Page 23 of The Shadow Bride (The Scarlet Veil #2)

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Cottage

“Mathilde?” I blink at the name, startled, but—surely it’s just a coincidence. Michal would’ve said if the witch we’re asking about revenants is actually Lou’s long-lost relative—her great-great-grandmother, to be precise—and moreover, why would such a prestigious and powerful witch have left her people to live as a recluse among vampires? “She doesn’t mean—?”

“She does, in fact.” Michal leads me toward the cottage as Mila leaves us, her laughter echoing behind. “Mathilde le Blanc is a very acquired taste on the isle, and I don’t mean her blood.”

“What did Mila mean,” I ask slowly, “when she said Mathilde bites ?”

In answer, Michal gestures to an enormous cast-iron pot on the top step, and I cannot help it—I peer into its depths apprehensively, expecting some sort of potion, perhaps poison, only to recoil in the next second.

Bones.

Mathilde has filled the pot with bones—animal mandibles and human femurs, ribs, vertebrae, and what appear to be the phalanges of an entire left hand. Flowering vines tangle between the latter’s fingers before spilling down the sides of the cauldron. Vividly blue and eerily beautiful, the blooms seem to quiver as I bend to examine them with macabre fascination; I recognize the rows of needlelike teeth around their centers the instant before they lunge at me, snapping violently.

I back away hastily. Bluebeard blossoms. The same beastly little flowers grow outside Monsieur Marc’s shop; Michal once told me they eat butterflies.

I suppose I should be grateful Mathilde isn’t a cannibal. “And Mathilde knows about revenants?” Will she know about Filippa?

Michal watches me carefully now, as if sensing the desperate thought. My sister seems to live and breathe between us. “Mathilde knows about many things.”

Carefully avoiding his gaze, I skirt around the cauldron. Though I’ve always been skittish beneath Michal’s undivided attention, I feel as if my skin has grown two sizes too small after our unfinished conversation in the forest . It’ll only end badly for both of you. “She is expecting us, right?”

He nods before joining me at the door, his cool presence spreading gooseflesh down my arms. “A mistake on my part, I think.” Despite the rather unusual silence inside the cottage, he speaks in a low voice. I listen closer, wondering if she could be hiding from us—then realize the sounds of her breathing, even her heartbeat, are conspicuously absent. “I sent a letter requesting a meeting after we docked on Requiem. She never wrote back.”

“Perhaps she never received it?”

“Oh, I think she did.”

Michal moves to push open the door, but my hand snakes out to seize his wrist. “Don’t you think we should at least knock first? This is her home, after all, even if she... well, isn’t home?” My voice trails into a hopeful question at the end. Perhaps it was the Bluebeard blossoms and their picked-clean bones—or perhaps it’s the silver doorknob—but suddenly, the thought of imposing on a witch who clearly doesn’t want us here feels foolish.

“By all means”—Michal’s gaze flicks to my hand on his wrist—“go ahead.”

Blowing out a tremulous breath, I release him and knock three times. When no one answers, I knock three more. Nothing inside the cottage moves. When at last I turn—determined to persuade Michal to try again later—he quells my argument with a curt shake of his head. “You heard Mila’s warning. We don’t have time to play polite, Célie, and even if we did, Mathilde won’t return the favor. We aren’t leaving until we speak with her.”

“How do you know she’s even here ?”

“She’s here,” he says simply.

Fine. Fine. Truthfully, no one on this wretched isle cares much for civility anyway. Mathilde feeds flesh to her flowers, for goodness’ sake. Odessa ripped out Michal’s heart, and Dimitri collected souvenirs from all the creatures he slaughtered in bloodlust. Perhaps the time has come for me to throw all good sense out the window too.

Feeling strangely defiant, I lift a piece of my skirt to grasp the doorknob, but Michal stops me again with light fingers upon my arm. “I think I should do that.” Before I can do more than scowl back at him, he tugs the fabric from my hand and wraps it around his own instead.

To my surprise, the knob turns easily. Except—

“Fuck,” Michal mutters.

He clenches his hand in my skirt, and instantly, I realize why: the doorknob has bitten him, and blood wells from two tiny puncture wounds in his palm. Two tiny fang marks. “She definitely knows we’re here,” he says with a bitter laugh.

I scowl down at the doorknob as its silver teeth melt back into smooth metal. “I thought Mathilde didn’t care for vampires? Why all the biting paraphernalia?”

“Mathilde thinks she is enormously funny.”

“Is she?”

“You tell me.”

