The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(16)
“Why didn’t you ever give it to me before?”
“She implored me to wait until you turned sixteen. Of course, by then you’d already run off as a murderess.”
Down the hall the musicians began to play a new melody featuring the piano and accordion. Rowdy. Jaunty. A song to get the blood moving and raise a thirst so customers would order more drinks. Shrewd Isadora, always worried about where the next coin would drop. Yvette knew the thing in her hands, if it had been a family heirloom like a silver locket or gold ring, would have been pawned long ago, despite any wish of her mother’s. And yet the shabby envelope wrapped in blue ribbon with a sprig of dried rosemary had value to her beyond the measure of mortal reasoning.
She could feel the energy humming against her palm.
A gift. From her mother.
She untied the ribbon and peeled back the brittle paper, all the while sensing Tante’s watchful eyes. She turned her body a little to the right and slid what looked like a booklet free of the paper. The unadorned black leather had dried over time, bearing a faded crack in its skin, but the pages—handmade paper with a deckled edge—still had the suppleness of fine cloth. She fanned them open and saw that the pages were filled with small handwritten symbols. Triangles, circles, swirls, and dots inked in black, all arranged in different positions. Some, though, had been double traced with gold. Yvette touched the symbols with the tip of her finger, feeling the raised ridge of the paint.
“What is it?”
“I thought you might know, being a ‘witch.’” Tante rolled her eyes and closed the wardrobe closet. “Like I said, nonsense.”
Was it a spell book? A book of curses? A pawnbroker’s coded ledger? There wasn’t a speck of explanation, a title, or even a pair of initials to claim it. The booklet simply hummed like a bee against her skin.
Yvette was having difficulty holding back the twist of emotions vying for dominance. She was one part confused, one part brimming with hope. Riding on the tail of the latter, she dared to ask, “Can I stay till morning? I’ll sleep on the floor. Or backstage after closing. It wouldn’t bother me.”
“With les flics hovering like fireflies at the door? I don’t think that would be wise for either of us, mon petite chou. My bribes only buy me a blind eye for so long.” Tante’s gaze flicked to the window. “Best you go the way you came, if you don’t want to wake in a cell tomorrow engaged to Monsieur Guillotine.”
For any other girl it would have been as harsh a blow as a palm against her cheek, but not for one holding pages full of buzzing promise in her hands. The cold, wet street would be no match against Yvette’s buoyant heart tonight, and so she left.
An hour later Yvette curled up on the floor beneath a painted dome aglow with starlight. Dozens of candles flickered from an altar below. Seeking refuge for the night, she’d slipped inside the great beast of the butte, as it was the warmest place she could think to hide. Staring up at the cathedral’s grand interior, it certainly lived up to its name. The exposed ribs arched three stories high, giving her a feeling of having been swallowed whole by a great white whale. As long as the overgrown beast held her safe, she didn’t much mind being fish food for the night.
People from the neighborhood came and went, one or two at a time, to show their adoration at the altar. But no one seemed to pay her any attention, once she’d tucked herself away in the shadows at the back behind a confessional. A woman wrapped up in a black shawl lit a candle and knelt nearby, speaking an invocation. Yvette drew her velvet curtain up under her chin and stared at her booklet, passively listening to the rhythm of the woman’s foreign words being said over and over again.
Even in the low light she could make out the gold-and-black symbols, as if they created their own luminescence on the paper. She tilted the pages, watching how the triangles and squiggly lines seemed to bend with the light. Like tiny golden fish. Her mother’s magic. It had to be. But it was no kind of magic she’d ever seen before. The symbols meant nothing to her. They could be magic symbols from another country for all she could tell, or the very same words the shawled woman was muttering. If so, she knew even less about her mother than she’d thought. Sidra might know what the symbols meant. But Sidra . . . no. That was a dead end. She’d rather tear all her hair out than listen to that self-righteous jinni explain magic to her.
She trailed her finger over the paper, liking the soft tingle of communication between the strange marks and her bare skin. The booklet was only seven pages long, with each page containing seven lines. And, she noticed, there were seven symbols in each line. A definite pattern. What did it mean? She looked for more telltale signs of patterns, but nothing stood out. Things repeated, but not in any order she could recognize. She was going to need help. And she knew enough about magic to know it could go one of two ways: good or very, very bad.
Yvette went over the names in her head of the witches she knew from her former days in the city. She’d spoken a few times to the rag lady Consuela, who always set her cart up on the street in front of Jardin Antoine to watch the spirits of the dead come and go between the catacombs and the park cemetery. Then there was Desiree, who used a levitation spell to become a juggler in the circus that did shows on the other side of the butte. And Rings, of course, who wasn’t really a witch but a thief who taught her how to charm locks and slip fat wallets free of their protective pockets. How he learned the burglar’s charm as a mortal, she had no idea, but it had never failed her. And while any one of them would probably help her for the right price, it was unlikely they had the know-how to contend with a conundrum like this. No, she was going to need the help of a properly trained witch.