Chapter 12
Tommy Crane was Enoch’s favorite child. This fact was neither a positive or negative. It was, simply, the truth of the matter.
When the Ouroboros children were whipped, Tommy was whipped less; when his hands were calloused, hers grew slightly softer; and when he spoke to the orphans as a whole, Tommy was regarded with a hint more humanity.
It didn’t matter that they were not related by blood. Nor, did it count for anything that Enoch had pulled her from a rat infested orphanage with a mold problem in the hidden islands and plopped her into a orphanage with far fewer rats and less food scarcity. She was, and always would be, the greatest project that he had ever embarked upon. And thus, she acted as so.
Enoch had taught her how to play piano, so she did. Her long fingers wrapped amble over the keys, drawing out some near forgotten tune that had been named for a blackbird. The lobby of the Maison Rose was largely empty. A few stragglers leaned back in their velvet clad chairs, wafting cigar smoke over the place until taking deep breaths felt akin to walking through fire. The rest of the them would already be at the Delavore’s, or, making preparations to arrive late to draw more attention to their fine silks and Italian crafted garments.
Enoch hadn’t had a preference in clothing, but he did admire the color green. Tommy wore it like a suit of armor. The gown fell off of her shoulders and into long waves that graced the floor and created tides about the piano seat. It had been crafted out of the curtains from the hotel room, torn down and rearranged into a more pleasing color and shape with the assistance of the magic she had used to make all of her clothing. The British wizarding seamstresses were all dead, or on retainer for causes that didn’t cater to generals making aims of war in foreign countries and gaudy bars. A muggle tailor would have worked fine, at twice the price and triple the time. She wore the teardrop necklace, as well as a set of stolen gold earrings and a thieved thin bracelet. It would do, and not come undone. Otherwise, she would certainly be the most interesting spectacle of the night if the magic gave and she stood stark naked in high company.
Enoch Ames drank. Whiskey, specifically.
Tommy preferred the dry fruit of a half glass of Malbec that sat on the piano top.
She still held pieces of herself, even if they were only on lease.
“There you are,” Regulus sighed as he meandered over the gilded inlay of the granite floor. He said at is he had been looking for her for some time, and as if that time had worn him down to the point where he had almost given up.
As always, he looked ravishing in an uncomfortable way. There existed in the world a certain subset of people who were so elegant to look at that it could cause nearsighted blindness in the viewer. This feeling was typically only reserved for art pieces, sculptures of Goddesses, and the men who had been birthed from them. Regulus Black was of that type. She hated him for it. She couldn’t look away.
“Here I am,” she returned, and he didn’t drop his gaze either.
Tommy had spent the majority of the night in an inescapable terror. The nightmares were of the sort that couldn’t be banished even when she woke in a sweaty panic. The moment her head hit the pillow, they would pick up tenfold. Always, surrounding one particular figure and a memory she hadn’t succinctly handled.
A Vitruvian woman had kissed her, near seconds before dying at the hands of the man before her.
That kiss had left something. A tainted taste in her mouth. A headache knocking at the back of her cranium as if someone was begging to be let in.
It had been her first kiss, so maybe they were all like that. Or, more likely, only the ones that hadn’t been asked for. Either way, her lips felt chapped.
“It’s time to go,” Regulus said. His eyes were wide and crystalline, like pools that flooded in from a mountain spring. Below them, the line of his mouth was pouted and seemed to say, no swimming.
She had also thought of Regulus in the night. Though, not in dreams.
Reality was inescapable. Tommy was tired, so tired that the morning had required a very long meditation on how to get out of bed and face the possibility that more horrors awaited her than what she already expected. All of this thinking, and lack thereof, had boiled down to a point that she had previously been too frightened to come to. That realization, was just that. She was frightened. She was scared of Vitrra and what the woman was capable of. She was in terror at the thought of failing.
Above all was that thing that thing which she feared the most, Regulus Black.
Their immediate disdain for each other hadn’t surprised her. He was from an enemy faction and at the highest rank of it. But, she had come to find, possibly far too late, that her hatred was something else. She was well and truly unnerved by the devil in a waistcoat.
Fear was it’s own sort of power.
That energy which kept soldiers moving and empires stood strong through the bleak, against all odds. Courage was born from fear.
Enoch Ames had taught her that.
Across the room, Caius Avery and Lucia Mulciber wandered up to the bar to fetch a parting shot of whiskey. Lucia donned a beautiful black gown, finely tailored with bronze pearls down the corset. It was not a cheap number. The sort of dress that Tommy could only hope to wear one day, let alone, find hanging limply in her closet as if it were nothing but a piece of daywear. She suspected Lucia owned many such dresses.
