Seduction (22 page)

Did I say basement? It was more like an underground city. At the base of the stairs was a large open area from which a number of passageways sprouted like roads around a central roundabout.
Or legs on a spider,
I thought.

The passageways all seemed to lead to rooms filled floor to ceiling with ancient artifacts—furniture under threadbare sheets gray with dust, gilded mirrors, books gone so moldy they were little more than wisps of smoke, rusted musical instruments, dozens of locked chests. . .  . I wondered if there were other passages leading out of these into still more rooms, but I hadn’t come to explore. If the Enclave was to conduct a
ritual, it would have to be in a fairly large space without a lot of junk in the way.

I walked around until I found exactly that: a chamber chiseled out of rock, illuminated so brightly that I could see motes of dust in the air. Looking up, I saw a skylight going all the way to the roof.

A skylight, here?
I wondered. And then I understood: It wasn’t a skylight; it was a
moon
light. In the early evening sky above, I could make out the outline of a full moon, even though it was still light outside. This was the place of ritual.

Back upstairs, while the silverware was swooping into a basket ready to take to the dining room, I prodded the corners of the kitchen with a broom handle, looking for a hole.

It didn’t take long. There were a number of cracks and mouse holes all along the baseboards of the old place. None of the ladies of the Enclave cared about the kitchen, and the staff were never around long enough to attempt any repairs. I found a broken place in the floor that opened into a far corner of the basement room. With a meat mallet, I forced it open wide enough for me to look through. Once the lights were extinguished, I was pretty certain I could watch the ritual from here without being seen. As a precautionary measure, I covered the hole with an old wooden bucket. Then I made myself a sandwich.

CHAPTER

•

TWENTY-SIX

After the kitchen was cleaned up, I took my sandwich and Azrael’s manuscript to wait in the library for the full-moon ritual to begin at midnight.

The library was my favorite room in the house, with its walls of polished wood and elegant, well-worn furniture, although it wasn’t used much by the people who lived there. Unlike most of the house, which had been somewhat modernized during the 1920s, the library and the wing it was in were still not electrified and nowhere near any of the bathrooms. But I loved it for the same reasons the others avoided it. I loved its inconvenience, its ancient beauty, and its sense of nobility. It retained the characteristics of the great houses, the grand
hôtels
of Paris, almost none of which were used as private homes any longer. Because of the huge expense of keeping them warmed and lit and in decent condition, the vast majority of these palaces had been turned into museums or government offices long ago.

But the house on the Rue des Âmes Perdues was an exception. It was still livable. Since my arrival here, I’d discovered some of its secrets: The servants’ entrance, for example, next to the kitchen on the first floor, was a lot easier to navigate than the zillion marble steps leading to the main doorway in the center of the courtyard. I’d bet that humble entrance had been used by the house’s inhabitants from the very first. And the library, with its oil lamps and walk-in fireplace, was connected to the downstairs kitchen via a set of stairs just outside the door.

But the best thing about the library was that Sophie and her cronies never went there. It was a place for reading, for one thing. For another, there weren’t any mirrors.

I spread out the pages of the book on the heavy oak table in the middle of the room, and settled in for another installment of the old man’s story.

1349

Plague

The new abbess sent word to Jean-Loup in May, informing him of the death of Sister Clément.

Paris had become a city of the dead, its streets littered with so many swollen, discolored bodies that it was not possible to bury them before they putrefied. The Black Death was sweeping through Europe with a ferocity that could only be attributed to the Devil.

In the Abbey of Lost Souls, the women had sealed the room where Sister Clément, who had been their abbess for the past 149 years, had died three days earlier.

Jean-Loup offered to bury her, glad he had insisted that Veronique remain at Toujours while he answered the abbess’s summons. Sister Clément’s body was already beginning to decay. Retching, Jean-Loup carried the corpse to the courtyard and deposited it into a grave he had dug.

“Are you surprised that we can die?” the new abbess asked.

“No,” Jean-Loup said. “Of course not.”

“Some come to us believing we can make them immortal, but that is not true.” She nodded toward the room where Sister Clément’s plague-ridden body had lain. “It’s just that if we can avoid death through pestilence, accident, or violence, our natural lives will be long.”

“Yes, I know,” Jean-Loup said, wondering why the woman was behaving as if he were a stranger to the longevity of Veronique’s followers. “My wife founded this, er, order.”

The abbess went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “The problem, of course, is that sooner or later we will approach old age, despite our magic. And when we do, we fall prey to all the miseries that come with the end of life. More, since we linger longer than most.”

Jean-Loup set his lips into a tight line. By “falling prey,” was she referring to the dreadful act of his monstrous son nearly a century and a half before? Everyone in the abbey had heard the terrible story about Drago’s violation of Sister Béatrice so many times that it had taken on the trappings of legend. “Drago will not return, if that is what you mean,” he said tersely.

