“Reid says I’m . . . lost,” I breathed. Though the words unfurled gently, softly, I couldn’t have stemmed them if I’d tried. It’s as if they’d been floating just beneath my skin, waiting patiently for this moment. For this last, desperate window of opportunity to open. For this . . . prayer. “He says I’m changing—that I’m different. And maybe he’s right. Maybe I just don’t want to see it, or—or maybe I can’t. I’ve certainly made a piss poor mess here. The werewolves left, and if my mother doesn’t kill me, they will. Worse, La Voisin keeps—keeps watching me like she’s waiting for something, Nicholina thinks we’re great pals, and I—I don’t know what to do. I don’t have the answers. That’s supposed to be your job.”

I snorted and turned away, anger spiking sharp and sudden in my heart. The words spewed faster. Less a trickle, more a torrent. “I read your book, you know. You said you knitted us together in our mothers’ wombs. If that’s true, I guess that joke was on me, huh? I really am the arrow in her hand. She wants to use me to destroy the world. She thinks it’s my purpose to die at the altar, and you—you gave me to her. I’m not innocent now, but I was once. I was a baby. A child. You gave me to a woman who would kill me, to a woman who would never love me—” I broke off, breathing hard and grinding my palms against my eyes, trying to relieve the building pressure. “And now I’m trying not to break, but I am. I’m broken. I don’t know how to fix it—to fix me or Reid or us. And he—he hates me—” Again, I choked on the words. An absurd bubble of laughter rose in my throat.

“I don’t even know if you’re real,” I whispered, laughing and crying and feeling infinitely foolish. My hands trembled. “I’m probably talking to myself right now like a madwoman. And maybe I am mad. But—but if you are real, if you are listening, please, please . . .”

I dropped my head and closed my eyes. “Don’t abandon me.”

I sat there, head bowed, for several long minutes. Long enough for my tears to freeze on my cheeks. Long enough for my fingers to stop trembling. Long enough for that window in my soul to slowly, quietly click closed. Was I waiting for something? I didn’t know. Either way, the only answer I received was silence.

Time slipped away from me. Only Claud Deveraux’s whistle—it preceded him to the rooftop—drew me from my reverie. I almost laughed. Almost. I’d never met a person so attuned to melancholy; at the first sign of introspection, he seemed to just appear like a starving man before a buffet of pastries and sweets. “I could not help but overhear,” he said lightly, dropping to the eave beside me, “your rather magnificent conversation with the celestial sphere.”

I rolled my eyes. “You absolutely could’ve.”

“You’re right. I’m a filthy eavesdropper, and I have no intention of apologizing.” He nudged my shoulder with a small smile. “I thought you should know Reid just arrived, whole if not unharmed.”

A beat passed as his words sank in.

Whole if not unharmed.

Lurching to my feet, I nearly slipped and fell to my death in my haste to reach the stairwell. When Claud caught my hand with the gentle shake of his head, my heart plummeted. “Give him a few moments to collect himself, chérie. He’s been through an ordeal.”

“What happened?” I demanded, snatching my hand away.

“I did not ask. He will tell us when he’s ready.”

“Oh.” That one simple word echoed my heartache better than a hundred others ever could. I was part of that us now, an outsider, no longer privy to his innermost thoughts or secrets. I’d pushed him away, frightened—no, nearly crazed—that he would do it first. He hadn’t, of course, but the effect remained the same. And it was my fault—all my fault. Slowly, I sank back onto the eave. “I see.”

Claud raised a brow. “Do you?”

“No,” I said miserably. “But you already knew that.”

A moment passed as I watched mourners—the poor and bereft, mostly, with their tattered black clothes—trickle into the street. The bell tower had chimed half past a quarter hour ago. Soon, Requiem Mass would end, and the burial procession would wind through these streets, allowing commoners to say their goodbyes. The Archbishop’s body would pass directly beneath us on its way to the cemetery, to the Church’s tomb in the catacombs and its final resting place. Though I still didn’t like Madame Labelle, I appreciated her forethought in this location. If there was one person in the entire kingdom who’d loved the Archbishop, it was Reid. He should’ve been the one to prepare the body this morning. He should’ve been the one to speak over it. Even now, he should’ve been the one holding vigil beside it.

Instead, he was forced to hide in a dirty inn.

