I think I blacked out for a moment because the next thing I knew I was on the ground, my head pounding, my vision blurry. With a great effort I turned to my left and saw Benjamin lying in the dirt, clutching his chest. I turned the other way and saw Julien sitting up, his man attending to him.
“The American has been hit,” a man shouted. “The woman, too. That’s blood on her hand. Get help.”
My hand, the man had said. My right hand? That I painted with? Had I deflected Benjamin’s first shot with my hand? But it didn’t hurt. All the pain was wrapped around my head, squeezing my skull. A few moments passed. I must have closed my eyes again.
“Sandrine?” It was Julien. Beside me. Sitting at an awkward angle, his arms crossed over his chest. “You little fool, why did you take such a risk? He could have killed you.”
“I knew he was going to cheat. He brought a second pistol, didn’t he?”
“You saved my life.”
“It was my fault you were even here. I couldn’t let him—” I broke off, suddenly noticing what Julien had been trying to hide from me. A crimson stain was spreading across his white shirt. “You’re bleeding? You’re bleeding. Are you all right?”
Julien’s shirt was soaked through with blood. It leached out and soaked into the ground. It saturated my clothes, its warmth reaching my flesh, its sweet smell permeating the air.
“The bullet just grazed my side. I’ll be fine,” he tried to reassure me through labored breaths. “But Benjamin isn’t going to make it, Sandrine. He’s not ever going to bother you again,” he said, and then he collapsed.
Chapter 40
They brought Julien back to Maison de la Lune with me in my carriage and summoned the doctor. As it turned out, he wasn’t fine. As it turned out, the butt of my father’s gun had deflected Benjamin’s first shot, but he used his second pistol to shoot Julien in the stomach before Julien shot him. No major organs appeared to have been damaged, but Julien was losing too much blood too quickly, and the doctor told me that he was afraid if he couldn’t stop the bleeding soon, Julien was not going to make it.
I was bruised, but none of my injuries were serious. I’d fallen on a rocky patch of earth. I’d cut my hand on a sharp stone. Hit my head on another. And a third had shattered one of the rosettes on the ruby necklace.
As I sat in the sickroom by Julien’s side, watching him losing all that blood, I knew it was time. He’d asked me to do this weeks ago. I hadn’t been strong enough then, I still wasn’t now, but I needed to show him how much I cared even if it was too late.
“Look, Julien, look.” I reached up and around the back for the clasp and found the Ouroboros waiting. The dragon allowed me to take his tail out of his mouth this time.
I took off the antique I’d been wearing for more than three months. Now it sat on my lap. I stared at the odd piece of jewelry that had encircled the neck of so many of my ancestors, tethering them to La Lune. Connecting them to the witch who had done everything to love again.
The dragon’s ruby eyes flashed at me in the light. As if he were winking. I examined the rubies, all intact except for the one floret that had been damaged. How odd. I could see that the floret wasn’t a ruby at all but two halves of a crystal casket filled with some red substance. I examined the other flowers and found a slight indentation on the rim of each. All of them opened. Every crystal was filled with the same red-caked substance.
Suddenly I heard the words that Dujols had said to me, but heard them spoken in a whisper, by a woman in a dream, words mixed with tears.
Make of the blood, a stone. Make of a stone, a powder. Make of a powder, life everlasting. Save him, Sandrine, save him.
I tilted the necklace toward the light. The red-caked interior had no glitter and no gloss. I ran my finger over it. It was dry. Dry? Almost powdery. Almost like . . .
No, it wasn’t possible. But it did feel like solid pigment. Like a brick of watercolor that you drew your wet brush across to access.
I licked my finger and touched the cake, and it came away red. The same color of the unfinished lips of the women in the painting. Pigment this color was in the studio. Bottles and bottles of it. I’d seen it.
What kind of necklace was this? What kind of special precious paint did it contain?
La Lune didn’t speak to me with words, but her thoughts were inside my head. She knew the spells. She could save Julien.
“I have to do this,” I whispered to him. “I have to allow her in. Please forgive me.”
He shook his head. “No. Let me go. Let me go. Please, Sandrine. She’s evil. She’ll taint you.”
He was still talking, his voice weak and faint, when I left the room.
As I climbed the steps to the bell tower, I knew that I would never again attempt to pretend that La Lune was a figment of my imagination born out my depressed state over my father’s death . . . my reading that Oscar Wilde book at the wrong time . . . or my grandmother’s fear of a family curse.
La Lune was real, and I had known that for a long time even if I wasn’t always able to admit it. It was La Lune who had brought Julien to me—or me to Julien—and she could take him away just as easily. She might have already taken him away, just to prove to me that she could.
I opened the door to the ancient studio, put the necklace down on the table, and gathered the materials I needed: a knife, a bottle of linseed oil, my palette.
“Don’t make me do this,” I shouted to her. “There must be some other way to save him.”
I listened for her answer, but she was silent.
“He’s in love with me. That happened because of who I am. It had nothing to do with you.”
Still she did not answer.
“I won’t let you bully me. I am alive—you aren’t.” But in the end that didn’t matter.
As I scraped the cake from inside the necklace, the bells in the tower began to chime. Slowly. Marking the occasion. I felt La Lune’s excitement flowing through my blood in my veins. She was going to achieve what she wanted after all, despite all my best intentions. But what good would my resolve be if Julien died?
I wasn’t the one with the power to keep Julien alive. She was.
Even if it was wrong, even if it meant opening myself up to all the darkness in her soul, I had no choice but to do everything I could to try and save Julien.
When I had enough powder, I poured out the oil and blended the concoction, watching the pigment metamorphose into a mound of silken, sensuous, ruby paint. The exact color, I thought, of the lips of the women in the portraits. The lips that looked as if they had been kissed too often.
After I’d mixed up the paint, I chose a fine sable brush. The best one I had. Closing the door on the tolling bells, I climbed down the narrow staircase from the rue du Dragon tower and made my way back to the main part of the house.
Chapter 41
Palette and brush in hand, I stood on the main staircase and examined the portraits that had hung there for as long as the house had belonged to my family. I turned up all the gas lamps so the hallway was flooded with light. I dipped the sable tip into the vermilion paint.
How dare I touch one of these masterpieces? It was blasphemy. All around me, the house seemed to be waiting, almost holding its breath. This was no time to be hesitant. Julien was fading.
The portrait was only a two-dimensional painting. It had no value compared to a human life. What difference did it make to anyone if I finished one of these paintings after all this time? Who was there to object?
I lifted the brush to the portrait of Lunette Lumière, and as I did, I heard Dujols warning me that there was no way to know what La Lune would do to her host when finally given a firm foothold.
How much of me, if any, would survive?