Chapter 37

Infernos

Astorm had struck sometime between Honoré Côte’s first visit to Russia and her last.

It’s too damn cold here, she thought, as she flew over the white grounds of Tsarskoe Selo. Pretty though. Catherine Palace looked like a snow globe before the shaking. The golden domes of its chapel were dusted with fresh flakes; blue lights illuminated the windows below. The Mad Monk was likely keeping vigil there, waiting for Terreur’s summons to the nearby ballroom.

Honoré waited too.

She spent several minutes perched in a tree, until she started shivering so hard that snow began shaking from the boughs. If Grigori Rasputin glanced out the window, he’d be sure to notice, but he was far enough away from the palace entrance to let Honoré slip inside undetected. It wasn’t much warmer here—but at least the wind no longer had teeth. Only the paintings. Honoré glanced twice at some of the pieces she crept past. Had the old powder-wigged empresses always been smiling so ferally? Had there always been a portrait of a dead stag in the dining room? It was a bizarre choice of decor. Or perhaps a little too on point? Those forked horns must have reminded diners of their own utensils as they sawed into choice cuts of meat bleeding on their fine china.

Honoré patted her own blade-laced outfit as she passed the blanket-covered table. She’d brought as many weapons as she could—daggers and dreams. There was even a cheese knife, slipped into her bandolier by Céleste.

“You never know,” the other Enchantress had said, with a cheeky grin.

“I did get a peek through the jewelry box’s lock,” Honoré informed her. “That heart sure as shit isn’t made of camembert.”

Hers wasn’t either, it seemed.

Honoré’s chest fluttered when La Fée Verte handed her the final weapon—much like that first sword, but shorter. And stronger. The blade had been forged with imaginings from all the salon’s regular guests. Picasso’s cubes. Jean Cocteau’s costumes. A speeding automobile—compliments of Duchess d’Uzès. Holding all these together? The dream of a magical artists’ colony. Rafael’s, no doubt. It held the same flavor of hope as all his childhood fantasies of Constantinople.

It even shimmered gold.

So did La Fée Verte’s masque as she leaned in to kiss Honoré. “Remember, you are more than my sword. Take care, my dame. Come back to me.”

“I will,” Honoré had breathed, before kissing her back. “I promise.”

But first, she had a devil to kill.

The anticipation of it prickled her every step. Her dragon ring stirred too. Soon, soon. All Honoré had to do was grab the jewelry box, choose a blade, and wait. In a few more minutes, sunrise would strike Paris. She’d no doubt see its light through the open portal in the ballroom…

The Amber Room was dark when Honoré entered; none of its candelabras lit. You almost couldn’t tell there was gold foil backing the fragments on the wall. The white sheet covering the corner table looked like a ghost as she reached for it with her dragon hand.

Soon, soon.

The sheet fell away.

Again, it was too dim to see the box’s details, but as soon as Honoré lifted it from the table, she knew something was off. Nothing rattled inside. And when she pulled out a dream knife to pry apart the lock, she saw no engraved letters buttressing the keyhole, which meant only one thing: This was not Christine Leroux’s jewelry box.

It had been swapped.

And Terreur’s heart with it.

“Oh, shit.”

This was the same oath Honoré had used back in the Montmartre alley, when the ink of the Tournée du Chat Noir pulled itself out of the poster. She should’ve spat it another hundred times, just to match what she was seeing now. Catherine Palace had started crawling. Bare-bosomed women and war-thirsty gods twisted themselves out of the ceiling paint and skittered like spiders down the walls, joined by cherub statues whose gold-leafed wings hummed like a kicked hornet’s nest.

The wall statues struck first. Fuck, they were fast. And heavy. Maybe they weren’t as gilded as they looked… Honoré beat the first two back with her blade, but there were twenty more just after, a number not even the fastest swordswoman could strike down. One smashed into her left shoulder. Another had fashioned a piece of gold garland as a whip and might have taken off Honoré’s head with it, but the jagged leaves did not hit a soft jugular.

