Chapter 44
Full Circle
For the first time in thirty-four years, Île du Carnaval had stopped drifting. The island stayed still on Sylvie’s map too—right past the bend in the Seine, where Gustav Eiffel’s tower rose over the water, flying France’s tricolor flag from its radio antenna. She’d found herself staring at the monument at odd moments throughout that afternoon, pausing her preparations just long enough to remember Céleste’s scheme to sell the structure for scrap metal. Or the time Sylvie had flown to the top to show Anastasia the secrets of her city… when she’d tried to explain the carnival’s empty tents.
They were no longer so empty.
The League of Imaginers had been hard at work getting ready for the evening, taming the island’s wild vines and its animals too. Sylvie had harvested an entire basket of silver apples to lure the wooden creatures back to their carousel, and now the carnival’s crowning jewel had returned to its former glory, turning to the calliope’s version of “The Battlefield Angel.” Pegasi spun at the center of the tents, though not all of them stayed there, much to their riders’ delight. They trotted off their stands and wandered through the festivities. Past the tent of the Frivolous Prince, where you might walk out with a blooming flower crown or a foxtail. Around the miniature racetrack game where Duchess d’Uzès handed out brightly colored wigs to the winning cars’ drivers. Through a menagerie of rainbow-scaled boas and leopards made of snow and a blue elephant, of course. There were parrots too—reciting lines of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poetry. If you stopped and listened long enough, a saying might stick to you, like a tattoo.
If your carousel horse kept going, you might find yourself riding through the wilds of some famous painter’s mind. Or you might decide to try out life as an acrobat, with the wings Désirée was exchanging for wishes. The skies were busy though. Green songbirds swirled just as they did in the poster. Sylvie’s butterflies were there too. Some even fluttered as high as the monument on the opposite shore. No one who’d seen Rafe’s advertisement and made up their mind to go would get lost…
La Fée Verte had helped Sylvie weave Enlightenment spells into the ink so that anyone who stopped long enough and read the poster all the way to the end would see where to go.
They’ll probably smell it too. Nicolas Stohrer’s booth sat close to the entrance, offering cloud crème éclairs and bonbons with a firework filling. There were macarons too. Sylvie’s favorite. Yet she hadn’t so much as touched them. Her stomach was too fluttery. Her eyes kept drifting back to the Eiffel Tower, its scrap metal now lit a glowing pink.
What’s the point of our power if we hide it?
They certainly weren’t hiding anymore.
“Good turnout, no?” Rafe appeared by her ticket seller’s stand, nodding at the roll of ADMIT ONE tickets Sylvie was holding. It was significantly shorter than it had been at the start of the evening. Beside it lay a large pile of imaginings. Silver, brass, gold, gold, gold…
There were even more stuffed inside Sylvie’s pockets.
“Aren’t you supposed to be putting on a shadow-puppet show?” she asked.
“I took a break.” He shrugged. “Not many people were coming to see it anyway. I can’t blame them: Paris has had enough of shadows.” Rafe stared over the lily pad bridge that connected Île du Carnaval to the opposite shore. His eyes widened.
Sylvie looked out over the water too.
Céleste! Oh, what a terrible and beautiful sight she was, dressed in red. She looked ready to attend a masquerade ball, with her hair swept back and her masque whispering across her face. She didn’t seem to be carrying a heart though… Her hands clenched the sides of her carmine gown as she crossed the river, marching straight past Sylvie’s ticket booth, over Rafe’s shadow, all the way to the carousel.
She was not alone.
The rest of Terreur’s disciples had arrived with her, their dark wings slashing over the Eiffel Tower. Sylvie’s insides twisted even more as they ripped through her butterflies. She felt the insects fade and fall. Gray as ash. Gray as Céleste’s eyes when Terreur landed at her side. The wooden pegasi spooked at the sorcerer’s nearness, tearing off into the neon jungles of the painters’ tent. Much of the crowd followed, leaving wigs and éclair wrappers in their wake. The calliope music came to a stop with the merry-go-round, and an eerie silence fell over the carnival.
The hungry man looked around the littered grounds.
“Is this all?” His voice slithered along the tent flaps, his eyes narrowing at the songbirds perched on the big top. “I believe I was promised a show. A chance to see La Fée Verte and her Battlefield Angel one last time? No?”
Sylvie crept out of the ticket booth, quiet as a cat. She didn’t even dare to breathe. It was difficult to see Céleste—the oldest Enchantress was surrounded by Apaches. Sylvie recognized a few. Yellow Boots was there, only now he didn’t have his pretty gold gun. He wore far more saints around his neck than the young man next to him. Honoré’s brother… the boy looked uneasy. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists, balling them up even tighter when the Battlefield Angel stepped out of the largest tent.
Sylvie released a single breath.
Céleste let go of her gown.
Even Terreur hesitated.
