The cult council at Chateau Beaumonte had begun to wonder where their search party had gone to after the second hour passed following their departure. The group had been ordered to search by sky after traveling a safe distance from Montmartre, and an hour, at most, was all they would need to skim the city and its outskirts. Their acute night vision and aerial speed should have seen to it. When no one had heard from them, the watch notified the council of suspicious activity surrounding the hill, and when Thomas Crowe’s name began to buzz around the palace, Leon came under heavy criticism during an impromptu assembly in the grand council chamber. His superiors, all gathered in haste, shut off all the doors leading into the room and sat with Leon privately around a circular table, each of them agitated and speaking out of turn. Leon heard little of what they said. Thoughts of Molly plugged his ears to them. As the council spent the next several minutes railing against Leon for bringing Thomas Crowe to Paris—and indirectly telling him his chance of earning patriarchal status was waning—all Leon could think of was the estrangement that had dug a trench between himself and Molly. In London, when he met her at Stepney, Leon remembered he had felt, not thought things that coerced him to introduce himself. But in Paris, in his family’s ancestral home, her mortality put up ramparts against those feelings. In the face of shame, the possible end of his family’s reign, and his bodily hunger, Leon stood without a word and left the council, whose tirades ceased as they watched the man who had twice ruined his father’s home walk from the room in defiance of their authority.
Leon stretched his jaw and rubbed his aching head, walking down the first floor corridor of the north wing of the palace, finding a staircase and reciting his proposal to Molly in his head as the seconds of his legacy’s life ticked away. He would let Molly make the decision, he told himself. He would accept either a yes or a no. If yes, then he would rebuild what his negligence had destroyed of his lineage’s long, arduous work. If no, he wasn’t sure. Climbing the north wing stair to the second floor, he calmly walked to Molly’s bedroom and knocked. Several times he announced himself and received no answer, so, slowly, he opened the door, gaze cast down at his feet.
“Miss Bishop?” he called, turning the knob and stepping inside. Before he entered the room, several of his men approached.
“Thomas Crowe is on the front lawn and demands to speak with you, sir,” one of the vampires informed Leon.
“On the front lawn? How did he …”
“He’s alone, sir. No one saw him arrive, and the watch has been focusing on the activity to the rear of the property.”
“What activity?” Leon didn’t want any more terrible news.
“Several fires, sir. They’ve spread in nearly all directions. The source is somewhere in the west. Also, sir, your search party was attacked.”
“By whom?” Leon raised his voice, striking a booming note. The vampires did not answer him immediately, as if they knew the information would only worsen Leon’s mood.
“We are uncertain, sir, but the fires came from the direction of the clan commune,” said one of the men after a moment. Leon did not reply, but ordering the men to follow him, he vaulted the second floor railing and stormed down the southbound corridor of the north wing.
The men headed to the front door, with many more vampires descending the grand stair and joining them. A vampire entered the room with Leon’s épée, “Fantome”, and presented it to him. The épée, made of Damascus steel, was a gift to Bernard Beaumonte I. It was crafted by a Middle Eastern warlock, whose techniques imitated the swordsmith Damashqi’s. At the utterance of a secret Scriptic verse, the blade was said to be capable of cutting through any material, even an opponent’s sword. Fastening the double-edged Fantome—an heirloom from his great grandfather, marked with the Beaumonte crest in the hand guard—around his waist with a belt and sheath, Leon stepped up to the front door and cued his men to unbar it. Another vampire approached Leon with a pair of gloves. He took them and slipped them on as a performance, then took them off again once the front door closed behind him, not wanting to look eager for a duel with Thomas. Holding his head high and walking with his shoulders back, hair tied and jacket stiff, Leon approached Thomas, stopping at a safe, fifteen or so metres from him. Tom stood with his hands by his sides, shirt beaten by high brush and darkened by soil, jaw lined with a day’s worth of golden stubble. His brow pinched together, shading his angry eyes—one yellow and one black, with a broken white ring where the pupil should have been, little white veins bursting from it across the cornea.
