Seduction Read online

  “Thee I call from the far side of the Abyss,” I read dutifully from the spell book while Marie-Therèse shivered in her nightdress. “Spirits of fire!” I said louder, trying to put some gusto into it.

  Flames erupted in a circle around the old lady, who gave a little shriek. I stomped the fire out with my sneakers. “Sorry about that,” I said, resuming my spot as High Priestess of the circle. “Spirits of water, I do summon, stir, and—”

  The exposed pipe in the corner suddenly sprang a leak, spraying water onto my bed. The first thing that came to mind was to quickly chew a piece of gum—I had a pack on my dresser—and stick it over the leak. “There,” I said, wiping rusty water out of my eye as I squelched back into the circle. Marie-Therèse was shivering, her thin arms wrapped around herself.

  “Earth?” I asked.

  “No,” Marie-Therèse said, her gaze deadly.

  I looked out the window, where a light breeze was blowing. “I guess we don’t want the spirits of wind, either.”

  “Mon Dieu, no.”

  I didn’t know if the spell would work with only half the Elementals called, but it would have to do. As I proceeded, tossing salt around the wretched-looking Marie-Therèse and exhorting all the hobgoblins of the universe to form a protective coating around her, I tried to feign sincerity and authority. But in my heart, I knew that this playacting wasn’t going to result in anything.

  A witch can feel power. Even when we just flick five fingers, we can trace the course of power from somewhere inside us out through our hands. Throughout this whole elaborate ritual, I’d felt nothing except annoyance.

  But I didn’t want Marie-Therèse to know that. So I went through with it to the end, walking widdershins and dismissing all the spirits and whatever until the circle was empty (as if it had ever been filled).

  “Are . . . are you finished?” Marie-Therèse asked uncertainly.

  “Yep,” I said, brimming with false confidence. “You’re all set.”

  She looked around the room, which appeared to have been struck by the spirit of Chaos. “May I . . .” She gestured vaguely. “. . . help?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll just enjoy the vibes.”

  She nodded doubtfully. “Well, then, if you don’t mind . . .”

  “Please,” I said heartily, opening the door for her.

  When she was gone, I curled up in a chair, wet high tops and all, and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER

  •

  THIRTY-THREE

  I’d tried everything I could think of to ward off the so-called “celebration” in which Marie-Therèse would be carted off to the geriatric equivalent of the Roach Motel (They check in, but they don’t check out!), to no avail. The following morning I tried to talk with her, but she wouldn’t even consider fleeing with me to Germany or someplace else, and when I’d discreetly suggested a cozy little nest in the Paris sewers, she’d screamed in alarm.

  Seriously, though, I could understand where she was coming from. She’d lived on the Rue des mes Perdues for more years than she was willing to tell me, and she wasn’t about to run away now, so it looked like my only remaining option was to physically fight off whoever was going to try to haul her away. I just hoped Peter would be willing to help me when the time came. And then, of course, the two of us would have to run for our lives, but I figured we’d worry about that later.

  I was busy stabbing my fingers with wicked-looking curved needles—I’d bought some that were made especially for sewing leather—as I bound another section of Azrael’s book when Fabienne bombed through the door to my room. “Katy!” she said breathlessly.

  I stashed the book with the needle in it under my pillow, but I needn’t have made the effort. Fabby was so excited, she couldn’t have cared less if I’d been making voodoo dolls.

  “This is about my mother,” she whispered, her face earnest. “It is shocking.”

  I didn’t think I’d be shocked at anything Sophie de la Soubise would do, but since Fabienne was her daughter, I kept my opinions to myself.

  “I have seen her only three times in my life, so I am hardly acquainted with her. I know almost nothing about her.”

  “Okay,” I prodded. “So she’s not Mom of the Year. Did she, like, do something to you? Because—”

  “Shh. Just listen to me, Katy.” Her fingers were digging into mine, and her voice was trembling with intensity. “Remember when you said something is odd about the people who live here? Alors, you were right!” She blinked several times and swallowed, as if she were afraid to tell me.

