Finally, the music quiets again. The harpist plays a soft, sweet melody, and the smoke clears.
Where the monster once stood, there is now a woman. Her short black hair is gelled in wet swirls around her forehead and neck, and her sharp, vulpine features contrast with her shapely, Rubenesque body. She looks like a tawny Botticelli’s Venus, arising from the water in her seashell, except she is dressed in a skin-tone tattered dress, and her body is streaked in soot.
The people around me are cheering, but I am frozen. Because I know this face too, and not just from the paintings.
Rose Callahan is none other than Margaret West.
Or perhaps more accurately, Margaret is Rose. Forty years younger, yes, but just as alluring. Her eyes catch mine. It shouldn’t be possible across the room, but they hold for a beat, and I could swear that her lips quirk into a smile.
Someone hands her a microphone.
“Welcome,” Rose says, “toTransmogrification.”
The crowd bursts into applause as she comes down from her platform. A crew sweeps behind her to clean the mess of destroyed porcelain and goop from the gallery floor while she glides through the crowd. Her existence, the fact that she is walking around, gesticulating with Margaret’s mannerisms, smiling her knowing smile, is greater than any evidence I could have gathered in Harrison & Conrad Galleries. Even knowing the truth, my brain still tries to reject it: maybe she’s Margaret’s kid, or a lookalike niece—
She stops in front of me.
“Don’t you look stunning,” she says, with a teasing smile. “Lovethe hair.”
I clutch my bag in front of me like a shield. There’s something regal and controlled about her that inspires wonder alongside fear. I’d wanted to run away screaming from Leila, but I want to prostrate myself before her.
“Hello, Margaret,” I whisper.
Her smile shines with genuine delight, and she lifts a finger to her lips, leaning in close.
“It’s Rose now, remember?” She rests a gentle hand on my shoulder and adds with warmth I do not expect, “So you’ve figured us out, have you?” When I flinch, she chuckles. “It’s okay. I’m glad. It’s nice to not have to pretend.”
My throat feels parched, like the champagne I drank a few minutes before has sucked out all its moisture.
“Pretend…” I start, then swallow down my fear, “to be human?”
Rose pulls back just enough that I can see that her eyes are shining.
“If you asked Julian, he’d say that’s precisely what we are,” she whispers. “Just different.Enhanced, so to speak. If you asked Leila, she would say that we are so clearly in a different realm. Gods. My perspective…well. I accept myself as exactly what I am, and I think there’s already a name for us. Ritika tells me you went to visitThe Recurring Nightmare. I’m hazarding a guess that you might know what that is.”
The harpist is still playing, but I can’t hear the music over the rush of blood in my ears. I have so many questions, but it feels like I might run out of time at any moment, and so I ask the one that has plagued me the most.
“You gave Ritika the note,” I say. “Why?”
If her newfound youth hadn’t just been siphoned from another living being—likely the bulldog-faced husband she’d carted around atPERPETUITY, I realize with a chill—I would almost think of her smile as kind.
“Because, my dear, I’m meddling,” she says. “I haven’t seen Julian quite so happy as he was with you, or quite so miserable as he’s been without. Not for a long, long time. I assumed you’d feel similarly. I’m trying to arrange a reconciliation.”
I suck in a shuddering breath, fighting against an assault of conflicting emotions.
“I’m not sure Leila feels the same way,” I manage on the exhale, and Rose chuckles.
“I’ll work on that one,” she says, beaming. “Truly, Sean. I’m so glad that he found you—”
Her voice cuts out mid-sentence, and she sucks in a pained breath. The hand on my shoulder tightens into a vise grip.
“Rose?” I say, concerned, just as a blossom of red begins to spread along the sides of her dress.
The next few seconds stretch, suspended, before me.
There is a man behind her, just one of the many guests clustering around the woman of the hour waiting for their turn, but when he jerks back his hand, I realize that he’s holding a knife, and that theknife is covered in blood. I watch him raise it high, watch his crazed lips curl, watch the reflection of Rose’s terrified face in his dilated pupils as she twists to avoid the assault.
In the space that his raised arm makes, I see Leila standing frozen across the room, her face pale with horror.