Seduction Page 23

  The sight was more than Jean-Loup could bear. “No,” he rasped unsteadily. “No . . .”

  “Don’t judge me, Father,” Drago said, his tongue questing obscenely for the blood around his lips. “I did not choose this gift. It is from my mother.”

  Jean-Loup staggered. “Your mother!” Even the words seemed like a sacrilege.

  “Her gift was to give life through her breath. Mine is to take it through the same means.”

  Jean-Loup could only gape in terror.

  “I told you there were many ways to extend life,” Drago said softly.

  “Your life,” Jean-Loup said.

  The two men stared at each other for a long moment. Finally Drago spoke. “Yes, my life,” he said. “It’s why I’ve come. The women in your coven—I’ve heard they number in the hundreds—”

  Looking back at the dried-up thing that had once been a living man, Jean-Loup began to understand what his son was asking of him. “My God, no. You don’t mean to—”

  “Why should they live forever, long past the time when they’re of any use?” Drago argued. “I can unburden those crones of their overextended lives.”

  “Unburden!” Jean-Loup snapped. “You want to kill them!”

  “So that I may live, yes. How is that so different from what you do?”

  “I don’t suck the life out of anyone!” the old man shouted.

  “No. You take advantage of their magic until they are too old to give any more, and then you allow them to lie in their own filth, praying for a death that will not come.”

  In truth, Jean-Loup did not know what happened to the women once they grew too old to participate in the abbey’s day-to-day affairs. He had noticed, however, that the full-moon rituals had become much more populous, with a number of motionless, insensate individuals propped up on chairs in the far shadows of the stone chamber. “But why do you want these old women?” he asked.

  “Would you prefer that I murder the young ones?”

  Jean-Loup sputtered. “No!”

  “I thought not,” Drago said. “To tell the truth, I’m intrigued by the fact that they’re witches,” he said. “Magic satisfies me best. Oh, cowen will keep me alive”—he indicated the two dead men on the road—“but witches feed my magic more fully. Even if they’re hags.” He smiled. Jean-Loup thought his son resembled a hyena, dining on offal.

  The old man backed away. “No,” he said. “What you suggest cannot be.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t stop me,” Drago said softly. “If you try, I’ll kill them all.”

  “What? You can’t—”

  “But I can. And I’ll enjoy it, I promise you.”

  Jean-Loup thought of his promise to Veronique. Take care of my sisters. He couldn’t allow them all to be massacred.

  And yet he couldn’t agree to his son’s horrid proposal.

  “One other thing,” Drago said. “I’ve heard that you have a companion.”

  Henry. “He’s not here,” Jean-Loup said quickly. “He’s gone to the American colonies.”

  “Good. See that he doesn’t come back.”

  “I . . . I can’t do that. I don’t know how to get word to him. For all I know, he may already have left to return home.”

  Drago shrugged. “Ah, well. Then come he must. But if you enlist his help against me, I’ll kill him, too.”

  “Oh, God,” the old man moaned. “My God, my God . . .”

  “Tell your former ward that your son has returned, and that you neither require his attentions nor desire his company.”

  “My son,” Jean-Loup said bitterly.

  “Yes. The son you sent away and never missed for five hundred long years.” Drago’s lips curved, but his eyes remained blisteringly cold. “How does that sit with you, Father?”

  Jean-Loup backed away. “I have no son,” he said woodenly. “I have no son.” He turned and stumbled through the field. “I have no son!” he shouted, his throat hoarse with tears.

  He ran back to his house and scrambled inside, locking the door behind him and leaning his back against it while he sobbed and shook with fear. “I have no son,” he whimpered.

  In the distance, he could hear Drago laughing.

  • • •

  After his time in America, Henry came back to Paris and Jean-Loup, who was the closest thing to a father he had ever known. To his dismay, he found the old man shaking and fearful and filled with stories of vampires and other ghouls.

  “Bandits on the road,” Jean-Loup babbled. “His mouth was covered with blood. Take your last breath from you.”

