Grim Lovelies (Grim Lovelies 1)

Chapter 3

That night, Anouk curled up in her small bed in the turret bedroom. Pasted to her walls were playbills and magazine covers, things Beau had found in the Pretty World and brought back to her. On her dresser was her collection of more found Pretty objects: a single baby shoe, a scratched-off lottery ticket, a man’s chestnut-colored toupee. Simple things that were magical in their utter lack of magic. What could be more impractical than a shoe for a newborn incapable of steps? The improbable hopes of million-to-one odds? The charming lie of a full head of hair? The playbill above her bed showed a picture of a prince and a princess, and most nights she’d sigh contentedly as she dreamed of their dashing adventures.

But not tonight. Tonight she dreamed of birds with gold-tipped wings that spoke with human voices, their eyes not inky black but green and hazel and blue, the eyes of children. She woke up shivering.

At dawn, she put on a fresh apron, climbed the stairs to Luc’s attic workrooms, and grimaced as she slaughtered and plucked the Corpus crows, her dream still too fresh; it was as though she were plucking fingernails off children.

The flight and tail feathers went into a linen bag to be used later for one of Mada Vittora’s tricks. The wispy gray down feathers just made a mess all over Luc’s big wooden worktable. His presence in the room was everywhere: in the placement of the knives and mortars and pestles; in the chair’s indentation that fit his body, not hers; in a half-cut onion, now shriveled. She smiled as she brushed away a dry husk of onion skin. Luc must have been making more invisible ink—?onion, lemon juice, a pinch of bitter herbs. Not long after she’d become a human girl, she’d made a mistake—?too much bleach in the laundry—?and Mada Vittora had banished her to her turret room for a week with no contact from the others, no conversations, no notes, and Anouk had thought she would go mad. But Luc had slipped perfectly innocent blank pages under her bedroom door, along with a fresh candle and matches, on the pretext that she should write the Mada a note of apology. Only . . . the pages smelled strange, like citrus and onion. When Anouk lit the candle to peer more closely at the paper, the heat from the flame made words bloom across the parchment.

Too bad you didn’t make the mistake of pouring that bleach in her shampoo instead. We could have called her the Bald Witch.

A smile had cracked across her face. With those words alone, Luc had made everything okay.

But where was he now, with his secret notes and silly jokes?

She grabbed the last crow and plucked a handful of feathers. She’d asked Hunter Black that morning if he would kill the crows, but he had only scowled and told her to do her own dirty work. As if killing weren’t the very task he’d been made for. Magic Is Life; Life Is Magic. The motto of the Haute. In order to do their tricks and whispers, members of the Haute needed to take life; the more complex, the better. The magic from a single Pretty life could theoretically sustain a witch for a year. But magic was tricky. Take a life, and the spell had a way of turning on its caster, causing not outright death, but death in slow little pieces: a liver turned to stone, a heart into wood. It was called the vitae echo. And so Mada Vittora, like all the witches, consumed flowers, herbs, feathers, and blood to work her tricks—?smaller pieces of life that carried little or no echo. And if she needed to kill any enemies? Well, beasties couldn’t use magic, but they could use knives.

It was a useful loophole.

Anouk wiped her forehead with her sleeve and then shook out her apron and watched the downy feathers float away into the air, some catching in the light, hanging suspended as though time were frozen. She used Luc’s paring knife to cut out the crows’ pink-fleshed breasts, then arranged them in a glass baking dish and rubbed in oregano, rosemary, and sage from Luc’s stores.

Ready to pop in the oven downstairs.

She ran a cloth over Luc’s table, wiping it clean, then wrapped the carcasses in old newspaper, clutched the bundle under her arm, and picked up the dish.

She padded downstairs and stopped at the landing. Listening. The ticking of the grandfather clock. Otherwise, no footsteps, no conversations. She glanced over her shoulder, Beau’s words in her ears. Spy on the house. Find clues about Luc.

If any clues were to be found, she knew where to look: the scrying room. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. The scrying room had an irritating way of moving around the townhouse, appearing behind different doors at different times. Once she’d found it in the guest bathroom. Another time, in the upstairs linen closet.

She walked down the hall, nudged the first bedroom door open with her foot, and looked in, her heart pounding, but it was still just a bedroom, untouched since the last time she’d cleaned it. The next two bedrooms too. The final door was open a few inches. She peeked inside.

It smelled musty, not like a bedroom at all. The reek of old feathers and flesh. There was a chattering of machinery.

Voilà—?she’d found it.

She slipped inside, set down the baking dish, and closed the door behind her. She’d only ever glimpsed the scrying room from a distance, catching flashes of Luc’s curved back as he leaned over the desk, headphones on his ears, pencil in hand. This had been Luc’s job when he wasn’t tending roses—?not just a gardener, but a spy.

The contraption that took up the entire rear wall of the scrying room was a type of switchboard, only this switchboard wasn’t used for two-way communication but for spying: a scryboard. Its operator would connect wires to specific slots in order to listen in covertly on the network of whispers that came from crows and, sometimes, even lowly insects like dragonflies. Scryboards were illegal in the Haute, of course—?hence the reason why Mada Vittora had charmed it to keep changing locations around the house—?but that didn’t mean that every witch didn’t have one hidden away somewhere.

Anouk took a step closer, apprehensive. Unlike the Pretties’ switchboards made of wood and wire, Luc’s scryboard was conjured out of more . . . organic materials. The glossy black wires that connected to different hookups were actually dark, ropy veins. A few malformed black feathers grew out of a row of gears near the top. The whole switchboard seemed to be pulsing slightly. In. Out. Breathing. Not alive, exactly, but not entirely lifeless either.

She sat on the stool, blowing dust off the log of meticulous notes that Luc kept, the record of who he’d been spying on and what he’d overheard. But that was only the official record he kept for Mada Vittora. He had another log. A secret one.

She felt under the desk until her fingers brushed a pad of paper, held there with a latch. She freed the notebook and flipped through the pages, looking for anything that might tell her where he’d disappeared to and why. But it was simply records of conversations he’d overheard—?gossip about Goblins, trouble with a former witch’s boy turned jewelry broker. She had no idea what she should be looking for. She picked up his headphones, turned them this way and that. Glossy black feathers grew from both earpieces, which were connected by a band of curved bone. She put them over her ears, and when she caught her reflection in the window, she thought they looked like wings on the sides of her head.

For a moment there was only the faint sound of whispering. A man’s distorted voice. Nothing she could make out clearly.

. . . These people . . .

She adjusted the headphones.

. . . These people with their little dreams and their little desires . . .

The transmission dissolved into static. She traced the wire. It led to a slot marked 444, and she flipped through the log until she found the corresponding number. The account for Mada Zola, the Lavender Witch, was 444. Just the night before, Beau had mentioned her banishment. She cocked her head. Who was this man on her wires now, whispering about dreams?

In the official logbook, there were no records for account 444. But in the secret log, Luc had scrawled this:

8 August Zola speaking to a man at her estate. A disgraced Royal? Her witch’s boy?