Chapter 38

The Last Enchantress of Paris

Paris had gone to shit, and the world had gone to hell.

But Céleste Artois was still alive.

Even eight months after trading Terreur’s nightmare in exchange for her life, it was hard for her to be glad of this fact. Au contraire. She was quite unsettled as she wandered the streets of her once-sparkling city, past cafés stacked high with chairs. Most storefronts were shuttered—partly because a portion of the population had been shipped off to the Western Front to fight and mostly because those soldiers were losing. Germany was marching for the City of Light. Parisians were scared. They spoke of what might happen if the kaiser’s army crossed the Seine. If you could find an open pâtisserie, you wouldn’t be able to buy bread without some stale scraps of rumors. I heard that Germans are raping women and murdering babies in Belgium! What would those beasts do if they reached Paris?

Well, they wouldn’t drink absinthe. Certainly.

The café in the Latin Quarter where she’d enjoyed une correspondance after The Rite of Spring—well over a year ago—was closed. When Céleste peered through the windows, she saw the miraculous sparkling water advertisement had been papered over with a mobilization poster, calling all its young customers to war. To add insult to injury, absinthe itself had been banned by the minister of the interior. To protect the soldiers’ will to fight. Never mind that the tafia they served in the trenches—a rum so combustible, it could serve as artillery—was more likely to send men to an asylum. That and the endless onslaught of bullets.

But yes, outlaw the elegant sugar spoons, instead. The thought was bitter in Céleste’s mouth. Far more bitter than the anise had been—or even the blood. There’s no longer a green fairy to summon anyhow.

Her shadow shuddered over cobblestones as she kept walking through the Latin Quarter, past the glass flowers of the MÉTROPOLITAIN sign’s lamps, past the statues of the Fontaine Saint-Michel. She sometimes stopped here, staring into the dragon’s unseeing eyes. This wasn’t a confession, but it was close.

Penance, perhaps?

Céleste didn’t have any other reason to keep coming back to this arrondissement. The alley across the boulevard was choked with dead vines, and even if you managed to get past that tangle, there was nothing on the other side. Terreur had made sure of this. He’d burned almost all the other Sancts’ holdings, but the destruction of the salon? Well, that had been personal. Rue des Ombres was a shining wonderland compared to what was left of the Quartier Secret.

Nowadays the nights stayed dark, the city’s curtains drawn. There was no whir of wings, no cinnamon-cigarette zeppelins—only the fear of real airships and their bombs. If imaginers were smoking anything, it was tar. It was orange ember stars dotting the trenches, some hundreds of miles away. The whole world was burning, one way or another. Bodies piling. Borders broken. Ashes spread across the entire continent so that it looked as dark from the skies as it did on Terreur’s globe.

The war, at least, was not Céleste’s fault. She could see this from the way Russia’s armies moved—by order of Tsar Nicholas II. By suggestion of Tsarina Alexandra. By the will of Grigori Rasputin.

She could see this in the way that Terreur was always feasting, guzzling goblets of blood. Enough had spilled on Europe’s battlefields to last him… well, forever. He need not wither when thousands of young men were mown down in muddy fields, their uniform pants as bright as poppies. Or damn roses. There’d been plenty of flowers at their send-off too, when they’d marched through Paris’s streets to the tune of “La Marseillaise,” lilies and carnations wedged into their bayonets. Not the best place for planting, Céleste had thought, as she watched the parade. Seeds needed soil and sun and time to grow…

Terreur must have been dreaming of this war for a long while, long before he’d met Céleste, but she couldn’t help but be sorry. Sorry that she’d failed to stop him. Sorry that she was alive when so many others were not.

She turned from the sightless dragon and walked on.

Survivor’s guilt wouldn’t do Céleste any good. She was due back at the Palais Garnier soon, and even though she now had enough power to fly or summon a portal to the opera house, she chose to wander the streets instead. She crossed the Seine and strolled into the second arrondissement. Some shops had stayed open here: A fromagerie filled with white wheels of cheese. A perruquier trying to sell patriotic wigs in the colors of France’s flag. A few doors down from that was a butcher—busy as ever. The Parisians who’d decided to stay and face the opposing forces had to fill their bellies, after all. The same held true with cake. Céleste could feel her own stomach growl as she walked down rue Montorgueil.

