Chapter 15

Shadows Circling

Lying to the other Enchantresses should have felt worse than this.

Céleste had more energy than ever—despite her long nights wandering around Paris, she woke up with no need for coffee. She would stop at the magical café across from the opera house later, to order a pot of tea and listen to a world of conversations unfurling around her. Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Russian… she’d always thought this last language sounded like an axe splitting wood for a bonfire. There was a smoky taste to the tea, a sharpness across her tongue when it slid down, but then the words began to bloom in her ears. Hello. Goodbye. How is the tsarevitch? As well as he can be. And the boy’s mother… have you really fucked her? No need. She hangs on my every word as it is, and her husband too. All of Russia will be ready, when the time comes.

There was still a hint of hatchet in the Mad Monk’s words.

Céleste stared at the saints chained around his neck—their rapturous expressions a reminder to keep her own face pious. XXXXXXX and his disciple might not speak so freely in front of her otherwise, and even if she couldn’t cast spells of her own, knowledge was power.

“How goes your search?”

The ballroom seemed to darken at the Mad Monk’s question. Not a cloud creeping across the palace gardens, but her employer’s masque. It rarely flickered like this. Even rarer? His annoyance. He did not frown, but he didn’t have to. The corners of his lips twitched like a clock counting seconds. “It will go faster if you keep her fresh.”

This did make Céleste shudder, hearing XXXXXXX describe her like a slab of just-cut meat, ready to be stuffed away in an icebox. The Mad Monk’s magic was frigid, fortunately. Cold enough to play her disgust off as a shiver.

But she did feel fresh in the days that followed such visits. She woke up in her grave, stretched, and breathed deep. She’d started taking long afternoon walks to get out of the mausoleum. Not that Sylvie and Honoré spent much time there anymore, but things became awkward when they did. How was Céleste supposed to pretend she didn’t see the youngest Enchantress’s growing collection of wings? Or the enchanted knickknacks she’d started collecting under her bed?

Ignoring Honoré’s dragon was even harder.

The ring hardly ever looked like a ring anymore. It was always moving up and down her friend’s arm, or perched on her shoulder, or climbing on her back so that she might fly. Though Honoré never tried to do this when she thought her friend had magical amnesia. No. The great irony was she treated Céleste like a convalescent. As if she were nursing a hangover.

“Sleep it off!” Honoré liked to say. “We’ll go looking for a new mark this evening.”

But Céleste could only lie on her mattress for so long.

She pretended to paint, instead.

She didn’t work on the drowning woman. She left Ophelia floating over in the corner as she packed up a much smaller easel. Honoré and Sylvie seemed to believe Céleste when she told them she was going out to sketch the city. That, or they were too busy tending to their own secrets to bother following her to Montmartre.

She found herself, most afternoons, walking to Rafe’s windmill.

It was the perfect hiding place.

If the other thief was to be believed, he’d found it only after seeing the structure sketched on an old map of the neighborhood. The building was much like a trap street. Imaginary, until it wasn’t. Hidden, unless you knew exactly where to look. Even the Sancts who ran the cabaret next door didn’t seem to notice the windmill. No one but Céleste and Rafe had opened the garden gate in years, and when the sun was shining so baldly in the sky, she was the only soul who could step foot in this place.

It looked different in the daylight.

Sunbeams shot through warped boards, revealing that the amber jars were filled with flower bulbs. Not organs. The page with the dissected heart was stained with soot. Not blood. The rest of the desk’s scrolls remained unrolled. Rafe probably figured she couldn’t read them, and in this case, he was right. There was no tea for translating ancient Aramaic or hieroglyphs. At least, none that was sold in Paris. But most of the items in this windmill didn’t seem to come from the city. Hand-carved nesting dolls, jungle insects with their wings splayed wide, geodes that had been cracked open to show their spiky purple insides… Céleste wasn’t sure how any of these items related to immortality. Unless there was something she wasn’t seeing. That might very well be the case… When she picked up a magnifying glass, she noticed there was a strange script written on the scarab beetles’ iridescent shells. Secrets. Again, they were too hard for her to read.

She started to sketch them instead.

Still life. No life. Everlasting life.

