Read Chapter 35: Facing the Comte

The bank’s marble lobby had the sterile calm of a mausoleum. Gaslight hissed behind brass grilles, casting long shadows across the counting floor where clerks in green visors had long since fled. Camille stood beside Philippe in the vault’s antechamber, both of them breathing shallow, the silver stake cold in her grip.

“He’ll feel us here,” Philippe murmured. His jaw was tight, the pallor of his skin more pronounced beneath the chandelier’s glow. “In his own house, his own earth. Every mirror is an eye.”

Camille looked at the rows of silvered glass lining the corridor—each one an ornate, gilded thing, reflecting her face back at her with the hollow stare of the undead. Her sister’s face. Her mother’s. The faces of women who had died screaming in the Comte’s grip for five centuries.

“Then let him see us coming,” she said.

The vault door at the corridor’s end stood ajar. Beyond it, the air changed—cooler, denser, smelling of copper and old ledgers. Camille stepped through first.

The vault was immense. Shelves of safety-deposit boxes climbed to a ceiling lost in shadow, hundreds of brass doors gleaming dully. At the center, on a raised dais, stood a single mahogany desk. Behind it, in a banker’s chair, sat the Comte de Rochefort.

He looked like a man in his fifties, silver-haired, immaculate in a charcoal suit, hands folded over a ledger. Reading glasses perched on his nose. He did not look up.

“I wondered when you would balance your accounts,” he said, his voice dry as old paper. “Both of you. The prodigal children.”

Camille’s fingers tightened on the stake. “I’m not your child.”

The Comte finally raised his head. His eyes were the color of drowned river stone, and they fixed on her with a tenderness that made her stomach turn.

“You are,” he said softly. “Every line of you. Your great-great-great-grandmother had the same stubborn set to her shoulders. She also thought she could outrun her blood.”

“She escaped you.”

“She delayed me.” He smiled, and there was nothing human in it. “Centuries are not so long when you measure them in vengeance.”

Philippe moved to Camille’s left, positioning himself between her and the mirrors. “The women you killed were innocent.”

“They were vessels.” The Comte rose from his chair with a fluid grace that betrayed his age. “Carriers of a line I should have ended in 1490. The daughter who refused me, who spat on my offer of eternity—she thought her blood would dilute mine. Instead, it fled through generations. And each one of you, every few decades, is close enough to her face, her form, her defiance, that I see her again.”

“You killed Isabelle because she looked like me,” Camille said. Her voice shook only slightly.

“Isabelle looked like all of you.” He stepped down from the dais, his shoes making no sound on the marble. “I was almost gentle with her. She never felt the silver.”

“You’re a monster.”

“No.” He stopped six feet away. “I am a debt collector. And you, my dear, are the final payment.”

He moved faster than sight. One instant he was in front of her, the next his hand was around her throat, lifting her from the floor. The stake clattered from her grip. Philippe lunged, but the Comte flung him aside with a casual backhand that sent Philippe crashing into the vault’s mirrored wall.

Silver shards rained down. Philippe’s skin hissed where they touched, and he cried out—a sound Camille had never heard from him.

“Stop!” she gasped.

The Comte tilted her head back, examining her face as a jeweler might examine a flawed stone. “You have her mouth. Her nose.” His thumb traced her cheekbone, almost reverently. “I will take my time with you. In a dark place. Where the sun will never find what I leave behind.”

Camille’s hand moved to her coat pocket. The Veil of Saint Veronica folded into silk. The relic that had burned her sister but not her. That neither reversed nor killed. But Élodie had said it could end all vampires.

There was no time to wonder.

She shoved the folded veil into the Comte’s face. The cloth touched his skin, and he screamed—a high, tearing sound that shook dust from the vault’s ceiling. His grip released her, and she fell, rolling across the shard-strewn floor.

The Comte clawed at his face, smoke curling between his fingers. “What—what is that?”

“Proof that your sins were written down.” Camille scrambled for the silver stake beneath a shelf. “And that someone was always watching.”

The Comte’s eyes cleared. His face was raw, blistered, but he straightened. “A relic. It burns. It does not end me, girl.”

He lunged again. But Philippe was already moving—bloodied, silver-sharded, dragging himself upright with a strength that surprised them both. He threw himself between Camille and the Comte, catching the older vampire’s wrists.

“She runs,” Philippe ground out. “You rot.”

The Comte snarled, sinking his fangs into Philippe’s shoulder. Philippe roared but did not let go. He drove backward, shoving the Comte across the vault toward the corridor—where the morning’s first light bled through the bank’s high windows, unimpeded by any shade.

“Philippe—no!” Camille screamed.

He looked back at her once. His eyes were soft, almost apologetic.

Then he slammed the Comte into the shaft of sunlight.

The Comte’s scream was not human. His skin blackened and cracked like old bark, then burst into bright, terrible flame. He thrashed, but Philippe held him pinned to the light, his own flesh burning silver-white where the Comte’s claws raked him.

The fire consumed the Comte in seconds. He crumpled to ash, a nothingness of cinders that scattered across the marble floor.

Philippe collapsed beside them.

Camille ran. She reached him, pulling him from the fading light, her hands coming away black with his blood—the silver poison trailing through his veins like ink.

“You idiot,” she whispered. “You magnificent, reckless idiot.”

His smile was faint, already fading. “Tell me the locket,” he said. “That’s all I need.”