Page 75 of The Scarlet Ball

I was more aware than ever before of the demon lords and their courtships. They chased after the girls they had chosen at the Rose Ball, sometimes with cunning, sometimes force, sometimes with charm. It was not uncommon to see Hugette’s suitor attempt to herd her into some distant corner of the opera house or to see Eliza Gelder give her suitor the slip around some particularly slow-moving captain of industry. Martha seemed to be taking a page from my book, and Julius Fordham circled her like a wolf, not too close but never distant.

The demon lords had been fed at the Rose Ball, and it seemed to have awakened in them a hunger for the meal they might have. They chased after the girls who had fed them so well, as if knowledge had made them realize they were starving.

We distracted them where we could, covered for each other where possible. Hugette stepped as if by accident on Tilly’s dress before whisking her away so that it might be repaired; Martha inserted herself into conversations between Hugette and her lord that seemed to be in danger of becoming too private. I didn’t particularly want to get involved, but when I realized that Eliza was about to enter a certain carriage after a show at the Marrakech, I stopped her and gave the coachman a nasty look.

She protested as if I had stolen the carriage for myself, and I told her that if she didn’t want to be dinner, she’d keep watch for coachmen in light cloth coats. Real coachmen wore coats of oiled canvas as heavy as suits of armor. They were out in the elements at all hours, waiting on us to grow tired of the balls and dinners and make our way home. Whatever that man had been, he was no coachman.

Her eyes grew wide.

“He says he wants to run off now,” she whispered, shredding the ribbon of her reticule in her fingernails. “He says that we. We don’t need the Scarlet Ball, that we don’t need all these rules if we truly love each other. He says we can be married and go to live in his castle in Scotland. He promised.”

“That and three dollars will get you a plate of bay scallops.” I shrugged. “Do what you like, but if you want to take a carriage with me, I’m leaving now.”

The Gelders did not live so far from the Howards, and as we rode, she watched me warily as if I might bite.

“What is it?”

“Mr. Rowe. What are you doing with him?”

I didn’t bother looking at her because I had been getting that question, more and less subtly, since the duke’s reception.

“I’m doing whatever I want,” I said as I had said before, but that was only a part of it.

The Scarlet Ball was rushing toward us with the speed and strength of a Keynes iron locomotive. Like the White Ball and the Rose Ball, it was test and ritual, a display of grace and guts, but more so than either, the Scarlet Ball was deadly. You won or you died.

At the White Ball, we had given the demon lords a taste for us. At the Rose Ball, when they had made their choice, we showed them that we could feed them better than they could themselves. They might have been dark gods of storm and fire, but we could give them meals such as they had never had before: beauty, fear, and betrayal, all wrapped up in trembling flesh and rivulets of blood.

At the Scarlet Ball, we would feed them one more time, and then, if we could, we had to make them stop.

That was the key, and it always had been. What good was luring down the power of a storm if you couldn’t make it strike where you told it? What was any marriage but control offered and control taken?

Martha and Hugette and the rest had to play a delicate game of keeping their chosen lords hungry while keeping their own skins intact. It was a balancing act, and leaning too far one way was just as bad as leaning too far the other. A starving lord might not hear the stop and tear them to shreds. A lord too well-fed on servant girls and imps and inches of hair or the first joints of fingers, well, he might kill her out of boredom, no love lost. No wonder they all looked at me the way they did, because I was doing precisely none of it.

Sebastian had disappeared so cleanly from my sight that he might as well have died with his namesake in the Gracens’ statue garden. He might never have existed, and I might never have danced with him. I might never have stood below a palace woven of ice or directed a force of nature to kill a girl who had tried to kill me.

The best proof of Sebastian’s existence was in my skin, and sometimes, when I noticed myself thinking of him, that bright tingle of electricity ghost-walked up my arms and down my spine, behind my knees, between my legs, to the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands.

One night, I stood by the window, looking past my reflected face to the sky beyond. His name sat like a stone on my tongue, and I wondered what it might kill if I spat it out.

I hung on to the fact that Sebastian hadn’t eaten at the Rose Ball like the other lords. They had been fed in full, on the flesh of bound offerings like Mielle. He had gone hungry that night, and then at Herons, I had fed him Odile. In both cases, he had acted under my command. Now he was gone at my command.

“You’ll come when I call,” I told the slate-gray sky. “You’ll starve when I say.”

I knew what the other girls and their mothers were whispering, that I was a fool to walk into the Scarlet Ball with a demon lord who had been banished and unfed for weeks. No one knew what he might be when he came back, and what happened to me might be a cautionary tale for the next hundred years.

Well, at least I had gotten to fuck him before I went. They said I wasn’t supposed to do that, either.

IN THE WEEK leading up to the Scarlet Ball, I heard that Sebastian had left New York, that he traveled south to Washington, D.C., and then on to Charlotte. Gloria Hennings told me that her sister-in-law’s Mosby cousin had dined with him in Saratoga, and I told her I didn’t care. Storms roamed far and wide, and when they wanted to, they moved fast. I was calm about the whole affair. I would rule, or I would die, or maybe I would call upon the darkness and find out that my storm had taken up with Sarah Mosby and they were now living in Florida. That wouldn’t be a terrible outcome, I told myself, no matter what they would say about Iphigenia Marshall afterward.

There was no way to know what would happen, and we were all preparing for something we could not prepare for. First it seemed as if the Scarlet Ball would never come, and then it was less than twenty-four hours away.

That morning, the society page was taken up with the deaths of the Lloyds, a distinguished New York couple. Their carriage had toppled on a dark night as they traveled upstate together. There was a list of their good deeds, his service in the Union army and in the halls of commerce, her work with the temperance movement and for the orphans of India. The broadsheets were more concerned with how the top had been torn off the carriage, baggage for a much longer journey for one scattered on the roadside. Mrs. Lloyd was found missing her head, as if it had been carried off like a trophy, and of Mr. Lloyd, they found nothing at all. I remembered Mrs. Howard’s disapproval of Mrs. Lloyd’s ways, and Mrs. Howard’s own missing fingers. Eaten slow or eaten fast, they all seemed to get eaten in the end.

As if my grim thoughts had summoned her, the door to the dining room opened, and Mrs. Howard entered. It was the first time I had seen her in weeks; she had lost weight she could ill afford to lose, and her face had taken on an iron-gray undercast that echoed her hair. Ignoring my stare, she took her place at the breakfast table as if she had never left it, and reluctantly, I went back to the papers because I knew she wouldn’t speak unless she damn well wanted to. After breakfast, she had an enormous trunk brought to my room. It was still sealed with wax over the lock, and it was cursed so that anyone illicitly opening it would get a welter of boils sprayed over their face, spelling out the word thief for all to see.

Mrs. Howard showed me how to disable the charm by stabbing an iron pin through the heart of the seal, and then she stepped back as I hesitantly undid the clasps.

The lid swung open, and a pile of white tissue paper fluffed up almost a foot out of it, seemingly endless as Mrs. Howard lifted it away. At last, she slid the pile of paper to one side, and with a satisfied sound, she reached deeper into the trunk to pull out a single dress.