Delilah Dawson - Wicked After Midnight

My breath caught, and I tried to smile and utterly failed. “That you need a bigger checkbook, monsieur ?”

Although I’d considered every smile from the suave older man a triumph, the one he gave now chilled me to the bone. “It tells me that I simply need to find the right cage and the right lock.”

I took a shuddering breath and sat up, my backbone suddenly going from gaseous to solid, sublimating into rage and defiance. “There’s no cage,” I said distinctly, “that can hold me. I’ve broken out of four so far, and I’ll beat my wings against the bars of the next one, too. Right until it fucking breaks.”

I was so scared that my knees trembled under my skirt, but his eyes were pinned on my face, and so perhaps he didn’t see. And yet something about the way his nostrils flared, like a dog scenting a mailman, told me that he knew. And he liked it.

Lenoir raised his chin, spun, and returned to his palette and canvas slowly, his boots silent on the thick carpet, as if he walked on the moon.

“The funny thing about cages, Mademoiselle Ward, is that if you build them just right”—he winked at me before disappearing behind his canvas—“the creature within need never know it’s been trapped.”

I heard the rasp of dry bristles on canvas and instinctively moved my arm back into place, my mouth freezing of its own volition into a smile I no longer felt. Not until the cool glass kissed my lips did I realize that he’d moved to my side and refilled my champagne flute, that the glass pressed heavily against my mouth, demanding to be consumed. But the liquid within wasn’t light and bubbly and as frivolous as butterfly wings and fairy glitter. No. The moment I scented it, I knew it for what it was. Absinthe. And blood. And other things that, I knew now, had been there all along, hiding under the heavy nightmare of anise and the coppery heat of hunger. His fingers pressed the glass to my lips, urging them apart. My own hands were frozen on the chair. I had no choice but to drink.

By the second sip, I no longer cared what it was.

By the third, I’d forgotten I had wings at all.

After that, time ceased to pass. I seem to recall cool hands on my arms, pulling laces, tugging on shoes, moving me like a grand, cold doll. I remember a slight thump as my head hit the wall on the way down the stairs. I recall, like some faraway dream, Auguste’s shocked gasp and his soft murmur. “ Monsieur , is she even alive? It’s too much.” And then the beat of an engine, the rocking of the stairs, and the beloved, dark, infinite quiet of silk sheets sliding over my body.

When I slept, I dreamed of dark angels and deep wells of wine, floating with bones. And dancing. Always dancing.

Heavy knocking roused me, justa little. My eyes were smeary, my limbs forged of lead. I tried to move, but I was all tangled up on my bed.

“Demi? Are you here?”

I had to swallow a few times to find my tongue. “ Entrez . Or something,” I called, struggling to figure out which way was up. My head felt as if it was stuffed with wine-soaked cotton balls, heavy and wobbly.

The curtains parted, and Vale appeared like a giant bat: upside down and flapping. I laughed my ass off.

“Oh, no, bébé . What have you done?” The words were lazy, slow, and overloud, as if he were shouting underwater, and yet his steps were oddly fast as he crossed the soft rugs to reach me.

“Might still be a bit drunk,” I answered, staring at his boots, which were wet and caked in filth. He’d come from the sewers under the city, then. “And you’re getting shit on my rug.”

Warm hands caught me under my knees and behind my shoulders, and my stomach flipped for a dozen reasons as he set me upright, or what I had to assume was upright, as everything suddenly ceased being upside down. He kneeled, his golden-green eyes boring into mine like corkscrew grass. I opened my mouth a little, hoping he might kiss me while I was too drunk to act surprised about it. But instead of settling his lips over mine, he simply breathed me in.

“Drunk on what?”

I licked my lips, marveling that the champagne and wine and anise and wormwood and red blood could merge to taste like candy, hours after the fact.

My voice went low, playful. Rebellious. “This is Paris. What do you think I’ve been drinking? Café au lait ?”

“Absinthe. Mon dieu, bébé . How much?” He shook my shoulders, making my teeth rattle like the bone dice Louis had shaken in a cup in the pleasure gardens.

I wiggled out of his grasp and turned onto my hip to splay myself gracefully over the bed in a similar attitude to the pose I’d adopted for the artist. I’d sat this way for hours, my face frozen in a teasing Mona Lisa smile, waiting like Pavlov’s dog for the moments when Monsieur Lenoir would set down his brush and refill my goblet with a splash of his potent cocktail. Funny, how things as normally repellent as red wine, absinthe, and blood could mix together and not curdle in the glass. But the taste was a thousand times better than any ingredient alone, and the high was the opposite of caffeine.

And it only got better, each time I had it.

“How much, Demi?”

I shrugged elegantly and nearly fell off the bed. “Just a glass.”

Vale leaned close, his face more serious than I’d ever seen it. Normally, I was the stiff, controlled diva, and he was the mischievous brigand, the clown. But now I was loose as a goose, and he was so tightly wound you could almost hear the gears grinding inside.

It struck me as funny, and I swallowed a giggle and poked his nose with my finger and said, “Boop.”

Vale was so tense he was all but vibrating. “Demi. Mon dieu , woman. Will you never listen to me? Not even once? Absinthe is serious, bébé . It is poison. It is dangerous.” His hands cupped my face, but again, the kiss didn’t come. With his thumbs, he pulled down my eyelids, and I rolled my eyes. “Drink all the bloodwine you want. Get drunk every night, preferably in my vicinity. But I’m begging you never to take absinthe again.”

I wrenched out of his grasp and rubbed my eyes. “You’re totally harshing my buzz, man.”

“You could go into a coma, Demi.”

“Your mom’s in a coma.”

“You could die.”

“I’d die happy.” I flopped back again and rolled my head over the pillows, my attention caught by what I thought was a brass octopus offering me millions of diamonds.

Vale’s hand cupped my scalp behind the sweat-plastered curls, pulling me forward and out of the little reverie inspired by the glittering chandelier. “I wouldn’t,” he said with a heavy gentleness. “And neither would your friend Cherie. Have you forgotten her already?”

That finally broke through the dizziness—that anger. “Of course not. Of course I haven’t forgotten her. She’s like my sister!”

“And are you any closer to finding her? Have you done a single thing today, asked a single question? Or have I been running around Paris, spending my hard-earned francs to buy up teeth, in the hopes that you’ll see how much I care for you?”

I pushed away from him, but my arms were too weak to have any effect. He only held me tighter. But he couldn’t stop me from talking. “I don’t know where to begin, Vale! This life eats me up. There’s not a spare moment. I’m lost and dizzy and exhausted and constantly hounded, and I’m still no closer, just rolling old men’s bodies, my hands deep in their moist pockets. Just waiting every moment to be kidnapped, to be stolen away like a child in the night.” Something knocked at the back of my brain, and the sudden realization would have taken me to my knees had Vale not been holding me. “Oh, shit. I should’ve just let the elephant take me away. I had my chance, and I totally blew it. It’s what I want most, and it terrifies me. I just had to fight, didn’t I?”