Her mind hummed with the possibilities; her fingers wandered freely. It had been years since Céleste had drawn something without a mind to sell it as a van Gogh or a Monet—and now she sat at the heart of the old masters’ neighborhood, trying to settle on her own style. Just the right balance of shadow and light. Darkness was easier to draw. She didn’t have to worry about erasers or pressing too hard—no, she could throw herself into the page. She could lose hours trying to perfect the lines of Rafe’s shadow.

She’d thought the other artist would be simple to sketch from memory. He’d branded himself there, after all, with his burning stare. But every time Céleste tried capturing his profile, she felt something was missing. The ink-drop tear? No. The day-old stubble darkening his jaw? No. The brow scar? The chin divot? The way his lips quirked—not quite smiling, but not scowling either? No. No. No.

Every single element was there, but Rafe’s face never leapt off the page.

Not the way his fox shadow did.

She drew it apart from him. A separate series: Leaping. Prancing. Napping with its nose tucked beneath its tail. Slinking. Céleste’s pencil could hardly keep up with the creature, so she set it to chasing its own tail. Around and around.

“What do we have here?”

Céleste jumped when she saw Rafe standing at the windmill entrance. The sky just past his shoulders was purple with dusk. The other thief hadn’t meddled with time—an entire afternoon had slipped away while she worked. How long had it been since that last happened? Her hand was tender from holding the pencil when she set down the instrument. She wanted to close the sketchbook too, because now that Rafe was here, the portraits of his shadow suddenly felt too personal.

For him, or for her? Céleste wasn’t sure. All she knew was that her insides flickered when the other artist’s eyes alighted on the page. He leaned closer over her shoulder, so close that she had no choice but to let him see what she’d been sketching.

“Nothing,” she said quickly.

“That doesn’t look like nothing,” Rafe murmured, taking in the picture of the fox running in a fluid O shape. “It looks like you’ve finally tried to capture something other than a boiled lobster. Color me impressed!”

“They’re just scribbles.” It was hard to keep her own cheeks from coloring as she said this. Rafe’s face remained very close to hers. “I wasn’t trying to steal your sigil.”

“My what, now?”

“Your sigil. Honoré told me you used to draw foxes chasing their own tails. I was attempting to build my calluses so the other Enchantresses will believe I’m out—” Céleste paused as she felt Rafe stiffen. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said.

But it didn’t look like nothing, the way his hand shook when he reached for the paper, the way his fingers barely traced the fox, grasping at some long-lost muscle memory. “My sigil,” he muttered under his breath. “My sigil. Mon Dieu. I’d forgotten all about that…”

His true shadow circled them then.

Around and around.

The goose bumps that sprang on Céleste’s arm had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with how Rafe kept staring at her drawing, the way he finally looked back up at her. “This piece—” He faltered. “It’s—it’s more than just a scribble, Céleste.”

Praise. She’d sought it so shamelessly in Gertrude Stein’s salon, but to hear it here, in the darkness of Rafe’s windmill, made her feel almost naked. Seen in a way she was rarely used to.

“A doodle, then,” she said, trying to make her voice as light as a 9H pencil.

“Yes, well, it’s a doodle of me.” He ran a finger over the page, right along the sketchbook’s spine. Softly, so softly. A shiver went down Céleste’s back as she watched. “Would you mind if I kept it?”

The request surprised her. “I had no idea you were so vain, Rafe García.”

“Neither did I,” he replied. “But a man should be allowed to have some hidden depths…”

“Being vain is the opposite of hiding,” Céleste pointed out. “If you want to display this piece, I’ll trade it for a few of your dreams.” She glanced up at the overhead lanterns. “Sylvie wants to visit some floating island in the Seine tonight, so we should probably fill our pockets before we meet up with the other Enchantresses regardless.”

Rafe tore the page from her sketchbook with gentle fingers, his expression uneasy. He didn’t seem to like dipping into his lantern stash. Curious, that. Was he worried XXXXXXX might catch on to their backup plan? Or was there more to it? Céleste hadn’t seen him use his dreams as currency at any of the shops—so what else would he save them for?

What were they worth?

Enough for Rafe García to haggle over. “Île du Carnaval shouldn’t take long to explore. It’s just overgrown rides and tents.”

“Well, you know Sylvie. She’ll want to go to Stohrer afterward, and if we let her wander there alone, Honoré will get upset.” The other Enchantress was too busy “patrolling,” as she put it, and she didn’t want Sylvie flying over the city with her. She also didn’t want the girl sneaking out by herself, for reasons she refused to discuss with Céleste. It was just as well. Céleste couldn’t exactly explain that she and Rafe were the reason La Fée Verte was so on edge.

