Chapter 1 Francois
Francois
If I wasn’t already on the route to being crazy, I would have told you the Ancients were trying to get me there.
I plucked at the lace frill on my sleeve. My Renaissance-style cuffs were hardly in fashion now, but I’d worn them long enough that probably the fashion would roll around again before I’d replaced my extensive wardrobe.
Well, it used to be extensive. Rack after rack of retro… Okay—vintage.
Merde.
Shit. Vintage. Who was I kidding? Retro and vintage were both far too modern to describe my sense of style. I wore antique clothes. Damnit. I was a living antique these days.
But clearly only the best, most valuable kind.
Most days.
I hadn’t even had chance to get used to living free in the modern age. Not really. I hadn’t truly existed outside the shadow of my father before Nicolas had imprisoned me, and my stay with Jason, such as it was, had been cut short. Irritation flared through me, but I quashed it.
It was a pointless emotion.
Stay with Jason. That made me sound like a guest, right? Almost honored, perhaps? Well, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was to Nicolas Dupont and his family, but I guessed honored would never be a verb of choice in reference to me.
But they had offered me some modicum of freedom.
Almost.
Better than I’d had when I’d lived with Father, anyway. I hadn’t really been a son or a subject. A servant, perhaps. Something necessary that he didn’t really like.
I’d run The Neutral Zone in New Orleans, which maybe sounded quite free—running a club that various supernaturals used to congregate and iron out deals and keep the peace—but even that had been under Father’s rule.
It hadn’t been true freedom. Then I’d been compromised in battle and captured by Nicolas.
Captured and saved. I shook my head again. It was weird to think of imprisonment as saving me.
But he had.
He was trying to cure me, or at least free me of the effects of the drug in my system.
Different freedom.
Only now, the Ancients had me, and they appeared to be carefully undoing Nicolas’s work and returning the effects of the dead man’s blood still in my veins. It was growing stronger with each passing day.
They didn’t have access to the antidote in the same way Nicolas seemed to. Or they weren’t sharing, if they did.
And they’d brought me full fucking circle.
When they first took me from the apartment where Jason and I were living, they’d holed us up in some antebellum mansion somewhere nearby.
I hadn’t recognized it. It was just a place that was still lucky to exist. A place that had smelled constantly swampy and damp, where fabrics were decaying and torn.
Mold and spiders had been my constant companions.
Well, the spiders had until I took their legs. Raisins had always held more value than spiders, I found.
I didn’t touch the spiders in this new residence they’d moved me to. They were bigger, but they were also familiar. Oh, and the residence wasn’t entirely new, either.
They’d brought me back. They’d brought me home.
Another full circle.
Fuck. I’d fought so hard to escape the influence of Father, of my position as heir to his throne, of all this house meant, and the gardens beyond… Hell, always the gardens beyond.
“Putain.” I swore aloud in French, the sudden sound harsh as I ground it out.
Those gardens. They were my torment now.
Ghosts visited me from those gardens.
I saw them each night. Originally, they’d only been visible through the windows.
Wraiths, of mist wrapped in the sheerest of transparent fabrics, an ephemeral breeze keeping them from ever being truly solid.
They’d flickered like the signal was failing, and I’d needed to blink or look slightly away to even see them.
These were the ghosts I’d created when I’d lived here. They certainly weren’t simply conjured up by my crazed mind just now. They haunted me but they also kept me from being alone. They dwelt here. The last place they’d seen on Earth.
Where I’d killed them.
Where I’d buried them.
They drove me increasingly mad but they also kept me company.
Perhaps they kept me sane.
I’d killed these women and I’d buried them. They were as much prisoners here as I was.
And they were no longer satisfied with remaining in the gardens. One had watched me from the doorway last night.
I shivered at the memory. I’d jumped when I saw her, and she’d stood still, simply watchful, her gaze heavy and knowing.
They all had a familiarity. Whatever had drawn me to them in the first place drew me to them still. Perhaps that was their end game, to bring me over to join them.
Well, I was vampire, so we had a long game in front of us if that was the case.
