Hotel Magnifique(33)

Des Rêves’s lips pursed. “I’m afraid, sweet, I don’t know. Perhaps you should bring it up with the ma?tre. His office is through there.” She pointed to a door behind the bar.

Just then, the ground shifted. I fell hard on the salon floor as the stage walked itself behind the tasseled curtain.

Des Rêves laughed. Grunting, I stood up. No one stopped me as I dipped through the door behind the bar to a dark hall lined with more closed doors. Halfway down, I spotted one door cracked open. Lamplight flickered from within. Silently, I walked over and peeked inside.

Red, the suminaire from the escape game, lay across a table, her small, freckled arms splayed, crimson hair spilling over the sides. Yrsa appeared and placed her teacup beside Red’s ear. The milk swirled on its own.

Unrolling a leather surgeon’s kit, Yrsa pulled out a long knife. She held the blade tip over a blue candle flame, humming to herself. Then, with a detached nonchalance, she raised the heated knife, pulled back the pale skin below Red’s eye, and sunk the blade tip into Red’s eye socket.

Red’s body jerked once before my own eyes squeezed shut. Instruments clanked. Sounds came: a low groan, a clatter, a wet pop. When I thought it might be over, I looked up, then bit down on the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t scream. Yrsa held Red’s detached eye above her teacup. A tendril of white liquid that most certainly wasn’t milk swirled up.

Yrsa flicked it down. She plunged the eye inside then pulled it out.

Red’s eye—what was once an eye—now looked like a cast-off piece from a potter’s studio that might snap in two if Yrsa dropped it. It had to be solid porcelain. If this was Red’s punishment for the escape game—

I caused it to happen.

“My god,” I think I said aloud. My fist flew to my mouth.

Yrsa muttered to someone. Footsteps shuffled toward the door. Stumbling back, I raced down the hall not caring where it would lead, just that it led away. The next door was unlocked. I ran in and slammed it behind me, shaking uncontrollably.

In this new room, a fireplace illuminated an enormous glass curio arranged with a collection of objects. I braced myself against it and felt faint vibrations sizzling through the glass. Artéfacts. On a high shelf sat the tarnished oval hand mirror Des Rêves had fanned herself with during the soirée.

A book snapped shut.

I spun around. Across the room, Alastair sat behind a desk littered with glass vials, some filled with shimmering purple ink, some empty. In the center sat his slim wolf-capped inkwell. “My office is off-limits. Who let you in?”

My tongue refused to make words.

“You’re the maid Bel brought on,” he said. “The girl with the sister.”

The mention of Zosa focused my mind. “Her name is Zosa and she’s a bird in a cage somewhere,” I blurted. “I—I need to find her.”

Before Alastair could speak, Sido and Sazerat burst in. Their combined pair of eyes trained on me. My throat tightened. Yrsa must have cut out their other eyes, too.

Alastair’s features sharpened. “What is it now?”

“That maid saw Yrsa use her artéfact.” One twin spoke while the other watched me with his dead stare.

“Wait outside,” Alastair said. They left in unison. When the door shut, he pointed to a chair across the room. “Have a seat.”

Sitting was the last thing I wished to do. “So you can scoop out my eye?”

“I don’t know what you saw, but I promise that will never happen to you. Have a seat. Afterward, I’ll take you to your sister.”

This was all wrong. “Take me now.”

Something hit the back of my legs. I sat down hard on a leather chair that had just been across the room. Its wooden arms felt like fingers gripping my wrists. I couldn’t move. Chair legs scraped the floor, pushing me forward until I was opposite Alastair.

He lifted his wolf-capped inkwell, uncapped it, and filled an empty glass well, identical to the ones Zosa and I had used to sign our contracts. Purple ink poured from his inkwell in a never-ending stream just like the tea from Red’s thimble.

That wolf-capped inkwell must be an artéfact. His artéfact.

When he finished, he pulled a book from a desk drawer, its leather binding covered in purple scribbles. Handwriting. Société des Suminaires was printed in tiny gold words amid the purple ink. I’d never heard of the society.

“What’s the book for?”

His eyes flicked up. “My infinite ledger? It’s enchanted to be a file cabinet of sorts.”

He began flipping through pages like Hellas shuffling his deck of cards. But cards were only so thick. The ledger’s pages were endless, as if Alastair flipped through a hundred books stacked atop one another. Purple writing flashed across each page. After flipping for more than a minute, he stopped at some arbitrary spot in the center. Opening the ledger wide, he plunged his entire forearm inside and fished around. Then he pulled out a sheet of parchment with a single purple signature scribbled across the bottom.

My contract.

“These were my invention,” he said mournfully. “We all must do our part to keep magic safe—”

His words cut off and the skin along his jaw pulled tight. I swallowed hard when he took out a second, blank contract and laid it beside mine. They looked identical until Alastair ran a finger down the blank contract, stopping at a small line of Verdanniere near the bottom.