A Drop of Night(25)

Oh. Jam the tracks. I get it. I grab a leg and mash it into the track just as a wire swoops overhead.

It doesn’t stop. The chair leg, pinched between the nub and the wall, goes squealing away down the tracks. Somewhere to my right I see Jules, a ragged outline in the gloom, ducking a wire. Will up ahead. Lilly behind me.

I hear a sharp ping. The jammed nub has stopped. But only on one side. The nub on the opposite wall is still moving. I watch the wire stretch, creaking. . . .

“DOWN!” I scream, and everyone drops and rolls into a ball just as the wire snaps and goes whipping back through the wall. Something snatches at my ankle. Blinding pain explodes up my leg.

I push myself onto my hands, clenching my jaw. I see what’s coming.

We’re dead now.

An entire wall of wires, eight feet high, two inches between each wire, is speeding toward us down the hall. There’s a space where the broken wire should be, but it’s five feet off the ground. The gap’s only six inches wide. There’s no way we can get through that.

Will is running back to us. I glance over at Lilly and Jules. I can’t see their faces, but they’re just standing there in the dark, calm suddenly, staring as the glinting wall approaches. I wonder if this is how death happens. Minimal drama. A simple cause and effect, and the universe ends for you. I see our bodies after the wires have passed through them, blood spattering our faces.

I close my eyes.

Another earsplitting clack.

And I’m seeing light. Not light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel crap, but actual golden light, blazing through my lids.

My eyes snap open. Two inches in front of us, the wires have stopped.

Sconces are flaring to life along the walls, spreading down the hall. The chandeliers are blooming into balls of light high above. Sweat drips off my face. The wires hover, shimmering. And all we can do is stand there, four in a row, staring into the blazing, beautiful glare.








Palais du Papillon, Salle d’Acajou—126 feet below—October 23, 1789


Thick fingers find the sack’s hem and drag it off my head. I am standing in a dark room, a jewelry box of red plush and smoldering gilt. My sisters are with me. The ceiling is tented, a canopy of ribbed silk. Dim lamps hiss softly along the walls. Father sits at the center of the room like a troll king in his lair, huge and hulking upon a delicate chair, one leg hooked over the other.

He is as enormous as Havriel, but that is where all similarities between them end: where Havriel is a mountain of calm and shadowy grace, Father is like a boar after the hounds have caught it, heaving and fighting and grasping for life, though the chance for that has long since fled. He wears a splendid coat of cherry red. On his head is a chalk-white wig. His mouth is in perpetual motion in his powdered face, shivering and twitching, forming silent words that he does not utter, and he holds a small brass mask full of herbs and perfume to his face even as he speaks. He has always done this, for as long as I can remember. The doctors say it will stop the plague, influenza, any sort of sickness from befalling him, but he looks a fool for it.

His hands have begun to tremble, the rings on his fat fingers clinking against the arms of his chair.

“My wife,” he says again. “Where is she?” He attempts to rise, collapses. Small black eyes skip across our faces and linger on the empty air at my side, as if he expects to see someone there.

Havriel’s knuckles tighten around the blindfold in his hands. “Frédéric?” he says gently. “Frédéric, you must listen to me—” He goes to Father’s side.

“Where is she, Havriel?” Father hisses, and beside me Delphine jolts upright. She must have been dozing as she stood.

Havriel lays a hand on Father’s shoulder. Father shrugs it off. Again he tries to stand and again he fails. “Where is Célestine? It promised we would be safe, the wicked thing, it promised—”

“The guards are with her as we speak,” Havriel says quickly. “She did not want to leave the chateau, but they will no doubt bring her safely down—”

“They shot her,” I say. My voice is just a thread, but it jerks Father’s head up like a puppet. Havriel does not turn. He has gone deathly still.

“She did not want to come,” I go on, louder now, and my voice turns taunting, bitter. “She was afraid. She was so afraid she was willing to die rather than come into your paradisical underground realm. Why might that be, Father, pray do tell?”

But Father is no longer listening. He is shrieking. He curls in the chair, his spine contorting, his hand scrabbling up the cushion as if he seeks to climb over the back of it, and Havriel is gripping him, and Delphine is whimpering.

“Frédéric, calm yourself! They are bringing her to safety as we speak! We do not know the extent of the damage—”

“They shot her!” I shout. “They shot her, and if they had not, she might have done it herself!”

I’m crying, and as I move toward Father, Havriel spins.

“Stay back, Aurélie,” he spits. “Stay back.”

Havriel’s bell rings. A door opens. Someone is here. The sack falls again over my eyes. I’m being bundled away, and I don’t know where my sisters are, but suddenly my body is wax and twigs and straw hair; I am a drained, brittle husk, too tired to fight. I walk on and on, through echoing halls, my feet aching inside my shoes. It feels as if I walk for days, soft hands guiding me through the dark, and yet I can still hear Father screaming.