A Drop of Night (25 page)

I watch from the ceiling, my gown drifting about me like a pulsing black stain. A girl lies below me. Her body is fetal, her knees drawn up to her chin. A younger girl darts around her, trying desperately to drag the dead girl upright. I see the younger girl's tears, watch her mouth open in a wail, but I do not hear the sound she makes. Everything is silent. Calm and warm, like floating on a pond, in a boat, in summer.

A small, pale man drifts into the scene below, his crimson coattails like twin fangs, or a dark cloven hoof. He is circling the girl on the floor, drawing nearer, nearer.

Aurélie!

It is Delphine. I hear her now. She turns her tear-streaked face and looks up at me, hovering just under the ceiling.

Aurélie, wake up!

The butterfly man leans down over the girl on the floor. His satchel lies open against the wall. He is lifting something
out of it, a glass bottle tipped with a long, silvered needle. The bottle's contents pool at its base, black and oozing.

Pain explodes in my arm. I am on the floor again, in the cage of my body, and something is buried in my wrist. White fingers are pressing, pressing a vile serum into my veins, and I see it wriggling below my skin like dark snakes, crawling into me.

A wretched burning sickness rises in my chest. Images flash before my eyes, nightmarish concoctions, empty faces and roiling skies, snippets of sound and color—

I return to consciousness with a gasp. I am lying on the floor of the boudoir, four empty glass bottles lined up beside me, and Bernadette, Charlotte, and Delphine huddled close by, their faces stricken, peering at me through their tears.

I see their arms. I see my own. We all bear the same marks: four red entrance wounds and something spreading away from them, stretching up through our veins like dark trees, branches and tendrils reaching toward our shoulders, our necks, our hearts.

“What has he done?” I whisper. I prop myself onto my elbows, fear rippling through me. “Where is Jacques? Where is he?”

“There are garments here for you to wear. Rise quickly, and change.”

I gasp, turning in the direction of the voice. The butterfly man stands by the door to the hall, statue still, eyes fixed on me.

“They will help you go undiscovered.”

He gestures, and I see a stack of striped cotton, aprons and bonnets, spotted with age, folded neatly against the skirting board. Servants' clothes, well worn.

“Bring him back!” I cry out, and my voice is a savage, broken wail. “Where is he? What have you done?”

“Do not think of Jacques. Listen to me: you will return to the surface. You will leave France behind you. My masters have been given what they most desire. They will live twenty years longer, perhaps thirty. Then they will die. My discoveries shall be safe from them.”

I drag myself to my knees and raise my head. The pain in my arm is fading, but the veins are still darkened, purplish threads swollen grotesquely.

“What have you done to us?” I say to the creature. “What is this?”

Bernadette is beside me, crying and picking at her arm, as if she might somehow pull the veins from her flesh and fling them away.

“I have made you a vessel,” the butterfly man says. “A carrier. Were my masters to possess the serum that I have created, they would wish to live a hundred years and a hundred more. I would be held captive to their foolishness, their greedy whims. They would live forever. They could never be sated.”

I stand and stagger toward him.

“And so I have put it inside your veins. You and your sisters shall be my strongboxes. You will take it far from here. The wondrous potion shall be passed down through generations, locked away in safety—”

“No . . .” I want to scream the word, but my throat closes. “We do not want your vile discoveries. You cannot do this! Take them yourself and leave!”

“Aurélie,” the butterfly man says softly, and his hands go to his face, to the cuts, his fingers moving quickly and nervously across the carved-open skin, as though he is trying to close them. “Were you not listening? I cannot escape. They build traps to keep me contained. They hang mirrors in every chamber to repel me, to remind me of my place in this world. I know what would become of me were I to walk among your kind: I would be detested. I would be hurt and imprisoned, some curious wretched specimen, wrapped in
chains and bound to a flaming pyre, or sunk to the bottom of the sea. They would call me a demon. I would have nowhere to turn. Here, at least, I am safe. They protect me. . . .”

He trails off, his fingertips hovering over his throat, a sliver of white skin visible above his collar. He drops his hand abruptly, as if only now realizing what he is doing.

“Do you know, they made me hideous so that I would be meek? Knowledge and power and eternal life I could have, but they would not give me beauty. They would not give me love or kindness. For then I would have more than they have themselves. I would have everything. I desire
everything
. Such is the folly of man. And such is my folly, too.”

“To be unhappy?” I ask. “To be cruel?”

The butterfly man does not move, and it is impossible to tell if he is pondering my words.

“Change out of your finery,” he says at last, drifting out of the room. “Follow me. Your name shall be the strongest shield, your skin the hardest iron. To harvest the precious material inside your veins would require your death. I do not think they would kill their own children.”

My head throbs. The door stands wide now. The lights in the hall are blazing.

