The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(57)

“You saw that, did you?”

“You might be good at spells, but I’m very good at stealing.” Yvette sat on a bale of hay and flicked the ash off her cigarette. “No one survives on the street without knowing how to snatch a bit of this and that to get by.”

“I’ve never had to steal anything before.”

“Lucky you. So why now?”

Elena took the crystal out of her pocket. “I could sense the strong protection aura emanating from it. If I can find the real murderer, I’ll need all the protection I can get. You won’t tell him, will you?”

“No one survives the streets for long if they snitch, either.” Yvette took a deep puff on her cigarette.

The faraway look in her eye when she exhaled stirred a sisterly instinct in Elena. She had to restrain herself from smoothing the girl’s hair back from her face and telling her it would all be okay. Instead, she sat beside her, feeling the morning sun warm her face through the veil.

“You said there wasn’t a pattern to the killings, but there is,” Yvette said after a pause. “I didn’t want to say in front of the Professor, but I’ve seen the same thing before.”

“You recognized something?”

“It’s the craving. That’s why they keep doing the same spell over and over again. To feed some hunger,” Yvette said, as if staring at memories. “Only after a while whatever they’re doing isn’t enough anymore, so the next score has to be a little bigger to get the same result. Ever been with a gent who can’t wait to put the white powder up his nose? Trust me, you don’t want to get between him and his next hit of madness. Or a drunk and his next bottle,” she said with a nudge of her chin toward Jacques the clown, who exited the outhouse wearing his pointed hat and white blouse with the black buttons.

“A pattern of addiction?”

Yvette nodded and tossed her cigarette away. “Worst kind of habit.”

Immortality. Power. Money. They would all qualify as powerful drugs. If Rackham were to be believed, it’s what the murderer killed for, driven by a compulsion so strong it defied law and logic.

A vision of a fiendish obsession flashed across her mind. A slathering craving. The murderer would be wide-eyed with madness. But then Jacques, who she’d seen wrapped around an empty gin bottle only an hour earlier, sauntered by and waved, thanking her for the remedy to his headache. There wasn’t a stagger in his walk or a tremble in his speech. Even his face, which had been an abstract mess, was now covered in fresh white greasepaint.

If addiction were the motivation behind the killings, would the murderer vacillate between extremes too? Between the craving and the satisfaction? Between living a life and taking a life? Yes, of course, but the mark of the demon would be permanent, just as Jacques’s costume remained whether drunk or sober. The stench of bonding with a demon would be imbued in the host. It must.

Elena’s head snapped up. “The smell.”

“Yeah, the back end of a carnival always smells like that.”

“No, I mean the demon. You could hide the behavior of addiction, but you couldn’t cover up the smell. Not without a potent fix.”

“I’d just drown myself in a bottle of L’Origan. Ha, I’d do that anyway. Divine stuff.”

“Perfume . . .”

Elena saw again the image of a scented gift box dangling from a feminine wrist as her scent-memory recalled the odor of rotting meat, so misplaced at the time. Realization coursed through her, every nerve alert to the truth.

“How could I have been so stupid?”





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Jean-Paul woke in the dark. His back rested against rough-hewn boards, and his legs would not move. Could not move. His arms, too, were useless to him, tied down at right angles to his body as if he were prostrating himself to God. A six-foot-square pallet rested against his chest, leaving off just enough pressure for his lungs to expand. Above the pallet, restrained by the mercy of a single rope attached to a steel crank, hovered a giant metal wheel on a helical screw.

He took a reflexive breath to calm his fear of suffocating. The heavy musk of oak, earth, and fermenting fruit overrode the stench of his sweat and fear. He was in a cellar, though not his own. And yet there was a familiarity to the surroundings. He tried to turn to get his bearings, but his head spun with a nausea-inducing bout of vertigo. He steadied himself and swallowed. The taste of black coffee furred his tongue.

And then he remembered.

The swish of a long skirt on the flagstones forced him to turn his head and suffer through the dizziness. The smell of decay, like cut flowers that have sat too long in their own water, wafted toward him, making him ill. A flicker of candlelight erupted in the dark, and Gerda’s face came into focus.

“The effect of the sleeping powder was shorter lived than I’d expected,” she said. “I must have misjudged your weight.” She placed the candlestick atop a polished wood table, one that guests to the cellar might stand at to sample the latest vintage, or perhaps a cherished bottle of vin ’99, opened for a special occasion. Of course. He was in Monsieur Du Monde’s coveted wine cellar. It housed a hundred barrels in the catacombs beyond. And, as he uncomfortably recalled, it also retained its original sixteenth-century press, on which he now lay helplessly constrained.

“For a city-born elitist, you’re in surprisingly fit form,” she said and removed the bung from a barrel of wine.