“Listen to reason, Thomas,” Corvessa pleaded gently. “That girl does not yet appreciate what she is, and when she …”
“What?” Tom asked, rubbing his forehead between the eyes where he felt the dreigher lurking.
“All I’m asking is what is to keep her from becoming like Harlan? How long do you have to love her, a mortal?” Corvessa got closer again. A cool breeze flowing through the cab tossed her fiery hair and she put her cheek to his. “I can help you to where you are going,” she whispered.
“I didn’t mention that I was going anywhere,” Tom corrected her, feeling sleepy each time she spoke.
“No, but you are thinking of it. Going east, are we?” Her lips tickled his cheek when she grinned. “Trying to rid yourself of a troublesome stowaway, am I right?”
“Something like that,” he answered.
“One more reason to let go of the girl, Thomas.” Corvessa brushed his hair out of his face, lounging into his lap and watching the passing scenery with nonchalance. “She has demons to dispel too …”
“Demons?” Tom felt the dreigher putting on the sleeves, stepping into the trousers. He was too distracted by his thoughts and his disorientation to care.
“You don’t look well, Thomas. Why not rest?” Corvessa’s smile was the last thing Tom saw before the darkness seized him. Corvessa acted quickly, turning her eyes in the driver’s direction, creeping into the front seat and into his thoughts without ever leaving Thomas’s lap. The driver, unaware, began to slip from consciousness. The coach slowed, and after only a second or two, the driver sat upright again and snapped the reins, the horses speeding up with a start. Corvessa relaxed on Thomas and kept one hand held out, passively directing the driver like a marionette.
“How far is Paris?” Tom asked as his eyes began to darken.
“Oh, not much further, darling. But we must part for now,” she replied, watching his eyes with anticipation. When she saw the white rings lay siege on his pupils, she placed a kiss on his cheek, hopped up from his lap, instructed the hypnotized driver to lash the reins abruptly. The horses whinnied, tossing their heads and galloping full speed. Corvessa braced herself, smirking, while commanding the driver to stand. Up he rose, at attention like a soldier, before turning to his right and deliberately throwing himself to the roadside.
“What are you doing?” Tom, or, the dreigher, barked from the other seat, a dark, yet curious scowl on his face.
“How do I explain this in a man’s words?” she said, feigning a thoughtful expression. “We’ll call it decisive action,” she decided, nodding her head. “If you will not do what is best for you, I will. Maybe you’ll appreciate me some day, Thomas, but now is the time for war, not love.” Before he could speak again, she crossed the cab and scratched his cheek with a quick swipe of her hand. Just as planned, it invoked the dreigher’s wrath and Tom swung back, tearing three deep gashes across her collarbone and shredding her blouse.
“Ooh, how strong! Yes, this looks convincing,” she said calmly, inspecting the ghastly lacerations. “You wonder why I do this, Thomas,” she said without a trace of doubt in the assumption. “I have done everything else there is to do. I have tipped over nations, tidied up others, put infantile rulers to bed and raised handsome armies, and without snagging one thread of my dress on a jagged edge or streaking my apron with soil. Those are men’s silly affairs, and I am a woman. The world just isn’t enough. I do hope you come back to me, Thomas.” With one hand she tugged him close by the neck and stole an aggressive kiss before the coach veered off the road, throwing both of them from the cab as the demon took full control of Thomas. The windows turned upright and a loud cacophony of snapping branches, whinnying horses, busting axels and breaking glass sang them down a steep ditch. When Corvessa’s vision stopped spinning, she found the cab to be empty and Thomas to have vanished. The coaches they had left behind were catching up, alarmed by the accident. A few vampires left their coaches and hurried toward the wreck, lanterns swinging wildly in the dark. Making a few extra tears in her clothing and forcing the delight from her face, Corvessa ascended the hill and waited, her tongue collecting the last taste of Tom from her lips.
“Corvessa!” Leon shouted, walking swiftly to her and commanding the others to give them space. “Corvessa,” he repeated, “What happened?” Molly poked her head from the coach she had been sharing with Leon, struggling with the door. Although Leon gestured for her to stay put, she ignored him, ready to assume Corvessa was to blame for whatever had just occurred.
