The Damned Read online

  But the best heroes possessed flaws. And the best mortals never forgot that fact.

  She drank deeply, letting Francine fall back in her embrace, like a lover overcome with emotion.

  Unlike Odette’s second sight, this ability to glimpse behind the curtain of a victim’s life was one shared among all blood drinkers in possession of the dark gift. As such, Odette never drank from men. It was too intimate for her, the action of entering the mind of her prey. Once, when she’d been a newborn vampire herself, she’d thought to drink from a man who killed others for sport. She’d thought it fitting, to let him meet his match in her.

  But the man’s memories were violent. He had delighted in the horrors he committed. The images flickering through Odette’s mind had knotted in her throat, choking her, burning her from the inside out.

  That night, she’d sworn never to enter a man’s mind again.

  Men were the worst kind of heroes. Riddled with flaws they refused to see.

  The instant Odette felt Francine’s heartbeat begin to slow, she pulled back. It would not do to drown in Francine’s death. Many a vampire had lost their minds in that slip of darkness between worlds.

  Odette licked her lips, the motions languid. Then she pressed her thumb to the puncture wounds along Francine’s wrist, waiting for the flow of blood to stanch. “As soon as we part,” she said, “you will forget what happened tonight. I will never haunt your dreams. You will return home and spend tomorrow resting, for a critter has bitten you and made you feel a bit piqued. Ask your family to prepare steak and spinach for you.” With care, Odette folded the cuff of Francine’s sleeve over the wounds. “When you walk these streets alone at night, walk with your head high, even if you believe death might be around the corner.” Her grin was like the curved edge of a blade. “It is the only way to live, lovely Francine.”

  Francine nodded. “You are an angel, dear.” Tears welled in her eyes. “And I could never forget you.”

  “I am no angel. Angels bore me. Give me a better devil any day.”

  “You are an angel,” Francine insisted. “The most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.” When Odette released her, Francine gripped Odette’s arm tightly, refusing to let go. Tears slid down her cheeks, confusion etching lines across her brow. “Please,” she said, “take me with you.”

  “Where I go, you cannot follow.”

  “I can if you take me with you. If you make me an angel like you.”

  Odette tilted her head, the musings of the beautiful creature she was now warring with the beliefs of the mortal girl she’d once been. In her hands, she held the power to give life. To take it.

  To savor it. Slowly.

  Francine smiled at Odette, her gaze tremulous, her fingers still twined in Odette’s shirtsleeves. “Please, angel. Please. Don’t leave me alone in the dark.”

  “I told you already, ma chérie.” With her free hand, Odette caressed the side of Francine’s face. “I am no angel.” With that, she snapped Francine’s neck. Felt the brittle bones break between her inhumanly strong fingers. Let Francine’s body slide in an inglorious heap, lifeless, to the cracked pavers at her feet.

  She stood that way for a time. Waited to see if Francine’s God would smite her down. After all, Odette deserved it. She could justify her actions however she wanted. She could say she’d spared Francine the disappointment of a sad future. She could say it was a kindness. Some type of twisted mercy.

  But who was she to offer mercy to anyone?

  Odette waited, staring up at the moon, wincing away from the long shadow cast by the cross high above. No hail of fire and brimstone rained down around her. Everything was as it had always been. Life and death in a single breath.

  “I’m sorry, ma chérie,” Odette whispered. “You deserved better.” She stared at her feet, letting regret roll down her spine toward her toes, to vanish between the cracks in the pavestones. What she’d done—this life that she’d stolen—it was wrong. Odette knew it.

  It was just . . . sometimes she was tired of trying so hard to be good.

  With a sigh, Odette began strolling away, her hands in her pockets.

  “Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras,” she sang, the tune tinged with sweet sadness. “Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes.” The echo of “La Marseillaise” filtered above, mingling with the smoke of Odette’s endless misdeeds.

  BASTIEN

  As a boy, I often dreamed about being a hero, like the ones from my favorite stories. D’Artagnan joining the musketeers, fearless in the face of danger. King Leonidas and his brave three hundred, standing firm against impossible odds. Odysseus on an epic journey, battling mythological monsters and saving maidens fair.