Bernadette and Charlotte are crawling over the floor.
Delphine is clinging to my skirts. Jacques is gone. And suddenly I feel as though I am standing at a crossroads under a fierce blue sky, and on one hand there is a girl lying in the dirt, weeping and unable to move. It is her right to weep; she has been lied to and betrayed, locked away in solitude, and I see the darkness under her flesh; her own veins are treason against her. The other road is empty, stretching away, because that girl has already gone far down it, running fast and desperate.

“Aurélie,” Charlotte says. “What will we do?”

I stare at the open door. “We will go, of course,” I say. I dash to the heap of clothing. I help my sisters change. Now I dress myself, slipping the rough woolen skirt over my head. It smells of lye and dirt, the stench embedded so deep in the threads, it has become a part of them. I reach the doorframe and see the butterfly man far down the passage, his back turned, waiting for us.

“Follow me,” he says over his shoulder, and I lift Delphine up and hurry the others in front of me. We follow him down the hallway, the chandeliers passing overhead like watchful, glittering spiders.

We come to the corner. The butterfly man is gone, but I still hear his voice, crawling through the arteries of the
palace, flooding every passageway and chamber, flowing like putrid water up the walls.

“Go now,”
he whispers, and I leave the girl in the road, leave her to weep and mourn.
“Run far with your precious cargo and do not let them catch you.”

I'm pretty sure Lilly's lost it. She's laughing hysterically, crying,
swooping her free arm in circles like some kind of demented windmill.

“I found them! I found you! We're getting out, Anouk!” She screeches it at the walls and the chandeliers:
“We're getting out!”

The screaming is not a good idea. Someone's going to hear. But I'm laughing, too, running as fast as I can in my Pilgrims-R-Us nightgown, and I feel like I could run forever. Everything's crazy. Everything's awful, but I'm alive and Lilly is, too, and Jules and Will are, too.

“Where are they?” I shout, and we skid around a corner, into a room that seems vaguely familiar—a spinet I recognize, a portrait of the woman in the red dress, only she's wearing summer silks here and smiling kindly, and her eyes are cornflower blue, and she looks a bit like
me. It's somewhere we trekked through before. Maybe somewhere near the library.

“I'll show you. I think they're knocked out, but they're still alive. Hayden must have just hidden them and gone to look for us. I don't know what happened to him, but he is
not
on our side. Better hope he doesn't come back until we're gone.”

We slam through a door, into the
salle d'opéra
. A vast theater. Red seats curve like rows of bloody gums. Gilt figures extend up every armrest and pillar, mermaids and cherubs and bundles of pikes wrapped in thorns. I glance up. The ceiling is one huge butterfly, translucent and ghostly, spreading its massive wings over a stormy sky.

“How long were you on your own?” I ask her.

“Ages. It was fine, though. The trick is to get off the main floor plan of the palace. There are servants' passages
everywhere
and spy holes—”

Lilly points to a pillar in the far wall, crusted with gilt leaves and a shield. “See that pillar over there? There's a door in it and a glass hallway like the one we ran down when we first got here. I think it's the emergency exit. Maybe the one Perdu meant. We're
getting the boys and we're getting out of here.”

I think of Lilly on her own, fighting her way through the palace while the rest of us were busy getting captured and falling out of chandeliers.

“Lilly?”

“Yeah?” She's not listening, just running, dragging me up some steps and along the rippling midnight-blue curtain.

“Thanks for coming back.”

“Duh,” she says, and we stop, right at the center of the stage. We turn and face the theater. At the back of the theater, the silhouette of a huge figure is growing against the frosted panes of the doors. A hand is placed flat to the glass. Behind it, I see more shapes, tall, dark shadows.

“Point your toes,” Lilly says urgently. “Hold your breath and keep your arms in.”

“What?”

“You know how to swim, right?”

“What?”

The doors at the end of the
salle d'opèra
burst open.

Lilly stamps a tiny wire prong sticking up through the boards. And the floor drops out from under us.

I scream so loud it's like my throat is ripping. We're
falling like bullets into the dark, wind whizzing in my ears—

“Point your toes!” Lilly shrieks, and a second later I'm burbling, plunging into black water. It's shockingly, painfully cold. I'm gulping it, sinking. But Lilly's got hold of my arm and she's kicking upward, pulling me with her. We break the surface.

I drag myself up onto a stone ledge, gasping.

“Are you insane?” I sputter. I'm shivering violently, wiping my face, trying to catch my breath. It's so dark I can't even see my hand in front of my eyes. “What was
that
? What—”

“Anouk,”
Lilly says softly, and I hear her
digging around in her sopping wet clothes. “They're going to come after us. We have to hurry.”

She's shaking something. By the metallic rattle coming from it, I'm assuming it's a flashlight. A broken one.

“Oops,” Lilly says. Giggles nervously. “There's light farther down. Come on.”

