Haidée leaned against the bedpost in her room, holding a new bottle of tonic to her lips. Its sickly sweet smell permeated the air around her, but she was used to it. She gulped it down, but only a trickle coated her tongue. She upended it. Nothing came out.
“Huh. I must have drunk more than I had thought.”
She stepped slowly towards the desk in the guest room and clutched the top once she got near it. The marten danced at her feet, chirping angrily at her self abuse. She carefully placed the bottle onto the top of the desk and then crumpled into the chair before placing her head in her arms. Oh, the headaches.
After she and Renaud had discovered Garnier’s body, they had rushed to the village to inform the magistrate and Father DeLorme before going back to the observatory to break the news to Everard. When Galliard had heard of Garnier’s death, a strange look had crept up on his face and then in an almost detached manner, began gathering some of his trusted men to look at the body and the scene. That look had Haidée shivering. Even Renaud had voiced his suspicions when they were heading back to the observatory.
Father DeLorme had appeared appropriately shocked. He had made the sign of the cross across his chest before he uttered a heartfelt prayer. Everard had taken the news even harder. If he had not been sitting at his desk in his study, he surely would have fallen on the floor in apoplexy. Instead, he had fainted where he had been sitting and the servants, Villiers and Claude had to haul the head astronomer’s body back to his bedroom. Colette periodically checked in on the man while he slept having nightmares and calling out, “My pupils! My pupils! Gone! Gone!”
Renaud had gone back out to see to Garnier’s body. Another reason he had gone out was to observe Galliard’s behavior. That left Haidée alone while everyone else was attending to something else.
She could not seem to erase Garnier’s horrified expression out of her mind. So she drank until the pain in her head overwhelmed any of her thoughts.
There was a knock at her bedroom door. The sound echoed through her head like drums and she moaned. The marten took hold the hem of her dress with its mouth and pulled, urging her to answer the door. She ignored the animal’s pleas.
“Mademoiselle Avenall?” It was Colette. “Mademoiselle, it’s the noon meal. It’s ready. Please come down. We’re all waiting for you.”
“Go away,” she called out. She winced. Her own voice hurt her ears. “I’m not hungry.”
“Mademoiselle…”
“No!”
She heard footsteps retreating. She sighed and pressed her cheek to the cool surface of the desk. The room used to belong to an astronomer named Nicolas Bisset who was said to have died under natural causes. She wondered if he had been the first victim and that no one had noticed.
Astronomers had some power. And whoever was killing them was probably taking that power through the use of black magic. But what sort of black magic was it? She had seen only a few instances of it in her late childhood with Madame Zephyrine. On that first job that she had been allowed to accompany her guardian, the wealthy man on death’s door had been smothered with dark symbols—in his room, on his bed, in his clothes, on his body.
Those symbols had been eating him alive.
But somebody had to have been close to that victim to have made all those symbols. Madame Zephyrine had deduced soon enough who had been the cause—the one man who had the most intimate acquaintance to that wealthy master, his valet. Madame Zephyrine had called Haidée her assistant back then, but on that first case, she had been merely an observer as her guardian tracked the necromancer down and had broken him before being able to save the victim.
But here, on this island, on Mont Saint Filan, it wasn’t so easy. The necromancers that Madame Zephyrine had tracked down were sloppy and arrogant, never bothering to hide their trail. Here, there was nothing except the count of dead bodies and the script on their backs—almost like the killer’s encrypted colophon.
The ability to produce symbols and to infuse power into them was intricately connected to the person’s life. Whoever killed the astronomers killed them by leeching out their powers. But what did they want with the extra power? They had to do something with it. And with the recent death of Edouard Garnier, she didn’t think that the killer was done. He would look for another one possessed with power. Like Everard. Or if the killer even suspected, even Haidée herself.
All these thoughts made her head pound. She didn’t want to think any more. She shut her eyes, trying to will all the questions away, and fell into a troubled and drugged sleep.