She could hear the street singer from several blocks away, plucking at his instrument as he sang choruses about the war. It was how many preferred to hear terrible news—set to the tune of F major. “GERMANY SUPPORTS AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. FRANCE AND RUSSIA STRENGTHEN THEIR ALLIANCE WITH SERBIA. CLOUDS OF WAR GATHER OVER EUROPE.”

Except this song.

It was not terrible.

She rounded the corner to find a crowd gathered at the Place des Victories, beneath a statue of the Sun King and his horse. The minstrel was standing by the monument. At first, Céleste thought his hair might be gold, but then she saw an even brighter shimmer around the man’s head. Like a halo.

It made sense, she realized, for he was singing about an angel.

The song’s lilting verses did not come from a Psalm or any other biblical story. No, they’d been plucked straight from the battlefield. They told of a woman whose silver wings turned back bullets, who wielded a flaming sword and brought hope to men drowning in mud. She saved soldiers and made them sing. She would save Paris too—of course.

Hope had started to spark through the crowd, filling the heads of balding men and erasing the gray-haired worry of young wives. Their children looked on in wonder. One of them was clutching a Stohrer bag to his chest, his face a mess of powdered sugar, his eyes lit like a tree on Christmas Eve.

“Is the angel real, Maman?” he asked after the final chorus.

His mother didn’t answer, but a crown of dreams flickered around her brow.

“Could be a saint,” answered an elderly man next to them. “Could be Joan of Arc herself, come down from heaven to fight for France!”

Let the stories stir, Terreur had once said. For there was power in a rumor. There was even more power in a legend, so Honoré, clever Honoré—named after the patron saint of pastries—had decided to become one. A story every man and woman and child in Paris was desperate to believe.

Céleste included.

She let her lips slip into the smallest of smiles.

“Quite real,” she told the mesmerized child, as she plucked a single bright thought from her head and handed it over to him, before continuing to the opera house.

War was far worse than Honoré Côte had ever imagined. She’d expected gore, certainly. As a girl she’d heard plenty of tales from the old soldiers of Belleville, men who’d fought in the Franco-Prussian war and then as Communards—red-blooded revolutionaries. To hear them talk, she’d figured battlefields were places where heroes were forged. Where bravery was tested and the person loading a gun at your side became your brother. And even if you died, there was a reason for it: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

There was nothing heroic about this.

Mud. Shit. Horses screaming, their intestines tangling in their hooves as they tried to gallop away from their own awful deaths. Forests bombed to splinters. Bones too. There was hardly a chance to learn the name of the soldier next to you before his head got blown off and the rest of his corpse was left to feed the rats—rats as big as goddamn cats. A few of those vermin did get christened by men who needed something to cling to. Gallows humor at its finest—in the form of a flesh-eating rodent who went by the name of Machiavelli. He’d become something of a mascot for Honoré’s unit.

So had she.

She’d enlisted under the dead man’s name and marched off to Gare de l’Est along with many of La Fée Verte’s old imaginers. And more besides: Bakers and booksellers, painters and poets. Farm boys with deep tans and even deeper provincial accents. Street kids who looked itchy in their fresh blue uniforms.

Young fathers kissed their infants’ bubble cheeks. Oldest sons hugged their mothers one last time. Honoré Côte had no goodbyes to say, and when the men in her unit started telling stories of their loved ones, she simply stared down at her dragon ring.

“Who’ve you got back home?” asked a young man with pianist’s fingers. Long and delicate. They tapped some unheard song on the butt of his 1907/15 Berthier rifle. “Anyone special you’re fighting for?”

The silver around her throat went tight, and the fields through the train windows became a green, green blur. Paris fell away. Something deep inside Honoré kept falling too.

“I’m not here to fight,” she answered in her huskiest voice.

The farm boy seated across from them laughed. “Careful. That kind of talk will get you a white feather. Or a bullet between the eyes for cowardice.”

Honoré simply smiled. Bullets wouldn’t touch her, thanks to the dragon ring. And while she did have some feathers tucked away in her uniform, they were not white. Not like the lily wedged into the barrel of the pianist’s gun, as if he were off to shoot petals instead of lead.

“Why are you here, then?” His fingers kept tapping the butt of the rifle. His flower kept quivering. Just above this, Honoré could see the gleam of the song he was composing. Far different from the tunes he’d played in La Fée Verte’s salon, last winter.

“Because you are.”

