Hotel Magnifique(94)

“She knocked it away, but Bel grabbed it before I could get there. He gave it back to Alastair.”

Frigga looked behind me and swore.

I turned. Alastair stalked toward us. Without hesitation, I gripped the silver talon and held it over Issig. “Stay back.”

He stopped.

My eyes snapped to the ledger under his arm. Zosa flew over and landed on my shoulder. I squeezed the talon. I could still change Issig. He remembered who he was for a brief moment in the deep freeze. It might be enough.

“Don’t,” Alastair said, desperate, his eyes flicking to Zosa. “Your sister isn’t a suminaire. If you change Issig, his cold will kill her.”

He was right. Issig might have tried to steal the ledger once, but with his mind gone, he was deadly. All because of a contract.

His contract.

My free hand flew to Maman’s necklace. If the necklace worked for Issig like it did for me, if it negated his contract and gave him back his mind, he could destroy the ledger himself without hurting anyone. Fumbling, I managed to unclasp it. I squeezed it. What do I do? There was no guarantee it would work. If it didn’t, if Issig hurt Zosa—

“Don’t be a fool. Give me the talon and I’ll let you leave tonight. You’ll be safe, and you never have to see me again. Don’t you want that?”

I did. Once. Now, his offer didn’t make me feel anything. Everyone I cared about was in this room, and I needed to make a decision.

I looked at Zosa. Her dark eyes hung on mine. “What should we do?” I asked. It was her life too, after all. Tears broke over my lashes when she flew up and pecked at the talon, nudging it down, toward Issig.

Her choice.

Rarely had I listened to her. But I would now.

“Don’t!” Alastair bellowed.

Cold hissed against my palms the moment the talon touched the arctic tern’s head. The tern rippled. Growing. Brittle steel flung everywhere and the cage snapped away when Issig changed from bird to man.

Careful not to touch Issig’s flesh, I clasped Maman’s necklace around his neck. Work, damn it, I willed. Nothing seemed to happen to Issig. In fact, something felt wrong.

My scalp cooled as the sensation of a thick blanket of fog came over me. I blinked. The fog wasn’t around me. It was inside my head, and it wouldn’t clear.

I started to shiver. The room was freezing. Suminaires were backing away. Bel did the same, moving along the bar, while Yrsa scrambled up the stage with her teacup. The salon floor groaned from the cold. Zosa’s tiny claws clung to the shoulder of my dress.

“You need to get back,” a deep voice said.

I turned and stumbled. Issig watched me. He touched the pair of necklaces he wore. One was a white disk, the other a thin chain of ruddy gold.

That gold necklace. I’d worn it before I’d given it to him. It was an artéfact. But when I tried to remember who gave it to me, it felt like my mind was pushing against a solid wall.

“I said get back,” Issig growled. The other necklace—the white disk at his neck, his artéfact—rattled. “Get to the stage now. Otherwise you’ll be hurt.”

Zosa shivered against my shoulder.

“Change him back!” Alastair shouted at me.

At the sound of Alastair’s voice, rage flooded Issig’s features. He rushed forward and ripped the ledger from Alastair’s hand, just as I imagined he tried to do the day his mind had snapped. But this time, he had his artéfact.

The ledger’s cover grew brittle from the cold and began to crumble away. Alastair tried to swipe it.

“Not this time,” Issig said. In one swift movement, he smacked Alastair’s hand and knocked the wolf-capped inkwell to the floor. It shattered on impact. Alastair cried out when the marble swallowed the broken well—wolf’s head and all—as if it were nothing more than a smashed champagne flute.

The temperature dropped. I clambered over chairs toward the stage as the salon turned into a tundra. Wood splintered. My own breath grew painful in my lungs, but I kept moving, climbing.

Glass cracked across the front of Salon d’Amusements. The ground buckled as the air was replaced with a chill that froze the marrow of my bones.

I tucked Zosa under the crook of my neck, against my chest, as time itself seemed to slow. My eyes locked on Bel’s from opposite sides of the room the same moment Issig opened the ledger wide. He plunged his hand inside and called up an explosion of cold right through the center of the salon.





I was standing, then I wasn’t. I was on the stage, wedged between a frozen piece of wood and the back wall, too numb from cold to think. The only warmth I felt came from my sister, and my fingers that refused to let her go.

Bones creaked. My joints felt old, scraped and raw from a hundred summers at a tannery. I hissed as bits of ice and glass debris fell from my arms, my hair, my nose.

Zosa shivered against me. At the feel of her, I checked my pocket. My fingers grazed the rough edges of porcelain.

Zosa’s finger had snapped in two.

No. I started to shake. Look. She’s alive, she’s alive! I told myself. But how? I turned and recoiled.

Yrsa had saved us in the end. Her body lay crushed under a large, splintered piece of wood that must have shot out in the blast. A ceiling beam. It ended mere inches from my neck. Next to her motionless hand rested the shattered remains of the teacup atop a frozen puddle of not-milk.