Wicked After Midnight(92)

Bea held out a tube of blood, and I took it and thanked her. They had a rushed conversation of signs, and I barely understood that there was something Bea wanted to tell me that Mel didn’t want me to know. And I did want to know, but I didn’t want them to know that I was learning more sign language. And I also didn’t want anything to come between me and Lenoir’s studio.

I drank the blood faster than usual—not that I needed it after draining the pilot last night. When I went to my ewer and began to bathe hurriedly, Mel rushed over.

“Mais . . . surely you’re not going out today, are you? You need to rest.”

I smiled and continued trying to clean off the smudges of grease and blood. “I’m off today. And I have an appointment with Lenoir. I can’t be late.”

The two daimons exchanged a weighty glance.

“It can wait.”

I pulled clothes out of my armoire and darted behind my screen to change. “It really can’t.”

“Demi, ma chérie. We understand. We really do. But you are already a star. A portrait by Lenoir will not make life any different. You’re as high as you can go already. But you have to take care of yourself.”

I stopped furiously pulling the strings of my corset to glare at her over the screen. I’d had just about enough of this line from her and from Vale. And I couldn’t even tell the daimons about how my main goal with everything was simply a front to get to Cherie.

“I am taking care of myself. But what I need most is not a bunch of mother hens and sassy-pants roosters telling me what I need. I’m not going to Lenoir’s studio because I think it’s going to make me a star. I’m going because it’s relaxing there. Because he’s the only person who understands me, who gets what I’m going through. When he’s painting me . . . I don’t know. It’s peaceful. Relaxing. Nothing here is ever relaxing. Here, I feel like someone owns every aspect of me, every moment of my time.”

“And when he’s painting you, you don’t feel like that?” Mel asked carefully.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that. I just don’t have to be what everyone else wants me to be.”

Bea frantically sketched signs in the air, and Mel sighed. “She says . . . well, I don’t think you should tell her that. Oh, la. As you wish, my love. Long ago, the daimons believed that—”

The door burst open with Charline in a long purple robe that grazed the ground and a fancy headdress. Behind her stood two human gendarmes and what had to be Paris’s version of a reporter, a dapper daimon with a gravity-defying mustache who held a very large and unwieldy camera-type thing.

I huddled behind the screen. “Mademoiselle Charline, I must protest. I’m undressed!”

A sharp flash blinded me and filled the room with pink smoke.

“Well, that’s her job, ain’t it?” the reporter said, and I pulled my lips back to show my fangs.

One of the gendarmes looked as if he wanted to hide under the bed, but the other one, the older one from yesterday’s scene at the toppled elephant, growled and grabbed the reporter by his arm.

“That’s no way to speak to a lady,” he barked at the reporter as he dragged him out of the room and slammed the door.

“Oh, mon dieu. We’ll be on the front page of all the papers,” Charline wailed, an elegant arm over her eyes, probably to hide the dollar signs that had appeared there.

“I’m Monsieur Bonchance, and this is my associate, Monsieur Legrand. We’re sure you’re upset and in need of recovering, mademoiselle, but we do need to ask you just a few questions so that we can better understand what happened yesterday,” the mustachioed gendarme said, his voice gentle, as if I were a dog that might bite him. “Did you know the fellow in question?”

“I’m afraid not. I was expecting Prince Seti, but then the elephant just started walking. I climbed up into the engine room and asked him who he was and what he was doing, but all he said was ‘Mal.’ Do you know what that means?”

“We’ll ask the questions here!” the younger gendarme barked, and I raised an eyebrow.

“I think what Monsieur Legrand means is that as the gentleman died in your presence and under curious circumstances . . .”

“The little doxy drained a human being, inches away from us! In broad daylight!” Legrand barked.

“It wasn’t daylight; it was after midnight,” Mel burst in as Bea wagged a finger in the surprised policeman’s face.

“Monsieur, I do believe that under the circumstances, it is considered self-defense, n’est-ce pas?” Charline lovingly dragged Mel and Bea out the door. “If she were a Pinky—I mean, a human—and she had used a hammer or a knife to dispatch her kidnapper, would that not be perfectly within the law?”