The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(79)

“I’m still feeling the rattle to my brain from being hit with this little trinket, but I know it plays a lovely tune when fired.” He removed the revolver from his waistband, pointed the muzzle toward the floor, then pulled the trigger. “Clair de Lune” played softly as he handed her the musical gun.

She held all the items needed for the incantation in her arms, all but the last two.

“Your hair,” Marion said. “It’s as gold as any thread. Perhaps you could use that?”

“Yes, that may do,” Elena agreed. “Given its stubborn resistance to being anything other than the color it is.” She gently removed three long strands from Yvette’s head, plucking them out by the roots.

They laid the items below the center painting. Remarkably, each person had contributed something from the list. Well, nearly everyone.

Alexandre seemed to realize he hadn’t anything to offer. And then he smiled and tapped his walking stick twice against the floor. “Your dragonflies, mademoiselle,” he said, and beside him Elena’s dress fluttered to life. The reed grass swayed, the moon glowed softly, and the dragonflies beat their wings and lifted off the gown, shimmering and iridescent as they circled the room. “The dress had already been enchanted, though the little devils usually only fly around the shop at midnight. A small charm to confuse them about the time,” he said.

Yvette held her finger out to draw a dragonfly to her. The largest of them landed, its wings cantilevering in perfect stillness. “That’s everything, isn’t it?”

“But what about her?” Marion asked, nudging her chin toward Sidra.

The jinni folded her arms. “The girl has already stolen everything she needed from me.”

“The wish.” Elena turned to Yvette. “Write down what you wished for,” she said and tore off a corner from the paper they’d used to transcribe the spell. Henri provided a stick of charcoal, and, with it, Yvette wrote down the thing she’d folded inside her heart all those weeks ago. Then she rolled it up, tied it off with a filament of her hair, and attached it to the body of the dragonfly, who proved a patient messenger as he buzzed to sit on her shoulder.

“All right,” Elena said. “Try it again.”

Yvette took a breath, looked at all the items arranged on the floor before her, and read once more the incantation left for her in her mother’s book. Again, she wasn’t sure if it had worked, but then the dragonfly took off from her shoulder. He zoomed toward the painting, landing at the feet of the couple. There he crawled across the canvas, moving his wings in mechanical precision.

Slowly, as if thawing from a frozen sleep, the scene in the painting began to move. Yvette took a step back, scared of what she might have unleashed with her words. She looked to Elena for reassurance.

“It’s only the wish and fairy magic binding together,” Elena answered, though she, too, kept a wary distance.

The woman in the painting blinked as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light. Yvette glowed ever so softly, helping to illuminate the faces of those in the room. The man in the painting watched the dragonfly buzz over his head, then turned to smile at her.

“Daughter.”

After all the years Yvette had secretly wished for this moment, she thought the word, once uttered, would fit her like a crown. Raise her up. Give her a sense of legitimacy, purpose. Instead it pinched like new shoes stiff from disuse.

The couple seemed to intuit her confused emotion. They straightened and stepped closer to the edge of the painting.

“We’ve been waiting for you for so long,” the woman said.

Her mother.

“I’ve been waiting too,” she said and took a curious step closer.

Her parents.

They stood before each other, searching for recognition. And it was there in the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, and the roots of the hair. The bloodline tying them together showed in their faces, and yet they were just as far apart as they’d ever been, divided by a canvas of magic.

“Where are you?” she asked, reaching out to touch the frame.

“In my father’s realm,” said her mother. Behind her a stag leaped across the grass.

“Can I come in?”

“Careful with your words, Yvette,” Elena said.

“Why?”

Her mother smiled softly. “She’s right to warn you. Words spoken in the fairy realm carry the value of currency. Words have weight and meaning beyond the mortal world’s understanding of language.”

“Like promises?”

Her mother’s brow tightened ever so slightly. The word had struck the way she’d intended it. Yvette might be ignorant about magic, but not about people. That’s all she’d done her whole life—study others, trying to figure out who she belonged to. And she knew how to defend herself against them all.

“I never promised I would return.”

“No, instead you abandoned me here. Alone.” Having her parents stand there as if they were real, speaking as if they cared, and yet still a world away only churned up the pain she’d lugged around since she was a child.

“We didn’t abandon you,” her father said.

“Never,” her mother said, stepping nearer to the painting’s edge. “Please, we’ve been waiting so long to explain.”

Yvette’s mother studied the frame of the painting as if surveying its strength. Her father encouraged her, saying the magic was strong and the portal would hold. She stepped out of the painting, floating to the ground in a halo of fairy light. The image of her in the painting had not fully captured the luminescence of her skin, the grace of her movements, or the warmth of her eyes when she beheld Yvette in her gaze from five feet away.