Céleste Artois sat at the top of a fang-tipped mountain, sipping tea from a flask as snowflakes drifted around her. Each of these ice crystals was a tiny piece of art. Literally. They weren’t cold though. Not nearly as freezing as the snow that had started to pile outside the windows at Catherine Palace. Autumn, as it turned out, was a short season in Russia. Even Paris was properly chilly, now that it was January. Céleste had started adding shed firebird feathers to her tea, which had the bonus of teaching her obscure Russian terms as well as keeping her warm. It helped her not to shiver in front of the Mad Monk. This task was getting more and more difficult, with the exchanges she was overhearing. There were stories about the tsarevitch, of course. How the young prince had tried—twice now—to sail off in a rowboat. Both times he’d nearly died on the lake…
“You should keep your icons closer to the boy, if they’re the only thing keeping him alive. Instead of hanging them above his bed, why not a necklace? They’ve worked wonders for Monsieur Lavigne.”
“Yes, your new lieutenant seems to go through lives faster than the cats he skins,” the Mad Monk had said coolly. “There are only so many peasants in Saint Petersburg that I can canonize without stirring up stories of upyr.”
Terreur’s lip lifted then, revealing spotless incisors. “Let the stories stir,” he’d said. “You, of all people, should know the power of rumors, Grigori Rasputin.”
Often, during such exchanges, Céleste chose to focus on the charms hanging from the end of the Mad Monk’s chains. The saints no longer looked so pious—no, the mouths she’d supposed to be singing hymns seemed to be screaming instead. She couldn’t stare at them without wanting to do the same. Thank goodness for the fat flakes swirling outside the palace windows. Watching them, Céleste could let her thoughts go blank.
Here in the landscape room, however, that was the last thing she wanted. Every night she and Rafe stole away someplace different: a castle on a cliff that could be reached only by a staircase of sea-foam, a forest filled with leafy prehistoric beasts, a sky where whales swam through cloud islands. This evening, Rafe was piloting a zeppelin over the sharp-white mountain range, sketching each snowflake by hand, writing secret messages into the crystals that swirled past Céleste’s face.
Are you quite done playing the hermit?
“I’m imagining!” she shouted back, her breath pluming into the shape of a tiger. The beast glittered through the air before landing on Rafe’s zeppelin.
After a moment, another snowflake drifted past: You’re vexing the birds is what you’re doing.
Céleste sighed and watched a second tiger leap down the mountainside. It had become something of a game—seeing how many of her own dreams she could collect throughout the evening. She surrendered them at dawn, of course, but not before her cheeks were dewy with magic—the beginnings of a masque. This always evaporated as soon as the songbirds descended and La Fée Verte claimed the imaginings as her own.
“I’m just giving my ideas time to grow!” Céleste yelled, tugging at the ushanka covering her scalp. “La Fée Verte shouldn’t be angry with that. The stronger they are, the stronger she becomes, no?”
Especially at the current exchange rate. The Sanct seemed to give one whim for every two of theirs she took, though the offerings had improved since the night of Honoré’s stabbing. Good enough to tide over Terreur for another three months. Céleste wasn’t sure how much longer they could keep this ruse up. Their hunt seemed to be at an impasse. Marmalade and the rest of Paris’s cats claimed they’d found no trace of the bastard’s heart in the city. Whenever Céleste tried to broach the subject, Terreur demanded his lost idea. He hadn’t tried tunneling any more Apaches into the salon, but she had no doubt he was planning another attack soon.
Céleste did not believe her dreams alone could stop it.
She’d gotten better at conjuring, certainly. There was an entire headful of ideas glowing beneath the ushanka’s fur—which made her think of Duchess d’Uzès’s driving helmet. Nothing much had come of the idea Sylvie had tucked inside its lining. The champagne heiress still attended the salon every few evenings and occasionally painted her hair festive colors, but Sylvie had moved on to other quests. Namely, cheering up the Romanov children.
