Wicked After Midnight

Truth was, he’d swooped in long ago, and I’d let him.



“Tell me, then,” I said softly.



As I kept my eyes trained on the lanterns up ahead, he murmured in a voice low enough for my ears only. “I want to marry you. I want to run away with you. I want to have children with you but not so many that you go crazy. I don’t want you to grow old by a campfire. I want to travel, see the world, pursue the sun. I don’t want to lead, but I don’t want to follow. I don’t ever want you to stop being wild, but I wouldn’t mind harnessing your ferocity. Perhaps we could start our own cabaret, treat the girls better. I don’t know. I have only been thinking about this most nights while I stare at the stars and wait for your light to go out so I know you’re alone when it does.”



I tensed, fingers squeezing his tightly. “You’ve been spying on me?”



“I’ve been protecting you, bébé. I knew that one of these days, no matter how strong and smart you are, the men of Mortmartre would find a way to put an end to your teasing and claim you once and for all, against your wishes and protestations. And I wasn’t going to let it happen.”



“I don’t know whether to be grateful or furious.”



“Both, probably.”



“Jesus, Vale. How are you so goddamn blasé about this? You love me, you want to marry me and start a cabaret, you’ve been stalking me, but it’s for my own good. And we’re walking into the lion’s den right this moment, and you don’t seem to give a shit. Do you ever take anything seriously?”



He laughed outright then. “I take everything seriously; I simply refuse to be serious about it. What is, is. What is done, is done. You don’t think much like a Bludman. And whoever said I loved you, bébé?”



I skidded to a stop, half terrified and half furious. “But you—”



“I do, though. Quite honestly, I feel on track for the first time in my life. I actually want to do the thing that needs doing, and you’re right here with me, hand in mine. The worst that can happen is I die fighting for my woman, and for a brigand, that is an enviable way to go.”



“You won’t die. I can always . . .” I trailed off.



“You can’t. That’s the irony, non? I’m the only one you cannot turn into a Bludman.”



My heart clutched itself behind my corset, and that’s when I knew how much I cared about him. The biggest weapon in my arsenal was being a Bludman. I was hard to kill, a dangerous predator in my own right, and gifted with the ability to turn a dying human into one of my own, thereby saving his life. But since I couldn’t drink Vale’s half-Abyssinian blood, he was right. I couldn’t turn him. I realized I was crushing his fingers and relaxed my hand, suddenly seeing him as fragile as a butterfly.



And he recognized it instantly and squeezed harder. “Don’t be careful of me, bébé. I am still difficult to kill in my own right, and I grew up in a brigand’s camp. I always have weapons up my sleeves, you know.”



“But still—”



“I forbid you to worry about me. Worry about Cherie instead.”



We were almost caught up to the group of girls, and they turned as one down another tunnel to the right, fanning out behind Bea. Unlike the well-defined archways that led to the other turn-offs and crypts, this entrance was like the crack in a broken tooth, and I paused before stepping over the jagged bricks and turned to face the man who loved me.



“Something else is bothering you, Vale. I can smell you again, and you smell of worry.”



“Ah, yes.” He chuckled, and I breathed in the strange spice as the blood hit his cheeks in a blush. “You never answered me. I basically poured out my heart to you, very unbrigandly, I might add, and you just continued walking.”



I glanced through the crack in the bricks. Somewhere up ahead, the girls had stopped. They all held their lanterns aloft, and I could just barely see a set of stone steps going, oddly, downward. A bizarre melange of smells reached me: fine cologne and old Scotch, oil and metal, sex and sadness, all overlaid with the greasy sweetness of dark magic. We had reached our destination. And the daimons of Paradis were waiting for us to lead them.



I went up on tiptoe to plant a firm kiss on Vale’s lips.



“I think I love you. Now, shut up and help me kill a bunch of people so we can figure out the rest.”



31



As I passed through the cluster of daimon girls, I felt hands fall softly on my arms, light touches on my shoulders and back and a few on my head, as if they could draw strength from me along with sustenance. Or maybe they were offering blessings. I felt a brief moment of shame that I had spent so much time in their world, living among them, and had never really taken the time to learn about them and their ways.



“What now?” Mel whispered.



“Stick to the plan,” I whispered back.