They met the dragon ring instead.

She’d been so careful these past months to keep the silver asleep, lest it creep closer, ever closer, to her skull. But Honoré had no heads to spare, so she let her relic grow, smashing the remaining cherubs to dust. These remains glittered over the paintings, which had reached the parquet floor, moving across it more like insects than not, bent into impossible shapes. When Honoré’s dragon lashed out at the paintings, they simply splashed apart into colored droplets. Each strike soaked up the magic that moved them, coursing through her ring instead. The beast grew. It roared. It cut down kings’ likenesses and archangels and maybe even Zeus himself, but paintings kept pouring through the Amber Room’s doors. The dead stag stumbled in, its horns twisting. Behind that was a slavering three-headed dog, and if they kept coming like this, she’d be cornered. Stuck—not just in this hellish palace—but inside herself. The dragon was already up to Honoré’s chin. Too much more fighting, and she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

This thought propelled Honoré toward the window.

Through it.

Glass rained over snow. Silver wings cut through fading night—she had to get back to La Fée Verte, before it was too late. Mon Dieu. She prayed it was not too late. Maybe Céleste hadn’t made the trade yet. Maybe there was some other miracle they could count on.

But as Honoré flew back toward the Children’s Island, over the chapel domes, there was a thunderous flash of blue. The crosses began to bend. They turned into claws and plucked her out of the sky, flinging her back into the gardens. The force should have shattered Honoré’s spine, but her dragon absorbed most of the impact. It had absorbed whatever spell had moved the steeples too. They slanted like wind-stunted trees.

They stayed this way as Honoré sat up, catching her breath with gasps.

Then she spotted the Mad Monk.

He stood only a few yards away, at the center of a swirling hedge pattern. He could have been out for a meditative stroll—if it weren’t for all the snow and the even colder magic flaring from his masque. Another curse. She could feel Rasputin’s power, the immensity of it, folding around her. Squeezing. Trying to make Honoré small enough to match the flashing saints around his neck.

He might have managed it, if she weren’t already wearing a ring.

Her dragon refused to bend.

The curse rolled right off its scales as Honoré pulled herself upright. The Mad Monk shifted in the snow, his palms moving in the sign of another cross. She felt her hair stand on end; fears started surfacing too. What was happening back in Paris? Had Céleste surrendered the dream? Was Terreur attacking La Fée Verte’s salon? Was Sylvie safe? Oh, Sylvie. Honoré blanched then, remembering that the door at rue de la Réunion had been cracked. She’d figured the youngest Enchantress had left it unlocked, but it seemed more likely that the daydreamer had never left Russia at all…

“What did you do to Sylvie?” Biting words. Frost-filled. Her dragon snapped through the air too. “I swear to God, if you’ve harmed a single fuchsia hair on her head, I’ll give you a real fucking reason to pray.”

She didn’t know if the Mad Monk spoke French, but his smile told her he understood. He reached into his robes and pulled out a tattered kerchief, before tossing it onto the snow the way an ancient warlord might offer terms of surrender. Only, it wasn’t a white rag. It wasn’t a rag at all, Honoré realized.

She was staring at a pair of crumpled butterfly wings.

The rage that filled her then wasn’t red but silver. It was cake crumbs everywhere and cat fur too. It was the promise of a happy ending ripped out at the roots. It was Honoré’s own roots, rising, up, up, into snarling metal fangs. Fear’s Bastard threw herself at Grigori Rasputin, and together they plowed through the snow. His masque flickered. Her heirloom sparked. Honoré screamed. The dragon sank its teeth into the Mad Monk’s throat and tore, until the flesh there was as tattered as Sylvie’s old wings, until they turned scarlet with the rest of the snow.

It was enough blood to end a man.

Honoré knew this because Lucien Durand had lost far less, despite it spreading everywhere. He’d died midswear. Rasputin was gagging, no words bubbling from his holey throat. His hand wandered up, pausing just beneath the wound. Pressing. One of the chains around his neck began to glow. Miraculously, no blood had spattered on its charm, but the saint’s throat reddened, as if some invisible hand were painting an injury there. Honoré’s skin crawled. The skin around the Mad Monk’s wound crept back into place too…

She hadn’t killed him.

