A Drop of Night (24 page)

The creature speaks, the cuts in his face flaring wide, glistening like the sliced bellies of eels.

“
Bonjour
,” he says, and his voice is thin, sharp, almost pitiful: a childish whimper that only adds to the wrongness of him. He makes me think of a bird spliced with a man, an insect dressed in a coat of human skin.

I look at Jacques pleadingly. He stands no more than four steps away, but in this dead, electric space it feels like an ocean. We cannot reach each other.
He is not on our side,
I want to scream.
You said so yourself; he is evil!

“Who are you?” I say again, louder. “Answer me!”

“They call me their butterfly man,” the creature says. He sounds shy, and as he speaks he lifts one of his small hands to his face, as if to hide it. His eyes glimmer from between his fingers, black pools without pupil and without iris. “They said if I helped them, they would make me whole. They would
love me, fix my ruined flesh. I could leave this place, be free.” His voice slips up, high and piercing. “They lied.”

I begin edging over the floor toward the door to the hallway. Jacques shakes his head, his face crumpled in agony.

“Jacques,” I whisper. “We cannot trust him. Bernadette, take your sister. Run,
run, all of you, GET AWAY!”

I clutch Delphine and dash toward the door.

Jacques is yelling. Charlotte screams. The butterfly man hardly moves, only turns his hands, palms outward, and there is a flash of blinding white light, unfurling toward me. Something immensely hot strikes me, and I stumble, Delphine slipping from my grasp. The air is forced from my lungs.

“Aurélie,” the butterfly man says. “Why do you run from me?”

Jacques is bounding toward me, but he approaches so slowly, as if through water or a dream. I am gasping in pain, vivid clouds of colored ink blossoming across my vision.

“Do you fear me?” the butterfly man says, and I see he is smiling at me, a false, studied smile, as horrible to behold as the splits in his skin. “The others fear me, too. Frédéric cannot bear the sight of me, though he is my father. Havriel is
disgusted by me. They want me only as a tool for their own wicked schemes. Even the servants, when I strap them to my table, shriek and cover their eyes.”

“Please let us go,” I whisper. “We want nothing from you. We—”

“But you do want something from me.” The butterfly man is standing directly before me, the force of his presence like a horrid iron weight. One hand drifts toward me. When it touches my cheek, my skin aches as if I have been pricked. I bring my fingertips up. They come away bloody. “Jacques Renaud has made a bargain. His service in return for your freedom.”

“You're lying,” I say, but in the same sick moment, I realize he is not.

Jacques has reached me. He takes my arm, whispers in my ear: “I will find another way, Aurélie. Go to the inn, ask for Madame Desjardin, and tell her Margeaux's son sent you, tell her you are a friend—”

The butterfly man's dark glow intensifies. Pain opens like a white-hot rose inside my skull. “Do not speak,” he says, his voice like a spike. “Listen to me. You will be my comrades.” He smiles again, his expression unreadable. “All of you.”

Jacques moves in front of me. “I will kill you if you lay a
finger on them. The deal was for me. I would serve you, and the Bessancourt sisters would go free; that was your promise!”

“Promises are like bones,” the butterfly man says. “Easily broken.”

Somewhere I hear Delphine crying, my sisters calling out. I feel the flutter of my heartbeat, wild through my bodice. And suddenly Jacques goes flying to the side, as if glancing off an invisible wall.

“No,” says the butterfly man. “You will not.”

I stumble backward, my hands finding Bernadette's, Charlotte's. I gather my sisters behind me, lifting weeping Delphine again to my hip. Jacques stands and pushes in front of us. But he has begun to bleed, tiny cuts forming on his head and neck.

“You must get away. I
will
find you—I'm sorry, Aurélie,” he says through clenched teeth.

“Jacques!”
I scream. I push Delphine into Bernadette's arms and lunge. The pain strikes me like a savage headwind, but I grit my teeth against it, pressing into this strange darkness, one foot, then another. My hand finds Jacques. “Leave him!” I beg the butterfly man. “Please, what are you doing?
Let him be!”

But the butterfly man does not hear me, or else he does not care to listen. I pull at Jacques with all my strength. He
will not move, and with a start, I see his feet no longer touch the floor. He is hanging in the air, the toes of his boots inches above the carpet. His muscles are straining, but he cannot move. Only his eyes stir. And his lips.

And even though he is bleeding, he smiles, and I see him sitting on a stool in a grimy cottage, his sisters and brothers hanging from his shoulders and bouncing on his knees. His mother sits by a little stove, her knitting needles going
clack-clack
, and sage and lavender are drying in the rafters, and a cat stretches in the sunlight from the window, and Jacques is smiling, just like that. But as I watch, his smile breaks. His skin drains of life and color, freezing gray and blue like a field in deepest winter.

I grasp his fingers, try to pull him down, crying and screaming.

