Chapter 5

The Vault of Dreams

It’s easy to lose yourself in magic.

Céleste could see why, as she walked across the midnight dance floor, slipping into a designers’ tent, where moving wooden mannequins showed off outfits made of mist and rainbows. Jean got left behind here—but not before he’d dressed everyone, choosing a pair of curled ram’s horns for himself. Rafe refused his own set of towering antlers—“I’d rather not get snagged in a chandelier, thank you very much”—but he did accept a purple velvet suit. Céleste ended up wearing a gown that looked like an oil spill. The fabric was dark but fluid, shedding iridescent droplets while she explored. Such a trail might be useful for finding her way back out of the salon. Its halls were labyrinthine. Tangled, sometimes with ivy, other times with lines of verse, and still other times with ribbons. It was easy to get turned around when architects kept conjuring new rooms and rearranging doors. Easy too, when poets asked jasmine to bloom like stars from the ceiling, where acrobats swung from vines and artists painted wings to help other revelers reach them. The deeper they ventured into the salon, the wilder it felt, like a midsummer forest, complete with bacchanal clearings and birds, birds everywhere, as green as leaves. Their beaks and talons wriggled with gold. The imaginers below seemed too immersed in their thoughts to care that their sentences faded or that their heads were a few hairs lighter.

The songbirds streaked like small comets overhead.

Rafe followed their shining trail.

Céleste followed him through a garden where ice sculptures sparkled beside fires. Past a library where writers talked in plush chairs, watching their stories take shape in the overhead smoke. Over a desert with dunes made of diamond dust. She finally stopped to empty her shoes, spilling jewels on the floor and gasping, not at their splendor, but with how weary she was. There was no room in her lungs for air anymore. There was a faint metallic taste on her tongue that had nothing to do with the gold-dusted cakes everyone else was eating.

“How much farther?” she asked Rafe.

“You’ll drive yourself mad, asking that question here,” he told her.

“As if I don’t already feel that way,” Céleste muttered. “Following a strange man into a maze of poems…”

“Touché.” Rafe scuffed some of the diamonds with his boot. “I only meant that the salon shapes itself around whoever attends, so the maze is different every evening. I usually just follow the birds until they start circling… That’s how I know I’m close.”

Céleste didn’t ask him to elaborate. She’d seen enough to know where they were going. Just that one glimpse of La Fée Verte laughing behind the bar had shown her how similar the two of them were. Not the magic part, of course, but the show. The custom cocktails, the flaming wildcats, the dewdrop dresses, the (probably) fake diamonds… these were all diversions. Something to distract the Sanct’s marks while she took them for all they were worth. What did the green fairy do with the ideas she seized? Besides turn them into jewelry?

If the Sanct was anything like Céleste, she’d have a stash…

And if Céleste was going to steal from that stash, she’d have to stop her gown from leaking everywhere. The skirt’s slick fabric pulled apart without much fuss as she knotted the ends around her ankles. Voilà! Pants! She could make pockets too; all the better for hiding her spoils.

Several songbirds passed as Rafe helped Céleste to her feet, their emerald feathers soaring over the field of sunflowers that lay ahead. Whoever had imagined the flowers made their petals shine like their namesake, and they flared even brighter when La Fée Verte’s flock started to swirl, around and around, then down.

“Ah…” Rafe pointed at them. “That’s it. We should cloak ourselves.”

“Cloak ourselves?” Céleste asked. “With what?”

The other thief looked down at the diamonds he’d scuffed. “You’ll have to share my shadow this evening.”

His silhouette began to stretch over the jewels. There was no fox this time as it joined Céleste, as it rose, up her legs, up her arms, over her head like a mourner’s veil. She could still see the field around them, but its flowers had become a few shades dimmer, the air a few degrees cooler. There was something warmer as well—the fizz of a just-struck match.

Rafe’s eyes remained as bright as embers when they met hers.

“Stay close,” he whispered.

As if she had any other option. “So this trick makes us invisible?”

“Invisible enough,” Rafe said, as he started pushing into the field of flowers. “The shadow itself is still there, so we have to walk through other shadows to stay hidden. That part can be incredibly irksome, but it works. The birds have never noticed my presence.”

