Chapter 27
Log entry
It had been three days since Inno had escaped and gone out into the world, and Victoria had unraveled in his absence.
At first, blinding worry and fury had poured through her in equal measure, but then the anger in her heart flared wickedly.
She cursed herself relentlessly for trusting him to stay and then for pushing him away.
By the third day, when the sharpest edges of her anger had dulled, and she was sad and empty, a more devastating truth emerged. She missed him. Desperately. Even in the loneliest stretches following her father’s death, she had not felt quite so abandoned as she did now.
Though she had insisted on distance between them, the knowledge that he was there, waiting for her with unspoken patience, had steadied her more than she had ever allowed herself to admit.
He had always been there. From the moment his broken, battered body had entered her life, Inno had offered a constancy she had never known elsewhere.
She knew she had treated him less like a companion and more like a dangerous thing she was afraid to acknowledge, a found creature she fed and confined rather than trusted.
Yet she had believed it was the only way to remain faithful to her father, to the countless voices that insisted his existence was wrong.
Wrong to create. Wrong to sustain. Wrong to care for.
Everything about him was condemned and wrong to love.
Anger crept back in, quieter now, threaded with reason.
He was intelligent, calculating. Perhaps he had gone somewhere remote, far enough away to remain undiscovered.
The thought soothed her even as it wounded her.
This was for the best for both their sakes.
The night at the ball had offered Inno a glimpse of a different life. One without her. She was not surprised that he had chosen it. Perhaps it would have been kinder to kill him outright than condemn him to the existence that now awaited him, whether he understood it yet or not.
She was cleaning the last of her dishes from eating lunch when the sound came, deep and resonant, cutting through the still air of the castle.
The bell. Her shoulders stiffened, her head bowing instinctively as resignation settled in.
What if she did not answer it? What had all this effort been for?
She would bury her father tomorrow. Then she would speak to Helena about the possibility of staying with her.
She would find a way to be useful, to exist without becoming another burden.
And she would live knowing she had at least gotten to kiss the only man she would ever truly love. Those memories would not be gone.
The bell rang again.
She needed to tell the town, and the new baron, that her father was dead. All those years of study at her father’s side reduced to nothing—because she was a woman.
Anger finally surged strong enough to move her.
It propelled her through the door and into the tunnel, through the final threshold and out into the open air.
She slammed the last door behind her and strode forward, grateful for the distraction as she approached the men waiting near the horses.
Two stood beside bay geldings. A third man lay slumped across a black Oldenburg, unmoving.
She did not bother with pleasantries. One look at their faces told her this was serious.
“My father and his assistant are inside,” she said briskly. “I will bring the man to them. What happened?”
Something was wrong. She could feel it in the way the men kept glancing behind them, their eyes restless, scanning the castle grounds as if expecting movement.
“You should not be out here alone,” one of the younger men said, his concern immediate and unguarded.
The comment unsettled her. She gestured toward the man slung over the horse. “What happened?” she asked again.
The older man hauled the injured figure down, his heels dragging through the dirt as he pulled him toward her.
“It got him too,” the man said, his gaze never lingering on her for more than a heartbeat. “After church. Right there in the crowd.”
“Just like the other two,” the second man added, his voice low and strained.
“Jacquine Dons was speaking with Baron von Lichtenmarstein in town when Jacquine dropped dead. No cry. No struggle. Same with the other one. Found him sitting upright on the steps like he was resting. No wounds. Nothing. It is as though the life was taken so fast the body did not even realize it.”
Victoria felt her chest tighten. “All of them?”
“All of them.”
“It is the Nachzehrer,” the younger man said, his brows drawn tight with fear.
The other nodded in agreement.
“The what?” The word settled over her like a physical weight, cold and suffocating.
“The Nachzehrer,” the man holding the body repeated. “A thing that rises from the grave and drains the living. Someone saw a figure.”
“A faceless figure,” the other interrupted, “moving through the shadows. Disappeared before everyone’s eyes.”
The man nodded, eyes wide. “They say it emerged from a grave at the old church.”
