sun for a moment. When they curved toward Daniel, he stepped back, repulsed. “You’d better find her, before she —or someone else—steps in and rewrites our entire history. And makes you, me, all of this”—Cam snapped his fingers—“obsolete.”
Daniel snarled, unfurling his own silvery-white wings, feeling them extend out and out and out at his sides, shuddering as they pulsed near Cam’s. He felt warmer now, and capable of anything. “I’ll handle it—” he started to say.
But Cam had already taken off, the kickback from his flight sending small tornadoes of dirt spiraling up from the ground. Daniel shielded his eyes from the sun and looked up as the golden wings beat across the sky, then, in an instant, were gone.
ELEVEN
COUP DE FOUDRE
Luce came out of the Announcer underwater.
She opened her eyes, but the warm, cloudy water stung so sharply that she promptly clamped them shut again. Her soggy clothes dragged her down, so she wrestled off the mink coat. As it sank beneath her, she kicked hard for the surface, desperate for air.
It was only a few inches above her head.
She gasped; then her feet found bottom and she stood. She wiped the water from her eyes. She was in a bathtub.
Granted, it was the largest bathtub she had ever seen, as big as a small swimming pool. It was kidney- shaped and made of the smoothest white porcelain and sat alone in the middle of a giant room that looked like a gallery in a museum. The high ceilings were covered by enormous frescoed portraits of a dark-haired family who looked royal. A chain of golden roses framed each bust, and fleshy cherubs hovered between, playing trumpets toward the sky. Against each of the walls—which were papered in elaborate swirls of turquoise, pink, and gold— was an oversized, lavishly carved wooden armoire.
Luce sank back into the tub. Where was she now? She used her hand to skim the surface, parting about five inches of frothy bubbles the consistency of Chantilly cream. A pillow-sized sponge bobbed up, and she realized she had not bathed since Helston. She was filthy. She used the sponge to scrub at her face, then set to work peeling off the rest of her clothes. She sloshed all the sopping garments over the side of the tub.
That was when Bill floated slowly up out of the bathwater to hover a foot above the surface. The portion of the tub from which he’d risen was dark and cloudy with gargoyle grit.
“Bill!” she cried. “Can’t you tell I need a few minutes of privacy?”
He held a hand up to shield his eyes. “You done thrashing around in here yet, Jaws?” With his other hand, he wiped some bubbles from his bald head.
“You could have warned me that I was about to take a plunge underwater!” Luce said.
“I did warn you!” He hopped up to the rim of the tub and tottered across it until he was in Luce’s face. “Right as we were coming out of the Announcer. You just didn’t hear me because you were underwater!”
“Very helpful, thank you.”
“You needed a bath, anyway,” he said. “This is a big night for you, toots.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“What’s happening, she asks!” Bill grabbed her shoulder. “Only the grandest ball since the Sun King popped off! And I say, so what if this
Luce shrugged. A ball sounded fine, but it had nothing to do with her.
“I’ll clarify,” Bill said. “Everyone will be there including Lys Virgily. The Princess of Savoy? Ring a bell?” He bopped Luce on the nose. “That’s you.”
“Hmph,” Luce said, sliding her head back to rest against the soapy wall of the tub. “Sounds like a big night for
“See, remember when I told you—”
The knob on the door of the great bathroom was turning. Bill eyed it, groaning. “To be continued.”
As the door swung open, he held his pointy nose and disappeared under the water. Luce writhed and kicked him to the other side of the tub. He resurfaced, glared at her, and started floating on his back through the suds.
Bill might have been invisible to the pretty girl with corn-colored curls who was standing in the doorway in a long cranberry-colored gown—but Luce wasn’t. At the sight of someone in the tub, the girl reared back.
“Oh, Princess Lys! Forgive me!” she said in French. “I was told this chamber was empty. I—I’d run a bath for Princess Elizabeth”—she pointed to the tub where Luce was soaking—“and was just about to send her up along with her ladies.”
“Well—” Luce racked her brain, desperate to come off as more regal than she felt. “You may not s-send her up. Nor her ladies. This is my chamber, where I intended to bathe in peace.”
“I beg your pardon,” the girl said, bowing, “a thousand times.”
“It’s all right,” Luce said quickly when she saw the girl’s honest despair. “There must just have been a misunderstanding.”
The girl curtseyed and began to close the door. Bill peeked his horned head up above the surface of the water and whispered, “Clothes!” Luce used her bare foot to push him down.
“Wait!” Luce called after the girl, who slowly pushed the door open again. “I need your help. Dressing for the ball.”
“What about your ladies-in-waiting, Princess Lys? There’s Agatha or Eloise—”
“No, no. The girls and I had a spat,” Luce hurried on, trying not to talk too much for fear of giving herself away completely. “They picked out the most, um, horrid gown for me to wear. So I sent them away. This is an important ball, you know.”
“Yes, Princess.”
“Could you find something for me?” Luce asked the girl, gesturing with her head at the armoire.
“Me? H-help you dress?”
“You’re the only one here, aren’t you?” Luce said, hoping that something in that armoire would fit her—and look halfway decent for a ball. “What’s your name?”
“Anne-Marie, Princess.”
“Great,” Luce said, trying to channel Lucinda from Helston by simply acting self-important. And she threw in a bit of Shelby’s know-it-all attitude for good measure. “Hop to it, Anne-Marie. I won’t be late because of your sluggishness. Be a dear and fetch me a gown.”
Ten minutes later, Luce stood before an expansive three-way mirror, admiring the stitching on the bust of the first gown Anne-Marie had tugged from the armoire. The gown was made of tiered black taffeta, tightly gathered at the waist, then swirling into a gloriously wide bell shape near the ground. Luce’s hair had been swept up into a twist, then tucked under a dark, heavy wig of elaborate curls. Her face shimmered with a dusting of powder and rouge. She was wearing so many undergarments that it felt as though someone had draped a fifty-pound weight over her body. How did girls move in these things? Let alone dance?
As Anne-Marie drew the corset tighter around her torso, Luce gaped at her reflection. The wig made her look five years older. And she was sure she’d never had this much cleavage before. In any of her lives.
For the briefest moment, she allowed herself to forget her nerves about meeting her past princess self, and whether she’d find Daniel again before she made a huge mess out of their love—and simply felt what every other girl going to that ball that night must have felt: Breathing was overrated in a dress as amazing as this.
“You’re ready, Princess,” Anne-Marie whispered reverently. “I will leave you, if you’ll allow me.”
