Page 95 of The Trick of It

She slapped his hand as he reached onto her plate and stole a glazed cranberry tartlet. He tilted it outward in his mouth and gave her a jammy, red smile with no teeth, which made her laugh and slap him again.

“Get your own plate, fool.”

“Harpy,” he returned.

“Child,” she answered, moving farther down to investigate the meats.

He drifted toward Mags, the taxidermist, who was regaling Father Wheeler and Master Yuri with a tale of smuggling and clever distraction. He was sad he’d missed the first part but happily chewed on a cheese and cherry pastry as she described finally removing the deceased platypus from beneath the decoy shipment of whale fat.

“It stunk so bad, no one noticed the dead body,” she said proudly. “And all the straw and cold insulation from the fat kept my little beauty preserved enough that I didn’t have to compensate for decay at all.”

“Did you bring her?” Father Wheeler asked hopefully. “The platypus?”

“Of course not, dear,” Mags said with a glint in her eye. “I don’t want her vanishing under a magic cloth and never coming back, do I?”

“We come back,” Rhys said smugly. “Eventually.”

“You had better,” Mags told him. “I’ve a good line on a wolf. Big ’un too.”

“Do you sell anything else?” Yuri asked, looking a bit green around the gills. “Or just dead things?”

“Parts of dead things,” Mags replied, blinking innocently. “D’you like shark teeth?”

Rhys brightened, his adolescence on the docks of Brighton waking inside him. “Now, depending on where you got those,” he told Mags, “they might be from a shark that’s still kicking around. They have endless teeth. Lose the same one five times? Grow five back in its place.”

Mags touched her jaw, where a few teeth appeared to be missing toward the back, and considered it. “Well, that’s clever of them.”

“A sailor told me once,” Rhys said, leaning closer, “that a lobster will never die of old age. It will just keep getting bigger and bigger until it’s too big to find enough food in a day to keep it going. They never expire from age, only hunger. Their own or ours.”

“Les crocodiles, aussi,” Mr. Charpentier said, hopping into their semi-circle with enthusiasm and miming a biting mouth with both hands. “A sheik told me! She is … immortelle, this green thing. A pet in their menagerie for four generations! Fearsome. Massive! Like a house!”

“So is my cat,” Merlin piped in from another group. “I was assured when I took her from the market that she would never die.”

“Is there a cat in this house?” Yuri asked, frowning. “I have seen no cat.”

“Of course not,” said Merlin. “I bought that cat thirty years ago.”

Rhys was still laughing as the conversation dissolved, and grazing diners began to mill curiously toward the seance table set up in the corner of the room.

Seph found him while she was still licking fig seeds off her fingers, and raised her brows at him, flicking her eyes toward the seats. He took her meaning immediately, pulling her toward the little cushy settee he preferred for the nights in the ballroom, but Madame Ivanova stopped them.

“Non!” she said, pointing at Rhys. “You are with me tonight, at the central table.”

“Both of us?” Seph asked, raising her tawny brows.

“Just the boy,” Madame Ivanova said. “If you please.”

Rhys frowned at how easily Seph released his arm and looked down at her. “She meant to say the man,” he informed her quietly. “I am a man.”

“Of course you are,” she answered, giving him a patronizing little pat on the bicep. “My man.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, but she only giggled, spinning away and claiming the spot beside Nini, as though the swap were no matter of great distress for her at all.

“Why me?” he asked Ivanova as he sat down. “I didn’t ask you to contact anyone.”

“Did you ask when you saw the apparition at your bed?” she pointed out, nodding when he shook his head. “Precisely. You are … hmm. How do I say this?”

“Bait,” Merlin suggested, taking the seat next to Rhys. “You are bait, my boy. You and I both.”