Wicked After Midnight(95)

By the second sip, I no longer cared what it was.

By the third, I’d forgotten I had wings at all.

After that, time ceased to pass. I seem to recall cool hands on my arms, pulling laces, tugging on shoes, moving me like a grand, cold doll. I remember a slight thump as my head hit the wall on the way down the stairs. I recall, like some faraway dream, Auguste’s shocked gasp and his soft murmur. “Monsieur, is she even alive? It’s too much.” And then the beat of an engine, the rocking of the stairs, and the beloved, dark, infinite quiet of silk sheets sliding over my body.

When I slept, I dreamed of dark angels and deep wells of wine, floating with bones. And dancing. Always dancing.

* * *

Heavy knocking roused me, just a little. My eyes were smeary, my limbs forged of lead. I tried to move, but I was all tangled up on my bed.

“Demi? Are you here?”

I had to swallow a few times to find my tongue. “Entrez. Or something,” I called, struggling to figure out which way was up. My head felt as if it was stuffed with wine-soaked cotton balls, heavy and wobbly.

The curtains parted, and Vale appeared like a giant bat: upside down and flapping. I laughed my ass off.

“Oh, no, bébé. What have you done?” The words were lazy, slow, and overloud, as if he were shouting underwater, and yet his steps were oddly fast as he crossed the soft rugs to reach me.

“Might still be a bit drunk,” I answered, staring at his boots, which were wet and caked in filth. He’d come from the sewers under the city, then. “And you’re getting shit on my rug.”

Warm hands caught me under my knees and behind my shoulders, and my stomach flipped for a dozen reasons as he set me upright, or what I had to assume was upright, as everything suddenly ceased being upside down. He kneeled, his golden-green eyes boring into mine like corkscrew grass. I opened my mouth a little, hoping he might kiss me while I was too drunk to act surprised about it. But instead of settling his lips over mine, he simply breathed me in.

“Drunk on what?”

I licked my lips, marveling that the champagne and wine and anise and wormwood and red blood could merge to taste like candy, hours after the fact.

My voice went low, playful. Rebellious. “This is Paris. What do you think I’ve been drinking? Café au lait?”

“Absinthe. Mon dieu, bébé. How much?” He shook my shoulders, making my teeth rattle like the bone dice Louis had shaken in a cup in the pleasure gardens.

I wiggled out of his grasp and turned onto my hip to splay myself gracefully over the bed in a similar attitude to the pose I’d adopted for the artist. I’d sat this way for hours, my face frozen in a teasing Mona Lisa smile, waiting like Pavlov’s dog for the moments when Monsieur Lenoir would set down his brush and refill my goblet with a splash of his potent cocktail. Funny, how things as normally repellent as red wine, absinthe, and blood could mix together and not curdle in the glass. But the taste was a thousand times better than any ingredient alone, and the high was the opposite of caffeine.

And it only got better, each time I had it.

“How much, Demi?”

I shrugged elegantly and nearly fell off the bed. “Just a glass.”

Vale leaned close, his face more serious than I’d ever seen it. Normally, I was the stiff, controlled diva, and he was the mischievous brigand, the clown. But now I was loose as a goose, and he was so tightly wound you could almost hear the gears grinding inside.

It struck me as funny, and I swallowed a giggle and poked his nose with my finger and said, “Boop.”

Vale was so tense he was all but vibrating. “Demi. Mon dieu, woman. Will you never listen to me? Not even once? Absinthe is serious, bébé. It is poison. It is dangerous.” His hands cupped my face, but again, the kiss didn’t come. With his thumbs, he pulled down my eyelids, and I rolled my eyes. “Drink all the bloodwine you want. Get drunk every night, preferably in my vicinity. But I’m begging you never to take absinthe again.”

I wrenched out of his grasp and rubbed my eyes. “You’re totally harshing my buzz, man.”

“You could go into a coma, Demi.”

“Your mom’s in a coma.”

“You could die.”

“I’d die happy.” I flopped back again and rolled my head over the pillows, my attention caught by what I thought was a brass octopus offering me millions of diamonds.

Vale’s hand cupped my scalp behind the sweat-plastered curls, pulling me forward and out of the little reverie inspired by the glittering chandelier. “I wouldn’t,” he said with a heavy gentleness. “And neither would your friend Cherie. Have you forgotten her already?”