“I can take you to her myself.”
Her voice was desperate with the need to make amends, but what she’d tried to do to me wasn’t something I’d forgive lightly. “So you can sabotage me further?” I shook my head. “I’ll go with Chris. At least him I can trust.”
Tears flooded down Sabine’s cheeks. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”
“I thought I knew that,” I said. “Tell me her name.”
Her breath hitched. “They call her La Voisin – the neighbor. She’s got a shop in Pigalle.”
The words sang through me; and for a moment, they chased away my anger, fear, and even my love for Tristan in order to make room for the single-minded purpose of my hunt. I clenched my teeth and dug my nails into my palms to regain control of the compulsion, but it was like trying to stop a wave with my bare hands. “Let’s hope she can help me, and some good might come from this.”
Chris and I walked swiftly through the narrow and muddy streets of the Pigalle quarter, the only light coming from between the homeless huddled around piles of burning trash in the alleyways, their emaciated forms hidden by layers of rags. The buildings were pressed tightly together, windows boarded over and wooden frames weak with rot. Every so often, we passed a building that had collapsed from an earthshake, its bones picked away for wood to burn until nothing remained but the foundation.
The air was filled with the smell of the harbor fish markets, but Pigalle itself smelled like too many people stuffed into too small a place. Human filth, waste, and desperation. It made me think about what the King had said to me on the beach. It made me think he was right.
“This isn’t a safe part of town to be in, especially after dark,” Chris muttered, eyeing the brothel on our left, shrieks of laughter coming from its open doors.
“Why do you think I didn’t come alone?” I whispered back.
“How do you know this La Voisin woman isn’t a charlatan like all the others?”
“I felt the magic, and even if I hadn’t, I saw what the potion did to Julian,” I said. “One minute, he was devastated about my mother’s pending retirement, and the next, he couldn’t have cared less. Impassioned one moment, pure cold logic the next.”
“And Sabine meant for you to drink it?”
Angry heat prickled along my skin, but I shrugged it off. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“All right,” Chris said, rolling his shoulders uncomfortably as a group of dockworkers staggered by. “So it’s possible we could be walking toward Anushka herself?”
“I doubt it.” I laughed humorlessly, although that had been my original hope before I’d thought it through a little more. “Do you really think the woman who cursed the trolls to an eternity of captivity lives in the slums of Pigalle?”
“Good point,” he said. “So what are we doing here then?”
I bit the inside of my cheeks and said nothing, because I wasn’t precisely certain what I expected to gain from this mysterious witch. “A way to find Anushka.” A way to kill her.
“I think this is it,” Chris said, stopping in front of a short wooden building that was squeezed between two run-down boarding houses. Lines of laundry hung between windows of the taller buildings, dripping dirty water on the witch’s abode. The front of the building had no windows, only a narrow, unmarked door.
“Charming,” Chris muttered. I swallowed hard, knocked once, and opened the door.
It took a long moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim interior, and even longer for them to take in the chaos filling the room in front of us. The walls, what I could see of them, were jammed with shelves full of herbs, stones, and small statues. There were bottles containing creatures suspended in fluid, some animals, some I didn’t care to identify. The tables and cupboards littering the center of room were piled nearly to the ceiling with papers, books, bolts of fabric, more herbs, crystals, and unlit lamps, turning the room into a maze that I didn’t look forward to navigating. A small dog ran around a stack of books, barked at us once, and disappeared again.
“Hello?” I called out. “Madame?”
No one responded, so I picked my way through the maze of clutter, Chris following behind. “Hello?” I called out again.
“I guess there isn’t anyone home,” Chris announced. “We should go – it smells like dog piss in here.”
“Souris likes to mark his territory,” a voice said from behind us. We both jumped. Chris collided with a stack of papers that proceeded to rain down around us as we took in the woman who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere.
“Are you the one they call La Voisin?” I asked.
“That depends,” the woman said, eyeing me up and down. “What do you want?”
What did I want? I stared at the woman in front of me, taking in her brilliant red dress and greying blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun, debating what to say. There was a haughtiness about her not suited to Pigalle – something about the way she held her head that suggested she hadn’t always lived in poverty.
She tilted her head and looked at Chris, who was gathering up the papers behind me. “Pregnant?”
Chris jerked upright, banging his head against an open drawer. “No,” I said quickly. “Nothing like that.”
“What then? Spit it out, girl.”
There was an intensity about the woman that made me nervous, and I could all but feel the power in her words. This was the woman who had made the potion, I was certain of it.