Tommy did not fear those two, not any more than a fox stands in peril at the company of field mice. Though, they looked at her as if she should.
“Where’s your mask?” Regulus asked, leaning on taunting. A mask was what she was after.
“I’ll have to borrow one,” she answered, folding her hands into her lap. “Surely, the Delavore’s will have extra.”
Regulus reached into his waistcoat for his own, a white piece that would fit snuggly over his nose bridge but leave the lower half of his face perfectly unobscured. In a strange and uncharacteristic act, he pulled a second totem from his pocket. He stepped forward and wrapped the delicate, black, half-faced mask over her hair and tied it in a tight ribbon.
“Consider it a loan until you get the real thing,” he sucked at his teeth. “Do your diligence tonight, and you will have it much sooner.”
It had, of course, occurred to Tommy that he had been lying this entire time. She thought about his cruel serpent tongue and the fables they could tell on a near constant basis. At this moment, she just tried not to think about how the spice on his cologne made her stomach turn.
-
“Good God,” Tommy huffed, sneering at a pantomime that cartwheeled past the troupe on their ascent up the Delavore’s stairs. “These people have no shame.”
The black and white striped little devils leaped to and fro in an attempt to catch the bubbles that blew from a cogged machine at the entrance. They backflipped and tumbled, hands up and mouths in a constant state of awe. A flood of people gawked and ooh’d at the display. They had to know that the pantomimes were not on hire from a morbid circus who had brushed into town for a private party. Their eyes were all bleak, blackened at the iris and void of any light. These were muggles beneath an imperio charm, forced to dance for the supper and a chance to be let free without the inherent knowledge that they were being forced to do so.
It was highly illegal. Not that the Delavore’s cared. The French minister would be in attendance as well as a slew of other officials from across Europe. These heftier transgressions would be seen as near mild misdemeanors in the company of European nobility.
All the devils, little or large, were allowed to have their fun tonight.
“You and your bleeding heart,” Regulus mocked at her side. He had forced himself to stand at her right as the group paraded up the marble stairs and into the belly of the ballroom.
Dmitri, in either annoyance at Regulus’s presence or simply eavesdropping, had shoveled his way in on Tommy’s left but hung in the peripheral. As they swept past swaths of people wearing their finest clothes and donning their wickedest smirks, she was reminded of his original insistance that she shine light on Regulus’s black heart. It would have been the time for light in any case. The ballroom was so lowly lit that she couldn’t make out a substantiated form, let alone, find Vittra in this growing crowd.
A saxophone player on the hulking stage dropped a slow melody before the rest of the band chimed in. People began to flush and move further toward the bar.
Tommy was pushed from behind, and when she turned her head, found Atlan breathing down her neck. “Why didn’t we think of that?” He was referring to the wait staff passing out glasses of champagne. Muggles, again, imperio’d to serve. Tommy was quite sure he didn’t directly mean that they should curse their way to constant opulence, but rather, they should use the lower class to their advantage. Atlan had once been a pureblood prince of the Mongolian wizarding faction. Occasionally, that rich blood showed itself.
When Tommy snapped back around her foot caught a rivet in the floor. Her knee buckled momentarily, fall evaded and easily recovered. Still, she found that someone was quicker than her. Dmitri had placed his hand at the soft part of her lower back to keep her straight. When her head turned to throw him thankful eyes, he was walking with his arms at his side and a scowl.
It was Regulus who squeezed her back, not all too friendly, “walk like you belong here.”
Tommy shook him off, “We should split up and cover more ground.”
At this, Regulus snapped his fingers at the deatheater’s and twirled his index. They seemed to catch the point, meandering to the outskirts of the ballroom to survey.
Tommy found Sinai in the fray. The moment Tommy approached, the dark haired witch grabbed at her as if she wasn’t quite sure who she was. The masked crowd must have been weighing on her nerves.
“Send the others around to look for anyone who could be a Vitruvian general, or Vittra herself and then find me.”
Sinai did not appear confident, but her grasp loosened.
Roughly ten seconds passed between them, a knit in Tommy’s half disguised brow and a purse on Sinai’s lips. Then, Regulus grabbed Tommy’s arm as if he were trying his best at chivalry before whisking her away into the crowd.
“A drink.” He demanded, obscured eyes roaming the room. He stole two glasses of champagne from a tray with nimble fingers and forced one into her hand. The movement was so slight and comfortable, despite his reverberating nerves. There was no doubt that he once belonged in these circles. “Are you even looking?”
“This was the stupidest plan that you could have come up,” she shot back. “I can’t make out anyone in here.”
“Try harder, then,” he chided. His grip on her arm tightened as he moved her forward. “Perhaps, if you had done some research..”