Honoré was fully armed, the dragon sheathing her from neck to toe. She held her sword of dreams aloft, and as its light met her silver masque, her very pupils seemed to glow. Even brighter, when La Fée Verte came out to stand beside her.
“You’ll have to pay first.” As Honoré’s voice rang out, the rest of the surrounding tents started to open.
Frost-clawed leopards sat next to alley cats. Jean Cocteau was dressed in an airy kimono—paired with a strand of pearls and his sharpest horns. The Fisherman of the Moon held a rusted tin can. Duchess d’Uzès stood by her finished statue, a hammer and chisel in hand. There was an entire company of artists from La Ruche guarding the painters’ tent with dripping brushes. Rafe García, in turn, guarded them. His fox was now as large as a horse. Nicolas Stohrer had stepped in front of the drawbridge, and Désirée winged her way to the top of the carousel.
And on the tightrope?
Fire.
Fire that belonged to the largest double-headed bird Sylvie could conjure.
It did not burn with rage, the way Anastasia’s had. No. It flickered with the immense love Sylvie felt as she looked out over this gathering. With the jagged pieces of loss—shaped like parents and a princess and a bookseller. With the way her heart kept beating around these things, making room for more. For hope.
The story isn’t over yet.
She kept skirting the tents, trying to get closer to Céleste, trying to see where the oldest Enchantress was hiding Terreur’s heart. Did that dress have pockets? Was it tucked up her sleeve? No, Céleste seemed to be reaching past this. Her hand wandered upward…
“Pay?” Terreur’s laughter rang across the grounds. Sylvie’s firebird flickered. “What? Do you really believe you can take a thought and banish me again?” A shadow uncoiled from him, thick as a kraken’s tentacle, and whipped toward La Fée Verte. Honoré’s wings spread out to stop it with a burst of sparks. When she swung her sword down, the shadow was severed. It writhed for a moment before melting back into the ground. Two more shadow tentacles sprang out from Terreur’s masque in its place. “Do you think one pathetic song can give you enough power to fight my war? I am blood upon blood. I am endless. You are clowns. Fools.” Both the dark ropes twisted back and grabbed Gabriel by the ankles. They twined up the young man’s legs and sent him marching forward. They coiled down his arms and forced his fists to reach for Honoré. “Your dreams will die with you. Your lives will mean nothing.”
Honoré tried to sidestep her brother, but another black shadow tentacle was unspooling toward La Fée Verte. When her armored wing went to block it, Gabriel grabbed the silver feathers, pulling them into a molten mess up his own arm.
Sylvie was close enough to stab the tentacle that reached for La Fée Verte with one of her own dreams. Terreur snarled as the shadow dissolved, and when his gaze landed on Sylvie, she felt his strength. His endlessness. She saw the teeth that broke stars and souls and knew he’d eat the rest of her name—given the chance.
Sylvie chose to look past this.
Her eyes found Céleste’s.
The oldest Enchantress wore a strange expression. She was smiling as she pulled the comb from her hair, but it wasn’t the grin she used when she told the twist in her bedtime stories. It was not a happily ever after.
She gripped the comb in her right hand.
With her left, she signaled. A small wave. A flutter of the fingers. The sign the Enchantresses used to send Sylvie off to bed, if a con went on too long or too late. Goodnight, ma rêveuse, it meant. Sweet dreams.
Sylvie understood then.
It was too much love, too much loss. Her firebird roared as Céleste turned the sterling teeth inward… The comb wasn’t Terreur’s heart after all. It was a weapon. A weapon sinking deep into the oldest Enchantress’s chest.
Céleste Artois did not want to die. This was the reason she’d made her deal with the devil in the first place and why she’d lasted so long by his side—it was all Terreur saw when he looked at her. The liar. The taker. The woman who’d do anything in her power to survive.
She was this, certainly. She’d tried her best to think of loopholes, a way to kill Terreur without sharing his fate, but there was no getting around the fact she had to stab herself to defeat him. If Céleste tried to remove the heart from her chest beforehand, he might get suspicious. He might take it back.
There were no saints to save her either.
She couldn’t risk Terreur’s heart healing. Her cut needed to be as clean as possible. Deep too, though she still wasn’t sure she’d have the strength to plunge the comb far enough into her chest. It was sharper than a cheese knife, yes, but it wasn’t as neat as the blades Honoré had taught her to stab old flour sacks with. Nor was Céleste full of straw, the way those had been.
She was flesh.
She was bone.
She was hearts.
And Céleste would only have one chance to pierce through these things. There could be no hesitation, or Terreur would turn her into a husk… He would take everything that made her her. Tiger clouds and hours bent over canvases and kisses stolen between dusk-covered sheets, and, oh, if she could only go back to that last night with Rafe, if she could only pause by the ticket booth and tell him the truth: How much she loved him. How much this hurt. How she was damned, but the rest of the carnival wouldn’t be, if she steeled herself.
She hoped the show would go on after tonight. The Carnaval des Merveilles was even more vivid than its posters—with so many swan boats and that wondrous merry-go-round and all the tents folding open.
