imperfect half-measures. Like the servants who didn’t wish to venture outside the castle walls and chop more wood for the fire. What lessons she could teach them! Perhaps she would. As she crossed the floor, looking down at the bowl of soup, she realized, with a jolt of surprise, that the next move was hers. She could give the poison to Marie-Madeline’s father or she could feed it to the lazy servants who had ignored her command. For once, she was the actor, not the spectator.
For three hundred years she’d had to sit by and hope humans used the resolve she gave them. Her reward was pain and suffering and chaos. But if they failed, she was left hungry—as helpless as a starving street urchin, begging for a crust of bread. That was what the humans had called the offspring of the Nixen—urchins—as if they knew and laughed at the power they wielded over these demi-demons. And yet, here she was, bearing in her hands the power of death, to deliver as she saw fit. She smiled. Perhaps she would stay a little longer than Marie-Madeline intended.
Hearing her footsteps, Marie-Madeline’s father turned. “You didn’t need to bring that yourself.”
She curtseyed. “It is a daughter’s duty, and privilege, to serve her father.”
He beamed. “And it is a father’s joy to have such a dutiful daughter. You see now that I was right about Gaudin Sainte-Croix. You belong with your husband, and with your father.”
She bowed her head. “It was a passing fancy, one that shames me all the more for the shame it brought on my family.”
“We will speak no more of it,” he said, patting her arm. “Let us enjoy our holiday together.”
“First, you should enjoy your soup, Father. Before it grows cold.”
For the next four days, d’Aubrey suffered the agonies of a slow death. She stayed at his side, genuinely doing all she could for him, knowing it wouldn’t save him, using the excuse to linger and drink in his suffering. At last, he lay in her arms, a hairsbreadth from death, and he used his last words to thank her for everything she’d done.
“It was my pleasure,” she said, smiling as she closed his eyes.
It took six years for the Nix to grow bored of Marie-Madeline, and exhaust the possibilities of her silly little life. Time to move on, to find fresh opportunities…but not before she had wrung the last bit of merriment from this one.
First, she’d killed Sainte-Croix. Nothing personal in that. He’d been a fine lover and a useful partner, but she had no more need of him, except to let him play his part in the last act of the drama. He’d died in his laboratory, an apparent victim of his own poison, his glass mask having slipped off at an inopportune moment.
After anonymously alerting the police about Sainte-Croix’s death, she’d rushed to the commissary and demanded the return of a box from the sealed laboratory. The box was hers, and must be returned unopened. Naturally, that only guaranteed that the police would open it. Inside, they found the bond she’d given Sainte-Croix for the poison used to kill the Marquise’s father, plus Sainte-Croix’s legacy to her—an assortment of poisons the likes of which the French authorities had never seen. She’d fled Paris, and taken refuge in a convent. The trial came and Marie-Madeline, having not appeared to defend herself, was sentenced to death.
And so it was done.
The Nix returned to Paris, where she knew Marie-Madeline would be swiftly apprehended. Taking a quiet room in an inn, she lay down on the bed, closed her eyes, and recited the incantation for ending the possession. After a few minutes, she opened her eyes and lifted her hand. Still human.
With a grunt, she closed her eyes and repeated the spell. Nothing happened. She snarled, gathered her spirit form into a ball, and flung herself upward, saying the words again, voice rising, filling with fury as her soul stayed lashed to this human form. For two hours, she battered herself against the flesh walls of her prison.
Then she began to scream.
Nicolette peered out across the crowd amassed in the courtyard, praying she’d see no one she recognized. If her mother found out she was here—she shuddered, feeling the sting of her mother’s tongue. Death is not a spectacle, she’d say. Nicolette should know that better than anyone. Yet she wasn’t here to see the Marquise de Brinvilliers die…not really. It was the spectacle surrounding the spectacle that drew