Chapter 7: Starting the Party

The murmur of the party swelled as we slipped down the grand staircase. Voices tangled with the low thrum of music and the occasional peal of laughter spilling from the drawing room, the dining hall, the library, and the salons beyond. Guests drifted from room to room in a kaleidoscope of elegance and excess, some restrained, others flamboyant enough to stop a heartbeat.

I had watched the house dress for this night every year of my life, yet tonight it felt charged with a new electricity. Maybe it was because I had just turned eighteen. Maybe it was because, for the first time, I was allowed to mingle with the adults instead of being shuffled upstairs with the younger crowd. Or maybe it was the grimoire, still hidden beneath my bedding, a secret humming against my ribs even from upstairs. I shoved the thought aside and focused on the pulse of the evening.

My parents stood beside the massive fireplace in the drawing room, greeting arrivals with practiced ease. Father looked entirely at home in his costume. Richard Langford was six-foot-one and lean, with the wiry strength of a man who still cut laps through the estate pool every morning. He had begun to silver at the temples, and his hazel eyes were sharp from years of boardroom battles. Tonight he was Gomez Addams, in a black pinstriped suit with a white shirt and dark tie, a red carnation in his lapel, a watch chain looped across his vest, and a narrow mustache curling above his lip. An unlit cigar was tucked into one hand like a conductor’s baton. He spotted us and smiled.

“There they are.”

Mother stood at his side as Morticia. Vivienne Langford was thirty-nine, tall and willowy, with the graceful line of a former ballerina. She wore a floor-length black wig, parted in the center and falling pin-straight past her waist, and a black gown that clung from shoulder to knee before flaring into a trailing, tentacled hem that snaked across the floor behind her. Her makeup was pale and dramatic, her lips a deep wine, and her storm-gray eyes scanned the room with an almost unsettling stillness. Even amid the sea of costumes, she had a contained poise, as though part of her were always observing. She turned to me, and for a fleeting instant her expression shifted, pride mixed with something I couldn’t name, before melting into a smile.