A photo of Felicia Davin
Hi.
I’m Felicia Davin, a writer and reader of romance, fantasy, and science fiction.
A photo of Felicia Davin
I’m Felicia Davin, a writer and reader of romance, fantasy, and science fiction.
Chiron refusa l’immortalité, informé des conditions d’icelle, par le Dieu même du temps, et de la durée, Saturne son père : Imaginez de vrai, combien serait une vie perdurable, moins supportable à l’homme, et plus pénible, que n’est la vie que je lui ai donnée. Si vous n’aviez pas la mort, vous me maudiriez sans cesse de vous en avoir privé.
Chiron refused immortality when his father Saturn, god of time and duration, told him of its conditions: “Imagine, in truth, how much less bearable and how much more painful an everlasting life would be, compared to the life I have given you. If you did not have death, you would curse me forever for depriving you of it.”
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, I, 19, “Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir” (To philosophize is to learn to die), 1595
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895
1825
Written on encrypted paper
I have survived everyone who has ever loved me.
I have also survived Jean-Louis-Alphonse Malbosc, a man whose rapacious love became indistinguishable from hatred. He will not survive me. I have never written that down before. What need is there for paper when the vow is carved on my heart?
Granted, this paper is special. It reveals my words only to readers I permit.
The paper’s magic encryption was devised by Sophie’s ward Victor Beauchêne, a horrible child of twenty or thirty years of age, useful for their zeal in studying magical artifacts and for impersonating their dead brother, but otherwise a little blond pest. Like their aunt Sophie, they make tiresome daily attempts to befriend me. They share opinions with wild abandon. For the past year of our work together, I have been subjected to Victor’s judgments of my home (“spooky, but I’m so concerned about the mess that I’ve stopped noticing”) and my behavior (“it’s very unsettling how little you sleep,” “what if you went to the theater or for a walk in the park,” “I’ve heard needlework can be soothing”). I have learned, against my will, their preferences regarding food, drink, clothing, literature, art, and whether they should organize their catalogue of enchanted artifacts alphabetically, chronologically, or by type. Worst of all, I have endured endless rhapsodizing about their lover, the young artist Morère, and how happy the two of them are.
I refuse to respond in kind. My preferences are of no importance and I have no happiness to speak of. They remain undeterred.
Victor explained how they like to be referred to as “they,” in addition to “he,” to reflect their status as something other than a man. I told them I didn’t wish to be referred to by them or anyone else. They mistook it for humor. After much badgering, I relented and said if they must speak of me with Sophie or Morère, “she” is acceptable. They smiled. They have done that to me on several occasions. Unthinkable.
Enough of these annoyances. That is not why I am writing.
Victor is a gadfly, but there is a reason I tolerate them. This encrypted paper will serve as a record. I have survived too long for memory—Victor’s quest to catalogue all the artifacts in my home is often accompanied by exclamations over my stores of knowledge, but I can no longer picture my mother’s face. There are things I need to remember.
Last night’s events, for instance.
I was hunting Malbosc. I’d been on my feet for hours. Days. The enchanted compass needle flicked wildly, following my discomposed thoughts as I trudged through the darkened streets of an ostentatious Right Bank neighborhood. Finding and killing Malbosc is the sole purpose of my interminable life, so my lack of focus was inexcusable. The compass had guided me faultlessly on my long slog of a journey to Toulon and back. Its magic requires nothing more than concentration. I did not have enough.
It was a mistake to go in search of Malbosc as soon as I’d returned to Paris, taking no rest after my weeks of travel, but I had no chance of sitting still at home. I could not wait. Once I’d secured the compass, its small brass case had a weight in my pocket far beyond what it should. When I gripped it in my palm, I swear my pulse made it vibrate. At last I had a way to find Malbosc for certain.
In retrospect, that was a foolish hope, as hope often is.
I circled the house. It belonged to Renard Bertin. I am not as quick with the names and addresses of all of Malbosc’s disciples as young Victor, who spent so many months hidden among them. Bertin, a forty-something man of enormous wealth and the same insatiable grasping as all the rest of them, had not featured in Victor’s reports as one of Malbosc’s intimates. But there remains much I do not know.
A brief observation from the shadows was all I needed to determine that a ground-floor window on the left side of the front door would be the best entry. It was unlatched.
Too easy, I thought, and had no idea how right I was.
