Chapter 31 Gideon ‘Then’ #2
Between feedings, Lucien has explained the laws of monsters – laws that vampires must obey.
Do not copulate with a human woman, because of the risk of Dhampir.
Do not get caught outside in the sunlight.
And never drink from the blood of your kin outside of the Kiss.
He said that draining a vampire of blood is one of the few ways to kill them, but it also changes your blood.
You take on some of their magic, their power.
And that’s more than dangerous – it is a sin.
If a vampire is found to have drained another, they will be executed.
No Upyr is meant to have that kind of power.
Now I know why.
I taste the shadow’s power – the dark, heady bite to his blood that no human delicacy will ever match.
I think of how easily my father and brother sold their souls to a devil in a bottle when they could have had this ecstasy instead.
His blood flows down my throat and fills my stomach and seeps into my veins.
Already it’s changing me. Already his ancient magic stirs within me.
And then, the tap runs dry.
I suckle at the messy pulp of his neck – I’ve not yet learned how to make a neat bite – but only manage a few meagre drops. His body hangs from my arms – limp, lifeless. I pull back and my fangs slide from his slack skin with a satisfying plop.
I’ve barely been a vampire for a week and I’ve already committed the ultimate sin.
Oh well. Start how you mean to continue, I suppose.
I won’t feel guilty for draining this creature who treated Arabella as his property, not even if she loved him the way I wish she loved me.
I glance around, listening to the shadows with my now superior hearing. The bridge is deserted. I fling the broken monster against the stone and shove him off the bridge.
He topples over the edge into the waters below. The last thing I see before he sinks beneath the surface is that single eye glaring back at me.
I sink down into the gutter, gasping, willing my body back under my control. My veins are on fire and I long to touch the edges of the power his blood has given me, but my ruined heart is a frigid ball of pain.
Arabella sent this creature after me.
She meant for him to kill me—
“There you are, Little Prince.”
Lucien’s voice breaks through my agony. I look up to see him descend upon me, his lips curled back into a satisfied smirk. There are two drops of blood on his starched collar. He gives no indication that he saw what happened.
He picks me up by the arm and dusts off my suit.
“Are you determined to embarrass me, Little Prince? You shouldn’t have run from the brasserie, but I forgive you. It’s been a long time since the bloodlust was new in me. I’ve forgotten the thrill of it. You’ve been hunting, I see. There’s blood all over you, and you smell sublime. Are you sated?”
I shake my head, too numb to register what he’s asking.
Arabella tried to have me killed by a monster.
I thought I could make her see the truth of why I took the collar, but we can’t come back from this.
“Then we must begin our lesson.” Lucien claps a hand on my shoulder, shoving me forward. “I know just the place. A perfect hunting ground.”
I follow him like a dog trotting after its master.
Lucien chats amicably about the gift he’s given me, the life I can expect to enjoy at his side.
I don’t hear a word, so lost am I in memories of gold-rimmed eyes and the taste of raspberries.
So lost that I don’t notice until it’s too late that Lucien has led us to a familiar Montmartre neighbourhood.
“Come and see what’s become of your courtesan!” Lucien laughs, tugging me along.
Even before we reach the old church, I know something is wrong. My vampiric senses pick up a tang of smoke in the air. Arabella’s ginger and myrrh scent clings to the pavement, but it’s sickly with fear. Lucien laughs to himself as we round the corner.
No.
I don’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s a trick of this disease Lucien infected me with. It’s the magic trying to seduce me to ruin. I’m seeing my nightmares come to life.
But it’s real. The stone facade of La Petite Mort is a pile of rubble and charred wooden beams. The statue of Jesus peeks out from beneath the broken remnants of the stage.
Fire-stained air stings my throat. The blaze has long since been extinguished.
The exposed guts of the building remain – a carcass strewn across the ground.
La Petite Mort is no more.
The street is eerily silent, no revellers or bohemians lined up outside, no haunting music or moans of ecstasy from the VIP confessionals.
Where is Arabella?
What did Lucien do to her?
She wished me dead. I should hate her.
But I can’t bear to see this place she loved as a charred ruin.
My fangs dig into my lip. I taste blood. I taste rage.
The magic whispers a single, intoxicating word.
Vengeance.
Lucien looks like the cat who found a bowl of cream. He touches the necklace beneath his shirt. “Your little cocotte’s luck ran out.”
This can’t be because of the necklace. That’s impossible. That would mean that its magic is real—
But monsters are real, because I am one, and magic is real, because I taste it on my tongue, because it’s whispering to me that Lucien doesn’t deserve to be my master.
I have to find Arabella.
Even if she wants me dead, even if she hates me for what I did, even if she never felt anything for me other than pity or scorn, I need to know she’s okay.
I have to make sure she knows what Lucien is, and what the scarred creature who claimed her as his own truly wanted from her. She is surrounded by monsters and if I do nothing else with my wretched life, I will keep her safe from them.
A crisp breeze gusts from the direction of the river, sending ash and debris billowing down the street. Something slippery and golden wraps itself around my leg. I reach down to free it.
My breath stills.
It’s from Arabella’s chemise.
The same chemise I tore from her body, before I became a monster and she… and she…
She came here.
Grief shatters the ice around my heart, and my heart with it. There is nothing in my chest but raw, pulped meat within a hollow shell of hate.
Vengeance.
“It’s all very tragic.” Lucien’s hand clamps on my shoulder, his fingers digging into my flesh. “I’m told that no one inside the theatre survived.”
That night, that beautiful night when we lay on golden sheets and showed each other slivers of our true selves, wasn’t supposed to be the last time I saw her.
