“I would do it for you. Please. Do it before I change.”
“No.”
“How many people have you killed? I’m going to be much more of a monster than you soon. Kill one more. Please.”
“Maybe. But not right now.”
Brigitte closes her eyes. I look at Vidocq.
“Do it. Freeze her.”
“Stark?”
It’s Allegra. Her voice is odd.
“What?”
“You’re bleeding.”
I look at my hands. Both are bitten and scratched. There’s a sliver of skin missing from my left palm. All the wounds are closed and scabbed.
“How ‘bout that.”
Vidocq says, “Jimmy, we must do it now. Both of you must go to the Garden.”
“Look at her and look at me. Her skin’s going blue. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s dying. Look at me. Do I look any different from when you saw me earlier?”
“No.”
“I feel fine.”
“For now,” says Allegra. “What if you’re wrong and you change later?”
“Then you have my permission to kill me. You’ve got to kill the central nervous system. You don’t have the right tools, so the easiest thing for you would be to cut off my head and burn it and my body.”
“That’s what’s easiest? Great.”
Vidocq takes the lamp and shines it in my eyes. Checks my face.
“There might be a simple reason you aren’t changing. The Cupbearer’s elixir.”
“You think it’s keeping his body from changing?”
“It’s possible. There are accounts of similar occurrences. During the Great Plague there are stories of people who drank the elixir for various ailments. These people survived while whole towns died around them. You might be all right.”
Allegra goes to the shelves lined with potions and alchemical mixtures and brings a few bottles back to the counter. She looks at me and shakes her head. I don’t know if it’s because I won’t let Vidocq put me to sleep, because I dropped a half-dead woman in her lap, or because who knows what the devil’s kid is really up to?
“My offer still stands. If you think I’ve gone bad, take my head. But I’m not lying down for this right now. Someone told me that any spell cast can be broken and any spell broken can be put back together. Someone is making all this happen and I bet they can unmake it.”
“What if you can’t?” Allegra asks. “What if Brigitte is stuck like this forever?”
I look her in the eye.
“What would you want? Would you want to be Sleeping Beauty for the next thousand years until maybe perhaps pretty please someone figures out how to fix you or do you want to get it over with fast?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you think about it. You’re a woman and about her age, so you think about it and tell me what you’d do.”