Poison Priestess Read online

  Her tidy face creases with such chagrin on my behalf that my foul mood uncurls and expands, gaining in vigor. Though Adam called this evening a “fete” in his invitation, I’d thought that only an arch term for an intimate rendezvous between the two of us.

  Clearly I have mistaken his intentions.

  “I am afraid not, madame,” she says regretfully, taking my cloak and offering me a black hooded cape in exchange. “My apologies for the confusion.”

  “It’s hardly your fault,” I mutter, stifling the urge to snap at her as I sling the cape over my arm. Though tendrils of suspicion stir inside me like ivy creepers, whatever is truly afoot here has nothing to do with her. “And what am I to do with this?”

  “Put it on, please,” she instructs as she leads me up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. Our footfalls release breaths of dust with each step, its motes whirling through the feeble halos cast by each flickering sconce.

  Then she opens another door, nodding me in, and suddenly everything becomes much clearer to me.

  The room beyond could be a run-down replica of my sorceress’s lair on the night of the Black Mass, a reflection viewed in the surface of a muck-riddled pond. Artfully sloppy runes deface the splintered hardwood floor, including a pentagram so slick and glistening it may have been painted with fresh blood. Though Adam is nowhere to be seen, a wooden full-length-mirror frame set with black baize instead of glass stands at the pentagram’s head. What use, I wonder with foreboding, could he possibly find for something like that? At least he has not aped my living altar. His is merely a table scattered with candles and occult artifacts, nothing of any particular note.

  And there is no fragrant incense, no feathers and flowers here. Where I strove for polish and decadence, Adam has embraced seaminess and grit.

  Perhaps he thought it might instill his stolen ritual with authenticity.

  So this is what he has been devising while he stayed away, I think with a mounting fury. A Black Mass to rival my own. That he would thieve my idea from me, after the night we spent together, rives me through with rage, along with a scalding mortification. Is this why he wanted me at all? So that he might avail himself of more of my secrets, pry them loose from my lips upon my own pillow?

  How stupid of me, how terribly foolish and naive, to invite him not only to my Messe Noire but also into my bed.

  But then, I wonder, my thoughts doubling back upon themselves, why summon me here at all to witness this traitorous turnabout? Why call this a fete devised for me?

  “Madame La Voisin!” a delighted voice purrs into my ear. I turn with a start to find my very own patroness standing among the hooded guests clustered against the room’s back wall. The marquise beams at me, porcelain-cheeked and perfect as Aphrodite against the black of her borrowed hood. She leans forward to brush a greeting kiss over my cheek. “This is all so delightfully sordid, is it not? And what a marvelous surprise to find you here. I would not have expected you to attend a rival sorcerer’s Messe Noire.”

  “A rival … sorcerer …” I sputter, so beset by outrage I can barely control myself. I swallow with an effort, my hands curling into tight fists by my sides. The painful slice of my nails into my palms brings a welcome burst of clarity. “He is no sorcerer, Marquise. Only a simple magician, a tawdry illusionist. If he has presented himself as anything grander to you, then I’m afraid he has tricked you here under false pretenses.”

  “Oh, hardly.” She flicks one shoulder in a heedless shrug. “I confess I came out of sheer curiosity. What can this Lesage possibly do, I wondered, that my own divineress—ostensibly the very finest of her age—could not manage better?”

  I read between the lines, divining the true meaning of the cold and pragmatic twinkle in her eyes. While my standing may still be safe with her, she sees no harm in taking the measure of my competition, drawing her comparisons. Determining if Lesage might perchance suit her even better than I do.

  It makes all the sense in the world, in the heartless way native to the aristocracy.

  I take covert stock of the rest of the room, gauging Adam’s audience. Amid a scattering of faces I do not recognize, I spot the Vicomte de Couserans, who tips me a wink when I meet his eye, along with the marquise’s usual entourage of Madame Leferon and the maréchale.

  Then, heralded by a swell of invisible violins, Adam appears beside the mirror between one breath and the next. As if conjuring himself out of thin air.