“Aurélie,” the butterfly man says, close to my ear. “You will be my ally in this long, slow game. And you.” He nods toward Jacques. A deep, rumbling cloud seems to strike me, strike us all, and I am drifting backward, my hair floating around my face. I watch as the butterfly man folds Jacques into his horrible embrace and draws him away from me. “You are nameless. You are lost.”

Vous êtes perdu.

“You were very difficult to track down, you know.” Havriel is
seated casually, his shoe buckles gleaming, artifacts from a different time. I hear the metallic glide of the nozzle's tube, dragging over the floor as he fiddles with the head, passing it from hand to hand. “Adopted.”

I ignore the bait. I'm not discussing my parents with him. “You didn't have to do all this,” I say quietly. “You didn't have to go through all this trouble if we're just bodies for you to harvest.”

He looks up at the ceiling. “But you are not simply bodies. Haven't you realized that yet? There were no other candidates. No elimination rounds. We have been hunting you, and others like you, all these years. From France to Mumbai to Wellington to San Diego. All this time you have been asking:
Why me? Why me?
Because you are a Bessancourt, Anouk. You are a part of the family.”

“I'm not related to you,” I spit. “I'm not a friggin' Bessancourt—”

But I'm seeing it now: Tall kids. Blue eyes.
Maybe we have something else in common? Something we don't even know about . . .
I feel the pieces grinding together, meshing in place.

Havriel laughs. “You don't know
who
you are, so why be upset? Now you know exactly where you belong. You know exactly what your purpose is.”

It feels like my entrails are sliding through me, pooling around my bare feet. “My purpose?” I say. “My purpose is to die miserably so you can keep existing forever?”

Havriel doesn't answer. It's like he blanked me out right there. I need to stall. Once he stops talking to me, he's going to kill me.

“Even if we are related,” I say, my toes digging into the carpet. “You guys fly us here, let us eat at your table, send us entire folders full of lies. You could have just stolen us off the street. Stuffed us in a van, knocked us out with some chloroform. We never had to meet.”

“But I wanted to meet you!” says Havriel. “As times become less desperate, there becomes space for formality; as in society, so also in families. And so for this harvest,
we devised a little . . . a little party. You must understand that despite how you may view the situation, you are not simply victims. You are our offspring, our precious progeny. So we found a way to connect you to your rightful place in this world, letting you know a little, not too much and not nothing at all, letting you meet others of your kind within your ancestral home.”

“So, basically, you murder us
after
dinner. And I thought
my
family was dysfunctional.”

Havriel crosses his legs in a quick, sharp motion. He doesn't seem to appreciate his thinking being questioned.

“Anouk, we are entirely functional. We are like a great machine, our family. My brother and I are the engine. You are the fuel. We extended to you the honor due you as scions of a noble bloodline. We gave you every comfort. Brandy in the bathroom. Dinner. A private jet. We treated you with respect. We needed you as close to the Palais du Papillon as possible, as the harvesting of the genes is a complex process and must be handled quickly and delicately after death of the donors—”

I snort. “It's not a donation if you rob the freaking bank.”

Havriel ignores me. “And Frédéric does not like to
leave the
palais
. He can no longer abide the surface with its many contagions. So what better way than to bring you here in style, give you a proper send-off, make you all feel special and important, as if you were picked for something great. Because you were. Don't you see? You are a very valuable person, Anouk.”

The words ignite something in me, a pathetic, involuntary response. I look at him in surprise and stupid hope.

“Your death paves the way for our family's continued success and dominance. It is not in vain.”

The hope vanishes.
What about my life? What about who
I
want to be?

“And the Sapanis? They're just a front? An alias?”

“The Sapanis are what we called ourselves as we reemerged from the palace during the Reign of Terror. We could not gain a footing in France under the Bessancourt name. We did not wish to emigrate. And so before we went into hiding, we devised a plan. We signed the château and its grounds and all our monies over to the brothers Wilhelm and Ehrfurcht Sapani. Ourselves. Twenty years later, we started anew under Napoleon. We opened a gunsmithy, then an armament factory, and slowly, crawlingly, over the decades and centuries,
we rebuilt our dynasty. And now here we are! The most powerful supplier of weapons and technology in the world. They say it's those with the money who make the rules, but really it's those who can steal the money from anyone, any country and government. It is those who are
feared
who make the rules. The truth is, there are no Sapanis. There is no Monsieur Gourbillon finding a crater in the wine cellar, no Project Papillon. My brother is a shy man. We prefer to run our business ventures in private. . . .”

He trails off. His eyes fix on mine, and my blood runs cold. “Now, Anouk. I think we've chatted long enough.” He bows his head respectfully, and the silver spike rises, his fingers wrapped around the nozzle like it's the head of a snake. “I will ask you one more time: where are your friends?”

