Seduction (36 page)

There wasn’t much left of Azrael’s manuscript to read, only a few more pages. But I knew now that it wasn’t just a story. Somehow, in some way I didn’t yet quite understand, the ancient tale of Jean-Loup de Villeneuve affected me in a very personal way.

What I did understand was that the aura surrounding the house called the Poplars was coming from the Darkness. The Darkness, my old friend. It had almost killed me once; now it loved me as its own.

The Master has saved her for you . . . a very special treat . . .

The Master.

Yes, I knew who that was. What it was. And I guessed it remembered me, too.

I sorted out the pages, but it took me a while to be able to concentrate. It wasn’t what the butler had said that preyed on my mind. He’d been trying to scare me, but I’d already seen
too much to fall for that line about sending the police after me. He knew as well as I did that the Enclave had killed Marie-Therèse. It had happened just as I’d feared it would, only on a different day.

“It was the young one,”
Marie-Therèse had said.

What I hadn’t known was that her killer had been Peter.

Going Home

Jean-Loup awoke near dawn. His left eye was swollen shut, and his hair was stuck to the floor where he had lain in a pool of his own coagulating blood. With a groan, he pushed himself into a sitting position. His sides and back were already mottled with bruises, and he felt a constant nausea in his belly from the beating he’d endured.

He stumbled out of his house. His carriage and horses had been stolen. His treasures were gone too, all of them: Charlemagne’s necklace, the pot that Henry Shaw had turned to gold, the golden heart he’d made long ago for a black-haired woman with violet eyes.

Mon amour toujours
.
My love forever.

Nothing was forever. That was God’s ultimate revenge for cheating death, the lesson learned by all who lived too long: There was no such thing as forever.

“Veronique!” he cried, falling to his knees in the dry earth.

He wanted to stay there until the life left his body, but death is cruel and slow. It brought insects and filth and the stink of rotting flesh. It brought Drago and his kind, eager and hungry.

“No,” he said aloud. “No, I will not wait for him to gobble me up like ripe fruit.”

And so Jean-Loup began to walk, not toward anything in particular, but
away.
Away from the house that had been stripped of everything that had made it a home. Away from the horrid perversion his life had become.

By the time the sun came up, the house was out of sight. Nine hours later he arrived back in Paris.
Where else
,
he thought as he watched a Revolutionary guard smash a woman’s face with the butt of his musket. All roads led here, to the center of the apocalypse.

Then he heard loud gunfire, close enough that Jean-Loup could smell the cordite. A group of five or six young men were running down the street, with a cadre of soldiers some distance behind. One of the men fell in front of him, his head exploding like a melon.

Jean-Loup looked about in confusion and fear. He knew the soldiers wouldn’t care if they shot him by mistake. Turning swiftly, he followed the young men who were being pursued into an old building and down the stairs into the earthen basement, where they disappeared.

The old man searched frantically for them, but when he heard the soldiers thundering down the stairs, he had to run anywhere he could. Perhaps he could find a corner littered with debris somewhere that the guards might overlook, he thought, scrambling into the darkness.

But he never reached the corner. There was no corner. The basement of the building was part of the complex underground configuration of tunnels that had honeycombed the limestone beneath the city since the time of the Romans.

Some of the tunnels were well used, even by respectable citizens. There were occasional torches, and even signs on some walls indicating which streets were above. Once or twice Jean-Loup thought he saw the young men he had followed from the street, but they were much faster than he was, and he lost them, although he continued to hear the shouts of the guards. He knew they would not trouble themselves to question him about whether or not he was associated with the others. After this long and tiring chase, the soldiers would make a game out of snuffing out his life as painfully as possible.

So he ran willy-nilly into the darkest and most narrow tunnels he encountered, into the catacombs, where King Louis had decreed that the bodies in the city’s fetid cemeteries be transferred; and past them into the horrific, stinking pits where multitudes of headless corpses recently killed lay putrefying. At one point he screamed as he tripped over one of the bodies and felt its slimy flesh under his hands, but he kept running. Running, and then walking in stages steadily down, farther, farther, until the air grew still and cold and he could no longer hear the orders issued by the guards.

Why didn’t I let them kill me
? he asked himself.

He had long ago tired of living. But soon he realized the futility of even asking the question. It no longer made any difference whether he lived or died. He just kept walking.

There were more than a thousand miles of underground tunnels beneath the city. Jean-Loup felt as if he had walked every one of those miles. In some places the slow dripping of water in the passageways formed forests of stalactites; in others, he discovered underground lakes filled with pristine water still as glass. And still he walked. He walked until he found the end of the world, a small cavern where he could hear nothing, see nothing. Think nothing. Remember nothing.

It was where he wanted to stay.

And he would have, if he hadn’t been so hungry. After a long time—he had no idea how long—he began to walk again. Eventually the pathway began to slope slightly upward, climbing higher, until the ground grew damp and he could hear the sound of rushing water.

Three days after he’d left Toujours, Jean-Loup found his way out of the underground maze to emerge from a sewer grate near the ruins of an ancient stone building. From there, he managed to stagger, starving, to the Abbey of Lost Souls, where a housemaid who mistook him for a beggar directed him to the kitchen.

