Seduction (28 page)

But I didn’t want Marie-Therèse to know that. So I went through with it to the end, walking widdershins and dismissing all the spirits and whatever until the circle was empty (as if it had ever been filled).

“Are . . . are you finished?” Marie-Therèse asked uncertainly.

“Yep,” I said, brimming with false confidence. “You’re all set.”

She looked around the room, which appeared to have been struck by the spirit of Chaos. “May I . . .” She gestured vaguely. “. . . help?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll just enjoy the vibes.”

She nodded doubtfully. “Well, then, if you don’t mind . . .”

“Please,” I said heartily, opening the door for her.

When she was gone, I curled up in a chair, wet high tops and all, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER

•

THIRTY-THREE

I’d tried everything I could think of to ward off the so-called “celebration” in which Marie-Therèse would be carted off to the geriatric equivalent of the Roach Motel (They check in, but they don’t check out!), to no avail. The following morning I tried to talk with her, but she wouldn’t even consider fleeing with me to Germany or someplace else, and when I’d discreetly suggested a cozy little nest in the Paris sewers, she’d screamed in alarm.

Seriously, though, I could understand where she was coming from. She’d lived on the Rue des Âmes Perdues for more years than she was willing to tell me, and she wasn’t about to run away now, so it looked like my only remaining option was to physically fight off whoever was going to try to haul her away. I just hoped Peter would be willing to help me when the time came. And then, of course, the two of us would have to run for our lives, but I figured we’d worry about that later.

I was busy stabbing my fingers with wicked-looking
curved needles—I’d bought some that were made especially for sewing leather—as I bound another section of Azrael’s book when Fabienne bombed through the door to my room. “Katy!” she said breathlessly.

I stashed the book with the needle in it under my pillow, but I needn’t have made the effort. Fabby was so excited, she couldn’t have cared less if I’d been making voodoo dolls.

“This is about my mother,” she whispered, her face earnest. “It is shocking.”

I didn’t think I’d be shocked at anything Sophie de la Soubise would do, but since Fabienne was her daughter, I kept my opinions to myself.

“I have seen her only three times in my life, so I am hardly acquainted with her. I know almost nothing about her.”

“Okay,” I prodded. “So she’s not Mom of the Year. Did she, like,
do
something to you? Because—”

“Shh. Just listen to me, Katy.” Her fingers were digging into mine, and her voice was trembling with intensity. “Remember when you said something is odd about the people who live here?
Alors
, you were right!” She blinked several times and swallowed, as if she were afraid to tell me.

“Well?” I asked. “What is it?”

She took a deep breath. “Perhaps you will not believe me, but they . . . that is, the people here . . .”

“What about them?” I pressed.

“They are
old
,” she whispered.

“Old?” I frowned. Fabby was fifteen. To her, high school seniors were old.

“I overheard Sophie and Joelle talking about Edouard Manet.” She looked up at me. “You know this painter, Manet?”

“I do,” I said. “Do you?”

“I know only that he was one of the famous painters of La Belle Epoch, at the end of the nineteenth century,” Fabienne said. “That was why I paid attention. I was walking through the dining room when I heard them. It sounded interesting, so I hid behind the cabinet that contains the Fabergé eggs and listened to their conversation.”

“So, what’d they say?”

Fabby’s eyes were bright in her pale face. “Sophie said that she had posed for him, and then Joelle said that she had too, and then she showed Sophie a book. This book.” She reached behind her to take a slim volume out of the waistband of her skirt and handed it to me. “They left it on one of the coffee tables. I picked it up after they left the room.”

I turned the book over in my hands. It was bound in gray linen with the name
Edouard Manet
printed on the cover. Its publication date was April 1911. “A first edition,” I said. “This must be valuable.”

Inside was some biographical text, but most of the pages just showed black-and-white reproductions of Manet’s work, with explanatory captions beneath them. I flipped through the pages. “All his most famous works,” I said. There was nothing I hadn’t seen before in art class.

“That one,” Fabby said, placing her hand on a page.

“This?” It was Manet’s most well-known painting. It was of a nude woman lying on a divan. I read the caption out loud. “
Olympia, 1863
. A nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of Titian’s
Venus of Urbina
, 1538, and also of Francisco Goya’s—”

“Look at her face,” Fabienne said.

I did, and burst out laughing. “Oh, my God!” I shrieked. “She looks just like Joelle!”

Fabienne wasn’t laughing. “It
is
Joelle,” she said. “She is nearly two hundred years old.”

“Two . . . Don’t be ridiculous, Fabby. It’s just a passing resemblance.”

“No. There are other books. In the library. Sophie mentioned them, and I looked them up. Her picture is in them too. And they are far, far older than this.”

I rolled my eyes. “Sounds like all those trips to Japanese hot springs are burning out your brain cells. Sophie’s your
mother
, Fabby. She can’t be older than forty, and that would be a stretch.” Not to mention the general dearth of Parisians—or even yogurt-swilling Russians—over the age of one hundred.

“But I can prove this! Come with me.”

Reluctantly, I trudged behind her into the library, which was empty as usual. Fabby lit an oil lamp. Then she took a book from the case and opened it to a portrait of a woman wearing the elaborate clothing of the late eighteenth century and a Marie Antoinette–style wig as high as Marge Simpson’s. Beneath the picture was the caption,
Portrait of Mme Sophie de la Soubise, c. 1785.

“What?” I gasped. I flipped the book over and checked out the title:
Slipping the Noose: French Aristocrats Who Survived the Revolution.

“It can’t be,” I said. The woman in the painting looked a little younger than Sophie, perhaps, but the resemblance was unmistakable. I began reading the text. “This says that . . .”

