“The other twin—Esmé—is missing her arm and is without a uterus, but she has two legs and all of her kidneys. Physically Esmé was the much stronger twin. But you see, cambions are only half human. There was a bit of daemon blood flowing through my creature’s veins, so I could do some things that could never have been done to a non-magical creature. I filled in the gaps, so to speak, with magic. Each girl looked… flawless.”

“You filled in the gaps?”

“I enchanted my fucking circus, so my girls looked beautiful inside of it. They were like dolls. Outside the circus, too, if they didn’t stay out too long. Oh, my beauties were the talk of Paris. Plutard made them costumes like little princesses, but I made a mistake.” He turned to Cecile and put his hand up. “I can admit when I’m wrong.”

Cecile flashed him a rather hateful look. “You were wrong on so many fronts, Father. It’s hard to keep track.”

“Well, yes, I made the mistake of putting the burden of keeping the illusion on Esmé, but she was a brilliant illusionist. Cecile did not fare as well when I separated them, so I decided to wipe her memories clean so she had no recollection of being torn apart from her sister. However, Esmé needed that knowledge to keep up the illusion.”

Lara thought that sounded like an entirely unfair burden to place on a young girl.

“What Father is hinting at but not saying,” said Cecile, interrupting his monologue, “is that to keep his illusion that we were intact inside this circus, Esmé was forced to commit murder as a sacrifice—fealty—to fuel it.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, dismissing her. “She’s so judgy now that she’s dead. Perhaps I felt guilt that Cecile here looked so much like her mother. On her deathbed,” continued Althacazur, unaware of how upset his daughter was becoming at the story, “I’d made promises to my Juno that I would care for the child. Juno was never told the entire story of the birth—that there were two. Never thinking they’d live, of course, I agreed to it, but then she died, and I was bound, you see.” He looked sheepish. “It was a grave mistake as I would learn.”

“You never should have split us. We were happy as we were.” Cecile glared at him.

“Then that painter Émile Giroux fucked everything up,” said Althacazur, ignoring her. “Although Tisdale likes to remind me that I don’t know my own strength and that it was my fault. You see, because I’m an artist myself… I put a little spell on Giroux so that anyone he painted fell in love with him.”

“What you did was unforgivable,” spat Cecile, folding her arms.

Lara knew this from the journals.

“Yes, well, while I may have split you both in two physically, Giroux’s knife was sharper.”