9 August Zola speaking to same man again. A partner of some sort. Romantic? Scheming how to break her banishment and return to Paris. Talk of a queenship.
11 August I personally attempted contact. Requested help. No response. Will attempt again.
Anouk felt a chill. Luc had not only listened in on the Lavender Witch privately—?he’d tried to contact her.
Why?
She heard a stair creak downstairs and slammed the log closed, then took off the feathered headphones. She hurried down the hall with the baking dish of crows, headed for the kitchen stairs.
“Anouk,” a voice called. “Stop.”
She winced. It was Viggo. She’d just walked by his bedroom. She went back and pushed his
door open a few more inches. Viggo looked up from his armchair, meeting her eyes. A tube snaked into his left arm’s inner elbow, connecting him to a glass pump that was filling steadily with blood, drop by drop. She quickly looked down; he hated for anyone to watch him during a blood harvest.
“Did you want something, Viggo? Water? Tea?” He shouldn’t even have been home now. He harvested on Fridays, and it was only Wednesday.
“Come here.”
She kept her eyes lowered as she took a step into the bedroom. Viggo wasn’t Mada Vittora’s real son, of course. Witches didn’t have children. The exact reason why was murky in Anouk’s mind, but she knew it had to do with the vitae echo: withered wombs, organs turned to stone, nasty things that came with the high cost of doing magic. In any case, witches had no use for children. It was blood they were after. Fresh young blood in copious amounts. Almost every trick and whisper demanded it. And so each witch adopted or stole a baby boy—?only ever a boy—?to raise. A lifetime of blood siphoned off, pint by pint, in exchange for an upbringing fit for a prince.
Viggo’s hand tensed and released, tensed and released. The blood pumped steadily. “Have you seen Cricket recently?”
She shook her head quickly, relieved at such a simple question. “She hasn’t come by the house in a few weeks. Your mother’s kept her busy with tasks around the city. Thieving books for the library, I think. The last time I saw her was at the Goblin gathering.”
Viggo kept pumping his fist.
“Did she say anything about me?”
Anouk paused.
Cricket had had plenty to say about Viggo at the Goblin gathering, all of it heavily laden with profanity. Something about a closet, Viggo making an unwanted confession, breathy whispers of You’re beautiful and I hate that I love you, though he’d never admit to doing it, of course. Viggo was human and young and handsome and richer than a god. Lusting after a beastie girl was beneath him, even one with cinnamon curls and rosebud lips and an easy strut that turned heads as if by magic. Luckily Cricket was a thief with quick reflexes and a quicker wit; she’d gotten back to a roomful of Goblins before his hands had strayed too far.
Maybe being beautiful was a curse, Anouk thought. Beautiful got you cornered in closets with pawing witch’s boys. While cleaning the parlor once, she’d overheard two Goblin girls in the next room debating whether Anouk was pretty or ugly. Pretty: her heart-shaped face. Ugly: the unfortunate nose. Pretty: long tawny hair, though it was often a mess. Ugly: the heavy set of her jaw.
Ugly, they had ultimately decided.
She’d always been self-conscious about her jaw. It gave her the look of some half-starved creature, she knew, a look that, every time she glanced in a mirror, she feared betrayed her deepest secret:
Animal. Creature. Thing.
An involuntary shiver ran down her spine. “No,” Anouk told Viggo. “She didn’t say anything else.”
Viggo grumbled in the armchair. His face was pale; the jar of blood was nearly full. He’d be in a foul temper the rest of the day, moody and drained.
“I want you to send her a message. Tell her my mother wants her here tonight to help with the dinner party.”
“But the Mada didn’t say—”
“Tell her.”
Anouk’s jaw clamped tight. Mada Vittora possessed their pelts, not Viggo. And yet refusing him was dangerous. One word to his mother, and Anouk might be locked in the cellar for days.
“I will,” she said quietly.
She escaped back to the hallway, only then realizing she was still holding the tray of herbed crow breasts and the paper-wrapped carcasses clutched under one arm. She tossed the bird entrails out into the courtyard, calling to the stray cats, trying to entice them. But they never came close.
Anouk exchanged her dirty apron for a fresh one and tied her hair back in a ribbon. She started with the feather duster, humming through each room on all seven stories, and then took the mop and polish to the ballroom floor. She’d read about contraptions the Pretties used, vacuum cleaners and blenders and something called a Mr. Coffee, but those things used electricity, and electricity interfered with Mada Vittora’s magic.