I stand up and look at the two of them. They’re perfect on the outside, exactly what any girl would want to look like. Perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect bodies, perfect everything. But none of it’s real. It never was. “I can’t do this,” I say. “Not until I’ve figured out what’s right and wrong here.”
“Do you have any idea how much you’ll be walking away from?” Peregrine demands.
“None of those things matter to me,” I say. “Besides, if we stopped—no magic, no charms—Main de Lumière wouldn’t have a reason to punish us anymore.”
“Sure, it’s possible they’d stop coming after us,” Peregrine says, “but in the meantime, we’d have nothing! We’d be like everyone else.”
“That’s better than being dead,” I tell her. I take a deep breath. “You’ve gone too far, Peregrine. You know that. I’ll do the ceremony with you whenever we figure out the identity of the Main de Lumière soldier who snuck in in during the party, but after that, I quit.”
“You can’t do that!” she cries.
“Watch me,” I say.
With that, I stride out of Peregrine’s perfect mansion, slamming her perfect front door behind me as I go. I don’t look back.
Boniface is sitting in the parlor with his head in his hands when I storm through the front doorway of my house a few minutes later.
“Eveny?” he asks, standing up right away. “Are you okay?”
“Just peachy.” I move past him without making eye contact.
“I never should have let you into the parlor,” he says, wringing his hands together and following me into the room.
I stop and look at him. “I wish someone had told me before.”
“Eveny—” he begins.
“Any other secrets you’re keeping from me?” I interrupt. “How about my dad? Is everyone lying to me about him too? I know he’s been back since I was born.”
“Yes, he’s been here, Eveny,” Boniface says slowly. “But he’s gone now.”
“Where?” I demand. “Where did he go?”
But Boniface just shakes his head. I throw my hands up in frustration, grab my mother’s herb journal from the coffee table where I left it earlier, and head upstairs to my room without saying another word. I can feel his concerned gaze on my back as I go.
I flip through the little book until I find a page in my mother’s hand entitled The Removal of Charms from Inanimate Objects. She’s written that you must focus intently on the specific things you want uncharmed. I fold the page and dash downstairs. I don’t know if her charm will successfully remove magic from this house, but I intend to try. It’s the first step to making things right again.
I close myself in the parlor, and with the herb book open in front of me, I ask Eloi Oke to open the gates to the spirit world, until the air in the room shifts. I touch the Stone of Carrefour with my left ring finger and feel it heat up. I focus on our house and property as I read the words from my mother’s charm.
“Mint, nettle, and rue, I draw your power,” I say. I pause and try to feel the request with my heart, like Boniface advised. “Spirits, magic killed my mother, and it’s destroying this town. I want it gone from this house.”
For a moment, nothing happens, but then I notice my Stone of Carrefour getting colder and colder, and something begins leaching from the parlor. I can feel it, like the air is being sucked out. The lights flicker, and a huge, crimson stain appears on the hardwood floor, just where my mother died. I gasp, and it takes me a moment to realize that her blood had never really been gone at all; someone had simply cast a charm to make it disappear.
I run toward the door and claw it open, but the moment I stagger into the hallway, I almost fall over. I stare around me in horror.
It’s not the same hallway I entered through just a few minutes earlier. Or rather it is, but it appears that the hall hasn’t been touched in decades. It’s caked with dust and cobwebs, the marble floors are cracked and chipped, and the walls sag under the weight of the house. Above me, the chandelier hangs at a precarious angle, like it’s going to crash to the ground at any moment. The front door is splintered, and light slices through in jagged beams. Several of the windows are broken, and wind whistles in.
“What have I done?” I ask, but I know the answer to my own question before the words are out of my mouth. I hadn’t thought it through enough to realize that the mansion itself is mostly a product of magic. Without zandara, it’s just a dilapidated old shack, and the room where my mother died still looks like a crime scene.