure you did your share of ankle flashing to get him up to five hundred francs!”
This was a joke, Céleste knew. Long-standing between them. Almost as old as their friendship. In the five years they’d known each other, the other woman had worn more names than gowns. Being a young lady in Paris meant navigating a number of social obstacles—corsets and curtseys and a whole host of things Honoré didn’t have patience for. This was the reason she sported trousers and shortened her hair with the sharpest of knives. Céleste saw little need to carry weapons up her sleeve the way the other Enchantress did. Men, as a species, were easily distracted. Often, all she had to do was show a sliver of skin, and most marks became paraffin wax in her palm.
You’d rather stab someone than seduce them? she’d asked Honoré.
To keep my ankles to myself? Absolutely.
“There was no ankle flashing this time. Merely a few tears.” Céleste smiled. “Like I said, your disguise worked wonders. Though it appears ‘Monsieur Dumont’s’ moustache was reticent to depart your person.”
“Is it bad? I tried a new adhesive, and it was a little too… adhesive.”
“It’s not… not bad.”
“I don’t understand why moustaches are fashionable.” Honoré’s nose wrinkled. “They itch like hell.”
“Most men don’t use glue.”
“Well, it’s better than wearing a corset. Ribs already are cages! Why must you lace another one on?”
Céleste did not disagree. Her own bodice was digging into her skin, and she knew that if she didn’t interrupt her friend’s speech, it would grow into a ten-minute diatribe about the flammability of crinoline. Do you know how many women go up in flames every year? Dresses are death traps! Death traps that hardly ever have pockets!!!
She fished her empty coin purse from her belt and showed it to Honoré. “I already deposited today’s take.”
“At la Banque d’Ossements?”
Pasted moustaches had taken the gang’s confidence schemes a good ways—men almost always trusted other men—but fake facial hair didn’t quite cut it when it came to Paris’s banks. Women weren’t allowed to open checking accounts, so the Enchantresses were forced to store their spoils with the dead instead. The Bank of Bones, they called it. Fifty francs with the mortal remains of J. M. N. Leroux de Prinssay in division twenty-five. Two hundred with Susan Durant in division fifty-six. Seventy-five by the lair of the feral orange tomcat, money none of them would ever touch again if they wanted to keep their fingers.
“Five hundred in division eighty-six.”
“Whose grave?” Honoré pressed.
Ah… Céleste tried to remember, but her thoughts crawled with ivy. Had she really not stopped to read the name? “I got distracted. There was a cat.” The other Enchantress made a stony face; not unlike the statue Céleste had tasked to guard their new treasure. “There was a saint too?”
“There are thousands of saint statues in this cemetery,” Honoré retorted. “This is precisely why we have systems in place, mon amie! If we don’t record names, we’ll forget where we’ve stored our fortune! If we don’t use the watchwords, I might mistake you for an attacker!”
“If I were a wheel of Brie, that would be terrifying—”
Another rustle came from the underbrush. Honoré’s face hardened even more as she raised her cheese knife, and Céleste felt her own laughter die in her throat.
“Hello! I mean—allons-y! Please don’t stab me!”
Honoré sighed and lowered her knife as the youngest Enchantress leapt out of the bushes.
Sylvie was small for her eleven years. Fae-sized. Her dark hair grew as wild as a thicket. Her eyes were brown too, but they were always wide, reflecting the sky, so Céleste sometimes painted them blue in her memory.
There was a baguette in the girl’s arms this evening; the loaf of bread was almost taller than she was. “I found dinner!”
“Did you find it, or did you steal it?” Céleste had a sneaking suspicion.
It was confirmed with a slight shrug. “We steal stuff all the time.”
“We acquire francs from those stupid enough to part with them,” Céleste corrected. “We do not raid neighborhood boulangeries, especially if we want them to sell you pain au chocolat every morning.”
Sylvie bit her lip—the girl did like her sweets. She was forever distracted by pâtisserie displays, and at any given moment, she had at least two macarons on her person. Honoré joked that if Sylvie ever got cut, she’d bleed sugar. Céleste just hoped the girl would make it to adulthood with all her teeth.
And no arrest record.
“What if a police officer had seen you, hm? Bread isn’t worth getting locked back in the orphanage, is it?”
Sylvie suddenly looked very small. Almost as small as the day Céleste and Honoré had caught the girl trying to pick their pockets. She’d been starving then. Beyond desperate.
“I didn’t mean— Please don’t cry, Sylvie!”
