Page 17

Chapter Sixteen

Boutique de vêtements de M. Marc

Though golden letters in the window declare it to be Boutique de vêtements de M. Marc —and a breathtaking peacock gown rotates slowly on display—the dress shop appears to be falling apart at the seams. Ivy covers nearly every inch of the dark storefront, which has been patched with mismatched stones, and the roof has fallen in on one side. A crooked silver birch curves over the hole, blocking the rain, yet bronze leaves flutter into the shop instead.

I reach out to touch the garland of lovely blue flowers brightening the door. “Careful.” With lightning-quick reflexes, Dimitri swats my fingers away as the petals begin to quiver. “The Bluebeard blossoms have started to bite.”

I clutch my hand incredulously. “Why on earth would they bite?”

“Because the isle has turned naughty.” The door opens, and a slight, scowling vampire with wispy white hair and paper-thin skin steps out, crossing his arms at the sight of us. Two dots of pink rouge color his cheeks, and kohl lines his ancient eyes. “You’re late,” he snaps. “I expected you sixteen minutes ago.”

Over his shoulder, Odessa arches a smug brow at her brother.

Dimitri sweeps into an impeccable bow. “My apologies, Monsieur Marc. We did not expect the rain.”

“Bah! One should always expect rain in Requiem.” He lifts his nose in my direction, sniffing disdainfully. “And just who are you? Must I beg for an introduction?”

Dimitri nudges me forward. “Allow me to present Mademoiselle Célie Tremblay, who requires an entirely new wardrobe befitting the castle, as well as a special gown for All Hallows’ Eve. She is a guest of Michal,” he explains with a devilish smile, “so expense is no object, of course.”

With a newfound sense of purpose, I follow Dimitri’s lead, dipping into a curtsy. This is familiar territory. After all, I’ve attended a hundred dress fittings in my life, been poked with every needle and cloaked in every fabric imaginable at my mother’s behest.

Monsieur Marc considers me through narrowed eyes. “Alas, I do not suffer tardiness from my clients. Not even from guests of Michal.” He pulls a large, cumbersome pocket watch from his vest—black silk with ivory stars—and huffs, “Seventeen minutes.”

“Did I mention it’s her birthday?” Dimitri asks. “She turns nineteen in only a handful of hours, and we thought it right she spend the momentous occasion with you .” He clears his throat with a covert glance at me, and I straighten, unsure exactly what he expects me to do. I start with a beatific smile. It’s only slightly strained.

“They say you’re a genius with fabric, monsieur,” I offer the dressmaker kindly. “The best on the entire isle.”

Monsieur Marc waves an impatient hand. “It’s true.”

“I would consider it a great honor to wear your work.”

“Because it would be.”

“Right. Of course.” Painfully aware of his silence, I search for something else to say— anything else to say—before catching sight of the garland overhead and blurting, “Do you feed them? The Bluebeard blossoms?” When the silence only deepens in response, I hasten to fill it, cringing internally. “It’s just that I—I’ve never heard of carnivorous flowers before. We obviously don’t have them in Cesarine, or—well, perhaps we do, and I’ve just never seen one. My parents never approved of magical flora. They did plant an orange tree in our front yard, though,” I add miserably, my cheeks flushing pink. I force a brighter smile to combat the awkwardness. It doesn’t work.

Dimitri closes his eyes with a slow exhale, while Odessa watches with rapt fascination. Her anger seems to have evaporated—a small mercy, as I will need to wear her gowns for the rest of my wretched life.

The dressmaker, at least, takes pity on me. “Oh, very well . Come in, come in, and make certain you wipe your feet on the mat. I am an artist . I cannot be expected to sully my hands with mud and mops and orange trees. What are you waiting for, papillon?” He seizes my wrist and yanks me inside when I hesitate on the threshold. “Time stops for no butterfly!”

Ducking my head, I hurry after him.

The shop boasts only a single room and two apprentices—a female and male vampire who appear no older than me. But looks can be deceiving in Requiem. These two are probably hundreds of years old. I tear my gaze away from them as a leaf flutters on top of my head.