She wanted so badly to step inside.
To stay.
But the sight of Honoré—holding that sword and looking so goddamn glorious—helped Céleste reach for her own blade. Every défense dans la rue lesson they’d ever had together came rushing back. Every watchword. Every shared wheel of Camembert. Every ounce of gold they’d stolen and buried.
You’ll have to pay.
Terreur was laughing. Distracted. He’d seized control of Gabriel, and soon he would try to take Honoré’s armor. His prize was in sight, and Céleste was not, so she grabbed the ouroboros with shaking fingers.
More moments came rushing back as she locked eyes with Sylvie. Croissants under pillows and making up myths to match constellations. Oh, just one more story? Please? Please? But Céleste could see Sylvie’s last birthday candle stuck in that tarte au chocolat, the memory itself twisting from the girl’s head, floating between her and Terreur like a strand of smoke before vanishing into his masque.
He was starting to devour the youngest Enchantress.
That.
That was the all the strength Céleste Artois needed.
Flames in her chest. Fire from the skies. Everything went molten as the comb sank in. Her knees buckled too. She spilled to the ground, into its long, long shadows, and waited for death to take her…
…
…
Darkness swept around Céleste, and she could still feel heat pressing down on the crown of her head. Hell really is full of fire and brimstone! She must not have spent enough time confessing her sins to Père Lachaise’s cemetery statues…
A laugh escaped her.
A hand landed on her shoulder.
“What is it you find so funny, mon amour? I, for one, am not amused at this wanton waste of my lifetime.”
She lifted her eyes to see Rafe. Oh, Rafe. Once upon a time, she’d thought he looked like Orpheus, standing at the edge of rue des Ombres, but she’d never imagined he actually would follow her down into hell. No, Céleste realized, as she took in the whole of him. The other thief knelt at her side, clutching his pocket watch, stealing one last moment for her. The rest of the carnival remained frozen. Sylvie’s firebird had exploded overhead, and if not for Rafe’s shadow wrapped around them, Céleste might have been too blinded to see Honoré trying to twist away from her brother or the menagerie animals leaping at the Apaches or the look of devastation on Terreur’s face. The bastard had clearly realized she’d stabbed his heart, but Rafe had stopped time before death could truly take hold.
“Is that what you think this is?” she echoed the other thief’s ice palace words, shivering a little, despite her burning breast. The wound there was agony. It made her words tremble even more. “A waste?”
All the blood drained from Rafe’s own face when he saw her chest, making his teardrop tattoo that much starker. His hand tightened on her shoulder. “Céleste, mon amour, what have you done?”
“You have to let me go, Rafe,” she managed. “Let me die.”
“After all this?” His pocket watch dangled like a portent between them. His eyes flashed gold. His fingers tensed. “No. No.”
“I don’t want to—” Céleste choked. It was everything she could do not to look down at the comb in her chest, but she sure as shit could feel the prongs. The pain wasn’t quite as intense as she’d expected. She could still speak, for one thing. She could still tell Rafe all the things she’d kept locked so deeply inside over these past eight months. “I never wanted to. If it weren’t for you, I’d be buried already, but you took my bloody hand after The Rite of Spring and showed me all the dreams Paris had to offer. All the dreams I thought I’d lost. Because of you I finally did something worth a damn…” She took another shuddering breath. “I love you, Rafe García. Every sliver of stardust. Every last shadow. Never forget that.”
His face looked so beautiful, even crumpled. “I can’t. I— You’re my life, Céleste.”
“And I’m Terreur’s death,” she said, with such a heavy, blistering chest. “He hid his heart over mine. I had to stab both.”
Rafe looked back down at her wound. “Oh shit,” he whispered.
“I know—”
Again, his fingers tightened. “No, Céleste, look at the comb!”
It was difficult to tell the difference between her blood and her dress, though Céleste supposed this was a good thing. It made the ugliness easier to look at. The comb though… she had trouble wrapping her mind around it. The circular serpent symbol jutted too far out. The prongs beneath were crooked and warped, bent by the sheer force of her blow.
“That bastard’s heart is too hard,” Rafe hissed. “It didn’t go through.”
He was right, she realized, as she pulled the comb free. Its teeth hadn’t been sharp enough. They’d made a mess of her flesh, but they hadn’t scratched the black stone below. Nor had they bitten into her own heart…
Céleste wanted to laugh again, but it was hard to be happy about her miracle.
She was not dying.
And neither was Terreur.
The Sanct’s stare was abysmal. His darkness was coming for her. Céleste realized, with a sick lurch in her gut, that it wasn’t Rafe’s fox surrounding the pair, but every other shadow from the carnival, whipped into submission by Terreur’s masque. Even her own silhouette was beginning to bend back, like a fingernail caught in a doorjamb. Once the flying hourglass on Rafe’s pocket watch ran out of sand, they were well and truly fucked.