We’d figured it out while waiting in the hall, and it had spread from girl to girl like flames licking a cursed painting. Just like onstage, everyone knew her own part and was ready to play it. The daimons set down their lanterns against the wall, away from the rippling skirts that many of them had worn and carried high above the water of the catacombs. The weapons they’d held while walking disappeared into the corsets, up their sleeves, under their hats, tucked into blouses behind their backs. They twisted their heads to crack their necks and twitched their shoulders, limbering up. Those high kicks we’d been practicing were about to come in handy. The next step was a strange one, but we’d discussed it back at Paradis, and at least the first installment of the plan was familiar to them. Bea had told us exactly what would be waiting beyond the door.



Vale gave my hand a final squeeze and melted back behind the group. I took the steep steps carefully, my skin going frigid as I descended. Instead of a trapdoor with a ladder like the one at Paradis or a hole in the floor with steps like Monsieur Charmant’s, this entrance was more civilized, as if the denizens within didn’t care to sully their hands or boots with climbing or crawling. Even the door was elegant—dark wood, oiled and carved. I was willing to bet the hinges wouldn’t dare to squeak.



Ever so slowly, I turned the knob, but the door wouldn’t budge. I had no pins in my hair, and with their tails removed, the daimon girls had no magic of their own. Even with all of our stashed weapons, no one had an ax.



Beside me, Vale put a hand on my shoulder. “Let the brigand handle that, bébé.” He fiddled with the keyhole for a moment and stepped back with a cocky grin. “Your turn.”



This time, the knob turned easily. I sidled through, drawn to a break between indigo velvet curtains that hid the door from the larger room beyond. Peeking through the crack as if yet again in the wings of a grand theater, I shook my head at the perfection, the gilded beauty, the most very definite wrongness of the scene. It was like a grand church mixed with a cabaret, far below Paris. Music floated in from a three-piece band of bright-eyed daimon men who, I noticed, still wore their tails. The room beyond the band was large and open, a ballroom like one might find in a public dance hall or a rich man’s mansion. The floor was light and polished, reflecting the bright chandeliers overhead and the swirling, jewel-hued skirts of the girls who danced in the arms of tuxedo-clad gentlemen. I had expected to find them in the bird masks I’d seen at the carriage fire, but what need did they have to hide here, in their secret club, where their victims would never escape the catacombs with their minds and hearts intact? There had to be at least three dozen of the bastards, although only half of them were dancing.



My heart wrenched as I inspected the girls more closely. They moved with daimon grace, dressed like dolls in revealing cabaret clothes. But their faces were blank, their eyes wide, and their mouths slack and unsmiling. They were drugged or ensorcelled, in some sort of stupor, dancing as if caught in someone else’s dream. On tables and in corners, partners and more unorthodox groupings of partially clad bodies writhed in ways that drew moans only from the men.



The daimons of Paradis gathered around me, vibrating with anger and fear. I looked to my left and my right, and the girls I had come to know on sight had changed utterly. Their skins, always a riotous rainbow, were now all the same color, the ephemeral smoky gray of shadows and darkness. As we’d discussed, they split into two groups. One group shimmied and shook themselves until they were back to their bright, beautiful selves. The other group remained shadow-dark and disrobed completely.



The naked girls became chameleons, every part of their bodies and hair blending in with their surroundings as they skirted the dance floor, slinking like cougars. There were about twenty of them, and I quickly lost sight of their bodies as I tossed their clothes back through the door and into the tunnel. The remaining girls fixed each other’s hair and fluffed skirts as they did backstage at Paradis. Then, as if we’d coordinated it perfectly, a grandfather clock struck two, and they sashayed past the curtains and onto the dance floor, hips swinging and smiles wide.



They’d caught the men mid-waltz, and with practiced motions, each girl found her mark and twirled the gentleman right out of his partner’s grasp. The nearly invisible girls guided their sleepwalking sisters to the curtains, herding them toward us like confused cattle. Bea, Mel, Vale, and I darted out to grab them, grasping each dazed victim’s arm through the curtain and carefully propelling them toward the door to the catacombs, where more girls waited to lead them back to Paradis, following that red string through the maze of tunnels.



The first girl I grabbed was pliant, her eyes dumb and her steps sluggish in slippers worn down to nothing. I didn’t realize until I was pressing her hurriedly forward that it was Limone—or what was left of her. The proud acid-green of her gold-dusted skin had faded to the the color of a molded lemon. All the hate I’d felt, facing her portrait in the Louvre, was gone. She was empty, a shell, but her hair was in perfect ringlets, and her eyelashes were long and false, proving what was more important to her captors.



“I’m sorry,” I muttered over her shoulder, the heat in my cheeks acknowledging that she wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t shown up exactly when I did to steal her spotlight.