I was armed, though only lightly. I did not intend to engage Malbosc unless I was sure of my kill. He should have died months ago when Victor cut his head off, but through the intervention of some unknown person or artifact (likely both), his head had disappeared from the room by the time I arrived to burn his body. Ever since, I have fruitlessly observed everyone I knew to be acquainted with him. Has his head become a gruesome relic, or has he contrived some other embodiment? His cunning makes me suspect the latter. I cannot stop until I know for sure. What condition Malbosc is in, and how I might transmute it into death, remain mysteries.
First I have to find him.
The compass pointed the way. If I could confirm that he was in Bertin’s house, I could study its plan, watch his movements, and perfect my approach. Before his failed decapitation, Malbosc was in and out of Paris, hiding in the spare bedrooms—or sometimes the beds—of his most devoted followers, people who believe he’ll grant them riches and magic and everlasting life.
Malbosc has clung to life for an extra century, but he possesses no immortality. Only a few secret caches of my blood, taken by force. Victor and I have discovered and retrieved all the ones we knew of. It gave me no peace. Malbosc is an inveterate secret keeper; I know because I was one of his secrets.
The stone was rough under my fingers, the windowpane cool. The hinges swung silently. I dropped into a crouch inside what I suspected was a parlor. Heavy drapes blocked most of my view. I pulled one over myself, crept to the side, and rose.
Someone slammed me against the wall.
The drape was between us, but I knew it could not be Malbosc. My assailant was too large in all dimensions, and Malbosc would never stoop to using his body if he could use a weapon instead.
I brought my knee up as hard as I could. My body is a perfectly serviceable weapon.
My assailant grunted. Hurt, but not debilitated. I’d missed the point of greatest pain. Their forearm remained pinned across my collarbones. I could still breathe. Their whole weight pressed into me. We were so close that the heat of their body through the drape contrasted with the chill of the wall at my back.
My pulse ought to have been racing, but instead it was my mind. My knee to the groin had accomplished nothing. My assailant must be accustomed to violence. They’d taken me by surprise, moving noiselessly and effortlessly in the dark. A member of the household would have no reason to eschew light—or leave the window unlatched. My assailant was an intruder.
I can hear Victor’s voice in my head saying “a fellow intruder”—what a curse, to hear them even when they are not present—but I feel no fellowship with anyone.
If my assailant intended to steal cursed artifacts from Bertin’s collection, they were greedy, cruel, or both. If they’d come to find Malbosc, nothing good could result. Either way, we’d have to fight.
They ripped the drape away. It happened in the space of a second with no time for me to escape. They pushed me into the wall again, neither covering my mouth nor cutting off my air, but trapping my arms. Without the curtain between us, my suspicion of their height was confirmed. My face was level with the top of their chest, or it would have been if their arm wasn’t between us. When I inhaled, it was the mingled scents of sweat and caustic laundry soap.
In the slant of light from the window, they squinted at me. I was in trousers with my hair braided and pinned up under a battered hat. It was how I’d dressed to ride into the city earlier in the day. I was still begrimed from my travels. Before breaking in, I’d tied a kerchief over my face.
They might as well have covered their own face for all I could see of it.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?”
Their voice was a low rumble. Based on that and the hard, flat plane of their chest, they might have been a man, but such things aren’t always evident. I do hate to be wrong.
I hate to answer questions, too. Their forearm still barred my collarbones, and their other hand was on my shoulder. I brought my hands together, palms flat against each other, and speared them toward my assailant’s chin. They jerked to avoid my sudden movement, allowing me to elbow them in the face instead. I wrapped my arms around theirs, twisted our position, and rammed them into the wall. They gasped.
I thought I’d won then. I should have climbed out the window and come back another night. Unfortunately, the fight had roused something in me. My fatigue inverted into vigor.
I pulled a knife from my boot and brought it to their throat. “You first. Who are you and what are you doing here?”
In this position, with the advantage of the window, I could see the scruff of a beard on their face. The light was insufficient to determine whether it was brown or black. They were dressed in dark clothes, a shapeless coat and trousers.
“You’re armed,” said the stranger. Yet the point of my knife might as well have been the tip of a feather for all they noticed it. “Maybe you have another little knife somewhere on you, but I’d guess not much else, so I don’t think you came to do violence. No bag, so you can’t be planning to steal more than what will fit in your pockets.”
I had three other knives on my person, and I don’t wear my sword when I plan to climb through a window. “‘Little’ doesn’t preclude ‘lethal.’”
They huffed through their nose. It must have been frustration; it couldn’t possibly have been amusement. “You came here same as I did. You want a look around. I’d be happy to let you.”
“Let me?” I dragged the point lightly over their skin.
“You’re a criminal, I’m a criminal, no need for trouble unless we’re after the same thing.”
“We are not.”