With a grudging smile, I lift my hem and tear away a piece of my silky underskirt. Though Michal’s eyes track the line of my leg as I let the fabric drop, I try to ignore him. I try to ignore the heady scent of his blood too. “That still doesn’t explain why she settled on an island of vampires.”

“That was Mila’s doing,” he says quietly, watching me wrap the silk scrap around his hand. “She convinced Mathilde to retire here after passing down the title of La Dame des Sorcières to her daughter. They met when Mathilde was a much younger woman, and the two of them became thick as thieves.”

My fingers go still around Michal’s hand, and unbidden, my thoughts drift back to Filippa. My heart twists.

“How does Mathilde know about revenants? It didn’t seem like—well, you and Odessa didn’t seem to know what they even were before Coco named them, and she only knew because of her aunt’s grimoire. Unless Mathilde knew La Voisin?”

“I’ll let her tell you that. Now”—he pushes open the door after I finish wrapping his hand—“by all means, please come inside.”

The two of us walk into the cottage on silent feet, entering a homely kitchen with an enormous stone hearth. Bundles of dried herbs hang from the rafters, and a copper kettle heats on the grate; the rest of the Bluebeard blossoms’ repast appears to line the mantel in a strange assortment of skulls. “I take it you’ve... met Mathilde, then?”

Michal’s eyes sweep the room for any sign of activity. “Yes. Twice. The first when she arrived on Requiem, and the second shortly after you did.”

“What? Why?”

“Nosy little thing, aren’t you?”

I glower at him before moving deeper into the cottage, poking my head into a small washroom and eyeing the tin bathtub, the nook of threadbare linens. “Try not to touch anything,” Michal says as he passes behind, and it might be the most unnecessary advice ever given. After the doorknob, I’ve never desired to touch anything less than I do in this cottage.

I still crane my neck to look after him, however, as he bends to fit through the bedroom door. “What am I looking for, exactly?”

“Anything out of place—a sound, a sight, a scent. The last will be difficult, but not impossible. Wherever the witch is hiding, it’ll reek of magic.”

“The entire cottage reeks of magic.”

I glance around warily, waiting for the floorboards to open up and swallow me whole. Part of me wishes they would—anything to cut this wretched tension between Michal and me, to dispel the lingering presence of my sister. He hasn’t mentioned her since our conversation, and now—in this eerie stillness—it feels like he’s waiting for me to mention her instead.

I open my mouth to speak, unsure what to say, just as he turns to do the same.

“I think we should—”

“We don’t need to—” I say at the same time.

Michal’s eyes narrow at whatever he sees in my expression. “What were you going to say?”

“What were you going to say?”

We stare at each other for a long moment, neither wanting to speak again, until the floorboards indeed begin to rumble beneath our feet. The vibration shatters the tension—as does the startled cry that escapes me as I leap forward, colliding with Michal’s broad chest. His arms wrap around me reflexively, and he exhales a soft laugh. I shake my head. “This house is going to kill us.”

“Come now, pet.” He pushes the hair from my face with a burgeoning smirk—a temporary truce, I realize, until after we speak to Mathilde. Relief floods my system. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little magic.”

My shoulders relax at the feel of him against me, and my jaw unclenches. Because if Mathilde knows what to do about revenants, she might know what to do about Filippa too. “Shall we make a game of it?” Michal asks. A distraction.

I lift my chin, forcing myself to step away from him. “What do you have in mind?”

He leans against the doorframe, entirely too large for the space. “First to find the witch owes the other a favor.”

Oh God. “What kind of favor?”

“Any kind of favor.”

Flutters erupt in my belly. If imposing ourselves on a witch feels foolish, agreeing to give Michal a favor without any other qualifiers feels downright demented. Only if you lose , that defiant voice in my head argues, and with a little thrill of anticipation, I stand straighter in response. “Fine. Agreed. I hope you’re ready to scrub the bloodstains from all my dresses.”

“Starting with this one?” He gestures to the scarlet droplets on my skirt— his blood, I realize, my cheeks flaming. Always his blood. “I could take it now if you’d like.”

My face burns hotter at the rush of images his words evoke—Michal kneeling before me, his hands sliding up my legs, my hips, as he peels the silky fabric from my body.

His grin turns positively wicked because he knows.

Because his distraction is already working.

Because when he looks at me like that, I can hardly remember my own name.

Clenching my thighs, I duck into a parlor down the hall before I can humiliate myself, and I take several deep breaths just inside the door. Focus, Célie.

Another fireplace dominates the center of the room; it allows for shelves upon shelves of books to line the walls on all sides. Mathilde appears to have hung them at random, filling every nook and cranny with little forethought or design. Indeed, the shelves look a bit like broken teeth. They jut this way and that, uneven, varied in shape and size, and when she ran out of wall space, Mathilde seems to have started stacking her books in teetering piles on the floor—beneath the desk, beside the settee, atop the tattered carpet.

