Read Chapter 10: Disappearances Mount

The ink on Élodie’s morgue report was still wet in Camille’s mind when she reached the opera house steps at dusk. The locket pressed cold against her collarbone, her mother’s warning—*He knows. Be careful.*—echoing with every heartbeat. Philippe was already there, a silhouette against the gaslight, his silver-tipped cane resting across his knees as he sat on the balustrade like a man waiting for a train that never came.

“You’re early,” he said, not turning. “I had hoped you’d bring the diary. And perhaps a little less suspicion.”

Camille stopped two paces from him. “I brought a condition instead.”

He turned then, and the dying light caught his face in profile. He looked tired—genuinely, humanly tired—and that almost made her waver. Almost.

“Name it.”

“Prove to me you’re not the killer.” She pulled the locket from beneath her collar, holding it up so it caught the last of the sun. “My mother wore the match to this. She died before I could ask her anything. You knew her. You owe my father a life-debt. And yet here you stand, in the same city where women are vanishing, bearing the same mark as my sister, whose death was staged and whose body rotted in a morgue for years before I found it.”

Philippe’s jaw tightened. “I knew Élodie would not be your only question. I simply didn’t expect you to arrive at it so quickly.”

“Answer me.”

“I am not the killer.” He said it flatly, without drama. “But I understand why you would doubt that. Come with me. I’ll show you what I am, and what I am not.”

He offered his hand. Camille didn’t take it.

“Where?”

“A place where the others live. The ones who don’t age.” He paused, letting the words settle. “My people—such as they are. And you can ask them whatever you like. If anything I show you feels like a performance, you can walk away. I won’t stop you.”

Camille thought of her sister’s body. Of the diary’s solar markings. Of the marquis’s sneer when he’d handed her the photograph. She thought of the masked man at the morgue, who had delivered a locket instead of a blade.

She took his hand.

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The carriage ride was silent. Philippe gave the driver an address in the eleventh arrondissement, a neighborhood of fading grandeur and shuttered shopfronts. They stopped before a mansion that had once been white, now gray with soot and neglect. The windows were dark, but Camille caught a flicker of candlelight behind a cracked shutter on the second floor.

“This is where you keep your secrets?” she asked.

“This is where they keep themselves,” Philippe corrected. He opened the gate himself, and the rusted iron groaned like an animal waking.

Inside, the air smelled of dust and old wine. A servant appeared from nowhere—an ancient woman in a black dress, her face a map of wrinkles, her eyes startlingly bright.

“Philippe,” she said, with the warmth of a grandmother. “You’ve brought a guest.”

“She’s a journalist, Mireille. She’s here to ask questions. I expect you to answer them honestly.”

Mireille’s eyes flicked to Camille, and there was something knowing in them—a measuring gaze that made Camille feel like a book being read backwards.

“The study,” Mireille said. “I’ll light the fire.”

She shuffled away, and Camille followed Philippe into a room lined with bookshelves and leather chairs. A portrait of a woman hung above the mantel—beautiful, dark-haired, wearing a gown from a century past.

“Who is she?” Camille asked.

“My wife,” Philippe said. “She died in 1789. Before the Revolution took the heads of everyone else I loved.”

Camille’s breath caught. “You’re saying you’ve been alive since then.”

“Alive is a generous word.” He moved to the fireplace, touching the frame of the portrait with a gentleness that seemed genuine. “But yes. I have not aged since I was thirty-two. It is not a gift, Mademoiselle Delacroix. It is a sentence.”

The fire caught, and in its light, Camille saw the others gathering in the doorway. Three of them—a man who looked to be in his forties, a woman who could have been thirty, a boy who couldn’t have been more than fourteen. All of them with bright eyes and still faces. All of them watching her.

“They’re like you,” Camille said.

“We are all like me,” Philippe said. “We were turned at different times, by different hands, but we share the same condition. And we share the same problem.”

“Which is?”

The boy stepped forward. “The Blood Price.”

Mireille returned with a tray of wine, setting it on the sideboard with trembling hands. “Every hundred years,” she said, “the blood that sustains us exacts its toll. A soul. A life, taken in a specific way, on a specific night. If the price is not paid, we do not simply die. We unravel. Every memory, every face, every love we’ve ever had—it all comes undone, and we become something less than human.”

Camille’s hand went to the locket again. “The autumn solstice.”

Philippe nodded slowly. “All Souls’ Night. That is the night the price comes due.”

“And the women with the solar marks—they’re the price.”

“They’re the currency,” Mireille corrected. “But they are not taken by us. The price must be paid in blood that is freely offered or violently taken. It cannot be taken by the one who is bound to it. That is the law of our kind.”

Camille turned to Philippe. “So you’re saying your brother took them.”

“My brother believes he is above the law,” Philippe said. “He believes that if the price is paid by one of us, it covers us all. He has been trying to pay it for years, in his own way, to buy our silence and his safety. But the price must be paid individually. If he takes those women, he is not paying for us—he is feeding his own hunger and calling it duty.”

The old woman pulled a ledger from the shelf, its leather cover cracked with age. She opened it, and Camille saw rows and rows of names, dates, notations in ink that had long since faded to brown.

“Every death that has ever been attributed to us,” Mireille said. “Every victim, every accusation, every rumor. We’ve kept track for two hundred years.”

Camille leaned over the page. The handwriting was neat, precise—a clerk’s hand. She scanned down through the 1890s, and stopped when she found a name she recognized.

*Élodie Delacroix—1887—All Souls’ Night—taken willingly.*

“This says she went willingly,” Camille said, her voice tight. “My sister would never have gone anywhere willingly with a monster.”

Mireille’s eyes met Philippe’s, and something passed between them. “She didn’t go with a monster,” Mireille said quietly. “She went with someone she loved.”

Camille’s blood went cold. “What do you mean?”

Philippe stepped forward, his face pained. “Élodie was in love, Camille. With one of us. She came to us because she wanted to join us. She believed it was the only way to be with him forever.”

“Who?” Camille demanded. “Who was he?”

Philippe said nothing. But his eyes flicked, almost involuntarily, to the portrait above the mantel. The dark-haired woman. The one who had died in 1789.

Camille looked at the ledger again. The handwriting on this page was not the clerk’s hand. It was bolder, more urgent—a man’s writing, but one that had been carefully disguised.

And it was not Philippe’s.

She looked from the ledger to Philippe, and then to Mireille, and the boy, and the others standing silent in the doorway.

“You said the price must be paid individually,” Camille said. “But you also said your brother believes it can be paid for all of you.”

“That is what he believes,” Philippe said.

“Then who wrote this?”

No one answered.

Camille looked down at the ledger, and at the signature at the bottom of Élodie’s entry. A single, ornate letter. *M.*

“Who is M?” she asked.

Mireille looked at Philippe. Philippe looked at the fire.

Finally, the boy spoke, his voice small and young and terrible.

“M is the one who turned us all. M is the one who wrote the law. M is the one who is supposed to die if the price isn’t paid.”

Camille looked up at the portrait of Philippe’s wife.

“She’s not dead, is she?”

Philippe’s silence was louder than any answer.