Chapter 27

Beware the Serpents

The mirror in Christine Leroux’s dressing room was shattered.

But not beyond repair.

Honoré Côte stared into the cracks, surprised at the reflection they webbed. She hardly recognized herself. The short blonde hair and high cheekbones hadn’t changed all that drastically since her visit two evenings ago. It must be the lighting… The soft golden glow of La Fée Verte’s masque did wonders. Actual wonders. The Sanct had agreed to accompany Honoré to the opera house to resurrect the mirror’s memory. There could be clues inside the glass, waiting to be pieced back together.

La Fée Verte stood in front of the secret passage, studying the tilted reflection next to it. “You say you punched the mirror?”

Honoré’s eyes narrowed on a particularly jagged piece of glass. It sat at an angle that caught her ring arm—where silver ran up her wrist like streaks of sepsis. Yes, technically that hand had struck the mirror, but Honoré wasn’t entirely sure that she had done it. She hadn’t meant to shatter the glass—same as she hadn’t intended to bite Céleste or crush the stray tin soldier. Her dragon ring had acted on a deeper instinct. A different memory. One where it was her mother’s head shaking. Her father’s shadow looming.

“My dragon hit the glass,” she said finally. “I didn’t want Sylvie and Anastasia to see Mademoiselle Leroux getting husked.”

La Fée Verte did not look too thrilled at the prospect either. Her wings hugged her shoulders as she reached out and touched the mirror. There was a swelling glow. The cracks vanished, and the Sanct stepped back, close enough for her feathers to tickle Honoré’s elbows. For one bright moment, she could see the two of them—side by side—and then the mirror’s magic took hold.

An opera singer dressed in stars ran in to the room’s reflection.

Darkness followed.

La Fée Verte flinched at the sight of him, leaning even closer to Honoré. She thought about wrapping her dragon arm around the other woman’s shoulder—if only to keep herself from breaking the spell again. She had to watch Mademoiselle Leroux’s fate to the end. It was not pretty. It wasn’t quick. After the soprano’s strike with the comb, the sorcerer’s rage was like a swarm of locusts. His masque bled into her shadow, knotting and pulling. He made Christine Leroux drop the comb and fall on her knees. He tilted her face to his and opened his mouth—more of a snarl than a kiss. The dark clouds connecting them pulsed as he loomed over her.

As he took her.

She was his first husk… The difference between the opera singer’s death and La Belle’s made this painfully clear. Honoré had been horrified by that murder, but this was far worse. It was primal. The sorcerer even used his teeth. Every time he bit her bottom lip or the soft flesh of her neck, the surrounding shadows grew thicker. Christine—she must have been terrified, but there was no trace of it on her face. What glimpses Honoré got through the writhing black showed a blank expression. Then blanker. Then nothing at all. Even before her flesh began to wither, Mademoiselle Leroux was gone.

The sorcerer sat with the opera singer’s body for a long while, cradling it in a way that made Honoré incredibly sick. His mouth and throat were a mess of red, but it was still possible to see the bleed of comb marks down his cheek. Patterned like tears.

Had he meant to kill her?

There was something about the scene that made Honoré wonder. She wondered if it was at all like the evening Maman died, when Lucien Durand had been a little too drunk, a little too loose with his hits, a little too close to the hearth. Or if it was more like the night he’d tried to beat his daughter instead, the night Fear’s Bastard decided to bare her own teeth.

Not that any of that really mattered to Christine Leroux. The killer slung her desiccated body over his shoulder, then paused by the vanity to grab a wooden jewelry box before disappearing behind the mirror.

“I knew Christine.” La Fée Verte sounded as broken as the glass she’d just fixed. “She came to my carnival quite often. She loved eating fairy floss. She dreamed of singing lullabies to her future children, but she told me she had terrible luck with suitors…”

No shit.

Honoré glanced back at the mirror. “How can you remember those things if he husked her?”

“My guess is that he hadn’t learned how to gut a soul very thoroughly,” La Fée Verte lamented. “He didn’t touch Christine’s memories. Nor did he know how to devour names. I taught him that nearly a year later.”