“Shit,” she said, gripping the comb in her red, red hand. “What do we do?”
“I can’t hold on to the moment much longer.” Rafe coughed. His lips matched her dress—and she began to realize what this spell was costing him. “Try to reach Honoré’s sword. That might work—shit! It’s slipping!”
The shadows around them shuddered. Céleste stood and tried to push toward Honoré. The other Enchantress was only a few meters away, but with each new step, more of the scene started to move. Different dreams danced across the broadsword. The silver of the dragon ring crept up Gabriel’s arm. Sylvie’s firebird flickered at the edges, and the flaps of the open tents began to flutter.
Céleste felt her true heart do the same as she reached for Honoré’s blade.
The pocket watch’s spell snapped.
Terreur’s magic stormed through the carnival. Céleste’s own shadow caught her by the ankles and clawed up her dress, then threw her into the carousel with such force that one of its mirrors smashed. Shards pierced her wings. Kept piercing them. She was spread-eagled against the broken glass, her arms splayed as wide as that crucifix that had once hung in her childhood bedroom.
The devil was coming for her.
“You…” His voice was charred. Even his footprints were black, his steps singeing the grass as he approached the carousel. “You backstabbing bitch.”
Front, really, Céleste thought grimly.
She’d never dropped the comb. Terreur’s rage bent around her fingers, around the ouroboros, so hard that fresh blood braided down her wrist.
“You thought you had me, didn’t you?” Terreur looked from the weapon to Céleste’s raw chest wound. “It seems I’m too far gone—”
A frost leopard lunged at the Sanct, but its claws melted into a puddle, along with the rest of the imagining. Other animals from the menagerie tangled with the Apaches. Several imaginers did too. Jean Cocteau had removed his pearls and was using them to beat back a group of Terreur’s disciples from the painters’ tent. Duchess d’Uzès, with her hammer and chisel, had joined him.
The other Sancts were rallying against Terreur. Masque rays shot through the night like spotlights—copper, ruby, silver, gold, pink, pink, pink. Sylvie’s magic shone the brightest. Dreams of every size and shade spilled to the ground as the girl turned out her pockets. She stepped into their light and joined hands with La Fée Verte, who then found the Fisherman’s gloved hand, who linked arms with Désirée, who grabbed the café Sanct and Nicolas Stohrer.
Terreur did not seem bothered by this.
His boots steamed through the mud, past a horrified Honoré, who had locked arms with Gabriel, too trapped in her armor to join the other Sancts, much less protect Céleste.
“Robespierre’s spell has worked even better than I hoped… Nothing can touch me. Not a comb. Not the Battlefield Angel. Not even a liar as twisted as you.” He halted by the empty carousel poles and spat. “My heart will never bleed again. But yours, Mademoiselle Artois… shall we see how well it fares outside your chest?”
The shadows squeezed around her fist, turning the comb inward.
Céleste tried to fight.
Her muscles were no match for Terreur’s will. Her masque wasn’t much better.
“You think a few weeks playing vulture on the battlefield can stop me?” He laughed.
No. Céleste understood how powerful he was. She’d seen how many lives he’d destroyed and knew that was only a fraction of what Terreur was capable of, but she could also see Sylvie gathering the other Sancts’ magic and feeding it straight into her firebird so that its wings grew and grew and became the whole sky.
The imagining might have grown even bigger, if not for Rémy Lavigne.
The gangster threw himself at Sylvie.
The youngest Enchantress landed on her back, her arms flailing as her wings beat against the ground. Her firebird dove off the high wire—not at Rémy, but Terreur. Flames engulfed the evil sorcerer. They were nothing like the fires he’d used to destroy the windmill and the salon and the bookstore. They reminded Céleste more of the opal lamps that had once lit the way to the Quartier Secret. They were burning desires and long-stoked hopes and chocolate melting on the tongue and golden spires on the horizon and all the beauty that made life worth living.
They seemed to hurt Terreur.
He let out a scream, and his shadow tethers dropped. Céleste fell too, gasping with pain as she landed on the floor of the carousel. She tossed the comb as far from herself as she could and started digging through her wound with her fingers. Terreur was bullshitting about his heart. He had to be. If she could just rip the goddamn thing out of her chest and get back to Honoré’s sword—
The carnival grounds were chaos. Spells shot across tents, and an army of cats had rushed to Sylvie’s defense, Marmalade leading the charge. Rafe was trying to punch his way toward the carousel, seizing Apaches by their scarves and wings, then tossing them to the ground. There was more blood on his face and a look just as red—as red as love and loss—when his stare found Céleste’s. She stumbled off the merry-go-round, her fingers slipping. She could feel the cold hardness of Terreur’s heart, just behind her ribcage. She could see the sorcerer—still standing—between her and everyone she held dear.
Their firebird had done its best.
