Père Lachaise was home to some very unusual ghosts.
And now, a phantom.
The new tomb sat in the cemetery’s most overgrown corner, not far from the original Honoré Côte’s resting place. It was much less grand. There were no glass stars or scrolled iron doors. There almost hadn’t even been a name chiseled into the black stone. Paris’s memorial masons were swamped with epitaphs, especially since the German armies had been driven away from the city. France had won the Battle of the Marne—with a fleet of taxis, nonetheless—but the cost was high. Eighty-five thousand new gravestones. And counting.
It was tempting for Honoré to leave the sorcerer’s resting place anonymous: bury him, brush the dirt off her hands, and be done with it.
She chose to carve the truth instead.
Here Lies Terreur, Last of His Name
There was power in these words, not just because of the binding spell she infused into each letter, but for their very existence. What they marked.
He ended here.
No one would disturb this patch of earth. Certainly not the junior groundskeepers, who’d sworn off this section of the cemetery altogether. Honoré had rearranged some of her old booby traps to keep any lost mourners on their toes. There were other safeguards against those who might have darker intentions. Duchess d’Uzès’s Battlefield Angel stood over the grave, her sword planted in the ground, waiting. There were a good number of cats keeping an eye on the plot as well. If anyone started digging—above or below—Honoré would be the first to know.
She doubted this would happen.
The Apaches were no longer such a threat. Few of them wanted to go to war—magical or otherwise—so they returned to Belleville. Lying low with card games and a cobwebbed piano. Now that Gabriel was no longer there to play it, the instrument’s keys were dustier than ever. A sorry sight. But what had struck Honoré even more, on her last visit to the Caveau, was that there was neither hide nor hair of Rémy Lavigne. She supposed it was possible the gangster had left Paris and joined forces with the Mad Monk. Grigori Rasputin had more power than ever, now that Terreur was imprisoned. By all reports, his grip on Russia was as unyielding as its winter. The peasants the Fisherman of the Moon had freed from the icon necklaces had tales of the “holy man” that would send ice down anyone’s spine. Every single one had refused to go back to Petrograd. Why would they, when they found themselves sipping steaming cups of French tea beside a tent full of fire-breathing bears? When La Fée Verte herself had extended an invitation for them to stay and help build the carnival into something even brighter?
Rémy though…
His boots had been more mud than yellow leather when he’d fled. Most of the gleam had been in the eyes of the hunters tailing him. Their claws. Their teeth. Their tiger souls. It didn’t matter how small the cats were. Not when there were so damn many of them…
No, Honoré decided, as she glanced back at the tom sitting by her string of rusted bells, batting one with his paw. The grave is quite safe.
“This really is the perfect purgatory,” Rafael said, as a calico marched over to the freshly churned dirt and proceeded to desecrate it.
Shit upon shit.
The group around the grave watched with various levels of epicaricacy. They were a strange collection of mourners: no kerchiefs, no veils, no black whatsoever. Céleste’s masque had changed almost as fast as her gown—it now shone like the insides of a broken-open seashell. Gabriel’s temple had turned almost as silver as his sister’s after he’d sat down at the calliope and tried his hand at some new tunes. La Fée Verte and Sylvie were both brighter than ever, thanks to the growing popularity of the Carnaval des Merveilles. The decision to keep the carnival open had not been made lightly. Honoré knew how her other half worried about history repeating itself. She could see it in the way Verte kept reading the gravestone’s inscription.
“I can think of no better way for that bastard to spend all eternity,” Céleste agreed. “Endless tolling bells and cat piss.”
Gabriel kicked some of the soil. Honoré stared at the scuffed dirt—out of all the people gathered around this grave, her brother was the hardest to read. He felt like a native language she’d stopped speaking years ago. Like la langue verte. Faded, but never truly forgotten. She was just thankful she had a chance to talk to him again. Their conversations weren’t easy—how could they be, with all those missing years and what had come before?—but mon Dieu, it was better than fighting. Better to share their wounds than create more.
“What’s wrong, mon frère?” Honoré asked, hoping she was not the answer.
“Are we sure that fortune teller was telling the truth?” he ventured.
“She was right about Céleste getting a whole new castle,” Sylvie pointed out.
“Technically, Château de Bonnelles belongs to Duchess d’Uzès,” the oldest Enchantress reminded her. “Rafe and I will be more like artists-in-residence.”
A strange twist. Honoré knew things hadn’t exactly panned out the way Rafael García had once dreamed they would. She could still remember that boy, even after surrendering the dragon. But outside of Honoré and Gabriel, a part of him would always be lost. Not the fun kind of lost—not painting his way around Europe, like his younger self had planned. The Orient Express had suspended its services to make way for trains filled with wounded soldiers. A fraction of these would find their way to an estate in the north of France, where the grandiose halls of Duchess d’Uzès’s hunting lodge had been converted into a hospital.