But she had the sick revelation that she had killed someone. It was hard to tell whom. They were already disappearing, their outline growing fainter, their features erased. All that remained was the blood on the snow, on her ring, on Rasputin’s own teeth as he smiled again and spoke in Russian.

Honoré had no translation, but she understood. The Mad Monk had over a dozen people strung around his neck. She had her dragon, yes, but if she kept battling the Sanct, the dragon might have her.

Robespierre and his disciples chose to bathe themselves in blood, and their rings did what they’d been designed to do. They grew thirsty. They grew over their wearers. Beware the serpents that eat their own tails. The Fisherman’s warning echoed in Honoré’s head as she forced herself back from the bloody snow. Her ring’s silver already felt stiffer.

She had to be better than her rage.

She had to get back to Paris before Terreur gutted the place.

She pulled a dream knife from her bandolier and threw it at Grigori Rasputin’s chest—not waiting around to see what kind of wound it left. The chapel’s crosses stayed bent as Honoré soared back over the domes, off and away.

Her prayer had gone unanswered. La Fée Verte’s defenses had failed. Honoré knew this as soon as she flew above rue de la Réunion, into a skyline slashed with smoke. Ashes danced over a Montmartre cabaret. Flaming pages turned above the ninth arrondissement—where Libris’s bookstore had once stood. The dome of the Palais Garnier was darkened by a scorched café. The Fisherman’s flea market booth burned beyond that.

Sylvie’s magical map would be useless now, charred beyond recognition.

Honoré felt that way too when she looked toward the Quartier Secret. A pillar of ruin rose beside Notre-Dame de Paris, as tall and thick as a third bell tower.

And above that?

If any of the cathedral’s priests had paused their morning prayers and peered beyond the church windows, they might have seen a scene that belonged in stained glass. An emerald-winged angel. A devil rising on the updraft of ashes. A knight in shining armor trying her best to reach them…

Honoré often had a nightmare, over and over, where she would try to run. Destinations varied—sometimes she was fleeing to Gare de l’Est to catch Rafael’s train. Sometimes she was trying to get to Maman at the fireplace mantel, before that final skull-splitting hit. It didn’t matter. It never did. That was the horror of the dream. Air porridged around her limbs and no matter how hard she pushed, she wasn’t fast enough. She always woke up sweating bullets. Honoré wished, very much, that she could do so now—as she struggled through the smoke-slurred sky—but this dream didn’t belong to her.

This nightmare had come straight from Terreur.

Céleste must have handed over his idea, not knowing the Sanct’s heart was beyond stabbing. He was still invincible. Not only that—he was strong. Far stronger than La Fée Verte. Her golden masque flickered much like the inferno below. She couldn’t fight Terreur’s fires. He’d burned too much of the salon and the imaginings inside. Too much of her. Flames blackened the ends of La Fée Verte’s hair and caught her feathers too. Songbirds started to scream, flying wherever they could to escape the heat. One slammed straight into Honoré’s breastplate. She caught it in both palms, horrified to see the bird was no longer green but pink. Raw flesh oozed beneath the remains of its plumage.

More birds fell past her, their bodies breaking on the street below.

Over the muddy waters of the Seine, Terreur grabbed La Fée Verte by the throat. Honoré’s scream was sulphuric. Her wings weren’t fast enough. She was stuck in a burning sky, trapped in such heavy, heavy armor, while her love’s feathers fell. One after the other after the other, until the only songbird left was the burnt thing shuddering in Honoré’s cupped palms.

La Fée Verte’s masque went dark.

Terreur’s masque did too. When he finally released the muse, his smile was the color of her wing bones. That’s all they were anymore. White and hollow as flutes, whistling as the woman fell, down, down. A splash. A bubbling gasp. The river took her quickly.