Too late. Dark eyes shone darker with tears.
“Ce n’est pas grave!” Honoré to the rescue. “We’ll leave extra change at the boulangerie tomorrow. Right now, this bread belongs in our bellies. I’ve got cheese to go with it. And some tarte au chocolat.”
At the mention of dessert, Sylvie grinned, her tears miraculously vanished. Pretending. Of course! Céleste couldn’t decide if she was incensed or impressed.
The girl clasped her hands together. “You remembered my birthday?”
“How could I forget something that happens every two months?” Honoré replied dryly.
At least that. Sylvie didn’t know her actual date of birth, which meant the Enchantresses ate cake whenever the girl wanted to make a birthday wish. If all these festivities were true, she’d be closer to forty than eleven.
“I’ll go get a candle!” she said brightly.
There was no sign of tears whatsoever on Sylvie’s face as she dashed into the mausoleum.
Céleste followed. The original Honoré Côte must have loved astronomy, for no expense had been spared on his tomb’s glass roof. It was fashioned like an observatory, salted with constellation etchings. As a result, the place was far brighter and far warmer than one might expect. Each Enchantress had staked out a side. Honoré’s held a collection of non-cheese knives and fake moustaches, while Sylvie’s had to be scoured for stale pastries every night before the rats got to them.
Céleste’s corner could hardly be called a corner.
Silk gowns were draped like curtains. Diamond necklaces dangled in place of chandeliers. And among all this sat the strangest studio any artist in Paris could claim. Canvases lined the wall next to a variety of wigs. Paintbrushes lay out to dry on the central tombstone. Flecks of color splashed the stone next to wax candle drippings—late-morning light was best here, but Céleste often painted by flame as the other girls slept.
Sylvie had set her baguette on top of the central stone’s faded epitaph: HONORÉ CÔTE, WHO STARED AT STARS UNTIL THEY HAD NAMES.
Monsieur Côte’s name had been stolen by the Enchantresses, like everything else here. Was the dead man turning, just a few feet below, knowing these young women had converted his sacred resting place into a space for their criminal activities? If he had been anything like his namesake, he’d be proud.
And perhaps a little exasperated by the crumbs.
Sylvie kept pulling croissants out of her pockets. It was truly impressive that she’d managed to snatch such a lot of fresh bread without the baker noticing. Then again, the youngest Enchantress had fingers lighter than feathers, so light that she’d even managed to slip a ring right off Honoré’s own hand, back when they’d first met…
“What did you do for your birthday, ma rêveuse?” Céleste asked, as she began sorting through dresses. Some were lavish and others were dirty, but they all had stories sewn into their hems. The bereaved niece was only one of many aliases. “Besides pilfer pastries?”
“Oh, this and that.”
Céleste chose a silk dressing gown and turned to face her ward. There were only thirteen years between them, but she knew she was the closest thing Sylvie would get to a maman. It was one of the few roles Céleste could not unbutton or step out of.
“What exactly?”
“I woke up.” The girl began counting with her fingers. “I peed in the bushes. I thought I was done, but then I had to go back and—”
“You don’t have to be that exact!”
Sylvie flashed an impish grin. It looked like it belonged to one of the goblins illustrated in the stack of Andrew Lang fairy-tale books by her bed. The ones she’d flipped through so many times that their spines had tattered. The books were beautiful, arranged in a veritable rainbow of colors, their covers gilded with portraits of fairies. But the stories inside were written in English, a language none of the Enchantresses had mastered. This didn’t stop Sylvie from reading them over and over. She’d come up with her own versions over the years.
Her imagination was… vivid.
“I explored a secret tunnel down by the Seine that led to a chamber full of spiders and bones. Then, when a gentleman stopped to ask where my parents were, I pretended to be a long-lost princess. Then I tried taming a tiger.”
Céleste strongly suspected this had been a stray cat.
The feast was their usual fare: bread, cheese, tarte au chocolat, and a bottle of drinking water they’d filled in the closest Wallace Fountain. Honoré spread out a picnic blanket—which also served as the tarp beneath Céleste’s easel and was covered in colors upon colors—on the front steps of the mausoleum. Crystal goblets were filled to the brim as Sylvie started describing the “tiger” she’d tried to tame. It had indeed been a cat. And not just any cat but the feral orange tomcat who’d commandeered a good number of their francs. “I tried luring him with some pâté, but he just turned around and lifted his tail stub. That means ‘no, thank you’ in cat-speak.”
