Poison Priestess by Lana Popovic (some good books to read TXT) 📗

heralded by a swell of invisible violins, Adam appears beside the mirror between one breath and the next. As if conjuring himself out of thin air.

“Welcome, all you gathered,” he booms, spreading his hands with a flourish, his eyes aglitter with a ferocious mirth. He’s clad all in black, as ever, though beneath his cape he sports no waistcoat or shirt. Above his pantalon, his sinewy torso is adorned with blood-red sigils, candlelight gilding the flow of muscle and the neat taper of his waist. “I thank you for gracing my home with your presence. Now, shall we court our demonic liege together?”

The marquise titters beside me, then heaves an admiring sigh.

“I suppose he does not even need a living altar, does he?” she whispers to me behind her hand. “Not when he might as well be an offering himself.”

As the ritual begins, I see why Adam chooses not to speak when he performs his magic shows. Charming as he is in private, in public he does not possess anything close to my poetic flair. Though his ceremony is in close mimicry of mine, his prayers sound simple and slapdash, pallid reconstructions of my own.

And yet it galls me to admit that it all still works quite well, because what the magician lacks in substance, he makes up for in form. Though he steers clear of obvious tricks, the glassless mirror at the altar’s head does all the work for him. It produces stunning images, from roiling darkness to gray smoke to licking flames, followed by outlandish tableaux both lush and obscene.

The most extravagant of these evokes Eden after the fall, filled with smoldering embers and withered trees, their branches heavy not with apples but with snakes.

As if he is affording all of us a glimpse through some profane window, a stolen peek into perdition. A porthole into hell.

Then there is the subtext only I can read, a sly tongue-in-cheek mockery. The way he’s taken back everything I stole from him and remade it into something almost better. But even as it makes my blood boil like tallow, I find I cannot help but admire the enterprising mind behind it all. When he looks my way, cocking his head almost as if in question, his eyes gleam with something both more complex and benign than the malice I expected to see. Something much more interesting than mere triumph at having outwitted me.

He wants me to appreciate this performance, I realize with shock, a little of my umbrage fading; he seeks my admiration. Which means that his invitation, while deceptive, was not intended as an insult. Because he does not see me as an enemy—but rather, as a skilled opponent who has borrowed from him in the past. An adversary whose respect he wishes to win.

I could learn from him, I realize, from his keen scalpel of a mind and dispassionate cunning.

And once I have learned, I could be the one to best him.

When he reaches the ritual’s climax, Adam instructs us all to kneel. “Let us look upon the face of our dread lord,” he intones, “and bask in his regard. There is no longer any need to merely hope that your prayers will reach his ears. Not when you can look the daystar directly in the eye.”

“No,” the marquise breathes beside me as we both sink to our knees, sounding genuinely unnerved. “Surely that cannot be possible.”

I think of Adam’s gruesome demons’ masks at the maréchale’s bal masqué, and his dancing skeleton in the courtyard of the Pomme.

“He is a renowned illusionist, Marquise,” I whisper back. “Who knows what further deceptions he has in store.”

Once he has us on our knees, Adam stands beside the mirror and sweeps his arms up slowly, as if in wordless command. A series of gasps sound from the crowd as a demonic visage coalesces in the mirror, lurid and scarlet and somehow all aglow, a storm cloud of black hair whipping around its frightful face. It yawns its mouth open in a silent roar, exposing a serpent’s flicking tongue and dripping fangs. It is of a piece with the infernal landscapes that came before it, yet somehow more substantial, infinitely worse to behold.

From the collection of ragged breaths and wide eyes all around me, I can tell just how deeply it has struck home.

Another illusion, I think irritably, wincing as splinters dig into my knees. This diabolic apparition can be nothing but an image somehow cast onto the baize, as in a shadow play. Though I cannot think of how he achieves such depth and vibrancy of color. Worse yet is how eagerly his guests—including my marquise—lap it all up like starving strays. Their wonder is expansive and genuine, and I can barely fault them for it. His staging is immaculate, the marvel of his mirror all the greater when set against the dilapidation of the surrounding space.

It only reinforces my resolve to learn from him, then to best him at his own game, to win this feral little contest between us.

Because he cannot have this life I’ve fought for tooth and claw, wrested into being by the force of my own will. I will not be upstaged when I have been so clever and worked so hard for all of it.

Especially not when it has cost me Marie.

After the ritual, Adam departs from my example by hosting an actual late-night fete. While the guests are occupied with chattering to each other of everything that has passed, his violinists strike up a merrier song.

As servers file fleetly into the room, bearing platters of wine, cheese, and fruit, I circulate among the attending noblesse in an attempt to salvage the evening in my favor.

“Alors, what were your impressions, Madame La Voisin?” the Vicomte de Couserans asks me, his eyes drifting appreciatively down my neck and the exposed swell of my bosom. I curse Adam inwardly for having misled me into wearing a more revealing gown than I would have chosen, had I