Céleste shivered and took another swig of firebird-laced tea.
The zeppelin’s anchor landed in the snow next to her. Rafe swung down from the ladder, his fob chains twinkling, his stubble glittering with frost as he leaned in to steal a kiss. It was not cold at all. His mouth melted against hers, and the rest of the mountain’s snow began to feel pillowy. Céleste was just reaching up to grab the other artist’s vest when he pulled back and eyed the flask in her hand.
“What’s that I taste?” Rafe licked the edges of his own lips. “Russkiy?”
Céleste bit back the urge to pull him back down into the snow. The more time she spent in Rafe’s arms, the worse it was returning with him to the Caveau des Terreurs.
Tell me… your arrangement with Monsieur García… Do you really love him?
The answer terrified Céleste.
She’d managed to hide it from Terreur for the past three months. But every time Rafe García dreamed at her side, every time he filled her with stars upon stars, it was harder to shake off the dust, that young lovers’ glow… For Rafe’s sake, though, she had to try.
“The tea helps with my Russian,” she answered, extending the flask. “Would you like some?”
“I have no need. The grand duchess speaks fine enough French…” Rafe raised his scarred eyebrow. “Though I’ve never seen you talk to her.”
“We don’t have much in common.” Aside from the princess’s ill-fated brother, and even Céleste wasn’t skilled enough to weave that subject into casual conversation. Yes, do you know the real reason why Alexei can’t conjure? It’s because Rasputin has a hold on his soul. Oh, and your mother’s too. Also, your brother’s blood keeps me alive, so thank him for that…
“That doesn’t seem to stop Sylvie,” Rafe said, with a twist of a smile.
“Nothing does,” she lamented.
“You raised her well.”
A third tiger iced the air as Céleste laughed. “I hardly think I can lay claim to that.”
“No?”
“She only eats with utensils half the time—”
“Ah.” He waved this off. “Trivial stuff. Besides, good manners make terrible stories. Our Magpie is meant for greater things. And the reason Sylvie is such a skilled daydreamer is because you and Honoré gave her enough freedom to explore. You offered her a safe place to return to at the end of her adventures. That’s no small thing.”
“The dead man’s mausoleum surrounded by booby traps?”
A smirk scrawled across his rugged features. “A home. It’s what I’d like La Ruche to become, when all this is over.”
A sudden ache gripped Céleste’s chest. She couldn’t deny that she wanted this too—days where she could wake up beside her Rafe. Where their masques glittered in the afternoon sun and the halls of the artists’ colony hummed with the magic of ideas.
“So you’ve said.”
“Have I?”
“You told me you wanted to open its doors to a league of imaginers. Sylvie decided the soup kitchen should serve ice cream. La Fée Verte decided to turn that dream into a necklace—pretty as you please.”
It was curious to Céleste that a similar notion had started growing back in the missing dream’s place. Though the more she considered this, the more it made sense. Jean Cocteau had conjured plenty of dresses embellished with flame, even after that first gown of dark stars was extinguished. Picasso kept trying to fill the landscape room with cubes. Guillaume had a poem about La Fée Verte that he’d only written in scraps and only in the daytime. Several drafts were drifting through La Ruche’s shared halls. Its working title? “In Somnis Veritas.”
“A League of Imaginers,” Rafe murmured. “I like that.”
“Me too.”
As soon as Céleste pulled off her ushanka, the songbirds rushed in, coloring the sky emerald for almost an entire minute. She watched the flock with a melting gaze. Her masque went the color of frost, vanishing with the last of the birds.
Only…
Not quite.
A single bird remained perched on the zeppelin’s anchor. There was a gray string in its beak, but the thought hadn’t originated from Céleste. It didn’t look like one of Rafe’s silver imaginings either. There was no glow. Only a wormlike squirm as the songbird dropped the idea into the snow.
Céleste froze.
Rafe did too.
Both thieves stared at the strand, which looked as if it had been plucked from a corpse. Not as a hair, but as a very long, very wriggly maggot.
