Page 11 of The Shadow Bride (The Scarlet Veil #2)

Chapter Eleven

Death of a Thief

We follow the trail to the end of the harbor.

Around the corner of the last building—tucked between a grubby pub and the open sea—three revenants hunch over a terrified couple. Even moving at full speed, trying and failing to keep pace with Michal, I categorize each detail of the scene in rapid succession: the revenants’ bloated bodies, their privateer uniforms, the water dripping from their mottled skin.

Drowned , I realize in alarm.

My blood must’ve resurrected them at the bottom of the ocean.

Michal rips the first revenant away from the man—badly injured, bleeding profusely from bites in his stomach, his thigh—while I dash for the woman, who cowers behind a barrel of crème de menthe and clutches her wounded arm. If possible, her eyes widen even further at the sight of me. “Oh God,” she whispers.

Too late, I realize that Michal’s cloak has fallen open to reveal my bloody nightgown, that my incisors remain long and sharp.

His shout spurs me into action.

“Get out of here, Célie! Take her and go!”

Covering my mouth with one hand, I seize the woman after thrusting the second revenant away; bile rises in my throat at how its flesh bursts under my palm. Don’t breathe. I repeat the words in a manic stream of consciousness, whisking the woman away from the waterfront. Don’t breathe, don’t breathe, don’t breathe—

“You,” the third revenant gurgles.

Something like recognition sparks in its watery eyes, and it catches my hair before we round the corner. It wrenches us backward as pain radiates across my scalp. I gasp—breathless with it—and at the scent of the woman’s injury, fresh pain sears my throat. It doesn’t hurt like it did before, however; Michal’s blood still courses through my system. It dulls the ache. It strengthens me, and with a curse, I reach backward, grasping the revenant’s swollen wrist and twisting with all my might. It releases us instantly, and I bolt through the harbor before it can recover. Though the woman screams anew—screams loud enough to wake every corpse in the kingdom—her arms clamp viselike around my neck.

I don’t realize she’s clawing at me until I release her several streets away.

“Vampire!” Her shrieks rend the quiet of the garden path—somewhere deep in West End, judging by the ornamental shrubbery around us. She clutches her elbow in blind panic, shaking her head and backing into a trellis of dead roses. “It’s a vampire! Please, someone help me! Please, please,” she whispers to me, quieter now. “I have ch-children.” As if she were realizing a grave mistake, her eyes grow even wider, and she searches for something—anything—she can use as a weapon against me. My stomach pitches at the familiarity of the situation, at the cruelty of this particular jamais vu. How many times have I felt this same terror? How many times have I been unable to defend myself? “But don’t take them either! We—we wouldn’t t-taste right, and—”

“I would never hurt you.” My hands tremble as I lift them between us, as I slowly move to refasten Michal’s cloak. Hiding all evidence of my lie. “This isn’t what it looks like—”

She doesn’t pause to listen, however. She doesn’t care to hear my explanation. The instant my fingers touch the clasp, she flees back in the direction from which we came—toward her injured husband, probably, or perhaps her children.

I watch her go with a horrible sinking sensation.

She feared me just as much as she feared the revenants. Perhaps more.

“I wouldn’t let it bother you,” says a voice to my right, and when I turn, startled, all concern for the woman flees with her, vanishing up the path. Because that is Frederic stepping out from the hedge, and the sight of him steals the breath from my lungs. “Hello, little sister.” He bares his teeth in a savage smile. “Did you miss me?”

Cold fingers of dread creep down my spine.

The last time I saw this man, he’d cleaved the very world in two for love. That overbright look in his eyes now, however—that isn’t love at all. No. That look is hatred, and the full force of it sends me back a step. Why would he possibly risk coming to this dead rose garden in the middle of the day while the Chasseurs still search for him?

“What are you doing here, Frederic?” I ask warily.

“What do you think ?”

With the jerk of his head, he gestures behind him, and there—

There stands my sister.

It turns out Mila didn’t need to find her at all. She found me.

The ground seems to tilt at the sight of her, an apparition pulled straight from my darkest nightmares. Except she isn’t an apparition anymore. No, Filippa Tremblay is just as solid as I am, just as real , and the black stitches down her cheek—those are real too. I stare at her in horror. My eyes are sharper now; they see all the things I missed while trapped beside her in the grotto.

They see how... unnatural she looks.