Céleste couldn’t say the same. This man’s shadow felt like silk—smooth but also shocking, if you touched it the wrong way. She stayed less than a step behind him as they crept through the field, zigzagging over silhouettes cast by hundreds of floral suns.

The birds left shadows too.

There was an entire cloud of them swirling around a staircase, darting down its spiral steps one by one. Céleste and Rafe followed them deep into the earth—deeper than the sunflower roots, deeper than the Seine or the Métropolitain. There was a cave at the bottom, but its stash was nothing at all like the Enchantresses’ Bank of Bones. Chimes dripped from the ceiling like stalactites—swaying gently into each other as the birds flew beneath. No, Céleste realized as she studied the layers upon layers of gold.

Not chimes.

This was a Vault of Dreams.

The birds had brought their guests’ ideas here… where they’d been strung up from the ceiling like drying herbs. Scenes shimmered from the closest ones. Storybook slivers: A foraging reindeer sprouted lanterns from its antlers. Snakes turned into swords before becoming snakes again. There were cities that grew taller in moonlight and ships that could carry a man into the stars themselves. On and on these wonders stretched, impossible and achingly beautiful. There had to be thousands of them.

Ripe for the taking.

“Shiny, no?” Rafe plucked an idea from the ceiling. “It’s enough to make a magpie out of anyone.”

It was. She felt that strange twist—again like wings—in her chest when Rafe handed her the chime. She studied the scene inside more closely. A reindeer with brassy fur grazed in a meadow of fiery flowers, and every time it swallowed one of the flaming blossoms, the teardrop lamps hanging from its antlers flickered brighter. Beauty for beauty’s sake.

But it had to be for something else too…

Why else would La Fée Verte go to so much trouble to collect them?

“How do you turn an idea’s power into magic?” Céleste wondered.

Monsieur Cocteau had broken his hair to conjure the tyger, but she didn’t need a whimsical reindeer. She needed to heal herself. Should she wave the dream as if it were a wand? Abracadabra? Should she swallow it like some flaming sword? Those were acts she’d seen magicians do…

But Sancts weren’t magicians.

According to Jean, they weren’t even human.

“Alas, I cannot,” Rafe told her. “That’s what makes a Sanct a Sanct. That and the masque of light around their temples—it flashes whenever they cast larger spells. Mostly. My employer is a little less luminous.”

“He’s a Sanct too?”

Rafe nodded and tugged down a second dream: snowflakes swirling across a blue-glass beach. “He doesn’t host a salon, but he still wants ideas. My task is to forge as many of these dreams as possible and take the originals to rue des Ombres.”

Céleste knew the best jobs were pulled when you placed something substantial in your mark’s hands—a deed for imaginary land or a just-dried canvas. That way they wouldn’t realize they’d been left with nothing.

She stared down at the flaming reindeer.

She was used to holding a brush or a pen, but this…

“How the hell do you forge a dream?”

“Well, first you have to stop swearing so much,” he said, lifting the snowstorm between them.

Céleste raised her eyebrows. “It sounds as if Monsieur Cocteau should have given you some pearls to clutch.”

“Pearls would be tame, compared to most of Jean’s accessories.” A look of amusement crossed Rafe’s face, made even cooler by the snowy blue shine of the imagining. “Personally, mademoiselle, I don’t give a damn about your vocabulary, but copying dreams is just like tracing a signature—you place yourself in the signer’s shoes and imagine what that person was thinking. I find that curses rarely conjure dreams.”

She supposed that made sense. “So how do you conjure yourself a copy?”

“I think of what the original imaginer must have been imagining, and then I say it out loud: blue beach, blue sky, blue blizzard, blue forever and ever, a moment frozen in time…”

One of Rafe’s hairs began to glow, filling their joined shadow tent with new light.

Sapphire sand.

Ice in the waves.

Snow howling.

He pulled this from his head and strung it from the ceiling. The original went into his velvet suit pocket. He nodded at the dream in Céleste’s hands. “You try.”

“There was once a reindeer with lamps on its head.” She paused to check the ends of her own hair, but none seemed to be glowing.

“You have to believe what you’re saying,” Rafe told her. “Believe it in your bones.”

