More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Water women,” Vasyl said. “They have them here too.” “They have them everywhere,” Maryse said absently, looking for others. “There’s never a shortage of unlucky girls who end up in the water.” “What a grim thing.” “We are in a grim business, darling.”
Vasyl laughed, throwing an arm around her shoulders. “How lucky we are, then, to know what the dead say.” They didn’t, of course they didn’t, but it was a living, and thus better than a dying, as Vasyl would say when he was drunk.
“Is that all you brought with you?” “But of course.” Vasyl arched an impressive eyebrow. “Do you think perhaps we need more?” “Well, I’m sure I couldn’t say,” the woman replied, and Maryse marveled all over again that people would pay to hear Vasyl condescend to them, so long as he did it in a specific way.
Maybe people didn’t smile in whatever exotic foreign land she came from. Someday she and Vasyl would have to name that distant place, but so far, they knew it involved the deepest jungles and echoed with the roars of man-eating lions.
“Strong storms,” Vasyl mused. “What strange things your country admires.” It was just more of his nonsense, things he said to keep the customers suitably impressed with his etheric connections, but as they left downtown and pulled onto the wooded road, Maryse wondered. Strong storms and angry rivers. This part of the country wouldn’t love them, and while she was usually fine with that, now it made her shiver.
It lifted up to the sky with two low wings fanning out to either side, its diamond-paned windows picking up what little light they could and gleaming like coyote eyeshine in the dimming day. It looked to Maryse like the most dignified of institutions, and also the most Catholic, though that was a bit unlikely in this part of the country. It did not look like the sort of place that would call for a night of entertainment from an occultist and his exotic assistant, or perhaps it looked exactly like that. Maryse wasn’t sure, and she didn’t need to be, as long as they were paid.
A hard hand suddenly grasped Maryse’s elbow, making her draw a sharp breath through her teeth. She fought back her natural urge to kick and bite, instead turning to look up at a deep-eyed man with a bristling mustache who regarded her with curiosity. “What in the world are you?” he mused, looking her up and down. “Chinese by your looks, but surely your nose is too flat? And your skin is too dark, I shouldn’t wonder . . .”
Noo. I hate when people do this. 😑
Throughout my life, I've had so many people guess about me. 😐
Out of the corner of her eye, Maryse saw an older matron quizzing one of the girls about how she might handle a dinner party to which a clergyman had been invited but one of the guests had apparently sold their soul.
Unlike other spiritualists, Maryse and Vasyl traveled light, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t take the opportunity to close off the library and prepare. There had been far too many skeptics and newspapermen recently, all eager to catch out frauds and grifters. “Fucking Houdini,” Maryse grumbled, up on a chair to check the top of the library shelves for any charmed mirrors or listening imps.
“You know I heard Houdini’s the real deal? A Hungarian sword-swallower told me he’s descended from eighteen generations of Jewish magicians.” Vasyl came up from checking under the sideboard. “All clear over here.” “Either he’s the real deal and he could be generous to the rest of us, or he’s a fake like we are and he could mind his own damn business. Fine up here.”
They were so close that they could reach out and pinch her feet, her arms, her face, and sometimes they did, no matter how watchful Vasyl was. Tonight’s crowd seemed polite at least, gasping and silent in the right places as Vasyl described her foreign origins, how he had bought her, the youngest priestess of a forbidden religion, out of a cage in the distant market of Saigon. I’d like to go to Saigon, Maryse thought idly. Sounds warm.
The students were pressed into service, guiding the married couples and Maryse to their rooms. They carried linens, washbasins, and extra nightshirts, and they lit the way with fireflies, their halos from earlier pressed into more practical service. It was an easy enchantment and common along the rivers, where the fireflies massed like sparks of grace, but almost painfully old-fashioned since the advent of electricity.
What the dead have left, Maryse thought, and it wasn’t until Nina shuddered that she realized she had said it aloud.
Why do people write this? How does someone not realize they said something out loud? 🙈
Out front, Nina had hitched the same patient-looking horse to a sleigh painted an offensively cheerful yellow. Maryse found herself staring at the sleigh, and the other woman laughed, a little shrilly. “It was Emma’s idea, for the girls,” she said. “Back when there was an Emma, and there were girls.”
