The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(60)
She wanted to scream as she hunkered down for the second strike. The hammer hit. The flash exploded. Yvette opened her eyes. The relief of being released from the fire of the metal rushed over her body like a cool stream. But it wasn’t enough to revive her as she rolled onto her back, too weak to revel in her freedom.
The cat arched and hissed at the goblins.
“All right, put your back down.” Gustave waved at his men, and they gathered around her. One by one they set their lanterns down so that she was surrounded by a chain of lights. Gustave knelt and blew gently on the flame in front of him until it glowed bright and yellow. The others followed his lead, until the coved space was bathed in golden light from a half dozen goblin lanterns.
The manlings, with their misshapen bodies and grotesque faces, lifted their feet to dance. They moved slowly at first, awkward and unwieldy, stepping sideways a few tentative inches at a time until they found their rhythm. Soon a soft glow formed at their feet, conjured out of the dust and darkness. As the light grew, their leather-shod feet moved faster and surer, stomping and leaping in a raucous circle around Yvette’s curled-up body. After three times around, the glow grew strong enough to penetrate her skin. Yvette roused as it slipped through her pores and slid into her veins. Her head filled with thoughts of sunflowers and lemon tarts, and her body practically rippled with the pulsating energy of a star. Revived, she sat up, ravenous for a plate of soft cheese and warm bread with a glass of red wine. The goblins stopped and patted their sweaty brows.
“I thought I was a goner,” she said.
“Sometimes all you topsiders need is a little light and a little dancing,” Gustave said and handed her a corner of flat bread he’d saved in his back pocket.
Yvette wasn’t sure if she should accept food from a goblin, but refusing seemed the more dangerous option, outnumbered as she was by so many grotesque faces. “Thank you.”
The little men picked up their shovels and pickaxes and hoisted them over their shoulders. They bowed to the girl and the cat and gathered their lanterns.
“Wait, where are you going? Can’t I come with you?”
“Non, your kind belongs up top in the air,” Gustave said.
“But how do I get there?”
“You’ve got your glamour back, haven’t you?”
“My glamour?” Yvette looked at her scuffed and dirty dress, burned arms, and filthy shoes.
The goblins shook their heads as if she were teasing them. Ignoring her question, they walked back out the way they’d come. Yvette got to her feet and followed their trail of light in the dark, stumbling occasionally on the odd bone or stone in her path as she called after them. “What glamour?”
The cat trotted nimbly at her heel as the little men got farther and farther ahead until they came to a small hole chiseled in the wall where they disappeared altogether. Yvette knelt, trying to squeeze through the opening, but it proved only big enough for a single-file line of goblins or a scrawny black cat. As the trail of lights disappeared, leaving her in the tunnel without the aid of a lantern or torch, Yvette hugged her knees to her chest, terrified of the dark and the dead around her.
She was doomed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was most inconvenient that Alexandre had not brought Yvette’s book with him. He’d chosen instead to entrust its safety to the chaos of his shop and the protection spell cast around the perimeter. Now they had to travel halfway across the city on a crowded, overheated underground train so they might return to the shop, decode the as yet understood language, find Yvette, and attempt to barter the book’s contents to secure her release from her captors. If, indeed, they could figure out who had taken her. On top of that, Elena was expected for dinner with Jean-Paul and her future mother-in-law at Maurice’s at seven thirty sharp. She crossed her arms and slumped in her wooden bench seat, wishing she knew of a spell that could turn back time.
“Could it be written in some ancient dead language?” Alexandre pondered aloud, pulling out the paper he’d copied of the symbols. “Or something runic? Musical notes perhaps?”
Elena had considered those possibilities as well. But there was something distinct yet familiar about the scroll-like writing they’d discovered in the symbols, something that chafed at her instinct. He handed her the paper and cake knife so she might attempt to decipher it one more time.
Try as she might, her mind would not stay focused on the cipher. She kept thinking about the coincidence of meeting Ferdinand Marchand that same week in the séance room and him being an acquaintance of Jean-Paul’s family, no less. Elena stared at her reflection in the window, thinking back to their introduction. Yes, Marion Martel knew the man as a client of her late husband’s, but there was something else there in the undercurrent. The whiff of rumor or uncertainty about the man. She made a mental note to ask Jean-Paul about him later at dinner.
Unable to concentrate, she handed the cake knife and paper to Henri to see if he recognized anything else. In the meantime, she let the train ride lull her into a shallow meditation, all the while thinking about Marchand and Cleo, Cleo and Tulane. She couldn’t get the image of the comté licking his finger and turning the page of his newspaper out of her head. Had they also been brought together by the whirlwind of a girl’s wish? As the train trundled down the track, Elena’s eyelids drooped and she felt herself go under, her mind off to wander the shadow world in search of answers.