  Then I learned that I lived among the monsters. And that such stories were often written not by the heroes themselves, but by those left standing to tell the tale. Perhaps there wasn’t much to recommend a character like d’Artagnan. After all, wasn’t he only ever lucky?

  Luck is not a skill. Uncle Nico said this to me time and again, when I lamented being drilled in my studies in warfare, in marksmanship, in riding, in all the talents expected of a so-called gentleman.

  Maybe I should have revered Athos, a paragon of mystery. Or Aramis, a lover of life. Or Milady de Winter, the shrewdest of spies.

  In the end, the monsters did possess the better stories.

  My eyes open with a start. Dust motes hover in the air above me, spinning about in the amber glow of a single candle. I watch them dance for a moment, studying each of their shapes as if they were stars in an infinite sky.

  The infinite captivates us because it allows us to believe all things are possible. That true love can last beyond time.

  Celine said that to me the night I first realized I had true feelings for her. It was no longer as simple as being drawn to her beauty, pulled like a tide toward the shore. It had become more than that. A comfort. An understanding. Some kind of magic.

  I watched her dance a quadrille in the middle of a carnival parade. It did not take long for the melody to win her over, as music so often does. She missed many of the steps and did not care. The sight caught me unawares. It was not just because of how she looked. It was how she made the people around her feel. Her smile lightened those of her partners. Caused the men and women who reeled about her to laugh with abandon.

  For a breath, I lost all sense of time and place. It was just her, a lone candle in a darkened room. But behind that beguiling smile I saw something more. A world of secrets, concealed behind a pair of haunted green eyes.

  As a boy with secrets of my own, an ache unfurled in my chest. I knew at that moment how much I wished to share our truths. No matter that they both might be riddled with monsters. A week later, the word love teased at the edges of my mind. I disregarded it. Considered myself too world-weary to fall prey to the foolishness of young love.

  I was wrong. Disastrously so.

  But it doesn’t matter anymore. For ours is not a love story.

  The ache around my dead heart spreads into my throat.

  Enough.

  I sense Toussaint before I see him. My entire body tenses as if coiling to spring. The giant Burmese python slithers over the tabletop, winding from my feet toward my head. I watch him move from where my family has laid me out on the table, like a body in an Irish wake. His tongue flicks the air in front of him, his yellow eyes narrowed, uncertain. He pauses on my chest, his head hovering above my sternum. I stare up at him. He glowers down at me.

  Two predators appraising each other, deciding whether to strike.

  After a beat, Toussaint sighs with resignation. Then he glides over my shoulder, the rest of his long body trailing behind him, his scales glistening over the bloodstained silk of my ivory waistcoat. I’ve always thought snakes to be prescient. The kind of all-knowing creature that thrives in the space between worlds.

  At least my ora
cular pet seems to have accepted this unfortunate turn of fate.

  I sit up, my motions blurred. Inhumanly fast. It would have been disconcerting were I unaccustomed to seeing immortals move about in such a fashion. The next instant, I douse the lone candle between my fingertips, longing to feel the fire singe my skin.

  I feel nothing. Not even a whisper of pain. Nor do I need time to acclimate to the darkness. Without the light—through layers of shadow—I see every detail of my surroundings, down to the gold foiling on the wallpaper and the sixteen sparkling rubies in Odette’s cameo brooch. Each strand in my uncle’s black hair and all forty-eight brass rivets in the gleaming wooden table beneath me.

  Revulsion grips me as the truth settles on my shoulders like a leaden thing. I am no longer of the living. I am a demon cursed to the shadows. There is nothing I can do to alter this twist of fortune. No prayer to chant. No quest to take. No bargain to strike.

  I suppose this has always been my fate.

  My uncle clears his throat and steps forward.

  The sight of the seven otherworldly creatures gathered in a circle around me should be alarming—to mortals and immortals alike—but I keep a cool head, taking measure of my immortal brethren with the gaze of a vampire for the first time.

  Odette Valmont, with her brown hair and sable eyes, watches me closely, her expression guarded. She is dressed in the garments of a gentleman, her silk cravat loose about her pale throat, her fétiche dangling from it. At first blush, she appears to be a girl of no more than twenty with a face to charm the devil.