A songbird peered out of Honoré’s sky-blue uniform. It hopped across her shoulders—even eight months after the fact, its emerald feathers had not filled in enough for it to fly. It fluttered to the pianist’s scalp the way a hen might hop to a fence-post. The imaginer did not see the creature, same as he couldn’t see the silver scales coating Honoré’s skin or the shining sword sheathed at her side. But when the bird plucked the inspiration from the musician’s head, his fingers stopped tapping.

“You some kind of chaplain or something?” the farm boy asked.

“Or something,” Honoré replied, as the songbird slipped back into the safety of her breastplate.

She was more than a sword.

She was a shield now.

She was two hearts in a single chest, beating as one. Her other half was back home, lying in a glass casket, under glass stars, guarded by cats and stray dreams, though they weren’t enough to wake La Fée Verte from her enchanted sleep. The Sanct’s eyes hadn’t opened since Honoré found her at the edge of the Seine, tangled in a net made of fates. Powerless. Only the last songbird trembled in Honoré’s hands like a faint pulse, and when she laid the creature between the woman’s breasts, it simply let out a distressed squawk.

“La Fée Verte needs imaginings,” the Fisherman of the Moon told her, after examining the other Sanct’s lightless masque. “Strong ones. Gather enough of them, and she’ll rise again.”

“You make it sound like she’s dead.” Honoré’s voice echoed around her namesake’s mausoleum. Her own heart shuddered as she scooped the songbird back into her palms. She hated how cold the Sanct’s chest felt beneath her fingers. How still.

La Fée Verte couldn’t be dead.

She couldn’t.

She and Honoré had found a better way together, after the magic of their first kiss. They’d gone even deeper. Delving into the idea that Robespierre’s spell was not the sole path to invincibility. What if you didn’t have to cut all ties to remove your heart from your chest? What if your love wasn’t a weakness but the greatest possible strength? What if you turned your heart into a green bird and sent it soaring across the burning sky, into your love’s arms, so that you might escape death?

What then?

“La Fée Verte’s not dead. No more than this one is.” The Fisherman held up Sylvie’s saint necklace, and Honoré struggled not to scream, the way she had when Rafael handed the relic over to the ragpicker. “Your heart spell worked, but La Fée Verte doesn’t have enough magic to return to herself. We just have to find the right powers to break these curses, is all.”

“But Terreur burned everything,” she replied bitterly.

It was why they stood in a grave instead of the salon, why the Fisherman’s handcart was parked over the paint-spattered picnic blanket. His stall had gone up in smoke, most of his trash and treasures lost. The Sanct couldn’t even go gather more, not without risking a battle with one of Terreur’s disciples.

The heartless bastard had set himself up at the Palais Garnier, watching operas from his old hidden box and sending Apaches to hunt down blood on his behalf. Honoré had figured that was the worst of it, until the assassination. Until Europe’s kings had decided to act more like dominoes than chess pieces.

“Terreur burned buildings,” the Fisherman corrected her. “The salon was only ever a place. You carry La Fée Verte’s spirit with you, so go to the dreamers.”

It hadn’t been simple at first, but she’d managed.

Visits to La Ruche, to Twenty-Seven rue de Fleurus, to a candlelit catacomb concert, to Temple de l’Amitié, where writers gathered in a garden to eat chocolate cake and discuss the poetry of Sappho. Honoré ghosted through these gatherings. She let the songbird hop from head to head. She watched its feathers slowly bud with the arrival of spring, with the rest of Paris’s flowers.

And then, the war.

Honoré had not marched off to Gare de l’Est to fight. She was following the dreamers. The men who took brass shells and turned them into vases, who carved sculptures out of enemy rifle butts, who scribbled poetry by the light of artillery, who looked out across no-man’s-land and still saw something worth sketching: a sunrise, a butterfly, an angel.

Many did see her, once they reached the battlefield. When the farm boy tried to be a hero and got a belly full of lead for his trouble, he gasped up at Honoré’s wings. He begged for last rites, for a miracle, for his mother, his mother, who was a sodden photograph in his pocket, whose face shimmered in the dark puddle that gathered by Honoré’s boots. What a waste… eighteen years and so many more lost. She shirked back from the blood, watching the boy’s anima swirl and his eyes fade. There was already a rat slinking through the muck, its yellow teeth chattering. There were worse carrion eaters too, she knew, flying in the skies above the crows and slipping through the doorways of burnt Belgian houses, making long shadows longer.