“Nothing will happen to Sylvie at Stohrer,” Rafe said. “That shop survived the Revolution. It will probably keep serving pastries until the end of time. And maybe even after. Ha! I wouldn’t be surprised if Nicolas made macarons for ghosts.”

The idea of ghosts wasn’t quite as humorous as it had once been—those evenings when Céleste and the other Enchantresses had set out to spook the cemetery guards. “Well, something will happen to us if we disappoint our employer, and I don’t want to have to waste your extra hour scrambling back here.”

The other artist placed her folded drawing in his pocket. He reached for the nearest lantern and set it down on the rug between them. “We shouldn’t get too comfortable with this arrangement.”

That was the thing, Céleste thought as she watched Rafe open the lantern’s orange glass hatch, dream light spilling across his face. It was comfortable. Some of the best nights of her life had happened inside these last three weeks. Watching Sylvie try to talk to the flaming Blake tyger in cat-speak, then trying to convince Honoré to take the plagiarisms out on patrol with her. Or flying with the youngest Enchantress to the top of Notre-Dame to feed stanzas of poetry to a pelican statue, who gulped up the lines like fish. Or standing in the middle of the landscape room while Rafe painted flowers the size of trees. Or sinking into a vine-draped corner to kiss him… drowning in the heady scent of jasmine, tangled up in his touch, heat blossoming all over her skin…

The point of these kisses was to convince the other Enchantresses that the pair needed privacy, which allowed them to steal away and start stealing dreams. It worked well. A little too well, sometimes. For Céleste found that the deeper they went into those fantastical landscapes, the harder it was to pull herself out. Instead, she found herself looking forward to the moments when Rafe would trace her lips with his thumb, when her whole body went taut and then melted into his, when the kiss tumbled into something hungrier and Rafe drew her into the depths of his shadow. The shock of this was usually enough to make Céleste pause and catch her breath. To remind her that they had darker work to do.

Was it just as hard for Rafe to pull away?

Céleste wondered.

He certainly didn’t seem miserable.

His shadow fox sat on his shoulders now. It looked almost solid in the dream light—watching Céleste. She both loved and hated how much she’d come to depend on it. “Perhaps we wouldn’t have to rely on your stash so much if you taught me how to shape my own shadow.”

“I can’t.” He pulled out several dreams and handed her half. “Not until you learn how to conjure some imaginings of your own.”

Oh, so he was going to hold that over her too, was he? As if there weren’t already enough to juggle. As if Céleste hadn’t tried her best to copy Sylvie’s constant glow—but coming up with creative ideas was much harder work than building back calluses.

“I know, I know. Dreaming is surviving.”

“It can be more than that.” Rafe closed the lantern then, his gaze alighting on where her own silhouette was stretched across the rug. “You can be more.”

At first glance, the Ilê du Carnaval looked like an overgrown spit of land in the center of the Seine, but if you watched the island long enough, one would see that it floated. Slipping under bridges, sliding by quais and the other three islands that dotted the river, passing the Eiffel Tower’s iron stance again and again. In the hours it took Céleste, Rafe, and Sylvie to explore it, they drifted from one border of the city to another. Then back against the current. Twice, Céleste looked past the phantom tents to see the Seer’s houseboat. It was anchored under the Pont Saint-Michel, as always. She stood on the prow, her white eyes prying through the passing leaves.

Sylvie didn’t seem to notice.

She was too busy clearing vines from the carousel, only to find that the ride no longer held horses. The wooden animals now roamed freely through the abandoned carnival. Around a giant steam-whistle organ and a lagoon scattered with swan boats. In and out of tents that once held wonders—according to an old poster Céleste found fluttering by a game booth.

Who knows what dreams may wake at the Carnaval des Merveilles? The text was flowery. And green. Much like the drawings of the birds that roosted inside its letters. Or the leaves that choked the island in its current state. It was a far cry from the festivities that unfolded on paper, where the grounds lit up with a cloud of fireflies that scattered for trapeze artists while spectators feasted on fistfuls of fairy floss as pink as Sylvie’s hair.

“This carnival must have been amazing.” There was a hint of sadness in the youngest Enchantress’s voice when a carousel horse shied away from her outstretched hand. “I wonder why people stopped coming.”