  “Captain Loup,” Henry pleaded, using his childhood name for his former guardian. “Please—”

  “Not my fault. Couldn’t stop him.” Jean-Loup clutched Henry’s shirt and hung on with his aged fingers like a drowning man. “Go,” he whispered wildly in Henry’s ear. “Go now, and don’t come back.”

  What had happened? Henry hadn’t been gone very long, less than thirty years. A heartbeat, in the context of Jean-Loup’s and Henry’s lives.

  “I tell you, go!” Jean-Loup insisted, looking over his shoulder. “My son has come back, do you understand?” he whispered hoarsely. “Drago.”

  Henry could only shake his head. The old man had never before spoken of a son.

  “He will kill you. He will kill all the women. He will kill you all.”

  “Shh—” It was pathetic, Henry thought. Somehow, during his absence, the old man had gone mad. “Have you been to the abbey?” Henry asked, hoping to steer Jean-Loup’s mind away from thoughts of murder and death. “You’ve gone to the rituals?”

  “Yes, yes. But it is not the same. Not since . . .” Jean-Loup cringed, hunching his shoulders and peering behind him. “You must provide the sisters with gold,” he said, close to Henry’s ear. “I am not permitted. You must take care of them. Promise me, for Veronique’s sake.”

  “Jean-Loup—”

  The old man grasped the lapels of Henry’s coat. “I vowed to provide for them, but I cannot. Please help me.”

  “Of course I’ll help,” Henry said, alarmed.

  “Promise!”

  After a long, stunned silence, Henry nodded. “I promise,” he said at last.

  Perhaps it was time for him to move his former master into the abbey, Henry thought. If Jean-Loup no longer wished for Henry to stay with him, he would be better off among the so-called “nuns” than he would alone on the farm. They would certainly not turn the old man away. After all the gold he had given them, they owed their benefactor at least a bed in which to live out the rest of his life, however long that may be.

  “Tonight is a full moon,” Henry said gently. “We can go to the Rue des mes Perdues together. I’ll speak with the abbess—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” interrupted another voice. Jean-Loup gave a little cry as a young man stepped out of the shadows.

  Henry blinked; he hadn’t seen anyone before. It was as if the man had simply materialized.

  “I’ll see that my father attends the ritual,” Drago said pleasantly. “In the meantime, I believe he’s asked you to leave.”

  Puzzled, Henry looked at Jean-Loup. The old man was weeping openly. “Yes, go,” he said, and wiped his sleeve across his nose. “Please go. Don’t come back.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I hadn’t expected Jean-Loup’s life to take such an unhappy turn. Suddenly I didn’t feel like reading anymore.

  I decided to take a walk. That was one thing about Paris: Wherever you went, there was something interesting to see. I had a vague idea about heading toward the Eiffel Tower, but I didn’t really care if I made it all the way or not. Maybe I’d buy an ice cream, I thought as I bounded down the stairs and through the courtyard onto the street. Or a marshmallow cone.

  I didn’t get very far, though. A crowd was gathered at the alley behind the Rue Déschamps, the street next to mine. The lights of a police car were flashing.

  “Did
you see her?” a man grumbled to a woman as they walked past me.

  “It looked as if she had no blood,” the woman hissed. “A mummy—”

  “Don’t talk foolishness, Francine,” the man said, and pressed his hand against her back, pushing her out of the crowd.

  I took her place. “What’s—” I gasped. On the ground in the alley lay what looked like a log, gray and dry and withered and hard.

  Except that it had arms and legs.

  “You,” the policeman said, pointing at me with his stick. “Go. This is no place for you.”

  I couldn’t move. It wasn’t that the thing was so gross, really—it wasn’t any worse than mummies I’d seen in museums, and to tell the truth, it barely looked human. It was just that there was something weirdly familiar about it.

