Chapter Eleven #2
Dulior stepped across the threshold of the Béziers tower. The place had never been meant for her. It reeked of her husband.
Ex-husband, Dulior reminded herself, scowling at the tilework on the floor and then at the carved staircase.
There was only one, and a maid stood close to the landing, head bowed, her eyes averted from Dulior in a telltale sign that the woman had recognised her for what she was; a creature akin to her masters, yet unknown to her.
This was the first time Dulior had dared enter the tower. The furthest she had come before was the driveway outside. Back then, she had not even left the carriage. Jean-étienne had argued with the servants, affronted at being denied entry by Marquis Bracci.
Marquis Bracci. Dulior’s flawless face twisted in aversion.
A title and a name she had not chosen for him, but he had appointed to himself, reclaiming his old family name as a final insult to her and the gift she had given him.
Silvio had discarded her like a cheap trinket, leaving her a widow.
The widow di Flaviari—how long it had been since she had gone by that title.
Emerick was not there. He had not been in the tower for a long time.
She felt the lack of his annoying presence even before she entered the building, but she could still see traces of him.
She saw his face in the painted fae creatures running along walls and ceilings, in the paintings, the frescoes and the stained glass.
Silvio had built his lover a shrine, an altar to his undying devotion.
Dulior’s mouth curled into a grimace. Silvio had drowned the tower in iterations of his lover, over and over again.
When she had turned Jean-étienne into a vampire, she was angry.
They had taken everything from her: her son, her husband, and her place as consort.
She wanted, in turn, to take something from someone else.
Jean-étienne’s life had been easy to grasp and replace with her lifeblood.
Watching him lap at her blood, uttering wet, pathetic thank yous, again and again, his mouth and face stained red, his body changing beneath her.
Jean-étienne was a devoted husband… but he was no Silvio.
He could never hold a candle to Silvio’s flame.
Any speck of will he had once possessed had been drained on the night Dulior turned him into her devoted, eager slave.
Jean-étienne put on gloves and took them off, throwing them on the ground, challenging Silvio’s ghost to a duel.
His devotion sickened Dulior. Not even Emerick had crawled and debased himself in such a way.
Over the years, she had made sure that Emerick—that disgusting, needy thing—always walked behind her, unworthy of lurking in her shadow, let alone enjoy a single glance from her.
Compared to Silvio, Jean-étienne was a fledgling: a baby chick refusing to learn to fly, for once its wings grew and spanned, it would have to leave the nest and its mother’s warmth.
And Jean-étienne never wanted to leave her.
Only Silvio could walk side by side with her, her hand resting in the crook of his arm, standing proud.
When Silvio abandoned her, Dulior discarded all the possessions he did not see fit to take with him.
The only thing she kept was an oil painting of the two of them.
The painter had arranged the composition—Silvio seated in a high-backed chair, his hands resting on the armrests like an emperor upon his throne; vases with flowers nestled near his legs while complementing drapes and tapestries hung from the walls.
Dulior had been placed slightly to the right, barefoot, in a gown so light it felt translucent, a lyre in her hand, like the muse of poetry.
Silvio was not looking at her, his gaze turned to the side, fixed at something beyond the canvas.
He was watching the majordomo overseeing the commission a few paces behind the painter.
As in life, so on the canvas: Silvio was forever averting his gaze and avoiding her touch. He would always be looking at another. Dulior hated that painting, yet she held on to it, for it allowed her to gaze upon him, so freshly made into the Blood, during the first century of their marriage.
After the portrait, Silvio had developed an interest in paintings.
Like all vampires, he found portraits fascinating.
They were drawn and made through the lens of a mortal’s eye, capturing a visage as deceitful as the flesh.
The paintings differed from how vampires actually looked.
Photographs, once they entered their lives, held an even stronger allure to them.
Made by a lifeless contraption, a machine rather than an organism, they captured a vampire’s true likeness.
Silvio had many photographs of him and Emerick.
Or only Emerick. He enjoyed commissioning those, for he liked to watch Emerick struggle to remain seated in one place, silent and still.
