Read Chapter 18: Leap of Faith

The observatory smelled of ozone and old blood. Camille pressed herself against the cold stone wall beside the door, counting the low voices inside. Three, maybe four—the scrape of boots on marble, the whisper of a blade being drawn and sheathed. Philippe moved ahead of her, a shadow among shadows, his hand raised in a silent signal to wait.

She ignored him. She had not come this far to wait.

The central chamber opened before them like a throat. Brass instruments gleamed in the dim light, their lenses angled toward the glass dome above, where the sky had begun to bruise with the earliest hours of the solstice. And there, at the center of it all, stood the Marquis.

Not Olivier. Not the scarred brother.

The Marquis himself—tall and silver-haired, his features arranged into an expression of terrible patience. He wore black evening dress, immaculate despite the hour, and he smiled when Camille stepped into the light.

“The little journalist who would not stay dead,” he said. “I had such hopes for you, Mademoiselle Delacroix. Your grandmother was the same—impossible to discourage.”

Camille’s blood went cold. “You knew my grandmother.”

“Knew her?” The Marquis laughed, and the sound echoed off the copper walls. “I killed her, my dear. Not personally, of course. But her name was in the ledger, and I make a point of finishing what I begin.”

Philippe was at her side in an instant, his hand closing around her wrist. “Don’t listen to him. He lies the way other men breathe.”

“Do I?” The Marquis gestured to the circle of robed figures who stepped from the shadows—six of them, their eyes glinting red in the low light. The newcomers from the attacks. The rogue faction. “Tell me, brother, how many journalists have you sent to their graves while claiming to protect their legacy? How many women have loved the doomed poet Philippe de Montfort before you tired of their flesh?”

Philippe’s grip tightened. “Elodie was not mine to kill.”

“No.” The Marquis stepped closer, his boots clicking on the inlaid marble floor. Beneath his feet, a great circle had been etched—not a symbol of the sun, Camille realized now, but of an eclipse. The moon devouring the sun, rendered in silver inlay that caught the lamplight. “She was mine. And her blood has been ripening for forty years, waiting for this night.”

The dome above them began to brighten. Dawn was coming, and with it, the eclipse.

“You killed her.” Camille’s voice was barely a whisper. “You wrote her name in that ledger and you killed her.”

“I harvested her.” The Marquis spread his hands. “Every drop of her blood is preserved in the vessels beneath this observatory. To the last, the Delacroix women have such fire. It makes the aging process so much sweeter.”

Philippe moved then, faster than Camille’s altered eyes could track. He crossed the room in a blur and struck the Marquis across the face with enough force to send him staggering backward. But the robed figures were already moving, converging on them like a tide.

Camille tried to run, but a hand seized her arm, and she was yanked into the circle. Ropes of silk bound her wrists—silver-threaded, sending sharp pain through her newly sensitive skin. She bit down on a scream.

“Bring her to the altar,” the Marquis ordered, wiping blood from his lip. He was smiling still, that terrible patient smile. “She will be the first of my immortal army. A fitting tribute to the woman whose granddaughter I have spent a century waiting to claim.”

Philippe fought—Camille saw him hurl one robed figure into a brass telescope stand, saw another crumple beneath his fists—but there were too many. They swarmed him, dragging him to his knees before the altar where Camille now lay, her back flat against the cold marble.

The Marquis raised his hand, and from the darkness came a sword—long and silver, gleaming with a light that seemed to come from within. He held it above Philippe’s neck.

“I cannot kill you directly,” the Marquis said, almost gently. “The old laws bind me. But I can bleed you, brother. I can take you to the edge of death and leave you there to watch as I build my empire from the ashes of everything you love. Starting with her.”

Behind him, through the glass dome, the sun began to vanish. The first shadow of the eclipse crept across the morning light, and the chamber darkened.

Camille’s hands were slick with sweat. The silk ropes had loosened just slightly—or perhaps her changed blood had made her smaller, more flexible, more desperate. She twisted her wrists, felt the threads give, and pulled one hand free.

The Marquis raised the sword higher. Philippe met her eyes, and in them she saw not fear but something like acceptance. An apology. A farewell.

She would not let it be.

Camille rolled off the altar and drove herself forward, low and fast, like a terrier at the heels of a boar. The Marquis sensed her too late—his head began to turn, the sword already descending toward Philippe’s neck—and her shoulder caught him at the knees.

He went over backward with a shout of surprise, his boot sliding on the silver-inlaid floor, and then he was falling, his arms flailing, into the great pit at the edge of the circle. The one she had seen when she looked at the eclipse chart—the marquis’s private chamber where he kept the silver that would unmask any vampire who stepped too close to his secrets.

The pit was lined with it. Walls of raw silver ore, glittering in the darkness below.

The Marquis screamed—a sound like glass breaking, like sunlight on old wounds—and then the silver did what silver does.

Philippe was at her side, hauling her to her feet, his wound already closing. They stared at the pit together as the scream cut off and the only sound was the echo of the eclipse consuming the sun.

“Camille.” His voice was hoarse. “Camille, look at me.”

But she could not stop looking at the pit. Could not stop hearing her mother’s locket, heavy against her chest, the painting inside of a woman she had never known. A false friend. Her grandmother had warned her of a false friend.

And yet the man beside her had just been willing to die to save her.

The chamber was silent. The robed figures had scattered. And somewhere in the darkness below, the Marquis was ash.