It was hard for Céleste not to entertain this question as she walked with her ward through the carnival. Even harder when they found the tent of the fortune teller—Madame Arcana, according to the sign—who’d left her cards facedown on a table. Céleste couldn’t help but peek at the spread. Death, the Devil, and the Fool. She flipped them back over quickly, telling herself that they hadn’t waited all this time for her. And, of course, the face she saw reflected in the crystal ball just beside them belonged to her… despite the fact its eyes were fogged over.

She tossed a tablecloth across the entire ensemble before Sylvie could see.

“Sometimes magic loses its shine,” Rafe was saying, as he ducked into the tent. “There are sites like this all across Paris, you know. Versailles was so covered in enchantments during Louis XIV’s reign that you could hardly stare at it without crying—it’s one of the reasons he was nicknamed the Sun King.”

Sylvie listened, rapt. “Really?” she asked.

“Where did you learn that?” Céleste wondered. “An ancient scroll?”

“No. This was a firsthand account. Told to me by one of the cherubs in the palace itself.”

Sylvie’s eyes widened enough to catch the overhead stars. “You went to a palace?”

“Anyone can. It’s much like this place now. Most of the power has been plundered, but you can still catch glimpses of what it was, in the Hall of Mirrors—”

“I want to see it!”

“Not tonight,” Céleste said hastily. “It’s too far.”

“We can fly!”

“I would have to borrow wings,” she reminded the youngest Enchantress.

“So? We can go visit that cabaret place! You and Rafe could trade them a kiss for some moon moth wings! Or I could lend you some. Though we’d have to go back to Père Lachaise—”

“There isn’t enough time.” Céleste cut her off, trying to speak before Sylvie could spill the location of their camp, but it was too late.

Rafe’s interest was piqued. “What’s in Père Lachaise?”

“Our tomb, of course!” Sylvie chirped. “And lots of dead people.”

The other thief arched his knife-nicked brow at Céleste. As much as she’d visited his windmill lately, she’d never once mentioned the Enchantresses’ mausoleum—if there were still going to be secrets between them, she preferred that one belong to her. At the very least.

“Oh, Céleste! You’ll love flying! It’s so fun! Did you know Honoré laughed, her first time? She even did a loop the loop!”

“Honoré?” Rafe’s eyebrows rose that much higher. “Doing acrobatics with that dragon? Surely you jest!”

Sylvie shook her head. “No! I’m telling the truth! She makes it look easy. I got too dizzy when I tried.”

“Well, we certainly won’t reach Versailles before sunrise if we zigzag.” Céleste tried her best to veer the conversation back on course—after all, she had another palace to visit. “It’s probably best we return to the salon.”

The girl wrinkled her nose as she looked around the shrouded tents. She wanted to keep exploring, obviously, but to Céleste’s surprise, she didn’t beg to stay. “What happened to this place… it won’t happen to the Quartier Secret, will it? History won’t repeat itself,” she added in her parrot tone. “Right?”

“There’s nothing to worry about, ma rêveuse,” Céleste said.

It was the worst lie she’d told yet.

This dawn began just like all the rest.

Céleste had taken to lingering in Place de la Concorde so that the sun would erase all traces of the night’s festivities, from painted tattoos to crowns of poetry. She’d forgotten about a stanza woven into her braid once, and her employer’s reaction had been… unpleasant. Now she let them burn in the sunlight, instead of XXXXXXX’s hearth. Golden sparks fizzed up the façade of Hôtel de Crillon as she disappeared into the trap street below. Rafe pulled his own dreams from his pockets. Again. Céleste had tried her best to get them back to the salon early enough to steal away—they might have been able to manage it, if Honoré hadn’t returned from some mysterious errand while they were trying to excuse themselves from Sylvie’s hair-coloring party. They might have managed still, with Rafe’s watch, but the other thief shook his head when Céleste looped her arm around his waist, tugging one of the chains. He’d leaned in too, his whisper grazing her ear: “Time’s up.”

He must have used the extra hour earlier, before catching her at the windmill.

Mysterious errands, all around.

This one seemed straightforward enough. The door’s lock settled as soon as Rafe’s shadow slid beneath it, opening to the usual scene. XXXXXXX sat in his wing-back chair. His fire waited. Its light licked across the Sanct’s cheeks; they appeared more sunken tonight. Carved a bit too sharply. His reach looked the same, when he took their offerings. As if there weren’t fingers fitted beneath those black gloves but claws, closing over Rafe’s horizons.