“Yes, you’re right. Since I have had so much time on my hands between being dragged across foreign lines and made to fight for my life.”
Regulus scoffed, “poor you. Do you want the mask or not?” After a pause, he sighed. “There’s Madam Delavore. Keep your sight on her while we move.”
Tommy took in the low and slow form near the stage. The madam had donned an azure ball gown that resembled a table cloth. Her crimson mask covered her face in dropping crystals.
Wealth is power. Imagine the estate that a woman like that leaves unguarded. No children, a useless husband, you could grasp it like an apple.
The words echoed inside of Tommy’s head as if it had been drilled into her. She didn’t know anything about the Delavore madam’s finances, but the image of an unsecured vault played at her mind. Maybe, it was knowledge she had accidentally picked up in prior conversation. Christ, she was so tired she couldn’t tell which thoughts were hers and what ones she had adopted.
Tommy’s eyes grazed the crowd. Pierre Ancout made his way over the Delavore’s table to whisper what seemed to be sweet nothings in the madams ear. He was distinguishable, the shortest man in the place.
“Are they having an affair?” Tommy asked.
Regulus followed her eyes with a sneer, “Nothing truly belongs to anyone here.”
“That certainly explains why she can get away with the imperio.”
“Let it go,” Regulus sighed, “They’re only muggles.”
Tommy tried to drop it, but what little remained of her morals harped on her. She could have easily been one of these pantomimes in another life. Though, muggledom was a curse she hadn’t considered for a very long time, it was true. Had she been cast forth into the world and into lesser circumstances, she would know still know pain and suffering, only without the magic that made it worth bearing.
Across the room, Arkady had plucked a debutante out of the masses and strode onto the floor with his hand tight against her waist. He had a way of making deviance look gallant. Directly against Tommy’s orders to survey the crowd, he had decided to pick from the fruits instead. The twiggish girl sashayed onto the floor with him in perfect step. They danced through two songs while Tommy stood uncomfortably rocking on her heels.
Regulus briefly abandoned her for his own target. A girl in a purple dress that made her look like an overly frosted cupcake. She swooned under his attention, tilting her head forward so that he could make comments about the tiara she wore tight against her tawny curls. Tommy looked away as he fingered the encrusted jewels.
“Which member of the monarchy is she?” Tommy asked as he returned to her side.
“There are no more monarchies in wizarding Europe,” he remarked back.
“She’s wearing a tiara. Must be someone important.”
Regulus pursed his lips. “None of them are nearly as important as they wish they were.” His hand fell out of his waist pocket as he grumbled, “Still nothing, Crane?”
“Give me a minute.”
Frowning, he leaned forward to survey the area. “We should dance, it will give us a better vantage point from the center of the ballroom.”
Tommy laughed, wholeheartedly, before catching the sincerity on his face. Her voice drew monotone, “I think I will have a walk around instead. You go enjoy the champagne and young ladies, they’re almost as pretty as you are.”
He sighed, and mumbled under his breath. Tommy couldn’t make out the insult, she was already dodging across the room. As expected, he returned his gaze to the purple pastry and made himself busy. Tommy, on the other hand, had stepped into the line of Pierre Ancout’s short shadow.
The little devil has no moral compass.
A wife and kids at home.
The madams perfume on his bobbing throat.
Doesn’t it smell like rot?
Once more, the thought permeated her senses as if she were living in it rather than thinking it. At first, she thought he may have whispered it himself. But, his lips were tucked tightly to a wine glass and his attention was on matters more pressing than the fire haired girl that had bumped into his shoulder as she spun.
The air was constricting amongst the parade of silks and sashes. Tommy had the distinct feeling that she had suddenly stepped into a wire trap, as if the eyes that peeked out beneath masks were seeing directly into her soul. She pressed palms to her ear to ensure she wasn’t speaking her thoughts out loud. Quiet, for a moment, and then a ringing. Once she let go, it was music and mumbles, groans and sliding footsteps, three hundred bodies crowding toward the dance floor in a singular rhythm.
She caught Dmitri’s gaze through the crowd, worrying.
Don’t approach.
Your thinking is so much clearer alone.
Tommy argued with herself that she had never actually been truly alone in her life. There was something in her head feeding false information through a feedback loop that sucked every ounce of energy from her. She had gone insane, perhaps, had finally tipped over the barrel that held her good sense and all of it had leaked out onto the polished floors.
She heard buzzing, and flicked an invisible wasp off of her shoulder.
Look at me.
This time, it wasn’t her voice. It wasn’t Avery’s or Regulus, not familiar in any regard, but distorted and raw like whispers through a hollow can. She closed her eyes.
