“Jacques!” I scream. I push Delphine into Bernadette’s arms and lunge. The pain strikes me like a savage headwind, but I grit my teeth against it, pressing into this strange darkness, one foot, then another. My hand finds Jacques’s. “Leave him alone!” I beg the butterfly man. “Please, what are you doing? Let him alone!”
But the butterfly man does not hear me, or else he does not care to listen. I pull at Jacques with all my strength. He will not move, and with a start, I see his feet no longer touch the floor. He is hanging in the air, the toes of his boots inches above the carpet. His muscles are straining, but he cannot move. Only his eyes stir. And his lips.
“Aurélie,” he says through clenched teeth. “I will find you. Go!”
And even though he is bleeding, he smiles, and I see him sitting on a stool in a grimy cottage, his sisters and brothers hanging from his shoulders and bouncing on his knees. His mother sits by a little stove, her knitting needles going clack-clack, and sage and lavender are drying in the rafters, and a cat stretches in the sunlight from the window, and Jacques is smiling, just like that. But as I watch, his smile breaks. His skin drains of life and color, freezing gray and blue like a field in deepest winter.
I grasp his fingers, try to pull him down, crying and screaming.
“Aurélie,” the butterfly man says, close to my ear. “You will be my ally in this long, slow game. And you.” He nods toward Jacques. A deep, rumbling cloud seems to strike me, strike us all, and I am drifting backward, my hair floating around my face. I watch as the butterfly man folds Jacques into his horrible embrace and draws him away from me. “You are nameless. You are lost.”
Vous êtes perdu.
“You were very difficult to track down, you know.” Havriel is seated there casually, his riding boots gleaming, artifacts from a different time. I hear the metallic glide of the nozzle’s tube, dragging over the floor as he fiddles with the head, passing it from hand to hand. “Adopted. Perhaps your parents knew what you were meant for and tried to keep you from us. How selfish of them, don’t you think?”
I ignore the bait. I’m not discussing my parents with him. “You didn’t have to do all this,” I say quietly. “You could have taken anyone. You could have taken some kids off the street.”
“Is that what you think? Oh dear. All this time you’ve had to sort out the truth and you still haven’t managed.” He looks up at the ceiling. “We took you because you were the only ones we could take. There were no other candidates. No elimination rounds. We have been hunting you, and others like you, all these years. From France to London to Boston to San Diego. In five generations we have found descendants as far-flung as Mumbai. Wellington. Cape Town. All this time you have been asking: Why me? Why me? Because you are a Bessancourt, Anouk. You are a part of the family.”
“I’m not related to you,” I spit. “I’m not a friggin’ Bessancourt—”
But I’m seeing it now: tall kids. Blue eyes. Maybe we have something else in common? Something we don’t even know about . . . I feel the pieces grinding together, meshing in place.
Havriel laughs. “You don’t know who you are, so why be upset? Now you know exactly where you belong. You know exactly what your purpose is.”
It feels like my entrails are sliding through me, pooling around my bare feet. “My purpose?” I say. “My purpose is to die miserably so you can keep existing forever?”
Havriel doesn’t answer. It’s like he blanked me out right there, and I need to stall. Once he stops talking to me he’s going to kill me.
“Even if we are related,” I say, my voice cracking, my toes digging into the carpet. “You guys fly us here, let us eat at your table, send us entire folders full of lies. You could have just stolen us off the street. Stuffed us in a van, knocked us out with some chloroform. We never had to meet.”
“But I wanted to meet you!” says Havriel. “How undignified, how cruel to do away with you like commoners. As times become less desperate, there becomes space for formality, as in society, so also in families. And so for this harvest, we devised a little expedition. You must understand that despite how you may view the situation, you are not simply victims. You are our offspring, our precious progeny. So we found a way to connect you to your rightful place in this world, letting you know a little, not too much and not nothing at all, letting you meet others of your kind within your ancestral home.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “So, basically, you murdered us after dinner. And I thought my family was dysfunctional.”