Read Chapter 11: The Safe House

The carriage rattled to a stop before a house that seemed to be holding its breath.

Camille stepped down onto cracked cobblestones and looked up at the mansion. It had once been grand—that much was clear from the bones of it, the tall windows and wrought-iron balconies now streaked with rust. But time had not been kind. The façade sagged like a tired face, and ivy crawled over the stone in thick, greedy ropes, pulling the building down into the earth.

“You live here?” she asked, not bothering to hide her skepticism.

Philippe offered his arm. “I keep company here. There is a difference.”

She did not take his arm. She followed him up the steps instead, her boots clicking on marble that had lost its polish a century ago. The door swung open before Philippe could knock, and an ancient man stood in the threshold, bent like a question mark. His eyes, though, were sharp as glass.

“Monsieur,” the man said, dipping his head. “And a guest.”

“This is Mademoiselle Delacroix,” Philippe said. “She is here to understand.”

The old man’s gaze slid to Camille and lingered. Something passed over his face—recognition, or perhaps memory—before he stepped aside and gestured them into the foyer.

The interior was worse than the exterior. Paintings hung crooked on walls where the plaster had crumbled, and dust lay thick enough to write in. But Camille noticed things that did not fit the decay. A crystal chandelier, clean and glimmering, caught the candlelight above. A银 tray of fresh pastries sat on a sideboard. And the carpets beneath her feet, though faded, were genuine Aubusson—worth more than her yearly salary.

“Who else lives here?” she asked.

“Come,” Philippe said. “They are waiting to meet you.”

He led her through a series of dark corridors until they reached a drawing room at the back of the house. The doors were double, oak, and carved with scenes she could not quite make out in the gloom. Philippe pushed them open.

The room inside was warm, lit by blazing hearth. Five people sat in mismatched chairs arranged in a loose circle. They ranged in age from a girl who could not have been sixteen to a man who looked well past ninety. But as Camille stepped inside, she noticed the same thing about each of them: their eyes had that same glassy sharpness as the old servant’s.

“This is Camille Delacroix,” Philippe announced. “The journalist I told you about.”

The ancient man—the one who looked ninety—rose first. He walked toward her with a steadiness that belied his frail appearance, and when he took her hand, his grip was cold and firm.

“You are the sister of Élodie,” he said.

It was not a question. Camille felt her throat tighten. “I am.”

“I knew her.” His voice had the texture of dry leaves. “Briefly. She was brave. It did not save her.”

The room went quiet. Philippe stood by the fire, watching her, his expression unreadable. Camille forced herself to keep her composure.

“Who are you?” she asked the old man. “All of you?”

“We are what Philippe is,” he said. “What we have been for a very long time. We are the ones who refused to feed on the innocent. We are the ones who chose discipline over appetite.”

The girl—the one who looked sixteen—spoke up. Her voice was surprisingly deep. “We age in fits and starts. Decades pass without a wrinkle, then we are granted years in a single season. It is the price of refusing.”

“The same price that must be paid at the century’s end,” the old man said. “To keep what we are hidden. To keep the blood price satisfied.”

Camille turned to Philippe. “You said the Blood Price. At the safe house. But you didn’t explain what it actually is.”

Philippe met her gaze. “It is a bargain. We were—turned by someone who did not act out of kindness. She gave us eternal life, but she bound it to a cost. Every century, on All Souls’ Night, the debts of those who refused the hunger come due.”

“Meaning what, exactly? Deaths?”

The old man laughed—a dry, rasping sound. “Meaning the hunger we refuse does not simply vanish. It accumulates. It grows. And if it is not fed in a single, concentrated act—if a worthy soul is not offered to the bargain—then we begin to die. All of us. Our kind.”

Camille looked around the room. The faces she had first read as old and young now seemed something else entirely—stations on a long, terrible road.

“So someone,” she said slowly, “has been making that offering for you. Every century. Killing worthy souls to keep you alive.”

No one spoke. The fire crackled.

“That is what’s happening now,” she pressed. “The disappearances. The women with the solar marks. You’re telling me those deaths are the price being paid so you can stay hidden from the world.”

“No,” Philippe said quietly. He stepped forward, away from the fire, and his face was drawn with something that looked like grief. “Those deaths are not the price. Those deaths are the *exaggeration* of it. The price requires one soul. Perhaps two. It does not require a trail of bodies across Paris. It does not require Élodie.”

Camille felt the air leave her lungs. “Then who is doing it?”

Philippe exchanged a glance with the old man, who nodded slowly. Philippe crossed to a wooden cabinet in the corner of the room, unlocked it with a key from his pocket, and withdrew a heavy leather-bound book. He brought it to her.

“This is the ledger of our kind,” he said. “Every death tied to the Blood Price since the bargain was struck. You will see the pattern. You will see the dates.”

Camille opened the book. The pages were brittle and yellowed, filled with handwriting that changed every fifty years or so. She scanned the entries—names, dates, locations. Most meant nothing to her. But near the back, in a hand she did not recognize, she found it.

*Élodie Delacroix. Rue des Saints-Pères. 1887. Taken to satisfy the bargain.*

The room swam. She looked up at Philippe, and her voice was barely a whisper. “You said you failed to save her. You said the killer wrote this. But this ledger—it’s under your control. In your house. Your people.”

The accusation hung in the air like smoke. The ancient ones looked at Philippe with something that might have been pity.

“The handwriting is not mine,” Philippe said. He sounded tired. “But it was entered by someone with access to this book. Someone who knows our secrets and uses them for other purposes.”

“Who?”

The old man answered instead. “The one who wrote those entries is dead. We have confirmed it. Which means either the ledger is haunted—or the writer is not who we think she was.”

Camille stared at him. “She?”

Philippe was very still. “The woman who created us. The woman in my portrait. She has been dead for three hundred years. But if these entries are in her hand, then she is not dead at all. And if she is not dead—then she is the one who took your sister. And she is still here. In Paris. Waiting for All Souls’ Night.”

The fire snapped, and somewhere in the house, a door slammed shut.