  The body was naked except for one green earring tangled in its hair. It looked so out of place under the circumstances. I bent down to touch it to see if I could read anything, but the police officer pushed me away with some force. “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

  I cleared my throat, wondering if I should tell him that I’m an object empath and could probably learn something about the dead woman from her earring. But then, that might lead to someone coming to the house on the Rue des mes Perdues and possibly finding out about the activities that went on there. So I just backed away.

  “Somebody get that girl away from here,” the cop said. A burly man complied, grabbing me by the shoulders and steering me, fighting and squirming, into the street.

  “Go home,” the man said. “Try not to think about it.”

  Right, I thought. I’ll just blot the image of a naked mummy in an alley clean out of my mind. I sighed. I no longer felt like a marshmallow cone. Or a walk, either.

  I went back to the house. Peter was sitting on the stairs of the servant’s entrance when I arrived. I was nervous about seeing him after the debacle at Marie-Therèse’s birthday party, but he’d been my friend for a long time. It was hard to forget that.

  His head was resting on his hands. “Hi,” I said. “What’s up with you?”

  He looked at me with sad eyes. “Have I lost you?” he asked.

  I hadn’t been expecting that. “I don’t know what—”

  “Yes, you do. Belmondo,” he said, as if it were the name of a rodent.

  “Oh.” My stomach clenched. Not again, I thought. “I didn’t think you cared what I did,” I said. “Or with whom.”

  “Stop being a drama queen, Katy.”

  “Hey, I didn’t bring this up. Besides, I hardly even see you anymore. Between your work and these people . . .” I gestured toward the house.

  “Yeah. Well, about them . . . Katy, I think something weird’s going on.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Do you think?”

  “For one thing, they’re all older than they look.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You know? And you still want to go out with him?”

  I felt my heart sink. “Belmondo’s not one of them,” I said.

  “Really? Is that what he told you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Because he’d never lie to you, would he?”

  I thought about Belmondo kissing Joelle on her neck. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  Peter sighed. “All right,” he said. “That’s your business, I guess.” He stood up. “Jeremiah wants me to be a part of this. The Enclave.”

  “I pretty much figured that out,” I said.

  He looked around and lowered his voice. “He wants me to take over the company.”

  “What, Shaw Enterprises? Are you kidding?”

  “Well, not right away. The company’s CEO runs the actual businesses under the Shaw banner from New York. For the time being, Jeremiah only needs me to . . . do things with the Enclave.”

  “Such as what?”

  He sighed. “You know what I do, Katy,” he said quietly.

  I lowered my head. Yes, I knew what he did. I’d known since his party last spring. Peter made gold. Just like Jean-Loup de Villeneuve. And Henry Shaw. And Jeremiah. Peter was just the newest link in the chain, the latest Sugar Daddy that Sophie and her cronies lived off.

  “So that would be your whole job?” I asked. “Keeping these ladies in designer shoes?”

  “Of course not. In time I’d take over all the things Jeremiah does. Oversee the shipping and imports. Coordinate the Shaw offices in Europe. A lot of things.”

  “Is he going to retire?”

  “He wants to, yes.”

  “I’ll bet he’s not planning to live at the Poplars,” I said acidly.

  “Look, you’re dead wrong about that place—”

  Suddenly there was a shriek from inside the house. Peter and I both stood up, and were nearly run over by a herd of women who ran out, their high heels clacking, leaving us in a cloud of dust and expensive perfume.

  “What was that?” Peter asked. “A fire?”

  “A phone call,” a man said from the doorway. I recognized him from Belmondo’s club. Also from the day Joelle led me into the sewer and left me there. As I recalled, the man’s name was Jacques. He was—or at least had been—Joelle’s boyfriend. “Apparently, there’s a body on the Rue Déschamps,” he said, rubbing his arms as he headed for the street.

  “A body?” Peter asked.

  “Not much of one,” I said. “It’s all dried out.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  I nodded. “It’s a mummy. But she’s wearing earrings. Well, one earring.”

  Peter frowned. “But how long could a mummy have been lying in the middle of the city?”