“Onto the platform, if you please. Hurry up!” Monsieur Marc pushes aside carts of fabric in our path: sparkling muslin, indigo wool, velvet and silk and linen and even pelts of soft white fur. The tips of the fibers glitter peculiarly in the candlelight. “Take off the cloak.”

Squeezed between a cluttered table and a shelf full of feathers, buttons, and bones, Dimitri and Odessa sit to watch the proceedings. The former gives me a reassuring nod and mouths, Well done. Though I try to return his smile, it feels more like a grimace—a suspicion I cannot confirm, however, as there are no mirrors in this dress shop.

Strange.

Flicking his wrist, unfurling a tattered measuring tape, Monsieur Marc trills, “We are waaaaiting.”

I hasten to shrug out of Odessa’s cloak, but when Monsieur Marc glimpses the gown beneath, he nearly swoons, pressing a hand to his chest. “Oh, no no no no no. Non. Mademoiselle Célie, surely you must know that such a warm hue does nothing for your complexion. Tons froids, papillon. You are a winter , not a summer. This—this”—he gestures indignantly to my gown of amber lace—“monstrosity must be burned. It is disgraceful . How dare you step into my shop with it?”

“I—” I shoot a wide-eyed look at Odessa over my shoulder. “My apologies, monsieur, but — ”

“You created this monstrosity for me not six months ago, Monsieur Marc,” Odessa says, sounding enormously entertained. “You called it your pièce de résistance.”

“And it was .” Monsieur Marc stabs the air with his pointer finger, triumphant. And perhaps a little unhinged. “It was my pièce de résistance for you , the sun cursed to live in eternal night, not for her —the waxing moon, the lustrous crescent, the starlight on butterfly wings!”

I stare at him for a beat, strangely flattered, as new warmth suffuses my cheeks. I’ve never been called starlight on butterfly wings before. It makes me think of the lutins. It makes me think of Tears Like Stars. It makes me think of—

“Your hair is lovely,” I say abruptly, and this time, my smile is tentative but true. He blinks in surprise. “It... reminds me of snow.”

“Snow?” he repeats softly.

My face flushes deeper at the avid curiosity in his gaze.

I don’t know why I told him that. It’s too personal, too intimate, and I only just met him. He’s also a vampire... so why did I? Perhaps it’s because his fangs are short, and I cannot see them. Perhaps it’s because his shop is cozy and warm. Perhaps it’s because he calls me butterfly.

Or perhaps it’s because I miss my sister.

I shrug casually, trying and failing to explain the situation away. “My sister adored the snow. She would wear white any chance she could—on gowns, ribbons, scarves, mittens—and every winter, she would bundle into her white cloak and insist on building an ice palace.”

I hesitate then, feeling more ludicrous with each word. I need to stop talking. I need to at least pretend I can adhere to social graces. In the dark whimsy of this shop, however—surrounded by the strange and beautiful—I can almost feel Filippa’s presence. She would have loved it here. She would have hated it here. “She once imagined her life a fairy tale,” I finish quietly.

Tilting his head, Monsieur Marc considers me with unsettling intensity. No longer curiosity but something else. Indeed, for such a distracted sort of man, his expression grows almost... calculating. Though I twist Odessa’s cloak with clammy fingers, I keep my gaze fixed on his. Odessa said Monsieur Marc is an excellent judge of character, and this moment—it feels like a test. Another leaf drifts to the floor as the silence in the shop stretches.

And stretches.

At last, a peculiar smile splits his powdery face, and he steps away from the platform. “My apologies, papillon, but I seem to have forgotten my measuring tape in the workroom. S’il vous pla?t”—he gestures to the shop at large, his hand mysteriously empty now—“feel free to select your fabrics in my brief absence. Cool tones, mind you,” he adds sharply. Then—with the same uncanny smile—he drifts through a door previously hidden behind a rack of costumes.

Uncertain, I stare at the door for several seconds before descending tentatively from the platform.

We have officially left familiar territory.

Not because I stand in a shop full of vampires, of course, but because my mother never allowed me to choose my own fabrics, and this shop bursts at the seams with them.

Cool tones only.

No one speaks as I approach the nearest shelf, trailing my fingers along a bolt of raw vicuna wool. My mother would’ve absolutely salivated over the mulberry silk beside it. Even as children, she insisted we wear only the most lavish of fabrics—and in silver and gold, mostly. Like pretty coins in her pocket.

Instinctively, I cast around the shop in search of either.

A rack of liquid metallics hangs directly behind Odessa and Dimitri. Their eyes track me across the room, and heat prickles up my throat when I realize they’ve been watching me this entire time. No— studying me. I clear my throat in the awkward silence, sifting through the metallics without truly seeing them. Copper and bronze. Rose gold. Lavender. “Do you think I... passed his test?” I ask at last.

“No one is testing you,” Dimitri says at once.

“That remains to be seen,” Odessa says at the same time.

Dimitri casts his sister an accusing look. “ Odessa. ”

“What?” Shrugging, she examines her nails with cool indifference. “Would you prefer I lie? She hasn’t yet met D’Artagnan, and everyone knows he’s the real test.”

“Who is—?”

At that moment, however, a truly enormous cat pokes its head up from the basket of fabric between them. With thick charcoal fur, protuberant amber eyes, and a squashed face, it might just be the ugliest creature I’ve ever seen—and if its low growl is any indication, it feels rather the same way about me.

“ Shoo. ” Hissing the word, I nudge the basket away with the tip of my boot. Because this is getting absurd. The cats on this isle have created a completely unnecessary situation for me, and now one of them has managed to follow me into a dress shop. “Go on.” I reach down, upending the basket to force the creature out of it, resisting the urge to open my jaw and pop the sudden pressure in my ears. “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

If a cat could scowl, this one would. “Rather cocksure, aren’t you?”

The words fall like bricks over my head.

Because this cat—he seems to have spoken them, and I must really, truly have succumbed to hallucination now. Surely I must’ve imagined it. Surely its mouth did not just move like a—like a human’s . Hearing disembodied voices is one thing, but cats—they cannot speak. They cannot scowl either, and—I glance in disbelief to Odessa and Dimitri. “Did either of you hear—?”

“Célie,” says Odessa with wry amusement, “please allow me to introduce the magnificent D’Artagnan Yvoire, original proprietor of this lovely little boutique and Monsieur Marc’s elder brother.”

I stare between them for a beat, convinced I misheard. Surely she didn’t just imply that this distinctly four-legged creature once owned a dress shop, and surely she didn’t imply that said creature is also Monsieur Marc’s kin . “But”—I feel compelled to state the obvious—“he’s a cat .”

Stretching atop the spilled fabric, D’Artagnan surveys me with scathing apathy. “An astute observation.”

I exhale a harsh breath before turning to Dimitri. “And—and you can hear him, right? The cat is—er, he’s actually talking? This isn’t happening inside my head? Or—or perhaps not some strange new sickness of the isle?”

“These voices,” D’Artagnan says dryly, “just how long have you been hearing them, precisely?”

Dimitri shakes his head in exasperation. “Just ignore D’Artagnan. Everyone else does.”

At the sound of his voice, however, D’Artagnan’s ears flatten, and the tip of his tail begins to flick. My frown deepens. I should feel relief, of course—and thank God others can hear this wretched cat too—but gooseflesh erupts down my neck instead. Probably from the chill in the shop. There is an enormous hole in the ceiling, after all, and I have too little experience with talking cats to assume anything about their behavior—except that this one boasts very poor manners.

“As you can see, he doesn’t particularly like me either.” Rising from his seat, Dimitri casts a disapproving look in D’Artagnan’s direction before patting my shoulder in a sympathetic gesture.

And at that precise second, a gust of cold wind bursts through the branches overhead.