Madame de la Soubise was reputed to be the mistress of King Louis the Sixteenth as well as a number of other noblemen.

I closed the book. I didn’t think Fabby had read it, or she would have freaked out by what it said about her mother. “This woman must be an ancestor or something. That’s got to be it, Fabby. A relative.”

“No, it is not a relative.” She took down another book and opened it to a page on which was another portrait, painted by Jean Louis David in 1815, of someone who also looked exactly like Sophie.

“Eighteen Fifteen?” I asked.

“Thirty years after the other painting,” Fabienne said. “But it is the same woman, no?”

“Thirty years,” I whispered. The two portraits looked nearly identical. And the living Sophie de la Soubise looked just like both of them.

On the facing page was a painting by Adelaide Labille-Guiard,
Comtesse Marie-Therèse LePetit d’Orleans, 1788
. In it, the same Marie-Therèse I saw every day was sitting in a garden with a book in her hand. It could have been no one else.

“A lot of our housemates are in these books,” Fabienne said.

“Then . . .” I flipped through the pages, pausing briefly at faces I recognized. Things were beginning to make sense, but they were still hard to believe. “But how . . . how do they do it?”

“Through the full-moon rituals,” Fabienne said pointedly. “I just figured it out. All their magic must be used to keep them young. It says so in the words of the ritual.”

“I know,” I said. “I listened to it. But I thought it meant that they wanted to
look
young. That is,
younger
. Not that they’d actually stop aging entirely.”

“But they don’t stop aging,” Fabby said. “Don’t you see?” She compared the paintings again. “They get old like everyone else. But it takes longer.”

“Hundreds of years longer?” I asked, incredulous.

Fabby shrugged. “Why not?”

Marie-Therèse’s eightieth birthday,
I thought. If Fabienne was right, then eighty wasn’t anywhere near the real number. “So how old are they when they have to leave?” I asked.

Fabby shrugged. “I suppose it depends on when they begin the rituals.”

“In the painting, Marie-Therèse looks almost as old as she is now.”

“Yes, I saw. She must have come to the Enclave late in her life.”

“So her time has run out, while Sophie . . .”

“. . . is still young.” Fabby crossed her arms over her chest.

“Well, relatively.”

We sat in silence for a moment while I digested what I’d just learned. The ritual I’d witnessed, which seemed to be so similar to the one I’d read about in Azrael’s book, had, in fact, been the
same
ritual, except that the words “healing and truth” had been changed somewhere along the line to “beauty and youth.”

And it was no coincidence that the Abbaye des Âmes Perdues and the house I lived in were on the same street. It was the same street, and the same house, and I possessed an account of it from its earliest days.

So much made sense to me now. The ritual had changed, and I’d bet I knew when that happened. The author of Azrael’s book hadn’t named the siren “abbess” whose talent had been
to entice men, but I had a pretty good idea who she was.

That was why Sophie had led the ritual the other night.

“So we’re not talking about a bunch of silly women who just like to look good,” I said. “The Enclave is about achieving nearly eternal life, with the youth to go with it.”

Fabby nodded. “It seems too good to be true.”

“Maybe it is,” I said. “You know, at some point, your magic runs out.”

“That takes a long time.”

“For you, maybe. Not for Marie-Therèse. Hers runs out tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her so-called birthday party. It’s when she gets kicked out of the house.”

“Oh, no,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. “Is there nothing we can do to stop it?”

“I’m trying to come up with something, but so far I haven’t had a lot of luck.”

“Perhaps if we stay near her tonight, the two of us, we can help. Plus Peter, of course.”

I lowered my head. “I’m not sure we can count on Peter,” I said.

Peter had once been my rock, the way I’d been his. But since we got here, in this place, all our values seemed to have been turned upside down. I was doing things with Belmondo that I wouldn’t even have been able to think of back in Whitfield, and Peter . . . Well, Sophie had seemed pretty sure that he was never going to come back to America. Or to me.

“Peter’s going to join the Enclave, isn’t he.” It wasn’t really a question.

“I don’t know,” Fabienne said gently. “Peter’s gift is different from ours. The coven must keep an alchemist. It is the most important position here. After Jeremiah is gone, Peter will be entrusted with our care.”

“You mean he’ll keep you in designer clothes and jewelry.”

“I suppose,” Fabby said quietly. “So you see, he will not have to sacrifice his talent . . . if he joins.”

Not like you,
I thought. What was in store for her was even worse than the scenario for Marie-Therèse. Not being good at anything was bad enough. But being good at something you weren’t allowed to do was beyond depressing. How many witches with tremendous potential had been forced over the years into being living dolls for their whole lives? How many great healers, musicians, scientists, teachers, visionaries, artists, mathematicians, and philosophers had women like Sophie destroyed by keeping their children ignorant and focused on the most trivial aspects of human life, until the day when they were taken away to the Poplars to die, alone and unfulfilled?

It made me sick to think about it.

“What about you?” I asked. “Doesn’t your gift mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does,” she said, “but this life is what I was born for—” Suddenly she inhaled sharply, her sensitive features quivering like a deer’s. “I think I hear people,” she whispered. “The witches would not want us to know their secret. Not before the Initiation.”

We both sprinted back to the shelves. “Hurry,” she said, snatching the last book out of my hands and replacing it quickly.

I followed her out of the library. “Fabby . . .”

She looked at me with big, frightened eyes.

“I know it’s tempting, but . . . if you join the Enclave, you’ll not only have to give up your talent, but you’ll be here forever, following their rules. Like literally
forever
,” I said quietly. “Are you sure you want that?”

Her eyes welled. I don’t know if Fabienne would have—or could have—answered me then, but our conversation was cut short when Sophie and Joelle met us at the bottom of the stairs.