  “Well?” I asked. “What is it?”

  She took a deep breath. “Perhaps you will not believe me, but they . . . that is, the people here . . .”

  “What about them?” I pressed.

  “They are old,” she whispered.

  “Old?” I frowned. Fabby was fifteen. To her, high school seniors were old.

  “I overheard Sophie and Joelle talking about Edouard Manet.” She looked up at me. “You know this painter, Manet?”

  “I do,” I said. “Do you?”

  “I know only that he was one of the famous painters of La Belle Epoch, at the end of the nineteenth century,” Fabienne said. “That was why I paid attention. I was walking through the dining room when I heard them. It sounded interesting, so I hid behind the cabinet that contains the Fabergé eggs and listened to their conversation.”

  “So, what’d they say?”

  Fabby’s eyes were bright in her pale face. “Sophie said that she had posed for him, and then Joelle said that she had too, and then she showed Sophie a book. This book.” She reached behind her to take a slim volume out of the waistband of her skirt and handed it to me. “They left it on one of the coffee tables. I picked it up after they left the room.”

  I turned the book over in my hands. It was bound in gray linen with the name Edouard Manet printed on the cover. Its publication date was April 1911. “A first edition,” I said. “This must be valuable.”

  Inside was some biographical text, but most of the pages just showed black-and-white reproductions of Manet’s work, with explanatory captions beneath them. I flipped through the pages. “All his most famous works,” I said. There was nothing I hadn’t seen before in art class.

  “That one,” Fabby said, placing her hand on a page.

  “This?” It was Manet’s most well-known painting. It was of a nude woman lying on a divan. I read the caption out loud. “Olympia, 1863. A nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbina, 1538, and also of Francisco Goya’s—”

  “Look at her face,” Fabienne said.

  I did, and burst out laughing. “Oh, my God!” I shrieked. “She looks just like Joelle!”

  Fabienne wasn’t laughing. “It is Joelle,” she said. “She is nearly two hundred years old.”

  “Two . . . Don’t be ridiculous, Fabby. It’s just a passing resemblance.”

  “No. There are other books. In the library. Sophie mentioned them, and I looked them up. Her picture is in them too. And they are far, far older than this.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sounds like all those trips to Japanese hot springs are burning out your brain cells. Sophie’s your mother, Fabby. She can’t be older than forty, and that would be a stretch.” Not to mention the general dearth of Parisians—or even yogurt-swilling Russians—over the age of one hundred.

  “But I can prove this! Come with me.”

  Reluctantly, I trudged behind her into the library, which was empty as usual. Fabby lit an oil lamp. Then she took a book from the case and opened it to a portrait of a woman wearing the elaborate clothing of the late eighteenth century and a Marie Antoinette–style wig as high as Marge Simpson’s. Beneath the picture was the caption, Portrait of Mme Sophie de la Soubise, c. 1785.

  “What?” I gasped. I flipped the book over and checked out the title: Slipping the Noose: French Aristocrats Who Survived the Revolution.

  “It can’t be,” I said. The woman in the pain
ting looked a little younger than Sophie, perhaps, but the resemblance was unmistakable. I began reading the text. “This says that . . .”

  Madame de la Soubise was reputed to be the mistress of King Louis the Sixteenth as well as a number of other noblemen.

  I closed the book. I didn’t think Fabby had read it, or she would have freaked out by what it said about her mother. “This woman must be an ancestor or something. That’s got to be it, Fabby. A relative.”

  “No, it is not a relative.” She took down another book and opened it to a page on which was another portrait, painted by Jean Louis David in 1815, of someone who also looked exactly like Sophie.

  “Eighteen Fifteen?” I asked.

  “Thirty years after the other painting,” Fabienne said. “But it is the same woman, no?”

  “Thirty years,” I whispered. The two portraits looked nearly identical. And the living Sophie de la Soubise looked just like both of them.

