by Nancy Gideon
“Marchand, I was so worried,” she cried, kissing his cheeks, his eyelids, his temples; everywhere but his neck. She was too aware of the jagged punctures there. “Are you all right?”
“No. I fear Pasquale didn’t leave much for you after all.”
“Gerard did this to you? Why?” Aside from the obvious, of course. Gerard was a vampire, and to him, Marchand meant no more than dining on French cuisine.
Marchand didn’t answer. He was slumped back against the polished wood of the coffin, his eyes half closed, his respiration quick and shallow. Seeing him so callously used up put a fury in Nicole that knew no bounds. She stood, sword drawn, and looked dispassionately down upon her mentor. He who vowed never to harm her. Hadn’t he realized how such a cruel attack upon her beloved would affect her?
“What are you going to do?” came Marchand’s gravelly tone.
“Reduce our enemies by one,” was her determined response as she aligned the blade along Gerard’s throat. She didn’t look up at his face. She couldn’t allow herself to look beyond the savage act.
Cara? She felt his confusion as he touched her mind, and reading her anger, his panic.
“You should never have touched him, Gerard.”
And she lifted the sword to make ready.
Nicole never expected resistance to come from Marchand. He flung himself across Gerard, crying, “No, don’t!” forcing Nicole to refrain.
“Marchand, move aside. It must be done.”
“No, you can’t. You don’t understand!”
“I understand that you’re protecting him because you can’t help yourself. Marchand, he almost killed you. Your mind will clear after it’s done.”
But he grabbed onto the sides of the coffin and refused to be moved. “Nicole, listen. It was Bianca. She tricked him into thinking I willfully tried to kill your father. He believes me responsible for your mother’s death. He was acting out of love for them and you. He may be the only ally we have!”
“My mother isn’t dead.”
Marchand looked up. “What?”
Putting the pieces of Bianca’s scheme together ended Nicole’s anger with her sleeping mentor. She knelt down and touched her palm to Gerard’s still cheek. “She’s not dead, Gerard. Just wounded through Bianca’s treachery. She was behind it all, not Marchand. It was Bianca trying to exact her revenge upon them. Can you hear me? Do you you understand?”
From the corner of one closed eye, a single droplet tracked down into his hairline.
“My mother sends her regards.” And she leaned down to press a brief kiss upon his warm, immobile mouth. Then she straightened and closed the lid. “Come, Marchand, we have much to do.”
He was weaker than he wanted her to believe, unable to walk without her assistance, barely able to stand under his own power. Nicole guided him into the sumptuous bath and he went down on his knees at the edge of the pool, dippering out handfuls of the cool water to splash upon his face and rinse his neck. Then he drank deeply, trying to replace the depleted fluids drained from him. Nicole watched worriedly, not expressing her concerns. She wouldn’t underestimate him. He was a man of phenomenal courage and fortitude. And right now, that was a about all that was sustaining him. She studied the wound at his neck, wondering if it supplanted the power of the matching mark upon his arm. Could she afford to trust him?
“I love you, Marchand.”
He glanced up at her, surprised by the sudden, passionate words. Then he looked away. “I’ve failed you, Nicole. I brought your family harm. I will never forgive myself for what has happened through my arrogance.”
She came down to him, slipping her arms about his shoulders, pressing her cheek atop his dark head. “We’ve both suffered falls from pride. It’s time to put the past behind us.”
“First, I must find Frederic and Camille. I can’t let them wander soullessly.”
“Do you know where to look?”
“I think so. I need your help, Nicole. I can’t do it alone.”
He looked up hopefully, trustingly, and she smiled.
“Then we’ll do it together.”
SOMEPLACE QUIET and undisturbed by day, Louis had said.
The Charnel House of the Innocents held eight hundred years of the dead from twenty-two parishes, the Motel Dieu, the Châtelet prison and the Morgue; monks, decapitated nobles, common washerwomen piled in with Merovingian kings. Twelve to fifteen hundred bodies lay stacked in communal graves. In 1785, the Council of State ordered the Cemetery of the Innocents to be abolished and the interred taken by night to the catacombs in a gruesome torchlit procession. Already excavated a half dozen times, still too many bodies remained, contaminating the city’s water supply as their gradual decomposition leeched into the great river sump from which its inhabitants drank.
Grimly silent, Nicole and Marchand examined the cemetery cloisters with their century-deep layers of crumbling bone and coffin planks, finding nothing. Unless the revenants had gone underground in natural graves, there was no place for them to hide. Both seekers agreed that the rather mindless beasts would not have the patience to conceal themselves well.
From the cemetery they went directly to the catacombs, the great ossuary of Paris. Where better for the undead to rest than beside their indifferent brethren? They walked the silent corridors, the rock-hewn galleries where bones had sifted together in a careless mingling into gleaming white and aged brown heaps almost six-foot high. But no sign that any had been disturbed.