So what did he do in the meantime? Honoré’s eyes drifted toward the secret passage. She didn’t exactly relish the thought of going back down to that underground lake and exploring the tunnels beyond, but there was no denying the possibility that the sorcerer had carved out his heart down there. Perhaps he’d even buried it with the rest of the catacombs’ dead…

“If only I’d blinded him at the beginning.” La Fée Verte was still watching the empty glass. The imprint of Christine’s body marked the spot where the pair of them stood. Honoré couldn’t see those marks on the carpet anymore. There weren’t even bloodstains. Odd, considering how much the dark Sanct had spilled. “If I’d made him forget magic, then Christine would be singing songs to her grandchildren now. Instead, he stole her voice and butchered her beautiful anima and—”

“This isn’t your fault, Verte.” Honoré held up a hand. She meant to grab the Sanct’s shoulder, but a green wing was there, so her fingers slid down to the delicate skin of La Fée Verte’s inner elbow. It felt as soft as it looked. “Men like that… it’s not magic that makes them awful.”

“Men like that should stay men,” La Fée Verte said. “I showed him how to become a god.”

“You showed him beauty and art and hope,” Honoré told her firmly. “You showed him how to grow wings, not cut out hearts.”

The Sanct pinched her lips, her wings drawing even closer against her shoulders. “Perhaps, but… I’m afraid, Honoré.” She kept watching the mirror, even as their reflections started rising back into it. The knight and the lady. There was a strange transitional moment—when Honoré thought she could see their devil again too, looming in the door behind them. “I’ve not felt fear like this in a very long time.”

It took everything Honoré had not to look over her shoulder. She chose to focus on La Fée Verte’s glowing face instead. “Can I tell you a secret?” She felt the Sanct’s pulse pick up at the question, thrumming through her inner elbow. “Everyone is afraid, even the brave. Especially them.” Honoré could feel her own heart beating madly. “I know it took a lot of courage for you to trust Céleste and Rafael, after what they did. I know that you did it for my sake. I know…”

La Fée Verte looked away from the mirror, her eyes meeting Honoré’s. It was like staring straight into the sun—she knew because she’d done so several times at dawn, searching for that elusive flash of green that sometimes happened just before the orange orb rose over the Seine. There’s magic in that moment, the other woman had told her.

Never mind that every moment with La Fée Verte felt magical.

Especially this one.

“What do you know, my dame?” she whispered.

I know that you are everything beautiful and I am everything sharp, and I never realized those two things could fit so well together, before I met you. I never thought I could hope for someone like this…

Honoré wanted to say these things, but she wasn’t even sure she was that brave yet. So she broke the spell, letting her fingers fall from La Fée Verte’s arm. “I know he won’t win. Tonight I’ll go down into the catacombs to search for more clues. I’m going to find that bastard’s heart if it’s the last thing I do.”

La Fée Verte caught her hand, squeezing the fingers tightly. “Be careful, Honoré. The magical tunnels can be especially treacherous.”

So can I.

Honoré was glad it wasn’t her dragon hand the Sanct held. She could feel the whole warmth of her companion’s hand. “I will, Verte. I promise.”

When Honoré was a child, she’d heard whispers of the catacombs. Not just the stacks of bones that had been hauled from a failing cemetery nearly a century before and rearranged into pieces that would make a puzzle master envious, but the wider system of tunnels. The city under the city. It wound on for hundreds of miles, snaking under the Luxembourg gardens and reaching out under the Louvre, braiding all the way through the southern arrondissements. If you found one of its hidden entrances—at the bottom of a cistern or the roots of a church—an entire underworld opened up. Several old quarries that had been turned into mushroom farms and then into crypts. Passages that had once hidden Belleville’s Communards. Fountains. Wells. Halls. Galleries. It was tempting to go deeper, ever deeper, but there was a reason Honoré’s father had never let his Apaches follow the footsteps of their more rebellious ancestors.

It was too easy to get lost.

Honoré could see why—mostly thanks to a miniature moon Sylvie had conjured on her behalf, when she’d gone back to the salon to prepare for the underground excursion. The youngest Enchantress offered her a croissant as well.

“I should be back before breakfast,” Honoré told her.

