The Dolls (21 page)

“Honey, no one knows exactly what happened that day. But we couldn’t have the police asking questions, not if her death was linked to zandara. So a decision was made to stage a car crash. It was for the good of the sosyete, and it made sense at the time. Your aunt asked that everyone play along for your sake too. She didn’t want you to remember your mom dying this way.”

“It was better that I think she’d killed herself?” I whisper incredulously. “That I’d think she deliberately abandoned me?”

“Bea was just trying to protect you. While Peregrine’s and Chloe’s mothers took care of staging the accident, your aunt and I calmed you down, got you back into bed, and convinced you it was just a bad dream. Chloe’s and Peregrine’s mothers gave you a charmed potion to make you forget what you’d seen.”

“They should never have done that.”

“But no child should ever, ever grow up with that kind of sad memory, and we were all afraid that if the police were called, you’d let the cat out of the bag about the ceremonies that were going on here. The police chief was a member of the sosyete, but none of the officers were. We couldn’t take the chance of anyone finding out.”

“So who killed her?” When he doesn’t answer, I add, “Was it Main de Lumière?”

“You didn’t see her killer in your vision?” he asks. When I shake my head, he sighs. “At first we assumed it was Main de Lumière, but tradition and ritual are very important to them, and none of us really believed they’d kill your mother by slitting her throat instead of stabbing her through the heart.”

“So if it wasn’t them . . . ,” I say.

“No one knows what could have happened,” he says simply, looking away.

“Okay, I get why no one wanted a little kid to have a horrible memory like that,” I concede. “But I’m seventeen now. Why hasn’t anyone said anything?”

Boniface looks sad. “It wasn’t my place to tell you, honey. I can’t speak for the others.”

I clench my fists, a wave of frustration rising within me. All the lies, all the half truths—I’m suddenly furious. “Peregrine and Chloe knew, didn’t they? They’ve known all along.” I don’t wait for an answer; my blood is boiling. “I’m going over there.”

“Eveny—” Boniface begins, but I’m already on a mission, already moving toward the front door. I have to confront them, to find out what else they’ve been hiding from me. “Wait, Eveny!” Boniface calls after me. “Come back!”

“I can’t,” I say as I shut the door behind me. I take off running toward Peregrine’s opulent mansion on the next hill over.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I
pound on Peregrine’s front door with both fists and am surprised when she and Chloe answer together.

“You lied to me!” I cry, still breathless from my run.

They look at each other and then back at me. “Lied about what?” Chloe asks.

“About the night my mother died!” I say. “Your mothers were there. I just charmed the parlor and watched the whole thing play out. Your mothers saw
everything
. You knew all along, and you let me keep believing my mother had left me on purpose!”

“Calm down, Eveny,” Peregrine says crisply. “Anger isn’t getting you anywhere.”

But her words only make me madder. “Could you cut the whole icy superiority thing for a minute and be honest with me? Or is that too much for you?”

Chloe takes a step forward and reaches for me without saying a word. At first I pull away, but she just steps closer and stays there until I crumple. She folds me into a hug as I start to cry. “We’re sorry, Eveny,” she says. “We’re sorry we didn’t tell you. And we’re sorry about what happened to your mom.” She pulls away after a moment and tilts my chin up so that I’m staring right at her. “If you come inside, we’ll tell you what we know.”

I reluctantly follow her in, glancing at Peregrine as I go. She’s being strangely silent, and her lips are set in a thin line.

“Are your mothers here?” I ask once we’re seated in the living room.

Peregrine shakes her head and looks almost apologetic. “They’re at Chloe’s house. We can wait until they’re back if you want. . . .”

“No,” I say immediately. “I want to know the truth. Now.”

“What did you see?” Chloe asks gently.

“Wait, go back,” Peregrine interrupts. “You said you charmed the room? How?”

“I used my Stone of Carrefour.”

The eyes of both girls widen. “You have your stone?” Chloe asks in a whisper. “We thought it was lost with your mother.”

“This is a huge deal,” Peregrine says flatly. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us.”

“Kind of like you didn’t tell me that my mother was murdered?” I say through gritted teeth.

Chloe puts a hand on Peregrine’s arm and says to her, “We can talk about the stone later. Right now, Eveny’s trying to tell us about her vision.”