Honoré could not stop them from feasting.

So, instead, she tried her best to focus on the imaginings. They did not grow easily here, but the dreams that did take root were strong. The pianist took the dadera-dadera tempo of machine guns and hummed even louder. There was a poet in their unit too—the one who’d christened Machiavelli—who turned the shrapnel into stanzas. Honoré took these ideas and slipped them beneath her armor, where La Fée Verte’s heart fluttered. She watched the imaginers frown and readjust their helmets. She hated leaving them so bereft. It was far easier in Paris, where torches flickered in the gardens and beautiful sculptures melted under moonbeams. Bombshells and clouds of bone didn’t have quite the same effect.

But Honoré stayed true to her oath.

She found a better way.

She defended the dreamers.

It didn’t take long for other soldiers in her unit to notice that bullets never landed on them when Honoré Côte was nearby. Damn lucky, they called her at first, but mere luck couldn’t account for the sparks they sometimes saw bouncing off her chest, the cartridges that dropped harmlessly to her hobnailed boots. It didn’t explain why an artillery shell exploded around her company and fire parted around them in the shape of wings. After that incident, Honoré got herself a new nickname. Battlefield Angel! A guardian as good as Gabriel himself! Men toasted her with sips of tafia and talk started to spread, the way talk does when it’s fueled by such strong rum and the constant presence of death. You need divine intervention? Fight by Honoré Côte’s side. He’ll keep hell at bay!

“It’s a little too late for that, don’t you think?” Honoré said, as she looked down the line. Cigarettes winked against spent bullet casings, and the farm boy’s rat-gnawed body was still halfway there in the mud. Her wings could only stretch so far…

But the songbird in her armor felt stronger.

Almost ready to fly.

She wondered if this had anything to do with the way the company was staring back at her. It wasn’t just cigarettes flickering from the soldier’s faces. It was faith. They really believed what they were telling themselves.

As a child, Honoré had hated her given name. Anne wasn’t strong. It didn’t make men quake in their boots or piss their pants, the way her father’s title did. She’d always known him as Fear, and she knew that if she was Fear’s Bastard, she might stand a chance of surviving. There was power in a name, yes, but the real power lay in the myth behind the man. The reputation. Terreur—who’d yank your teeth out with pliers if you told a lie, who’d steal your house out from under you with a dirty deed, who’d pull up your wife’s skirts whether or not she fancied it, who’d take whatever he wanted without an ounce of remorse.

Honoré had survived a long time in her father’s shadow.

But she could feel her own myth taking shape beneath Lucien Durand’s old ring. Feathers growing so that the silver spreading from her back no longer looked like dragon’s scales but like the wings of the archangel these soldiers believed her to be. Their faith was making a difference, and Honoré hoped that she could too, so during the next skirmish, when a hail of bullets rained down on their unit, she let these wings be seen. Her blade too. She let the pianist compose a tune. She let the poet write some accompanying verses. She let them sing the song to the rest of the company, with only one complaint.

“He is a she.” This revelation made the soldiers’ jaws drop even more than the supernatural armor. Figures. “Men shouldn’t have all the glory.”

But the story of Honoré Côte—Battlefield Angel—spread quickly after that. Trench to trench. Unit to unit. Fast as a fuse, trailing all the way back to the City of Light.

As far as curses went, being a necklace was fairly boring.

The worst part—aside from the initial spell cast by Rasputin to squish Sylvie of a Single Name down to the size of a thumbnail—was the fact her nose itched yet she couldn’t lift a finger to scratch it. She was so thoroughly trapped in the charm that she could not even blink. She’d been forced to watch the fluttering cobwebs on the ceiling of the Caveau, then a tumble over the table, then Rafe’s blood-crusted face staring down at her in agony. This went shaky when the thief’s hand trembled, turning him into a blur of red. She heard voices but not words; it was all an underwater gargle. And then she was in a pocket.

The next face that leaned in to hers belonged to a Sanct.

The Fisherman of the Moon!

Of course, I’m nefarious jewelry now. Sylvie wanted to laugh. She couldn’t, of course. She couldn’t stick her tongue out either while the ragpicker examined her with his jeweler’s loupe, same as he’d done with Honoré’s dragon ring. His frown was just as grim as it had been then. His bronze masque glittered, but nothing happened.

