Mallory glanced at Anaïs’s hand and Gabrielle’s ring—passed down through generations.
On the altar, they had placed a single candle, already burned down to a nub, inside a glass lantern. A pentagram had been drawn in chalk around the candle and decorated with flowers and herbs. Mallory laid the rings around the sigil. Anaïs pried Gabrielle’s ring from her own finger and laid it on the fifth point of the pentagram.
“Should I be doing something?” Armand said. “Actually… if we know that I’m not currently possessed, maybe—”
“No,” said Mallory. “We’re not untying you. Bastien knows where we are and what we plan to do. He will possess you again the first chance he gets.”
The wives appeared then, their hazy forms climbing up from the center of the rings that had been placed around the pentagram, their figures shimmering but whole.
“We tried to find the brute,” said Julie. “He’s become a part of the house again.”
Mallory conveyed this to the others, informing them the wives had arrived.
Gabrielle snorted. “He cannot hide from me.”
Lucienne shrieked giddily. “Gabrielle, is that you? It’s been so long! You look…” She trailed off, cheek twitching, before she took in Gabrielle’s thin, naked figure, feathery hair, twitching movement. “Like you could use a drink.”
Whether Gabrielle couldn’t hear the ghosts or she simply chose to ignore this, she moved to stand beside the ring that had once been hers. “We can begin.”
“What do the rest of us do?” asked Mallory.
“Nothing. Bastien is held by the same dark magic that he has bound us with. Once I summon him into this circle, his spirit willbe trapped inside this candle and no longer able to invade the minds and bodies of others. We need only hold him, and when the flame can burn no longer, the death of the candle will snuff out his spirit as well, and the monster will be reclaimed by Verloren.”
“Must we wait for the candle to burn out?” asked Mallory. “Or can we…” She mimed pinching the wick with her fingers.
“Once he is here, the circle is not to be broken,” said Gabrielle. “Do not be impatient.”
“Is this going to hurt?” asked Triphine. “I’ve had a bit of a sore throat of late, and I don’t want it getting worse.”
“Hush,” said Lucienne as Gabrielle began to chant.
Mallory recognized the words from the old language, the same she had recited to open the door to Verloren and summon her ancestor when she was a child. The spell that had brought Le Bleu back to this world.
It began to storm outside, rain pounding at the roof of the chapel, coming down so hard on the stained glass that Mallory worried it might shatter. The candles flickered, as if a wind had coursed through—though Mallory felt nothing but her own shudder.
The flames flickered again, and this time they went out, all at once.
Gabrielle’s chanting grew louder.
Anaïs gripped Mallory’s hand.
Armand looked worriedly at the door. Fitcher tapped restlessly at the closed pocket watch. Constantino thumped an arrow into his palm.
Outside, lightning flashed—brightening the chapel in one blinding instant, thunder shaking the walls.
When it passed, the candle on the altar had burst to life with a single tall flame—burning blue.
Anaïs’s grip slackened with surprise.
Gabrielle fell quiet, the blue flame dancing in her dark eyes. “He is here.”
Mallory inched closer to Armand and crouched beside him. His hand flexed in welcome, and she took it, squeezing tight, her pulse pounding.
The candle was so small—barely more than a wick and a coin-sized ball of tallow. Surely it would not take long to burn out.
After everything, to see the great Monsieur Le Bleu reduced to that tiny, inconsequential flame felt strangely anticlimactic. And perhaps too easy, though she reminded herself that, actually, it had not been easy at all.
The flame brightened and Mallory imagined Bastien, with all his stubbornness and will, fighting the fate that threatened to claim him.
