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“If you please,” Michel said, reaching backward and pulling a hood over his hair.
Izzy did the same. She smelled lavender, and she was very warm.
Michel said to the gremlin, “Let’s begin.”
Raising their hands like scrubbed-in surgeons, he and D’Artagnon faced the altar. They took deep breaths, centering themselves; Izzy did the same, trying to let go of all the chatter in her brain—her anxiety, her fear. The smell of candle wax overlaid something more odious; she caught a whiff of a terrible stench and figured it was coming from the box. It did nothing to make her feel better.
D’Artagnon said something in French. Michel replied, then translated, “He’s worried about your being here. I told him you insisted.”
She looked from him to D’Artagnon, whose face was still hidden. He creeped her out. All of this creeped her out. “I’m staying,” she said to him.
D’Artagnon inclined his robed head. “S’il vous plait, Madame la Guardienne .”
“D’accord . Then do as we do, please,” Michel said. “Do not depart from our ritual.”
He and the gremlin extended their arms and began another chant. Izzy copied them, spreading her arms wide and trying to follow the singsong words, which they repeated in a complex pattern.
The chant seemed to go on endlessly, the stench to increase. A thin layer of something white appeared along the floor.
Michel said, “Don’t be alarmed. It’s for protection.”
It was a mist. It curled around her ankles, cool as whipped cream, smelling of lavender. It billowed up to her knees and grazed her hips, then it rushed all the way up to her chest. As it rose to the level of her chin, she backed out of it, although Michel and D’Artagnon remained inside, breathing deeply.
“It’s all right,” Michel said. “Come back in, please.”
She knew Michel would probably be happy if she bailed. But she stepped back into the fog, closing her eyes, and took an exploratory breath.
Despite the coolness of the vapor, it felt warm as it entered her body; it was soothing, like deep-heat rub on a sore joint. She exhaled and took another breath. The gentle lavender scent filled her nose. With a pang, she thought of the mingled fragrance of roses and oranges that had often accompanied Jean-Marc’s soothing spells. Would she ever smell it again?
Michel snapped his fingers, and she started, opening her eyes.
The mist thinned and drifted back toward the floor, condensing into puddles. The atmosphere grew darker, the room, cooler. The shadows themselves seemed braced for whatever came next.
Michael and the gremlin clapped their hands three times, bowed low and knelt on both knees on dry sections of the floor. Izzy’s stomach constricted as she knelt, too, and a cold chill washed over her. She trembled, hard.
“You’re sure you want to do this,” Michel said. “Once we begin, we can’t stop.”
“Yes.” Her voice broke. “I’m sure.”
“Et voilà ,” Michel said.
She and Michel began to glow again. On the altar, the lid of the white container popped open like a jack-in-the-box. From the interior, a curl of bruise-colored smoke drifted toward the ceiling. Another followed, roiling, billowing and folding in on itself.
“This is concentrated evil,” Michel informed her. “Please keep your distance until we take care of it.”
“Not a problem,” she muttered.
Enveloped in white light, he got to his feet and pulled an object from inside his robe. It was a golden athame encrusted with opals. Holding it like a switchblade, he cautiously approached the altar, as if the smoke were a wild animal that could spring at any time.
D’Artagnon also pulled an athame from his robe, his made of some sort of ebony material and free of decoration. Whispering another chant, the two arced their arms over their heads—Izzy saw D’Artagnon’s long, scaly arm—then whipped them downward and began slicing at the smoke. Wherever their knives connected, the smoke solidified into chunks, which then crashed to the floor. The chunks glowed like embers, then sputtered out.
After a few minutes, no more smoke poured out of the box. The floor was littered with purplish-black briquettes that reeked of decomposition, overpowering the lavender scent.
Panting, both Michel and D’Artagnon lowered their arms to their sides. Michel said to Izzy, “Please come to the altar, but don’t touch any of that. It’s still very powerful stuff.”
I’m glad I put my shoes back on, she thought as she cautiously tiptoed on the balls of her feet to his side.
Michel and D’Artagnon genuflected to the altar. She had seen Jean-Marc do the same at any magical altar he encountered. For the first time since her journey into the world of the Gifted had begun, Izzy did, too.
God forgive me, she prayed, feeling blasphemous.
