Beau wrapped an arm around Anouk’s waist. “Listen, cabbage, I don’t think Luc is dead. Mada Vittora has her reasons for everything. Maybe she’s sent him off on a mission she wants to keep secret.” He lowered his voice. “But just the same, if you think you can do it without risking getting caught, spy on the house. Find clues about Luc. Keep an eye out for anything odd while you’re cleaning. Residue from one of her tricks. A note she might have scrawled and thrown away.”
She looked at him in surprise. Spy on their mistress? She downed the remains of her scotch and reached for the half-full bottle to pour herself some more.
He glanced at the glass shaking in her hand. “Give me that before you drink too much and fall off the roof.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re my brother, Beau, not my nanny.”
Beau winced as he scratched at the corner of his jaw. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
“Nanny?”
“Brother.” His hand fell. “It isn’t true, not even remotely. We aren’t related. Not through blood, not through adoption. We’re just . . . just two people who live and work together.”
“But that’s what you’re like to me. You and Luc and even Hunter Black. And Cricket’s like a sister. We’re family, the five of us.” She’d always liked that word, family.
He drew in a long breath through his nose, not answering.
“You’d rather I called you coworker? Housemate?” She knocked her shoulder teasingly against him and then snatched the bottle out of his hands and held it up in accusation. “Stealer of expensive scotch?”
Now it was his turn to give her a hard look. He leaned over and slowly took the bottle out of her hand. “You could just call me Beau.”
His voice had dropped. The scotch was doing dizzy, heady things to her. Up here, on the roof, it felt almost magically private, as though outside of Mada Vittora’s walls they could say anything, be anything. His lips were whisper-close, his breath earthy and sweet from the drink.
He cupped her face in his palm. “Anouk.” His thumb brushed over the apple of her cheek, smelling faintly of his driving gloves.
“Yes?” she whispered.
And then he suddenly grinned. “You’ve soot on your face.” He swiped his thumb over her cheek again; it came away with a black stain.
She wiped at her face. “Again with the dust!”
“Maybe we’ve had it wrong this whole time,” he said in mock seriousness. “Maybe Mada Vittora made the rest of us from dogs and cats and birds but you from a dust bunny.”
She smeared a sooty finger down his nose. “She probably made you from a monkey.”
He threw an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.
She closed her eyes. Her head spun from the scotch. Luc was gone, and if she was being honest, she knew her mistress probably was responsible. Mada Vittora, who just moments ago had tied her shoes like a mother would for a daughter.
“What now?” she whispered.
If he’d been there, Luc would have known what to do. Luc always knew what to do. Without him, she felt lost.
Beau pulled back. “Now?” He held up the burlap sack. “Now we catch some crows for a dinner party.”
Her face broke into a smile.
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.