Wicked After Midnight(116)

I sat up straight and stared down at Lenoir. Vale nodded once and turned to him with the antidote, but I finally found my words.

“Don’t give it to him yet.”

All eyes locked on me.

“Demi?” Vale asked gently.

“Tell us where the Malediction Club meets.”

Lenoir was foaming at the mouth now, red bubbles leaking from his dry white lips. He laughed, his head spasming and his eyes going mad and glittery. “Wasn’t. The deal.” He wheezed a laugh. “Antidote!”

Vale sighed and kneeled. “I did promise him.”

I was too tired to protest and leaned on the chair’s arm, too drained to hold myself upright. Surely there would be some way to compel Lenoir, if we kept him alive. Vale unstoppered the vial carefully and used the dropper to squeeze a stream of golden liquid into Lenoir’s mouth. The once-handsome painter lapped at it like a starving dog but quickly spit it back out, coughing up red foam.

“You said. There was an antidote.”

Vale grinned. “Oh, there is one. That’s just not it.” He licked the stopper and scrunched up his face. “Oh, la. It would seem that’s my aunt Merle’s famous hot-pepper sauce. We consider it the antidote to poor cooking. Spicy, n’est-ce pas?”

Lenoir uncurled and straightened in a creepy rictus dance that resembled an exorcism. His trembling hand went for his pocket, but Vale stomped on it, grinding it into the floor.

“None of your blud magic, monsieur.”

After clenching his teeth and trembling for a moment as he fought to get his hand from under Vale’s boot, Lenoir pinned him with his indigo eyes, the veins bloody and wet and starting to seep into the white. “Going to curse you. For lying to me.”

“Think back carefully, monsieur. I did not lie.”

Lenoir breathed out, spewing bloody froth. His eyes went lucid and crafty then, and he began speaking in Sanguine, slurry and slow. Before he could get out more than a couple of words, Vale kicked him in the throat, and he choked and fell onto his back.

“Of course, if you’ll tell us how to find the Malediction Club, I have the real antidote right here.”

A twist of paper appeared in Vale’s fingers, but Lenoir was past caring. With the last of his energy, he pointed at the smoldering painting, then at me, then drew his trembling finger across his own throat. His hand fell on his crushed neck as his head lolled sideways on the carpet, blood spilling from mouth and eyes and bubbling from the holes in his stomach, which would have healed themselves quickly if not for Vale’s half-Abyssinian blood.

“But—how will we find it now? If he’s dead?” I shuddered and sobbed. “How will we find Cherie?”

With an angry growl, Vale rushed to a heavy desk in the corner, flicking on the green banker’s light and shuffling through the drawers and papers, throwing everything he found onto the ground. “There must be something here, somewhere. An invitation. A bill. A card. Something.”

I tried to stand, to hurry to his side, but I could barely move. As it was, I was able to pull myself up holding the back of the chair, then collapse against the windowsill and shuffle along the wall, grabbing each warm sconce like Tarzan reaching for vines. Vale had pulled all the drawers out of the desk by the time I got there, and I fell gratefully to the ground in a puddle of skirts to paw through the spilled papers.

Vale took his search to a series of deep shelves that held rolls of canvas. As he pulled them out and threw them onto the floor, I untied the leather thongs to let the fabric unfurl. I saw fruit, dogs, creepy dolls, cathedrals, haystacks, dead rabbits, piles of bones, people on trains. It was as if he’d plundered an art history book and copied every painting ever, trying out styles from van Gogh, Monet, and even Picasso. They had irregular sides, as if maybe he’d sliced them out of frames. None was signed; hell, maybe they were originals of Sang versions of the artists I revered. With Lenoir dead, there was no way to know.

As Vale moved through the shelves from left to right, the paintings got better and more nuanced. Finally, the figures began to appear, graceful daimon bodies caught in repose or ballerinas holding their legs aloft. There were nudes sprinkled in, too. The first few daimon girls had tails, but after that, the tails disappeared, and the paintings graciously neglected that part of the daimons’ anatomy, perhaps to avoid the inconvenient scars that must have remained after removing so large a limb.

“Oh, mon dieu.” Vale held an uncurled canvas in front of him so that all I could see was the blank, khaki-colored back.

“Did you find something?” I asked, trying to stand and barely making it to my knees.