Soon, they’d speak. Of that, I was certain. Their mouths often moved already but they were soundless, like a television I couldn’t tune in well enough to align the audio with the visuals.
I laughed. I couldn’t lip read. Maybe they were simply telling me what a slum my ancestral home had become.
“Oui, oui.” I directed a disinterested wave at the latest ghost to appear, my frilled sleeve flapping against my hand.
She stood in the middle of the lawn, but my expansive gesture did nothing to sweep her away.
I didn’t need any of them to point out what this place looked like, though. I could still see that much for myself. If the bayou had been busily reclaiming the previous place the Ancients had kept me, dust and age were waging a fiercer battle in my family home.
Every surface had a soft gray layer of old skin cells and other things I never wanted to know. Upholstery fabric was worn and thin. Paint flaked on the walls, and wood was silvered and scarred.
Some of the furniture bore rips and tears—even evidence of tiny claws and probably teeth. Sometimes I heard the scratching and gnawing, but it was a welcome relief to the silence.
When everywhere was too still, my veins ached with the passage of my blood, and my head pounded. I couldn’t reach my state of vampire meditation anymore, the place where everything was silent and still. It was beyond me. I was in a perpetual state of alertness.
The Ancients still brought me blood, but never fresh.
It was like they had a stock or a supply, but when I asked questions, no one answered.
And it was always from a virgin—I could taste that, although there was an element of something old and bitter—and the blood was never from my mate.
The one I’d just found before they moved me.
Found.
Then lost.
She was somewhere, but I was sealed in here by the same magic they’d used before, the barrier to the corridor outside invisible but more tangible than any door.
The door itself stood open, mocking me, but I couldn’t leave.
Anger and rage fueled some of my desire to survive, now. My mate was out there. I needed to claim her. After so many years of so many mistakes, my life was mocking me.
Before, it would have been easy to succumb to the madness.
Too easy. The house I’d fought to keep together for so many years seemed to be falling apart around me, although I was currently in the butler’s quarters, below stairs—me, below fucking stairs in the servants’ parlor—so I couldn’t see the rest of the rooms.
Father had liked to keep things traditional, but stasis had claimed him so often that I’d eventually modernized one of the rooms for my own comfort, and now I had no idea what the Ancients were doing to my home. They were using it as a base of some sort but I didn’t know why.
From the infrequent sounds I picked up, it was as though they were searching.
Something they were doing systematically, anyway, in the upstairs rooms. I couldn’t always hear them moving around, but I could feel when the house was empty of their presence, like they all had a signature that radiated around them.
Something that spoke to me. Like I was plugged in to whatever circuit they were operating on.
Maybe the multitude of voices would be enough to stop the craziness threatening to engulf me because I couldn’t become a savage. I couldn’t give in to the dead man’s blood trying to claim my system and my thoughts.
I brought the image of my redheaded mate to mind again. I’d seen her for such a short time.
So very short.
But her scent. That was the sweetest voice of all. It whispered and beguiled, and it begged me to hold on.
I needed to hold on.
For her.
For me.
I kicked my leg up over the back of the chaise and let my boot swing, the heel striking the dusty velvet with satisfying muffled thuds when there was a noise from upstairs.
In addition to the noise, there was the usual signature I associated with the Ancients but also someone else…
the new person was definitely different. Yet familiar.
Who were they bringing here?
My interest piqued, I stood and walked toward the enchanted doorway. I couldn’t pass through the space, but I could see and hear and smell…
Sweet Jesus.
My gums ached then my fangs sliced through in a Pavlov’s dogs’ response to my captors being back and the fact that their appearance usually meant food swiftly followed.
This was no gentle descent of hunger. One moment my fangs weren’t there, then they were, taking up all of the space in my mouth.
I grumbled as I breathed in a familiar scent and finally placed it.
A useless scent. And she had yet to acquire the full level of grace granted to her by her vampire side.
That strangely mingled smell of vampire mixed with born-shifter could only belong to Jason’s mate. But why were they bringing her here to me?
Did they smell her unusual scent, too? Did they know what she was?
A hybrid.
I half grinned, and my fangs pressed against my lower lip. How long since we’d had a true hybrid amongst our number?