I was supposed to win her over with my charms and help her and Jacob escape Paris and marry her on the stage at a theatre in Vienna and stand in the wings holding her furs while she toured the world bringing audiences to tears with her dancing, and every night I would kneel at her feet and worship her until she screamed my name like she might grant me godhood if only I’d give her one more orgasm.
She can’t just be gone.
There isn’t supposed to be a world without Arabella Macquart in it. Even if she never stopped hating me, at least the venom of her hatred would have flowed in my veins, and I’d carry that piece of her with me everywhere.
Now all I have left is a singed ribbon of gold and a whisper of hate in my veins.
The fabric slips through my fingers, dancing across the cobbles.
“What is that you have there?” Lucien asks. “A little souvenir?”
I snatch up the silk before he can kick it away. I bring it to my face and breathe in. Ginger and myrrh fill my head, chased by the faintest scent of raspberry.
I turn away, not wanting Lucien to see me cry. He grabs me, his grip like steel, steering me along the street towards another lively cabaret.
“My poor sad Little Prince. I brought you here to teach you a lesson about being one of us – you can no longer tie yourself to the mortal world. You cannot love your food. I know you are sad to lose your cocotte, but it will pass. Nothing cures sadness like the power now flowing in your immortal veins. That is what you must experience tonight. Obliterate her memory with the hunt.”
He pulls me into a dark alley, surveying the street beyond with the steely intent of a predator.
My stomach churns. I am hungry. Starving.
The blood of that scarred creature churns inside me, its whispers growing louder.
I do not feel right. I do not know what is me and what is Lucien and what is a darker, older magic.
The hunger rises like a beast clawing at my chest, giving me the briefest respite from my grief.
“There.” Lucien points at a woman in a dirty green dress who tarries in the entrance of the alley, calling out a list of her services to the men who hurry past. “She is tonight’s feast. Streetwalkers are easy pickings, because no one will stop to investigate their cries of pleasure, nor believe them when they wail about a client sucking on their neck.
But you have to be careful not to drink too deep.
You can’t take enough to kill. If we leave a trail of dead bodies behind us, sooner or later, we end up on the end of a stake. ”
He nudges me towards the woman.
“Go, Little Prince. She is yours. Take her. Embrace the gift I’ve given you.”
My fangs slide down. The hunger burns in my veins. My whole body trembles with heat and grief and rage as I grasp skin and pull my prey towards me.
“Very good, Little Prince,” Lucien praises me as my fangs descend on his neck. “But you must practise on the human.”
Lucien’s body jerks as my fangs sink into his flesh.
His blood floods my mouth. I gulp him down, blood spilling over my lips as his crimson river flows faster than I can drink.
I’m drowning in him, and it is nothing like the human blood he’s fed me from bottles these past days, or the dribbles from his veins to ease my transition from man to monster.
He tries to shove me away, but he’s no match for me.
Now that I’m at full strength, now that the scarred shadow’s ancient blood courses through me, I taste more than Lucien’s claret.
I’m swept away on a molten river of Lucien’s essence.
I lose myself in the rush of his avarice, his cruelty, his quest for power.
I am him, his blood is my life now, and I think of the love he’s taken away from me and I take more, more, more for her…
“Gideon, stop! I told you, we don’t drink the blood of our kin.”
I don’t let go. I suck harder.
“She’s getting away,” Lucien snaps.
I’m faintly aware of a woman screaming in the alley, of footsteps scuttling away. Lucien jerks in my arms but the bite holds him captive and I won’t let him go.
This is for Arabella.
Lucien’s struggles grow feeble. “Gideon, you must stop. You are draining me. Gideon… you will burn for this sin…”
Then let me burn.
I don’t stop. My rage bubbles to the surface, mingling with the pleasure arcing through my veins. Lucien struggles one final time, and then he sags, his eyelids fluttering closed and his lips puffing with ecstasy. And then he doesn’t move at all.
When I’m done, he’s a dead weight in my arms, his blood cold and stale.
I drop him into the gutter, exactly where he belongs.
I fumble at his neck and remove the collar.
The jewels glitter in the moonlight, pale imitations of their true beauty now that they’re no longer adorning Arabella’s neck.
I pocket the necklace and, on impulse, slide the signet ring from Lucien’s finger – the symbol of his hold on the criminal kingdom. I slip it over my own.
Then I take my thin, silver-inlaid blade, and hack off his head.
Some minutes later, I step out of the alley into the busy street, a monster among the throngs of humans. The collar weighs heavy in my pocket. I wipe the blood from my mouth with my sleeve. For now, at least, my hunger is sated.
My heart is crowded with whispers of blood magic. But at least they drown out the grief.
I wind my way back through the streets to the Seine, where Arabella and I spent evenings walking, laughing, enjoying each other.
My fist curls around cold stones. I stare down at the collar in my hands.
I don’t even remember taking it from my pocket.
The jewels glitter in the moonlight, dappling prisms of pale light across the lapping waters below.
Claude would have been smitten with the colours.
I wish I could cut out my mangled, rotten heart.
Arabella never loved me. I was nothing but a distraction to her. And now, because of this damned necklace, I’ll never get the truth from her.
I draw back my arm and hurl the necklace as hard as I can. It sails in a graceful arc before landing with a faint splash, joining that ancient monster in his watery grave.
Tears prickle the corners of my eyes. I don’t blink them away. I let them fall. I indulge my stupidity.
I turn back to the city, a city that belongs to me now. The only jewellery left on my person is Lucien’s signet ring – a key to a new life. His empire is without an heir and here I am, with nothing left to hope for and the blood of two monsters singing in my veins.
I hope édouard is right. That one day, loving Arabella will feel like a distant memory of a forgotten country. Because right now, loving her is a poison that burns from the inside, and the whole world will feel the bite of her loss.