The cook was a kindly woman who took pity on the old man. “Here’s a basin,” she said, pouring water into a bowl. “Clean yourself up while I fix you a plate.”

He thanked her, grateful to wash the grime off his hands and face. After he had eaten, he watched through the high window as a carriage came round the curved courtyard and a well-dressed man stepped out.

“Henry,” Jean-Loup said, surprised. He headed for the door, but the cook stopped him.

“Now, how would you even know a toff like Henry Shaw?” she teased.

“I . . . I must speak with him,” the old man muttered. “Toujours . . . the Revolutionaries . . .”

“Never mind them. Those what live here’ll have my head if they know I’ve been giving food away to strangers.” She waved a wooden spoon at him. “So you keep quiet about this, or I’ll turn you in to the militia myself, got that?”

On the other side of the window, Henry was kissing Sophie de la Soubise on both cheeks in greeting.

“The siren,” he said.

“Is that what they’re calling her these days?” the cook said with a raucous laugh. She slapped Jean-Loup on his back. “Oh, it’s a new world, Gramps, make no mistake.” She dried some spoons with a rag. “Nothing’s the way it used to be.”

Outside, Henry and Sophie entered the carriage and drove away. In the street beyond, a small boy screamed as he was dragged into the prison wagon along with his parents. Farther away, a row of prostitutes flirted with a group of self-appointed soldiers in dirty uniforms. Muskets sounded in the distance while intermittently, when the wind was right, the sound of the guillotine’s falling blade sliced through the air with its silvery song.

“No,” he repeated numbly. “Nothing is the same.”

He left the abbey with a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, a sack of candles, and some flint—items he’d purchased from the cook for a handful of gold nuggets he’d made from lead pie weights while she wasn’t looking.

Then he walked back to the abandoned building where he had emerged from the tunnel.

“I remember this,” he said in wonder, running his hand along the crumbling stone wall. It was the building where, six hundred years before, he had caught a zinc
dénier
that had changed his life forever.

“Such a small thing,” he whispered as he lifted the sewer grate and lowered himself once again into the darkness and peace of the distant past.

Jean-Loup had finally found his place in the world.

• • •

Azrael.

I supposed I’d known for some time, without admitting it, who Jean-Loup was.
What a strange and terrible life,
I thought as I closed the last page with a heavy heart. I remembered what he had said, that there was no such thing as forever. Was that true?

Was there nothing that wouldn’t be corroded or destroyed by time, even our own souls?

CHAPTER

•

FORTY-THREE

I sneaked into the abbey’s kitchen. I couldn’t risk going back to my room because I was pretty sure the life-sucking butler at the house in Vincennes had made good on his promise to call the witches of the Enclave, so Sophie and her friends would probably have a surprise welcome waiting for me if they found me. Fortunately, it was unlikely they’d venture into the kitchen for any reason, so I felt fairly safe while I worked on sewing the last pages of the book.

It was after ten when I finally finished. Then I bound the pine with some glue I found in one of the pantry drawers. When I was done, the book looked as good as new, or at least as new as it looked when I’d first wrecked it. I stuck it in my backpack and let myself back out.

I had to see Azrael, even if it meant waking him up. I needed an explanation about the events in the book I’d read. Even if parts of his account were fictitious, Azrael knew a lot about the Enclave, and it was important that I learned what
he knew. The similarities between his story and my reality were just too close. And Joelle still hadn’t come home.

• • •

“Azrael?” I called into the darkness. In the distance, I saw the light from one dim candle. Maybe he was still awake. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” came the grizzled old voice. He sounded confused, and for a moment I thought he’d been sleeping after all. But when I walked in, I saw that the old man had taken down the painting of Veronique from the wall and was standing in front of it with a palette of paints and a brush. He was painting the white streak in her hair.

Obviously absorbed in his work, he blinked at me for a moment as if he didn’t recognize me.

“Hi,” I said softly. “I apologize about the time.”

Finally he smiled. “What? No chicken livers in aspic? No frog legs in browned butter?”

I laughed. “I don’t think I’m cut out for
haute cuisine
,” I said. It was true. I’d spent all the money I’d saved up for college to come here and cook food I wouldn’t even eat. But that was just one of many mistakes I’d made in the past couple of months, and probably the smallest of the lot. “I like what you’ve done to the painting,” I said, changing the subject.

“You were my inspiration.”

“Me? What did I do?”

“You stole my book,” he said, quite conversationally.

My mouth went dry. “I . . . I’m really sorry about that,” I stammered. “That is, I didn’t really steal it. In fact, it’s right here.” I ran over to my bag and took out the book. “You see, I dropped it, and . . . and . . .”

“Are you sorry to have read it?” He added a few more brushstrokes to the painting.

I swallowed. “It’s always better to know the truth,” I said carefully. “That’s why I came tonight.”

He sighed, a wheezing, whistling sound. “What do you wish to ask me?” He seemed so
rickety
, as if he were held together with chewing gum.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.” He waved me away irritably. “Was that your question?”

“No.” I laid the book down carefully. Then I took a deep breath and tried to keep my voice steady. “Marie-Therèse died,” I said. “She’d been drained of whatever life she’d had left. And that skeevy butler . . .” I shuddered. “He tried to get me to take her last breath.” I looked up at him. “Like in your book.”

“And did you?” he asked. “Take her last breath?”