Seduction (33 page)

“I pretty much figured that out,” I said.

He looked around and lowered his voice. “He wants me to take over the company.”

“What, Shaw Enterprises? Are you kidding?”

“Well, not right away. The company’s CEO runs the actual businesses under the Shaw banner from New York. For the time being, Jeremiah only needs me to . . . do things with the Enclave.”

“Such as what?”

He sighed. “You know what I do, Katy,” he said quietly.

I lowered my head. Yes, I knew what he did. I’d known since his party last spring. Peter made gold. Just like Jean-Loup de Villeneuve. And Henry Shaw. And Jeremiah. Peter was just the newest link in the chain, the latest Sugar Daddy that Sophie and her cronies lived off.

“So that would be your whole job?” I asked. “Keeping these ladies in designer shoes?”

“Of course not. In time I’d take over all the things Jeremiah does. Oversee the shipping and imports. Coordinate the Shaw offices in Europe. A lot of things.”

“Is he going to retire?”

“He wants to, yes.”

“I’ll bet he’s not planning to live at the Poplars,” I said acidly.

“Look, you’re dead wrong about that place—”

Suddenly there was a shriek from inside the house. Peter and I both stood up, and were nearly run over by a herd of
women who ran out, their high heels clacking, leaving us in a cloud of dust and expensive perfume.

“What was that?” Peter asked. “A fire?”

“A phone call,” a man said from the doorway. I recognized him from Belmondo’s club. Also from the day Joelle led me into the sewer and left me there. As I recalled, the man’s name was Jacques. He was—or at least had been—Joelle’s boyfriend. “Apparently, there’s a body on the Rue Déschamps,” he said, rubbing his arms as he headed for the street.

“A body?” Peter asked.

“Not much of one,” I said. “It’s all dried out.”

“You’ve been there?”

I nodded. “It’s a mummy. But she’s wearing earrings. Well, one earring.”

Peter frowned. “But how long could a
mummy
have been lying in the middle of the city?”

“I guess someone moved it there,” I said. “I might have been able to find out if I could have handled her jewelry, but the police kicked me out before I could get close enough.”

“Too bad,” Peter said, distracted.

“So go ahead. It’s only a murder. You were talking about your plans to become an international mogul.”

He gave me an angry look. “Don’t, Katy,” he said. “I’m not like these people.”

The hell you’re not,
I thought.
You’re ready to throw away everything you are to be one of them.
But instead I said, “You’re luckier than they are. You won’t lose your gift with time.”

Fabienne had said Peter’s gift wasn’t like the magic the
other witches possessed—that he wouldn’t need to sacrifice a small part of it every month in exchange for the benefits of the full-moon ritual. Of course, that made sense. The coven wouldn’t want to lessen his ability to make gold. He’d get a free ride on the longevity train, just as Jeremiah and the alchemists before him had.

“It’s not like I’d be stuck here forever. In time, I’ll be taking over the American branches too. I’d just have to come back here once a month, like Jeremiah.”

“Great,” I said without much enthusiasm. So he really was going over. “Sounds like what you’ve always hoped for. Money, power, and a
soupçon
of eternal life, all in one fell swoop. What more could you want?”

He turned away. “I should have known I couldn’t talk to you about it.”

That felt like a slap. There had been a time when Peter and I could talk to each other about anything. I was going to apologize for my sarcasm, but Sophie and Annabelle appeared, with Jacques trotting behind them. They were talking excitedly as they crossed the street.

“So deliciously
creepy
,” Sophie was saying. “Like something in a horror film. Oh, hello, Pierre.” She gave him her most dazzling smile. “Have you heard? There’s a—”

“Yes. Katy told me.”

Almost reluctantly, she shifted her gaze toward me. “Hello there,” she said, as if she’d forgotten my name. “Did you have a nice day cooking?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said tightly.

“I wish Joelle could have seen it,” Sophie was saying as she headed toward the front steps. “She loves freakish things.”

Jacques’s face collapsed at the mention of Joelle’s name.

“Oh, don’t be so theatrical, Jacques,” Sophie said. “You were Joelle’s boy of the moment, and your moment has passed. Get over it.”

Jacques just shook his head. “What a beast you are,” he said as she walked away.

Joelle.
The name stirred something inside me. I didn’t know what, but I’d learned to trust my instincts. I sprinted up behind Sophie and grabbed her arm. “Where is Joelle?” I asked.

Glaring, she snatched her elbow away from me. “How should I know?”

“Didn’t she come home?”

Sophie exchanged a look with Annabelle. “No, dear,” she said with exaggerated gentleness. “I’m afraid our bad boy Belmondo has kept her out all night.” She put her hand over her mouth in a parody of shock. “No doubt, such things don’t go on in your world,” she said.

“A lot of things that happen here don’t go on in my world,” I answered.

“Then I suppose you’ll be eager to get back,” she said, smiling oh so sweetly as she pushed me out of her way.

Peter was looking up at me from his spot on the steps, his eyes narrowed as I trudged back. “Still thinking about Belmondo?” he snapped.

“Quit it, Peter,” I said. “It’s not him, it’s Joelle. Do you remember the earrings she had on?”

He looked blank. “She was wearing earrings?”

“Forget it,” I said.

CHAPTER

•

THIRTY-NINE

The party—I supposed it could be called the “Discovery of the Corpse” party—began almost immediately, with everyone toasting whatever came into their heads and going on about the body in the alley. Not everyone in the house had gone to explore the Rue Déschamps. Those who hadn’t had obviously used their time well, ordering snacks and filling ice buckets.

Jacques, apparently somewhat recovered from his broken heart, leaned against the fireplace with a glass of champagne in his hand, laughing heartily at a story someone was telling. Sophie was holding forth in her own little area, describing the ghoulish mummy in grisly detail.

