The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(31)
For a spark of a second the old competitive instinct flared—dive for the bin, throw an elbow, stomp with a pointy-heeled boot and take, take, take and run, run, run to the other side of the butte. She extinguished the impulse with a deep, distancing breath, even as something else caught fire within her. Following an instinct, she waved one of the children over, a girl with a pair of mismatched pigtails tied up with butcher’s string. The gap in the girl’s smile from a missing front tooth suggested she was no more than seven or eight years old, though the sunken eyes and rip in her frock sleeve confirmed she’d already been at this game awhile.
Yvette knelt when the barefoot girl approached. “I used to wait for the bread too,” she said.
The girl pointed matter-of-factly. “Your eyes are dirty.”
Yvette rubbed the back of her hand under her eye and came away with a streak of kohl. She must look like a ghoul with her black eyes and frazzled hair, though she doubted she came close to the strangest creature the girl had ever encountered on the butte.
“Hold out your hand,” she said.
“What for?”
“Because there’s a magic coin in my pocket that keeps trying to jump out, and if I don’t find a safe place for it soon, I’m afraid it might fly away.”
The girl stuck her hand out. Yvette set one of her three coins in the girl’s palm, then told her to watch it try and take off.
A butte-born skeptic, the girl stated the obvious. “It isn’t doing anything.”
“Voilà! The money must be happy right where it is.” Yvette closed the girl’s fingers over the coin, planting the first of what she hoped might be a magic seed. Even a witch without a mother knew the threefold law: that which is cast out—either good or bad—will come back three times as powerful. And she had a storm of bad karma that needed to be blown out of her life. She shooed the girl toward the bakery to fill her stomach with soft, warm bread.
Yvette stood, achy from withdrawal and hunger. She wished she had a coin to give to each of les enfants, but her fortunes were as flimsy as rusted tin at the moment. Well, though her prospects were never much better than they were now, she had found some stability working the carnival. That was probably lost for good. And even if Elena could help her unravel the book’s message, what then? She was still wanted for murder and escape. She’d have to leave the city for good. Perhaps the country. But if Sidra was telling the truth, she could do none of that until the wish was fulfilled. But what if it never was? How long could she live on the streets as a murderess on the run?
The children began to gather and stare, hoping for more money to come, so Yvette made for the next street over. Given her appearance, she decided her fate was best trusted to the familiar back lanes where one only stood out if they weren’t oddly attired. A dirt road led to a handful of little hovels atop the butte where the windmills still ground wheat into flour alongside the derelict taverns and bistros.
The lane proved as grubby as it had always been as Yvette sidestepped a pile of horse manure. Under the eye of a gloomy morning sun, the ground reeked of emptied bladders and the rancid-grease smell of unwashed bodies. On reflection, she was feeling a little ripe herself, but in this end of the butte it only helped her blend in with the crude population of comers and goers. Yvette cut through the section of the street where the cabarets and drinking houses huddled hip to shoulder, including Le Rêve. She’d just crossed the road when a sallow man in a wrinkled frock coat and dirty spats stumbled into the back of a two-seater fiacre. Memory rippled through Yvette, riding her nerves like a bad hangover. Two doors down from where she stood was where the prelude to the murder occurred that sent her to witch’s prison and a date with la demi-lune. The “gentleman” took notice of her standing on the corner. He whistled, wet and sloppy, for her to get in the coach and warm the seat beside him. She ignored his drunken proposition and marched forward with her head down, eyes on the pavement, even as he called after her, branding her a worthless whore for walking away.
Merde, she needed a smoke. There was a kiosk not too much farther up the lane. Or at least there used to be. She hadn’t walked this side of the butte in years. She felt the coins rubbing together in her pocket and walked on, anxious to get her ciggies and get back to the room. No sooner did she have the thought when she got a funny feeling inside, a ruffle in her intuition, that told her to look up. Yes, there on her left, a rakish young man in a shabby brown corduroy coat approached from a narrow alley, something familiar about his walk. The way he carried a folder under his arm yet kept his hands in his pockets and his head up as if he had all day to admire his surroundings. She didn’t know anyone that carefree in life, and certainly not at this hour of the morning, but what little witch instinct she possessed made her take notice.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him stare straight at her as he emerged from the alley, then quickly turn his face away and walk in the opposite direction she was headed. She didn’t know why exactly, but the young man’s retreat left her disappointed. Before she was forced to conceal herself under a shabby velvet curtain, it sometimes happened that way with the left side of her face. She’d been told enough times she might be a real beauty if not for the odd scar that ran along her jawline. People clicked their tongues in that sad sort of way, as if the mark were an unfortunate scratch on a mahogany table or a blemish on an otherwise perfect peach. Strangers sometimes asked her outright about it, and almost always when they were drunk and had abandoned their manners. She made up various stories about its origin depending on her mood and level of annoyance—a mugging turned violent, a scratch from a leopard at the zoo when she’d ventured too near to the cage, or the result of a lightning bolt that had entered through the top of her head and exited through her toes. As long as there was astonishment in their eyes at the end of her story, Yvette was satisfied. The truth of how she got the scar, however, was as much a mystery to her as it was to anyone else. She remembered nights as a child trying to scrub it off with a washcloth, as if she could rub the skin raw enough to erase the mark.