  But looks are deceiving by design.

  Wrath threads through my veins, my cool-headedness lost to the winds. If Odette possessed any knowledge of my fate and kept it from me, there will be hell to pay. She’s done this once before, in some misguided attempt to steer me down the path she deemed correct, as if she were judge, jury, and executioner.

  Before I lash out at Odette, I look through her, willing myself numb.

  Shin Jaehyuk, Nicodemus’ foremost assassin, lingers in a fall of darkness at Odette’s back. The second vampire Nicodemus ever turned, Jae ruled the night in the heyday of Korea’s Joseon dynasty. A master of weapons and sleight of hand, this vampire—with his penchant for blades of all shapes and sizes—frightened me the most as a child. The way he loomed ever present, his pallid skin marred by countless scars, from a story told to me in pieces.

  “Welcome to forever, my brother,” another voice intones with its characteristic Carolina drawl. Boone Ravenel leans his left shoulder against the damask wallpaper as he sends me an insouciant grin, his features tan, his expression the portrait of charm. But beneath his angelic mien skulks a fiend with a shark’s sense of smell and a hawk’s eye for tracking. Fifty years ago, Odette dubbed him the Hellhound, for a variety of reasons. As with many such things, the name stuck.

  To Nicodemus’ immediate right stands Madeleine de Morny, her eyes and skin the color of dark teak and her expression culled from quartz. The first of my uncle’s undead children to be turned, Madeleine is also the vampire Nicodemus consults before any other. Over the last hundred years, she’s become his equal in many things, though I would never dare to say so in my uncle’s presence. Alas, I know very little about Madeleine’s past along the Côte d’Ivoire, beyond the fact that she begged Nicodemus to turn her younger sister, Hortense, in exchange for her eternal loyalty. And that her greatest passion in life—aside from her family—is to lose herself in the pages of a good book.

  Hortense de Morny lounges on a chaise of tufted velvet, toying with the ends of her long, thick hair, groomed like the mane of a lion. Amusement ripples across her face, a wicked sparkle in her russet eyes. She wears a gown of translucent tulle dyed the exact color of her dark skin. Of all Nicodemus’ undead children, Hortense relishes immortality the most. A lover of the arts, her favorite pastimes include an evening in Nicodemus’ box seats at the French Opera House—scandalizing the lily-white members of New Orleans society with her presence—followed by a sampling of the city’s finest musicians. She favors the violinists the most. Their song is like spun sucre, she likes to simper.

  One immortal among them remains outside the circle. Though it is not readily apparent—for his hazel eyes possess a similar inhuman luster, his brown skin the same subtle sheen—Arjun Desai is not a vampire. He came to New Orleans last year at Jae’s behest. Trained as a barrister under the auspices of the British Crown, Arjun was denied access to the profession’s hallowed halls as a result of his heritage. Born nineteen years ago in Maharashtra, a state in the East Indies, Arjun is an ethereal, the son of a mortal man and a fey huntress of the Sylvan Vale. Another being straddling the line between worlds. His arrival to the Crescent City solved two problems: that my uncle’s interest in New Orleans’ hotelier industry necessitated a lawyer with a particular set of skills and that the Fallen was forbidden from bringing any more vampires into the city, following their treaty with the Brotherhood a decade ago. In less than a year, Arjun has established himself as a proper member of La Cour des Lions.

  There they all stand, from all parts of the world and all walks of life. Each of them a lion in their own right. Two of my blood brothers, three of my blood sisters, and one half fey.

  Gangly Nigel Fitzroy, the vampire responsible for my death, remains glaringly absent from this twisted tableau.

  Rage riots through me. I swallow as it burns through my veins, my teeth gritted in my skull. Everything around me sharpens. Becomes clearer, like a point of light in a haze of darkness.

  It is not an unwelcome feeling. I want to lose myself to it. To abandon all sense of logic, caring about nothing but destruction. There is purity in such a sentiment. Reason in its simplicity.

  I roll back my shoulders and take in an unnecessary breath. When I gaze about the space once more, my sight fixes on my uncle, his golden eyes shining through the shadows like those of a panther.