She shook her head. “Actually, he might have done us a service.”

He did not understand her meaning, but he was tired from digging the grave and wanted to be back home with Veronique. So he dropped the conversation, bade the young abbesss good-bye, and left for home.

By the time he arrived back at Toujours, he was already feverish.

Within two days the dread buboes, the swollen black lumps that were the sure sign of the Black Death, appeared in his armpits. “Stay away,” he croaked as his wife tried to wipe his sweat-sheened face.

“Nonsense,” Veronique said.

“Even you can die.”

“But I won’t. And neither will you.” She smiled at him confidently, but even through his fevered vision Jean-Loup could see that she was worried.

He became delirious. Over the next few days he sank deeper into madness, shrieking and talking gibberish. Finally, he quieted as he fell slowly into a coma, separated from death by only a few shallow breaths.

“No, my love, no,” Veronique whispered. She had not left his side since the first night of his illness, and had grown thin and haggard herself. At last she knew what she had to do. She was not able to cure him—that was not exactly her talent—but she could ward off his death. So now, when her beloved husband was so near to crossing over, she took his trembling hands in her own and willed her life force into Jean-Loup’s ravaged body, all the while singing as if to a child:

My love, my love

Walk through the door

The voice that was calling

Is calling once more

Be well, my angel

Be strong, be whole

Your suffering has ended

Awaken your soul!

Her breath, sweet as lilacs, washed over him like a benediction.

But when her song was finished, Jean-Loup opened his eyes and saw the terrible toll that bringing him back from the brink of death had taken on his wife. “Oh, Veronique,” he cried as a flood of hot tears coursed down his cheeks.

She sat in the chair beside him, her white hair fluttering gently with the breeze from the window. Straining, she raised her eyelids, and her violet eyes lit up her ravaged, ancient face.

“Take care of my sisters,” she said. “Welcome others and give them sanctuary.”

He nodded, unable to respond.

In her hand was the heart amulet Jean-Loup had given her so many years before. “
Mon amour toujours
,” she said as her fingers opened.

“No!” he screamed. He had taken the last, the very last, of Veronique’s life. Filled with inexpressible sorrow, he wept until the sun left the sky and the night wrapped around the two of them, as it had when they were first wed.

“
Toujours
,” he whispered, and kissed her eyes closed.

The love of his life was gone forever.

• • •

I wiped the tears from my face. I didn’t know if I was reading an allegory, or if Azrael had fallen into dementia, remembering a woman he had only read about as his wife Veronique,
but it didn’t really matter. It was a beautiful story. I wondered if Peter and I could have anything as good as the love those two had shared.

Love was hard. I was finding that out. There were so many distractions, pitfalls, temptations, mistakes. Seductions from sweet words, wild promises, ambition, hope, arrogance, impatience, greed.

Seductions. Yes.

Had we already taken those first steps in the wrong direction? A single misstep would be all that was necessary for Peter to abandon me for the golden future that awaited him, or for me to turn toward someone else for love . . .

No. I wouldn’t think of that.

That wasn’t going to happen.

CHAPTER

•

TWENTY-SEVEN

I stayed in the library until I heard the stirrings of the ritual participants. The door knocker banged constantly, so I knew the ritual included people who didn’t live in the house. They all seemed to be gathering in the main parlor, where there was a lot of talking and laughter, but no music.

I checked the clock: five minutes to midnight.
They’re ready to go down,
I thought. I expected everyone to come through the library and the kitchen below it en route to the basement, and I’d even planned a few choice remarks for Peter—the traitor—but no one showed up. The noise from the parlor diminished and then died into silence.
Another stairway, then.
There must be some sort of opening in the parlor that led directly to the ritual chamber in the basement.

Even better. No one would see me at all. I went down the rickety back stairs into the kitchen and uncovered the hole I’d staked out as my observation tower.

Crouched on my hands and knees, I watched as the stone
chamber filled up with what appeared to be half of Paris, all wearing gray hooded robes and carrying candles to light their way.
This is a real coven,
I thought as they assembled into rows packed tightly against one another in a circle around the central shaft of moonlight from the skylight I’d discovered earlier. I reasoned that the full moon at midnight must pass directly overhead every month.

I strained to identify some of the people I knew, but their hoods shrouded their faces in shadow. There were so many! From the rituals I’d attended in Whitfield, I understood that the more participants there were, the more magic would be created. That is, provided the participants had magic of their own to begin with. When witches get together—the groups are always in multiples of nine or thirteen—and use their combined powers for a common goal, the results can be mind-blowing.

Finally, one of the robed figures—the leader, I guessed, and a woman, judging from her graceful hands—stepped out of the circle and into the moon-drenched light at its center as all the candles in the chamber were extinguished. The smoke from them curled in the shaft of moonlight, where the leader raised her slender white arms as she spoke the opening words of the incantation: