Page 18 of The Shadow Bride (The Scarlet Veil #2)
Chapter Eighteen
Le Roi Est Mort
Long live the queen.
The words hover in the silence of the hall for a single moment—or perhaps all eternity—as time seems to stop, and I stare into the corner where Michal lies alone and slightly slumped, concealing the hole in his chest as if still refusing to show any sign of weakness. No one moves to inspect his body. No one celebrates his abrupt and tragic downfall, or even speaks at all. The vampires who hissed and jeered only seconds ago have frozen around the perimeter of the room, half-crouched and hidden in shadow, blood dripping from the shattered flutes in their hands. Stunned. Terrified. Dimitri’s grip now bruises my shoulder, and Lou struggles to breathe, tensing as if preparing to flee.
Waiting.
We’re all waiting, even me— especially me, waiting and waiting for something to happen, for Michal to sweep to his feet and regard us with that cold and penetrating gaze, to mock us for accepting his death so easily. Any second now, he’ll wrench his heart from Odessa and slide it back in his chest before snapping her neck neatly in two. He’ll toss her into the revenant’s cage with Léandre, and he’ll force us to watch as the creature rips them both to pieces. Because he is Michal Vasiliev.
Hundreds have challenged him in his thousand-year reign, yet he alone remains—didn’t Odessa herself speak those words before All Hallows’ Eve? Here there is only darkness, and darkness is eternal.
Creeping numbness spreads though my limbs as I watch him now, willing his body to rise.
Any second.
When Odessa drops his heart, however, it hits the parquet floor with a sickening, mundane thud.
And something ruptures inside me.
Lurching to my feet, I fling aside Dimitri’s hand and bolt across the room, skirting around the revenant’s cage and skidding to a halt when Léandre rises up to meet me. All at once—like another spell shattering—everyone else moves too. Vampires dart from the shadows like cockroaches, some vanishing through the door and others swarming to Odessa, while Lou appears at my shoulder. I pray she doesn’t start bleeding again. “Célie—”
“He’s DEAD!” Shouts echo through the corridors now—screeches and inhuman shrieks—ricocheting from the walls with a feral sort of glee, of rage, of disbelief until the entire castle seems to vibrate with the calamitous news, until the streets below teem with it too. “The king is dead!”
Dead! Dead!
The king is dead!
“LONGUE VIE à LA REINE!”
“Long live the queen!” A vampire near us screams the words, cackling wildly as she flings the revenant’s cage open, and the winged creature lunges into the thick of the room, snapping and snarling—sinking its teeth deep into Léandre’s foot—before sprinting through the door and out of sight.
Odessa stares after it with wide eyes. “Fuck.”
Longue vie à la reine! LONGUE VIE à LA REINE!
“This is bad.” Lou seizes my hand and backs around the now-empty cage, her eyes darting frantically in search of an escape. “This is really bad. This wasn’t supposed to happen like—”
“Pasha! Ivan!” Odessa snaps her still-bloody fingers, and Pasha and Ivan attempt to detach themselves from the scores of guards pouring into the room, each adorned in their night-dark uniforms and golden crests—except it isn’t the dragon and cross any longer. Now two foxes dance around a pillar of flame with words I cannot read, and the realization dawns swiftly, intolerably, sickening in every way. This was planned. Raising her voice over the tumult, Odessa thrusts her hands toward the door and contorts to see Pasha and Ivan through the crowd, but Dimitri appears at her elbow instead. “The revenant!” She thrusts him toward the door, panicked. “ Catch it! Do not let it escape!”
With a quick nod, he darts after it, and—and he knew too. He must have known, which means everything he said in the grotto—
This was all planned.
“He’s DEAD!”
“ Dead. ”
“The king is dead!”
Lou’s hand grows slick in my own. “We need to get out of here. Now. ”
Behind Odessa, a sallow-faced vampire tracks her movements with predatory intensity. She hasn’t noticed him. Amidst the chaos, no one has noticed him, yet when he strikes—lunging for her throat—Odessa shrieks and whirls, decapitating him with a single swipe of her hand. Her eyes glow with indignation. “How dare you? It has been thirty seconds into this regime—”
Snarling across the room, Pasha and Ivan shove their way toward her, and I—
I dart to Michal’s body.
Léandre’s friends descend after two steps, however, forming an ominous circle around me and Lou. Desperate now, I strain to see through the gaps in their elegant bodies, searching for any opportunity to break through them. Because we must reach Michal before they do. We must—help him somehow, protect him, though my thoughts skitter wildly at how to do either of those things when he—when he looks so—
Dead! Dead!
The king is dead!
The floor starts to tilt, and blood roars in my ears as Lou presses her back against mine. We might be outnumbered, outmatched, but she will not leave me; I will not leave him either. Furious pressure builds behind my eyes as the shrieks outside escalate. Lou is right, this is not good, yet I will reach Michal. If it kills me, I will drag his body from this place, and I will—my chest shudders—I will bury him. No one deserves to die alone in the corner, but especially not Michal. Not him. I choke on another sob, darting forward, refusing to yield even as the vampires block my path, hissing and leering in anticipation. Please not him.