It was midafternoon and they were both weary and discouraged as they sat amid an unsuspecting populace, drinking wine and trying to think like the cunning creatures they stalked. Nicole was doing her best to ignore the ache of hunger threading through her veins and the sweet fragrant scent of the man beside her. She should have fed before leaving the countryside. Her thirst was a distraction. Sharpened senses brought her the torturing sounds of hundreds of beating hearts, all beckoning to her with soft, seductive promise. And there was Marchand, so close, so readily available. She found herself touching the back of his hand, stroking her fingers along warm skin, curling them insidiously to press against the throb in his wrist.
Unaware of her thought’s direction, Marchand continued to drink too much wine while he mulled over the seemingly impossible task ahead. He’d turned up his collar to conceal the marks upon his throat, but the aftereffects were as obvious as the remnants of a wasting disease. His complexion was sallow, his eyes slightly sunken and ringed with bruise-like circles and his hands held a noticeable tremble. It wouldn’t take much to suck the remaining life from him, and Nicole found her lips moistening at that vile contemplation.
Marchand looked up in surprise as she shoved away from the café table abruptly. He was so handsome, so vulnerably human, it nearly tore her heart in two. Would that she could send him away someplace safe to gather his resources. He was in no shape to go hunting demons. But there was no time left. Sunset was scant hours away, and with it came the creatures of the night to hunt their human prey. And on this night, they were it. How hard would it be for Bianca to find them using the shared beacon of Marchand’s blood?
“There’s one place left to look,” she said gruffly. “Are you strong enough?”
Of course he wasn’t. He was too weak to hold a wine glass let alone wield a fearsome retribution, but he pushed back his chair to claim, “I’m ready.” Nicole had to turn away lest he see the tears in her eyes.
The great sewer ran from the Bastille to Chaillot, an underground reproduction of the streets above hidden behind great iron grilles. Eight hundred miles this labyrinth ran, carrying streams of water and fetid matter that were swallowed up in vast cesspools which discharged overflow into open drains. These ran into the stream of Menilmontant, which emptied into the Seine, the same water the city used to wash and cook and drink. Occasionally twenty-two thousand hogshead of
water were poured into this giant sump from a reservoir in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to flush away the residue of rottenness, but it quickly became so pestilential again that none but the sewer sweepers who were paid to brave its stench would enter. The perfect place to disguise the stink of decay.
Nicole broke the lock on one of the grilles with her bare hands then held it open while Marchand slipped inside. The interior was dank and chill and repellent to the senses. The farther they walked, the worse it got. They walked along the cobbled edges, stepping into the sluggish flow of water only when it was unavoidable. Light filtered down in weak streaks from the streets above, but it took torchlight to penetrate the deeper shadows they searched.
“It would be somewhere near the Place Vendôme.” Marchand’s voice carried down the cavernous tunnel, coming back to them in distorted whispers. “They wouldn’t have wandered far from where they were made.”
Nicole squinted upward through the overhead metal mesh. “We should be about there now. Look carefully. We haven’t time to miss anything.”
They separated, each covering a side of the wide-throated drain. Then came Marchand’s hoarse call.
“Nicole, here.”
She splashed across the fetid stream, holding her light aloft to pierce the dimness. She could make out a recess in the wall, probably a tributary that, from its dry stones, had been blocked off farther back. In that slightly elevated niche were row upon row of boxes.
Coffins.
Dozens of them.
Marchand had his hand on the crude corner of the nearest box, hesitant now that he was faced with the reality of what they must do. Then he seized it by the sides and dragged it with a grim clatter out into the grey fingers of light threading down from above. And he threw off the lid.
They got the fleeting impression of a human form before the spontaneous burst of bright popping flame.
Marchand grabbed onto another crate and hauled it into that puddle of light. Again, the pulsing blaze, this time accompanied by inhuman shrieks that hurt the ears and penetrated the soul. Nicole took hold of a third, putting up the lid before pulling it into the sunlight. She almost wished she hadn’t.
She recognized Camille Viotti by the color of his hair and the remains of the jacket he was wearing. Little else was left of the dashing young artist. She couldn’t believe this horror of sinew and bone could rise up at dusk, but she knew it would. She also knew that the only kind thing she could do for the man who’d once dwelt within this rotted corpse would be to end its nightly terror.
Using the blade Takeo gave her, she severed tendon and bone first, because she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t feel the pain of the fire then she pushed the box into the light and watched Camille ignite. Marchand watched, too, and those unholy flames reflected in the glitter of his dark eyes.
“Au revoir, mon ami.”
Then he wiped his face on his sleeve and went to retrieve another of the coffins.
They had nine of them consecrated by daylight with only the ash of the demons powdering the scorched linings. Marchand counted Camille, Gaston, his four henchmen and the second female ghoul. He grew paler and less steady with each one they revealed to destruction, and Nicole knew it was because he was trying to harden himself for the discovery of his brother. But in the end, he couldn’t.
Nicole turned to see him slumped down beside one of the cheap coffins, his knees drawn up and his head hanging between them as if recovering from a swoon. When he lifted up at the call of his name, Nicole was shocked at how pitiful and lost he looked. His features were tight and drawn with defeat, wet with the glimmer of tears. But it was the sight of his pain that was so hard to bear.