“Is that…?” She didn’t dare finish her question.
Rafe nodded. For someone who’d spent over five years combing the salon for this lost thought, he didn’t seem pleased to stumble across it. In fact, he stepped back when the string started to melt the surrounding snow. The mountain disappeared too, thawing into gray cobblestones. Buildings began to rise from the carpet of clouds, growing into familiar formations. Notre-Dame’s bell towers unfurled in the distance. The Panthéon’s dome. The layered designs of the Palais Garnier. Landmarks that were soon lost to closer structures.
The songbird stayed on the anchor.
A single splash of color in a dead landscape.
Céleste held her breath, studying the buildings. She and Rafe were standing on a nameless street with colorless doors and curtained windows. Nothing moved, yet there was a frantic flavor to the air. Undercurrents of desperation. It reminded her, somehow, of the sketches hanging from the walls of the attic loft in Montmartre. This was Terreur’s handiwork. His city. So much so that she kept expecting to see him perched on a nearby rooftop.
It was La Fée Verte who flew down instead.
The Sanct landed next to her songbird. The worm-gray imagining wriggled at her bare feet, casting its vision across the landscape. Not even the light of her golden masque could soften its starkness.
“Welcome to the bones of Paris,” La Fée Verte said, folding her wings.
“So this is what the city would look like without magic?” asked Céleste.
It was strange—all the architecture remained unchanged, but there was some essential -ness missing. Paris was not Paris. Statues sat blank-eyed. There wasn’t even a sense that they might stir. It was the same with the curtains. Only the surrounding shadows flickered, the way they so often did in the corners of Catherine Palace or the edges of the Caveau.
“Without magic? No.” La Fée Verte glanced at a nearby alley, where a withered leg stuck out between some crates. “This is Paris without hope.”
There was a rumbling in the ash-colored sky, too sharp to be thunder. Céleste’s tea tasted extra metallic as she swallowed. She couldn’t help but wonder what kind of nightmare had sprouted in this one’s place.
“I’m guessing you didn’t keep this in the Vault of Dreams,” Rafe said.
La Fée Verte shook her head. “It would’ve stunted the other imaginings.”
“So we never would have found it.” Rafe let out a rueful laugh. “I’ll be damned. Well… double damned.”
“What do you mean by bringing this to us now?” Céleste asked.
“You must both know my faith in you was thin, when we agreed to join forces and search for Terreur’s heart… I supposed you were offering your services to save your own skins. And souls,” she added. “I agreed to go along for Honoré’s sake.”
“So did I,” Céleste said.
“I know that now—after what you did for her the night the catacombs collapsed.” La Fée Verte swallowed. “The lengths you went to, to save her, they showed me that I needed to go even further myself.” She knelt and picked up the idea, the way a fisherman might bait a hook. The gray city faded from sight. “Finding Terreur’s heart may fix many things; but it will not heal you, Céleste Artois. He won’t bow to blackmail. He’ll drag you into a grave with him and scorch the rest of Rafe’s soul along the way.”
Again, Céleste shivered. She knew—deep down—that the Sanct spoke the truth.
“Honoré and I have been talking.” La Fée Verte paused, long enough for Céleste to raise an eyebrow. Closed doors were an oddity in the salon, yet the vines around the Sanct’s bedroom had grown much lusher as of late. Even stranger? Céleste sometimes heard Honoré’s laughter through the leaves. “We believe there’s a better way. She believes I can trust you with this.”
The Sanct held the nightmare out on her flat palm.
Céleste felt more wriggling in her throat as she stared at Terreur’s lost thought. She could see Rafe at the edge of her vision, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Trust me to do what?”
“Once we find Terreur’s heart, we’ll keep it in its hiding place until you can present this dream to him. Hopefully, he’ll then fulfill his end of the bargain. Heal you. Release Rafe from his service. Once these deeds are done, Dame Honoré will stab his heart. He’ll have no chance to make this future come true.”