  “Welcome, all you gathered,” he booms, spreading his hands with a flourish, his eyes aglitter with a ferocious mirth. He’s clad all in black, as ever, though beneath his cape he sports no waistcoat or shirt. Above his pantalon, his sinewy torso is adorned with blood-red sigils, candlelight gilding the flow of muscle and the neat taper of his waist. “I thank you for gracing my home with your presence. Now, shall we court our demonic liege together?”

  The marquise titters beside me, then heaves an admiring sigh.

  “I suppose he does not even need a living altar, does he?” she whispers to me behind her hand. “Not when he might as well be an offering himself.”

  As the ritual begins, I see why Adam chooses not to speak when he performs his magic shows. Charming as he is in private, in public he does not possess anything close to my poetic flair. Though his ceremony is in close mimicry of mine, his prayers sound simple and slapdash, pallid reconstructions of my own.

  And yet it galls me to admit that it all still works quite well, because what the magician lacks in substance, he makes up for in form. Though he steers clear of obvious tricks, the glassless mirror at the altar’s head does all the work for him. It produces stunning images, from roiling darkness to gray smoke to licking flames, followed by outlandish tableaux both lush and obscene.

  The most extravagant of these evokes Eden after the fall, filled with smoldering embers and withered trees, their branches heavy not with apples but with snakes.

  As if he is affording all of us a glimpse through some profane window, a stolen peek into perdition. A porthole into hell.

  Then there is the subtext only I can read, a sly tongue-in-cheek mockery. The way he’s taken back everything I stole from him and remade it into something almost better. But even as it makes my blood boil like tallow, I find I cannot help but admire the enterprising mind behind it all. When he looks my way, cocking his head almost as if in question, his eyes gleam with something both more complex and benign than the malice I expected to see. Something much more interesting than mere triumph at having outwitted me.

  He wants me to appreciate this performance, I realize with shock, a little of my umbrage fading; he seeks my admiration. Which means that his invitation, while deceptive, was not intended as an insult. Because he does not see me as an enemy—but rather, as a skilled opponent who has borrowed from him in the past. An adversary whose respect he wishes to win.

  I could learn from him, I realize, from his keen scalpel of a mind and dispassionate cunning.

  And once I have learned, I could be the one to best him.

  When he reaches the ritual’s climax, Adam instructs us all to kneel. “Let us look upon the face of our dread lord,” he intones, “and bask in his regard. There is no longer any need to merely hope that your prayers will reach his ears. Not when you can look the daystar directly in the eye.”

  “No,” the marquise breathes beside me as we both sink to our knees, sounding genuinely unnerved. “Surely that cannot be possible.”

  I think of Adam’s gruesome demons’ masks at the maréchale’s bal masqué, and his dancing skeleton in the courtyard of the Pomme.

  “He is a renowned illusionist, Marquise,” I whisper back. “Who knows what further deceptions he has in store.”

  Once he has us on our knees, Adam stands beside the mirror and sweeps his arms up slowly, as if in wordless command. A series of gasps sound from the crowd as a demonic visage coalesces in the mirror, lurid and scarlet and somehow all aglow, a storm cloud of black hair whipping around its frightful face. It
yawns its mouth open in a silent roar, exposing a serpent’s flicking tongue and dripping fangs. It is of a piece with the infernal landscapes that came before it, yet somehow more substantial, infinitely worse to behold.

  From the collection of ragged breaths and wide eyes all around me, I can tell just how deeply it has struck home.

  Another illusion, I think irritably, wincing as splinters dig into my knees. This diabolic apparition can be nothing but an image somehow cast onto the baize, as in a shadow play. Though I cannot think of how he achieves such depth and vibrancy of color. Worse yet is how eagerly his guests—including my marquise—lap it all up like starving strays. Their wonder is expansive and genuine, and I can barely fault them for it. His staging is immaculate, the marvel of his mirror all the greater when set against the dilapidation of the surrounding space.