“It’s not for eating!” That was a first, coming from Sylvie. “Well, not immediately. Have you ever heard the story of Hänsel und Gretel? It’s about a brother and sister who get sent into the woods to starve. Hansel, the brother, takes a stale loaf of bread to mark their trail so they can find their path home.” The girl took a giant bite of the pastry before handing it over. More flaky dough appeared, filling in the marks left by her teeth. “You can use this to do the same! Marmalade wanted me to conjure you a ball of endless yarn instead, but this way you will have a snack on the way back.”

“That’s… smart,” Honoré had said. “Good thinking, Sylvie.”

“It was Anastasia’s idea, actually.”

Sylvie was still meeting the grand duchess at their door every evening. We have to keep dreaming, she’d said. How could Honoré argue with that, when she wore some of the girls’ imaginings like knives?

She couldn’t really argue with Marmalade either. The tomcat had followed her here on Sylvie’s orders, down the secret passage’s stairs, to the edge of the underground lake. Over it. Honoré folded her dragon’s wings back into the ring as she studied the passage on the opposite side. The stolen jewelry box was not sitting just around the corner. Honoré hadn’t been expecting it—at least not with the same unwavering optimism as Sylvie—but she found herself disappointed all the same. The tunnel was bare. No cryptic Latin marked its wall. There wasn’t even a crude X. She had no way of knowing which path she should choose when she came across a fork in the Lutetian limestone. Both branches unspooled into a vaster network of paths.

The hunt for a heart? She dug a gold coin from her pocket. It landed on King Louis XIV’s head after she flipped it. More like a gamble.

The Enchantresses’ games had always been risky: To get caught impersonating government officials guaranteed prison time. But the stakes felt so much higher now that there were fairies and royals and heartless men in the mix.

They were wagering everything.

Céleste was trying her best, but she hadn’t managed to get any solid leads on what Terreur’s heart looked like, much less where he kept it. Until she did, all Honoré could do was guess. She chose the path to the right, dropping croissant crumbs as she went.

“The catacombs would be the obvious place to bury a heart.” A full moon bobbed above Honoré’s shoulder. Marmalade’s head bobbed there as well, watching it. He’d hitched a ride across the lake and then decided he preferred to be carried. “But maybe it’s too obvious?”

The tomcat stayed quiet. Quiet enough for Honoré to realize just how deep they were. There was no growl of Métropolitain trains, no clip-clop of carriages or shush of pneumatic tyres. Down here, the city La Fée Verte had built was a distant dream. Down here, Honoré could feel her old closet claustrophobia closing in. Muffled ears. Shapes in the darkness: squirming worms and glittering skulls…

Marmalade hissed.

The bones were real. Honoré paused in front of the ossuary. Its skulls had been stacked, yes, but they’d also been… decorated? The skeletons were gilded with precious metals. Silver. Gold. The light of her miniature moon shimmered against orbital ridges as she walked this shining path. It circled back in on itself, and by the time Honoré reached the exit (entrance?), she had the feeling the skulls were watching her.

“Excuse me.” She thought of how Sylvie had gotten the statues to show them the way. It was worth a try… “Have you happened to see a small wooden box? I’m hunting for a heart that might—”

Hisses filled the chamber. All of them said the same thing:

“Beware…”

“Beware…

“Beware the serpents…”

A silver tongue slithered out of an unhinged jaw. No… not a tongue. A snake? It disappeared back into an eye socket before Honoré could get a better look. All around the depository, skulls’ metal adornments started writhing. Seething. Reaching.

“Beware the serpents that eat their own tails.”

Another snake snagged the edge of her tunic.

It tore as Honoré stumbled toward the ossuary door.

She didn’t bother scattering any crumbs outside.

This was not a place she wanted to return to.

Honoré and Marmalade explored the left set of tunnels the following evening. She found they weren’t the only ones. There were more skeletons in this section, yes, but the voices drifting down the passage belonged to the living. Cataphiles? Perhaps? She’d heard of people who held picnics down here. Some even listened to concerts by haunted candlelight. A man was humming, many meters away; his song kept getting interrupted by the scrape, scrape of shovels.

Someone was digging.

Digging and humming the song that accompanied La Danse Apache.

Honoré halted as soon as she recognized the notes, shoving Sylvie’s moon into her pocket so the light would not give her away. Strange bones pressed into her spine as she peered around the corner.

Ten men filled the gallery ahead.

Ten Apaches.

