The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(30)
Elena blinked back her bewilderment. Was this real? An elaborate trick? How could Madame Fontaine have gleaned such details about her mother? Fontaine didn’t even know Elena would be attending, as she’d been RSVP’d as a guest of Madame Martel.
Eyes adjusting to the contrast of light and dark, Elena peered around the table looking for any sign of manipulation, a hint of a deceptive smile on the assistant’s grim face. Did the woman work in the records office? Did she know about her mother? Her crime was well known, but it had happened over twenty years ago. Did people in the city still remember?
Or was it possible her dead mother was truly speaking through the medium?
“Who are you?” Elena asked. “Why are you here?” But no answer came as the connection seemed to fade, and when she looked again the medium sat normally as if nothing had happened. Instead of channeling her mother, Fontaine appeared to be speaking about Jean-Paul’s father and how much he missed his dear wife.
“Astonishing,” Marion said, her hand gripping tight to Elena’s. “To think Philippe was here in this very room!”
Elena had no idea how to respond. Had she somehow slipped into the shadow world? It was the only plausible explanation, but she knew she hadn’t. She’d been conscious of her location the entire time. And yet no one else in the room seemed to have heard what she had. The encounter left her feeling uneasy. Rattled. As if some unbidden magic had invaded her mind.
After two other guests had relatives speak to them through Madame Fontaine, she thanked the spirits for presenting themselves, then slipped out of her trance. Or rather she released her grip from those at the table, clapped her hands together twice, and welcomed in the light. The sconces burned brighter, the mood lifted, and everyone let out a much-needed sigh of relief that their psychic wings hadn’t been burned by flying too close to the otherworld.
They were not the only ones relieved to have the light return.
“My dear, are you all right?” Marion asked. “You’ve gone pale.”
“The spirits can be somewhat unsettling if you’re unaccustomed to their strong presence,” said the comté, trying to be helpful.
As Elena gathered her wits, Madame Chevalier remarked, “Don’t despair. It’s rare to have a spirit address you on your first night. It must have taken three visits for me to hear from my beloved Arturo.”
Madame Fontaine agreed. “The spirits can be quite stingy about who they will and won’t respond to until they are sure of your intentions.”
Her intentions? Had she somehow conjured the voice of her mother because of her spoken desire? Was this mortal woman somehow a conduit for the spirit world despite her obvious lack of supernatural talents? Elena’s flesh grew cold.
Blood will tell, blood will remember.
Hadn’t Grand-Mère said as much? Always worrying about her mother Esmé’s bloodline showing itself in her? As if the art of poison were a disease that could be passed on from one generation to the next. Maybe it was. Maybe that was the thing she’d felt swelling beneath her intentions.
Blood will tell, blood will remember.
Oh, Grand-Mère. She wished she could send the old woman a dove to express how deeply the regret and sorrow she felt still festered in her heart. But the channel to the spirit world had closed, sealing the fissure between this world and the next.
The comté and others continued to stare. To assuage their concern, she replied, “I’m fine, really.”
Yet she was far from all right. Yvette might wear her scar on her face for all to see, but others carried them deep inside, where only their bearers knew the damage done.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The sun had barely cleared the rooftops the next morning when clouds conspired to obscure it. Yvette opened the window to check for the smell of rain and discovered the mouthwatering scent of bread baking nearby instead. She was only three streets removed from the boulangerie she’d terrorized as a child, stealing croissants and macarons off the counter whenever Madame became preoccupied with watching her oven. Her stomach clenched at the scent, but she’d been punched by hunger before. She knew how to take the hit. What she couldn’t take was waking up and not having a single cigarette to puff on. And neither the threat of rain nor the threat of incarceration was strong enough to keep her mind off her next cigarette.
The three centimes she’d found stacked atop the stove behind where Monsieur Whiskers slept ought to be enough. The cat had claimed the space for his own, and it was only after he’d trotted outside first thing in the morning that she noticed the money. Elena must have set the coins there before she left the day before, not mentioning the charity for fear it would have been rejected out of some stupid sense of pride. Not likely. Not from a girl born on the butte, where the line between survival and falling through the cracks to the netherworld was often no wider than the lifeline on an open palm.
Her fingers twitched again. No getting around it. She’d have to go out. Either that or gnaw all her fingernails off from the craving. Despite Elena’s warning to stay inside, she thought walking the street in the morning ought to be safe enough. At night all the ghouls were out. Mornings were made for old women to sweep their sidewalks and see their husbands off to work at the mill or tannery.
After securing her updo with the pencil-thin handle of an old paintbrush, Yvette wrapped the stolen velvet over her head and scuttled down the stairs to the street. The smell of fresh bread assaulted her again the minute she turned the corner, as did the sight of the street urchins creeping about the perimeter of the boulangerie three streets later. She’d been able to spot the children watching from the ivy along the iron railing and from the recessed door of the tenant building across the street, because that’s where she used to hide. They were young but had already learned an empty stomach was filled quickest when the sun came up and the trash went out.