Read Chapter 24: Midnight Mass

The cathedral doors loomed like the gates of judgement, and Camille’s heels clicked against the stone steps with the finality of a countdown. Midnight mass had not yet begun, but the nave was already crowded with the faithful—shawls, whispers, the cloying weight of incense. She scanned the pews for the mayor's daughter, a girl named Marguerite whose portrait had hung in the papers for two days now, pretty and porcelain and thoroughly unaware she was the final course of a madman’s feast.

Camille had left the priest bleeding on the sacristy floor. Father Aloysius might be dead or dying, but his words echoed in her skull: *Other hands. The flock is gathered.*

She moved through the crowd in her black wool coat, the revolver pressed cold and heavy against her ribs beneath the fabric. Philippe had wanted to come. She had kissed him goodbye and told him to rest, to trust her. Guilt twisted in her chest—but there was no room for it now.

There. A flash of white-blonde hair in the third pew from the front. Marguerite Deschamps, flanked by two women in gray shawls who sat too stiffly, their faces angled toward the altar like sentinels rather than supplicants. Camille’s blood went cold. The flock was not gathered in the pews. The flock was sitting beside their sacrifice.

Camille slid into the row behind them, keeping her head low, feigning a prayer. She could see the whites of the women’s knuckles, the way their eyes never strayed to the prayer books in their laps. They were waiting for the bell. For the elevation of the host. For the moment all eyes turned to the altar.

She reached forward and touched Marguerite’s shoulder lightly. The girl turned, startled, her eyes wide and uncomprehending. Camille leaned in, her voice barely a breath. “Come with me. Your father sent me.”

Marguerite blinked, doubt warring with obedience. One of the gray-shawled women shifted, her head turning just enough to look at Camille with flat, knowing eyes.

There was no time for subtlety. Camille grabbed Marguerite’s wrist and yanked her bodily from the pew. The girl gasped, stumbling, and the gray-shawled women rose in unison, mouths opening to raise alarm. Camille drove her elbow into the first one’s throat, a brutal, graceless strike that sent her crumpling backward. The second lunged, and Camille kicked her knee sideways with a crack that echoed in the quiet.

“Run!” she hissed at Marguerite, and they fled down the side aisle, past startled worshippers, through a low door marked *No Admittance* that led into the chill darkness of the crypt stairs.

Stone steps spiraled downward. Candles guttered in iron sconces. The air grew thick with the wet smell of old bones. Camille pulled Marguerite along, her boots sliding on slick stone, until they burst into a vaulted chamber lined with tombs—and stopped.

The crypt was not empty. A dozen figures stood in a loose semicircle, their faces masked by hoods of black velvet, each holding a blade that caught the candlelight like a promise.

“Miss Delacroix.” The voice came from the shadows beyond them, familiar and thin. Father Aloysius stepped forward, his cassock stained dark at the chest, his hand pressed to the wound she had given him. “You underestimate the work of the Lord. A bullet is a small thing when the flock is devoted.”

Camille pushed Marguerite behind her and pulled the revolver free. “You’re dying, priest.”

“I am finishing.” He gestured, and the hooded figures began to move forward, a slow, inexorable tide. “And you have delivered yourself to the harvest. How fitting—a Delacroix, purged at last from the earth her grandmother soiled.”

Twelve blades. One revolver with five shots. Camille took aim and fired.

The first hooded figure dropped. The second. The third. But they were too many, closing from both sides, and she felt hands grip her arms, rip the gun from her grasp. Marguerite screamed. Camille twisted, driven to her knees on the cold flags, a blade pressed to her throat.

And then the tomb behind them exploded inward.

Stone burst in a shower of dust and splinters. A figure erupted from the wreckage with a roar that was almost animal. Philippe.

He was not the sleek, effortless creature she had seen in the ballroom shadows. He was half-transformed, his face caught between man and predator, veins dark beneath translucent skin, his eyes burning gold. He moved like borrowed lightning, tearing through the hooded figures with his bare hands, hurling them against the pillars of the crypt. Blood sprayed in arcs across the ossuary, and the priest staggered back, his face twisting from triumph to terror.

“You—you were supposed to be mortal!” Aloysius shrieked.

“I lied,” Philippe snarled, and he closed his hand around the priest’s throat.

Camille scrambled to Marguerite, gathering the trembling girl, watching Philippe exact his justice with a violence that made her gut clench. The crypt fell silent save for ragged breathing. The hooded figures lay scattered. The priest hung limp in Philippe’s grip, and he dropped the body with a contemptuous flick.

He turned to her, the gold receding from his eyes, mortality and faith bleeding back into his features. “Camille. The girl. Are you hurt?”

“No.” She pulled Marguerite closer. “How did you find us?”

“I followed you. I couldn’t—I couldn’t let you go alone.” He swayed, one hand bracing against a pillar. Whatever strength had carried him here was already draining. The transformation was tearing at him, burning what mortal years he had left like oil in a lamp.

It was in that moment of distraction that the shadow moved.

A hooded figure—one she had thought dead—rose from among the fallen, faster than any human, and sank its teeth into Camille’s throat before she could scream. Pain, white and blinding. She felt her blood leave her in great, terrible pulses, felt her knees buckle. Philippe’s roar was distant, underwater. Marguerite’s weeping faded to nothing.

The creature pulled back just as Philippe ripped it away, and Camille lay on the cold stones watching shadows swim at the edges of her vision.

A vampire, then. Not a priest. Not a man. They had left one true monster in their fold.

Her heart stuttered. And stopped.