Céleste shut her eyes and let her thoughts carry her back to her grave, to her easel and her canvas, to those evenings when she got carried away in colors while Honoré sharpened her knives and Sylvie made up stories for her fairy books. This reindeer would fit well in those tattered pages…

“The beast stood in a field of fire”—or so Sylvie would say—“with flowers in its teeth and lights in its horns. It grazed there every evening to keep the darkness at bay.”

“There!” Rafe’s voice lit up the space between them.

A hair did too, searing over Céleste’s shoulder.

She tugged it free. The scene inside wasn’t a perfect match—her reindeer had darker fur and was more aggressive about ripping flowers from their roots—but the forgery was passable enough to make Rafe smile.

“You are good,” he said.

She slipped the original idea into her pocket and looked back through Rafe’s shadow, at how the cave stretched out, out, probably all the way to the stone quarries of Montparnasse in the south of the city. Maybe it went even farther than that, all the way to Versailles…

“Your employer wants all these ideas?”

“He doesn’t know what he wants,” Rafe said. “Every night he sends me here, and every night I forge as many ideas as I can, and every morning… well, he’s insatiable.” He moved on to the next set of chimes: A lion with a mane of flames. A sky with more than two moons. “I’ve been doing this for five years now.”

“How do you still have hair?”

“It grows back by dawn, if you drink the digestif before you leave. Otherwise, Paris’s wigmakers would be incredibly wealthy.”

They do well enough by me, Céleste mused, before she thought up a story for the second moon in that strange sky. It was the same color as her star-kissed hair, but the shape reminded her of an eye, as if the night itself had been startled awake.

They worked for a long time in the cavern, replacing dreams with glimmers from their own heads. Despite Rafe’s assurances, Céleste still feared she’d be bald by the end. So much of her hair was strung from the ceiling, showing floating mountains and underwater cities. The actual imaginings dragged down her pockets, so when she ascended the spiral staircase, her pants tolled like bells. Hopefully anyone listening would think this was a part of the original design.

Rafe halted when they reached the top step. “Shit,” he said.

Her heart hammered, expecting an onslaught of green wings, but when she looked around, she realized La Fée Verte’s flock had thinned. No more ideas were being brought to the Vault of Dreams. There was no more sunflower field either. A thick fog settled where the stalks had been.

“What is it?”

“I lost track of time.”

“That must happen a lot when you wear a broken watch,” Céleste pointed out.

“I never said my watch was broken. Merely that it doesn’t tell time.” Both fob chains rattled as he pulled out the timepiece and started to wind it. Hands spun. Gears clicked. And then Rafe García disappeared.

His shadow vanished too.

Céleste gasped as the fog around her brightened and swirled. “Rafe?”

She waited for one moment and then another, but he did not return, so she walked to where the clouds were thinnest. There were some imaginers lounging on settees, their limbs as limp as rags, but the rooms were no longer bursting. Dancers were busy unlacing their slippers, and the cake platters were down to crumbs. More mist was growing from the edges of the walls and creeping over the carpet, so that she couldn’t follow the oily trail of her gown. It would’ve met a dead end anyway. There was only one hallway remaining, siphoning guests to the front room. Its wallpaper flowers had furled, and the butterfly chandelier was no longer fluttering.

She still did not see Rafe.

Jean was there, standing by a mannequin from the designers’ tent. All the wooden figures were lined up by the front door, wearing the revelers’ discarded clothes. The young man was in the process of changing—a challenge considering his ram horns. “Ma chère! There you are! You vanished before I could fashion you a crown of flowers! Black lilies to go with—oh—” He put a hand to his chest in mock horror. “What on earth did you do to this dress?”

“I turned the skirts into trousers,” she told him.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Nothing breathes in pants.” Jean grunted as he buttoned his opera outfit back on. “I would wear dresses every day of the week if I could!”

“Don’t you?” Céleste nodded at the robes he’d discarded over the mannequin’s stiff shoulder.

“I said ‘day’—” The young man paused, staring just over Céleste’s shoulder.

“I think women’s trousers are a wonderful idea.”

She didn’t have to turn to know who spoke.