“What’s the meaning of this?” she demanded, directing the rage in her eyes at Corvessa.
“I won’t say I didn’t warn you, Leon,” Corvessa snapped, refusing to acknowledge Molly’s concern. “Don’t trust Blood Moons,” she hissed, thrusting her face into his like a striking viper before storming away and shutting herself into a new coach.
“Blood Moons?” Molly asked, eyes following Corvessa and then turning back to Leon. “What does she mean? What just happened? Leon!” she shouted, angered by the confusion on everyone’s faces and their hesitance to provide her an explanation. She was also afraid of the implication of Corvessa’s words.
“Please, Molly, calm yourself,” Leon said, the music in his voice working her out of her ire. “Corvessa has … To be honest, I myself am guilty of suspecting Thomas.” His uneven delivery was laced with sincere embarrassment, but it did not settle Molly’s nerves.
“Suspecting him of what?” she demanded, her mahogany eyes hardening.
“I do not want to conclude anything about Thomas that may encroach upon his honor, or your trust in him, but many believe that Thomas has some history with the Order of the Blood Moon. I am not saying this is true, but …”
“It can’t be true!” Molly asserted. “How does that have anything to do with this incident?”
“Lucia, the Order came to Paris recently, and we know beyond any doubt that Jack Darcy has met with Henriette Petit. The Howl was sighted in Marseille. Half of the reason we left London after the ball so abruptly is because we received this news.” Unable to mediate between honesty and respectful censorship, Leon frowned, feeling responsible for whatever had happened in the coach, and for the tears that pooled in Molly’s eyes.
“No, Thomas wouldn’t.” What Thomas wouldn’t do, Molly wasn’t sure. She still hadn’t figured out why Tom had attacked Corvessa. A part of her felt guilty, believing her mistrust in him had led to the incident. All had been right after she came to terms with the murder of Eli, but she felt foolish for having assumed that would be the end of their troubles. After all, she hadn’t been completely truthful with Thomas either. Guilt quickly turned to anger. Had Corvessa said something to him? Resisting the urge to tear Corvessa from her coach and bloody the details out of her, Molly apologized to Leon for the outburst. One of the coach drivers hiked up the embankment and spoke quietly to him.
“My men cannot tell which direction Thomas went,” he told Molly, the clover on his cheek drooping. “They say there are no tracks.” He reached out and directed her back to the coach, but out of respect, did not touch her. “I would prefer to take you to Chateau Beaumonte for comfort’s sake. The city is not far, and I will have my men search for Thomas immediately upon arrival.”
“Thank you, Leon,” said Molly quietly after a moment. If Leon had not displayed such amiable character, Molly would have already been in the woods looking for Thomas herself. From the moment she met him, Leon’s comportment had enkindled her undue repulsion, and his tuneful voice and magnetism enervated her. However, he had not once validated these reactions. But more than that, France was unfamiliar to her, and as much as she trusted Leon, she did not trust the swarm of vampires around him. She wasn’t disinterested in going after Tom, but she was isolated from him, and she didn’t go after him for the same reason fishermen don’t go out to sea during a storm. As the ensemble of vampires set out again, Molly looked off into the dark just as she had looked east from beneath the tree in Arthur Fairman
’s pasture.
Corvessa told all but one of the occupants of the coach to leave her to herself. Two of the three women, both Roses, nodded and exited the coach, going to sit in the driver’s seat. The woman across from Corvessa, face shaded by a hood, looked up ever so slowly, her violet eyes burning through the dark. She kept her arms wrapped tight around her stomach, fidgeting with hunger.
“She’s alone,” said Corvessa to the vampire. “Wait until we’re in Paris. After that, do as you please.”