Sinking. That's how I feel. Sinking down-down-down, into an
endless, crushing blackness. This is too big for me. Too big for all of us. Lilly, Jules, Will, Hayden, and I—we're just tiny, rusty wheels in their huge plan, squeaking desperately. There's no way on earth I'm getting out of here alive.

“I don't think you know where they are,” Havriel says. “I think you're lying.”

“I do. I know where they are.”

“Ah! So tell me. I upheld my end of the bargain.”

He gazes at me expectantly across the tip of the nozzle, his eyes glittering.

I hesitate. Just one second, one flicker of confusion while I sort through possible lies I can tell. Havriel sees it. He smiles.

“I'm afraid we'll have to find them on our own,
then. It was lovely speaking to you, my dear.”

Behind him, the man in the red coat strikes something—a sharp, crystalline note against one of the figurines on the mantelpiece. My eyes flick toward the sound—

Havriel lunges. Grips my shoulder and tries to spin me, jamming the nozzle toward my spine. I wriggle out of his grasp, knee him in the stomach. Whirl, looking for somewhere to run. The two men are between me and the door. Havriel's moving, the nozzle raised. I dive through the bed curtains. Crawl over the sheets and slip out the other side.

You still think you can escape . . . live happily ever after
. No. Not really. But being realistic doesn't get you anywhere. I guess that's just what humans do, keep holding out for something, even if it never comes, even when there's only the tiniest, tiniest hope.

I hear Havriel coming after me. I'm pleased to note he's breathless from my kick, a rasp at the back of his throat. He emerges around the bedpost. I try to dash across the bed again. He catches my ankle and yanks me toward him.

“Do not make this more difficult than it has to be,
Anouk,” he spits, and I roll over and kick him in the face with my free foot, over and over again, pummeling his cheeks, his nose. He catches that foot, too. But he has to drop the nozzle to do it. I wrench myself upright, grab the nozzle, and stab the sharp silver tip straight at Havriel.

The spike embeds itself in his shoulder.

He lets go of me with a howl. I launch myself back out the other side of the bed, scramble to my feet, and run for the door.

The marquis is right in my path. I slam into him. I expect him to topple over. At least move backward a few inches. Nope. It's like hitting a sack of bricks. I reel back. He shoves me. I stumble into the center of the room.

Havriel is hulking toward me, one hand clutching the small red puncture in his velvet coat.

I try to stand tall, dig my fingers into my palms. The pain in my rib cage is excruciating. It makes me mad. It makes me proud.
The chandelier didn't kill me. The psycho butterfly thing didn't kill me. Hayden didn't kill me. You're going to kill me, but hey, I made it all the way to the end, boss. That's not too shabby.

Havriel doesn't even blink. He lashes out with the
nozzle. I duck, drop to the floor, and scrabble away on hands and knees—

And now I hear something behind me, coming from the double doors. The
click-click
of a handle being tried, cautiously.

Havriel kicks me in the shoulder. The pain is unreal, more like a white shower of sparks, like my nerves can't even really deal with that much anymore. I'm reeling, dragging myself over the floor.

The doors are opening.

I look up.

It's Lilly.

No way.

But it is.

Lilly, standing in the doorway, her face filthy, her clothes torn and ragged, grimy with sweat and blood. She's not crying. She's holding an old-fashioned flintlock pistol. She pulls back the hammer and raises it at Havriel.

Seeing her makes me smile like nobody's business. “Shoot Havriel!” I shriek from the floor. “I mean Dorf,
shoot Dorf
!”

The marquis starts toward her from the left. She wheels around, pointing it at him.

I start to crawl for the door. Havriel lets out a low growl and comes after me, fast and liquid like a panther.

Lilly jerks the gun back and forth between them, confused. The marquis is digging something out of his pocket, another glinting bottle—

“Lilly!” I scream.
“SHOOT THEM!”

The gun goes off. There's a bright flash, a dull cracking sound, and a puff of gray smoke.

Havriel freezes, inches away from me.

Who's been shot
?

They're both still standing. I get myself upright. Hobble toward Lilly.

The bottle falls from the marquis's grasp. Bursts against the floor. He brings his hand down to his stomach.

“Aide-moi,
mon frère
. . .
!”
the marquis breathes. And he collapses, folding at the knees, the waist, neatly, like a length of fabric.

Lilly points the gun at Havriel. Aims at his leg and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. She pulls again.

One shot, Lilly. Flintlocks have one shot.

She throws the gun full force at Havriel's head, grabs my arm, and we race out of the room.

I glance back. See Havriel kneeling next to the
marquis, pressing his hand to the wound. He'll be up in a second. Maybe the marquis will be, too. Can these people die from bullet wounds?

We're in a long hallway. It's blazingly bright, and it only seems to get brighter up ahead. Wild, crazy elation bubbles up inside me. I feel weightless. I'm gripping Lilly's hand, and she's got mine, and we're running so fast. We're flying.

“Where are we going?” I shout.

“The boys!” Lilly shouts back. “I found the boys!”