There is no one on Earth who needs to kill Malbosc as badly as I do, not even Victor, who nearly succeeded. I let Victor and their lover try, but I refuse to share my project with any strange interloper who comes along. I will find and end Malbosc alone.
“I don’t think so either,” they said. “Would be funny, though.”
The alleged humor eluded me.
“Then you’ll let me go? If Malbosc is here, I’d like a word with him,” they said.
“You’re… working with him?” The thought that I’d been touching someone who would willingly ally themself with Malbosc made me recoil.
An instant’s error, but the instant sufficed.
They seized my wrist and wrenched the blade away from their neck. My reactions lagged with fatigue. Before I knew it, my knife was in their hand. I jumped back from a slash. Reaching for the knife in my other boot cost me precious seconds. Once it was in my grip, I lunged. They dodged. They were as agile as they were silent.
In the fight, I had no time for begrudging admiration, but now that I am recording it and forced to reckon with my own defeat, I must acknowledge it. They bested me. I was exhausted and unprepared. Anyone else would be dead.
I doubt they meant their slash to cut my abdomen quite so deeply. My footing slipped and I fell toward the knife. There was the usual blaze of pain that accompanies a stab to the gut. I crumpled to my knees and then to my face.
I wish I were not so well acquainted with the gore and humiliation of stabbings, but I prefer them to poisonings. Pain always narrows my focus regrettably, but I do remember a further detail from this portion of the night. The stranger muttered “fuck” after my collapse, and then several more times, quietly but with increasing panic, as they opened the window and slid over the ledge.
What they did after that, I don’t know. I’ll have to return to Bertin’s house to determine if Malbosc is or was there. All I could manage last night was to extract myself, bundle my coat over my abdomen to stanch the flow of blood, and drag myself home.
I lay down on the foyer carpet. It’s ruined.
Victor found me this morning. They dropped to their knees. Their bag hit the floor and exploded into a flutter of loose papers. “Jesus fucking Christ, Isabelle.”
They sounded distraught. They shouldn’t have. I am, as always, unharmed.
Victor attempted to check me for wounds, remembered that there wouldn’t be any despite all the blood, and then went in search of a glass of water. I determined that prone on the carpet was an acceptable position and remained there.
Victor called me Isabelle. I can’t remember when they started using my first name. I shouldn’t have let them. It breeds familiarity. Working together was unavoidable, but I’ve been lax. They should find me both disgusting and terrifying. That arrangement is safest for everyone.
Unhappily for both of us, it’s hard to be afraid of the half-conscious, blood-soaked woman you’re pulling into your lap and forcing to drink water. Of course I didn’t plan to arrive home in such a condition, or be witnessed, but I will have to take more care in the future—and not encounter that stranger again.
Written in an invented shorthand
Went to Louise’s tonight.
She grabbed a fringed silk pillow from her enormous bed and chucked it at my head. I deserved that. Louise meant to be playful. I snatched it from the air and threw it back at her too hard. She still caught it—I didn’t raise her to miss—but she was seated at her vanity and her elbow knocked over a vase of tulips and a bottle of perfume. Nothing broke, thank fuck. I would have bought her replacements and still never heard the end of it.
“Oh, I see,” she said. She righted the vase and the perfume and blotted the spilled water with a kerchief. “You only call on me when you’ve had a bad night. Is that how it is now?”
“I was here…” I tried to count the days, but my blood was still pounding from the fight—the kill, maybe. Gut wounds are slow, ugly things. Hell. I hate to do something like that, and by accident, too. “Last week.”
“Two weeks ago, you ne’er-do-well.” Louise clasped her peignoir closed with a little brass filigree clip and gestured at her round, absurdly luxurious bed. “People pay handsomely to arrive there and I let you sit on it for free, yet here you are, looming in your greatcoat and glowering at me. I have an appointment in an hour, so you’d better get to your point quickly. Sit down. Take your hat off. What have I done to merit such a visit, since you never come see me anymore?”
I shouldn’t have gone tonight, but the thought of tossing and turning in my boarding house room until dawn had made me want to tear my hair out. I was angry at the stranger and angry at myself. That fight had annihilated my chance to search Bertin’s house. Robbery takes careful preparation. There’s not much else to do in the small hours now that I’ve given up sex. Louise was a better choice than drinking. I don’t have to be careful around her.
I shouldn’t piss her off. She’s my favorite person in the whole world.