  On the facing page was a painting by Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Comtesse Marie-Therèse LePetit d’Orleans, 1788. In it, the same Marie-Therèse I saw every day was sitting in a garden with a book in her hand. It could have been no one else.

  “A lot of our housemates are in these books,” Fabienne said.

  “Then . . .” I flipped through the pages, pausing briefly at faces I recognized. Things were beginning to make sense, but they were still hard to believe. “But how . . . how do they do it?”

  “Through the full-moon rituals,” Fabienne said pointedly. “I just figured it out. All their magic must be used to keep them young. It says so in the words of the ritual.”

  “I know,” I said. “I listened to it. But I thought it meant that they wanted to look young. That is, younger. Not that they’d actually stop aging entirely.”

  “But they don’t stop aging,” Fabby said. “Don’t you see?” She compared the paintings again. “They get old like everyone else. But it takes longer.”

  “Hundreds of years longer?” I asked, incredulous.

  Fabby shrugged. “Why not?”

  Marie-Therèse’s eightieth birthday, I thought. If Fabienne was right, then eighty wasn’t anywhere near the real number. “So how old are they when they have to leave?” I asked.

  Fabby shrugged. “I suppose it depends on when they begin the rituals.”

  “In the painting, Marie-Therèse looks almost as old as she is now.”

  “Yes, I saw. She must have come to the Enclave late in her life.”

  “So her time has run out, while Sophie . . .”

  “. . . is still young.” Fabby crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Well, relatively.”

  We sat in silence for a moment while I digested what I’d just learned. The ritual I’d witnessed, which seemed to be so similar to the one I’d read about in Azrael’s book, had, in fact, been the same ritual, except that the words “healing and truth” had been changed somewhere along the line to “beauty and youth.”

  And it was no coincidence that the Abbaye des mes Perdues and the house I lived in were on the same street. It was the same street, and the same house, and I possessed an account of it from its earliest days.

  So much made sense to me now. The ritual had changed, and I’d bet I knew when that happened. The author of Azrael’s book hadn’t named the siren “abbess” whose talent had been to entice men, but I had a pretty good idea who she was.

  That was why Sophie had led the ritual the other night.

  “So we’re not talking about a bunch of silly women who just like to look good,” I said. “The Enclave is about achieving nearly eternal life, with the youth to go with it.”

  Fabby nodded. “It seems too good to be true.”

  “Maybe it is,” I said. “You know, at some point, your magic runs out.”

  “That takes a long time.”

  “For you, maybe. Not for Marie-Therèse. Hers runs out tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her so-called birthday party. It’s when she gets kicked out of the house.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. “Is there nothing we can do to stop it?”

  “I’m trying to come up with something, but so far I haven’t had a lot of luck.”

  “Perhaps if we stay near her tonight, the two of us, we can help. Plus Peter, of course.”

  I lowered my head. “I’m not sure we can count on Peter,” I said.

  Peter had once been my rock, the way I’d been his. But since we got here, in this place, all our values seemed to have been turned upside down. I was doing things with Belmondo that I wouldn’t even have been able to think of back in Whitfield, and Peter . . . Well, Sophie had seemed pretty sure that he was never going to come back to America. Or to me.

  “Peter’s going to join the Enclave, isn’t he.” It wasn’t really a question.

  “I don’t know,” Fabienne said gently. “Peter’s gift is different from ours. The coven must keep an alchemist. It is the most important position here. After Jeremiah is gone, Peter will be entrusted with our care.”

  “You mean he’ll keep you in designer clothes and jewelry.”

  “I suppose,” Fabby said quietly. “So you see, he will not have to sacrifice his talent . . . if he joins.”

  Not like you, I thought. What was in store for her was even worse than the scenario for Marie-Therèse. Not being good at anything was bad enough. But being good at something you weren’t allowed to do was beyond depressing. How many witches with tremendous potential had been forced over the years into being living dolls for their whole lives? How many great healers, musicians, scientists, teachers, visionaries, artists, mathematicians, and philosophers had women like Sophie destroyed by keeping their children ignorant and focused on the most trivial aspects of human life, until the day when they were taken away to the Poplars to die, alone and unfulfilled?