She charges off into the dark and I follow, stumbling blindly. My nightgown is soaked, sticking to my skin. My feet are bare. The ground is weirdly sharp, full of welts and holes, like volcanic rock. As my eyes adjust, I
see the barest outline of where we are: a low stone tunnel, hacked into the bedrock.

The ground becomes metal grating. We're on a walkway now, suspended high up in the air. Dull-white lightbulbs inside cages blink on as we pass them. The walkway is sloping downward.

“How far did you go?” My teeth are chattering. I can barely talk. The grating of the floor is cutting into my skin.

“Far enough to find them.” She glances at me, and she looks scared suddenly. Exhausted. “Far enough to find a lot of things.”

We're at the end of the walkway, turning onto a circular stairway. We stagger down, farther and farther underground. The sound of our descent seems to echo forever. Beyond the lights all I can see is thick, uniform darkness. And now we're at the bottom, in a huge vaulted space. A clammy, stone-cold copy of the
salle d'opéra
high above. The floor is covered in shale and huge triangular shards of rock, like this place was blasted out and never properly cleared.

The light is surreal—a dark, chilly green. Fluorescent tubes are bolted at random intervals across the ceiling, like glowing staples closing up a wound.

Lilly leads me along the wall. We're trying to be quiet, but if someone's within a hundred feet of us they heard us clambering down those stairs. I look up at the wall. It's scrawled with dripping words. Names. Numbers. Some of them are huge. Others form tiny, shaky sentences.

L'enfer,
I read under my breath as we hurry past the uneven letters.
I am Jacques Renaud.

1775—1795—1885?—1912—2004—2016

Aurélie. Aurélie du Bessancourt.

Forgive me. I cannot find you.

I brush my hand along the wall as I run. Some of the words are gouged into the rock, deep.

How long is eternity?

She cannot return to me.

I am lost.

Mon nom est perdu.

The words terminate in an angry mass of blots and splatters.

We reach a pocket of light. A huge, shattered chandelier is lying between the rocks, cables snaking away into the dark. It's been laid at the feet of a crudely hacked sculpture. At first it looks barely human. On second glance, I think it's supposed to be a girl. Piles
of trinkets and ancient paper are heaped around it and tangled through the prongs of the chandelier.

“It's like a shrine,” I breathe. Lilly looks up at the disfigured stone face. “Come on,” she says, and pulls me onward. “Come on.”

We're coming up on something. At first it looks like Stonehenge, looming out of the dark, and now like a circle of ancient telephone booths, and now I see that it's a series of tanks, glass and heavy, bolted frames, standing end up in the center of this enormous space.

They aren't empty.

Lilly tries to pull me past them. I shrug her off.

“Wait.” The water behind the thick glass is cloudy, yellow-blue. A figure is floating inside. My throat closes.

It's indistinct, drifting. Closer. Now farther.
A finger. A hand
—

A face slides forward through the murky fluid.

For a second I think it's Jules. It's got his black hair, the same narrow face and pointed chin. But it's not Jules. It's someone his age, a kid with a fuller mouth and muscled arms, and he's wearing a button-down shirt, wide '60s pants. He's suspended in the water, eyes closed. Definitely, inarguably dead.

“I don't know what those are,” Lilly mumbles. She's watching me, not the tanks. She won't look at the tanks. “We need to go, Anouk.”

I wrap my soaking arms around me. Start walking again, moving past the circle of tanks. I catch glimpses of a boy in knee breeches. A thin, dark-haired girl in a nineteenth-century gown. Her petticoats are floating around her. There's a black cavity in the back of her neck.

“It's everyone they've killed,” I whisper. “All the people they got rid of to stay alive. It's their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

Lilly stares at me. One of the bodies floats against the glass with a
thunk
, wispy hair drifting around its head like spun gold. Eyes closed. Blue lips. It could be Lilly's twin.

These are our ancestors. Bessancourts. I wonder if they were dragged down like we were, if they ever got the chance to fight, how long they lasted. Or if they just never woke up.

Lilly grabs my arm. We stumble on.

“Look,” Lilly says, and up ahead I see something. To the left, close to another bubble of light: two slumped shapes solidifying out of the dark.

It's them. Will and Jules. They're tied to chairs, backs toward us, heads to their chests.

And Hayden's with them. He's leaning over Jules, cupping something in his hands. A rococo table stands next to him, medical instruments laid out in two neat, glittering rows across the top.

Lilly doesn't hesitate. Neither do I. Lilly tosses me a jeweled dagger. Pulls a long, thin saber from her belt loop. We approach out of the darkness.

Hayden sees us. Grins.

“My friends have all returned to me,”
he growls, and it's not Hayden's voice. It's like a dozen voices at once, strand after strand of grating, whining sound.
“My lost brothers and sisters, fellow children of darkness.”