Sylvie stayed stuck.

Her nose itched for a long, long while. She had no idea how long, only that the Fisherman of the Moon’s winter coat got shed, and his eyes became more weathered each time they looked through the loupe, each time his shine could not break Rasputin’s curse.

And then, one evening, it did.

A lightning crack broke through the charm, and Sylvie spilled out, arms, legs, earth on her knees. Orange fur appeared there too, as Marmalade rushed to greet her with a wild yowl. An entire chorus of meows followed, and she looked up to see a throng of lamplit eyes—orange and green and blue. The latter belonged to Fable, who was perched protectively on a stack of Sylvie’s fairy books, and for a dizzy moment, she wondered why the cat was sitting in a mausoleum instead of her bookstore. Why was the Fisherman of the Moon’s handcart parked outside the scrolling doors? Why was the Sanct himself sitting by the edge of Honoré’s mattress with a smile on his beaten bronze face?

“Welcome back, daydreamer,” he said, brushing his gloved hands.

“I didn’t exactly go anywhere,” Sylvie muttered, scratching her nose just short of bloody. Then she began scratching Marmalade between the ears. The tom had clambered in her lap, his claws pricking through the fur coat that was far too warm for the air that now swelled through the tomb. It smelled like summer’s end—when drying dahlias were laid on the tops of graves.

“You’ve been to Russia, I’d wager. Was that not the Mad Monk’s curse I just cracked?”

Sylvie shuddered. Marmalade curled even closer to her chest, over her butterfly heart. It was still palpitating at the sight of Grigori Rasputin perched in the tsarevitch’s window, at the pain of her uprooted wings, at the growing understanding that their plan to steal the evil sorcerer’s heart had failed.

“What happened here?” She looked around the Enchantresses’ tomb again. “Where are Céleste and Honoré? Where’s Rafe?”

The Fisherman of the Moon cleared his throat, the way adults sometimes did when they had news they did not want to share. “Monsieur García brought you to me on the day we lost Paris.” He glanced toward the central stone, and that’s when Sylvie realized what most of the feral cats were sitting on: a glass casket. Inside lay La Fée Verte. Her masque was extinguished. Her wings were even more ruined than Sylvie’s.

When she saw them, she let out a small sob—sharp as those bones.

“It’s not what it looks like,” the Fisherman said quickly. “Her body is in stasis, same as you were, stuck just as she was when she was fished out of the Seine. I built this box after studying your charm for a while. Rasputin’s spell was easier to replicate than break.”

“So La Fée Verte’s just… sleeping?”

“She’s not here,” the Sanct explained. “She’s with your friend Honoré, gathering enough dreams to get back to her old self.”

Sylvie looked up at the rose-colored imaginings that shimmered over the mausoleum roof—a pale imitation of the Vault of Dreams. “Are they in the Quartier Secret?”

Marmalade huddled even closer to Sylvie’s chest.

“The salon’s gone,” the Fisherman whispered. “Terreur torched it. Same as my stall and Cabaret d’Ailes and Libris’s shop.”

Fable let out an ashen meow from the fairy book stack, and Sylvie paled at the translation. No. No! This wasn’t how their story was supposed to go… but she’d never know for sure now, would she? The book behind the glass case was no more. The store had burned fast—all its pages the perfect kindling—and Libris had gone back in to grab Lore, into a building full of flaming endings.

Neither of them had ever come out again.

Sylvie let out another sob. She thought of the lost look on Anastasia’s face—the withering betrayal as the grand duchess’s Enlightened memories faded. All that had been for nothing. The firebird’s flames had spread too far… and now the rest of Paris’s magic was lost too. The bookstore. The cabaret. The salon. She didn’t want to believe it, but belief didn’t matter so much now that Terreur had won.

“What—what about Céleste?” she asked in a wobbly voice. “Is she alive?”

The Fisherman of the Moon nodded. “She surrendered the dream to Terreur, according to Monsieur García. I hear she’s living with that devil at the Palais Garnier now.”

Several of the strays started meowing then, but Sylvie’s ears were ringing too much to translate. She looked over at Céleste’s old corner, where beaded opera gowns hung next to a spare set of moth wings.

“No…” Sylvie rasped. “Céleste wouldn’t.”

Would she?

