“Like you.”
I nodded, moving on to the next portrait. There were dozens in the room – the task was going to take forever.
“Cécile?”
I heard the question in his voice, but I wasn’t ready to talk about the realization that was twisting through my stomach. “I know,” I said. “Let’s finish this, and then… And then we’ll discuss what we’ve discovered.”
We circled the room, then went around again with the ladder. But even the effort of clambering up and down the rungs wasn’t enough to drive away the chill that prickled my skin every time we found a portrait matching a name on the list.
Only when I was certain we’d examined the name and face of every one of the two hundred years’ worth of paintings did I finally sit cross-legged in the center of the room, my skirts pooled around me and the annotated list on the wooden floor. “Help yourself to a drink from the cart,” I said, my eyes fixed on the undeniable truth on the paper. The last ten names on my list were represented by portraits in the foyer, and every last one of them was wearing my necklace.
Which meant all of them were my ancestors.
“Here.” Chris handed me a glass, and with a shaking hand, I took a large swallow. The brandy seared down my throat, but did nothing to steady my nerves.
“She’s killing your maternal line,” he said, sitting across from me. “But why?”
I set my drink down on the floor, the answer coming to me even as he asked the question. “Blood.” I sucked in a breath of air through my teeth, seeing the verity of the trolls’ prophesy. “The connection of a blood tie can be important to some spells, because it is a link between people. That’s how she’s doing it.”
“But that means…”
“It means that all these women are her descendants. And,” I swallowed down the burn of brandy rising back up in my throat, “That means so am I.”
I clenched my fists so hard my pencil snapped. I’d thought the prophesy meant I’d do something, that it would be my and Tristan’s actions that would bring an end to Anushka’s life. But that wasn’t it at all. What it meant was that I was a future victim. I didn’t have to do anything – my very existence ensured she’d one day come after me to maintain her immortal life. All the trolls had to do was hold on to me and wait.
All this time, I’d thought there was something special about me, something making me uniquely capable of ending the curse. And what a fool I was to have thought so. Any of Anushka’s line would have been sufficient. Only chance had made it me.
Chris had picked up the end of my broken pencil and was counting on his fingers, then writing down numbers between names. “There’s something of a pattern,” he said. “There’s a few times she breaks with it, but for the most part, the deaths are usually nineteen or thirty-eight years apart. Can’t say what the significance of that is, but it does look as though she’s picking one off almost every generation.”
“My grandmother’s name isn’t on our list.”
Chris picked up the map and unrolled it, pointing to the burn mark we hadn’t investigated. The one on the road to the Hollow.
Taking the pencil, I carefully wrote my grandmother’s name and the year of her death. It was nineteen years after the last name on my list. By the odds, the soonest Anushka could be expected to kill again was nineteen years later. I did the math. “We have six years before she’s likely to strike.”
“It could be less,” Chris warned.
“Or longer.” I wondered how Thibault would take it when I told him he could have another twenty-five years to wait before Anushka came after me. I did not think it would sit well with him to know that he’d be a doddering old man when he finally won his freedom.
Except it wouldn’t be me she came after.
Leaping to my feet, I snatched up the lamp and went over to where my mother’s portrait hung. It was many years old, from the prime of her youth, and before she’d given me the necklace. With a shaking hand, I reached up to touch the gold paint on the canvas. I wasn’t the next target, my mother was.
“Are you going to tell the trolls it’s Genevieve she’ll go after?”