Bouchard folds her limp, partially stuffed snake over her arm. “Hmmm. There is something decidedly flushed about your complexion tonight. Come here, into the moonlight.” She yanks me toward the windows. Diable follows, spitting at the snake’s dragging tail. “Faire taire, rancid feline,” she scolds.
Diable claws at her ankles until she drops the snake. It glides to the floor—a bone-curdling whisper of scales on marble. The cat attacks the dead reptile, leaving me to my face-off with the music teacher who no longer seems to care about her precious Franco.
Her clammy hand cups my chin and forces my gaze up. Already powder-sheen pale, she drains to almost transparent. “Non, non, non. I’ve seen these eyes before.” Her aura shifts from a stubborn brown to the grayish yellow of trepidation. “She’s going to want to know about this.” Her last statement carries a sour whiff of the coffee she must’ve been drinking while in her workshop.
I try to break free. Bouchard struggles against me, fingernails digging into my skin through the weave of my sweater’s collar. Her thumb catches on the roof key’s chain, breaking it. It drops to my feet. Before I can retrieve it, there’s a rustle again on the stairs, close to the second flight.
Bouchard trains a glare toward the noise. Panic lines her forehead. Shooing Diable aside with her pointy shoes, she snarls. “Come, wretched child. You should’ve listened to me from the beginning. You’re endangering others as much as yourself by being here.”
We head toward the teachers’ dorms and understanding slams into me. Aunt Charlotte’s the one whose glimmering eyes Bouchard has seen. Somehow, she’s been hiding them. She’s the one who’ll want to know about my awakening because I’m like her now.
The Bride of Frankenstein has been working with my aunt all along, to chase me away. They both want me gone, maybe as much as Grandma did.
Other than dropping my tote like a lonely, pitiful bread crumb for someone to find should I go missing, I don’t even attempt to escape as Bouchard jerks me behind her. Where would I go?
Diable falls into step close at my heels—my knight in woolen armor.
In a matter of minutes, I’ll have those answers Etalon needed. But there’s a brand-new question scratching at my psyche that I would’ve never thought to ask when I first arrived at RoseBlood six weeks ago:
Will I live to relay everything I’m about to find out?
21
BOOK OF BLOOD
“Everybody is a book of blood . . .”
Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volumes One to Three
I’m strangely calm by the time we reach Aunt Charlotte’s room and Bouchard knocks almost reluctantly on her door. I’ve remembered what Etalon said about my aunt not being “all bad.” He wouldn’t have sent me her way unless he knew I’d be safe.
He knows her secrets, and that she’s one of us. I suspected it for an instant once I realized the deviation originated on Dad’s side of the family, but it seemed so far-fetched. The door cracks open and Aunt Charlotte peers out with one arm behind her back, white braids piled high on her head and a terrycloth robe wrapped around her dancer’s frame. Taking one look at my eyes, she ushers me and Bouchard across the threshold before shutting us all in.
I cast a quick glance around the room. It’s designed just like mine—spiraling mini-stairway and loft, antechamber bed with a vent in the wall, zero windows. Instead of violet light, the soft amber glow of a floor lamp casts long shadows across her décor: black-and-white posters of stage productions and hooks holding ballerina shoes of various sizes from different times in her life—details that seem carefully staged, knowing what I know now.
After that glimpse, I stare directly at my aunt, on the chance Etalon’s wrong. If so, she’s going to have to hurt me with my mom’s and her brother’s likenesses staring back—damning her.
Sighing, she draws out her hidden arm and gestures with an e-cig toward the chaise lounge. I relax my shoulders a fraction as I plop down and Diable leaps up into my lap.
“Fran?oise.” Aunt Charlotte aims a grimace at Bouchard. Her voice is tinny, as if she’s speaking through a metal pipe. “How did this come about? Did you catch her feeding?”
Bouchard snatches the cigarette and leans against an armoire to sip the vapor. The scent of cloves drifts over to me. “She was meandering around the foyer, already looking like that. Most likely she siphoned off one of the boys as they slept.”
“I would never,” I say, surprised by my security in that knowledge. Not just because I’m no longer hungry after being with Etalon, but because I’m aware of what I’m capable of now, and that I control it, which has nothing to do with our twin flame connection. It’s because I make my own conscious choices. I can live with this and learn to blend in. My aunt is proof of that.
“Whatever the case,” Bouchard responds to my denial but keeps her gaze trained on Aunt Charlotte. “She’s a danger to the other students now, and to our secrets. She’s cured, yes? So we should put her on the next plane back to the States.”