“Look how she trembles.” Léandre’s eyes glint with fervor as he steps down from the cage overhead. Deliberately gentle, he takes my chin in his hand, guiding my gaze away from Michal with the ease and entitlement of an aristocrat. Beneath us, the floor tilts again, and I grip his wrist to steady myself. He raises his golden eyebrows with a condescending smile. “Oh, how quaint you are, Célie Tremblay. How lovely . At last, we meet Michal’s human pet—though not so human anymore, are you, my sweet? Still learning to be a vampire, yes?” He turns my face this way and that, examining it from every angle before exerting the barest pressure on my chin. I lift obediently to my toes, where I can see Michal’s body over his shoulder. I can see Michal.
That sob climbs higher in my throat.
“Ahh, submissive too! Be still my cold, dead heart.” Léandre’s wistful sigh belies the evil gleam in his eyes. He reminds me of the vampires in the aviary—beautiful and elegant as they discussed how best to split my body between the four of them. I am no longer human, however, and my body no longer trembles with fear. Now it trembles with rage—a rage so potent, so vitriolic, that when Odessa glances in our direction, still surrounded by guards and revelers, I meet her gaze headlong. Let her see me , I think savagely. Let her see what is to come.
Her brow furrows slightly at my expression. A flicker of unease.
Good.
“Oh, sweetling.” Pursing his lips in concern, Léandre wipes the tears from where they spill down my cheeks. “Oh, you poor wretched thing. You will need protection if you mean to stay in Requiem.”
“She has it.” Baring her teeth in a fierce grin, Lou lifts her hands, and the nearest of Léandre’s friends wince and draw back from the light sparking at her fingertips. Though I see the tension in her shoulders—the great effort it takes to remain motionless, upright—the others do not. Still no blood. “I suggest you let her go now, Leopold, and we part ways as unlikely friends.”
His head twitches in irritation. “Léandre.”
“Not an improvement,” Lou assures him.
Dead! Dead!
The king is dead!
The words still ring through the air like a war cry, and perhaps they are; this was a coup, after all—a triumphant one—and all over the isle, its citizens will be flooding the streets to fight or to feast or to mourn because their king is dead. Michal is dead.
I act without thinking. I act before Lou or Léandre even realizes I’ve moved, snapping his wrist and relishing the gruesome crack of his bones between my palms. Surprise flares briefly with it—because that was easy, too easy—and Léandre releases me with a howl of rage. As if I’ve left my body completely, I feel myself move around him, slipping between two of his friends—
One of them seizes my collar, my neck , and pain erupts down my spine as she wrenches me backward. Cursing viciously, Lou leaps to incinerate her arm, but Odessa materializes quicker than both, her expression blazing at the chaos unfolding in her court. “Let her go,” she says sharply to my captor, a woman with flaming-red hair who glances to Léandre for permission instead. Odessa’s eyes narrow.
Ignoring her, he flashes a savage smile in my direction. “You’ll regret that, sweetling.”
I lift my chin and glare back at him.
“Enough, all of you.” Odessa pushes past us into the center of the circle. Though Pasha and Ivan both move to follow, bodily removing Léandre, she halts them with a curt hand. “You seem to have conflated my empathy for your plight with Michal as permission to do as you please. This could not be further from the truth.”
“Couldn’t it?” Though Léandre bares his fangs, he doesn’t dare attack her with a horde of sentries at her back. Instead he glares at me with unconcealed rage and longing. “Are you not still protecting her, just as your cousin before you?”
“This has nothing to do with Célie,” Odessa says in an impatient voice, “and everything to do with her master. Do try to think , Léandre, won’t you? She is a Bride of Death. It would be foolish in the extreme to provoke him by attacking her.” She seizes the flame-haired vampire by the shoulder, adding, “And if you continue to ignore me, Violette darling, I will pry this arm from its socket and use it to flay you in the street during my procession. Do we understand each other?” Her grip on Violette’s arm tightens, and slowly, grudgingly, Violette releases my neck. “Good. Very good. Now—”
Throwing a disgusted look around the room, she walks up the cage in the next second, ascending over the mob to stand tall and proud before them on top of the iron bars. Somehow more vampires have joined the fray; they spill out into the corridor, wind through the guards, yet all of them— all of them, even the oldest, the foulest—avoid Michal’s corner like it’s diseased. Keeping one eye on Léandre, I creep toward it.
Odessa clasps her hands as she surveys the hall, and the gesture is so achingly familiar that I pitch forward, stumbling a little, and catch myself on Pasha’s arm. He does not speak to me, does not stop me either, instead shunting me toward Michal as Odessa speaks in a clear, ringing voice: “The time has come, darlings, to get our house in order. We are not children”—she dips her head to the cage beneath her—“and we do not require playthings. We are vampires , and anyone who cannot comport themselves accordingly will lose the privilege of this isle.”
Though crashes and shouts still echo from deep within the castle—and strange music unfurls from the Old City—all vampires within earshot fall still at her words. After so much commotion, such silence feels unnatural, even oppressive, as hundreds of predatory eyes gaze up at her without blinking.
