The House of Shattered Wings

THE omnibus was crowded, but the crowd lessened as they drew away from the major attractions. They passed the empty space where Les Halles had once been, the charred trees on rue de Rivoli, under the watchful gaze of the dome at La Samaritaine: the shop, like Les Grands Magasins, had been nuked in the war, and an upstart House whose name Philippe couldn’t remember had settled in the wreckage, making grand claims of restoring the art deco building to its former glory. Like most grandiloquent claims, this one had never materialized.

Then, in the distance, the dome of Galeries Lafayette, and the roofs of House Lazarus and its counterpart, Gare Saint-Lazare—where trains had once departed for Normandy, but which hid nothing more than beggars and essence junkies. The crowd was no longer House dependents, or middle-class shopkeepers, surviving as they could; but younger, more haunted faces: children with nimble hands doubling as pickpockets, mothers carrying their entire belongings on their backs; old women smoking pipes, tobacco the only luxury they had left.

Philippe left his ornate cloak and Laure’s basket of food to one such woman, bowing very low to her; and ignoring the puzzled, suspicious glance she threw him. Suspicious or not, she would sell the cloak: he hoped for a good price, though it was all out of his hands. Then, at the next station, he got down.

La Goutte d’Or had been a workers’ neighborhood before the war, the hands and arms toiling away in factories, making the luxuries the Houses gorged themselves on. Now the factories functioned at part capacity only, and the workers sat on the pavement, drinking absinthe when they could afford it, or other alcohols that were much less kind on the eyesight when they could not. They watched Philippe, warily; not because he was Annamite—there were plenty of Annamites there, the descendants of those sucked in by the maw of war—but because, with his quiet, confident walk and his clean cotton clothes, he stuck out like a sore thumb.

Philippe ignored them, except to answer when a mocking voice would greet him. He was unfailingly polite and courteous; but, nevertheless, he called fire from the wasteland around him, and held the khi element in his clenched fist, ready to finish an argument with more than good manners.

The building hadn’t changed. It was still where he remembered it: at one of the edges of a triangle-shaped square, its limestone walls overgrown with ivy, its wooden shutters discolored and cracked. The bottom floor had once been a vendor of sewing materials, but had since long fallen into disrepair; the little drawers with cloth samples and ribbons now held pilfered artifacts and containers, anything that could be sold for a price.

It hadn’t changed. But then, why had he expected it to?

He waited outside until the usual crowd had all but gone, as the evening deepened around him, and the wind picked up. Then, shrugging his scarf around his neck, he walked into the shop.

And stopped, for it was Ninon behind the counter—who watched him, openmouthed. “Hello,” he said, into the growing silence. “I’ve come back.”

*

SELENE had hoped it would get better, but it didn’t. Asmodeus was shut in his rooms, claiming to be grieving and refusing all her polite requests for a meeting. Emmanuelle was back with her, but given to odd bouts of melancholy; back to her old self, before she’d completely given up essence, grieving for something neither she nor Selene could name. Despite their intense searches, Philippe could not be found anywhere, though there had been the occasional glimpse of him on the margins of the House, like a ghost she could not exorcise.

And Selene knew the name of her enemy now, though it did not help her.

Nightingale.

She had been young then, in the days of Nightingale’s apprenticeship; young and naive and self-centered, paying little attention to the things that didn’t concern her. Nightingale had given way to Oris, and Selene had barely noticed; nor had anyone within the House ever talked about the transition.

Given away, Emmanuelle had said. Betrayed.

How could he—? He was cold, and cruel, and ruthless, but she’d always thought he would do right by his students; that he discarded them for weaknesses, but not that he would turn them out of the House; bargain them away on shadowy things, use them as pawns in his war of influence.

Not her. He never would have. He didn’t love her, or even feel more for her than the casual affection of a man for his pet, but he . . . He never would have—

But, if she closed her eyes, she would see, again and again, that amused glint in his gaze, would feel again that terrible sense of oppression; that primal fear that tightened all her leg muscles at the same time, primed for fighting or fleeing—fleeing, for what else could she have done, she who had never even been close to equaling him?

He never would have—

And her mind paused then, hanging over the precipice, because she knew, deep down, that he was perfectly capable of it. That he had always been.

“You can’t appease a ghost,” Emmanuelle had said, with a tired sigh. “She’s dead, Selene, and she’s been working on her revenge for decades. The dead don’t easily change their minds.”