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The same was true for a shimmering white gown that shed glistening snowflakes whenever I touched it, and a grass green one with sleeves formed of hundreds of fluttering butterflies. But the real showstopper was a pale pink kimono with a Japanese landscape hand painted onto the silk.
Francoise had been watching me with an amused tilt to her red lips. “ ’E is good, no?”
“He is good, yes,” I breathed, as the kimono shimmered seductively under the lights.
It would have been beautiful on its own, but the scene had been magicked to change as I watched. Snow melted from the bare branches of a tree, which sprouted leaves, and then delicate pink and white blossoms. They hung there, trembling, until blown off the surface of the dress by a summer’s breeze.
But unlike the images on the other dresses, these didn’t almost immediately disappear. They hung in the air for a long moment, creating a sort of train effect that gradually vanished maybe three feet behind the dress. And when I caught one on my hand, I swear it was petal soft, with weight and substance, before it melted away into nothingness.
“Zees is one of ze special orders for ze ceremony,” Francoise said, reaching up to flip over a little card affixed to the hanger.
“Is it . . . is it mine?” I asked, fervently promising every deity I could think of unswerving devotion if only it said my name. I could look like a Pythia in that dress. I could take on the world in that dress.
“Non,” Francoise said, squinting at the card.
“Whose is it?” I asked, breathing a little harder. And wondering whether said individual might be open to bribery. There was still a week and a half to the big day. Maybe Augustine could make another dress for whomever—
“Ming-duh,” Francoise read, scrunching up her face. “Or’owevair you say eet.”
“What?” I snatched the little card and stared at it, hoping she’d just mangled the pronunciation. But no. The card bore the name of the leader of the East Asian Vampire Court.
Goddamnit.
“But . . . but she’s Chinese,” I protested. “Why would she want a kimono?”
Francoise gave a Gallic shrug. “You wanted it,” she pointed out. “And she ees also ze head of ze Japanese vampires, is she not? Perhaps eet is—’ow you say?—diplomacy.”
I looked at the dress, which had cycled back to the winter stage again. It was no less lovely, despite the relative bleakness. The black branches were a beautiful contrast to the shell-pink silk, and on the one slashing across the skirt, a bluebird had paused to delicately preen its feathers.
It was achingly, desperately beautiful, and there was no way, no way at all, that anything I wore was going to compete. That wouldn’t have bothered me quite so much if it had been going to someone else. But Ming-de wasn’t just one of the world’s most powerful vampires. She was also one of the women I strongly suspected of having been among Mircea’s lovers.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, she was also an arresting, delicate porcelain doll of a woman. Even in her normal clothes, she made my five-foot-four frame look Amazonian and cloddish, and my reddish blond coloring look washedout and common. And in this—
Okay, it was official. My life sucked.
Francoise noticed my expression and frowned. “We’aven’t seen your dress yet,” she pointed out. “It may be even better.”
I shook my head. “It won’t be.”
“You don’t know zat,” she said impatiently, sorting through the other gowns and sending a cloud of multicolored magic into the air.
There were a lot of them—it looked like business was booming—and I didn’t know when Augustine might be back from lunch. I plowed in to help her. “I came by for a couple of reasons,” I said, as we furiously flipped tags.
“Vraiment? Qu’est-ce que tu veux?”
I explained about the night’s events. “I wanted to ask about what Pritkin said,” I finished. “You were in Faerie a while, right?”
“Too long,” she said darkly.
I hesitated, not wanting to poke at old wounds, because Francoise’s trip to the land of the Fey hadn’t been by choice. One of the things the old legends got right was the Fey’s poor reproductive record, which you’d think wouldn’t matter so much to beings who lived as long as they did. But apparently that wasn’t the case, because they had no compunction at all about kidnapping anyone they thought might be able to give them a little help.
But Francoise didn’t change the subject. “I only saw a leetle of ze Light Fey lands before I escaped,” she told me. “But I ’ave ’eard about zem. And I know ze Dark Fey court well. And nevair do I hear of any Fey who does ze possession.”
“Neither have I,” I admitted. “I always thought they were flesh and blood, like us. Well, more or less.”
“Zey are. And zere are no spirits in zeir world, and no ghosts. So ’ow could zey possess?”
“I don’t know. But Pritkin seemed pretty adamant.”