“Thomas.” Leon rested a hand on the free side of his belt, shifting his weight to one leg casually and at a loss for how to greet the growling dog. “I would say that I am glad to see you found your way, but I am missing a few of my cult. You return and announce yourself under darkness and, as you noticed, the city is alight and burning itself down.”
Tom said nothing, did not move, and did not blink.
“I have not a just reason to keep you out of my house,” Leon continued, “and neither have I reason to permit you into it until the circumstances surrounding the night’s events are clear to me.”
Tom began to walk toward him. Leon drew Fantome and relaxed when Tom stopped.
“You do not trust me, Leon?” Tom’s scowl gave way to an explosion of wild laughter. “It’s been hours since I awoke, lost, beaten and abandoned …” A series of coughs choked him up and a pain in his head, brought on by injury sustained during his blind romp through the countryside stifled his voice. “You don’t trust me?” Tom shouted at the top of his lungs, the scowl returning to his face.
“I cannot allow you in my family’s house until I know why you came back,” repeated Leon, raising his épée. A crash at the gates stole his attention from Tom. At the bottom of the hill, the darkness was alive. The fires were spreading across the street from the gates, threatening to continue their march toward Chateau Beaumonte. From high on the third floor balconies, the watch shouted. Dozens of vampires burst from the front door and dispersed across the lawn, drawing blades and sprouting black wings.
“You brought me here …” Thomas didn’t finish. Corvessa’s warnings pushed every other thought out of his mind. “Why did you bring me here?” he demanded, storming toward Leon, who snapped Fantome to head level, halting Tom again.
A rhythmic, thundering set of footsteps ascended the hill. The vibration escalated sharply, and then, his silhouette blocking the glow of the blazing city, Jack Darcy reared up on his hind legs. Nearly two men’s height from the ground, his lupine head surveyed the array of vampires standing between him and the palace. Breathing out a deep growl that ruffled the beardlike mane hanging from his jaw and rattled his round gut, he crouched and flexed his clawed feet. As Leon’s men drew their sidearms and peppered him with silver shots, he thrust his ugly maw opened wide and blasted them with a long howl that cracked the full windows on the south face of the chateau. When the smoke lifted, Jack stood tall, and inhaled slowly, muscles tightening as he pushed the bullets from his limbs and torso. The costly curse lent to him and his men by the Oath sealed his wounds in seconds. The vampires drew their blades and transformed, bodies losing color, eyes narrowing, wings spreading and fangs sprouting forth fearlessly. The rest of Jack’s pack of frenzied werewolves crept up Montmartre, filling the shadows and lawn, but their numbers grew until Leon could see the figures of Blood Moons beyond the hill, filling the streets and pouring forth from around corners.
“Why did you bring me here? Let me hear it from the ass’s mouth, I’ve already heard it from the parrot’s!” Tom shouted again. A hoarse whistle cut the air as a hatchet struck Leon in the shoulder, forcing him to face Tom, whose rage blinded him to the presence of Jack and his army. Corvessa did this, thought Leon to himself, far too late to make a difference. Hundreds of pairs of black wings took to the air, swarming about the palace like wasps, surrounding Montmartre and closing the battlefield, preventing more of Jack’s crew from crossing the street. Their speed and mass
whipped up a wind that beat back the fires laying siege on the palace. The Blood Moons’ eyes watched the whirlwind of vampires. They poised and snapped their jaws. Jack charged the door, his blade banging around in its sheath, clinging to his only garments, a werewolf-sized war sash and broad-legged trousers, trimmed off at the knee. His hulking body drove through the defensive line at the front door, and he put a hole through the architecture. His pack followed, the first attackers being swept up by a striking flock of vampires, who skewered tens of them like fishing seabirds and took flight again, dropping their catches again after reaching deadly heights above the hill. Jack wrenched a chunk of marble off the front steps and hurled it into the whirlwind of vampires overhead. The stream dove for him, and he leapt aside, drawing Quarter and running it through three of the Black Coats, putting the bottom of his foot to the first and pushing them off the end of the blade.