“ Mariéeee... ”

The pressure in my ears spikes to actual pain through my temples, but I bolt upright anyway, glancing around the shop in alarm for any sign of flickering ethereal light. Not again. I nearly weep at the pressure, at the looming sense that someone or something lingers just out of sight. Please not again.

“Mademoiselle Tremblay?” Dimitri’s face twists in concern, and he removes his hand at once, stooping slightly to peer into my eyes. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” My eyes continue to dart, however, searching for that damning silver light. “It’s nothing.”

“Your face has gone white as a sheet.”

D’Artagnan’s eyes glitter in unapologetic amusement. “Or perhaps as white as a... ghost?”

I stiffen at the implication, turning slowly to stare at him. “Why would you say that?”

Though he merely licks his paw in response, his silence—it speaks volumes, and it grows loud enough to muffle even the debilitating pain in my head. Because he knows . He has to know. His use of the word cannot be simple coincidence, which invites the question—can D’Artagnan see them too?

The... ghosts?

Cats are guardians of the dead, Célie. I thought everyone knew that.

I swallow hard, forcing myself to take deep, steadying breaths through the dread. Whatever D’Artagnan might be, it isn’t a simple cat—of that much I am now sure. “How—” A trickle of sweat trails between my shoulder blades as I kneel beside him, as my teeth threaten to chatter in the cold. “How exactly did you come to... to look like this, monsieur?”

“Oh, it’s monsieur now, is it?”

The door to the workroom bursts open in response, and Monsieur Marc strides through with his assistants in tow. Though a measuring tape remains nowhere to be seen, both balance several bolts of fabric in their arms: emerald silk, black wool, and deep lapis-blue satin. “I poisoned him, of course,” he says, voice genial. “For seducing my consort.”

“After which, of course,” D’Artagnan says scathingly, “ your mistress trapped my soul in the body of a wretched animal for all eternity.”

“Ah, Agatha.” Monsieur Marc chuckles, and a dreamy look passes over his powdered face. “I’ve never met a witch with such proclivity to eternal torment. You should never have killed her. Death by cat is a terrible way to go—quite slow, you know, and rife with pain.” Turning to me, he snaps his fingers and says, “Well? Have you chosen your fabrics, papillon?”

“I—” My eyes fall to the rack of metallics, where my hands clutch both a glittering magenta and a deep emerald green. Swiftly, I forage for any hint of gold, finding a brilliant satin swathe of it at the very end of the rack. I seize it without thinking. “This one, of course—for an evening gown. Don’t you agree?”

His misty eyes narrow at the fabric as if it has personally offended him. “Do you suffer from color blindness?”

“Pardon?”

“Color blindness,” he repeats emphatically. “Do you suffer from it? Or—perhaps—you come from a realm where gold is considered a cool tone?” Wincing, I return the satin to the rack as quickly as possible, searching for a swathe of silver instead. Before I can find it, however, Monsieur Marc shakes his head with impatience and snaps his fingers once more, signaling for his assistants to present the green, black, and blue fabrics. “Soft pink, too, I think,” he tells them, “or perhaps a nice teal—”

“Teal?” D’Artagnan makes a derisive sound from his basket. “Tell me, brother, did your good sense die with me?”

“And what , precisely, is wrong with the color teal? It symbolizes clarity, originality—”

“There could be nothing less original about this young woman.”

“Is that your official verdict?”

“Will it change your mind either way?”

“No, of course. An enemy of my enemy is a friend, which makes you, papillon”—he turns to me, clapping his hands together in delight—“my new favorite customer.”

I gape between them, incredulous. And perhaps a touch indignant. “You think I’m unoriginal ?”

“Oh, come now,” says Monsieur Marc kindly. “If everyone were original, no one would be. Which is quite the point.”

“Forgive me, monsieur, but it didn’t sound like a compliment.”

D’Artagnan licks his paw once more, thoroughly unbothered, in the feline equivalent of a shrug. “Life is long, and opinions change. If it bothers you, prove me wrong.” When I open my mouth to tell him, well—I don’t know , exactly—he turns away from me altogether, sniffing Odessa’s cloak. “For now, I am afraid you’ve lost my interest. What does continue to interest me, however, are the anchovies in your pocket, Mademoiselle Petrov.”

