I let the witch live long enough to spread the invitation herself: that an unnamed benefactor would host the vigil personally in his grand ballroom, a gesture of devotion to the departed.
Only I know which ghost I intend to summon.
The world, including my own kind, think I’ve gone mad, addled by twisted betrayal. But madness doesn’t have a heartbeat.
Tonight, I mean to prove my dead heart beats where it counts.
I rise, the movement slow and deliberate, like waking from a centuries-long sleep. The air trembles as I reach for my coat, its rich midnight silk and onyx buttons displaying the finery of a monster pretending to be a man.
Below, the music shifts…a waltz, lush and dangerous.
I turn from the window and the silky breeze that at once delights and torments me with the promise of her scent of smoke and incense and seductive perfume.
The revelry has been going long enough for the mortals to be pliant from the wine I had my staff season with a little mix of my own. A tincture of compulsion, barely there: not slavery, not yet.
Just enough warmth to loosen tongues and dull suspicion. They sway like reeds; they will not leave unless I let them.
The others, the semi-, demi-, and barely-immortals will fare worse.
Same as the fae who came for spectacle, the warlocks who smelled a bargain, and the revenants who haunt every fashionable salon—each was invited with a gilded hand and seated under my wards.
I softened the wards around the ballroom, threaded them with an old binding that takes the edge from teeth and claws.Their power ebbs like tide, stripped thin by sigils only I can undo.
They can feel it, of course.
Their smiles grow brittle and their fingers twitch where they would otherwise strike. They would be formidable beneath other moons.
Tonight they are ornamental.
Because no one is going anywhere unless I say so. The doors are closed. The locks are my language. The candles are my witnesses. Even the wind outside hesitates at the threshold.
It is a private theater; any exit will be a curtain call at my pleasure.
And if the photograph and the rumor and the promises that this woman is Elara prove to be lies, then the night ends in a way befitting the lies: in blood and judgment. I did not invite death for theater. I invited truth. But truth has teeth. I have sharpened mine.
So let them dance. Let them drink. Let them pretend to honor the dead and whisper gossip over the gilt. Their comfort is a thin, fragile thing and I will strip it away with a single command if I must.
Tonight, thepalazzois a kind of altar, and every mask a potential offering.
Because whatever this woman is—ghost, witch, martyr, trick or troll—she is the reckoning I have hunted for two and a half centuries.
If she is real, I will unmake every shadow that kept her hidden. If she is not, then none of them leave alive to tell another lie.
I leave the observatory and descend the marble stairs, the sound of my steps swallowed by the music rising from below. My servants bow as I pass, careful not to meet my eyes. They knowthe signs. When I wear this coat, these shoes andher ring, the city is never the same by dawn.
Thepalazzodoors swish open at my approach, carrying with it a thousand scents.
Mortal hearts. Candle wax. Spells and torment.
But beneath it all…something faint…
…and impossible.
Belladonna and crushed lilies.
Her scent. Deadly and delightful.
It hits me like the near-fatal strike to the chest she dealt me two and a half centuries ago.