Most of the flames had faded, though a few pale tongues continued to dance up Terreur’s sleeves. His clothes had not been singed by the enchanted fire, but his skin no longer looked like gypsum. There was an ashen quality to it, a flakiness usually exclusive to overcooked fish. His cheeks had gone gray, the color of those awful trench bodies that had been eaten by rats. His flesh too was coming off in tatters. Sloughing from Terreur’s jaw, until she could see all thirty-two of his teeth. Peeling from his chest, until Céleste could see his hollowed-out ribs.
His stare held the same terrible emptiness.
She wasn’t sure if Terreur’s eyes were still there—his masque had grown too thick to tell—but she knew all that power, all his fury, was now focused on her. She knew there was no stopping him. Terreur used no shadows this time when he seized her, merely his own skeletal hand. Bones locked around Céleste’s wrist and pulled her blood-soaked fist from her chest. Kept pulling. Blood began wicking off her fingers, onto his. It vanished from Christine Leroux’s costume too, and she wondered if this was how the opera singer had felt in her final moments.
Not enough.
Never enough.
“I did promise that fantasies would not save you.” Terreur’s flesh grew back over his teeth, but she could still see them bared in a snarl of a smile. “You should have listened.”
Honoré Côte had been here too many times before.
At the mouth of an alleyway, a spoiled bowl of milk by her feet.
At the edge of a fireplace, next to Maman’s ice-cold fingers.
At the center of the Caveau, clutching her father’s bloody ring.
At the rock bottom of Paris, fighting her brother for the same damn thing.
She’d hoped it would be different this evening. Simpler. Stab the bad guy, save the day.
She should have known better.
Gabriel held fast to their father’s ring, and the dragon, in turn, held her. Not because the metal had stiffened but because it was slipping, slipping away, and if Honoré did not use her entire heart and soul to stop the silver, she knew Lucien Durand’s heirloom would swallow them all. If she let go now, everyone she’d ever loved would be lost. Including Gabriel. Terreur would use her brother to kill until the entire carnival was dead. Or the dragon ring entombed him.
So the Battlefield Angel stood helpless, despite all her power, watching their plan fall to pieces. Céleste, stabbing herself, appearing suddenly at Honoré’s side, then just as suddenly getting smashed into the carousel. The speech. The struggle for the comb. The firebird.
She’d felt another flicker of hope when the imagining attacked Terreur.
She felt a flicker through the dragon too, as the sorcerer’s shadow strings around Gabriel dissolved. Her brother was in control of himself again, staring across the ring at Honoré. It wasn’t hatred she saw there. She recognized her little brother’s fear well enough, felt a surge of it herself as she watched Rémy Lavigne struggling with Sylvie. She knew what it was like, to be pinned beneath him, to smell his rotten breath, to thank heaven for your knife. Only, Sylvie didn’t have a blade—
Come, oh hunters mine! We must save Sylvie’s skin from the carver! She recognized Marmalade’s yowl. The orange tomcat launched at Rémy with a lionlike boldness, just as he had in Belleville, only this time there was an army of felines with him. Hissing and spitting and scratching.
Perhaps there’s some poetic justice in this shitty world after all, Honoré thought, as she watched Rémy’s yellow boots disappear beneath a mountain of fur. Sylvie had managed to slip away, holding a fistful of the butcher’s saint necklaces.
“That’s what happened to our kitten?” Gabriel’s question wavered across the silver. Through it. He must have picked up on her memory the same way. “Rémy? I spent all these years believing his lies about you, while he… Shit. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were too young, Gabriel.”
“So were you,” he said.
A sob surged in her throat at that, and her brother’s face crumpled. Dozens of other memories flickered through the dragon’s scales: All their father’s rage. All the hurt Honoré had tried so hard to hold inside herself and how it had spilled out anyway…
“I understand now, Honoré,” her brother whispered.
The dragon coiled up Gabriel’s arm, and she felt flashes from his life: How alone he’d felt after she’d fled, so alone that he’d kept sleeping in the coat closet. Rémy had taken the boy under his wing—there had been darkness there, yes, but safety too, safety in knowing you were the worst thing that could happen.
Honoré knew this feeling well.
She knew too, the horror that followed it.
The Terreur.
“You were right, ma sœur,” Gabriel muttered. “He’s fucking dangerous.”
“Glad you’ve finally come around,” Honoré replied.
But it was too little, too late. The imaginers’ firebird had faded. The sorcerer was skeletal—he might have fit into the catacomb walls but for the fact he was lurching forward. Grabbing Céleste. A heavy numbness settled over Honoré as she watched her friend’s blood disappear into Terreur’s body.
He was using the Enchantress’s flesh to restore his.
I am blood upon blood.
I am endless.
A few feet away, Honoré could see the hair comb in the mud, broken by the sorcerer’s heart. He was right. Robespierre’s spell had worked too well. Terreur had cut out every piece of his humanity so he might live forever—he was too far gone, and now he would keep going and going and going until there was nothing left.
