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Mama’s pale face remained as unreadable as ever.

She raised her hands and drew them through the air as though she were drawing an invisible curtain. Darkness spread over the ponds, swallowing the lantern light and the fireflies. A scene breathed to life around me.

I had seen this trick before. In Old Town, she had pulled back the world and shown me Hartley scampering into The Drowned Goose. But this time it was different. I wasn’t just seeing a shade. I was inside of one. Standing in front of a door labeled seventy-three.

A woman appeared beside me holding a limp bundle in her arms. She presented a key, and the door swung open of its own accord, revealing a grimy, windowless room.

Swallowing her fear, the woman stepped inside and laid the bundle of blankets on a long table. A slim arm slipped out of the folds, and I saw black veins had spread beneath her skin.

“Shh, it’s okay, ma fille,” the mother whispered.

“Mama,” the little girl whimpered.

I covered my mouth. It was a little girl. My heart twisted in pain. She couldn’t have been older than Adrien.

A hooded figure materialized beside the table. The mother drew her wand. “Reveal yourself!”

The figure pulled back her hood, exposing her face and the silver medallion around her neck: a serpent coiled around a crescent moon.

“The curse is already in her blood, Honora,” the robed woman said, assessing the child. “We have to draw it out.”

Honora withdrew a short blade with an ivory pommel carved into the shape of two snakes.

Before anything else happened, the scene dissolved around me, and I was back at the edge of the salt ponds. The lanterns flickered back to life. The fireflies blinked above the water.

The robed woman had called her Honora.

I looked to where my mother had been hovering beneath the willow, ready to ask what this all meant, but she was gone. Leaving me with nothing but unanswered questions.

Frustrated, I made my way back to the castle. By the time I reached my room, I had replayed the scene several times. I locked the door and set crystals around the frame to ward off ghosts, then checked that my bodice was still safely tucked inside the vase on the mantel.

Lou had called Honora’s spell The Devouring’s greatest achievement. Gran had spoken of her as a disgrace. Neither one had mentioned a daughter. If that woman was my ancestor, perhaps saving her child was what had brought her to The Devouring. But the shade had ended before she used the knife.

I hadn’t seen what she did, or whether her daughter survived.

I sat on the edge of the bed, turning the map over in my hands. Lou’s people had tried to capture me and my relics. They’d sent a note with a veiled threat. One woman offering to help a frightened mother didn’t erase that. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl.

What would I have done if it had been Adrien lying on that table?

I swallowed and reached for a quill. Before hiding the map beneath my mattress, I wrote Honora, door seventy-three on the back.

I changed into my nightshift and brushed out my hair, working through a stubborn knot while I tried to settle my thoughts. I couldn’t understand why Mama didn’t just tell me what she wanted me to understand about Honora Kemp and her spell.

Either way, tomorrow night, my magick would be restored, and Dominique would lead me to Hartley.

He would answer at least a few of my questions. I would make certain of it.

For tonight, I had exhausted the usefulness of arguing with absent people.

I climbed into bed and opened the green book about Captain Cortez. If a fictional man couldn’t distract me from my family’s secrets and a certain vampire prince, nothing would.

Chapter 30

Impuissant

YVES

It was nearly seven o’clock when Severin sent word that a delicate household matter required my immediate attention, and I feared the worst.