Wicked After Midnight(114)

“He said he would have me drained.”

“Then you definitely turned him down.” I thought he would stop on the second level, where I had assumed the bedrooms were, but he continued to the attic. As he twisted the gaslights on and flicked the switches of a few electric lamps, he kept his back to me. “Thank you for that. I was betting rather heavily against him.”

“I can’t imagine you need money, monsieur.” I glanced around at the subtle trappings of his wealth, scattered around the atelier. The marble statues and urns of hothouse flowers and little salt dishes filled with jewels, not to mention the rich paints and soft sable brushes.

“It’s not about money, ma chérie. It’s about prestige. Pride. A man’s reputation is a precious thing, you see.”

“How much did you win?” I asked, but he ignored me and gestured toward the changing screen with an open arm.

With the window showing cloudy darkness and the sconces burning orange, the room didn’t carry its usual haze of golden sunshine, but he went about his paint preparations as if it were a normal afternoon, as if he’d been expecting me. With a shrug at the oddness of it all, I gladly changed out of the scrap of a toga and into the chocolate-plum dress. It felt deliciously heavy and cool against my skin, and I sighed as I hurled the toga into the fire already burning in the grate. Stretching until my back popped, I walked around the screen in bare feet and melted into my usual chair.

The goblet was in my hand before I’d noticed Lenoir at my side, and I sipped it gladly, anxious for a taste of dreamy oblivion, for the strange passage of time that made me feel like a butterfly caught in amber. I felt as if I couldn’t exhale, as if all the anger and fear and worry were bottled up inside my chest and the drink would help it unwind like pulling a bit of yarn to unravel a sweater. As the liqueur slid down my throat and into my belly, a strange feeling overcame me. Instead of making everything warm and fuzzy and glittering, it seeped into me with cold tendrils like liquid ice. I licked my lips.

“Something’s different.”

Lenoir appeared by my side again, not in his usual painting coat but in a high-necked white jacket that looked like something a doctor might wear. In his hand was a brass syringe, the sort I’d seen hanging on the wall at Monsieur Charmant’s shop, beside the dentist’s chair. This one was smaller and far cleaner, but the needle still reached past my Bludman’s bravado to the human deep within and terrified me.

“I won a great prize, mademoiselle.”

The goblet dropped from my trembling fingers, which had gone numb. I couldn’t close my mouth, couldn’t move my arms. As if from the bottom of a frozen pond, I saw Lenoir loom overhead as he pulled an artificer’s complicated goggles down over his eyes and settled the lens attachments with one hand, his other hand tense on the syringe. My eyes were open and tearing and cold, locked onto the small gold pin attached to his high collar.

Raven skull, bat wings, top hat.

“Are you ready, mademoiselle, to see the Malediction Club?”

No, no, no. I couldn’t shake my head, couldn’t speak. When the needle pierced my neck, right over my jugular, it was like cracking through a crust of ice. I had no choice but to watch in horror as he pulled back the plunger and sucked out my blud, my soul.





28


Forever and forever we were locked there, me frozen and him killing me. He was taking more than my blud, somehow, drawing some necessary life force from me, stealing all my warmth. And I could do nothing about it, could only choke silently on the freezing potion coating my throat. Lenoir didn’t speak, but he did smile for real for the first time, and it was the hangman’s cruel grin, a skeleton’s fangs that shone in the light.

When he was done, I was but an empty husk filled with panic and shadows. He held the syringe as if it was filled with liquid gold and carried it reverently to his canvas. With a flourish, he turned the uncovered painting toward me, letting me see his work for the first time.

Terrified, frozen, broken, drained, and dying, still I was awed by the perfection of it. It wasn’t me, not quite. But it was the most beautiful painting I’d ever seen.

“I can see from your eyes that you’re pleased. It’s a masterpiece. But it still needs one final touch.” His head swiveled around like a snake. “Your blud. Mixed properly with Charmant’s draught and a few of my own inventions. I’ll trap your very soul in the painting, lighting it from within. No one will be immune to its spell. It will hang in the Louvre, and they’ll line up to see it. They’ll weep. And no one will know that they are looking at your soul, and you are trapped within, looking back.” His smile curled. “And then I’ll switch it with a clever reproduction and hang the real you somewhere much, much darker.”