The teeth of the comb were so twisted, so awful, that Honoré almost didn’t see their ornament. Even when she did, it took her a moment to recognize the shape. A circle? Yes, but also more. The silver had been hammered into the shape of a snake…
Beware the serpents that eat their own tails.
Honoré sucked in a sharp breath.
A crypt of gilded skulls—each stacked over the other—shuddered through the dragon. Gabriel straightened at this memory. More followed. The Fisherman of the Moon standing at her bedside, diagnosing her relic: Power is a path. It is one choice after another after another. 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. Said as rotten teeth rattled like dice in the ragpicker’s fist.
“Are you sure?” her brother whispered.
“No,” she answered.
It was a gamble, certainly. Honoré had no way of knowing if this choice was the right one, but what else could they do? Nothing? She and Gabriel could encase themselves in the relic, true, but then they’d be stuck at the center of Île du Carnaval forever, Fear’s Bastards displayed next to the duchess’s armored angel…
Gabriel’s hold on the dragon started to slip. “I don’t want that,” he said.
Honoré understood. Her side of the heirloom was shrinking too—down to her middle finger with its misshapen bone. So much of her life had been marked by Lucien Durand, even after he was gone, and she couldn’t stand the thought of her death belonging to him too.
No.
She wanted a brighter future.
A better legacy.
So Honoré turned toward the newest Terreur. Gabriel did too. Her brother’s hand rose alongside hers, and they threw the heirloom together. They let go of their father’s power and watched the dragon soar. It was a mesmerizing sight—the silver unspooled like an aurora through the night sky. The ring arced over the mud puddles and the bent comb, shining in Céleste’s eyes, brighter and brighter, until it spilled onto Terreur’s head. The relic shimmered on his skull, bending into the shape of a crown. The sorcerer released Céleste, his hands touching the metal, his gaze finding the shattered carousel mirror, where his image was cast back hundreds upon hundreds of times. Almost infinitely…
Honoré felt unshelled.
She felt everything. The mud at her feet. An ash-flecked breeze on her feathered wings. She felt La Fée Verte’s songbird land on her shoulder, then felt Gabriel’s hand slipping into hers, holding tight. She squeezed back even harder and fixed her grip on her sword.
There would be no running this time.
Terreur turned. He had an eerie smile on his face. Rictus, considering the shape of his skull. Silver began to drip down the jagged sutures, over his triumphant expression. The dragon gathered its head at the bridge of the sorcerer’s nose, bristling at the carnival-goers. “You fools! Now I am—”
The dragon never let him finish this sentence.
Honoré’s crooked fingers locked with Gabriel’s as the silver slid into Terreur’s mouth. Over his lips, his teeth, his tongue, washing down his throat as fine as any wine. There was plenty of room for the relic to settle—Honoré caught flashes of fangs between the sorcerer’s ribcage, exactly where his heart should be. It had been so long gone that he did not need to breathe, true, but this didn’t stop the Sanct from flailing. He grasped at his face, his skeletal fingers coming back with beads of molten silver. It didn’t stay molten. Once the metal crawled up his arms and over his chest and down his legs, the relic did what it was designed to do. For all his power, Terreur couldn’t stop the ring from swallowing him whole. It was his power. His thirst for blood upon blood. His endless hunger.
All turned back upon himself.
Silver encased the sorcerer. Arms, legs, everything froze, except for the scales that kept sliding, sliding into his mouth.
Honoré had escaped by the skin of her teeth.
She stood there in disbelief, waiting, waiting. But Terreur did not move, not even when La Fée Verte flew to Honoré’s side and cupped her face in her hands. Honoré marvelled at how warm their flesh was, at how incredibly alive she felt.
“Are you all right, my dame?” the Sanct asked breathlessly.
Honoré felt breathless too.
Not for fear.
He was gone. Truly, gone. Terreur was no longer able to touch the woman she loved, but Honoré could. Her hands felt so light as she lifted them to La Fée Verte’s beaming face. What if, what if, what if it all worked out splendidly well?
What then?
“I’ve never been better,” she said with a laugh.
Sylvie let out a short laugh too as she marched over to the carnival’s newest statue and gave it a kick. Terreur’s gilded form fell face-first into the mud.
“There!” the youngest Enchantress exclaimed.
Most of the Apaches scattered at this. It seemed their loyalty to the sorcerer was mostly shadows—and the ring had severed all the strings holding the gangsters in place. Rémy had fled too, pursued by half the feral cats in Paris. Marmalade had chosen to stay at Sylvie’s side, trailing the girl as she kept walking through the mud toward Céleste.
Céleste… oh, it hurt Honoré’s chest to see hers. That meaty mess, looking even rawer for lack of blood. Past strips of torn flesh, she saw the heart they’d so long hunted. It looked just as black as it had through the keyhole of Christine Leroux’s jewelry box, only now it was locked behind her friend’s ribs. Honoré wanted to rush over and comfort the oldest Enchantress, but Rafael had already beaten her there. He held Céleste in his arms, to his own chest, so close that the watch around his neck touched hers as well.