The château would undergo an even deeper transformation, if everything went according to plan. The house would hold hidden halls. The grounds would harbor secret gardens. More than just flowers would bloom there…
Honoré knew all this not because she’d seen the future but because she’d handed a piece of it to Rafael. His idea of a magical artists’ colony had transformed during the time it spent serving as her sword. She was not sorry to break the blade apart. Not for this. Besides, she’d barely used the blade anyway. The look on the timeless man’s face when she offered him his dream was enough. Céleste stood grinning beside him. Even his teardrop tattoo shimmered.
“You know,” he said, after examining the idea, “on second thought, I’m not sure La Ruche is the right venue… so many of its artists are off getting shot to pieces anyway.”
Honoré remembered the men her armor’s wings had not reached: That farm boy with his belly full of lead. The bodies that Machiavelli had so cheerfully gnawed on. She couldn’t help but wonder how the rest of the unit was faring without her.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked him.
“Well, it’s not from my mind,” Rafael said. “Manuela mentioned putting together an ambulance service to take wounded souls back to her castle—” He paused at this word and grinned toward Céleste. “We could start something there, mon amour.”
“An artists’ colony?” Honoré posited.
“More than that,” Rafael said. “War is living hell, so there should be some alternative, no? A sanctuary. A space safe enough to help their souls grow back.”
A year ago, Honoré Côte might have snorted.
Now though, she found herself recalling the sweet scent of wood shavings curled beneath Rafael’s old drafting table. Proof enough that such things were possible. “Ever the savior, aren’t you, Rafael García?”
He’d smirked. “Fine words, coming from a knight in shining armor.”
“I’ve been upgraded to angel, thank you very much.”
There were moments where Honoré found herself missing the armor—how could she not?—but standing around this grave wasn’t one of them. She knew just how close she’d come to being buried alive. She couldn’t forget how strongly the silver had gripped her, after the catacombs and during her snowy battle with Rasputin. It would have taken her altogether, if not for La Fée Verte…
She reached out and grabbed the other woman’s hand. “Terreur is gone,” Honoré declared, her voice striking stone. “He’s gone, and he is never coming back.”
Sylvie gave a cheer, while Céleste rested her head on Rafael’s shoulder.
Gabriel exhaled.
La Fée Verte’s fingers tightened in Honoré’s. The woman’s golden gaze rose from the grave, holding hers the same way it had after the Sanct’s waking from her own glass casket. Radiating with hope. So much hope. Honoré had figured, at the time, that all their powers had been saved for the sake of defeating Terreur, but now he was deep in the ground, and they were still shining. They were an island of light—not just because of Île du Carnaval—but for the rest of Europe. Paris was fast becoming a refuge. A place where soldiers on leave could return from the front and find a few days of normalcy. A few nights of wonder. More, perhaps, if La Fée Verte and Honoré kept up with the carnival. Magic grew faster than the old vines, spreading its tendrils throughout the arrondissements. There was enough for the Fisherman of the Moon to build an antique shop in Les Puces. Désirée’s cabaret had opened its doors again too.
Was history merely repeating itself? At first Enlightened glance, perhaps. La Fée Verte still took care, considering which carnival-goers should be able to remember the enchanted parts of their evening, but there were new daydreamers too. The Frivolous Prince. Manuela. Men and women who wanted wings. Who—even in the midst of a continent torn apart by war—believed they could leave the world a better place than they’d found it.
They were pretty damn inspiring.
As for Honoré… well, she missed her dragon ring, true, but the Fisherman of the Moon had helped her find new ones. A matching set of gold bands—magical only for the fact that Honoré smiled every time she saw them together. When La Fée Verte’s hand joined hers.
She smiled a lot these days.
Even here. At Terreur’s graveside. The others had begun to drift away—Céleste and Rafael walked back to the Enchantresses’ old campsite, and Sylvie grabbed Gabriel’s hand and pulled him along. She could hear the girl promising her brother a treasure hunt. “There’s gold all around here if you know where to look! And if you don’t, just ask Marmalade!”
“I don’t think that cat likes me,” Gabriel replied.
“But he brought you a rotten rat carcass!” Sylvie said, as if this explained everything.
“He keeps calling me a small prick.”
The youngest Enchantress giggled as they hopped over the alarm bells. “No, you’re the small prickly one. Because ‘prickly one’ is their honorific for Honoré, and you’re her brother.”
“But I’m taller than her!” Gabriel protested.
“Your body is, sure, but cats have different categorizations than we do…”
Their voices faded into the underbrush, and Honoré squeezed her true love’s hand. “Shall we?”
La Fée Verte nodded.
Honoré Côte did not glance over her shoulder as they walked away. Not once.
There was too much to look forward to.