  It made me sick to think about it.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Doesn’t your gift mean anything to you?”

  “Of course it does,” she said, “but this life is what I was born for—” Suddenly she inhaled sharply, her sensitive features quivering like a deer’s. “I think I hear people,” she whispered. “The witches would not want us to know their secret. Not before the Initiation.”

  We both sprinted back to the shelves. “Hurry,” she said, snatching the last book out of my hands and replacing it quickly.

  I followed her out of the library. “Fabby . . .”

  She looked at me with big, frightened eyes.

  “I know it’s tempting, but . . . if you join the Enclave, you’ll not only have to give up your talent, but you’ll be here forever, following their rules. Like literally forever,” I said quietly. “Are you sure you want that?”

  Her eyes welled. I don’t know if Fabienne would have—or could have—answered me then, but our conversation was cut short when Sophie and Joelle met us at the bottom of the stairs.

  “What are you doing with her?” Sophie snapped at her daughter. She indicated me with a toss of her head.

  “Probably learning how to act like an American teenager,” Joelle said before turning her malevolent gaze on Fabby. “Is that it, darling? Is the cook teaching you how to chase after grown men?”

  “Excuse us,” I said, moving past them up the stairs.

  “Oh, must you go? We were hoping you’d tell us all about how you forced Belmondo into spending an evening with you.”

  “Oh, Mother!” Fabienne said. She tried to take my hand, but I shooed her up the stairs. She ran into her room and slammed the door behind her.

  “Yes, why not?” Sophie joined in, ignoring her daughter’s exit. “I imagine you’ll tell all your little friends about your tawdry exploits. Americans are so poor at keeping secrets.”

  “You’re so right,” I said as brightly as I could. “In fact, I’ll tell you a secret right now. I didn’t spend an evening with Belmondo.” I smiled sweetly. “It was three.”

  Joelle backed
up a step.

  “Three evenings,” I said, just to make sure she got the point.

  For a moment Joelle’s eyes blazed at me furiously while I clenched my jaw and tried to hold my ground. Finally, Sophie took Joelle’s arm and led her away, forcing a laugh.

  “Oh, by the way,” she said, barely raising her voice as she turned to address me, “Pierre is adjusting very well to our life here. I imagine he’ll be staying after you leave.”

  Joelle laughed for real this time.

  I ran upstairs and opened the door to my room with trembling hands. Pierre. They’d even changed Peter’s name to make him one of their own.

  CHAPTER

  •

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Don’t think. Sew.

  Marie-Therèse’s last hurrah, the immortal witches, Fabby’s future, Azrael, Belmondo, Peter . . . just about everything in my life, including my totally waning enthusiasm for French cooking, was turning to dreck, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to change anything. Marie-Therèse’s birthday party would begin in a few hours, and the rest of her life was going to depend on how I handled things there. The problem was, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do to prevent her from going to the Poplars.

  So I sewed the book together and hoped that if I could just relax, maybe an idea would come to me.

  It was strangely comforting to move the needle in and out of the ancient binding. I wanted to get the job done, but at the same time I didn’t want Jean-Loup’s story to end. I wondered if it was possible that his apprentice, Henry Shaw, might be the same Henry Shaw I’d heard about in Whitfield. If so, that would make Peter one of his descendants. How weird would that be?

  Peter had always been ashamed of his connection with that Henry Shaw, who had been a dishonorable tycoon who’d turned in his own wife to the authorities when he’d found out she was a witch. To protect her, my own ancestor, Serenity Ainsworth, together with a West African shaman named Ola’ea Olokun, had cast a spell over part of Whitfield that would render it invisible. That was why so many witches lived there today: Those early witches had lived with no outside influences at all for generations, until Massachusetts was safe for our kind again . . . no thanks to Henry, who’d disappeared when the witch hunters couldn’t find anyone to persecute.