  “I guess someone moved it there,” I said. “I might have been able to find out if I could have handled her jewelry, but the police kicked me out before I could get close enough.”

  “Too bad,” Peter said, distracted.

  “So go ahead. It’s only a murder. You were talking about your plans to become an international mogul.”

  He gave me an angry look. “Don’t, Katy,” he said. “I’m not like these people.”

  The hell you’re not, I thought. You’re ready to throw away everything you are to be one of them. But instead I said, “You’re luckier than they are. You won’t lose your gift with time.”

  Fabienne had said Peter’s gift wasn’t like the magic the other witches possessed—that he wouldn’t need to sacrifice a small part of it every month in exchange for the benefits of the full-moon ritual. Of course, that made sense. The coven wouldn’t want to lessen his ability to make gold. He’d get a free ride on the longevity train, just as Jeremiah and the alchemists before him had.

  “It’s not like I’d be stuck here forever. In time, I’ll be taking over the American branches too. I’d just have to come back here once a month, like Jeremiah.”

  “Great,” I said without much enthusiasm. So he really was going over. “Sounds like what you’ve always hoped for. Money, power, and a soupçon of eternal life, all in one fell swoop. What more could you want?”

  He turned away. “I should have known I couldn’t talk to you about it.”

  That felt like a slap. There had been a time when Peter and I could talk to each other about anything. I was going to apologize for my sarcasm, but Sophie and Annabelle appeared, with Jacques trotting behind them. They were talking excitedly as they crossed the street.

  “So deliciously creepy,” Sophie was saying. “Like something in a horror film. Oh, hello, Pierre.” She gave him her most dazzling smile. “Have you heard? There’s a—”

  “Yes. Katy told me.”

  Almost reluctantly, she shifted her gaze toward me. “Hello there,” she said, as if she’d forgotten my name. “Did you have a nice day cooking?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said tightly.

  “I wish Joelle could have seen it,” Sophie was saying as she headed toward the front steps. “She loves freakish things.”

  Jacques’s face collapsed at the men
tion of Joelle’s name.

  “Oh, don’t be so theatrical, Jacques,” Sophie said. “You were Joelle’s boy of the moment, and your moment has passed. Get over it.”

  Jacques just shook his head. “What a beast you are,” he said as she walked away.

  Joelle. The name stirred something inside me. I didn’t know what, but I’d learned to trust my instincts. I sprinted up behind Sophie and grabbed her arm. “Where is Joelle?” I asked.

  Glaring, she snatched her elbow away from me. “How should I know?”

  “Didn’t she come home?”

  Sophie exchanged a look with Annabelle. “No, dear,” she said with exaggerated gentleness. “I’m afraid our bad boy Belmondo has kept her out all night.” She put her hand over her mouth in a parody of shock. “No doubt, such things don’t go on in your world,” she said.

  “A lot of things that happen here don’t go on in my world,” I answered.

  “Then I suppose you’ll be eager to get back,” she said, smiling oh so sweetly as she pushed me out of her way.

  Peter was looking up at me from his spot on the steps, his eyes narrowed as I trudged back. “Still thinking about Belmondo?” he snapped.

  “Quit it, Peter,” I said. “It’s not him, it’s Joelle. Do you remember the earrings she had on?”

  He looked blank. “She was wearing earrings?”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  •

  THIRTY-NINE

  The party—I supposed it could be called the “Discovery of the Corpse” party—began almost immediately, with everyone toasting whatever came into their heads and going on about the body in the alley. Not everyone in the house had gone to explore the Rue Déschamps. Those who hadn’t had obviously used their time well, ordering snacks and filling ice buckets.

  Jacques, apparently somewhat recovered from his broken heart, leaned against the fireplace with a glass of champagne in his hand, laughing heartily at a story someone was telling. Sophie was holding forth in her own little area, describing the ghoulish mummy in grisly detail.

  “Excuse me,” I said, interrupting her story.