Though I knew Frederic stole her body from the catacombs, reversing the blood sickness Morgane inflicted and sewing her remains with bits of other people, I hadn’t realized the extent of the damage. I should’ve known better. I should’ve prepared . Her flesh had been rapidly decomposing when Morgane forced me into her casket before La Mascarade de Cranes. Even Frederic’s magic could only do so much to preserve her.

Now she stares back at me with the face of a chthonic deity: half hers and half not. To the left of the stitches, her skin remains her own, ivory and smooth, with her emerald eye intact and her eyebrow black as her hair. To the right, however, her skin is too pale—as pale as my own—with an eye that once belonged to someone else. The iris isn’t emerald but deep brown. Almost black. And her eyebrow there—it’s several shades lighter than it should be. Also stolen. She wears a gown of pure white with sheer sleeves as if she cannot feel the cold, and at her crown, a delicate silver hairpiece nestles. The diamonds look like ice. Like snowdrops in a winter palace. No gloves , I realize abruptly. I was right.

Unbidden, my gaze next falls to my sister’s stomach.

“She’s still dead,” Filippa says.

Her voice holds no inflection. No emotion.

I wince at the sound of it. Three simple words. Three perfect blows. Despite all Frederic’s careful planning, my blood failed to resurrect their daughter too, and—and what does that mean ?

Was it truly my sister tormenting me, or did I imagine her voice in my head? If the former, how? And if the latter... why ?

Why has any of this happened?

Swallowing hard, I glance around for Mila before accepting she isn’t here—I am alone—and force myself to return Filippa’s hollow gaze. I resist the urge to approach her, to console her, because she wouldn’t want it. She wouldn’t want my questions either. Even undead, my sister is still my sister, and her grief isn’t mine. As if sensing my thoughts, she shakes her head and clicks her tongue reprovingly before I can apologize. “The world doesn’t live and die at your fingertips, ma belle.”

At that, Frederic grimaces before stepping forward with a resolute expression. “This time it did.” The wind ruffles his unkempt hair—dirtier now than I’ve ever seen it, and longer too. Shadows have crept beneath his eyes. Combined with the sickly pallor of his skin and the dark stubble along his jaw, he looks... haunted. “You aren’t supposed to be here, Célie.”

In his hand, he holds La Voisin’s grimoire.

“Oh?” My nape prickles at the sight of it, and I shift away from the trellis to keep the path behind me clear. I can outrun Frederic now. If he attacks, I can flee to Michal’s ship, and this time, he won’t be able to follow us to Requiem—not until Yule next month. The protective enchantment around the isle won’t lift until then. Still, it seems a wasted opportunity not to press for information first: about the revenants, about how to lay them to rest. “And where should I be if not here?”

My gaze falls to the grimoire.

“You should be dead .” Spitting the word, Frederic lifts the evil little book between us and shakes it with frenetic energy. “The spell called for Blood of Death. It required your death—”

I gesture with forced calm to my sharp teeth, my terrible and beautiful face. “It might’ve escaped your notice, but I am dead.”

“Not properly,” he snarls, stabbing a finger at my sister, “or Frost would still be growing in her belly, and she wouldn’t be so—so—” He seems to struggle with the words, his knuckles white against the grimoire. “She wouldn’t be so different now.” As if unable to resist, he pulls Filippa to his side, lifting his hands to cradle her face. The grimoire presses directly against her stitches. “Look at me, darling,” he says softly, feverishly. “Please look at me. Just look at me, Pip, and everything will be just like it was before. We’ll be together. We’ll be happy .”

Filippa gazes back at him, strange and unblinking. “I am looking at you.” A pause. “Darling.”

Frederic’s expression crumbles. Whatever he hoped to see in her mismatched eyes is clearly no longer there, and after several more seconds, he releases her with a pained sound, his fingers lingering above her cheeks as if he still longs to touch her.

I might’ve once felt sick at his loss.

“She won’t look at me, Célie.” Though he speaks to me, he still stares at her like a starving man. “The Filippa we knew loved us. She would do anything for us, but this one—she won’t—she says that she feels cold, empty, hungry, and I can’t do anything to help. I can’t help her because you’re still alive. Don’t you understand?” He drags a hand through his ragged hair before plunging it into his coat, withdrawing a crooked knife, and whirling to face me. Emotion chokes his voice. “None of this is right. None of this is what should’ve happened—”

“You expected differently?” I cannot keep the note of derision from my own voice. I should run. I should flea into the mist before he attempts to use that knife, but his movements are clumsier now. Slower. If I wanted, I could crush him with my bare hands, and part of me longs to do just that.