XXXXXXX did not so much as look at them.

“Would you care to explain how you spent your evening?” he asked, as he tossed the imaginings into the fire. “Obviously you cannot be bothered to do your job, since you keep bringing me the same worthless drivel, night after night after night.”

Rafe flinched.

Céleste’s breath became like a knife’s edge.

“Is something wrong, Monsieur García?” The room went darker. Walls bent at the edge of Céleste’s vision, and Rafe’s shadow spilled across the floor. It twisted—in and out of its fox shape—clawing at the Persian rug as it was dragged into XXXXXXX’s waiting arms. When the Sanct touched the darkness, it split into dozens of ropelike strands, which wound their way back up Rafe’s legs, over his torso, to his neck.

“No,” Rafe gasped.

“Do not lie to me, Monsieur García.”

“I’m not—” Words got cut off as the shadow wrapped around his throat.

The Sanct’s nostrils flared. “Oh, but you are. Do you think that I am so easily deceived? Hm? That I can’t taste your wanderlust in these pathetic wonders?” The flames in the fireplace reared higher, causing the fox shadow to stretch and twist. It looked more like a part of XXXXXXX than Rafe now. “You think I don’t know about your little excursions?”

Shit. The Seer must have spied them through the Ilê du Carnaval’s underbrush after all. She must have tipped their employer off again. Céleste’s thoughts grew as brambly as the carnival’s leaves when she watched Rafe García get lifted off his feet. The thief grasped at the shadow wrapped around his throat, but his hands kept slipping through. The scars on his arms looked like waning moons. Pale slivers, growing paler. He couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t just stand here watching—

“Please!”

Céleste knew this was the wrong word the moment it slipped off her tongue. Their employer’s stare turned on her. His eyes were about as merciful as a starved wolf. The masque around his temples spread like a night fog, and suddenly she felt her own shadow slipping, pulling away from her feet just as it had during the opening notes of The Rite of Spring. Tauter than a cello’s strings.

“Go on,” XXXXXXX told her. “Beg.”

The fire kept flaring behind their employer, and in its terrible light, she saw Rafe… His neck veins bulged, crawling up to his eyes, until Céleste could see every ounce of blood there. The rest of the thief was getting chiseled away. His cheeks hollowed. His chest started to cave. His skin withered like fruit left too long on the vine.

“We couldn’t slip into the Vault of Dreams tonight, so we had to improvise.” Easier said than done, with her own lungs crumpling. “It was my idea to use Rafe’s ideas—”

“It was, was it?” Their employer’s face had changed. A black cloud still pulsed around his eyes, but Céleste could have sworn the Sanct’s jowls had filled in. Enough to cushion a snarl. “Let us see.”

Rafe made a strangled sound when XXXXXXX reached for Céleste’s hair.

There was no lost castle in the strand the Sanct plucked.

Just the specter of the windmill.

“My, my,” clucked their employer, as he examined it. “You two have been busy. Though I expected a more magnificent lie, given your reputation, Mademoiselle Artois.” He tossed this memory into the fire as well. “You’ll have to do better than this if you want to save yourself.”

Céleste’s cough came on cue.

Blood spattered her palm like an ellipsis. Rafe’s breath stuttered.

“And what is it you want?” She looked back up at the Sanct. “For both your forgers to die?”

Their employer sighed.

Their shadows went slack.

There was a gasp from Rafe.

“A fair point,” said XXXXXXX. “I only need one of you.”

The Sanct was still holding on to their silhouettes. Rafe’s fox hung like a limp dishrag—seized by the scruff. Céleste’s stretched from her feet to his black glove. She swallowed back more red. Shit. It was all going to turn to shit if she didn’t think faster. How could she spin this?

“That’s not true,” she managed. “Not anymore. La Fée Verte has a new guard, someone who knows me and Rafe.” The other thief was recovering beside her, his black hair hiding his face. “She’s been watching us closely the past three weeks, and we only managed to slip away because she believes we’re sleeping together. If you let one of us die now, the other won’t last much longer.”

“La Fée Verte has taken on a protégé?” The Sanct’s hands tightened over the fox shadow.