Silvio liked to look through the eyes of the painter or the photographer, seeing his beloved as they captured the beauty of the dead and immortalised it upon canvas and plate.
“Beautiful, is it not?” A man’s voice startled Dulior.
She was on the landing, studying a tapestry.
It depicted a medieval garden where a maiden with long flowing hair waited at the base of a tall structure.
Rapunzel cast from the tower, entrapped in the web of her long hair, stumbling in it and the vines that crawled from the stones.
A shadow was watching her from the trees, its eyes yellow, bleeding crimson.
Dulior turned, expecting to see her husband, but Jean-étienne had gone astray along the way, taking the staircase down towards the kitchens and ladders.
The vampire who greeted her was a man with short chestnut hair and sad grey eyes.
He looked at her with such naked fascination that she almost mistook him for a human.
“My apologies, Madame. I did not mean to startle you.” He bowed his head, his chin bobbing down too fast. He kept one hand bent and hidden behind his back, like a servant.
His clothing was simple, befitting someone with no plans or errands to run.
“I was not made aware of your visit. The butler told me you were here.”
“And you are?” Dulior scrutinised him. How unremarkable he looked.
“Elay Hébert, Madame, your servant.” And he bowed again, this time bending his body in half, his hair falling over his face.
Dulior had no need for servants, let alone another man. She was about to dismiss him when Jean-étienne emerged, turning around the corner.
“What a gaudy house,” the Count remarked, tilting his head as far back as he could to see the ceiling and all its monstrosities. He reached out and pushed at a vase, toppling it over, scattering the velvet petals of the flowers arranged in it.
The house was an aberrant altar, with its gilded mirrors and frames, golden halos and the faces of statues melting in tears and ecstasy.
The master bedroom was the worst of all: it reeked of carnality and excess.
What a glutton Silvio had become without Dulior by his side to keep him in check, to feed him morsels of obedience and restraint.
That fille de joie had always ruined her husband.
“I would advise against entering that room, Madame,” Elay said but he did not stop her from striding through the door.
Something crunched under her shoe. Dulior looked down at shards of glass.
On the wall behind the massive bed, a multitude of mirrors replicated her movements.
One of them, the one at the centre, was broken.
Fragments of it had spilled over the bed and the floor, as though something had pulled itself out of the glass and dragged itself across the room.
The sight of the wreckage was a telltale sign that Emerick had not been here either.
Nor is he planning on coming back.
When the rumours of Emerick’s disappearance had first reached her, Dulior had dismissed them.
She had long since grown tired of hearing about the Marquis and the Comte, of their travels and acquisitions over the centuries.
Raffaelle, for his part, had been nothing but gleefully accommodating, keeping her informed of the Regent’s visits to the Coven, some even well before Silvio’s arrival, never failing to invite her to come and stay in Berlin as well.
Since Ingenuar’s death, Dulior had made a point to ignore Raffaelle’s reports, no longer inclined to indulge in his games.
The next time she received an invitation from the Coven, Dulior frowned at the few lines it contained: It appears we have misplaced our Marquis. Would his mother care to join the search and gain favour in Court?
If Emerick was truly gone, and with Silvio in Berlin, then there would be no one to stop her from going to Béziers.
And even if that man was there by all by himself, he would still let Dulior in the tower only for the sake of spiting her, so that she may witness with her own eyes how the two men fared without her.
Yet it was curiosity that gnawed at her, driving her forward until she found herself standing once more before Silvio’s gate, waiting for the doors to finally open for her.
Back in the bedroom, Dulior scoffed and turned to leave, nauseated by the display and the heavy lingering smell of Silvio’s perfume and candle wax, when her eyes landed on the wall opposite the bed. Atop the many shelves hung two swords, keeping watch. She recognised them instantly.
“What fickle tokens,” she whispered, as though bringing Emerick through the veil had not been enough of a horrid reminder of their mortality…of Dulior’s error of judgment.
“Madamе?” Elay called out to her from the doorway. “You are welcome to stay with your husband. I will arrange a room to your liking.”