Holding their athames overhead like flashlights, Michel and D’Artagnon approached the box. After a moment’s hesitation, Izzy approached, as well. She didn’t have the athame Jean-Marc had made for her, and she had no idea where it was.
Weaponless, she looked inside.
The container was filled with a black, throbbing mass of goolike substance that stank like rotten meat. She covered her mouth and her eyes watered.
This is what’s left of Julius Esposito? Had he even been human?
As she watched, the center section of the jelly moved, breaking apart, and in the indentation, a round, human-size eye with a deep-brown iris glared up at her. Her gorge rose and she fought hard not to scream. In that single eye she could see life…and evil.
“Stop looking at it, madame,” Michel ordered her.
Sickened, she turned away.
“More than bokor, ” Michel commented, with the air of a scientist examining a microscope slide. “What was he messing with?”
The temperature in the room dipped; it was like a meat locker. Izzy shivered, hard. Every instinct for self-preservation was telling her to get the hell out of there. Michel had warned her that this would be unpleasant, but it was horrible. She could barely tolerate the sensation of menace crawling over her.
Then a voice bounced off the stone walls: “Give me back my soul .” It was a low, terrified howl, and it shook Izzy to her core.
Michel grunted, still peering inside the box. “Malchance magic, I’m sure of it,” he murmured. “They’re good at soul stealing.”
D’Artagnon said, “Oui .”
“Julius Esposito,” Michel said into the box, “I call on you. Who captured your soul?”
“Give me back my soul. ”
“Tell us who has it, and we’ll retrieve it for you,” Michel soothed. “We can do that. We’re Gifted. We’ll help you.” Beneath the warmth of his promises, there was an unmistakable edge. He was lying. Izzy wondered if Esposito knew it, too.
“My soul! ”
Or perhaps Esposito was beyond caring. He was in agony. She had never heard such terrible despair in her life, and that included her father’s pleas to God Himself to bring his beloved wife, Anna Maria, back from the dead.
D’Artagnon murmured something to Michel, who nodded in reply. D’Artagnon extended his athame into the box.
“Stay well back,” Michel ordered Izzy.
There was a terrible shriek. The white candle on the altar flickered. The statue of Jehanne shifted.
New mist billowed from the floor, very white, very concentrated, so redolent of lavender that Izzy’s eyes watered. Neither Michel nor D’Artagnon paid it any attention. But the smell was choking her, making her cough and gag. The mist hung like a curtain between her and the altar.
A second, more horrible shriek followed.
The candles in the candelabra went out. A cold wind whistled around the room.
“What are you doing?” Izzy demanded, stumbling forward. She craned her neck—
A burst of brilliance filled her field of vision.
“Don’t look!” Michel cried.
But it was too late.
Where is your gun, Guardienne? He will take the gun and he will end the House of the Flames. You have to secure your gun. You have to do it now.
Izzy was running in the nightmare forest, dodging branches that grabbed at her as the wolves howled in a ring around her, their hot breath bathing the blood-red moon. The silver wolf at her side darted ahead, diving into the cattails at the murky bayou shoreline. Its tail bobbed like a periscope as the wolf searched frantically, howling and chuffing.
Baying, the other wolves charged in after the silver one, disappearing into the cattails. Water splashed as they all jumped in, and Izzy called out, “No! This way!”
The bayou was crawling with death. It was all around them. They had to get out.
“This way!” she yelled again.
Sharp rocks sliced her feet as she ran to a trio of cypress trees jutting from the water. She heard herself sobbing for breath.
The moon raced across the sky as if hunted like her. Death was coming like a whirlwind.
Pressing her fists against her abdomen as she sucked in air, she glanced up. Her lips parted in terror. Something hung from the center tree…a man…
She saw his shoes, and then his legs…
It was Jean-Marc, gutted, hanging from the tree, his face blackened, worms crawling from his empty eye sockets.
“It didn’t happen!” she shouted. “You showed me this before and—”
And he’s lying in surgery with his chest cracked open, a voice whispered to her. He’s dying, and he will rot, just like this. And it will be your fault.
Get your gun.
Chapter 4
I have to get my gun. I have to stop it.
Thrashing, Izzy sat bolt upright. A damp cloth tumbled from her forehead onto her lap, which was swathed in white satin sheets. Beneath the bedclothes, she was wearing an ivory satin nightgown. The rose quartz necklace, the ring and her crucifix still hung around her neck. Andre’s gris-gris was missing.