This man has taken everything from us—our innocence, our dignity, our peace. Like a thief in the night, he stole my very life, slitting my throat and draining every last drop of my blood, forcing it into my sister to steal her death too. I cannot feel sympathy for him; I cannot feel anything but disgust. “After Morgane tortured and killed her, after you punched a fist through the veil—dragging her back here, violating her body and soul—you thought she would remain unchanged?”

“I didn’t violate —”

But I scoff, unwilling to hear any more. “The spell worked exactly as intended, Frederic. You woke her up. You woke all of them up, and now they’re crawling out of graves across the kingdom, exacting vengeance on those who’ve wronged them. Perhaps next they’ll come after you ,” I add with relish.

“They already have , little sister!” He thrusts the knife and grimoire into the air for emphasis. “You still don’t seem to understand. Those revenant witches—they would’ve eaten me if not for—for—”

His eyes flick to Filippa, who stands calm and regal in her glittering gown, not a strand of hair out of place. My frown deepens as realization trickles in from my subconscious. Despite her macabre stitches and eerie eyes, she doesn’t hold herself like the other revenants; she doesn’t act like them either. The Archbishop tried to take a bite out of my cheek, after all, while the three at the docks did their best to devour everyone in sight. None of them spoke. None of them slipped inside my mind and... reasoned.

Frederic’s heartbeat quickens at the small smile on Filippa’s lips.

“You’ve eaten,” she says to me. “It suits you.”

I regard her warily. “How are you talking to me, Pip? How have you been talking to me?”

“I’ve eaten too.”

Frederic swallows hard at that, his hands twitching around the knife and grimoire. “She’s been insatiable, Célie. Insatiable. It’s all I’ve been able to do to keep her from—”

“To keep her from what , Frederic?” My voice grows louder as realization surges from a trickle to a flood. Please no. “What have you done?”

He lifts his chin defensively. “What I must.”

And now I really do feel sick; it takes little effort to imagine my sister’s mismatched face instead of the Archbishop’s rotting one, her teeth on that man’s thigh instead of the privateers’. It could’ve been her instead of them at the harbor. It has been her. With Frederic’s help, she’s been... eating people, truly eating them. Consuming their flesh.

Like you’ve consumed their blood?

Bile rises in my throat—at the comparison, yes, but also because I cannot tell whether it was her voice or mine inside my head. Pressure builds behind my eyes. “What have you done?” I whisper again. Because none of this is right—not her, not magic, not the witches, and not the revenants either. Not me.

Another sunken smile. “I made a friend.”

Frederic’s gaze darts between us in confusion. He still holds the knife and grimoire half-raised as if unsure how to proceed now that Filippa has joined the conversation. “A friend ?”

She ignores him.

Gritting my teeth, I step forward, just as heedless of Frederic and his knife. Heedless of anything except the flat black of my sister’s stolen eye. I want to shake her, to slap her, to rattle any kind of emotion from the horrid emptiness of her expression. My sister has always been secretive and withdrawn, but she has never— never —been unfeeling. She has never been cruel. “Who is it, Filippa? Tell me. ”

“Pray you never find out.”

But Frederic’s patience has finally reached its end. Shaking his head, he snaps, “Enough of this. We came here to finish the ritual, and there will be no loopholes this time, no ambiguity and no escapes. You will die to resurrect your sister, and she will finally return to me.” Lifting the knife and grimoire abruptly, near overwrought with purpose, he lunges toward me, and my knees bend in preparation to bolt, to find Michal and flee. To lose this particular battle as a means to winning the war.

And then, quite suddenly, Frederic stops.

The entire garden seems to still with him—to suck in a collective breath—as together, we look down at his chest. At the unfamiliar, black-gloved hand now protruding from it.

Oh my God.

Blood spurts from Frederic’s mouth.

“Pip,” he whispers, his eyes wide and unseeing—searching—but Filippa says nothing in return. She says nothing, and a single tear tracks down his cheek as he collapses to his knees, falling forward without another word.

Dead.

Frederic is dead.