It’s hard to go see her at Florine’s, though. On my way up I have to pass through the parlor. It’s always a froth of lace and giggles. I used to love it in there. Who doesn’t want to be surrounded by card cheats and cleavage? Now it makes me feel like an elephant in a porcelain shop. Florine, Catherine, and Apolline are always perfectly welcoming, naturally. Tonight they all got up from their lounging to greet me—or the false name I’ve given them—and tease me about going to see Louise. Apolline might have her suspicions about who I am, but Florine and Catherine have no idea. Who knows what Louise has told them about our relationship. I left that up to her. She’s good with my secrets.
In the old days, if I came here in disguise, I’d use a password with her. I’d mention something about Les Feuillantines or Hermès, or one of my tree names. Something only we knew. These days, we don’t bother.
“You know I hate to come here like this,” I said to Louise.
“What, like a cop?” she asked. “You look far too disreputable for anyone to recognize you, and if you think you’re the only cop who frequents Florine’s, then you don’t know nearly as much as you pretend to.”
“You know what I meant.” I tossed my hat and greatcoat on the floor and sat on the edge of her bed. I put my elbows on my spread knees. I managed not to put my face in my hands, but only just.
Louise said, “It’s been four years of this, Cheat. Are you going to be angry about it forever?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You always liked it before,” she said. “Why don’t you like it now? And even if you don’t like it, it’s your life. You’re alive to live it. Half of what you want is better than nothing.”
I was too tired to explain myself again.
“If posing as a cop makes you miserable, quit,” she said, though that wasn’t the problem and she knew it. “Go back to your roots.”
“I’ve lost my talent for crime.”
“Ha,” she said. “Can a fish lose her talent for swimming?”
I didn’t tell her about the house I’d broken into, or the fight I’d won, or the bloody scene I’d fled. I slumped backward onto her bed to stare at her sky-painted ceiling and the gilt-framed mirror hung there. When it showed me my stubbled, scowling face, I turned my head to look instead at Louise, twenty-four years old and resplendently fat, happy, and beautiful in her printed silk robe with chestnut curls cascading down her back. That Louise survived our childhood after Les Feuillantines is the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I like to see her thriving.
“Ah, Cheat,” she said on a sigh.
“Nobody calls me that but you.”
“Cheat, darling, everybody calls you that. Cheats Death, master of disguise, legend of the underworld, undetectable thief. The cops couldn’t catch you or kill you. Nobody’s seen you in four years and people still talk about you. Besides, everybody calls me Butterball and that’s not my name.”
“Do you like it?” I wasn’t sure how I’d get all of Paris to stop saying it, but that didn’t matter. If Louise didn’t like it, I would make it go away.
“I love it,” she said. “Fame requires a memorable nickname. You taught me that. And look at us! We could have starved after the Sisters died, and now I’ve made these”—she pushed her breasts together—“entirely out of pastry, which I can afford to eat whenever I want. What could be better than that?”
“Fame for you,” I corrected. “Infamy for me.”
Louise swept a fan-shaped brush through a pot of powder, then tapped the handle, clouding the air with a shimmer of excess. She flicked the brush expertly, letting the bristles kiss her pale cheeks. “You and your words.”
A memory intruded from earlier in the night: the stranger saying “‘little’ doesn’t preclude ‘lethal’” in that low, serious voice. Enunciation like the tip of their knife against my throat.
Not quite their last words, but close enough.
My head swam. The sweet, perfumed air of Louise’s room turned sickly.
It had been a long time since I’d killed anybody, and I didn’t like to kill a thief if I didn’t have to. It hadn’t even really been self-defense. The stranger had moved in a way I hadn’t expected, and the blade had gone deep.
I wondered who they were, what their corpse would look like when the morning light came through the drapes. If they were a man or a woman or something else.
My money was on “woman,” though they’d been dressed in trousers. Then again, people thought I was a man and half the time they were wrong.
I didn’t want to think about that. To Louise, I said, “We could work on your letters while I’m here.”
“You’re having a bad night so you want to ruin mine?” She was pulling one eyelid closed to draw a line of black along her lashes. “I told you I have an appointment. And I don’t need to work on my letters. I can read what I need to, I just don’t enjoy it. I don’t understand why you do, or why people are fanatical about it. One of my clients tried to help me with my letters last year, you know.”
“Oh?” I propped myself up on my elbows.
“Stop that,” she said, lining her other lashes. “You always want me to snitch. I won’t do it.”
“Not on the ones you like, anyway,” I said. Florine and her bouncers were pretty good about kicking out men who misbehaved, but for Louise, I was always ready to step in.