The only semblance of order comes from a narrow bookcase in the corner. Unlike the other shelves, which float, this bookcase stretches from floor to ceiling, and the tomes within it appear in pristine condition. The embossed letters on their spines sparkle in the firelight. Their leather covers gleam. Indeed, I can still smell the mink oil with which she conditioned them. These books—whatever they are—must be her most treasured in the collection.

They also look jarringly out of place in the chaos of the room.

Curious, I approach the bookshelf to inspect the titles there. One Night with the Bear King. The Wizard of Waterdeep’s Staff. The Demon: Endowed and Enflamed. Choking on laughter, I recoil, the tension further loosening in my chest. It seems Mathilde’s most treasured books are erotica, and that—that is perfectly acceptable. Healthy, even. It is not, however, any of my business.

Moving to search the rest of the room, I stop short at a title on the center of the shelf.

The Secret Door.

I hesitate, feeling incredibly sheepish, but secret passages do exist on this isle. I’ve walked them myself, and they seem like the sort of thing a witch like Mathilde might utilize too—and that isn’t even considering her relation to Lou, who would think the innuendo quite clever indeed.

Could it be that simple?

I stare harder at the book. Is Mathilde standing behind the bookshelf even now, snickering at me? True, I do not scent anyone—nor does the magic here smell particularly stronger than anywhere else in the cottage—yet I didn’t scent Babette or Frederic either. Witches have always been able to disguise themselves from vampires.

In the end, the sound of Michal’s footsteps in the garret overhead is all the motivation I need.

Squaring my shoulders, I grasp the book and pull.

A mechanism triggers deep in the wall.

Something—or someone —indeed cackles.

And every book on the shelf hurtles at me in rapid succession. With a shriek, I fling my hands over my head and scramble backward, but the books follow, flapping their pages like wings and pummeling every inch of me they can reach. And it hurts . Michal appears in the next second—his expression dangerous—and snatches one, two, three in midair before hurling them into the desk drawer, where they rattle and shake and threaten to collapse the entire piece of furniture.

The house rumbles again. The floorboards quake beneath our feet.

Cursing under my breath, I catch the next book, and in my haste, I nearly fling it through the wall. Its metal corner embeds in the plaster instead, and—trapped—it continues to flap angrily, shredding its pages against the wall. “What did you do ?” Michal asks in exasperation, swatting aside a particularly fat volume as it launches at my head. “I told you not to touch anything—”

“The book said something about a door!” Seized by panic and another bizarre urge to laugh, I duck toward the settee for cover. “I just thought—maybe—Mathilde could’ve been hiding—”

The silver corner of another book nicks my cheek, however, and Michal’s eyes dilate at the scent of my blood. He takes a deep breath to collect himself before seizing The Secret Door from behind my head. “This one?”

“Yes! Look— ”

With a sigh, Michal opens the book, his eyes flicking down the page before he flips it toward me. “Is this the content for which you were hoping?”

The book depicts a pair of fairies locked in embrace, their winged bodies heaving and their expressions contorting in ecstasy. With an abrupt squeak, I squeeze my eyes shut, slamming the book shut too. “Put it back! Oh my goodness, Michal, put it back now !”

He chuckles darkly but obliges. The instant he returns the book, the rest of the books—now flapping around the room almost halfheartedly—fall still and crash to the floor. I exhale a quick breath, too relieved to feel embarrassed—or at least, too embarrassed—and lift a hand to the blood on my cheek. Michal watches with glittering amusement. “Shall we continue our search, or would you like to peruse the rest of Mathilde’s extensive collection? I can be swayed to either pursuit.”

Still that ridiculous urge to laugh. “We don’t need to search anymore.”

A devious smile spreads across his face. “Option two, then—unless you’re forfeiting our game? There is no shame in defeat, you know. I’ll be a very gracious winner.”

“Michal.” I speak his name through clenched teeth, refusing to give him the satisfaction of breaking right now. “What I mean is that I think I found her.”

“Hmm. Not as much fun, that.”

“I heard someone cackling .” Forcing a scowl at his expression—because honestly, what is wrong with me?—I stalk past him to a sconce across the room, leaning close to inspect the brass sculpture at the base. It resembles a human face. Quite a wrinkled face, her eyes narrowed, her jowls sagging on either side of an aquiline nose with a wart on the tip. When a thin line of blood trickles from said nose, Michal’s smile vanishes.

“Célie,” he warns, but it’s too late.