The pyrite bell dangling above the shop entrance jingled, alerting the Madame to the girl’s arrival. The shop owner jerked, spilling her last bottle of LeFleur’s Specialty Vanishing Ink across the counter, causing it to soak into the previously pristine wood and drip onto the floor.
The ink did not vanish as advertised.
Madame LeFleur spun the bottle to hide its label lest her lone customer take notice. But the young girl wasn’t paying attention. Instead, she lingered by a shelf of products that claimed to alleviate sudden bursts of heat in aging women.
The shop owner narrowed her eyes. She hadn’t been expecting a customer tonight. In fact, she’d closed up an hour early for a handful of reasons.
One, Prince Evander’s ball was to be held at Othian Castle tonight. As the Madame’s business model revolved around preying upon the insecurities and groundless hopes of women wishing to make themselves prettier than nature had blessed them with the capability of being, it made no sense to keep the shop open past sundown.
Every human girl in the city of Othian would attend the ball, vying for the chance to snag the handsome fae prince. The Madame estimated not one of them would chance spending fewer than three hours preparing their skin with fragrant oils, arranging their hair in ornate braids, and stuffing their corsets with her bestselling LeFleur’s Miracle Endowment Enhancer—which was really just dyed cotton and the Madame’s most lucrative idea yet.
It didn’t matter how much the entire kingdom detested the Heir to the Throne of Dwellen.
The opportunity to become a princess had presented itself, and there wasn’t a woman in Dwellen who wouldn’t grasp at it.
Except, perhaps, for Ellie Payne. If all went according to plan, the parasite would be seeking her out later.
In the past few hours, the traffic in the shop had dwindled to almost nothing, and the Madame had purchased too expensive a porcelain tub and too exotic a collection of foreign soaps not to be soaking in lavender bubbles. All for the sake of a stray sale here and there.
At least, that was what the Madame told herself.
Then there was the real reason—one from which the parasite lurking in the corners of the Madame’s consciousness derived no small amount of satisfaction.
Tonight was a full moon, and the Madame was superstitious about this heavenly occurrence above all others. All her neighbors knew as much.
Rather, everyone thought they knew as much.
That was the thing about humans, the parasite mused; they always assumed they knew more than they did.
The parasite, of course, knew perfectly well that Madame LeFleur’s superstitions regarding the monthly celestial event were more than well-founded, the parasite herself having planted the gnarled roots by which these superstitions fed.
Madame LeFleur paid little attention to the girl as she tried and failed to wipe the spilled non-vanishing ink with a nearby terrycloth. “Silly me, forgetting to lock up. We’re closed, dearie.”
If the parasite could have rolled her eyes, she would have. Madame LeFleur had the irksome habit of floundering about, using the same sort of language one might hear from an elderly woman whose only concerns were that of who had accidentally dyed their hair blue recently when attempting to go silver-plated, or whose grandchild had disgraced their family by eloping with a farmhand.
The parasite knew better than to be fooled by her host’s carefully crafted facade.
Underneath the cheery disposition and altogether silly demeanor, the Madame’s mind was sharp as an adder’s fang.
Madame LeFleur was like many living beings in this strange and wonderful realm, disguising deadly venom under an array of vibrant colors.
That was part of the reason the parasite had picked Madame LeFleur. Typically, the parasite went for weaker-minded hosts, ones whose consciousnesses were more readily overcome. But with each body, each mind, came a price, and the parasite had grown weary of inhabiting the unintelligent.
Madame LeFleur sometimes used brains in the many potions she concocted—the ones that actually worked, the ones she sold in the underground market rather than the watered down briarseed oil she bottled in cheap crystal and peddled to desperate women. The parasite had now witnessed quite the assortment of brains. Lizard brains, rat brains, human brains. It fascinated the parasite to observe the differences—the smooth silky film that coated the outer layer of the rodents’ brains versus the cascading folds and the plunging shadows that carved texture into the human brains.
The parasite sometimes wished Madame LeFleur could use that glinting scalpel of hers to slice out the brains of the parasite’s previous human hosts; she was fairly certain what she would find: a glaring absence of hills and valleys cresting the wet, juicy membranes.
But the parasite’s previous hosts would all be decayed beyond recognition by this point. Most of them had returned to dust and were likely being chewed up by livestock at this very moment, so the parasite could only dream of such things.
“Did you hear me, child?” Madame LeFleur asked, her pitch heightening in what most would have mistaken for agitation when the girl remained planted in front of the counter. “We’re closed.”
Madame LeFleur finally looked up from her incessant scrubbing, allowing the parasite to get a good look at the girl through the Madame’s eyes.
Plain and unadorned as a mouse’s tail, the girl was the kind who often fell prey to the beauty elixirs the Madame fashioned from the leftover lard that sloshed off her morning bacon.
That was, of course, all the Madame noticed about her.
The Madame couldn’t sense what the parasite could.
Desperation, raw and crude and completely unrefined, emanated from the girl, radiating from her soul and pulsing in noxious waves.
The parasite could get drunk on that sort of energy.
“I…” The girl’s gaze flitted back toward the door, and the parasite’s hope threatened to wither. No, the girl couldn’t leave now. Not when the parasite had endured so many unsuitable women with unsuitable auras today. Not when she’d almost given up hope of finding anyone fit for her intentions. But then the girl’s back straightened, and she plastered a look of determination on that unremarkable face of hers and said, “I’m told you sell potions that alter one’s appearance.”
Predictable, the parasite thought. But useful all the same.
“You’re a bit too late for that, I’m afraid.” Madame LeFleur lowered her spectacles, as she often did when she was looking to get a particular thrill from asserting her dominance—disguised as disapproval, of course—upon a youngster. “Sold out of those a week ago, the hour the prince announced he’d be throwing a ball.”
The girl frowned, which didn’t help to soften her less desirable features. Tethered to the Madame for now, the parasite had only recently become able to discriminate the slight differences between the faces of the humans. The variation in their features was so slim already, and the Madame had never been all that good at it. It was as if the Madame could see faces as a whole—pretty or, more importantly, ugly—but her brain couldn’t quite grasp onto the details. The parasite was almost positive this had not been the case in previous hosts, and it often had her wondering what sort of pattern the curves on the Madame’s brain made.
Perhaps one day the parasite would find out.
“Surely you have something.” The girl tapped her fingers against the counter, the beat off-kilter with the dripping of the spilled ink still slowly splattering the floor.
The Madame shook her head, her curls bouncing against her ears. “Nothing at all.”
It seemed that whatever courage or insanity it had taken the girl to come here expired as her shoulders deflated and she turned to go.