His eyes met Honoré’s.
She recognized that look all too well. The look of a drowning man hanging on to driftwood. She knew the pocket watch was buoying them both with its magic—otherwise Céleste would be going into shock from that ghastly wound. Had they been in the trenches, she would’ve been placed on a stretcher and left there.
As it was, the oldest Enchantress looked dazed, her gray eyes going in and out of focus as she stared toward the mud-spattered statue. “I’ll be damned.”
“Not if I can help it,” Rafael growled tenderly into her ear. “I’m not letting you go, Céleste Artois. I’ll stay here in the mud with you forever, if that’s what it takes.”
Honoré knelt next to them as well. The ouroboros glimmered by her filthy knee. As much damage as the comb had done to Céleste’s chest, they wouldn’t have won the battle without it. Honoré never would have surrendered her ring if she hadn’t seen that snake choking itself down.
“We’ll get you patched up, mon amie.” The injury was awful, but if it was halved, Honoré figured they both might be able to heal naturally. “First we’ve got to get that rock out of your chest.”
“You mean the evil sorcerer’s heart?” Sylvie leaned in to examine the open wound. In the girl’s lap, Marmalade growled. “You’re right!” she replied to the tomcat. “He must have loved nothing… it’s so small. In fact, I think it’s just small enough…” A pink butterfly left Sylvie’s masque and slipped through Céleste’s ribs. It came back out with a dark pebble curled in its proboscis. The stone must have been far heavier than it looked, because the insect dropped it straight into the mud only a foot or so from the Enchantresses.
The Fisherman of the Moon scooped up the heart with a rusted tea tin, pulling out his monocle and eyeing the bottom of the container warily while Sylvie’s butterfly settled back into her masque.
“There!” the youngest Enchantress declared. “Now we can heal Céleste! Wait—how do you heal someone without killing a person trapped in a painting?”
“I’ll take as much of her wound as I can,” Honoré said, though she was aware there was no more dragon silver to cover her chest. It was just as exposed as everyone else’s. “If enough of my flesh fills hers, she won’t get sepsis as soon as Rafael releases her back into time.”
The man in question fixed her with his lost-at-sea stare. “Honoré, you and I both know that’s not the kind of injury you patch up with a sewing kit. It’s a fucking hole in her chest! If you ended up taking half of it, I’d be stuck holding both of you for the rest of our lives. Three gets a bit crowded… no offense.”
Honoré wasn’t offended, just desperate, as she looked into Céleste’s glassy eyes. Her hand trembled when she placed it just above the raw comb marks on her friend’s skin.
“But what if it’s three people sharing the wound?” Sylvie piped up. “Or even more? That way everyone would have only a little bit of pain. You don’t have to take all the hurt, Honoré.”
“Sylvie’s right,” La Fée Verte said over Honoré’s shoulder. Her hand settled there, softly. “Let me help you with this, my dame.”
“Me too!” Sylvie declared, as she handed her fistful of Rémy’s icons to the Fisherman of the Moon.
“No.” The word left Honoré automatically. “You can’t be the fourth person. You’re—”
Too young.
She would have said this, if not for Gabriel. Her brother had come to stand behind Sylvie. He stared down at Céleste and Rafael, his hands wandering to his neck. Honoré swallowed her words. No. None of them were so young anymore, but they all still had room to grow. Especially if Honoré was brave enough to take a step back.
“I’d offer to take Sylvie’s place,” Rafael said. “But my body won’t naturally heal unless I remove Flamel’s watch.”
The dried bloodstains around his lips made it clear what would happen in that instance. Rafael García had already given Céleste more than his fair share of life. “That’s all right,” Honoré told him. “Just… keep holding her.”
Céleste was watching them with all the fervor of a fever dream. Her white hair splayed over Rafael’s tunic—which he’d half ripped open to expose the watch. Her skin looked a little less chalky wherever it touched his, especially around the timepiece.
Honoré felt her own pulse tick-tocking at her throat.
She prayed their plan would work.
Meanwhile, Gabriel was removing his own chains. The three saint necklaces. He offered these to the Fisherman of the Moon. Honoré said nothing as Sylvie grabbed her brother’s hand and pulled him into their inner circle.
Your love binds you together, La Fée Verte had once said, for better or worse.
Honoré’s masque pulsed with these words. Their truth. She felt the coal of it over her own chest—warm, but not unbearable. She saw a pink stain bloom through Sylvie’s tunic. Gabriel’s striped shirt. La Fée Verte’s gown. It was much the same color as the new flesh that had come to cover Céleste’s wound. As well as the color that crept back into the oldest Enchantress’s cheeks.
She blinked, and the glassy sheen in her eyes fell away.
The circle broke, each one of them stepping back to look at their chests. It hurt, certainly, but Honoré’s new wound wasn’t deadly. She could cover it with gauze and forget about it. Well, perhaps not completely. All five of them would heal, but they would also scar, sharing this moment on their skin forever.
