The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(73)
Yvette jumped off the bottom stairs, confronting Rings and his crew as they bent down to rifle through Henri’s pockets. Her body shone even brighter until the men were forced to back away and shield their eyes with their arms. When they were nearly blinded from her luminescence, she focused her energy into a fine point, like a knife extended from her hand, and aimed it at Rings’s heart. Elena, fearing Yvette was about to run the spike through the man’s chest, rushed to intervene, but then the young woman stopped her advance.
Rings stared at Yvette wide-eyed, as if searching for an electrical cord that might explain the light shining off her. “How are you doing that?”
“On your knees.” She shouted with the fury of an angry goddess, taking Elena by surprise at the ferocity in her voice.
The men, mouths utterly agape at what they were witnessing, fell to the floor at her command. Yvette trembled as she held on to the swell of energy. The crowd, though still convinced they were watching a performance, took an instinctive step back. Elena wished to retreat as well, but this was no fairy play. The intensity of the young woman’s energy continued to build. She feared Yvette had channeled something she didn’t yet have the experience to control.
“Yvette, can you feel the wave of energy flowing beneath your grip?”
The girl nodded, uncertain at first, but then more firmly. “Yes, I think so, but it’s getting harder to hold.”
A man tried to run. Yvette’s hand followed him, zapping him off his feet as if struck by a live wire. Rings and his remaining crew shrank to the floor and covered their heads.
“I need you to breathe gently.” Elena took a step closer to Yvette. “Ask the power inside you to subside. Summon the All Knowing for help, if you need to. Focus on lowering the flow of energy so we can help Henri.”
Yvette nodded and took three shallow breaths. The funnel she’d created crackled and arced, sending random sparks shooting out of its center.
“Deep breaths, Yvette. Inhale, exhale.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Elena saw Jean-Paul and Alexandre splash the contents of an ice bucket on a stray spark that had landed on a tablecloth, burning a hole.
Yvette scrunched her face in concentration and inhaled, filling her lungs. The light quivered as it began to lose its centrifugal force. She took another breath and another until the light storm softened into a radiant glow.
Once the threat had receded, the men got to their feet and ran as if making their exit from the stage. The crowd clapped and cheered before returning to their champagne and fantasies in Heaven and Hell, the show apparently over.
As the mob dispersed, Yvette rushed to where Henri sat on the floor, cradling his head.
“You got away,” he said when she knelt beside him. “I knew you would.” Then he noticed the strange burn marks on her arms. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
“I’ll be all right. Always am,” Yvette said, absently rubbing the marks on her arms. “But it looks like you got popped a good one.”
Elena joined them, returning Henri’s satchel of drawings to him, and dabbed the blood from the young man’s forehead with a borrowed napkin. “I’d rather not make a habit of patching you up twice in one day,” she said, surveying the damage on Henri’s face.
“Is he okay? That’s a lot of blood.”
“He’ll have a lump on his head for a day or two, by the look of things, but I think he’ll recover.”
Elena asked a waiter for a glass of water and some mint leaves from the bar to soothe Henri’s wound, then turned her focus to Yvette’s arms. So, it was the comté after all, recalling what Isadora had said about Yvette’s mother and her need to wear gloves in public.
Elena looked at Henri. “Did you give him the book?”
“Wait, my book?” Yvette’s skin radiated noticeably, rising with her anger. “Was Rings telling the truth?”
“No, I . . .”
“Then what’s that money for?”
Henri saw the wallet sticking out of his pocket. He tucked it away, then patted his jacket on both sides, growing more worried, as if something was missing. “I didn’t, I swear. I gave him another book. I took two from the shop, but the real one, the one with the feather in it. It’s gone. It was here in my pocket, I swear. It must have fallen out during the scuffle.”
“You tried to double-cross him?” Yvette paced with worry. “Oh, Henri, he’s desperate for that book. He thinks it holds the key to some fortune he had stolen from him. When he figures out you gave him a dummy, he’ll be back. He loves throwing fire around.”
“He’s a fire witch?” Elena searched over the heads of the people for the exit. “We’ve got to go. All of us.”
Henri ignored her, crawling across the floor to search for the dropped book. As people continued to mill about at the bottom of the stairs, patting him on the back and congratulating him on his performance, he stretched his arm out to feel behind the statue of a half-goat, half-man figure. His fingers came up with the tossed revolver but no book. He was just about to search behind an oversize funeral urn when the stairs from the Underworld exploded with light. A blaze of green fire churned in the air, as odorous and malevolent as anything the decor had tried to replicate of hell.
The walls caught fire, and no one mistook the flames as part of any féerie play.