Not the reaction I’d expected. “Are you saying I should wear it?”
“Evie and Maud didn’t agree on much where you were concerned, but neither wanted me to hold the power of your future in my hands. Both wanted you to forge your own path, make your own mistakes.”
The casual mention of my mother knocked the wind out of me, and Odette noticed my breathlessness.
“You look so much like your momma, the goddess weeps.” She cupped my cheeks between her palms. “What would she say if she could see us now?” She laughed softly. “Other than for me to keep my nose in my own business.”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I don’t remember much about her.”
Evangeline Marchand died when I was five. I can’t recall her face from memory, but I studied Maud’s albums often enough to know I saw a younger version of her each time I looked in the mirror. Thin lips, high cheekbones, sharp chin. I inherited those from Mom. The dark tangle of my hair belonged to her too. Whoever my father was, he hadn’t contributed much. Not to my DNA and not to my life. But I got his amber eyes.
“More’s the pity,” Odette sympathized. “Maybe if she had been allowed to choose…” She flexed her fingers as though recalling how she had once held Mom’s hand, guided her. “Evie walked her path with her eyes wide open. There was only ever one outcome available to her once she knew the end I foresaw.”
That end came in the form of a car wreck the morning after we arrived in Savannah.
Maud admitted once, on a night when guilt had tipped back more than one wine bottle, that she had been the one who begged Mom to stop zigzagging across the country. The best thing, in her opinion, was for us both to put down roots. But the second Mom stopped being a moving target, death had struck her down.
Maud never forgave herself for her advice, yet another reason she wanted Odette blind to my future.
The lovingly renovated carriage house Maud had intended to be our home never received its promised family. Instead, a kind man dressed in black sat me down in Woolly’s parlor the morning after the funeral to explain that Maud had been named my legal guardian.
She formally adopted me when I turned thirteen. Though she could have passed for a woman in her midfifties, she was four hundred and twenty-five the summer we met, well on her way to the maximum life expectancy of a necromancer. Any hope for biological children had died centuries earlier. That didn’t mean having an heir of her own shaping didn’t appeal to her. Up until that point, her nephew, Linus Andreas Lawson III, had served as both Woolworth and Lawson heir. But in order for my claim to be recognized by the Society, I had to first take her last name so that her line might be continued.
Considering all she had given me, how much I had desperately wanted to belong to her—to anyone—I decided the cost of my last name was a fair price for that acceptance.
“The bangle,” I said, dragging Odette’s eyes back into focus and my thoughts from the past. “What can you tell me about it?”
“They’re called avowals. They’re symbolic of a blood oath given between two consenting parties.” Her lips compressed. “Gifts of this caliber are rarer than the Last Seeds themselves. Pins, broaches, bangles, rings. Each carries a significance. Such baubles are reserved for clan heritors and persons of great import the vampires want protected from tampering by enemy clans. And also for lovers, wives, children.”
Throat dry, I asked, “What is the symbolism of a bangle?”
“The tube is seamless. There is no end or beginning.” She worried the piece of metal affixed in the center. “This is a promise that your union will be the same.”
I almost swallowed my tongue. “Our what?”
“The metal is the curious part,” she prattled on. “What is its purpose?”
“When I put it on, these needlelike things stabbed me in the wrist. Are they not supposed to do that?”
“The band should be unadorned, a statement in its own right, but this one is not. That it wanted to taste your blood… Hmm.” She tapped a finger against her bottom lip. “Can you remove it? Have you tried?”
“I wanted a second opinion first.” I offered a weak smile.
“Well, go on then.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Let’s see what it does.”
“That’s not as comforting as I’d hoped.” I slid the bangle off my hand as easy as pie. “Huh. Guess it comes off easier than it goes on.” She gestured for me to go ahead, and I put it back on. “Well, that went—” I hissed as its prongs stabbed me. “Dang it.”
“Tell me what the vampire said when he offered this to you.”
“He offered me an alliance with Clan Volkov.” I scrunched up my nose. “He said I would be drowning in such offers soon, and he wanted his to be the first and the most generous.”
“An alliance?” She chortled. “What did you say?”
“That I couldn’t imagine why he would want to align with me, and that I couldn’t possibly accept this—or him—until I had answers. He convinced me to keep the bangle, but as to the rest… What does this mean?”
Her eyes drifted closed for a moment before a frustrated growl parted her lips. “I thought perhaps I could divine the future for Monsieur Volkov and seek your answers there, but he flew too close to your sun and has been burned from my psychic eye.” She tapped the side of her head. “Sometimes I glimpse your future from the corner of another’s destiny.”
“It’s all right.” I took her papery hands in mine. “Don’t strain yourself trying.”
“I have a theory, if it helps.” Her fingers tightened around mine. “Until and unless you accept his proposal, the bangle will remain unmastered. He’s released it into your care for now, but it must verify your identity prior to each wearing. Should you accept, I imagine it will be attuned to you and the metal removed.”
“That makes sense.” I spun it around my wrist. “As long as I keep it on, I can avoid the bite.”
Her eyes glittered. “Avoiding the bite seems unlikely if you continue your dalliance with Volkov.”
“Hold up. There is no dalliance.” I clamped a hand on the side of my throat in reflex. “No one is getting dallied.”
Her tone gentled. “You do understand what an offer of alliance means, don’t you, bébé?”
“He wants to unite Clan Volkov and the Woolworth bloodline…” Dread ballooned in my chest. “Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” Odette patted my cheek. “You are the Woolworth heir for all that they stripped you of your title and fortune. The match is a good one, if unorthodox. To offer up what must be their heritor instead of a clan noble speaks to their hunger for your acceptance.”
“Plus, I’ll be dead in four hundred or so years, and he can move on to a wife of his choosing. What’s a half millennium in the grand scheme of his immortality? A drop in the bucket.”
“Men like Volkov are not for keeping, not for loving,” she agreed sadly. “They are for savoring during the time we possess them and then releasing them when we can no longer hold them.”
Nice of her to gloss over the bits where he would remain forever young while I aged. Slowly, yes, but no less surely. What woman’s pride could survive waking one day and realizing your husband could pass for your son? Your grandson? Not that children would be an option for us.
Maud had never hinted at planning an arranged marriage for me, but such mutually beneficial unions were the threads that bound High Society families. You couldn’t walk through an assemblage without rubbing elbows with the victim of a marriage of convenience.
“There’s more I haven’t told you.” I started with the hinky wards, segued into vampire stalking me for his friend-deficient master, and ended with his implication the Grande Dame had a vested interest in me. “None of this makes sense.”