High atop Montmartre, the loftiest hill in Paris, sat Chateau Beaumonte. The majestic abode was constructed a century before Arnaud Beaumonte took the seat of patriarch, and its position symbolized the place that vampires held in France. It became the fortress of vampire aesthetics, the governing palace of the Black Coat Society and the most respected structure in the country, sapping the prestige from Versailles and silently staring down the gentry. Its presence was challenged only once in its lifetime. The French army, prompted by the ruling powers, stormed Chateau Beaumonte in the early 1730s. The Society had failed to meet with the royal family at Versailles for a semi-annual assembly, which alarmed the powers. Attendance was law, and the vampires hadn’t once defied it, knowing that the military would assume the worst and Chateau Beaumonte would fall under siege. The Society, however, was not openly ignoring the law, and the royal family had changed the date of the assembly one month before. The courier who was sent to inform the Society never conveyed his message. Why he did not, neither party could account for. To this day, the French government persists in declaring the courier was killed by vampires and the Society used his disappearance as a scapegoat for the massacre. The Society, in contrast, accused the ruling family of conspiracy and held firm to the belief that France had an agenda—to exterminate the superior vampire class and appear to have none of the blood on their hands.
When the French army mobilized, they chose the lesser of two evils: attacking during daylight hours. They had no advantage of cover, but it was certainly wiser to disadvantage the vampires as well. To the soldiers’ surprise, the Society met them at the door. The patriarch, Bernard Beaumonte II, was later quoted as lamenting the notion that the royal family was so disturbed by his absence at their home in Versailles, that they would mar the front doors of his, and that he had no other choice but to “water the lawn” with mortal blood in order to keep the weeds from “cracking the marble of his front step.” Two hundred soldiers lay dead on Montmartre that evening, and the people living around the hill said that after the sun set, the lawn was spotless again. The defeat was forever after known as Hell’s Feast, and it marked an immediate and permanent decay of immortal relations with the French powers. For decades the Beaumonte family conceded to France’s retaliatory mandates, but despite their submission, the stigma survived. The death of Arnaud Beaumonte, to many, was the harbinger of the Black Coat Society’s darkest days. Most were suspicious of the Order of the Blood Moon and the arrival of Jack Darcy in Marseille. Others were prepared to assume that the revolutionaries had assassinated Arnaud. Fewer still rejected those notions and cast their suspicions on the House of Roses and Corvessa, but they didn’t publicize this theory. It was under this blanket of revolution, distrust and decay—darkness—that Leon Beaumonte would return to Paris with Lucia Vasquez.
Geoffrey Mylus,
July 4, 1833
****
Leon pulled the shades halfway down on the cab windows when the coach rolled into Paris later that night. Periodically he would move to one end of his seat or the other, looking across the cab and out the opposite window for several minutes before switching sides again. Molly did not ask what he was doing, rather she guessed he was concerned about the Order of the Blood Moon, should they be out and active.
Molly’s thoughts drifted to Thomas. She did not believe Thomas had anything to do with the Blood Moons, presently or ever. His past was ugly, but not that ugly. Surely, she thought, the demon had gotten the better of him. Still, why wouldn’t he have taken measures to warn someone, or have the driver stop? She knew next to nothing of Corvessa, but the ordeal smelled of conspiracy. Molly decided she would wait until the facts surfaced, but if Corvessa’s hands were found to be unclean, Molly would not allow her to go uncorrected.
Weary of her concerns, she turned her gaze to the cab windows once Leon lifted the shades again, but her heart was not met with ease. The only life Molly saw was a pair of wretched dogs, badgering a man for his armful of old bread. The rest of the city appeared asleep … or wide awake and watching their windows as Molly watched hers. No, more as Leon watched his. That vibration of silent anxiety ceased resonating only when the coach crested Montmartre and stopped at the front doors of Chateau Beaumonte.
The palace, unlike the rest of the city, was alight and festive, unaware that it was the only blooming thing in a garden of poverty. Stately, lavish and powerful, its foundation gripped the hill as an archer grips a bow. Its ornate and delicate full windows were complemented with authoritative balconies guarded by legions of hellish creatures of stone, their eyes focused on the city outside the gates. Hanging vines and quivers of flowers sprouted forth from the second and third floors. Long, flowing banners rippled and whipped up their tails as if to shoo away mortals. They displayed the Beaumonte crest in black, silver and deep purple. The palace itself, seen from above, resembled two lowercase t-shaped major wings, attached at their cross marks, and attached again by a semicircular, multilevel colonnade at their bases, overlooking the edge of Paris that faced away from the Seine and to the northeast.