I see you, and this sounded like a plead, a child pulling on its mothers coat. Tommy Crane, see me back.
Tommy opened her eyes.
The man who stared at her from across the dancefloor was a tree trunk in a white suit. He didn’t fit in well amongst the gently clothed society mice. A rat king was a viable description, as he seemed to pull all of the other rats from their hiding places to crowd around him. She couldn’t make out much of his face behind the gilded mask, but if she had to make an educated guess, she would say he looked better with it. His demeanor was what gave the ugliness away, hunched and skulking. The other rats crowded in, all dressed in ivory.
Not him. Me.
Tommy flittered her gaze over the room once more and landed on a rat to the mans left. Thinner, feminine, beady eyed and lauding. She didn’t bother to keep her vision strained, the bigger one was moving forward with dragging feet.
If corpses could walk, they would fall into a similar gate. She happened to know that on occasion, they could. She looked for Regulus Black, but found Dmitri in the middle of a dance with a debutante.
Wrong again.
What good has he ever done you, Tommy?
Look for me.
It was Regulus’s voice now. He mocked her from inside of her own mind. A habit he was quite adept at. Still, it was not quite correct. The inflection was all wrong, anyway, and Regulus never called her Tommy. It was always Crane.
Against her will, her eyes pleaded for reprieve. The infiltration was starting to hurt. This was nothing like legillimancy, it hardly seemed to contain any magical property at all. Like speaking to a God and hearing a reply in the brute wind, this was divine interruption of the worst sort.
A figure toward the stage lowered her head ever so slightly. Tommy could appreciate beauty, even in a raw and formidable form. This was such a case. The woman tipped her glass toward Tommy before emptying it onto the floor. The partygoers around her chortled and laughed, one falling to his knees to lap up the liquid like a dog. The woman would look pleased if she could be seen behind a giant gilded masquerade that dripped with quartz down her ivory gown. Tommy was sure she enjoyed the display.
Tommy was also quite sure that the room has started to smell like rot.
You look so lovely, daughter of Enoch.
Come sit on my lap, little bird.
The voice was clear. Entrancing.
Tommy attempted to pull her gaze away but found it locked in the fine cut of those jewels; the tower that rose from a tight bun of black hair in golden spires like a brass quill held at candlelight; the sheer terror of her stature. Unfortunately, the woman had the sort of eyes that could drown men in their whiskey tint. Tommy swam for her life.
In her peripheral, the rat king had come up on her shoulder. He could disapparate her, if there was any magic left in his cold body. The rules of life and death, of magic and war, had seemed to flip on their backsides. She held her gaze on the woman, but clutched the rats arm before he could snap at hers.
Tommy gripped, nails to flesh, and drew blood. She squeezed until the man’s knees buckled and his arm swung to hit her. Then, she dodged, grabbed his other wrist and drove sharpened points into soft veins.
He was very much alive, he only smelled as if he had been rolling about in a pit of corpses. Droplets of blood coated her fingerpads as he seized forward, but he lost momentum and will, or someone had stolen it from him. He relaxed in Tommy’s grasp, and she used the opportunity to press for more force until his blood dripped down the hem of her gown.
“Get out of my fucking head,” she mouthed.
Don’t make a scene.
“I’ll kill him.”
Do as you wish, but you’ll miss the show.
The crowd had begun to catch the spectacle unfolding. A girl gasped at her right, the purple cupcake drawing hands to her mouth as if she were witnessing the most heinous of faux-pas. Dmitri halted his dance, dropping his hand to his wand and clutching it.
Regulus was faster. His black curls swept over the shorter patrons, eyes wide beneath his mask. He sent a stinger to the rats knees, forcing him on all fours. It was such a gentle display of power, a hardly noticeable wand movement. A second later, he blew the lights out of the chandelier.
The shrieks and dismayed laughter were short lived. But, it took enough attention off of Tommy for her to bolt backward from the man. Regulus grasped her around the hip as she stumbled, and with one hand, he wiped the pooling blood from her nails with his handkerchief.
Tommy breathed in his ear, “Vittra is here.”
“Good,” Regulus sighed, relieved. “Now, you’re going to dance with me, and drink, and act as if you belong here before you get us locked in the cellar.”
“She’s in my head,” Tommy moaned into his shoulder. Maybe, she wasn’t anymore, but she had been. A splitting headache was proof of that. “I don’t know what to do, how to make her stop.”
Regulus eyed her down as if she might be exaggerating. His pouted lips pursed and then relaxed. An eyebrow raise, the tilt of his chin. All apathy had abandoned him as he spoke, low and amused, “Do you know how to waltz?”