Dirt streaked their striped shirts, stirred up by pickaxes and spades as they chipped away at the cavern wall. One gangster had untied his scarlet scarf and was using it to mop sweat from his brow. His tattoo—and the extra swirls of darkness around it—did not budge. Shadow strings slithered around his arms, stretching down the opposing tunnel.

Terreur must have sent them here.

They’d been digging for a good long while, carving out enough limestone to create a new passage. Honoré scanned the rubble for a jewelry box, but they hadn’t unearthed the heart. Not yet. They were singing and swinging away. Oblivious to the young woman crouched around the corner, with an orange tomcat coiled around her heels, trying to decide their next move. There was nothing to steal. Nothing to stab. Perhaps it would be best to go back the way they came and—

Her breath caught as Gabriel emerged from the tunnel—the eleventh man. Her brother set down his pickaxe and started to fumble with his trouser buttons, moving toward Honoré’s passageway. Oh shit!

Or piss, rather.

She pulled her jacket over her bandolier, covering the dreams there as she shrank back into darkness. It wasn’t exactly as helpful as one of Sylvie’s invisibility cloaks might have been—why hadn’t the youngest Enchantress offered one of those?—but Gabriel didn’t seem to see his sister. His eyes were surrounded by black markings now, just like all the others Terreur had under his sway. But Honoré could still see a spark of curiosity as he spied the pile of croissant crumbs.

She watched his interest grow as he spotted the second stack.

The closer her brother got, the more distinctly she could see the sorcerer’s controlling shadow snaking from Gabriel’s heels. It looked a little like the insides of a piano—pulsing and tugging. Her own heart staccatoed so hard that the dreams on her bandolier almost rattled. Honoré knew they were true this time—not like the sword that had shattered all over Caveau des Terreur’s sandy floor.

She unsheathed an imagining.

Gabriel was so focused on the crumbs that he couldn’t even manage a yell before his sister was behind him, severing shadows like tendons. Snap! Snap! Snap! Strings recoiled like the tentacles of a wounded sea beast. Gabriel shirked in the opposite direction. His shoulders clattered against a stack of skulls.

“A-Anne?”

Normally, the name made Honoré recoil. It belonged with these bones…

Her brother didn’t though.

“Come on, mon frère—we have to go.”

But Gabriel didn’t move. She studied her brother again. There were no extra stripes on his sailor shirt. No more strings wrapped around his limbs, rooting him in place.

He should’ve been free to follow her.

He was staring at the dragon ring instead. His eyes glittered. His tattoo brambled along his cheekbones—swirls and thorns. “You think you can just come back, after all these years, and call me ‘brother’? After you murdered my father?” Ink started sprouting from Gabriel’s temple. His darkest memory. Honoré could see herself inside it. Their sire’s body slouched over the bar. The red smeared across her brother’s face—the sheer terror there.

“You shouldn’t have had to see that,” Honoré whispered. “I was trying to defend myself, Gabriel, I was trying to protect you—”

“Protect?” her brother spat. “How’s that?”

This question hurt more than Honoré cared to admit. So did his other words. My father, he’d called the man, as if he and Honoré weren’t cut from the same warped cloth. She supposed Lucien Durand had been a different person to his son. He’d actually tried to be a papa—letting Gabriel wear his razor-edged cap or teaching him phrases in the gang’s signature slang, la langue verte. The very same words he used when he swore at Maman on the other side of the closet door.

No, she shouldn’t have covered Gabriel’s ears.

She shouldn’t have left him sleeping on the pile of coats, either, when she pulled one out to cover their mother’s cold body.

“Rafael García wanted us to run away to Constantinople with him, but I figured you were too young for the journey, so I decided to wait another few years. But our father found the note Rafael had left for us, and he—he was going to kill me, Gabe.”

Her brother tilted his head.

His eyes kept glittering.

He didn’t believe her. Of course. Why would he if he had no memories of Rafael García or of his own father’s true body count?

“You didn’t protect me from nothing,” he said in a low voice. “You cut and run, left me to fend for myself.”

“I had Eleanor watching over you.” Her reply felt watery, even more so when Gabriel frowned.

“Who?”

“Eleanor.”

