The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(73)

She remained silent and dutifully followed as they frog-marched Gerda through the narrow corridor to return to the main barrel room. They’d walked only a few feet when Gerda stumbled, writhing in pain, her back arching as if caught in a spasm. It appeared a trick. A stalling measure to buy time or sympathy. A way to slither free through a feint of injury. Elena braced herself for a confrontation.

“I didn’t do it.” Gerda pleaded with Matron, tugging on the handcuffs. “Whatever deal she’s made with you, I can give you life. Immortality. We could live forever. You and me. Just take these damn things off!”

Matron rolled her eyes and prodded Gerda forward again. But the witch’s outburst was more than prisoner dramatics. The aging metamorphosis had begun to reverse again, but at a freakishly fast pace.

“The cuffs,” Elena said, remembering the sensation of having her magic severed by the restraints. “They’ve cut off the spell that’s been keeping her alive.”

Gerda’s eyes widened in horrified realization of what was happening to her. In seconds her hair turned gray and fell out, her skin sagged, and the eyes clouded over. She’d transformed into the same old toothless woman she’d been before, but then her body recoiled even more violently. She cried out in agony, shriveling to an impossible thinness of bone and skin, like a twisted strip of leather withering in the sun. Seconds later, desiccated as an ancient mummy, the skull crumbled and the body disintegrated into a pile of dust and bone beneath a layer of black mourning lace.

Time had finally come to collect the death it had been cheated for three hundred years.





CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

There’d been no midday fire in the stove. The grate was cool to the touch. No bread crumbs on the table, no plates drying on the dishcloth, and the delivery of eggs still sat on the back step beside the geranium pots. Madame had not returned home.

“She’s not upstairs or in the sitting room,” Jean-Paul said, returning to the kitchen.

Elena tried to hide her concern, but the way her eyes and fingertips checked for details beyond his vision told him the prolonged absence wasn’t normal.

“She’s probably still upset over all that’s happened,” he said. “Perhaps she stayed in town to see a friend.”

“She went to see Brother Anselm, but that was hours ago. I’ll get another message to her later.”

Jean-Paul hung up his jacket and homburg on the rack near the back door. His button-up shirt was covered in blood and sweat, his and hers. He’d tried to hide it, but she noticed him flinch as he slipped his arms out of the jacket.

“Come to my workroom. I need to put some salve on those wounds.”

There was a pause as he bit his lip. He held back from saying what was on his mind, but she’d guessed anyway.

“Yes, it’s magic. Good magic. You won’t feel a thing.”

He doubted that. Nothing this woman did left him without feeling. He followed after a compliant nod. Regrettably the workroom was located in the cellar, a space neither wished to revisit so soon, but he propped the main door open to add air and light. He’d not entered her workroom before. The times he’d tried to get a look inside it had been locked, jammed, and seemingly blockaded from the other side. Now, as she held her hand over the lock and whispered a spell, he suspected it might also have been secured by an enchantment. The door swung open without so much as a squeak.

He had to confront his privileged standards of normal when he saw the smallness of the space she’d been living in. The single bed, the trunk, the desk, and the shelves overflowing with bottles containing bits of leaf, fur, and animal bone—Madame had been closer to the truth when she’d called it an old storage closet full of brooms.

She selected several bottles, shaking their contents and considering, before replacing them back on the shelf. Her finger paused at an empty space, a toothless hole in an otherwise full smile of apothecary jars. Her brow tightened. Her lips pressed together in concentration as she searched the desk.

“Something wrong?”

“Strange, there was a bottle here and now it’s gone.”

“Madame was in here earlier.”

Elena considered it and then shook her head as if setting the thought aside. She reached for her mortar and pestle, then began crushing a handful of dried leaves. “You’ll need to unbutton your shirt,” she said, adding the grindings to a jar of sweet-smelling cream.

He obliged, ever more aware of the impropriety of the two of them being in her room alone together. He decided he didn’t care and opened his shirt to let her fingers probe his tender ribs. He sucked in a short breath at her touch.

“Breathe,” she said and applied the cream, smoothing her hands over his side while she whispered soft words of healing and mending.

“What happened to you?” he asked, feeling slightly dizzy from the nearness of her. “Before. To make you go away?”

She looked up at him with those cat eyes of hers, only this time she didn’t turn away or change the subject. “Someone put a curse on me. A bad one. It took seven years to break it so I could free myself. That’s why I was gone so long.”

“Someone? You don’t know who?”

“I was convinced it was Bastien. But it wasn’t. Now I don’t know.”

He wanted to put his arms around her. He wanted to protect her. It was absurd to think someone with her supposed powers might need his protection, but he remembered the desperate look in her eye as she’d faced Du Monde in the street. Trapped like a wild bird fighting to get out of a cage. Now he knew why. And now he understood that whoever cursed her was still out there.