Leon dug the hatchet out of his shoulder, extending his wings while the rest of his body dressed for battle. He stood his ground. His men would deal with the raiding Blood Moons. His home would burn, and he knew it. It began burning when he was a young boy and it had never stopped. What was important now was to keep Tom safely away from the war on the lawn. The time for discussion had passed. Corvessa had made sure of it. Thomas had come for Molly, and not to simply retrieve her, but to take her from Leon, and Leon knew it. Thomas’s reappearance was a scripted segue into a ceremonial undoing of the Society. Knowing this, Leon accepted the inevitable duel. It would be the only way to spoil Corvessa’s ploy, but in order to overturn his, Thomas’s, and Molly’s fates, Leon would have to preserve his opponent—a man eager to kill him. Until he had Molly to offer to Tom, no other item or word of reason was going to turn Thomas’s mind from his mission, so Leon wasted none of his breath. As Tom pulled the pistol from his belt, Leon’s wings flared, rushing forward and down as Tom pulled the trigger. Leon’s right wing caught the bullet and its elasticity foiled the shot. Tom’s distraction was successful, and as Leon moved his wings, two clawed hands and fanged mouth came for him.
Molly hadn’t wished to speak to Leon when he came knocking on her door the second time that night, and when he left abruptly, she decided she wouldn’t wait for the sunrise to leave. Tearing through her few bags, she picked out a pair of men’s’ trousers she had modified to her size and shape, added a chemise and bodice and swapped her shoes for sturdy boots. Throwing her dress to the floor, Molly wrapped a gun belt around her waist, strapped La Flor to her thigh, slipped on her ruby ring next to Tom’s, and put out the lamps in the room. Drawing back the curtains in the window, she peered outside and caught sight of the mayhem on the lawn. A bright glow pulsed from Tom’s ring, startling Molly. She closed the curtain and watched the luminous face cut into the gem. A few little points of light extended from it and aligned, pointing her to the door. Her heart filling with hope, Molly hurried out into the hallway. The lights rearranged themselves and guided her out onto the colonnade, opposite the lawn side of the palace. The colonnade was quiet, save for the repercussions from the collapsing innards of the palace. The ring pointed down the marble stair that led to a beautiful stone garden, raised up level from the hillside behind Chateau Beaumonte. A shadow slipped away behind a hedge in the garden, and the little points of light on Tom’s ring followed it. Again Molly’s heart livened, and she flew with light steps down the marble stair, running to the garden and calling out for Thomas.
Stepping through the entryway to the gardens—an arched tunnel made of brick—Molly felt an invasion of chills wrack her neck and stampede down her back. As she walked further into the archway, her ring fed her light to find her way. At the end of the archway, a wrought iron door squeaked open for her as if persuaded by ghostly hands. Looking over her shoulder, she could no longer see the moonlight from whence she had come. The darkness behind her had changed, and suddenly there was no return path. The squeaky door banged into brick wall and bounced back a few inches, startling Molly. She felt the touch of fingertips on the nape of her neck, shrieked, and ran forward, spinning to look into the darkness behind her. Not a soul was there. The archway had led her into the open air gardens, surrounded by brick walls high enough to prevent one from looking over them. They were decorated with the images of stone faces that peered down, weary-eyed, into a channel of dead water that nestled up against the brick and followed it around the perimeter of the gardens. The branches of full trees blocked out most of the night sky, their arms reaching out to touch one another with bony twig hands. Beds of flowers lay in perfect silence, unmoving. No insect or cross breeze disturbed the floral tomb. The waters of a round fountain nearby hushed, as if frozen in rigor mortis. Molly held out her little source of light; she was loathe to pay it any mind as she felt the garden watch her.