  It only reinforces my resolve to learn from him, then to best him at his own game, to win this feral little contest between us.

  Because he cannot have this life I’ve fought for tooth and claw, wrested into being by the force of my own will. I will not be upstaged when I have been so clever and worked so hard for all of it.

  Especially not when it has cost me Marie.

  After the ritual, Adam departs from my example by hosting an actual late-night fete. While the guests are occupied with chattering to each other of everything that has passed, his violinists strike up a merrier song.

  As servers file fleetly into the room, bearing platters of wine, cheese, and fruit, I circulate among the attending noblesse in an attempt to salvage the evening in my favor.

  “Alors, what were your impressions, Madame La Voisin?” the Vicomte de Couserans asks me, his eyes drifting appreciatively down my neck and the exposed swell of my bosom. I curse Adam inwardly for having misled me into wearing a more revealing gown than I would have chosen, had I known some of my clients would be here. “I found Lesage’s ceremony exceptionally chilling.”

  “And I!” the marquise gushes, giving an ecstatic little shudder. “Heavens, that face! I swear it shall follow me directly into my dreams. Was it truly le Diable, do you think? I imagine it can’t have been anything else.”

  “Very doubtful, my lady,” I say, taking heed to mask my turmoil. “Of course, I cannot say for certain, but it is worth remembering that Lesage is only an illusionist. Not a sorcerer, and certainly no dark priest. All this was not so different from his magic act. More a dangerous mockery than anything else, of a ritual that should only ever be undertaken with the proper respect.”

  The two lapse into pensive silence for a moment, mulling this over. Perhaps this is how I might sway them back toward me, I think with a flare of hope. By convincing them that there is a protocol to dallying with the devil. A certain way these things must be done.

  In other words, my way.

  “But the images in the mirror!” the vicomte insists, his ruddy cheeks blotching even further. I remember his wish, the craving for excitement in any form. Of course he would want to believe in something so thrilling as having seen the devil’s face. “Not only that countenance, but the fire, and those stunning panoramas! I cannot imagine how any of it could have been feigned. But you, madame, are you not acquainted with Lesage? Do you have any notion of how it was done?”

  “I’ve no idea, I’m afraid,” I reply, shrugging as if Adam’s secrets hardly matter. “We do know each other, but it is as they say. Magicians are loath to reveal their tricks.”

  “Well, perhaps you will entice him into some disclosure yet,” the marquise suggests coyly, fingering the silken ends of a ringlet and tipping her head toward the back of the room. “He seems … rather partial to you.”

  I glance over to where Adam holds court with several of the other nobles while gazing my way, eyebrows lifted in invitation. Making my excuses to the marquise and the vicomte, I wander toward him. He extricates himself from his admirers at my approach, leading me lightly by the elbow toward the impromptu dance floor, where a few couples drift in a slow pavane like lily pads caught in a lazy current.

  “Well?” he asks as he whirls me around. “How did I do? I am all but dying to hear your thoughts.”

  “My thoughts are that you are a scoundrel and a rake,” I say under my breath, keeping my tone studiously placid and my expression smooth. “Neither of which comes as any great surprise.”

  “My, such harsh words!” That wolf’s smile again, curling the corners of his mouth. “Come now, my lady, all pique aside. Were you not pleased by the performance? I did so hope you might enjoy it.”

  I struggle with myself for a moment, torn between aggravation and curiosity.

  “How was the illusion done?” I demand. “And let us not prevaricate. That was no more the devil himself than it is the devil who reads their wishes by my hearth.”

  He purses his lips into a tantalizing moue, tilting his head back and forth as if deciding what to divulge. When I start to pull away from him, he makes an apologetic noise and tugs me delicately closer.

  “Stay with me tonight,” he murmurs into my ear. “After they’ve all gone. Stay with me, and tell me that the next Messe will find us standing together, as black priestess and her priest. If you agree, I will do one better than tell you—I will show you how it was done.”