He would miss the Archbishop’s last rites. He would miss lowering his forefather into the earth. He would miss his final goodbye. I forced the thought away, tears threatening once more. It seemed all I did was cry these days.

At least here, Reid would have one last glimpse of him.

If Morgane didn’t kill us all first.

I felt rather than saw Claud studying me. He had the air of someone trapped in paralyzing indecision. Taking pity on him, I turned to tell him to stop, to tell him it was okay, but his resolve seemed to harden at something in my eyes. He removed his top hat with a sigh. “I know you are troubled. Though I have long debated the time and place to tell you this, perhaps I might ease your conscience by freeing my own.” He looked to the sky with a wistful expression. “I knew your mother, and you are nothing like her.”

I blinked at him. Of all the things I’d been expecting, that wasn’t one. “What?”

“You’re the best parts of her, of course. The vitality. The cleverness. The charm. But you are not her, Louise.”

“How do you know her?”

“I don’t know her. Not anymore.” The wistfulness in his gaze faded, replaced by something akin to sorrow. “In a different time—a thousand years ago, it seems—I loved her with a passion unequal to any I’ve ever known. I thought she loved me too.”

“Holy hell.” I lifted a hand to my brow and closed my eyes. It made sense now, his strange and unsettling fascination with me. The white hair probably hadn’t helped. “Look, Claud, if you’re about to tell me you—you empathize with her, or you still love her, or you’ve been secretly plotting with her all along, can you wait? I’ve had the shittiest of all days, and I don’t think I can handle a betrayal right now.”

His chuckle did little to reassure me. “Dear girl, do you really think I’d admit such a connection if I were in league with her? No, no, no. I knew Morgane before she . . . changed.”

“Oh.” There was that word again. It plagued me, full of unspoken pain and unacknowledged truths. “No offense, but you’re hardly my mother’s type.”

He laughed then, louder and more genuine than before. “Appearances can be deceiving, child.”

I fixed him with a pointed look and repeated my earlier question. It seemed important now. “What are you, Claud?”

He didn’t hesitate. His brown eyes—warm, concerned—might’ve pierced my soul. “What are you, Louise?”

I stared at my hands, deliberating. I’d been called many impolite things in my life. Most didn’t bear repeating, but one had stuck with me, slipping beneath my skin and moldering my flesh. He’d called me a liar. He’d called me—

“A snake,” I replied, breath hitching. “I suppose . . . I’m a snake. A liar. A deceiver. Cursed to crawl on my belly and eat dust all the days of my life.”

“Ah.” To my surprise, Claud’s face didn’t twist in disgust or revulsion. He nodded instead, a knowing smile playing on his lips. “Yes, I would agree with that assessment.”

Humiliation hung my head. “Right. Thanks.”

“Louise.” A single finger lifted my chin, forcing me to look at him. Those eyes, once warm, now blazed with intensity, with conviction. “What you are now is not what you’ve always been, nor is it what you always will be. You are a snake. Shed your skin if it no longer serves you. Transform into something different. Something better.”

He tapped my nose before rising and offering me his hand. “Both blood witch and werewolf will stay until after the funeral. Cosette spoke rather passionately to the former on your behalf, and with Reid’s return, the latter are eager to repay their blood debt. However, I wouldn’t expect a bouquet of roses from either party in the foreseeable future, and—well, I might also avoid Le Ventre for the entirety of my life if I were you.”

I accepted his hand, rising heavily. “Reid.”

“Ah, yes. Reid. I’m afraid I might have omitted the teensiest, tiniest of details in his regard.”

“What? What do you—”

He pressed a kiss to my forehead. Though the gesture should’ve been jarring in its intimacy, it felt . . . comforting. Like a kiss my father might’ve given if . . . well, if things had been different. “He asked for you. Quite insistently, in fact, but our stalwart Cosette insisted he bathe before seeing you. He was covered in vomit, of all things.”

“Vomit?” Each rapid blink only heightened my confusion. “But—”

The door to the stairwell burst open, and there—filling up every inch of the frame—stood Reid.

“Lou.” His face crumpled when he looked at me, and he crossed the rooftop in two strides, crushing me into his arms. I buried my face in his coat, fresh tears dampening the fabric, and held him tighter still. His frame trembled. “They took her, Lou. They took my mother, and she’s not coming back.”

The Funeral

Reid