A violent thrashing tore up waves in the fountain to her left, slinging water over its low walls and soaking the stone pathway. A loud metallic clang followed it. Molly’s heart jumped into her throat as she turned her ring to it, casting harsh light on the west corner of the garden. Nothing—nothing at all to be seen, except a trail of wet footprints that fled the area and disappeared into another brick archway, it’s wrought iron door swinging lifelessly on its hinges, as if having been thrown open moments before. The little points of light aligned and, as much as Molly twisted and turned her wrist, they insisted that she go through the door, following the footprints. She could not bring herself to enter the dark archway, coming within steps of it and feeling every instinct command her to stop. To her right, the iron door creaked. In the corner of her eye, Molly saw the figure of someone standing so close she could feel them breathe. Without turning to look, she screamed and tripped as she darted into the archway, the iron door slamming shut behind her. Her right foot stepped on uneven stone, and she took a painful tumble down a set of stairs. Dizzy and lying on her twisted arm, she could see the lights aligning again, pointing up the stairs. The glow of the ring revealed a flickering shadow on the brick that didn’t belong to her. It appeared to be standing on the staircase. It reached out, arm stretching like rubber down the wall, descending the stairs, like scuttling spiders, toward her. Molly scrambled to her feet and ran, panic and terror strangling her as she burst through the next iron door and shut it closed, backpedaling into another open air garden.
Silence. No breath of wind. No chatter of a fountain.
The sound of her heart, rattling her ribs like a jailed criminal pleading to be set free, pumped with such force that her ears felt the pressure of her blood as it surged past her neck and up her temples. A chittering sound echoed through the garden. Around a hedge to the back of her, Molly heard two voices whispering to one another. When she turned to look at the source, a pale face ducked out of her line of sight around the hedge. She wasn’t alone. Her stomach sank, and her back went rigid. Walking wide around the hedge, her legs tense as a stalking cat’s, Molly drew one of her pearl pistols and peered around the corner, catching sight of a pale body. A blast of smoke and the clatter of marble broke the silence before Molly had time to realize she had pulled the trigger. She blinked for the first time in several minutes as the blue smoke cleared. The bullet she had fired had taken the left arm off of a statue at the elbow, but Molly had little time to notice, for she began to shake when she saw that the statue’s head was missing—the one that had peeked at her around the hedge. It had to have moved at least two paces for her to have seen it before. As she shut her eyes and tried to reject the hallucination, the missing head came out of hiding, rolling up behind her and clumsily knocking the backs of her ankles. Molly put her hands to her face and refused to open them, biting her tongue and stifling another scream. A bitter cold brushed over her. Something exhaled a wintry sigh that made the hair on her arms and neck raise. Someone was standing inches from her face. She opened her eyes and, and first, saw nothing. Then, a frigid chill licked her arms and neck when she caught sight of a lifeless woman’s body floating about in the air, her head and limbs hanging limp, as an unseen presence
swept her around and around the garden aimlessly, like a possessed puppet. Molly, her feet turned to lead by her fear, did not move. Her eyes followed the body the way a cat’s follow prey, with rapt obsession.
The woman, wearing the attire of a Black Coat, stopped suddenly and turned to face Molly. Her head snapped to attention and her eyelids popped open with the crisp crunch of dead leaves. The violet eyes in her head stared quietly at Molly, and then the body rushed at Molly, lifeless limbs trailing behind like the tails of many kites. The woman’s face was thin and starved. Blotches of bruise-yellow and purple gave little color to her deathly skin. Limply, her dark hair hung in straight fetters around her head and swung as her skull wobbled slightly on her stem of a neck. She looked nauseous.
Molly scampered backward, drawing another pistol and putting the spent one back in its holster. She pulled back the hammer and recited all the spells she could remember silently. “Where is Thomas? Is he here?” she asked, keeping a distance from the woman, whatever she was.
Here.
Molly heard the whisper in her head, but the woman’s mouth had not opened to speak, though her eyes aimed at Molly. “Where is he?” she persisted, threatening the woman with her pistol.
He let us die.
“What is your meaning? Tell me who you are!” Molly demanded, attempting to intimidate the woman, whose eyes followed Molly’s, unaffected.
The Lore Series (Box Set): All 3 Books In One Volume Page 42