She came over to him, saying with a steely calm, “I’ll do it for you,” because her sympathy at that moment would have broken his incredible bravery down. But he shook his head, speechless for a moment then with a remarkably strong voice, he told her, “No, I will.” Then, “Help me up.”
Frederic LaValois lay inside the box, composed as if for burial, but that was the only thing holy about what they saw. He’d started to deteriorate, but not so much that he wasn’t easily recognizable as the idealistic young writer who’d been eager to change the world. It should have helped that his shirtfront was stiff and brown with gore and that his face was bloated and his lips rouged from a recent kill. But it didn’t. He was still more Frederic than he was monster. Which was why it was so difficult for Marchand to bring the blade up at ready.
Then the eyes of the thing in the box opened. They weren’t Frederic’s warm, dreamy eyes but bottomless holes of hunger and hate that fixed Marchand’s with a viper’s hypnotic power. He hesitated.
“Mon frère,” came the low wet hiss, and with a terrible cry, Marchand made a fierce slash with the blade, not jumping back in time to avoid the hot jet of blood spraying upward as head and shoulders parted. He dropped the dripping blade to damp stones and with a wail, shoved the coffin into the sunlight.
And as Frederic burned, his brother wrestled out the remaining two boxes for the same consuming end. Then he stood in that weak curtain of light, head back, face uplifted, hands limp at his side. Nicole left him alone for as long as she dared, then she took up one of his slack hands and gently tugged.
“Marchand, it’s almost nightfall. We must go.”
He nodded and allowed her to lead him up from the stinking hole of death and purification. She bundled his coat close about him, not just because he was shaking fitfully but to hide the terrible bloodstains from those who passed them by. She guided him back to the house in the Place Vendome, the place they would have their final confrontation, where he staggered through the rooms, shedding his soiled clothing as he went until sinking naked into the pool. Revived by the shock of cool water, he began to scrub himself as if vigorous cleansing would wash away the stain of guilt and fear and horror. But of course it wouldn’t, Nicole knew as she watched him.
He came up from the water and straight into her arms, letting her hold him, dry him and finally take him to the first bed they’d shared together. There, she wrapped him up in the covers and bid him to stay still while she went to find one of Gerard’s clean shirts and retrieved his trousers and boots which, while distastefully dirty, would have to do.
He was lying back with eyes closed when she returned, so Nicole thought at first that he was asleep. Then she saw the movement of his hand beneath the covers. He was rubbing the bite mark in his arm.
“She’ll come for me as soon as it’s dark.”
Nicole shivered at the cold truth of those soft-spoken words.
“When she does, I won’t be able to stop myself from doing whatever she commands. We both know that. I’m damned, Nicole. Nothing can save me unless you’ll do for me what we did for them down in the sewer.”
Nicole stared at him, aghast.
“I beg of you to save my soul. I want you to kill me, Nicole.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“NO!”
“Nicole—”
“No!”
“You know I’m right! I could hurt you. I could even kill you and not be able to keep from doing it. I won’t be that kind of risk to you. I couldn’t live with more of that kind of guilt. I can’t stand the thought of that—creature—controlling me! If you don’t do it, she will and she won’t be as considerate about it. And then what? Then I rise up at night to stalk the unsuspecting? Nicole, don’t condemn me to that, I beg you. If you love me, spare me that. Please.”
She came to lie beside him, curling up within his embrace, nestling tight against his solid male heat, absorbing his frail human strength. She’d never loved another the way she loved him. She knew he was right in what he said. She knew she had to save him from the horrors Bianca had in store. He couldn’t do it from this mortal state. He wasn’t strong enough. She couldn’t protect him. But how could she end his life and
all her hopes of a future?
“I can’t lose you, Marchand. You are everything I’ve ever wanted in a man, in a mate. I can’t just let you go.”
“You must, Nicole. And soon. It grows darker by the minute.”
He didn’t have to tell her that. She could feel her senses sharpening as twilight deepened toward dusk. They had maybe an hour, probably less. And then she would have to kill him. She would have to.
“I love you, Marchand,” she cried wretchedly.
“Shhh.” And he was kissing her, lavishly, lingeringly, until her heart was pounding madly and her tears were streaming uncontrollably. Then he simply held her close and she savored the scent of him, so potent and powerful and richly flowing. With her head upon his chest, she listened to the steady beat below, wondering how she was going to stop that pulse and continue on, herself.
But would she have to?
“Marchand, there is another way.”
“And what is that, my love? To run? To hide? That would be no good for either of us.”
“No. To stay and get strong. To fight her on her own terms.”
He was silent for a moment then asked reluctantly, “And how would we manage that?”
She came up on her elbows so she could look down upon his face; such a wonderfully strong and masculine face. He was watching her, curious, cautious, but he wasn’t prepared for her suggestion:
“Let me bring you over.”
“Over where?” he asked without thinking.
“Over to the night. Where you can be her equal and free of her control. You don’t have to die.”
The corners of his mouth quirked slightly. “I beg your pardon, but I believe for what you have in mind, I do.”
“But you won’t stay dead. You will rise up, eternal.”
“A vampire.”
“Yes.”
“And be more damned than I am already? Thank you, no. I’d rather stay in my grave than rise from it nightly.”