night lets out a squeal and rubs the little pearl on her pinky finger. “Slate! Do you have any more tricks? Can you make something else disappear?”
“Your virginity.”
That gets a booming laugh from Alma and a look of absolute repulsion from Cadence. You’d think I was a leper.
“Too late for that.” Alma’s smile is as wide as the Strait of Gibraltar. “We’re going to go grab something to eat if—”
“Slate was just leaving.”
I can take a hint.
I bid them goodbye, glancing up at the cupola dripping colored light on the giant, gunmetal-gray clock face decorated with none other than a golden outline of the quatrefoil—of fucking course. I stride down the aisle, the ochre-and-white floor tiles brown with slippery slush, then shoulder the heavy wooden door open. When it clangs shut behind me, the icy level of hell that is Brume hits me anew. The mist sinks into the wool of my peacoat. The cold freezes my nostril hairs and eyeballs. The only part of me that’s warm is the hand with the ring.
I crunch across the campus lawn, past a giant building that looks a little like a fancy art museum what with its limestone façade and ginormous picture windows. As I follow the windy road that laces around the village, I go over what I learned in the library.
I’d been hoping for a set of step-by-step instructions on how to get the damn thing off so I could hock it for a pretty penny, screwing De Morel over at the same time. But now, I have no choice but to pay the man a second visit, because I finally believe in magic.
8
Cadence
La Taverne de Quartefeuille is busy, which isn’t surprising considering nothing else is open in town.
When I walk in with Alma, it seems like all of Brume is wedged between the roughcast stone walls of the bistro that doles out the best fare in all of Brittany. Nolwenn, the owner, stops on her way to a table to greet me with a kiss perfumed by puffs of savory steam curling out of the ceramic casserole dish she’s carrying. The buckwheat and meat stew makes my stomach growl.
“I just cleared a table upstairs, ma chérie.” She nods to the crooked wooden staircase at the end of the bar, her puffy, peroxided hair not even shifting thanks to her passion for hairspray.
As we pass behind the jampacked row of red leather stools, I catch sight of black curls and gloves. Ugh. Why does Slate have to be everywhere? I speed-walk past him, towing Alma along before she can invite him upstairs or into her bed.
His little joke about absconding with her virginity has run on a loop inside my brain since we left the library. I’ve never met a man as crude and slick as Slate. To think that, when he showed me his birth certificate back in the library, his eyes teeming with hurt, I felt sympathy for him. The grief, or whatever I saw in his expression, was probably all an act.
I hate that I fell for it.
The wall along the stairs is covered in framed black-and-white pictures of Nolwenn and her white-haired, white-bearded husband, Juda, their arms around various celebrities who traveled through Brume on magical pilgrimages. Romain, their grandson, is also in a few, as are Gaëlle and Matthias. Matthias is Nolwenn and Juda’s son, but since he abandoned Gaëlle with three kids, he’s not talked about much. Or at least, not here.
“I still can’t believe it just up and started ticking,” Alma says, the stairs creaking like old bones under her platform boots. At least she traded in her skimpy black dress for a low-cut emerald V-neck sweater and black leggings.
“I know.” I tried calling Papa when we left the temple, but I got a text message that he was in physical therapy and that he’d phone me as soon as he was done.
I scan the low-timbered second story for the free table Nolwenn mentioned. It’s all the way across the room, beneath the window swathed in lacy white curtains. The square panes are steamed from the arctic chill outside and cozy heat billowing inside.
As I ford through the room, I wave hello to a few people and lean over to kiss Gaëlle’s toasty cheek. A smudge of magenta lipstick adorns her light-brown skin, courtesy of Nolwenn.
“The hat looked amazing on you last night, sweetie,” she says with a smile.
“It’s officially my favorite hat.”
“I told her she should wear it every day. I think