Chapter 5
Five
“Don’t bring her again.”
“What?” Noah’s mind-voice conveyed his emotions without a filter, his surprise sharp and genuine. “Why not?”
Yes, why not, Antoine?
Talking to Cally, even through Noah, was his only respite. Why was he pushing her away?
Pain blurred his focus and stole his words.
He closed his eyes and fought for control. “I’ll be feral in… days. I don’t want her seeing me—talking to me—like that.” She neither sees nor talks to you, you damn fool. It was so hard to concentrate, and Noah would pick up on his sentiment just like Antoine picked up on his. “Just keep her away.”
“I don’t bring her; she brings me. She’ll come anyway.”
Noah’s voice receded as the distance grew, their boat carrying Cally away from him for the last time.
“Tell her not to. Tell her I said…” I love you. I miss you. I’m sorry. “… to move on.”
No reply through their link.
“Noah?”
Nothing.
Antoine floated in his steel cage, alone again, nothing to keep him company save for the agony of his body and his memories.
*
Paris, France, 1750
“When she is gone, let the Seine have her.”
Antoine wrapped her in a sheet with hands that lingered. But it was a paltry gesture; éliane deserved so much more.
Barely four weeks they’d had together. Belle had implied that he could have her forever—at least as long as she lived naturally—but he should’ve known better.
Just another of her games.
He left her face until last, and her eyes were closed as though she were sleeping. He placed a kiss on her lips in farewell, then cinched the sheet tight around her.
A life snuffed out in its prime. éliane would never become the dancer she had wished to be.
But what did it matter? Chattel died every day, and none of them would live as long as he, as long as Belle. They would all die, in time, while he never would. Yet he carried her body through the streets like it was something precious, even though it was now nothing more than a husk.
On ?le Saint-Louis, one never had to walk far to encounter the Seine, and at this hour there was no one to bear witness.
Antoine crouched on the bank and eased Cally into the water, the black water quickly enveloping—
No. Not Cally. éliane.
It wasn’t even the same; I didn’t love éliane, not truly. She’d been an innocent spirit, full of life, until Belle had taken it from her. She wasn’t Cally. Cally was still alive.
Antoine remembered walking the banks of the Seine that night, for so long that the smell no longer bothered him, and the sky lightened on the horizon.
Usually, at this time, the stupor of helpless sleep overcame him. But instead, his grief and anger held it in check.
He hadn’t seen the sun in too long; more than anything he wanted to glimpse it now. All throughout the seventh arrondissement were townhouses owned by nobles. Many had courtyards with side alleys. From the pitched roof of one, he would be able to watch it rise.
He leaped for a windowsill to pull himself up, only to be caught by surprise when instead he landed on it, feet scrabbling for purchase on the narrow ledge.
He could jump higher than he’d imagined possible, and in a few more leaps he reached the top of the building, the whole of Paris laid out before him, a sea of uneven rooftops like waves of gray.
The Seine snaked muted and dark through the city, and in the distance lanterns illuminated a cargo boat moored at a quay. Beneath him, narrow, cobblestoned streets wound between tall buildings, as streetsweepers scraped the muck toward the river.
The sun crossed the horizon, flares of light so bright that it seemed to wash out the colors, and Antoine sat with his back to a chimney stack and took in all the beauty for the last time.
He didn’t notice his skin and hair steaming until steam became smoke. And then the pain arrived.
The memory of that moment slammed into the anguish that gripped him, physical and emotional: the loss of éliane, the loss of Cally; sunlight searing every nerve, the lack of air clawing at every muscle.
Until Antoine was no longer sure whether he was in the present or the past, remembering that morning in Paris, or reliving it.
He covered his head in his hands, crouching on the rooftop, as the day dawned around him and the dawn burned the gloom away.
Every inch of his skin felt the bite of a thousand needles and the sting of a thousand wasps.
Half of him wanted to flee, to seek cover, to find somewhere the sun could not reach.
But what did it matter anymore?
Maybe this was the escape he wanted, the one way Belle could no longer control him. All he needed do was give in to his morning stupor; sleep would come from which he would never awaken.
As if the thought had summoned her, she landed beside him, shadows curling around her.
“Is this how you choose to go?” Belle asked, no anger or judgment in her tone, merely a hint of curiosity.
“Leave me alone,” he gasped, wrapping his pain around him like a shield.
“Là, là, c’est tellement mélodramatique. Are you sulking over the loss of your toy?” She gestured out over the city. “There are others. So many others.”
“What do you want from me? Even now, you plague me still. How did you even find me?”
“The answer to both your questions is the same, my pet. I made you, and I am not yet done with you.”
Antoine laughed, a hollow sound even as it felt like his skin was being stripped from him in swathes. “It is too late, madame. Find another to torment. I am finished, and grateful for it.”
“Mon vertueux, always so noble.”
She called him virtuous again. That was ironic. He didn’t feel virtuous, he felt… numb.
What he really wanted was escape—from her, not from life itself.
But what could he do? She was forever so much more powerful than he.
Even now, she rested one hand on one knee as she watched him, the sun a backdrop like it was an inconvenience.
The hood of her cloak was pulled up, the only concession to its presence, while he was unable to move, the pain too crippling.
Not long now. Escape was coming anyway, just when he’d decided living was preferable.
Ironically, it was the agony that gave the lie to his thoughts. Death was so final, so empty, so permanent. Even pain was better than that; feeling something over feeling nothing.
“A beautiful morning,” she said, though she didn’t look away from him. “Is the anguish of living so great that you would wish to give all this up? So many mornings yet to come, so many chattel to pine over. So much misery to wallow in. Are you done, truly?”
He wanted to answer, to say he wasn’t, but he couldn’t. The burn had reached within, the physical at last surpassing the hurt in his soul, and the words wouldn’t come.
What would he say, anyway? Did she want him to beg?
It was as if she knew he couldn’t speak, for she didn’t wait. Instead, she bit into her own wrist until blood welled out around the twin fang marks, then held it to his lips.
She didn’t have to tell him to drink; his body wanted to survive even if he had his doubts, and his hand moved of its own accord to grip her wrist, holding it tightly as he fed.
Her blood was so much more powerful than that of any chattel he had ever tasted. He’d forgotten—or he’d never known, having nothing to compare it to when first she had given him her blood. That had been in a chalice; this was more intimate, somehow.
Belle sighed softly as he pulled from her again, a note of pleasure in the sound. Not from anything he had done: he hadn’t bitten her, there was none of his serum in her blood. None of the secretion that made those like éliane lose their minds in pleasure.
He fed, and she let him. Mouthful after mouthful. Some of it was his own blood, for she had fed from him often enough. He truly was her pet.
Fear and helplessness make good bedfellows for hate.
At last, his hand fell away limp, and he had no strength left to feed. Her blood had healed him; the agony had diminished, his skin no longer hurt, but in its place came such weariness as he had never known. It was long past dawn now, and he couldn’t fight it any longer.
“Sleep, mon c?ur noir, you will awake stronger for this.”
Her black heart? Was that how she saw him, or what she wanted him to be?
The thought was smothered in the heaviness of the deepest fatigue, and Antoine knew no more.