Spectacle(105)

Instantly she was transported to another place. She was beating someone, pounding hard. People were all around her. She got a glimpse of the body she was thrashing.

Zoe Klampert.

Here. Moments ago.

Nathalie returned to the present and scrambled onto her feet. Simone looked at her, perplexed.

“I touched her and had a vision of what just happened. From the perspective of someone who helped kill her.”

It was neither the morgue.

Nor the glass.

Her magic was connected to the murders and bodies themselves.





51


The next day, Le Petit Journal published a letter from Zoe Klampert to Paris.

I write this knowing I may get caught someday, and until then I shall keep this on my person. I will add to this page the names of the Insightfuls whose lives I take.

Damien Salvage—exceptional hearing ability; consequence of overuse is temporary ringing in the ears. (Have experienced)

Hugo Pichon—ability to read the mind of the last person whose hand he touched; consequence of overuse (i.e., not “pausing” at all) is temporary inability to comprehend the written word. (Experienced moderately, quickly rectified)

[new page]

Damien was faith and art and imagination. I am reason and science and fact.

What started out as a flirtation in an opium den became a splendid partnership.

I am a woman of great means because of my father, a brilliant scholar and researcher at the University of France. My father, deaf and mute but a genius through his quill. My father, my teacher. My father, swindled out of his scientific findings by the fraud Henard, who ignored my father’s warning that the work on magic through blood was incomplete, untested. My father, who bid farewell to this earth with wolfsbane and a glass of Bordeaux.

I didn’t kill Henard. But I did pay someone—a stranger, a mercenary—to kill him. Or assassinate him. How important must a man be to have an assassin rather than a killer? I paid the man to poison him and slice him with the glass used in his transfusions. To ruin his work. The dolt I hired was supposed to take a sample but thought he heard someone and fled.

Oh, how ironic! Damien never got caught because he always knew when someone was coming. Twice he heard someone approach just prior to abducting a girl and abandoned the effort.

Few charmed like Damien. After following them from a considerable distance for a day or two, he could be whatever he needed to be to gain their trust—to get someone to walk through a door or enter a room or accept a lift in the carriage. From there he did what he had to do to carry out the deception, sometimes with my help, sometimes not. Ask for directions. Feign illness. Beg for assistance. Show his workshop to a curious girl. Night and fog were our dearest accomplices.

I should have hated Damien for being an Insightful, but I didn’t. I loved him. Profound and morose, angry and passionate—he was enchantingly damaged. He became more damaged as his magic started to slip away. A horrendous ringing in his ears, something he described as a tempest in his head, was the disadvantage of his power. As time passed it became more frequent, more prevalent, more pronounced.

He grew increasingly bitter. His magic dwindled and left behind a void nothing could fill. Food. Drink. Me. Opium. Woodworking. Nothing.

I wasn’t there when he killed the first one. We’d gotten into a row and I didn’t call on him for nearly a week. When at last I did, he told me what he’d done to the girl the day prior. “I had a moment of clarity at the opium den,” he’d said. “And I’ve found something to make me feel more supremely human than my hearing ever could.”

I never assumed he meant murder. Who with an iota of reason, even in a cloud of opium, would? (Astute investigators might recognize that quote from when I gave it to a reporter on the condition of anonymity following Damien’s death.)

His eyes were full of something—mischief, satisfaction, voracity. He was delirious with glee, proud to see her on display at the morgue.

I was angry with him. Not for killing the girl—Paris is full of meaningless lives—but for not taking her blood. He deprived me of a sample by shipping her body off so soon.

I have been studying my father’s work for years, and now I dwell in a well-hidden lab he established long ago at [address redacted]. I aim to perfect the magic so that no one suffers like Damien ever again. Regular injections, I think, rather than a single transfusion.

I need samples to conduct my studies. Damien provided the girls, I did the research on myself using the victims’ blood. We wedded his compulsion to kill with my desire to experience magic. We chose the girls we chose because of some quality they possessed, something I wanted for myself.

I was stronger one day, smarter the next. Prettier. Swifter. The nuance was gone but I was getting something, something from each of these girls, if only for a day or two. I continued to make discoveries and refinements; once confident, I tried Damien’s blood. It was so powerful the ringing in my ears had me bedridden for days. The setback reinvigorated my fervor, however, and I eventually discerned how to alter it for my own self. Near perfection.

That one girl, the strange one Damien called a “natural,” would have been the crown jewel. Instead Damien killed her friend, in a moment of recklessness, out of frustration that he couldn’t get the natural. She did endow me with a lovely singing voice, however, for a few days.

Our interests began to diverge. I was annoyed with his stupid, risky letters to the newspapers. He wanted pretty girls and I wanted Insightfuls; he wanted to choose them based on their appeal, and I reached a point where I didn’t care if the victim was a young woman or an old man—I wanted to pursue Insightfuls.