The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(11)
Merde. After a month of watching the old place and waiting for les flics to give up, tonight she thought she might actually be desperate enough to act no matter the danger. She was so hungry, so tired of trying to find a safe place to sleep. And even more, the stolen wish was churning like a dervish inside her, desperate to be fulfilled. She’d fought it for weeks, afraid of the risk, afraid of the answers she might find, but something had changed. She’d felt the quiver in her blood when she woke up that morning, separate from the usual faintness she felt from eating only vegetable peels and gristle out of rubbish bins.
Yvette had no family, but she had Tante, her only tenuous tie to her long-absent mother. That was why the police were still watching the cabaret a month after her escape. They’d assumed, correctly it turned out, that she’d swim home like a spawning salmon returning upriver. Though “home” was a loose term, the drive to breach the cabaret’s walls and cross the threshold was turning into a compulsion she couldn’t ignore. But how to get inside without les mouches swarming all over her?
Yvette backtracked until she came to the narrow lane around the corner from Le Rêve. “One house, two house painted blue, three house, four house, say adieu,” she whispered as she walked past the two-story boardinghouses, remembering her old chant for getting in and out of the cabaret unnoticed as a young girl.
And there it was. The Perezes’ place, built on a wonky slant to accommodate the steep incline it sat on. There, tucked between the walls of house number three and house number four sat a narrow corridor leading to a hidden courtyard. It was where the women hung their laundry to dry during the day. In the old days, drunks needing a place to piss at night sometimes staggered in, too, hence the locked gate. Yvette watched the upstairs windows for movement. When no one stirred, she put her palm over the lock and whispered her burglar’s spell. After aiming a little spit at the hinge, the gate opened, squeaking no louder than the rise and fall of a carousel horse in the Jardin des Fleurs.
With one hand pressed against the bricks to guide her, she passed through the darkened corridor to where the rear apartments of Le Rêve overlooked the courtyard. A prickle on her neck made her turn and look up. A faint light, like a match held to a cigarette, glowed in one of the windows, but it quickly went out again. What if it was one of les mouches buzzing around the back? She held still, ears and eyes tuned to any movement. When no one came out to investigate or raise the alarm, she turned her attention to the window of her old room, one story up. The once convenient ladder was gone, but there was a wooden wheelbarrow leaning against the building she might stand on. She could drag it across the yard, but the scraping of metal would make a hell of a noise, and the only stealth spell she knew wasn’t worth the effort. Never buy a spell off the back of a wagon, she thought, even if it does come wrapped in a fancy decorated tin covered in testimonials.
Preoccupied by her dilemma, Yvette almost didn’t notice the prowler who had joined her in the shadows. The black cat that had ignored her earlier tiptoed through the corridor, flicked his tail, then walked to the opposite end of the courtyard. There, stacked in the corner, sat a tower of vegetable crates still ripe with the smell of cabbage and turnips.
Ah, merci.
She threw off the velvet curtain and, as quietly as she could, stacked two crates under the window. The long skirt and blouse would be a hindrance. Not made for climbing, those. But on the streets, you couldn’t afford to throw anything away. She kicked off her clumsy shoes and shimmied out of the stolen skirt and blouse until she stood in the harlequin leotard she’d been wearing when she arrived in the city. It hadn’t fared well from the grime of the gutters, but it was made for performing just the sort of acrobatics a climb like this required. And, as she’d learned from working the carnival, so was her body. She put her stockinged foot atop the bottom crate and tested her weight on it. It held, so she scrambled onto the ledge of the first floor. The cat curled up in her discarded velvet, preening his paws, unimpressed.
Yvette brushed the brick dust off her hands. “You may not know this, Monsieur Whiskers,” she whispered in her thief’s voice, “but I’ve been called as nimble as a cat myself.”
What she didn’t say was that she first heard those comments come from behind the glass of the apartment window she now peered through, by men she never knew beyond the phrase, “Whatever you like, monsieur.”
The room was dark, so she lifted the sash a mere inch. She’d have bet her last centime it wouldn’t be locked. She’d broken the mechanism years ago during one of her midnight escapes, and Tante Isadora was too tightfisted to spend precious coins on such a minor concern as a girl’s security. Yvette pushed the window all the way open and slipped over the sill. A feather-light tingle brushed over her skin as she stood inside her old room. The scent of male musk and rose-oil perfume mingled in the air above the unmade bed. Three years gone by and still the smell lingered, transporting her back to those last moments she’d stood in the room, blood spilling everywhere.
Her eyes adjusted to the inky darkness. The furniture was the same: bed, vanity, wardrobe, and washstand. But they’d been moved, rearranged to suit another’s spatial comfort. Or maybe to cover the stain. She hadn’t come to snoop, but a glint of starlight reflecting off a metal blade on the vanity caught her eye. She reached for it as the door swung open.
“Stop right there!”