With a supercilious smile, Odessa withdraws a small tin, opening it to reveal a row of small, slimy-looking fish. She offers them to D’Artagnan, who tucks in with the complacent air of having done this a hundred times before. I stop searching the rack abruptly. Again, I should feel immense relief at this revelation, yet the indignation in my chest only flares higher. Of course D’Artagnan dislikes Dimitri and me in comparison—we don’t carry fish around in our pockets. “You’re the reason the cats have been following us,” I say accusingly.

Odessa’s smile fades. “The cats haven’t been following us , Célie.”

“But—”

“Papillon!” Monsieur Marc huffs and plants his hands on his hips. “Focus, s’il vous pla?t! My next appointment arrives in eleven minutes, which leaves us approximately two minutes and thirty-six seconds to choose the rest of your fabric. Boris, Romi—”

He motions to his assistants, who pull measuring tapes from their aprons and thrust me toward the dais. Their hands are cold as they take my size.

“Silver.” I speak the word through gritted teeth, keeping hold of my patience by a very short leash. “I’d like to request a silver gown, please, instead of the teal or pink.” I expect him to huff again, perhaps roll his pale eyes and point to an entire cupboard filled with silver fabric, yet he does neither of those things.

Indeed, no one reacts at all how I expect.

The assistants both halt their ministrations, going completely still, while Monsieur Marc plasters a too-wide, too-bright smile upon his face. Odessa and Dimitri exchange a wary glance, and D’Artagnan—he looks up from his anchovies, whiskers twitching slightly as he considers me. “Yes, brother,” he says sleekly. “Where is the silver fabric?”

Monsieur Marc clears his throat. “Completely sold out, I’m afraid.”

“Is that so?”

“You know it is.”

Despite his smile, his voice sounds strained, and though there is nothing inherently wrong with his explanation, it doesn’t feel right either. Not in a shop like this. Not when he offers at least four different shades of gold in a variety of fabrics. “When will the next shipment arrive?” I ask. “I assume you’ve placed an order to replenish your stock.”

“I fear the borders do not open until All Hallows’ Eve.”

I blink at him. “Why?”

“So many questions,” Odessa mutters.

“And quite the wrong ones,” D’Artagnan adds.

After frowning at both of them, I return my attention to Monsieur Marc, whose smile has become rather fixed. “Perhaps a merchant in the village will have—”

“No, no.” Clearing his throat again, he waves his hand wildly before plunging it into his waistcoat to retrieve his pocket watch. “I think not, papillon. Silver is a rather—ah, finite resource on Requiem, and indeed, we have little need of it. You shall look dashing in emerald on All Hallows’ Eve. Indeed, I insist on transforming you into a true and proper butterfly—”

“Finite?” A strange sensation settles in my stomach with the word. An inkling. A suspicion. In Cesarine, every dress shop bursts at the seams with ornament—if the fabric itself doesn’t sparkle, metallic beads and thread adorn every hem, every waist, every sleeve, and Requiem seems to favor the same lavish taste. It makes little sense that vampires would exclude silver from their repertoire without good reason. “My apologies,” I say at last. “Emerald wings will look lovely, of course. I understand completely.”

“ Do you?” D’Artagnan asks.

“I think so.”

A beat passes as we stare at each other. His gaze assessing. Mine challenging.

Then, with an abrupt snort, he crouches low over his anchovies once more. “Somehow, I doubt that very much—and I’d go with the pink if I were you. It suits.”

Monsieur Marc shuts his pocket watch with the definitive air of someone ending a conversation. “Eight minutes.”

I lift my chin in defiance, smiling down at D’Artagnan and ignoring the sharp stab of pressure through my ears. The fresh gooseflesh down my arms. Though a flicker of unnatural light surfaces in my periphery, I ignore it too. Because now—for the first time since arriving in Requiem—I do understand.

Vampires have secrets too.

“Teal it is,” I say pleasantly.