“When they returned in daylight,” the younger man continued, “one grave was empty. Not robbed. Not disturbed. Just empty. Nothing left but dirt.”
“And then the deaths began,” Victoria said, her voice barely steady.
They both nodded.
The world seemed to tilt slightly beneath her feet as the truth pressed closer, heavy and undeniable.
“The Nachzehrer. It’s come to Glen Shire and is draining the life from everyone.”
Victoria’s stomach lurched. “What about him? Did it not succeed?” She gestured toward the limp figure held before her, feeling a chill crawl along her spine.
“No. He was lucky. Found barely breathing outside the potter’s. We brought him here as fast as we could. Can your father help him?”
The words sank like stones into her chest. Her pulse hammered in her ears.
“This is the first you’ve heard of the monster and its killings…” said the man who had stayed silent beside the horse, his eyes dark pools of fear.
“Sort of,” Victoria admitted, though the truth felt thin in her throat. “Give him to me. I’ll take him in and see what my father and his assistant can do.” She stepped forward, a tremor of dread threading through her legs.
“He is far too heavy. Let me carry him in for you,” the man said, his voice tight.
“No.” The laboratory rose before her in memory: the chains, the heavy, overpowering smell of rot and decay that clung to the shadows like a second skin.
She braced herself and pulled the man away, his feet dragging across the ground..
The moment her arms closed around him, a strange, uncanny weight pressed against her chest. His head lolled unnaturally to the side—he had likely already passed.
Discreetly, she pressed her fist to his chest and felt the same chilling hollowness she had sensed before.
She should have returned him to the men.
She should have abandoned this macabre task.
Yet a prickling shiver ran up her spine, warning her not to let go.
The hair along the back of her neck rose.
“You may wait here or in the stable around the corner. The stable master can give you shelter,” she instructed, her voice hollow, distant.
Sweat slid down her temples as she dragged the body into the laboratory, the cold stone floor biting through her slippers.
The men had wisely retreated to the stables, sparing her the humiliation of watching her struggle.
Her movements were rougher than usual; the man’s legs scraped across the flagstones.
Yet adrenaline clawed through her veins, a feverish insistence urging her forward. She needed to know.
Innominatus had not gone far. He was keeping his word, yet even in this grotesque spectacle, he had thought of her.
The thought that he might have prepared a grave for her father in the old church cemetery made her chest tighten, a bitter ache of gratitude and grief.
Even in destruction, he had shown her twisted kindness, revealing what he could be—a monster and still somehow a protector.
She laid the man on the table, the familiar smell of cold iron and antiseptic filling her nostrils.
Her trained hands moved with precision yet failed her.
Despite all her knowledge of human anatomy, she could not understand how he had died.
No wounds, no signs of violence, only the small X etched delicately upon his chest, no larger than her fingernail.
A creeping horror spread through her, crawling up her spine and settling behind her eyes.
She pressed on the chest, feeling the impossible hollow void again.
Her pulse thundered as she drew her scalpel, hands trembling, slicing into the sternum.
Each movement felt like a defiance of some unholy law.
When she used the bone saw to part the rib cage, it clattered against the stone floor with a sound that echoed like a death knell. Her eyes widened in utter disbelief. The man’s heart was gone, and in its place lay a small scroll, tied with a crimson ribbon, impossibly pristine amid the carnage.
Her back collided with the cold wall behind her.
The impossible truth pressed down, heavy as the tombstones outside.
Inno had killed the others, leaving this man alive just long enough for Victoria to receive a message.
The thought of his cunning sent a shiver through her, gooseflesh prickling every inch of exposed skin.
He had removed a human heart and replaced it with a note.
She bent closer, the scent of iron thick in the air, and carefully lifted the scroll from its cavity.
Her fingers trembled as she unrolled it, round script gleamed against the dim light.
Every elegant curve of the letters seemed to pulse with menace, as if Innominatus’s will had seeped into the ink itself.
From my grave I come to seek the joys of love;
Still bound by passion, which I cannot quell.