Page 55 of The Scarlet Ball

We stepped back, offering our hands to the darkness, and in the darkness, something moved. The skin of my palm prickled, my eyes strained to see in the dark, but there was nothing, and then it was turn back to the circle, and sixteen counts to the left.

I saw the other girls counting as I did, and we came up one girl short, one girl taken. We closed the gap where she had stood, and as we danced, we listened for sounds in the dark, something that would tell us whether she had been chosen as a prospective mate or as a meal. Of course there was nothing, and we danced on.

On the third repeat of the figure, we turned again, offering our hands to the darkness, and this time when we turned back, two girls were gone. One of them screamed as she went, and then we heard it, the rip of flesh, the crunch of bone. The little I had been allowed to eat that day rose in my throat, and I swallowed it back hard. The girl across from me had a spot of powder wiped away, and as if it was a window, I could see that under her artful powder, she had gone as pale as a cut mushroom.

One more, I chanted in my head. One more, and I am done.

I turned with the precision of a hunting hawk, I kept the rhythm like a Swiss clock. I was close. I was so close, and I concentrated on executing the steps perfectly, because if I thought of what came after, then surely I would stumble.

Despite my fears, I did not, and at the third pass, I held my hand out to the darkness with a sense of wild relief and triumph. I grinned like no society girl should be seen doing, because what did it matter anymore, but then a hand took my own, pulling me into the darkness. A cry caught in my throat. I wanted to lash out with foot and fist, but all that time spent training with Mielle had changed me. Instead, I stepped straight into the opening figure for the waltz almandine.

We danced in the dark, the pale sky of the hall suddenly a long distance away, and of course I knew who it was who had chosen me.

“You have refused my gifts,” Sebastian said. “Why?”

“Because I did not want them. My lord, let me go.”

“Ask me something else. Ask me anything else, but do not ask me that.”

The waltz almandine is one of the older dances, more for the delight of women Mrs. Howard’s age rather than for young girls. It moves the dancers in a kind of figure eight around the ballroom, and as we danced, I could make out the shapes of four other couples completing the circuit. Sebastian and I were dancing with one another, but we were dancing with them as well, all pieces of some great whole.

I could not tell whether we had moved or whether the entire room had done so, but something slid or shifted or locked into place, and then we were dancing at the center of the hall. The girls who had not been chosen moved to the sidelines, and there was a white sheet placed over a crumpled figure on the floor to the right. Overhead the sky painted upon the ceiling (or perhaps it was the sky itself) had taken on a ruddy, bloody glow, and that was one question answered for me. It was a sunset, and soon it would be night.

The final notes of the waltz almandine were struck, and Sebastian and I separated, my left hand in his right as we turned to face the people watching us, the humans and the deeper shadows behind them. I dipped low in a curtsy, and he bowed. It was no submission to their rules, only an acknowledgment of how beautiful we could be when we wished to be pleasing.

When we rose, Mr. and Mrs. Howard came to greet us. Mrs. Howard took my hands in hers, a complicated expression on her face. It reminded me again how old she was, and that while she had wished this terrible thing for her granddaughter, it was no less than she had lived herself, from the old razor marks on her arm to the fire she had learned to bear.

She drew me close, her kiss on my cheek warm and dry.

“I’m sorry it is not her here,” I murmured. The look she gave me was almost wistful.

“It is enough that you are,” she said quietly. “Here.”

She removed the amber brooch from her breast, holding it out to me. Before I could take it, perplexed by the token of her regard, she stabbed me with the pin, driving it deep into the pad of my ring finger, the spark of pain as bright as a falling star.

I didn’t cry out, I didn’t do more than draw a short breath, but I might as well have shouted. Sebastian turned and a wash of cold air struck my skin. I was chosen, I realized, and the blood I spilled, he saw as his. He advanced on me, eyes strange, fingers elongating, and beyond him, I could see other couples playing through similar scenes, the girls blooded, the young lords after them.

Martha Webster backed up steadily, flinging something hard to the ground before her lord. There was a crackling sound, and staggering up from the floor was a horse so long-legged and frantic that at first I thought it had double the number of limbs, but it only had four. I recognized her as Galleon Girl, the filly who had won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness just this past year. She shrieked as a thing of rushing flame fell on her, and beyond Martha, Tilly wound the key on a music box and a clockwork tiger folded out enormous and enameled, straight into the arms of a young man with steam dribbling from his eyes and mouth.

“The brooch,” Mrs. Howard said with dreadful calm beside me. “Throw it on the ground between you.”

I would rather have thrown it at her head, but taking another step back, I did as she said. The demon lords needed to be fed, and only something fantastically valuable, something immensely rare, would do it. I expected some extinct magic, some prodigy, but instead, I got a naked young woman, her limbs clotted with crumbs of amber, her face as still as a mask.

“Mielle!”

She crouched on the ground, not as if she was hiding herself out of modesty, but as if she hoped to make herself so small as to be beyond notice, and Sebastian drew back in surprise. For a single instant, he looked more human than he had, startled by the figure in front of him, confused as to what play they had cast us in.

I reached for Mielle. I don’t know what I intended to do. Perhaps I thought to cover her, perhaps it was only that I could not stand to see her like that, so small and exposed when she spent every moment as painstakingly and carefully dressed as a fashion doll. Before I could reach her, Sebastian lunged.

I saw so clearly what he meant to do that I thought it had already happened. He got her on the ground, one knee planted deep in the softness of her belly, one hand gripping her face. The only part of her face left visible would be her mouth, open in a scream that he could hear even if I couldn’t, and then he’d shove her head back so far she’d be dead if she were human, but of course she wasn’t. She was something else, clever, skilled, expensive, and teeth like slivers of Atlantic ice would tear out her throat.

And then he stopped.

He stood over her, mostly human except for the way his eyes were fogged with storm and his fingers cast long sharp shadows. Mielle was a pale shape on the ground, the arch of her back and the nape of her neck oddly bitable even to me, but he looked at her like a schoolboy in front of an incomprehensible Latin lesson.

“Why does he not eat,” Mrs. Howard said, anger and fear coloring her words. “This was a sure thing. There has never been any hesitation between her kind and his. Why not her?”

Her words shook loose an echo in my head—a stormy night weeks ago, a demon lord at my window, Mielle between us. My own words came back to me: Not her. Never her. You understand?