Rafe could only nod. There seemed to be tears in his eyes—visible only because they reflected the fire so. XXXXXXX stared back into the flames as well. He stared and stared and then stood before walking to the door and pulling out his ring of keys. They jingled as he sorted through them—a sound that set Céleste’s teeth on edge. She wasn’t surprised when he let the gold key that unlocked the Mad Monk’s palace fall back with the rest.

The one he used today was mostly rust.

The door’s hinges were too. They gave a laboring groan.

“Come,” their employer called.

Céleste jerked to her feet, although she wasn’t quite sure how much of the motion was her and how much was her shadow—the thing XXXXXXX seemed to be able to pull like a string. Rafe was getting dragged back across the rug as well.

“Clever of you to use Moulin’s old windmill as your bolt-hole, Monsieur García. I’d forgotten about it, thanks to the Mapmaker. Do you know, I used to have a perfect view of that courtyard? See?” XXXXXXX paused at the threshold. “Don’t worry about the daylight, Monsieur García. I’ll keep you Enlightened. I want you to watch every second of this.”

Past their employer’s shoulder, Céleste could see an attic loft. An artist’s loft, though it somehow felt more like a tomb than her own cemetery set-up. No broom had been over the floor in at least a decade. Drawings were pinned all over the walls, and even though their lines were soft, they had a frenzied feeling. Obsessive. Most featured the same young woman with an operatic pose: Mademoiselle Leroux, according to one of the penciled titles.

None were signed.

Perhaps they had been, once. Streaks of soot marked the lower-left corner of each piece, where signatures traditionally sat. Several papers fluttered to the floor when XXXXXXX slipped out of the wardrobe door. He stepped on them uncaringly and went to the window, which opened onto a familiar scene. Montmartre, once more. The glittering spell of its night was broken, as were the shards of glass a man was sweeping up from the sidewalk below. The rest of the street was as stark as a spine.

Céleste could see their secret garden, tucked between the neighboring buildings. If she jumped off the wrought iron balcony, she just might touch one of the windmill’s arms. Or she would fall. And Rafe’s shadow wouldn’t be there to catch her this time…

The Sanct was still holding the fox by the scruff, still controlling Rafe with it. The other thief came to a halt at the railing beside Céleste. His face was no longer shriveled, but his eyes remained desperate. Bruised. The veins their employer had almost burst wreathed around his brow—a deep purple that smudged into the blue dot of his tattoo.

The masque around XXXXXXX’s temple licked the air as he leaned over the railing. “It was impossible to get a good night’s sleep here. Painters wandered in and out of that mill at all hours. Flying, flirting, screaming, singing.” A breeze blew through the window, scooping up several sketches of the prima donna. It must have been the Sanct’s spell—for when the papers swirled past his head, they burst into flame. “All that joie de vivre. They thought so highly of themselves… they believed in the power of their dreams.”

Céleste could see the lanterns’ rainbow glimmer through the mill boards. Lost, when the burning sketches landed on weathered wood.

“Most of those artists are dead now. The rest are dying, their soft hearts rotting away even as they beat in their chests.” Disgust curled their employer’s lips. His glove also curled, deeper into the shadow fox’s fur. “Fantasies will not save you.”

The fire caught quickly.

A hot roar. Sparks spitting. Rage. So much rage. It beat Céleste’s body with all the force of a smith’s hammer. She couldn’t help but tremble as she watched Rafe’s dreams go up in flames. Ghosts of lands that never were. Mountains and seas and so much more. Where would she hide from the other Enchantresses now? How would she survive?

A scream needled her ear, but when Céleste looked at Rafe, she saw the other thief’s jaw was clenched. The rest of him stayed just as rigid—except for the tear rolling down his bruised cheek.

The sound had come from his shadow.

The fox was thrashing in XXXXXXX’s grip, evanescing with the rest of the inferno’s smoke. Its tail was a snuffed candle, ribboning out. The legs vanished next. Then the rest of the animal. Until all that was left in its place was a formless black. When their employer let go of Rafe’s shadow, it fell flat at his feet. Stagnant. Spent. The thief crumpled into it like a marionette whose strings had gone slack.

Céleste’s own knees felt shaky when the Sanct released her silhouette.

“Play lovers. Be lovers, for all I care. But do not try to deceive me again, or I will be worse.” The Sanct’s eyes darkened as smoke rose over the neighborhood. “I will be so much worse.”