Chapter LV
LV
Sebastian?”
Antoine’s voice roused me from my orgy of bloodlust.
I found myself on my knees, dazed and disoriented. I was hunched atop a warm, mutilated body, pinning it to the ground with my hands. It had been half devoured. In my state of confusion, I could not imagine the creature that could have caused such dreadful injuries.
I wondered for a second at my own nakedness. I marveled at the sticky film of blood that covered me. Around me, the snow was a sludgy mess of plasma and body fluids, strewn with dismembered corpses.
Before me stood Antoine and the last group of survivors he had managed to rescue from the flames: the steward, the Bishop of Mende and a number of the lodge staff. I gathered they had just climbed down a length of knotted curtains from a shattered window.
But it is my young lover’s face that remains imprinted in my memory, the image unsoftened by the passage of centuries. I had never seen him wear such an expression of dismay and revulsion; he was like a different person.
“Antoine!” I rasped, my voice barely human. I worked my mouth, spitting unspeakable gore onto the ground. “Help me, please!”
“Sebastian . . . what . . .” he breathed.
I was distracted by a whimpering cry. The body beneath me heaved weakly, still alive somehow in spite of its mortal wounds. In the light of the conflagration, Rosalie Mimet’s chaperone looked up at me, his wide eyes staring from a mask of blood.
“Release him, monster!” shouted the bishop. He strode forward and shoved me solidly in the chest with his boot. “We will put you to the flame!”
I collapsed back into the red slush, my strength gone. I could feel the world beginning to darken. My body had resumed its natural form and it was time to pay the price for Sarmodel’s abuses; the long sleep was coming for me.
“Antoine . . . don’t . . .”
But it was not my lover’s face I saw as my senses faded.
Instead, it was the grave, beautiful visage of the Lion of Judah.