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?
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.