There was a glow that grew brighter as La Fée Verte stepped around to study Céleste’s outfit. “I’ve been trying to plant the concept for years. You wouldn’t think the idea of pants for women would be so difficult to grow, but Paul Poiret is the only one of my designers who’s done anything about it in the waking world.”

La Fée Verte was not wearing trousers. She wasn’t even wearing a dress—her body was covered in a thin shift of mist. Clouds wisped along her curves, and she didn’t seem to care that the rosy pink of her areolas was easily visible. What could have been lewd was, in fact, the exact opposite. This woman knew how to wear power, even if she wasn’t clad in much else.

Between the two of them, Céleste felt like the naked one, especially as the Sanct kept staring. “I like the flow of the bottom into the top—all one piece. It’s clever. Are you a couturier?”

“A painter,” Céleste answered.

“Is that so?” The bracelets on La Fée Verte’s arms flashed when she crossed them. A songbird landed on her shoulder, then slipped into her wing. “I’m not sure I saw any of your work tonight.”

You might if you go down to your vault. Céleste tried not to think this, tried not to move, tried not to search every shadow she could for signs of Rafe. “I went looking for the landscape room, but I never found it. Or maybe I did, and I just didn’t know I was walking through someone else’s painting…”

“You’d know if it was Picasso’s,” Jean offered. “Cubes everywhere! But no one could blame you for wandering instead of wondering on your inaugural evening. My first night was a whirlwind. Quite literally. Top hats and tutus flew everywhere. I feared La Fée Verte would never invite me back, but now she cannot live without me.”

A smile tugged the Sanct’s lips. “You exaggerate.”

“And that is why you love me!” said Jean.

“I do,” La Fée Verte told him.

This mark was nothing like the others Céleste stole from: men flushed with Veuve Clicquot and their own importance. She wasn’t sure what to do with the softness in the Sanct’s voice.

Even Jean hesitated. The corners of his eyes glimmered, but his voice held too much hope for this to be tears. “Enough to let me see past sunrise?”

La Fée Verte’s own gaze hardened, then flashed. Two glasses of silvery liquid appeared in her hands. Jean’s face fell when she handed him the digestif, but he lifted it to his lips without complaint.

Céleste did too. The drink tasted like the final page of a book falling shut or that last slant of sun escaping through drawn curtains.

The actual fog around them was growing thicker, filling empty plates and misting over furniture. It started to envelop La Fée Verte as well—so that she looked as if she belonged on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “Come back another midnight, and I’ll show you the way to the painters’ wing,” she promised. “Perhaps you could draw up another skirtless dress. For now, I must say au revoir to you and that beautiful ensemble.”

She stepped back into the cloud.

Jean sighed.

Céleste sighed too, only hers held relief. She could still escape with everyone else’s dreams and try to find Rafe in the alleyway—

“Wait!” Jean caught her by the wrist and waved at the mannequin that wore Céleste’s old dress, which now resembled a wilted piece of lettuce. “As much as it pains me to say, you should change back into your old outfit.”

“Here?”

“There’s no time for modesty, and no need, really.”

Céleste might as well have been another mannequin where this man was concerned. It wasn’t modesty that made her hesitate, but it was a good excuse. “I couldn’t possibly!”

“Suit yourself.” Jean gathered up the green dress. “We must take the goat gown with us, at least.”

She saw the flaw in her plan as soon as they stepped into the alley. The fog was rolling through here too, threading alongside vines and snuffing out the opal flames of the lanterns. There was little need for their light—the sky overhead was going through the shades of Céleste’s first drink in reverse.

Jean stayed a few steps ahead, and Céleste did not think it wise to linger. She didn’t want to stop on the main boulevard either, even though the Fontaine Saint-Michel’s statues were back on their pedestals—as stiff as bronze should be. Jean’s horns matched the dragon’s. The rest of his features were tauter than an acrobat’s tightrope. It was the look of a man bracing himself for a fall.

“Here.” He tossed her gown back to her. “I like to make it to the bridge if I can. It is the most terribly beautiful view in all the world…”

Again, Jean seemed to be exaggerating.