Her brother’s frown grew, and Honoré knew then that his accusations weren’t entirely false. She had cut and run—twice. And last time she’d left the barmaid to fend for herself too. As if an empty lemonade bottle could do shit against dark magic. Oh, Eleanor…

“Listen to me, Gabriel. This new Terreur is dangerous. Really fucking dangerous. He devours people and drinks up their souls. That’s why you can’t remember who Rafael and Eleanor are, and if you don’t come with me now—”

“What?” her brother interrupted bitterly. “You’ll stab me too?”

“You really think I’d do that?”

“Rémy says you’re a ruthless bitch, and after what I saw you do to him…”

Gabriel’s gaze slipped back to the lantern-lit part of the tunnel, and Honoré felt a flare of panic. Her dragon flared too. Silver bristled up and down her arm. There were no teeth when she reached for her brother’s hand—of course. She didn’t want to hurt him. She just wanted to pull Gabriel back to the salon or someplace where she could clear his head and keep him free from Terreur’s shadow tethers.

Her fingers found Gabriel’s.

Something strange happened with Honoré’s dragon then. It wasn’t all hers. The alchemy of silver meeting soul started to shift—parts of the metal pulling toward Gabriel. The ring began to drip down his hand. She could feel her brother’s fears. His anger. His hurt. It mixed so well with Honoré’s own, until it was impossible to tell their emotions apart. Gabriel hated her for the night she’d killed their father and left. She hated herself for it too.

“Durand!” Their once-shared surname was shouted from the gallery. “This tunnel isn’t going to dig itself! What are you doing back there? Holding a séance?”

No.

Gabriel was holding her dragon.

Their father’s ring bridged both his bastards’ hands, but Honoré felt herself slipping—silver, soul, and bone.

“Durand!” The foreman’s voice was closer now, and Honoré’s ears prickled with eerie recognition.

As soon as a pair of yellow boots rounded the corner, Marmalade growled.

Rémy Lavigne halted.

The gangster was very much not dead. He wasn’t wearing a shirt either, making it all too easy to see his newest scar: a dragon-shaped mark on his chest. Its jagged edges went from the top of his belly button to the base of his throat, where several more saint necklaces dangled. Ah, shit. His prayers had worked. Or rather, the icons had. If such charms could keep a Russian prince’s soul from fleeing his body, then Honoré figured they could do the same for a sadistic cat-skinner. What a twisted world this was, that he got seven lives after what he’d done to that poor kitten…

“Oh, I’ve been waiting to see that look on your face,” Rémy said with a split-scar smile. His gaze cut to Marmalade—who bristled and backed away. “Got me some promises to keep.”

The gangster drew out a knife.

The tomcat vanished into the tunnels.

Honoré couldn’t exactly blame him. It was the wisest course of action, especially since the rest of the Apaches had exchanged their shovels for sharper instruments. Pickaxes. Blades. She would’ve fled too, if she weren’t bound to Gabriel. Their father’s ring still twisted between them, twisted, twisted, and her brother refused to move. She couldn’t pull him away. She couldn’t separate her dragon from him either, couldn’t control the silver enough to shield herself as the other gangsters moved in. Their silhouettes were all a step too eager. This isn’t how it was supposed to go…

Honoré reached blindly for a knife, but her bandaged hand slipped, and then there was this horrible flame of a feeling sliding between her ribs.

All the air left her right lung.

The tunnel of bones stretched out around her. She wondered how many of these leering skulls had been killed by knives and if their deaths had felt like this: Such a simple punctuation. A period at the end of a wandering sentence.

Rémy Lavigne’s blade was small. Its hilt jutted out of her ribcage, and she suspected, with a delirious laugh, that a corset might’ve stopped the knife from going so deep. Too late now. She felt the dragon rushing back—rage, oh, such rage—and she heard Gabriel screaming once more. She felt more metal than woman; silver spilled up Honoré’s arm and down around her torso, fusing the knife in place. But the beast did not stop there. It grew and grew, shoving the rest of the Apaches into the skeletal walls, bones crushing into bones. Fear, oh, such fear. This was so much worse than shattering a mirror. But when Honoré tried to pull the ring back, she could see it had gone too far—cracks snaked along the cavern ceiling. Dust began raining down on the bodies.

Her brother’s eyes locked with hers.

Too far, mon Dieu. She’d gone too far.

The cavern collapsed into darkness.