Delilah Dawson - Wicked After Midnight

“Tonight’s what night?” I asked.

Charline smiled too brightly. “ The night.”

Blue darted in with her brush, painting my lips with a blood-red Cupid’s bow. Her own mouth was drawn down in a frown, darker blue in the wrinkles.

Madame Sylvie’s eyebrows shot up in drawn-on arches. “You know what to do, n’est-ce pas ? Where everything goes? In theory if not in practice?”

I went stock-still, frozen. They still thought I was a virgin. And they still thought I was for sale. And apparently, they had finally earned a price high enough to ensure that they got a receipt, elephant or no.

“I’m not a whore.” My voice was tiny, needle-thin. But as strong as a needle, too.

“Of course not.” Charline patted me as if I was a fractious lapdog. “You’re a courtesan. And the highest-paid one in all of Paris. Possibly all the world one day, if you’re any good at it. Impress him, and you might find yourself on the Maybuck .”

Bile rose in my throat. When had I eaten last? Ah, yes. A vampire poodle. No wonder it tasted gamey. I swallowed it back down. “I don’t want to go on an airship brothel. And I’m not sleeping with whatever rich asshole you sold me to. Period.”

“That’s no way—” Charline began.

“How dare you—” Madame Sylvie barked at the same time.

But Blue held up a hand. I was utterly surprised when both Sylvie’s and Charline’s mouths snapped shut, and Blue gave them both a benevolent and forgiving nod. “You’re a girl. A beautiful, talented girl with a unique flair that draws men to you like bludbunnies to a baby carriage. What are your choices?” She counted the options off on her stubby blue fingers. “Marry well. Unlikely, as you’re not landed or human. Make enough money in the cabarets to set up your life. Probable, if you don’t make enemies, but they’ll always want more. Stand your man up tonight, and you might wind up dead, for he’s not the forgiving type.” She pinned me with a gimlet eye. “You could be someone’s mistress. Possible, but you’ll need to be damn fine in bed and willing to put up with a nagging wife in the background. Become the greatest and most well-paid courtesan in Paris, with just an hour’s worth of work.” Her last finger was a thumb, scarred with years of sewing and needle pricks. She pointed it at my chest. “Or get kicked out of here and fall into the gutter as so many girls do. Take less and less money for doing more and more against the filthy bricks of back alleys. Waste away on drops of absinthe. Fade into nothing.”

The thumb disappeared.

“You’ve got five other fingers,” I hissed.

Blue held up a fist. “Only if you’re a man.”

“He’s waiting, darling. We know you’ll choose wisely,” Charline said.

“Or else,” Madame Sylvie added.

Charline’s hands curled around my shoulders and squeezed, ushering me toward the door. My feet were leaden in gold sandals so thin I could feel the nails in the floorboards through their soles.

“If all else fails, just moan and think of the Tower,” Blue called.

That struck me as odd. In my world, they told people to think about England.

“Why the Tower?”

The old blue daimon snorted. “Because if you want to die, you need only touch it.”

Nothing but twisted moorings andbroken concrete remained of the copper pachyderm where I’d once met my suitors. Instead, Charline pulled me down the hall and up the stairs, and a cold foreboding descended on me. So the deed was to happen in my own room? The only privacy I had in all of Paris? The place I had stolen and claimed for my own?

But when she opened the door . . . it wasn’t my room anymore.

It was a bower. A beautiful, otherworldly bower. They’d brought in potted trees, draped flowering vines across the walls, and hung warmly glowing lights between them. My bed had been replaced by a monstrous boat of a four-poster thing, draped with fluttering white gauze. The windows were thrown wide open to let in the breeze, and a tiny sliver of moonlight shone upon the thick rugs and furs they’d draped everywhere, as if the magic depended on one’s feet never touching the ground.

Charline sat me on the bed, my limbs wooden and numb in her claws. Madame Sylvie watched from the door, a skeletal and austere shadow. Twisting my shoulders away, Charline slipped leather straps over my arms and buckled them tightly. Something soft and ticklish brushed my bare back and the tender skin of my elbows.

I had wings.

“This is a nightmare,” I whispered.

“Only for you. For him, it is heaven. Paradis.”

“Paradise Lost,” I mumbled.

I yelped as she grabbed a twist of skin inside my arm and pinched hard. “Enough. You’ve been given everything. Now it’s time to earn your keep. He owns you now, that man. At least for tonight. If you don’t wish to be tied down, beaten, and raped into silence, I would suggest you pretend that he is worthy of worship, that his every touch excites you beyond belief.”

I turned slowly, eyes wide. “You would let him . . . do that to me?”

Madame Sylvie stepped close, into the warmth of the lights. I saw her color change, even through the heavy layers of paint and powder that made one forget she was a daimon at all. She shivered over with faint leopard spots, fierce and suddenly alien. “For the night, he has bought all of Paradis. You two will be the only ones in the entire cabaret.” She leaned close, her breath heating me with sulfur and brimstone. “No one would hear you scream. And no one would find your body.”

I flinched as if she’d slapped me, and she took a step back, letting her normal color descend and putting on that charming crocodile’s grin.

“ Bonne chance , my dove!”

She was out the door in a heartbeat, with Charline in her wake, and I hissed at the trembling door that slammed and locked behind them.

I had forgotten to ask who had bought me.

It didn’t really matter.

My mysterious master kept mewaiting, and I alternated between fear and fury. I paced the room, the furs tickling my feet through the sandals and the long, feathered wings trembling against the backs of my legs through the thin muslin of the shift. Pausing in front of the mirror on my vanity, I ran a hand through the flames of an army of dripping candles. Lifting my red-painted lips, I inspected my fangs.

Wait. Fangs.

My bed was gone and, with it, Cherie’s fangs. Vale had bought them from Monsieur Charmant for some mysterious sum that he refused to discuss, and they had become relics, reminders of my quest, of what was at stake. I scrabbled through the compartments of my vanity and ripped the graceful vines off my armoire to dig through the drawers. The fangs were gone, as was my lucky bludbunny foot. And that was what finally tipped me over the edge.

My choices were play nice, get raped, or die?

Yeah, no.

“Demitasse, ma chérie ?”

I knew that oily, insinuating voice.

It was the prince. Again. Of course. Apparently, twenty-four hours after your preferred virgin’s kidnapping was a sufficient time to wait to claim your prize. My lips drew back, my hands curling into claws tipped with blood-red enamel.

The door opened slowly, and Prince Seti stepped inside in another vibrant folly of a sultan’s costume, his perfectly trimmed beard tied in a braid and his eyes outlined in kohl, an insult to Bludmen everywhere. In his onion-head hat and ridiculous vest and striped silk pants, he was meant to look kingly, exotic. To me, he looked like a sad little man playing at being important. A collection of amulets jangled on his chest, and I saw something there that cinched it for me: a gold disk with a raven’s skull, bat wings, and a top hat. I took a step back, the billowing curtains brushing my calves.