When Céleste joined him on the Pont Saint-Michel, facing east, she found a fine-enough scene. The kind she might have tried to paint when she was younger. Paris, on the Edge of Waking. Where the bready fumes of boulangeries mixed with lavender clouds, while booksellers opened their sage-colored booths along the banks of the Seine. The edges of the river were turning molten, and soon the bells of Notre-Dame would sing along its length—five strikes for the break of day.

Even with his ram’s horns, Jean did not look out of place as he leaned over the balustrade. Another few shades of gray, and he could’ve passed for one of the city’s statues.

“You know,” he told Céleste as she joined him, “you really should change—”

That was when the sun struck.

It hit Jean’s horns first. Their tips began to burn—sparks, becoming ash in the golden light. This floated from the bridge, drifting over the boats moored at the quai, over the unconcerned heads of the booksellers, over zinc rooftops.

The oil-spill outfit was next.

Céleste swore as dreams spilled from her vanished pockets. The sunlight did not seem to burn these, and they didn’t break on the sidewalk either, only rolled toward Jean’s shoes. The man made no move to help gather them. Smoke drifted from his head—in the shape of phantom horns—as he stared out over the Seine. There was no fog on the river, but it had settled in Jean Cocteau’s eyes. Their light had been snuffed out.

It reminded her of the way Honoré slept sometimes.

Lids open. Seeing nothing but nightmares.

This certainly felt like a bad dream, standing on one of Paris’s busiest bridges in her underwear. Céleste swore again, tugging the green dress over her head. “You could have warned me with a little more detail, Monsieur Cocteau!”

He blinked at the sound of his name. A frown twisted his lips. “I’m sorry, who are you? And more importantly, ma chère, what happened to your dress?”

“We went to a salon—”

“Did we?” Jean shook his head, as if he’d tried to reach for the memory and found only cobwebs instead. “It must have been wonderful fun.”

You have no idea, Céleste thought, watching ash float over balconies full of fluttering laundry, moved by the same wind. Her companion did not seem to see the glowing motes. He didn’t notice the stolen dreams she’d gathered either.

So why did Céleste know to hold on to them? Why hadn’t the sun struck her in the same way? She recognized others from La Fée Verte’s salon—clothes rumpled, eyes dulled—but they did not recognize her. They moved through the dawn like sleepwalkers. There was still no sign of Rafe. Had he forgotten about their evening together too? Or had he abandoned her on purpose?

Either way, she was stuck holding magic she could not use, could not take back, could not—

“Would you like to borrow my jacket?” Jean was already slipping out of it, handing her his tailored overcoat. It had not one, not two, but three pockets. He raised an eyebrow as Céleste stuffed the dreams into them—motions that came across as rifling. “There should be enough francs in there for a taxi fare too, if you need it.”

Now that was a thought. Rafe had mentioned a street, where he took the stolen imaginings every morning: rue des Ombres. Céleste had never heard of it before, but perhaps if she tried to take a taxi, she could find the Sanct who’d pay her for these dreams. It wasn’t rubies she’d ask for, not when her lips were already so red without rouge…

She still had a chance to heal herself.

Céleste thanked Jean, then made her way to the opposite end of the bridge, where a Renault AG was waiting at the corner. Its driver seemed used to strange customers. Especially at this hour. He didn’t bat an eyelid at Céleste’s jacket, only took a longer drag of his cigarette and let out a stream of ordinary smoke.

“Where to?”

“Rue des Ombres.” Céleste slurred her voice just enough to make the man believe she was drunk, because what other person would ask to be driven to the Street of Shadows?

She knew the request was foolish.

She thought she knew what his answer would be too.

“Sorry, mademoiselle.” Sparks scattered as the cab driver stubbed out his cigarette, but he kept speaking. “That’s a trap street. Mapmakers put them on their maps to catch copycats. Can’t take you to a made-up place.”

Her heart pounded beneath a pocket full of dreams. “But you know where rue des Ombres is?” She tried to bite back her excitement. “Where it… would be?”

The driver shrugged. “It shows up on the maps next to Place de la Concorde, and that’s real enough. I can take you there. S’long as you can pay.”

She was too tired to negotiate, and at this point, she did not care what the fare was.

Céleste nodded.