  Nicodemus studies me, his face hewn from marble. A single devilish whorl of black hair grazes his forehead. “Sébastien,” he says. “Do you know who I am?” He analyzes me as he would one of the many winged specimens in his collection. Like a butterfly with iridescent stripes, a long metal pin stabbed through its abdomen.

  Again the rage spikes in my chest. “Were you truly concerned I would not remember you, Monsieur le Comte?” I expect my voice to sound gruff from disuse, but the dark magic rounds its tones, making a rich melody of it.

  No trace of relief flashes through Nicodemus’ features, despite the proof that my mind survived the change. “It was a distinct possibility. You were dangerously close to death when I began turning you.” He pauses. “And it is always a gamble to mix mortal blood with that of an immortal ancestor, as you well know.”

  I do. I blink back the memory of my mother, who was consumed by madness. Poisoned by grief. Obsessed with the desire to be unmade and return to her mortal form. I say nothing in response. Those remembrances serve no purpose now, except to goad my anger.

  “How do you feel?” Nicodemus takes a step forward. Everything about him—from his slicked hair to his shining shoes—epitomizes the look of a gentleman. The kind of gentleman I aspired to be from boyhood. But there is an odd hesitancy in his question.

  My uncle is not one to waver.

  It puzzles me. Unwilling to show him any sign of my own confusion, I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I feel powerful.”

  I expect my brothers and sisters to laugh at the triteness of my reply.

  “Are you not . . . angry?” Odette’s voice is gentle. “I know this is not what you—”

  “No,” I lie without even considering it. “I am not angry.”

  More silence.

  Madeleine blurs toward me, then stops short as if catching herself, her palms held in a placating manner. “Do you have any questions? Anything you need? Il y a des moments où—”

  “I believe I underst
and the general gist of things, Madeleine.” I suppress another wave of wrath, bitter amusement quick to take its place. “Drink blood and live forever.” I grin at my immortal family, then straighten my stained cuffs.

  “Stop it,” Jae says, the two syllables cracking through the darkness like warning shots.

  Madeleine glares at Jae, attempting to silence him with nothing but a glance.

  He is unmoved. Unapologetic. “Be angry,” he grits out. “Be sad. Be anything but this.”

  I quirk a brow at him.

  “Afraid,” Jae clarifies. “You are so afraid, I could cut your fear with a knife. Slice it to ribbons.” With his chin, he gestures toward Odette. “She can wear them in her hair.”

  I swallow, struggling to hold fast to my smile. Weighing whether or not to attack Jae.

  He is quick to respond to my unspoken challenge. Like a ghoul, Jae glides forward, his greatcoat swirling around him. He draws two blades from hidden sheaths in his jacket. Twirls them once, daring me to answer his silent threat.

  I stand straight, my hands curling into fists, the fire purifying me from the inside.

  He’ll win. Of that there is no doubt. But I won’t tuck tail and run. I’ll come at him until he’s forced to cut me down. Maybe if he cuts me deep enough, I will find what remains of my humanity. Or maybe I will simply succumb to another one of my uncle’s lessons: destroy or be destroyed.

  Afraid? Jae thinks I’m afraid? Let him see what fear truly is.

  Just before I make good on these promises, my uncle claps his hands like a judge with a gavel, demanding order. It almost makes me laugh, for Le Comte de Saint Germain is anything but the proper gentleman he wishes the mortal world to see.

  Nicodemus is renowned in all circles of the Otherworld, as much for his wealth and influence as for his brutality. He was there at the beginning, when vampires and werewolves resided in castles carved from ice, deep in a forest of perpetual night. When blood drinkers and shapeshifters lived among their fey brethren, like the gods atop Mount Olympus, toying with humans for nothing but sport. He cavorted with the nymphs, the goblins, the ogres, the phoukas, and the sprites far apart from the mortal world, in a place of endless winter known as the Sylvan Wyld. Nicodemus still remembers a time when they did not hide their elven nature, but instead basked in it. Until—in their quest for power—the vampires allied with the werewolves and made a great error in judgment: they attempted to trade their most precious commodity with humans.