Hotel Magnifique(86)
In the center of the alley, a tall thing stalked forward, blood dripping from an empty eye socket, one single eye remained. The right side of its body looked as if a piece of it had been ripped away.
Sido.
He thrashed his head from side to side, backing away from the other nightmarish creatures dotting the alley. I knew Sido was still a man, and it was just the nightmare playing tricks on my eyes, but I still gagged.
“Jani!” Yrsa’s voice boomed. A figure stepped forward. It looked like Yrsa but not. She was now taller than everything, looming over us.
Run, I thought. Except I stood frozen in place, watching the thing that was Yrsa. She leaned against the alley wall, wiping at her eyes.
There was nothing where her eyes should be. The holes oozed white liquid, as if she were weeping tears of the not-milk.
She walked toward me as if she could still see. Her mouth opened. Each of her teeth came to razor-sharp points.
“You can’t leave us, you realize,” Yrsa said. Her tongue snapped out like the lash of a scorpion’s tail. Then she pulled a piece of porcelain from her own pocket, rolling it in her hand. A threat. When she held it up, everything inside me stilled.
“Who does it belong to?”
“You already know the answer to that.”
A strangled noise came from my throat. I wanted to swipe the porcelain piece from her fingers, but Sido had already come up behind her. I couldn’t risk it. I had to go.
“The ma?tre wants you inside by two or he’ll snap this in half himself. Now that you’ve seen firsthand what my teacup can do, I suspect I’ll see you shortly,” she said, waggling the piece of porcelain. It wasn’t an eye—it was a finger, but not Zosa’s petite one.
This porcelain finger belonged to a man.
I stumbled down more cobbled streets, through a city full of beasts, trying to stop crying.
Not real, not real, I chanted to myself, picking my way to the banks of the Noir. At the iron rail, I finally stopped running. Zosa squawked when I dropped her cage and vomited.
Even with the nightmare, Zosa still appeared the same. She pecked at my hand, quivering. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I tried rubbing her feathers, but she bristled at the touch, her eyes squeezing shut. “We’ll fix it all, I promise.”
As soon as the words came out, I bit down on the inside of my cheek. The promise was another lie to protect her, like most of the lies I’d told her over the years.
“Actually, I don’t know what to do. I’m scared to death and tired. I’m so tired I could keel over.” Zosa’s head peeked out from her feathers. I wiped silver from my face and blinked. “And I feel like I just let fifty snails scuttle snot across my eyeballs.”
She nudged the bars.
“Don’t look at me like that.” Even as a bird, her dark eyes studied me. “I can’t believe I’m talking to a bird.”
She squawked as if she could understand me.
“All right, all right. A very clever, very spirited young lady trapped in bird-form.”
With one hand on her cage, one hand on the rail, I kept moving. After a few minutes, I found some stairs leading to the riverbank. I rested the cage on the ground so I could splash handfuls of water on my face.
“The time! What’s the time?” I shouted at a row of men with fishing rods. They all took a step back except one old man. “Not yet eleven,” he said with a toothless grin.
Three hours.
My hair hung in wet clumps around my shoulders. I combed through it and shoved it into a tight bun. I needed to think.
“What do I do?” I asked Zosa. I couldn’t storm into the hotel; I’d be recognized in an instant. I needed a disguise, along with help.
I thought of Bel and my chest ached. I wanted help so badly. Then I remembered where we were, what it meant.
The fishermen jumped back when I walked toward them, attempting to smooth out my dripping dress. “I’m in dire need of a large, colorful wig. Can someone kindly point me in the direction of Atelier Merveille?”
* * *
On the outside, Atelier Merveille was an elegant mix of frescoed stone and gold leaf. Stepping inside, however, felt like diving into a fancy, frosted cake. Gilded stairs gave way to taffeta-paneled walls dripping in a palette of sugared colors: mint, lavender, and cream. Dolled-up clerks gaped as I waltzed past, their shellacked cherry smiles dimming at the sight of my damp hair, the birdcage. Luckily no one stopped me.
I didn’t find Béatrice in the shoes, or with the powders and striped tins of crème de rose. I didn’t find her among the scarves, or exotic feathered hats, or near the swan tower of pearlescent macarons inside Salon de Patisserie. I found her in the dressing rooms, of course, seated amid a lavish heap of fabric. A towering pale purple wig sat beside her, bedecked with steel butterflies.
When she saw me, she jumped up. Her eyes grew at the splotches of silver on my neck. My face crumpled, overwhelmed with relief.
“Oh, I cannot wait to hear this.” She swished her wrist and her gears clattered. “Don’t make me force it out of you. Because I will.”
A clerk in a ruffled apron arrived with a tray of iced buns. Béatrice waved the clerk away then ushered me to sit. Instead, I paced as I told her the truth about my contract and how it never worked on me, then I went over every detail since I kicked the oranges. Aside from a couple of gasps and a bit of clucking, Béatrice listened, until I came to the part about choosing the cosmolabe.