Except mine.
They fix not on Odessa but on the fallen man in the corner of the room. Beautiful and terrible and alone.
Michal.
Falling to my knees beside him, I pull his body into my lap, and its heavy weight feels so real, so solid and stark amidst the dreamlike quality of this night; if not for the wash of scarlet on his chin and unnatural hole in his chest, I could imagine he is simply sleeping. My tears fall thicker now. Faster. They fleck his cheek before trickling down his jaw and disappearing into his leather surcoat.
I never asked him how to sleep. The thought is bizarre, unwelcome, yet it strikes like a bolt of lightning as I hold him, as I stare hungrily at the smooth planes of his face. Only once have I seen it like this, before the horrors of the grotto—relaxed and untroubled, completely at peace. I clutch his waist tighter, rocking him slightly, hating the words and the lie. At peace. As if anyone could find peace after such a violent and unexpected death. His cousin tore his heart from his chest. The hole is still there—leering at me—and—and I never asked him about philophobia either, or where he would most like to visit in the world. Why did he visit Les Abysses so many times and Paradise only once? Did his parents name him after someone? A loved one?
Had Michal ever been in love?
Though Odessa claimed he loved me , she also ripped out his heart a moment later, and I—I don’t know what to do with any of it. Tracing his brows with my fingers, I memorize his face. I don’t even know how vampires honor their dead—if they honor their dead at all. I do not know what Michal planned for himself, and the likeliest one who does is the vampire who killed him.
You never asked , he told me, and now I never can.
Somehow, we always seemed to talk about me—about my past and my sister and my parents. Are his parents still alive? Did he turn his father and stepmother like he turned Mila? But—no. Even as my eyes dart around the hall, searching for pieces of his face, I remember Odessa’s supercilious voice: In his entire existence, he has sired only his ungrateful little sister. And she hated him for it.
How will I ever tell her?
I hear rather than see Lou move behind me, blocking us from anyone who might be watching. I hear Odessa too—her voice if not her words—and the procession gathering in the entrance hall several floors below. The strange music lilts higher from the Old City, growing wilder, less inhibited. Is the song to commemorate Odessa’s rise or Michal’s fall? I don’t know— I don’t know —and I wish someone would tell me what to do —
Unbidden, my gaze settles upon Pasha and Ivan, who both stand below Odessa in front of the cage. Wiping fresh tears from my cheeks, I study them with growing unease.
Then I sit bolt upright.
Instantly, Lou crouches beside me, her eyes wide as she searches mine. I seize her hand, terror-stricken and trapped beneath Michal, mouthing, My mother.
My mother is still in the castle.
The last of Lou’s color drains from her face, and she too whips around—stumbling slightly—to stare at Pasha and Ivan, who should be standing guard outside our room. Pasha and Ivan, who left my human mother alone and defenseless amidst a vampire horde. Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God—
Squeezing my hand in reassurance, Lou lurches to her feet, and the lights at her fingertips flare as she shudders a breath. As she collects herself. As she slips through the crowd toward the door. Several watch her go, their heads turning slowly, their eyes glowing like animals’ in the dark. They want to follow her. They scent her fear—they taste it on their tongues—and tonight, they want to abandon all ceremony and succumb to their primal instincts. Just as quickly as the urge flares, however, they seem to realize Lou is not frail or feeble; she is not prey. She has managed to trick them, and not a single vampire moves to follow La Dame des Sorcières as she vanishes into the corridor. Hideous relief surges as I listen to her sprint up the corridor, turn left, right, and hurtle down a flight of stairs without meeting a single soul.
Lou will protect my mother. She will hide her, and both of them will survive the night.
Still, a shiver of anticipation ripples through the room as Odessa finally descends from the iron cage, and sentries fall to either side of her to start the procession—and though I know nothing of Requiem and its rituals, I do know vampires. I know the true revelry is about to begin.
Many will die tonight.
I can only pray I won’t be one of them.
I brush a loose strand of Michal’s silver hair from his forehead, and I hold him closer as Odessa leads her courtiers and sentries from the hall. Perhaps she has forgotten me. Perhaps all of them have forgotten me, yet why would God answer a vampire’s prayer? He won’t even allow us to say His name. Sure enough, Léandre and the flame-haired vampire, Violette, hesitate by the iron cage to glance back at me. “Later,” she croons at his soft hiss. “We shall find her later.”
“You will not.” Seizing her arm, Ivan tows her out the door. “You heard our queen.”
“She still has use for the Bride.” Pasha cuffs Léandre around the head when he snarls. “You will not interfere.”
“What use ?” Léandre snaps, but Pasha doesn’t answer, instead thrusting him after the others and removing a key from his breast pocket. He turns pointedly to face me.
“Stay,” he warns. “Her Majesty will return for you at dawn.”
I’ll return for you at dawn, Célie.
Face crumpling, I press my forehead against Michal’s shoulder as his earlier words echo through the empty room. As Ivan closes the door with a definitive click and thrusts the key into the tumblers, locking me inside and leaving me alone with the corpse of my kidnapper, my protector.
My friend.