Page 123 of Monsters in Love

Certainly, the figure standing beneath that window at the altar claimed to know a lot about torment.

“Bishop!” Jaston called. “Isabelle DuNorde has emerged from the tunnels spouting madness.”

The bishop turned as they approached. That narrow face, with its pinched features, made an eerie silhouette in the window’s golden light, and his white robe with its gold embroidered trim was as pristine as when he’d cast her sister into the tunnels. Anger at this sanctimonious man who’d caused their people such harm flashed through her.

She forced it down.

This was not the moment for rage—lives were at stake.

“Your Eminence,” she said, choosing her words with care. “I come to warn you—”

“Show respect.” Jaston shoved her forward.

She staggered toward the altar, falling to her knees on the white woolen rug that covered the dais and the few feet of stone before the bishop. Her knees stung and the impact knocked the wind from her lungs.

“Beg forgiveness for your actions,” Jaston snarled. “Repent. And I’ll make a decent woman of you.”

“Now, Jaston.” The bishop’s gaze was almost benevolent as he stood before her, a small object clutched between his weathered hands. “She might be fair, but she is hardly a fitting wife.”

This time Isabelle couldn’t repress the wash of anger.

All she’d done for her town, and all she was trying to do, and this wizened husk of a man deemed her unfitting? She would never be the kind of wife he’d approve of, and she’d wear that with pride. She tugged her neckline to the side, revealing Talos’ bite on her shoulder. “Nor is she available.”

Jaston recoiled in horror. “Demon-marked whore.”

The bishop merely chuckled.

“Ah, little Isabelle.” He lifted the object in his hands to the light of the window—a glass vial with a dark liquid inside. “Of all the people in Windhaven to escape the labyrinth, I had not expected it to be you. But I find myself…pleased.”

“Your Eminence? What do you…” Her eyes widened as she realized it was blood in that vial.

She glanced at Jaston.

The captain’s gaze seemed to be on the vial, but his expression didn’t flicker.

“Normally, I refrain from excess,” the bishop drawled. “But I do so enjoy admiring the fruits of my labor.

Brows furrowed, her attention returned to the bishop. “Your… labor?”

His lips curled into a terrible parody of a smile.

The afternoon light filling the Chastry seemed to flicker into shadow. The bottom of the massive stained glass window fell dark, while the top burned with a bizarre hue of red. When she blinked, the bishop’s robes flashed from white to black, and an image of sharp teeth lining an impossibly wide mouth seared itself into Isabelle’s mind.

A dark figure crept through the tunnels, Talos had said.And in its wake, we changed.

Her thoughts reeled, shreds of information pulling together like the drawing of a river, winding and flowing into a lake. How demons hunted the streets of Windhaven, but couldn’t escape the tunnels. How a man who cried every day for redemption kept killing.

The lines wove together in her mind, forming a terrible map.

Because there was only one answer.

“Dear Gods, no.” She lurched away from the bishop. Scrambling backward on all fours, off the white rug and onto the smooth white stone between the benches. Clutching at Thomas’ ring, she stared in horror at the man who’d claimed to be a beacon of morality for her entire life. “You know exactly what’s happening beneath the streets. Because you made those creatures. Didn’t you?”

“Indeed, I did.” The bishop’s chuckle chilled Isabelle’s very bones.

As he smiled, layers of fangs filled the bishop’s human mouth, growing like sharp-edged sugar crystals lining pastry in a bowl. Behind him, the light slid upward along the stained glass, the stretch of shadow growing with each heartbeat as the sun slid behind the mountains.

“No.” Eyes fixed on the bishop, her feet pedaled against the polished floor. “You can’t… but the people…”

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