“No, my sweet. Not about the party.”
Anouk tried not to let her disappointment show. She cocked her head, a question on her lips. Then what?
Mada Vittora placed an icy hand on either side of Anouk’s face. Her smile stretched wide. “Tonight, my darling, you go outside.”
Outside? Into the Pretty World, where the Pretties strolled hand in hand with the sun on their faces amid cars and mailboxes and traffic signals, walking down the tree-lined block and then the block after that and the one after that?
Outside?
“Do you mean it?” Anouk gasped.
“Oh yes. But first, you’ll need a good pair of shoes.”
Chapter 2
Mada Vittora’s closet was the stuff of dreams.
Anouk knew every inch of it; she had laundered every dress, starched every collar, dusted each pair of shoes. Thousands of them. Golden heels, red leather pumps, satin slippers with little blue bows.
“You’ll want a sturdy pair,” Mada Vittora said. “Flats. I could swear I had some Chanel loafers in here . . .”
The witch was currently waist-deep in the closet, rooting around like a pig hunting for truffles, her disembodied voice floating back to Anouk, who sat on the bed with her hands clutched in her lap, fingers squeezed together, the pinch of pain assuring her this wasn’t a dream. She tucked in her chin in an attempt to hide her smile. “I’ve never worn shoes before.”
“Nonsense,” Mada Vittora said from the closet. “Just last week you tried on the Bergdorf heels, remember?”
“I mean real ones. Not just for dress-up.” She wiggled her bare toes.
The witch extracted herself from the forest of fur coats. “Here. These will do.” Her hair was mussed, her cheeks flushed, and Anouk was struck by how beautiful she was even when rumpled.
She held up a pair of stiff oxfords.
Anouk reached for them, but Mada Vittora shook her head girlishly. “Let me. They have tricky laces.” She lowered herself to her knees and started to unlace the shoes. Anouk stared at the perfect part in the top of Mada Vittora’s hair. It was always the other way around: Anouk on her knees, hemming her mistress’s skirt or picking lint off her socks, while Mada Vittora towered over her, godlike. It felt topsy-turvy to have their roles reversed, like a bottle of tonic dropped upside down.
“There now,” Mada Vittora said. “Snug, but they’ll do.”
Anouk bit down on the inside of her cheek. There was a particular tenderness in the way Mada Vittora tied the shoes, teaching Anouk how to lace them with some funny phrase about a rabbit and a hole. The strings of Anouk’s heart pulled tighter with each tug on the laces.
Was this what it felt like to have a mother?
Mada Vittora’s smile stretched over bone-white teeth. “Are you ready?”
Anouk, afraid to speak, nodded.
Mada Vittora took her hand.
Not even Viggo and Hunter Black, standing in the hallway and snickering to themselves, could dampen her spirits. Nor the fact that the shoes pinched the sides of her feet. Or that she and Mada Vittora were headed the wrong way, not down the stairs to the ground floor but up toward the attic. Luc’s rooms? Wasn’t this the opposite direction of the front door? The shoes clunked awkwardly. As the two of them climbed the stairs, tendrils of drafty air came from beyond Luc’s door, carrying scents of thyme, speeding her heart all over.
Mada Vittora walked straight to a ladder that led to a trapdoor to the roof.
“Up you go. Hurry, now, or they’ll get away.” She held out a burlap sack.
“Wh . . . what will?”
“The birds, my sweet. The birds.”
Anouk stared through the open trapdoor in the ceiling, bewildered. It was a clear night; a few stars shone overhead. Fresh air howled down, fluttering the ribbon in her hair. Behind her, the sound of Viggo’s snickering grew. Something slowly curdled in her stomach as she realized what was going on. No, no.
Anouk spun on Viggo. “A joke.” The dry word scraped on her throat. “You aren’t letting me go outside at all.”
He smirked, tossing a conspiratorial look to Hunter Black, though Hunter Black’s face remained as wooden as always.
Anouk choked back the feeling of hot shame. She couldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.
Her hands tightened into fists.
“Oh, my sweet girl, no!” Mada Vittora’s silky hands were on her shoulders, turning her around to face her. “A joke? Ah! How foolish of me. You thought I meant outside into the city. Oh, you silly creature.” Her soft hands stroked Anouk’s tawny hair. “You know that your work is here, in the house. I only meant that there are some crows outside, on the roof . . . Corpus crows, very rare . . . they pass through only once a year . . . breast meat a delicacy for tomorrow’s dinner . . . Luc used to catch them, of course, but with him gone . . . oh, you poor, innocent thing. I’ve upset you.”
Her hands drifted to the sagging ribbon around Anouk’s ponytail. She gently retied it into a tight bow.
Innocent?
Anouk had heard it before. The sweet one. The innocent one. Beau teased her mercilessly for it, and so did the other beasties when she saw them. They thought that because their tasks took them out into the city—Cricket even lived in an apartment on her own—they were more worldly than she. And they were, that was the worst part. Anouk had never seen the things they spoke of—the Eiffel Tower and the patisseries and the bookstore with the sleeping cat—had never been to a bistro, had never been caught in a sudden rainstorm, never taken a shortcut through a graveyard. But innocent? No. They didn’t know the thoughts that sometimes wandered into her head late at night. Thoughts of stealing shoes, of sneaking out, of running away and never coming back.
She grabbed the burlap sack and climbed the ladder.
“Anouk,” Mada Vittora said. “Wait!”
Anouk paused, hopeful.
“Try to catch at least three,” the witch said.
With a burst of anger, Anouk slammed the trapdoor behind her. Birds! That was all the Mada wanted.
Her face was hot. Her blood was coursing palpably. Viggo’s laughter still clapped against her ears as she paced on the roof. The shoes pinched her feet, clomp-clomp-clomping on the tiles. The wind chilled her as she stood on the roof, seven stories high. The lights of the city below were like a sea of stars, and . . . and she stopped.
The city.
Paris.
She was—at least in one sense—outside.
Suddenly it hit her: the lights and the wide-open night sky and the squeals of brakes and the rumble of tires and the chatter of voices. She dropped to a crouch. Steadied herself. Fingertips curled under the tiles as though she might float up to the stars if she didn’t hold herself down. She squeezed her eyes shut, but she could still hear the cacophony of Paris, pure and raw, not filtered through double-paned windows.
She drew in a breath. Another. The night rushed down her throat with each gasp. How did this chaos, this vast and crazy world, not drive everyone mad?
Start small, she thought.
She opened an eye.
She looked only at the roof tiles, the errant weeds that bravely grew through the cracks. She lifted her gaze to the edge of Mada Vittora’s townhouse, fenced in by iron cresting.