The Great Ellini (Book One of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty One: The Recurring Blonde

Paris, 1875:

The Bibliotheque Mazarine was gorgeous. It would have been gorgeous even to someone who'd never read a book in their life. But, for someone whose every joy from the age of fifteen had been very firmly lodged in the printed word, it was a Garden of Eden.

In fact, Ellini wondered if the library's designers had had the Garden of Eden in mind when they'd built it, because the halls and galleries were lush with green tones. The shades on the oil lamps were the colour of moss. The bookshelves were interspersed with golden pillars which stretched like tree trunks to the high, domed ceiling. And the upper galleries which overlooked the main hall were bordered by iron lace-work balconies, with the elaborately twisted look of jungle creepers.

And, best of all, this Eden had no Adam.

Oh, there were plenty of Guillaumes and Jean-Pierres—the main hall was busy with dapper gentlemen, even at this time of night, wearing double-breasted frockcoats, glancing at their pocket watches, parading themselves in all their elegant splendour. But Ellini was studiously ignored by most of them, because they'd had a long time to familiarize themselves with the consequences of looking at the awkward, shy girl with the long black hair.

She made her way to a gallery just off the main hall, where the books on Demonology were kept. It was a long room, with a lamp-lined table running down it. A few upper galleries overlooked it, but, by and large, the inhabitants of Paris had learned to avoid these too.

She turned to the shelves and ran her fingertips fondly along the nearest set of volumes. To her right was a ladder, twenty feet tall, ascending into the gloom, but she didn't stick to it. She had little feet and was used to clambering over the rooftops of Edinburgh, so she could keep her balance on the edges of the shelves.

Besides, she always had this wing of the library to herself. There were no librarians to tell her off. Val was extremely proactive in discouraging hanky-panky. The inhabitants of Paris had long since learned that it was safer to avoid 'la petite souris' because she was guarded by 'une grande éléphant'.

Ellini didn't mind, not now she was amongst her books. At first, she had read to escape, but eventually—because she was still young and alive and in possession of a beating heart—hope had crept into the endeavour. She had picked out little clues, the merest passing suggestions, that there might be a way to cure her of the curse that made her so endlessly fascinating to men.

Her logic went like this: New-breeds had no control over their demonic symptoms. The fangs, or the horns, or the prophetic visions, either appeared when they were frightened and hungry, or they were a constant that couldn't be switched off.

Demons, on the other hand—from the little that the terrified chroniclers of Faustus's time had been able to record about them—could shape-shift and slide into prophetic states at will. They could look like demons when they chose to, and like everyone else when they wanted to be inconspicuous. For them, magic was an art, rather than an uncontrollable hereditary trait. So the demons might know how to switch a new-breed's demonic symptoms on or off.

This wasn't, in itself, a very useful insight because it led to a much bigger problem. How did you get in contact with the demons? New-breeds had been trying to reach their ancestors for centuries, and nothing had ever worked. The gates of hell were emphatically shut.

So Ellini had tried to understand how they had first appeared, and why they had left. She read biographies of Faustus and reports of Eve's trial. Most of the latter were rash and excitable, seething like a cauldron, with words like 'whore', 'scarlet', and 'Jezebel' occasionally bubbling to the surface.