Céleste’s scar looked a little bit like a cupid’s ass… a heart over a heart. She patted the tender skin once, twice, with a look of disbelief. She scanned the circle, pausing not on Honoré or Rafael, but past them, where the Fisherman of the Moon stood. Saint necklaces dangled from one of the ragpicker’s hands, while he stared hard into that rusted tea tin.
“Can you destroy the heart?” she called to him.
The Fisherman shook his head. “It’s too mummified. A sword wouldn’t scratch this any more than that comb did,” he declared, before looking back at the mud-spattered dragon—a strange but fitting sarcophagus. “We should thank our lucky stars Honoré had her relic on hand.”
“Our stars, yes.” La Fée Verte looked up from her tender chest; her gaze wandered past the carousel, to where the fortune teller’s tent sat. Honoré could see a figure inside. “Though I’m beginning to believe luck had little to do with it…”
Madame Arcana emerged from the tent, holding three cards. The first and last time Honoré had seen the Sanct, she was dredging La Fée Verte’s fallen form from the river with a net of fates. To shift the currents. It sounded like a load of bullshit at the time—what good would a few snipped lifelines do? Honoré hadn’t had much patience for the woman’s riddles when La Fée Verte was splayed so limply against the quai.
She studied the Seer more carefully now.
The woman’s gown was still soaked with river water, dripping over her bare feet. The skin of her face remained dewy, her masque silver. There was no more fog over her eyes, however. They were blue. Blue as an ocean and just as deep. It was clear they’d seen many things.
“A tea tin? Ha!” she said, as she drew close to the Fisherman. “The last Terreur never did want me to read his leaves, but they were all shit…” Madame Arcana tossed her cards into the air. They fluttered over Terreur’s entombed body before landing faceup. Death rode a pale horse. The Fool traveled on foot—looking quite a lot happier than the Devil at his back. “They were shit upon shit,” the Seer repeated, with a piercing glance at Honoré. “There was only one way to break the cycle and start anew.”
“You didn’t think to tell us?” Honoré grunted.
“Some futures cannot be told, or they would cease to be,” the Seer said. “Had I warned La Fée Verte of this man’s hunger thirty years ago, she would have sent him away, and he would have stumbled across even deeper shadows…” A sigh left her. “There are many black mirrors out there, full of worlds where nothing is left to see. Our existence is so very fragile. We are tightropes and tapestries—the threads must be arranged carefully so they do not tangle.”
Honoré was having a hard enough time following what Madame Arcana was saying. She wasn’t the only one. Céleste and Rafael wore matching frowns. The Fisherman’s brow was wrinkled, and La Fée Verte’s birds looked more restless than normal.
“But we did it, right?” Sylvie asked. “We won?”
“I should say so,” the Seer answered.
“Good!” the girl chirped. “Then… what do we do now? Or are you not supposed to say?”
The fortune teller knelt over Terreur’s twisted form. “He shall hold himself prisoner, untouchable until the end of time. Toss his heart in a trash heap. Carry on this carnival.” She picked up the card that depicted the traveler. “To be a Fool is not such a bad thing… It represents fresh horizons.” Madame Arcana handed the card to Céleste. “There’s a new castle waiting for you, Mademoiselle Artois. You and your dizzy fox.”
“What about me?” Sylvie wondered. “Do I get a castle?”
The Seer simply smiled. Fresh lines creased her face.
Céleste had a few of those as well, as she considered the card in her hands. Her smile only grew as she turned toward Rafael. They were so close—his arms still around her—that their foreheads touched, and though they were not kissing, there was an intimacy to the moment that made Honoré focus intently on the shadow around them. A fox, again. Chasing his own tail in the slow-moving lights of the carousel. The calliope had started playing music once more, and wooden horses answered its call, stepping from the painters’ tent to take their place back on the carousel. Colors streaked their hoofprints, covering up the muddy marks of battle. A few of the guests who followed them stopped to see Terreur’s display—but in the way someone might examine a museum piece. He was art now. Ha! Honoré grinned at this. She smiled even more at the sight of a talking parrot perched on Jean Cocteau’s horn as he refastened his pearls and sashayed toward their group.
He paused by Céleste, offering a smattering of solo applause. “Well done, ma chère! Such drama! Such flair! I couldn’t have scripted it better myself. Though the outfit is…” The parrot on his horns squawked an obscenity. “Yes, well, I was going to say ‘dated.’ Never mind that crimson is not your color.”
“I don’t think she looks that terrible,” Rafael said.
“That’s because you are in love,” Jean replied. “Not to mention you took several blows to the head fighting off those gangsters. Anyone without a concussion can see that the red is washing out this poor young woman’s complexion. Come!” The Frivolous Prince plucked Céleste to her feet and guided the oldest Enchantress to his tent. “Let’s get you changed!”