Read Chapter 26: Fangs and Ink

The night air was a feast. Every scent—horse manure, coal smoke, wilting roses from a passing florist’s cart—hit Camille with an acuity that made her skull hum. Her own footsteps were thunder. Her heartbeat, a war drum. And beneath it all, that low, constant thrum: the pulse of the city, a thousand throats, a river of warm blood.

She hated how good it felt.

The Le Figaro building loomed ahead, its grimy windows glowing amber. A little over a week ago, she had hurried through these doors with ink-stained fingers and a story to chase. Now she walked in with a predator’s grace, her shadow stretching wrong against the cobblestones.

The night editor, a ferret-faced man named Joubert, was the only one still at his desk, hunched over a stack of proofs. He didn’t look up until her shadow fell across his lamplight.

“Delacroix.” He blinked. “You look like hell. Or—” his eyes narrowed, taking in her pallor, the unnatural stillness of her posture, “—something else.”

“I need the council file,” she said. Flat. No charm. No easy smile. Charm was a tool for the living.

Joubert snorted. “You need a lot of things, and a byline isn’t one of them. You’ve missed three deadlines. The editor wants your desk cleared by Friday.”

“The vault.”

He laughed, short and sharp. “You’re mad. That’s city records, property of the Prefecture. And you, my dear, are a woman who shot a priest. Word travels.” He leaned back, tapping his pen. “You’re done here, Camille. Buried.”

She leaned over his desk. The lamp flame guttered, as if in a draft. “There’s a network of murderers wearing cassocks. They’ve been culling the city’s ‘unworthy’ for decades. The council knows. The council *feeds* them names.” Her voice was silk over a blade. “And you’re worried about a deadline.”

Joubert’s face contorted. He opened his mouth to sneer—and stopped. His gaze fixed on her lips. On the slight, sharp points that had descended with her fury.

“Good God,” he whispered. “Your teeth.”

Camille smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of the thing that now lived behind her ribs. “My teeth are the least interesting thing about me tonight, Joubert.” She straightened, folding her hands behind her back. “Now, you can give me the key to the archive room, or I can show you what the rest of the night feels like from my side of the food chain.”

He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, tossed a brass key onto the desk. It clattered and spun. “Take it. Take it all. Just go. You’re a monster.”

The word landed. It should have stung. Instead, it felt like a confirmation. A title. She picked up the key, cold between her fingers. “Monster,” she repeated, tasting it. “Yes. And monsters keep excellent records.” She turned at the door. “One more thing. When the morning shift comes in, tell Dupont that Camille Delacroix is resigning. Effective immediately. I have a better story.”

The vault was a narrow, dust-choked room behind the morgue of back issues, crammed with municipal ledgers and sealed city council transcripts. She had never been allowed in. Now she tore through them with a speed that made paper edges blur. The hunger was quieter now, replaced by a colder, sharper hunger: the need to know.

Who had turned her? Not Aloysius—he was a tool, a fanatic with a poisoned blade. Someone had made him. Someone who thought in centuries, not seasons. Someone who had remolded the world once, long ago, and wanted to do it again. Her great-grandmother’s pact. The priest’s whispered taunt. The threads were tangling into a rope.

An hour in, her fingers stopped on a floor register. A name, buried in a list of donations to the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. A name she knew from Philippe’s hushed stories of the old houses of the blood: *Baron Étienne de Vaudreuil*. A patron. A protector. Dead, according to the social register, in 1871.

But the signature on this ledger was dated 1889, in a hand that was firm and un-aged. And in the margin, a small ink sketch—a tall, scarred man with a priest’s collar was not there, but a spider’s mark, a symbol she had carved from the chests of two victims only that week.

Camille’s blood—no, not blood anymore, something better, something brighter—sang in her veins.

“Étienne,” she breathed. “You wear a mask of death, but you walk.” She traced the mark. “You wanted a new flock. You wanted a sacrifice tonight. But you made one mistake.”

She closed the ledger, tucked it under her arm, and walked out into the pre-dawn dark. The hunger pulsed, but it was a familiar ache now. A weapon. The city spread before her, all its secrets and pulses, and for the first time since she had woken in that crypt, the fear drained away.

She had a name. She had a story. And she had teeth.

She let out a slow breath, watching it mist in the cold. She did not run. She *moved*, faster than any living woman, and her shadow fell long and hungry across the cobblestones. She knew where Philippe waited. And she knew, now, where the trail ended.