“As if a cat would ever say ‘thank you.’” Honoré snorted.
“They do,” Sylvie insisted. “They talk all the time. We just don’t listen well enough.”
“Could you imagine? I bet they’d sound like crotchety old men and shunted prima donnas, cursing things just because they can.”
“Or perhaps they could tell us whose grave I buried today’s francs in,” Céleste offered.
Honoré rolled her eyes. “You’ll have to dig that up for yourself, mon amie. And, Sylvie, you do know that if cats were as big as tigers, they’d probably kill you. Right? Next time you have good pâté, don’t waste it on moggies. Put it on some bread instead.” She ripped off a piece of baguette with her teeth.
“This is why I don’t take you to parties,” Céleste said.
“The bread or the cynicism?”
“What’s cynicism?” Sylvie snatched the loaf from Honoré, ready to take a bite of her own.
“Cynicism is the needless interruption of fairy tales.” Céleste grabbed the bread before the girl could really sink her teeth into it. “Knives aren’t just for cutting people, you know.”
When she returned the baguette to Sylvie, along with the appropriate piece of cutlery, the girl began sawing. Bits of crust flecked the ground, but the blade was too dull to slice all the way through.
“That knife is meant for cheese,” Honoré told Sylvie. “There’s a sharper one under my pillow you can use.”
As Sylvie slipped back into the tomb to find it, Céleste studied her other friend. The same gothic cheekbones that suited Honoré to suits made her expressions more nuanced than most. Her blonde hair was rumpled from “Monsieur Dumont’s” top hat, but her eyes were flat, like the surface of a dark lake at dusk. Anyone else might mistake this for calmness, but Céleste knew better.
“What’s wrong?” she prodded. “Is it the francs?”
“It’s not the francs.”
“What, then?”
“There’s a difference between cynicism and realism,” growled Honoré. “Between tigers and talking cats and moggies.”
“She’s only making up a story.”
“Stories are like sugar. If you consume too much, things start to rot.” Insects sang to the evening light. The other Enchantress held her knees close to her chest, and early shadows settled into her face. “You shouldn’t let Sylvie think we can just make believe our way out of mistakes.”
“Isn’t that what we do for a living?”
“We lie, yes, but not to each other. Not to ourselves.”
Céleste looked down at the tarte au chocolat. The silky chocolate at its center had been cracked by a small candle, ready for Sylvie to blow out. Was it so wrong to let the girl keep eating cake?
Céleste didn’t believe so.
She didn’t want to believe so.
“I just…” Honoré glanced back into her namesake’s tomb. “I don’t want Sylvie to get lost.”
Too late. Céleste could see that their ward was unsheathing a blade from some bedding. Très Arthurian. Their lives were closer to a fairy tale than not, and it was better to be a lost child than unwanted. And better unwanted than… whatever Honoré once was. Céleste knew the young woman’s father had been a gangster, because of the ring she sported on her right middle finger. Distinctly designed for violence—the top was forged as a dragon’s head, and the bottom was thick enough to touch a curled fist. Any punch it delivered would leave a nasty bruise. The fact that Honoré wore the ring led Céleste to believe that the young woman’s father was dead, but the subject had never been broached.
Best let sleeping beasts lie and orphans dream.
“The kid just wants a cat.”
“Well, I don’t,” Honoré grumbled. “They have fleas.”
Céleste knew her friend, knew to stay silent as church bells joined the crickets around them.
After the first few tolls, Honoré raked fingers through her hair and sighed. “Sylvie has to grow up sometime. She can’t keep just running around Paris pretending she’s some secret American heiress. Real life is hard. Real life is shit. We’ve got to start preparing her for it.”
Céleste looked down at their collection of cheese knives. “I suppose you’ll teach her how to be fatal with cutlery?”
“She shouldn’t be scampering around the streets without défense dans la rue lessons. I was already proficient at her age.”
It was hard to imagine Honoré as an eleven-year-old. Or a little girl, for that matter. Obviously, she’d been nothing like Sylvie, who was now skipping out of the tomb, her knife stabbing straight up, oblivious to the fact that she’d impale herself if she slipped.
“Keep the pointy end down!” Céleste urged, shooting Honoré a look. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to teach Sylvie to stab things?”
“Oh, I don’t need to learn that! Stabbing is easy!”
Honoré let out a sigh.
“See?” Their ward plunged the blade into the tarte au chocolat. “I hereby declare it time for dessert.”