“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting her story.

She looked up at me angrily. “What do you want
now
?”

“Her earrings,” I waffled. “That is, the earrings on the mummy—”

“The mummy’s earrings?” she shrieked. “Is that what
you were looking at? Were you planning to steal them?”

“Sounds like a movie title,” someone said. “
The Mummy’s Earrings
.”

“I just wondered if they looked familiar to you.”

“Familiar?” Sophie repeated.

“Were they Joelle’s?”

Sophie sighed. “Joelle again! Look, she’s with Belmondo, all right? If it makes you feel any better, Joelle often doesn’t come home after a date. Sometimes she’s gone for weeks. It’s just the way she is.”

“And you didn’t recognize the earrings?”

“No,” she said pointedly. “I didn’t.”

“All right.” I nodded and backed out of her circle. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

“Idiot girl,” Sophie muttered.

I headed up the stairs to my room and lay on my bed. Peter hadn’t wanted to go into the house. I felt bad about how far our relationship had unraveled. If we were closer, I might be able to talk him out of joining the Witches that Time Forgot. But I didn’t think he’d listen to me anymore.

He was being seduced. By the future. By what might be.

And maybe I was too.

Maybe we both ought to turn and run while we still could. If only the prizes being offered weren’t so tempting. If only it weren’t already too late.

I opened Azrael’s book again. The binding was almost finished, but I thought some of the pages might be missing. The story took up nearly a hundred years later, during the worst years of the French Revolution.

1793

The Angel of Death

Open revolt had broken out. The monarchy had been deposed and the royal family imprisoned. Self-appointed leaders vied for power over the citizens, who were still hungry even after the nobility’s blood had run red in the streets. To make matters even worse, it became known that, before his execution, the king had hired Hessian mercenaries to fight his own subjects in order to quell the uprising, so that no one, anywhere, of any persuasion or station, was safe.

In the midst of this horror walked a handful of women, according to Sophie de la Soubise’s account of the day as she would relate it to Henry Shaw years later. Among the women was Countess Marie-Therèse LePetit, who walked purposefully beside Sophie through the dangerous streets, their opulent gowns concealed beneath plain cloaks taken from their servants.

“But what is this place you’re taking me to?” the countess asked. She was very agitated. The hem of her skirt was heavy with the jewels that had been sewn into it. They were all she could salvage from her home, which had been ransacked and taken over by revolutionary “leaders,” men who stank of sweat, with dirt under their fingernails. The only thing she had to be grateful for was that her husband had died before he’d had to see the world as it had become.

“It is an abbey,” Sophie said. “I was once its abbess.”

Marie-Therèse gasped. “Surely not!”

Sophie laughed. “Indeed, madame. There are more strange things in life than any of us can understand. But this place is a true sanctuary, and we’ll be safe there.”

“Hey!” called a gutter cleaner who had never seen any aristocrats until he had watched them lose their heads under the guillotine’s blade. “You’re a fine one, aren’t you?” He pulled Sophie’s hood off her head. “Hair like spun gold.”

Sophie slapped the man’s hand away. “Stop,” she whispered, skewering him with her gaze as if he were a butterfly pinned to a board. The man froze, rooted to the spot where he stood, as the women rushed away. “Hurry,” she urged the woman with her. “He’ll remember everything in a few minutes. If he talks, they’ll kill us all.”

“Unless we can produce a miracle, they’ll kill us anyway,” Marie-Therèse said as they approached the doors of the Abbey of Lost Souls.

But they did produce a miracle. Working together under the abbess’s direction, they used their combined magic—for once—in the service of something other than the preservation of their own youth. They produced a glamour that shielded the abbey from notice. “The building is not really invisible,” the abbess explained. “Just uninteresting to those who see it. It is a magic that one of our first abbesses, Sister Béatrice, used to perform.”

Sophie laughed. “This is the first time I’ve been pleased to be thought of as uninteresting,” she said.

And so the women had waited out the worst months of the Reign of Terror. At Sophie’s insistence, others with psychic abilities were also permitted to take refuge in the abbey and were thus spared the acquaintance of the “National Razor,” as the ever-present guillotine had become known.

Within a year the abbey became crowded, not only with the new people seeking sanctuary, but also because of the aged among them who were so infirm that they were unable to move from their beds.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” the abbess confided to Sophie, who had known her since childhood. She was new to her office, having taken over after the former abbess, a duchess, had the misfortune to venture outside, where she was set upon by thieves who cut her throat for her woolen cloak. “We’re running out of space.”

Sophie shrugged. “So get rid of them,” she said.

The abbess was taken aback at her friend’s lack of compassion for the old nuns. “But they’ve been here for centuries,” she said.

“Exactly. It’s time for them to move on. Call for Jean-Loup de Villeneuve,” Sophie said. “He’ll know what to do.” She looked at her nails. “We need more money, anyway.”

• • •

Henry went alone to the ritual, as he had for more than a hundred years. Unlike the austere enclosure he had entered the first time Jean-Loup had brought him, the abbey now looked like a royal palace. The once-bare walls had been covered with lacquer and gold leaf. Thick carpets cushioned their footfalls. The rooms were filled with beautiful furniture and paintings taken from the homes of the new residents, rescued before the mobs broke in to steal them. In a corner, a woman played a harpsichord while people milled about dressed in their finest fashions. Even the “abbess”—who had never been a real abbess, or even a nun, of course—looked as if she belonged at a party in Versailles.

“Welcome,” she said, curtsying to him.

“Has Jean-Loup de Villeneuve arrived?”

“Not yet. But as you know, he never misses our gatherings. Perhaps you’d like to . . .”