Die for Me

As for Charlotte’s comment, Vincent’s body lying a few feet away from me as I read wasn’t distracting. It was comforting. It struck me again that I—the orphan stripped of her roots and displaced to live in a foreign land—finally felt home. I felt centered. Whole.

As I finished a chapter on Victorian writers, I heard the ring tone of Vincent’s phone coming from the direction of the bed. How strange, I thought. Everyone who knew Vincent well enough to phone him would know he was dormant. I followed the sound to his bedside table and, opening its small drawer, pulled the phone out. CHARLES, read the caller ID.

My heart raced as I pressed the button to answer. “Charles? This is Kate. Are you okay? Everyone’s looking for you!”

A sobbing sound came from the other end of the line. “Is Vincent there?”

“No. He’s dormant. Where are you?”

“He’s dormant,” Charles repeated aloud, and then his crying became a jagged, gasping weeping. In a lowered voice, he said, “Listen. Tell my kindred I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen like this. . . .” His voice was cut off by the metallic sound of a blade leaving a sheath. There was a clattering as the phone hit the ground, and then there was silence.

“Oh my God, Charles! Charles!” I screamed into the phone, and then a low voice, smooth as an ice floe, began speaking.

“Tell Jean-Baptiste that if he wants Charles’s body, he’ll have to come and get it.”

“What did you do to him?” I yelled into the phone, my voice staccato stabs of panic.

“We’ll be waiting in the Catacombs. At midnight, young Charles goes up in smoke.” The line went dead.

The door flew open and a wild-looking Charlotte burst into the room. She looked at the phone in my hand and cried, “What? What happened?”

“Oh, Charlotte.” I felt the blood drain from my face as I held the phone out to her. “Call the boys. Tell them to come home right now.”

“Was it about Charles?” she asked, begi

I nodded.

She scrolled through Vincent’s numbers and placed a call. “Jules, come back now. It’s about Charles.” She hung up and said, “They’re almost home. They’ll be right here. Kate . . .” She searched my face for some reason for hope. I couldn’t give it to her. “He’s dead,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes.”

“And the numa have him?”

“Yes.”

Charlotte sank to the ground and hugged her knees against herself. Tears coursed down her ashen cheeks. I kneeled down and put my arms around her, just as the door flew violently open and Jules and Ambrose rushed in.

“What happened?” Jules said, throwing himself down in front of Charlotte.

“Ask Kate,” she sobbed. “Oh, Ambrose,” she said, holding her arms out to the man crouched beside her. He lowered himself to a sitting position and wrapped his powerful arms around her, hugging her close.

It was the first time I had seen the two of them interact, and even in the midst of this trauma, something clicked in my mind. There was something there between Charlotte and Ambrose. He handled her carefully, as if she were breakable. And she soaked in his comfort like a sponge.

He was the unrequited love she had mentioned that day by the river. The one who “didn’t feel the same way.” She hadn’t been talking about a human. She had been talking about Ambrose. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I knew it was true.

“Kate?” Jules asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“Charles called Vincent’s phone,” I said. “He asked for Vincent, and when I told him he was dormant, he asked me to tell you all that he was sorry. He hadn’t wanted things to happen this way. And then . . . it sounded like a sword.”

Charlotte let out a whimper, and Ambrose tightened his hold.

“Someone else picked up the phone and said that if you want Charles’s body, you have until midnight to get it in the Catacombs.”

“The Catacombs!” Jules said to Ambrose, incredulous.

“Figures. We’ve looked everywhere else.” Ambrose’s voice was tinged with venom. Charlotte began crying harder. “Shhh,” whispered Ambrose, dipping his head down so that his face touched her cheek. “It’ll be okay.”

“Vincent says we have to go tell Jean-Baptiste and Gaspard,” Jules said.

The same second I realized Vincent was in the room, I heard the words, I’m here. It’s okay. I breathed a sigh of relief knowing he was nearby.

As we made our way down the upstairs hallway, I saw Gaspard walk out of a room saying, “Okay, okay, I’m hurrying, Vincent. What’s the panic?” And then, seeing Charlotte’s twisted face, he whispered, “Oh my. Yes. I see,” and opened the door across from his, leading us all inside.

The group filed into a room that looked like it had been beamed over from the castle of Versailles. On one end of the room, velvet draperies cascaded from the ceiling to curtain a bed below. Mirrors and paintings lined the paneled walls, and an enormous tapestry worked with a hunting scene took up most of the wall facing the bed.

Jean-Baptiste was in the middle of the room, sitting at a delicate-looking mahogany desk, writing with a fountain pen. “Yes?” he said calmly, and finished writing his sentence before he looked up at us.

I repeated verbatim what I had told the others a few minutes before.

“And did the second person on the phone identify himself?” asked Jean-Baptiste.

“No,” I responded.

I saw the others glance at one another warily.

“Could it have been Lucien?” he asked.

“I only spoke to him once, in a noisy club. I really couldn’t tell.”

“It’s got to be a trap,” Gaspard said, wringing his hands.

“Of course it’s a trap,” Jean-Baptiste said. After a second of silence, I saw him nod and say, “I see.” Rising from his desk and walking across the room to face me, he said, “Vincent says that your sister plans on attending an event that Lucien is giving tonight.”

I had forgotten all about the party. “Oh my God—that’s right,” I gasped, blanching as I thought of the danger she could be in. “It’s a big party being held near Place Denfert-Rochereau. A place called Judas.”

“Denfert?” Ambrose let out a spiteful laugh. “That’s just what they call it now. It used to be d’Enfer, ‘Hell’s Square.’ Right above the Catacombs. The perfect spot for a band of demons to set up shop.”

“It makes total sense for Lucien and his clan to camp out among the dead,” Jules added. “They probably provided half of those bones themselves.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

I HAD BEEN TO THE CATACOMBS BEFORE, ON A guided tour for the general public. Made up of a series of medieval mines underneath the city, they are filled with the bones of centuries of Paris’s dead.

Paris had been inhabited for mille

The Catacomb walls were lined with the bones of its ancient residents, arranged in decorative shapes like hearts, crosses, and other patterns. It was the most gruesome spectacle I had ever seen. And to think that someone would actually spend time there . . . I shuddered, unable to imagine the kind of monster that would be drawn to such a place.

“Did he say where in the Catacombs we were to go?” Jean-Baptiste asked. “The tu

I shook my head.

Gaspard left the room and returned holding a large roll of parchment. “Here’s the map of the sewers and Catacombs,” he said.