“Shh, Guardienne, it’s all right. You’re safe,” a woman’s voice murmured. Annette, her mother’s nurse, leaned over her.
“What happened?” she said thickly, as she tried to pick up the cloth. Two veiled women were holding her hands. “Where am I?”
“You’re in your bedroom in the mansion.” Annette took the cloth from Izzy and placed it on a silver tray on a dark wood nightstand beside the bed. She saw gray stone walls, heavy dark furniture and a massive fireplace similar to the one in the safehouse back in New York. In fact, the room was very like the one Jean-Marc had prepared for her in New York. Perhaps it was to make her more comfortable. The truth was, she found both rooms horribly oppressive.
“Reading the bokor’s corpse was too much for you. It made you very ill. We rushed you in here and took care of you. The doctor left only a few minutes ago to check on the regent and your mother.”
She remembered the agents, the box, the gremlin and the eye. And Esposito pleading for his soul. Everything past that was fuzzy.
Annette gestured to the dozen or so veiled women standing around the bed, holding each other’s hands. One of them was curled up beside Izzy on the bed.
“The Femmes Blanches linked up with you and shared their magical essence with you. The doctor gave you oxygen and ran some tests. Your electrolytes were severely imbalanced. That’s been corrected.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then, “What did we find out from the reading?”
A figure moved from the darkness and approached the end of Izzy’s bed. It was Louise. She said, “I’d like to clear the room before we discuss that.”
The Femmes Blanches moved and shifted. Izzy nodded at Annette, who seemed to be in charge. The woman holding her right hand released her. The veiled woman who was seated beside Izzy gave her left hand a squeeze and slid off the bed, joining her sisters as they walked toward the door.
“Please, if you weren’t on duty in my mother’s chamber, go home,” Izzy told them.
The Femmes Blanches had made a vocation of keeping vigil over Izzy’s mother. They worked in shifts, took vacations, and some of them even had jobs. They didn’t live in the mansion. Some had homes in the garden district, and a few occupied funky bungalows and elegant apartments in the French quarter itself.
Once the women had filed out of the room, Louise said to Annette, “You, too, ma’am.”
Annette shifted, unsure.
“It’s all right,” Izzy told her, although she was equally unsure.
As soon as Annette had closed the door behind herself, Louise said, “First, I want you to know that this is the most heavily warded space in all of Bouvard territory. Nothing gets out, nothing comes in. That’s the only reason I’m going to speak so freely.”
“Okay,” Izzy said.
“Esposito gave up Alain de Devereaux’s location. Devereaux is being held in an abandoned convent on Rue de Gas-connes. Michel took Madame Sange and a sizable security team to extract him.”
“Michel…left? ” Izzy asked, her eyes widening. Abandoned her, her mother and Jean-Marc after a direct assault?
Louise’s expression was shuttered. Izzy couldn’t read her tone of voice, either, as she said, “It was a hard decision, madame. Michel wanted to survey the situation firsthand. If we can prove that the Malchances engineered the attack and the kidnapping, the Grand Covenate will have no choice but to punish them.”
Izzy didn’t know what to make of that. She had been going on the assumption that most members of the Bouvard family distrusted the Grand Covenate, the governing body of all the Gifted families, clans and tribes. She knew that the last time the Grand Covenate had intervened, Jean-Marc, who was a member of the House of the Shadows, was selected to act as the regent of the House of the Flames. The choice of an outsider from a different family caused a great deal of resentment. The fact that Michel hadn’t contacted the Grand Covenate immediately after the attack bolstered her opinion that he would prefer not to deal with them at all.
She asked, “How many people know what happened to me? That I’ve been unconscious?”
“Very few. Michel ordered strict need-to-know,” Louise informed her. She added, before Izzy could ask, “Your mother’s condition is unchanged. The regent is out of surgery and the doctor is cautiously optimistic.”
Izzy reeled with relief. Oh, thank you, Patroness. Oh, my dear God, thank you.
“Is the regent conscious?” Izzy asked. She needed to see him, to touch him, to be sure that it was true. She needed to hear his voice. See those dark eyes flecked with gold.
“No, and we’re keeping that under wraps as well,” Louise told her. “We’ve got our best guarding him and your mother both.” She lifted her chin. “I’ve been assigned to you.”