Molly’s eyes lingered on the palace as Leon opened the cab door for her. It was, in her opinion, the residential equivalent of Stepney Hall. There was indeed evidence of borrowed aesthetics in the statues that graced the rooftops—Greek figures here and there, attempting to, but not succeeding in offsetting the presence of gargoyles and other fire-spitting, winged imps.
“This is my family’s home,” said Leon.
“Luxurious,” Molly commented.
“Centuries of work built it. My family’s work, not theirs,” he informed her, pointing down the hill and across the river at Paris.
“I didn’t mean any offense,” Molly apologized. “I just sense that it cost more than manual labor.”
“Yes, much more.” Leon led Molly to the front doors, wanting to explain exactly what it had required of his family to defend Montmartre over the past century, or how short the lifespan of a Beaumonte actually was, or what the palace meant to him and other vampires. However, he was aware that Molly held anti-vampire sentiments, and he thought it would be unwise to appeal to her, especially if Thomas didn’t return soon. A strange and unwarranted anger passed over his heart. For a moment he cared nothing for Molly or her well being. Why should he? Daughter of a magesmith or not, she was mortal. Her blood was inevitably the most interesting thing to him, and rejecting that impulse gave him headaches. He scolded himself for the previous thought and immediately corrected it by telling Molly that he would send out a search party as he had promised. Molly thanked him and asked for accommodations, saying nothing more once Leon had shown her to a room in the north wing. She expressed only bated happiness, taking an interest in the paintings in her room, but Leon knew her feigned curiosity would not last. He left her to organize a search and to speak with Corvessa in private.
A group of four vampires left the palace in search of Thomas. A fifth, waiting outside the gates, joined them unexpectedly, following quietly as the four descended the hill. The group decided to head northeast, and not until they were far from Montmartre did they notice the presence of the fifth vampire, who hadn’t spoken to anyone and seemed distracted. The group leader complained to her, but received only a blank stare. He said nothing further, bewildered by the woman’s odd violet eyes. After several more minutes, before the group had covered any significant ground, the group leader ordered a halt, spotting what he believed to be a Blood Moon, who hadn’t noticed the group, and was headed down another street.
Just as the group relaxed, the violet-eyed vampire ran after the Blood Moon. Suppressing the urge to shout at her, the leader gave chase and the rest of the group followed, trying to stop her.
“It makes no difference that your father chose a mortal wife, Leon.” Corvessa shut the door of the east wing study and shook her head. “Must I tell you this? You forget that you are not a mortal. Why, Leon, do you care so much for the city?”
“There is time left to change the minds of those people,” Leon argued.
“There has never been time left because there is none to waste on those people! Those … humans! We are not people, Leon!” Corvessa threw a hand over her head and turned away from him, going to sit in a chair by the full windows. “We’re not people,” she mumbled, looking at the empty chair reflected in the glass pane.
“I don’t believe Miss Bishop is going to want anything to do with us, by the way. I don’t know why you’re so confident,” Leon said, following her and taking a seat as well.
“She hasn’t much choice, now that Thomas has chosen his side,” she replied, resting her chin in one hand and leaning on the armrest.
“I’m glad you brought it up.” Leon took a seat. “What did you do to provoke him?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, eyes narrowing, staring a hole in the window.
“Thomas isn’t here to reunite with his fictitious Blood Moon brothers, Corvessa. I don’t know why he came to Paris, but it was not in order to abandon Miss Bishop, however auspicious a coincidence it may be for us.” Leon pushed back his hair from his face, rubbing the top of his head and stretching his neck. His head ached fiercely. His blood was due for a renewing, and his instincts would not let the matter rest. Thoughts of beautiful, mortal Molly treaded the surface of his mind.
The Lore Series (Box Set): All 3 Books In One Volume Page 40