Delilah Dawson - Wicked After Midnight

They’d opened the entire cockpit up, showing a tumble of gears, wires, cogs, levers, and gauges. I didn’t see my skirt, but I had no qualms whatsoever about snatching up the kidnapper’s abandoned tailcoat and exchanging it for the rough blanket.

“Would y’all mind if I borrowed this?” I asked in my most charming voice.

The gendarmes looked at one another. “Seems fair enough,” the leader finally said.

“Then I’ll thank you for your time, brave gendarmes.” I went up on tiptoe to kiss each of them on the cheek and turned to stroll a few short blocks to Paradis, where the brightly gowned daimon girls and their tuxedoed escorts had crowded out behind a very annoyed barricade of Madame Sylvie and Mademoiselle Charline to watch the chaos. Auguste was already running toward me with a real cloak, but I wanted to keep the tailcoat for myself to see what hints it might hold about its owner.

“Please give the prince my regrets,” I said to Sylvie as I sashayed past.

The crowd split to allow my passage, the girls standing sentry between the goggle-eyed gentlemen and my barely dressed form. No one spoke, but Bea’s hand lingered on my arm as I passed.

As soon as I was in the building and out of sight, I cracked my back and allowed myself to limp. Damn, that hurt. I went straight upstairs and locked my door. After tossing the oil-stained tailcoat on my bed, I went over every inch of it. There was nothing unusual, just a handkerchief soiled with engine grease and a half-smoked cigarillo. No name tag, no packet of calling cards and bills like so many gentlemen carried in their breast pockets. Whoever the bastard was, he’d planned the kidnapping far enough ahead that he’d remembered to empty his pockets.

I wadded up the coat and hid it in the petticoat drawer of my armoire, undressed, and fell into bed. My head swam, half woozy with blood and half hyped up on fading adrenaline. Someone knocked on my door, and hours later, someone else scratched quietly. I ignored them both. I’d had more than enough excitement for one night.

The next morning came alltoo soon and, with it, the ache of bruises in places that had never been bruised before. I stretched and pointed my toes, feeling limp all over. As if they’d been listening at the door, which they probably had, Mel and Bea slipped in and approached my bed as if I might bite their heads off or faint.

“Oh, la. I can’t believe it. I just can’t. Are you . . .”

Bea signed alive , and I laughed.

“Y’all, I’m fine. Giant metal elephants run away with me all the time, and I haven’t died yet.”

“It’s all over the papers. Shows are sold out for weeks. Everyone wishes to see you. Mon dieu, chérie. You’re the most famous girl in Mortmartre. Ever.”

I could not care less that everyone wanted to see me. But wait. Someone more than wanted to see me—someone was expecting me. I’d promised Lenoir a full day of sitting, and the thought of that dizzy, drunken, golden time under the relaxing and dreamy effects of the Red Fairy was a mighty powerful lure. I would heal faster and not feel as much pain, and I would have a bit of respite from the wagging tongues and clutching hands of the gentlemen who would be showing up later tonight to see the girl who’d lived through a pachyderm rampage.

Bea held out a tube of blood, and I took it and thanked her. They had a rushed conversation of signs, and I barely understood that there was something Bea wanted to tell me that Mel didn’t want me to know. And I did want to know, but I didn’t want them to know that I was learning more sign language. And I also didn’t want anything to come between me and Lenoir’s studio.

I drank the blood faster than usual—not that I needed it after draining the pilot last night. When I went to my ewer and began to bathe hurriedly, Mel rushed over.

“ Mais . . . surely you’re not going out today, are you? You need to rest.”

I smiled and continued trying to clean off the smudges of grease and blood. “I’m off today. And I have an appointment with Lenoir. I can’t be late.”

The two daimons exchanged a weighty glance.

“It can wait.”

I pulled clothes out of my armoire and darted behind my screen to change. “It really can’t.”

“Demi, ma chérie . We understand. We really do. But you are already a star. A portrait by Lenoir will not make life any different. You’re as high as you can go already. But you have to take care of yourself.”

I stopped furiously pulling the strings of my corset to glare at her over the screen. I’d had just about enough of this line from her and from Vale. And I couldn’t even tell the daimons about how my main goal with everything was simply a front to get to Cherie.

“I am taking care of myself. But what I need most is not a bunch of mother hens and sassy-pants roosters telling me what I need. I’m not going to Lenoir’s studio because I think it’s going to make me a star. I’m going because it’s relaxing there. Because he’s the only person who understands me, who gets what I’m going through. When he’s painting me . . . I don’t know. It’s peaceful. Relaxing. Nothing here is ever relaxing. Here, I feel like someone owns every aspect of me, every moment of my time.”

“And when he’s painting you, you don’t feel like that?” Mel asked carefully.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that. I just don’t have to be what everyone else wants me to be.”

Bea frantically sketched signs in the air, and Mel sighed. “She says . . . well, I don’t think you should tell her that. Oh, la. As you wish, my love. Long ago, the daimons believed that—”

The door burst open with Charline in a long purple robe that grazed the ground and a fancy headdress. Behind her stood two human gendarmes and what had to be Paris’s version of a reporter, a dapper daimon with a gravity-defying mustache who held a very large and unwieldy camera-type thing.

I huddled behind the screen. “Mademoiselle Charline, I must protest. I’m undressed!”

A sharp flash blinded me and filled the room with pink smoke.

“Well, that’s her job, ain’t it?” the reporter said, and I pulled my lips back to show my fangs.

One of the gendarmes looked as if he wanted to hide under the bed, but the other one, the older one from yesterday’s scene at the toppled elephant, growled and grabbed the reporter by his arm.

“That’s no way to speak to a lady,” he barked at the reporter as he dragged him out of the room and slammed the door.

“Oh, mon dieu . We’ll be on the front page of all the papers,” Charline wailed, an elegant arm over her eyes, probably to hide the dollar signs that had appeared there.

“I’m Monsieur Bonchance, and this is my associate, Monsieur Legrand. We’re sure you’re upset and in need of recovering, mademoiselle , but we do need to ask you just a few questions so that we can better understand what happened yesterday,” the mustachioed gendarme said, his voice gentle, as if I were a dog that might bite him. “Did you know the fellow in question?”

“I’m afraid not. I was expecting Prince Seti, but then the elephant just started walking. I climbed up into the engine room and asked him who he was and what he was doing, but all he said was ‘Mal.’ Do you know what that means?”

“We’ll ask the questions here!” the younger gendarme barked, and I raised an eyebrow.

“I think what Monsieur Legrand means is that as the gentleman died in your presence and under curious circumstances . . .”

“The little doxy drained a human being, inches away from us! In broad daylight!” Legrand barked.

“It wasn’t daylight; it was after midnight,” Mel burst in as Bea wagged a finger in the surprised policeman’s face.