“I did like that one,” she said. “As peculiar as he was, I liked him a lot. He stopped coming. He sent me flowers and a very flattering sum about a month ago and that was goodbye forever, I suppose. I heard he sold his house and gave away his fortune and retired to the countryside. Can’t imagine. Not even if my whole family died, which is what happened to him. Of course, you’re my whole family, and I don’t have a house to sell. I’ve never been to the countryside. Is it nice?”
“Louise,” I said, sitting up fully. A rich man giving away a fortune was a rare and notable thing. “Are you talking about Horace Faucheux?”
“Oh, here we go,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”
Faucheux’s connection to Malbosc was all I could think about, but Louise wouldn’t talk to me if she thought I wanted information about Horace Faucheux as a collector of magical artifacts and an associate of the man I was looking for. My approach had to be more nonchalant. So I said, “I’m surprised you liked him. Faucheux had a reputation as a cruel and thoughtless man—that is to say, before his change of heart and move to the countryside. You know if you ever have a concern, even the slightest worry...”
“I didn’t. He wasn’t anything like his reputation.”
And wasn’t that interesting? I prompted, “He sent you farewell flowers and tried to teach you to read.”
“Get over here and do my hair.”
I washed my hands with the ewer of water she had at her washbasin before I touched the silk of her brown hair or any of her delicate hairpins. Already set in pristine ringlets by nature and devoted care, her curls needed nothing. I gathered a mass of them to twist into a bun at the crown of her head. Each of her pins was tipped with a little paste gem, worth no more than its sparkle. I slid them in without jabbing her scalp, more gentle than I would have been with myself. Here and there, I let one tendril escape to loll against her neck.
I worked in pleasant, silent concentration for a time—I’ve always liked using my hands, long-fingered and dextrous in all my forms, good for arranging hair or picking locks—until I judged it safe to say, “You were telling me about Horace Faucheux.”
“And you care too much about him,” she said with finality. “It must have something to do with your obsession. I don’t want to tell you any more and I don’t know anything, anyway. Go home and rest and maybe go for a walk in the sunshine tomorrow. Stop working yourself to the bone chasing a ghost.”
“Louise,” I said, not quite a plea.
“What you need is to fuck somebody new,” she opined. “Find somebody to fall in love with so you can forget all this.”
I grunted in response. There was no chance of that. But if I argued, she’d really get going. I finished her hair and retreated to the bed.
She continued, “And before you say anything about how I have a lot of opinions for somebody who doesn’t fall in love, we’re not the same. I’m not made for love, but you are. That man broke your heart.”
“My heart?” I said incredulously. “Louise, he ruined my life.”
“No, you did that,” she said. She’s brutal when she wants to be. “Plenty of people suffer a heartbreak and pick themselves back up. You didn’t. You can’t stand that you’re Cheats Death, legendary thief, and he stole from you. Who are you if some halfway handsome stranger can sweet talk his way into your bed and steal your most precious possession? It’s like he stole your whole self.”
Malbosc had been more than halfway handsome, and I don’t care much for sweetness, but she’d grasped the betrayal and the loss. My heart wasn’t broken. It was the theft that hurt. “Now you understand.”
“I don’t, really. Why have you been living like this for years?”
“You know what he stole from me.”
“You made yourself. Just do it again.” Louise pulled an enameled metal comb out of the top drawer of her vanity and tossed it at me.
I caught it out of the air and ran the pad of my index finger along the edge. “The teeth on this are too fine. They’ll break your curls.”
“Do you give your cop friends hair advice?”
There was a note of genuine curiosity in her voice. I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have friends.”
“That’s not a good thing, Cheat. And I see you trying to change the subject. I’m serious. Stop living like this. Make a new comb—or whatever. Fuck a new man—or whoever.”
“You think I haven’t tried?”
“The combs, sure. I saw you eyeing mine every time you came over here. I bet every surface in your little rat-infested boarding house cell was littered with combs. I bet you spent every spare centime on new ones. I bet you fell asleep with your sweaty hands clenched around a different comb every night and woke up with teeth marks in your palms.”
The only thing worse than having a sister—somebody who knows me well enough to be fucking mean about it—would be not having a sister. I raised Louise to observe people and go for the throat in a fight, but Jesus.
She was right. I couldn’t let her know that, though.
“I can’t just make another one,” I said. “Magic isn’t bound by rules. Doing it once doesn’t mean you can do it again. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. What I did to that comb, how I made it, I’ll never know exactly. It was just the right moment.”
Every other moment had been the wrong one. I tried enough times to know. I might get lucky if I spent the rest of my life working on it, but it’s a surer bet to steal the one I already made. It’s mine by rights.
And if I have to kill Malbosc to get my life back, that’s fine by me.