Read Chapter 22: Poison Garden

The Jardin des Plantes was a perfumed lie in the morning light, all gentle gravel paths and manicured beds. Camille walked past rows of medicinal herbs with her notebook pressed to her chest, the steward’s face still swimming behind her eyes. The symbol carved into his flesh had been delicate. Precise. Almost reverent. Which made it worse.

The greenhouses rose ahead like glass cathedrals. The poison catalog she had bribed from a Le Figaro stringer mentioned a woman named Lady Isobel who kept a private collection of toxic flora. Not a permanent fixture—a visiting researcher, the note said. A woman who knew her plants the way an assassin knew his knives.

Camille had left Philippe at the safe flat on the Rue de Sévigné, his breathing the only thing she had trusted enough to break away from. He had insisted she go. The pallor of his skin and the tremor in his hands had said otherwise.

The greenhouse door opened without resistance.

Lady Isobel stood at the far end of a long table of seedlings, her silver-streaked hair pinned in a coronet braid. She was older than Camille expected—perhaps sixty, with hands that moved over the plants with an intimacy that bordered on worship. She did not look up at Camille’s entrance.

“You’re the journalist,” Isobel said. “The one who ruined the Council.”

Camille stilled. “You know of the Council?”

“I know of them the way a gardener knows of frost.” Isobel lifted a small potted plant with waxy leaves. “They buy seeds from me. Discreetly. For their tea and their tonics and their immortality rituals.” Her gaze finally found Camille. “But you’re not here about seeds.”

Camille took another step forward. The sweet, cloying scent of nightshade bloomed somewhere to her left. “A man was killed last night with a poison I’ve never documented in Paris. Fast. Leaves no trace but thread-like veins of black beneath the skin. The wound was carved but the poison did the work. A New World venom, my sources say.”

Isobel set the pot down. Her face had gone carefully blank.

“I sold a single vial of *Datis viridis*—what the Guarani call the sleeping-kiss—to a man three weeks ago. He paid in gold and spoke with an Italian accent. He did not tell me his name, and I did not ask.” She picked up a hand trowel, turning it over in her fingers. “But he had a scar across his left palm, layered and pale, as though the mark had been cut multiple times and healed over.”

The air in the greenhouse thinned.

A scar. A left palm.

Camille did not need to close her eyes to see it. Father Aloysius. The priest at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont who had refused her father a Christian burial on account of his “unrepented former atheism”—a man who had looked at twelve-year-old Camille at the graveside with that long, silken condescension. A man whose crow-black sleeve had lifted slightly when he turned the page of his missal, revealing the pale, ridged scar on the palm of his hand.

Not an Italian accent then. Father Aloysius had spent seven years in Rome.

“You know him,” Isobel said, reading her face.

“I thought I did.” Camille’s voice sounded distant to her own ears. “He’s a priest. He gave the last rites to my grandmother. He blessed the sick during the bad winter.”

Isobel’s expression tightened. “And you believe a holy man cannot also be a murderer?”

The question caught Camille low in the stomach. “Men who wear black and speak of God are precisely the ones I do not trust,” Isobel murmured. “I have sold seeds for three decades. I have learned one thing. The most devout is the most dangerous.” She walked past Camille to the greenhouse door, paused, and looked back. “The scar was deep. He said he received it catching a blade meant for the Virgin, that it was God’s way of marking him for divine work. I remember his eyes when he said it.” She shook her head. “They were not the eyes of a man who loved God. They were the eyes of a man who hated all God made.”

The door clicked shut behind her, leaving Camille alone among the sleeping plants. A bead of sweat traced the seam of her corset.

Father Aloysius had presided over her grandmother’s funeral. He had spoken of Éloise’s virtue, her charity, her husband’s grief. One memory surfaced—the priest’s hand resting on the edge of the locket between her grandmother’s cold fingers, palm uplifted to bless the casket. Pale. Scarred.

The same mark that had been carved into Élodie’s neck. Into the steward’s chest.

Not a remnant of the rogue faction. Not a follower of the Marquis, hungry for revenge. This was something older. A holy madness.

Camille burst from the greenhouse and flagged a carriage at the gates of the Jardin. “Saint-Étienne-du-Mont,” she told the driver, climbing in so quickly she nearly lost her footing. “And hurry. If I’m late, a woman may die.”

Midday bells were tolling as she approached the church, its great stone façade rising in pale limestone above a narrow lane. The doors hung open, and the smell of candle wax and dust clung to the vestibule. Inside, morning mass had ended; only a few elderly parishioners remained, kneeling in the side chapels with silent rosaries.

Camille moved down the central aisle, past the carved pulpit, toward the sacristy door at the side of the altar. Her heels echoed in a hollow rhythm against the stone.

She reached the door—found it unlocked—and pushed into a narrow hallway of worn oak and varnished ecclesiastical robes. At the far end sat a small office, candlelit, and upon a simple desk sat Father Aloysius, writing in a ledger.

He looked up.

His smile was thin, courteous. The smile of the man who had stood over her father’s grave without a word of comfort.

“Mademoiselle Delacroix.” His voice was honey over cracked glass. “Your grandmother’s soul rests well. I trust you are not here for another funeral.”

Camille kept her hand by her side, where her derringer lay loaded in her coat pocket. “I’m here about a poison. A green one. You bought it from a lady at the Jardin des Plantes.”

His face did not change. But his hand—the scarred left one—stopped mid-ink, hovering above the page. He set the pen down slowly. Deliberately.

“I have no idea what you are speaking of.”

“Your scar says otherwise,” Camille said. “She remembered you. And I remember you. When my grandmother died, you held the locket against the casket, palm out, so the wound would be seen. You wanted people to look at your hand and see devotion.” She stepped closer, and her own voice hardened. “I looked. I see murder.”

Father Aloysius stood. He was taller than she recalled, or perhaps he only seemed that way now, in the low light, with the shadow of the cross placed squarely behind him.

“Murder is a judgment,” he said quietly. “The noble ones are not murdered, Mademoiselle. They are pruned.”

Camille’s stomach turned cold.

“Pruned?”

He straightened his cassock, a man utterly unshaken. “The Council has coddled their kind for centuries—turning only the worthy, hiding behind their bloodlines and their lawyers. The Church teaches that evil must be excised to save the soul. The eternal undead are the only souls that can still return to God’s light if they are separated from their vessels first.” His eyes were bright with a terrible certitude. “The new regime will change that. The deaths are not an ending. They are the harvest.”

Camille let the derringer slide into her palm. “Who is next?”

The priest smiled, and the true horror of it was that he looked almost kind at the edges.

“The solstice falls on midnight mass,” he said. “And the mayor’s daughter is young, unbaptized, untouched. A pure chalice.” He tilted his head, considering Camille with that old condescension from her childhood. “You may have the unholy marquess and his pretense of mortality, Mademoiselle. But you do not have his blood. You cannot stop what heaven has already begun.”

Camille pulled the derringer free and cocked it, aiming at his heart. Her hand did not shake.

But the priest only laughed, and reached beneath his desk, where a small bell began to ring—a summons. Heavy footsteps approached from the nave beyond.

“You are too late to change the hour, Mademoiselle. The midnight mass begins tonight.” He rose to his full height, and for the first time she saw the knife resting on the blotter before him. Long, wickedly curved, the blade stained at the base with old rust-colored pigment that even candlelight could not soften. “And I know where you live, too.”