She was in the house. He blinked and the image of Cerise vanished.
Genevieve’s mouth contorted, struggled to form a word. William’s eyes burned from the pollen that swirled in the air about them in a snowfall of tiny powdered stars. It filled his mouth and his nose, it burned his throat. “Before …” Genevieve whispered. “My daughter …”
Her whip swung toward the desk and rolled back, twisted about his shoulder with a gentleness equivalent to a caress. A leather journal fell at his feet.
“No choice … made me …”
“She knows,” he told her. “Cerise knows.”
“Tell Sophie … So sorry …”
“I will.”
She squeezed his hand. “Kill me … Please … So Ceri … doesn’t have to …”
The knife felt heavy in his hands, as if filled with lead. He raised it.
She smiled. Her fragile sharp-boned face, her sunken cheeks, her eyes drowning in pain, all of it lit, united and transformed by that weak smile, made radiant and timeless. William knew he would remember it to his death.
He swung. The blade sliced cleanly through her flesh. Her head dropped to the floor and rolled, releasing a torrent of blood from the stump of her neck. It splashed onto the floorboards, and the roots stretched toward it. The vesicles pumped, sucking up the liquid in a cannibalistic cycle even as blood continued to flow from the wound.
William picked up the journal off the floor.
Her head lay on its side. She was still smiling and her blue eyes focused on him. “Thank you,” bloodless lips mouthed.
The pollen had clogged his lungs, sapping his strength. William pushed to his feet and staggered to the door, half-blind, stumbling, exhausted, and weak. His hand found the handle, and he lay on it with his weight. It fell away before him, and he crashed into the hallway. The cool smoothness of the wooden floor slapped his cheek.
The door.
William dragged himself upright, shut it, and sagged against it. His lungs burned. The last whiffs of pollen swirled around him.
William concentrated on the rising and falling of his chest. His hands flipped the journal open on their own. Long streaks of cursive lined the pages, too out of focus. He wiped the last tears from his eyes and brought the journal so close the pages nearly touched his nose.
R1DP6WR12DC18HF1CW6BY12WW18BS3VL9S R1DP6WG12E 5aba 1abaa
Gibberish. No, not gibberish, code.
A rapid staccato of footsteps echoed through the hallway. He dropped his hand to his side, letting the journal hang along his leg.
Cerise rounded the corner, Richard behind her. She raced toward him.
“Are you hurt?”
William shook his head and tried to tell her he was okay, but words wouldn’t come out. He dropped the journal into her hands. Understanding slowly crept into her face. She turned corpse white and tried to push past him. “Let me in.”
“No,” he rasped. His voice finally worked.
“I have to see her!”
“No. She didn’t want you to. It’s over.”
Richard caught her shoulders. “He’s right. It’s done.”
“Let me see my mother!”
She jerked from him, but Richard held on. “It’s over. It’s all over and she’s resting now. Don’t taint your memories. Remember her as she was. Come on. Let’s get William into the fresh air.”
Cerise said nothing. Her shoulders slumped. She gulped and slid her shoulder under his right arm, while Richard pulled him up. Cerise’s arm wound her way around William’s waist. He thought of telling her he wasn’t that weak, but instead leaned on her and let himself be led out of the house into the sunlight.
THEY had set the house on fire. It burned like a funeral pyre, belching thick acrid smoke into the air. The flames consumed the old boards with a loud snapping, snaked their way up the walls, melted the glass of the hothouse, and Posad’s plants hissed and wailed as the fire sank its teeth into their green flesh. Nobody arrived to stop the blaze, and even if they had, the fire had spread too far and too fast.
Cerise refused to leave. William sat next to her. He felt her pain, sharp and brutal. There was nothing he could do, except sit next to her. She didn’t cry. She didn’t rave. She just sat there, radiating grief and fury.
Soon the whole structure stood engulfed, no more than a mere skeleton of stone and timber wearing a mantle of heat. She sat on the edge of the clearing, reading the journal in the light of the raging blaze, until the roof crashed with the thunderous popping of ancient support beams, spraying glowing sparks everywhere, spooking the horses, and forcing the two of them to retreat from the heat.
TWENTY-SEVEN
WILLIAM reclined, sinking deeper into the comfortable softness of the Mars’ library chair. Spider was gone. Gone somewhere in the Mire. Everything rode on that damn journal. It would tell him where Spider went and what he wanted from Cerise. Except the fucking thing was in code.
Cerise took a spot by the window with the journal, a pen, and some paper.
The library was crowded. The Mars kept coming in and out, radiating anxiety. William clenched his teeth. All of their tension made him jumpy. In the corner Kaldar brooded over a glass of wine. He, Richard, and Erian sat by the door, like three watch dogs.
William kept running the pattern in his head. He’d memorized a page and a half of code. It was a code, he was sure of it. It had a pattern. For one, the numbers ran in sequence.
R1DP6WR12DC18HF1CW6BY12WW18BS3VL9S R1DP6WG12E
The numbers repeated themselves, but rarely with the same letters—R1, P6, R12, C18, and then F1, W6, Y12 … Or was it 1D, 6W? They differed by 6. Except for the first interval from 1 to 6, which differed by 5 … But then there was the second sequence—3, 9, 15, 19. Sometimes the numbers would run the entire sequence, and sometimes they ended and a different series started over.
He had hammered his brain against the pattern, ever since he saw it. Codes weren’t his thing, but he knew the basic premise: figure out the combination of letters and numbers occurring most often and try sticking the most often used letter of the alphabet in its place. But he was a hunter, not a code breaker.
Erian swung his legs off the chair and paced, measuring the library’s length with long strides. His voice was quiet. “It’s been three hours. She’s not going to break it.”
“She’ll break it,” Richard said. “It was Vernard’s life’s work, and she was his favorite grandchild.”
“Yeah.” A bitter edge in Erian’s voice set off an alarm in William’s head.
“What is your problem?” Kaldar kept his voice low. “Did she spit in your breakfast?”
Erian pivoted on his foot. “It’s over. Why don’t the two of you get it? The feud is done, we’ve won, we’re fucking done.”
“It’s not over until we have Gustave and Spider’s head,” Richard told him.
Erian swung his hand, his face slapped with disgust. “The whole damn family went mad.”
Richard rose smoothly, crossed the library, and pulled a large leather volume off the shelf.
“What is it?” Kaldar asked.
“Grandfather was exiled under Article 8.3 of the Dukedom of Louisiana’s Criminal Code. I just realized that I never thought to check what Article 8.3 was.”
Richard unlocked the leather flap securing the book, flipped the cover open, and riffled through the yellow pages. He frowned. “Found it.”
Richard raised the book, showing them the page. The red-lettered heading read “Malpractice and Corruption of Vows.” A long list of subsections crawled down from it.