I recap what played out in the parlor. The ceremony. The plunge into darkness. The screams. My mother gasping for breath as Peregrine’s and Chloe’s mothers ran for help. My mother dying.

“Our mothers aren’t sure whether your mom was a target because of something personal, or whether it was someone trying to weaken the power of Carrefour by eliminating the triumvirate,” Chloe explains when I’m done.

“Without your mother,” Peregrine adds, “our mothers were greatly weakened, and it’s been harder for them to . . .” Her voice trails off and she adds, “Harder for them to cast their magic.”

“So I’ve heard,” I say stiffly. “Somehow you’ve all managed to convince yourselves that it’s fine to use the Périphérie to keep your own lives floating along perfectly.”

“You don’t understand; they owed it to us,” Peregrine says right away. “Our ancestors have been providing for the people in the Périphérie for over a century.”

“That doesn’t justify taking from them now!” I exclaim. “All the crumbling houses, the people who have lost their money, the dead lawns, the decaying trees . . . That seems right to you?”

“We had to keep central Carrefour up somehow,” Chloe says in a small voice.

“Even the weather?” I ask.

“The sunshine on this side of town doesn’t create itself,” Peregrine says. “We don’t use it every day, though. You can see there’s a storm coming now.” Peregrine’s eyebrows knit together in annoyance. “You can’t expect us just to stop
living
.”

“I don’t,” I say. “But you have no right to live in luxury that’s built on other people’s lives falling apart. That’s disgusting!”

Chloe quickly picks up the thread of Peregrine’s argument. “It doesn’t have to be that way anymore, Eveny. That’s the great thing about you being back. We have a triumvirate again. We can start drawing our power purely from plants. We can even restore the Périphérie.”

“If you join us,” Peregrine says, “our lives can be just as we want them to be. You seem to keep forgetting what a gift this is.” She reaches out to take my hand, but I pull away.

“But you and your moms have already destroyed so much. You can’t possibly justify that.”

Peregrine rolls her eyes. “Whatever,” she says. “Don’t goody-goody us. You’ve adjusted quite well to the perks of zandara since you’ve been back, haven’t you? Your beautiful house, your huge property, your instant popularity, the money to attend Pointe Laveau. It’s all zandara, Eveny. All of it.”

“We don’t deserve those things,” I reply. “None of us do.”

I stand up and look at the two of them. They’re perfect on the outside, exactly what any girl would want to look like. Perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect bodies, perfect
everything
. But none of it’s real. It never was. “I can’t do this,” I say. “Not until I’ve figured out what’s right and wrong here.”

“Do you have any idea how much you’ll be walking away from?” Peregrine demands.

“None of those things matter to me,” I say. “Besides, if we stopped—no magic, no charms—Main de Lumière wouldn’t have a reason to punish us anymore.”

“Sure, it’s possible they’d stop coming after us,” Peregrine says, “but in the meantime, we’d have nothing! We’d be like everyone else.”

“That’s better than being dead,” I tell her. I take a deep breath. “You’ve gone too far, Peregrine. You know that. I’ll do the ceremony with you whenever we figure out the identity of the Main de Lumière soldier who snuck in in during the party, but after that, I quit.”

“You can’t do that!” she cries.

“Watch me,” I say.

With that, I stride out of Peregrine’s perfect mansion, slamming her perfect front door behind me as I go. I don’t look back.

Boniface is sitting in the parlor with his head in his hands when I storm through the front doorway of my house a few minutes later.

“Eveny?” he asks, standing up right away. “Are you okay?”

“Just peachy.” I move past him without making eye contact.

“I never should have let you into the parlor,” he says, wringing his hands together and following me into the room.

I stop and look at him. “I wish someone had told me before.”

“Eveny—” he begins.

“Any other secrets you’re keeping from me?” I interrupt. “How about my dad? Is everyone lying to me about him too? I know he’s been back since I was born.”

“Yes, he’s been here, Eveny,” Boniface says slowly. “But he’s gone now.”

“Where?” I demand. “Where did he go?”

But Boniface just shakes his head. I throw my hands up in frustration, grab my mother’s herb journal from the coffee table where I left it earlier, and head upstairs to my room without saying another word. I can feel his concerned gaze on my back as I go.