“Even the best people can make the worst choices, when it comes to surviving,” the Fisherman said. “She’s not the only Sanct who joined Terreur. Plume did too—Wait, where are you going?”

Sylvie’s insides were roaring as she pulled the wings from the easel and rushed out of the mausoleum. It was late afternoon—nearly golden hour—but as she flew out over the streets, she felt a pall over the city. This grayness only got worse when she crossed the Seine. When she landed on the rooftops where La Fée Verte’s salon used to be…

It looked as if a bomb had been dropped. It felt that way too, when Sylvie fluttered into the crater. There were few things she recognized—a mannequin that looked too much like a body, a smashed aperitif flute, the skeleton of the spiral staircase that once had led to the Vault of Dreams. Nothing more glittered here. Leaves, it seemed, burned just as fast as pages. Just as hot as Anastasia’s double-headed firebird.

A third sob bubbled up in Sylvie’s throat.

She knelt in the ruins, cursing herself for being so careless. Honoré had been right; she’d let the princess see too much. It was Sylvie’s fault they’d gotten caught. Her fault Céleste had been forced to make such a horrible choice. Her fault everything here was ashes…

Well, perhaps not everything.

Something was squirming through the long-cooled cinders by Sylvie’s knees. She kept thinking of firebirds, as she reached for it, those phoenixes who were born again after burning. That legend had been one of Céleste’s favorites—her eyes always twinkled with the telling as she’d tucked the youngest Enchantress into bed.

But the thing Sylvie pulled from the ashes wasn’t shining at all.

It twisted on her palm.

Terrible.

Wonderful.

She wasn’t sure. It looked identical to the idea she’d seen in La Fée Verte’s memory. Exactly like the vision that had been ripped from the evil sorcerer’s head. But… that didn’t make sense… unless…

Oh!

“Always have a backup plan.” Sylvie laughed, thinking of the lesson Céleste had recited to her over and over before every single one of their cons. Of course, the oldest Enchantress hadn’t walked into the Caveau des Terreurs without a contingency. Or a forgery. That was what she must have handed the heartless sorcerer…

A damn good forgery.

Sylvie’s laugh faded as she looked back over the wreckage. It vanished altogether when she saw a figure perched on one of the nearby rooftops, shadow stretching around his shoulders, gold glimmering from his neck. No! Sylvie scrambled, kicking up a cloud of black ash. She couldn’t get caught again. She was sick at the thought of getting turned back into jewelry and taken to Terreur—much less holding his real idea. Sylvie didn’t exactly know what Céleste had planned, what kind of game the other Enchantress was playing over in the haunted halls of the Palais Garnier, but she wasn’t about to sabotage those efforts a second time.

Her masque flashed—furious and fuchsia.

Shadows dropped from the rooftops.

The man’s wings twisted back into a four-legged beast. His lips were drawn in not quite a smile. “Don’t get too shiny on me, Magpie! It’s dangerous to be so bright in Paris nowadays!”

The chains around Rafe García’s neck winked when he said this. Not a saint necklace, Sylvie realized. The rogue artist had taken the double chains of his pocket watch and fused them together so that the winged hourglass lay against his bare skin. This looked a touch paler than usual. Not quite as porcelain as Céleste’s complexion had been last summer, but there was a similar fragility. Sylvie figured she shouldn’t hug him too hard, but she did run to his side, her arms and wings flapping.

“Rafe!”

His full smile surfaced then. His fox did a small spin. “It’s good to see you too, Sylvie. Outside that necklace, especially.”

“What are you doing here?”

“The Whisper Network warned me you’d bolted for the Quartier Secret, so I’ve come to take you where it’s safe. Or… do you mean here on this earthly plane?” He paused, his fingers tracing the relic that hung from his neck. “That’s a tale we don’t have time for, at the moment. We’re too exposed.”

“Can’t you stop time?” Sylvie pointed out.

“Cheeky as ever, I see.” Rafe’s shadow stilled when he caught sight of the gray thread writhing in her palm. “I see you’ve managed to dig up a secret too.”

“Céleste is tricking Terreur, isn’t she? She’s planted something else in his head!”

A curt nod. “I’ll explain everything when we reach the bakery.”

“The bakery?”

Another nod. The fox shadow swirled around the pair, cloaking them, as Rafe jerked his chin at the unsettled ash. “I’d leave that nightmare here, if I were you.”