Page 149 of The Scarlet Veil

He turns on his heel and disappears through a nondescript door in the wall behind. Odessa pulls more insistently on my hand—whispering for me to hurry,hurry—as Pasha and Ivan haul the imprisoned vampires to their feet. As they drag their prone bodies into the center of the pit.

“Célie,move—”

Forceful now, Odessa whisks me onto the balcony, down the tree, and into the courtyard below—but not before I hear the screams.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Spilled Tea

A large fire crackles in my room, where Lou, Coco, and I curl up in the squashy armchairs by the hearth, steaming cups of lemon tea in our hands. The clock on the mantel reads three o’clock in the morning. We changed out of our costumes immediately upon entering, and a knock followed shortly after. Ivan and Pasha stood in the corridor, scowling with the tray of tea before shoving it at us and explaining they’d be guarding our door tonight.

I stare numbly at the wall of books now. Rows upon rows of cracked spines. Beside me, Lou shares a seat with Coco, leaning her head upon her shoulder and sprawling her legs across the arm of their chair. The silver ribbon Michal gave me dangles loosely between my fingers as I read each title.

Adventures of Od, Bodrick, and Flem.

Briar and Bean.

Sister Wren.

Clearly the fairy-tale section. I almost laugh at the irony. Almost. Only hours ago, I thought vampires capable of living within the pages of one of these books, sailing to secret islets with baskets of roses and bottles of blood, but those bottles of blood must come fromsomewhere.

How very stupid I’ve been.

Michal’s swift execution of Yannick and the others led me tobelieve their deaths brought him little pleasure, but tonight—tonight he proved differently. Tonight he was calculated, cruel, borderline sadistic for the approval of his people. The thought brings sharp, unexpected pain until I focus again on the titles. On the faded golden letters. Anything to forget the memory of Michal’s scarlet-stained hand. Of Priscille’s earsplitting screams.

How Doth the Little Rose.

The Winter Queen and Her Palace.

My eyes linger on the last—an ivory, cloth-covered spine with peeling letters. I recognize this book. We owned a copy of it ourselves, and for years, it sat in a place of pride atop Filippa’s bedside table. She read it to me every night, the tale of the ice queen Frostine, who fell in love with a prince of summer. He would ride his sunlit carriage past her palace every year, melting the snow and ice, and she hated him fiercely for it—until one year, she found a stem of snowdrops placed upon her doorstep. Furious, she crushed the white petals beneath her boot. The next year, however, she found a whole carpet of them across her garden, and because she could not crush them all, she had no choice but to fall in love with the prince instead.

It was a ridiculous story.

Later, Filippa would tell me so herself. But what wouldshethink of all this, I wonder? What would she do? Would she warn me to flee far and flee fast from Requiem and its darkness, or would she urge me to reconsider? She fell in love with the Necromancer, after all. Perhaps—to her—Juliet and the others would’ve deserved their fate. My fingers curl tighter around my cup as I search blindly for another section to read.Anyother section to read. Horticulture, perhaps, or human anatomy—

“This is an... interesting room.” Lou follows my gaze to the bookshelf before turning in her chair, craning her neck to look up at the mezzanine. She tilts her cup to a portrait of a particularly severe-looking woman with withered skin and a wart on her nose. “That one looks anawfullot like my Crone form—or, I suppose, my great-grandmother’s Crone form. I haven’t posed for a portrait myself, but I’m almost positive those are the same chin hairs.” When I refuse to laugh, to muster any sort of reaction at all, she adds, “Legend claims she liked them so much that she commissioned thirty-seven portraits of herself as the Crone and strung them all throughout Chateau le Blanc. Thirty-six are still there. After she died, my grandmother shoved all of them into a single room, and I accidentally stumbled into it one night.” She feigns a shudder. “I had nightmares for aweek.”

When I still don’t answer, Coco sighs and says, “They would’ve killed you, Célie.”

I stare hard atThe Mythology of Plants. “I know.”

The three of us lapse into silence again—albeit a tense one—until Lou shakes her head in my periphery, setting her jaw in an obstinate line. “Theydidtry to kill you, and if Michal hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have hesitated either.” She leans forward in her seat. “I might’ve chosen a different method, yes, but I would’ve killed them all the same.”

When I continue to stare at the bookshelf, unable to respond, she hooks her foot beneath the leg of my chair and spins me toward them. “Jean Luc wasn’t the only one mad with grief, you know,” she says. “When you never turned up at my house, we thought you’d been killed. We thought we’d find your body in the Doleur the next morning—floating right there with all the dead fish.”

Coco looks away swiftly, her eyes tight.

Glancing at her, Lou continues, “And then when we received your note—”

“How could you ask us not to come for you?” Coco asks in a low, strained voice. “How could you think we’d leave you here to die?”

I stare between their hurt expressions, stricken. “I never meant—I didn’t think—”

“No, you didn’t.” Lou sighs and places her half-drunk cup of tea upon the table. “Look, we aren’t blaming you for what happened—truly, we aren’t—but do you really think so little of us?”

“Of course I don’t.” Leaning forward anxiously, I too place my cup upon the table, unable to articulate the incredulity rising in my chest. I—I need to fix this somehow. I need toexplain. “Michal—he wanted tokillyou, and I was just trying to—”

“Protect us?” Arching a brow, Lou cuts Coco a sideways glance. “That sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it?”

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