I flip through the little book until I find a page in my mother’s hand entitled
The Removal of Charms from Inanimate Objects.
She’s written that you must focus intently on the specific things you want uncharmed. I fold the page and dash downstairs. I don’t know if her charm will successfully remove magic from this house, but I intend to try. It’s the first step to making things right again.

I close myself in the parlor, and with the herb book open in front of me, I ask Eloi Oke to open the gates to the spirit world, until the air in the room shifts. I touch the Stone of Carrefour with my left ring finger and feel it heat up. I focus on our house and property as I read the words from my mother’s charm.

“Mint, nettle, and rue, I draw your power,” I say. I pause and try to feel the request with my heart, like Boniface advised. “Spirits, magic killed my mother, and it’s destroying this town. I want it gone from this house.”

For a moment, nothing happens, but then I notice my Stone of Carrefour getting colder and colder, and something begins leaching from the parlor. I can feel it, like the air is being sucked out. The lights flicker, and a huge, crimson stain appears on the hardwood floor, just where my mother died. I gasp, and it takes me a moment to realize that her blood had never really been gone at all; someone had simply cast a charm to make it disappear.

I run toward the door and claw it open, but the moment I stagger into the hallway, I almost fall over. I stare around me in horror.

It’s not the same hallway I entered through just a few minutes earlier. Or rather it is, but it appears that the hall hasn’t been touched in decades. It’s caked with dust and cobwebs, the marble floors are cracked and chipped, and the walls sag under the weight of the house. Above me, the chandelier hangs at a precarious angle, like it’s going to crash to the ground at any moment. The front door is splintered, and light slices through in jagged beams. Several of the windows are broken, and wind whistles in.

“What have I done?” I ask, but I know the answer to my own question before the words are out of my mouth. I hadn’t thought it through enough to realize that the mansion itself is mostly a product of magic. Without zandara, it’s just a dilapidated old shack, and the room where my mother died still looks like a crime scene.

I have to fix this. And I’m certainly not going to turn to Peregrine or Chloe for help. Boniface will know what to do. In a panic, I run across the rotting floorboards of the living room and out the back door, which is hanging from its hinges and swaying in the breeze.

As soon as I’m through the doors, I stop dead in my tracks. My mother’s beautiful rose garden, her pride and joy, is dead and decaying. The few roses that still cling to vines are wilted and gray; the rest of the garden looks like it hasn’t been tended in decades. It’s overgrown with weeds and smeared with mud.

“Boniface?” I cry out. But then I see him, and for a moment, I’m so stunned I can’t move. He’s lying motionless beside one of the rosebushes, a pair of garden shears still in his hand. “Boniface?” I whisper, sure that he’s dead. I run to his side, but when I bend to help him, my breath catches in my throat, and I scramble backward in terror.

Not only has he collapsed, but he looks like a skeleton with graying skin stretched haphazardly over the sharp juts of his bones. He’s gasping for breath, but his skin is so thin and decayed I can see his lungs rising and falling inside his chest. He looks like a rotting corpse. “Eveny . . . ,” he rasps. “Help me.” It sounds like a death rattle.

Boniface’s eyes close and as he goes still, I back away, horrified, sure that I’ve killed him. I’m sobbing with my hands over my mouth when Peregrine and Chloe stroll into the rose garden, looking as glamorous and unperturbed as usual.

“The front door was unlocked—well, more like unhinged— so we let ourselves in,” Peregrine says casually, her stilettos clicking across the stone path as they approach me. “Come to think of it, you’re looking rather unhinged yourself.”

“What did you do to Boniface?” Chloe asks, staring at his collapsed, sunken frame. “We came over because we figured you might do something rash after our talk, but we didn’t think you’d hurt someone.”

“I didn’t mean—I mean, I didn’t want—I didn’t know . . .” I’m still stammering nonsensically, my teeth chattering, when Peregrine holds up a hand to stop me.

“Just tell us what you’ve done,” she says calmly. “Quickly, before Boniface expires.”

I take a deep breath and quickly recap what happened. “I was only trying to get rid of zandara’s influence in my life,” I say. “H-how did I hurt Boniface?”