  “That is what you wish?” I ask, both taken aback and, despite myself, a little gratified. “A partnership with me? That is why you invited me here under such brazen false pretenses?”

  “Of course,” he says blithely, as if it should have been clear to me from the start. “Is it not the obvious next step? With forces joined, would we not command immeasurably more influence?”

  I stare consideringly into his eyes, so dark they look almost black in the room’s low light. There is merit to his suggestion. What could we achieve if we merged our respective powers instead of continuing our struggle to upstage each other? With our stars yoked together, what blazing constellation might we scrawl across the heavens?

  Together, what might we become?

  “We could own them, Catherine,” Adam says fiercely, just above a whisper, sensing the soar of my temptation. The first time he has used my Christian name. “All of them, up to le Roi Soleil himself. Louis may be enthralled by the novelties of science now—but when faced with advisers such as the two of us, with your scrying gift and my legerdemain? Nothing would be beyond our reach. Not even the space just behind the throne.”

  Such power, I think dreamily, swept up by his vision of us as shadow regents, weaving our dark stratagems from the catacombs. And the vast influence and wealth that might be amassed in this fashion, the staggering freedom that would come with it.

  Surely no one else would be my master then.

  When I shake my head, it is reluctantly, and with a tinge of genuine regret.

  “To stand beside you, I would have to trust you with my future,” I say with an almost rueful smile. “And underhanded as you have been tonight, how could I trust you with anything of mine? No, I’m afraid we are better suited as we are.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” he says, shedding some of that banked intensity and slipping back into his easy smile. “Or perhaps you will take some time to reconsider? Because I am not going anywhere, my lady. And while I do not consider us enemies now, is that not what we are destined to become, if we do not choose to thwart fate by becoming friends instead?”

  With a kiss brushed over my knuckles, he releases me and melts back into the fray.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Ingenue and the Newcomer

  Ilinger at the fete far longer than I’d like, reluctant to leave Adam to his own devices. Should something else transpire, some other crafty piece of drama, I cannot afford to be left in the dark.

  At the same time, my stately oracle’s masque begins to chafe. The fete has devolved into a sloppy bacchanal, and I grow heartily sick of making conversation with soused aristocrats. The vicomte alone has attempted to paw me thrice. Should there be a fourth time, I will be sorely tempt
ed to fling my wine into his face, social niceties and my livelihood be damned.

  My patience fraying, I retreat to the sidebar for a moment to gather myself.

  “Are you quite all right?” the young woman beside me asks, in a voice so light and sweet it barely carries over the festive ruckus. “Pardon the presumption, but you do not entirely look as if you are enjoying yourself.”

  Though the question comes across as somewhat impertinent, the tone itself is not. When I turn to look at her, I find that she is perhaps seventeen, comely and well attired, but clearly not highborn.

  “I hope that was not too forward,” she says timidly, shrinking a little under my openly appraising regard. “I am only asking because I wish to leave, myself, but would not want to offend our host.”

  “I rather doubt you would,” I reply sourly, glancing over at Adam, who is sampling a bunch of grapes dangling from the Vicomte de Couseran’s hand. “He seems far too busy cavorting with his more esteemed guests to even notice. If you do not mind my asking, how did you come to be here at all? Are you a friend of Adam’s?”

  “Oh, no,” she says with a fetching flush, her skin dramatically pale for someone with such dark eyes and hair. “I saw a show of his only last week, and then he bought me some wine after. When he invited me to a fete, I was so flattered, and I thought …”

  She bites her lower lip, sighing a little. “In truth, I am not sure what I thought. But, mon Dieu, I did not expect anything like this!”

  “You mean he did not warn you the devil would also be stopping by?” I ask dryly, sipping my wine, half wishing to laugh at our shared predicament. “How very thoughtless of him.”

  The girl giggles so adorably it teases a real smile from me. She really is so refreshing in comparison to the overdone fops and cloying grand dames that take up all my time. Perhaps, in a different time or place, we might have become friends.