So that brings me to tonight. Sylvie has just left my dressing room, fretting again. I assured her that flying for me is like breathing, but I didn’t tell her that even that has become more difficult lately since giving birth. Sometimes I have to sit on the way to the carousel. Doro has put a bench there for me. He hasn’t said that it is for me, but a bench arrived at just the location where he saw me leaning against the wall.

Last week, before Sylvie left my dressing room, she turned back from the door. “I lied to you.”

“About what?”

“You asked me when I fell in love with you. I told you that it was when you were sketching me, but that wasn’t true. It was the first day when you crawled up the ladder to the trapeze. You kept falling and you had such determination. I hadn’t seen that from you and something changed. I don’t know… it doesn’t matter, I guess.”

But it did. Her love for me was real, yet I didn’t love her in that way, and it broke my heart.

I am so weary tonight and a little distracted. It has been this way since Margot’s birth, but I anticipate that old tingle that comes from flying again. My costume hangs waiting for me, draped on the covered mirror. I want to pull off the cover, but the pitiful creature whom Father has trapped in there will be peering out at me. Hesitantly, I pull back the drape. To my astonishment, I don’t see one creature—but two—and they are familiar.

As I walk down into the center ring, I wonder who Father has invited tonight in the audience. He has begun sending out tickets again, thinking things will go back to the way they used to be.

But that, I fear, will never be.

Chapter 25

Paris / Eighth Layer of Hell

July 3, 2005

After reading the final journals, it was taking Lara a moment to adjust to the fact that Althacazur—the daemon of really cool shit—was her… what? Great-great-grandfather? Oh dear. Lara felt herself sink.

Oblivious to everyone, Althacazur had his leg over the arm of the chair and was sitting like a petulant teenager, swinging his leg. “So,” he began. “Let me tell you a story. Once there was this really cool gent.”

“Gent?” Lara couldn’t help but mock his word choice.

“Short for ‘gentleman,’” said Althacazur, his eyes widening, like she was stupid.

Lara rolled her eyes. “I know that.”

“Anyway,” he said, annoyed at the interruption. “This gent who might have had some really great powers met this mortal actress—Juno Wagner. Such a beautiful name. Well, he fell head over heels for her—which for a major daemon is not something that happens every day.”