Page 17 of Kept 4
“Yes. He came to research your family. I called the Hunters then. They have waited for you ever since. We had a feeling you would return, one way or the other,” he sighs.
“With or without your soul,” Prudence adds.
“He didn’t steal my soul,” I snort, “he saved my life.”
“See,” the woman with Benjamin shrugs.
“No,” the old man shakes his head. “Listen, child,” he says as he squats down and cuts my ankles free, “you have been bewitched, misled, guiled into believing that the man who you proclaim freed you, perhaps even the man you believe you love, is worthy of such devotion. If you give me but half an hour of your time, I promise you I will take the binds from your heart, the blinkers from your eyes, and free you to the truth. Will you do that? Can you give me just half an hour?”
“I don’t see I have much choice,” I snort again, pointing to Benjamin, who is still holding a gun to my head, and his partner, whose name I still haven’t learned, who stares at me as though I am a bug that needs to be exterminated.
“Benjamin and Prudence will not harm you. Unless I agree,” he adds the last reluctantly.
I almost laugh out loud at her name. So incongruous with her personality. She had certainly shown no prudence when it came to repeatedly punching me in the face.
“So, you’re a Hunter?” I ask, turning my attention back to the priest.
“Goodness no,” he says, chuckling as he turns towards his office and beckons me to follow, “I am a keeper of the faith, a supporter, so to speak. I wouldn’t normally become so involved in hunter justice, but I felt I owed it to Nicolette. She was a friend you see, a good woman. I owe it to her memory to try to save you if I can.”
“You just said,” I turn to scowl at Benjamin as he pokes me with the gun, “that they followed your orders. That they won’t kill me without your permission.”
“Yes, but that is not of concern at this point,” he smiles back to me as we enter his room and points to the chair in front of the computer that I had only recently sat in that afternoon, “what is of concern is how someone from such a good family, someone who confessed to me just this day how much she wanted a family of her own, could allow herself to drink from a vampire and become his slave.”
“I didn’t,” I mutter, scowling as the priest begins to type in a password and pulls up a folder marked ‘Montague.’ “As I told Thing One and Thing Two here, right before they drowned me. I was dying, and he saved my life.”
“If you believe that to be true,” Monsieur Levac murmurs, “then what I’m about to show you may just save your life again.”
I frown and turn to where he is pointing at the computer as he begins to flick through biographies, one after the other, after the other, of women Lord Nicholas Montague had murdered. The records show their histories, their families, their photographs, their educational records, their accomplishments, and finally, their bodies.
I sit, stunned, shocked into silence, and watch. Tears begin to slip down my cheeks at one point, and I don’t even notice as the list goes on, and on, and on.
We are way past the promised half an hour, more like three hours later, when we come to the last photograph.
“And this,” Monsieur Levac says quietly, “is Celeste Birmingham, Lord Montague’s last Kept. Here are some photographs of her artwork, you would agree, I am sure, she was a rare talent.”
I look at the photograph of the painting he has pulled up on the screen and recognise her work immediately. I realise I had seen her style, her work before, once, in the dining room of La Boufantania, almost two years ago now, the very first night I ate and ran. The night Nicholas almost caught me, had it not been for James.
I swallow hard.
The painting before me is beautiful, all muted golds and reds. It is a desert scene. A robed woman stands pinned to a cross, crucified. She is looking down at a handsome man, his head turned to the side, towards the distant hills. At his feet lies her heart, spilling its last drops of her lifeblood onto the sand. Her face is so sad, so beautiful and lost and sad, and yet still, so full of love for the man standing before her. I choke out a cry and put my hands to my face. I can’t bear to see any more.
“You have come to believe that his tastes, his desire for blood, is acceptable,” Monsieur Levac whispers, “but at what cost, Josephine? At what cost? Can you imagine the pain of losing a daughter to such a man? Could you give up your own daughter to one who would drain her life away? Can you not see that you are fighting on the wrong side, regardless of whether you hold any religious beliefs.What these creatures do is wrong. Wrong, Josephine.
“I know,” I cry, sobs wracking my shoulders, my face still hidden behind my fingers, “I know.”
“Then help us,” Prudence says, her voice a low growl, “help us end them.”
“And so that is why I think he is the ancient vampire, the original one,” I finish, sipping the glass of water I have been cradling for some time while I spoke, “I can’t see any evidence of any other powerful one in any of the journals, but he is throughout them all.”
“It makes no sense,” Benjamin scowls, that the ancient would not do his own dirty work, risk his own neck fighting Hunters – he would send servants, minions, hell, an army, he wouldn’t fight us as this Gerald does.”
“Unless he enjoyed the hunt,” Monsieur Levac muses, “after all, our records show we have been unable to kill either Gerald or Nicholas for more than 500 years. One of them may indeed be the ancient.”
“It can’t be Nicholas,” I frown, “he was turned by Elsbeth, it’s in his journals.”
“Maybe he fills them with lies,” Prudence sneers, “has that thought ever entered your vacant little head?”
I lean my head back and stare at her, meeting her eyes.
