"Let us have the bounty on the heads of the long-chained and that'll be thanks enough."
I remembered the faces of the raving vamps. The way the girl vamp licked at her own arm, trying to taste her own blood. On one hand, it seemed wrong to give them true-death if there was any chance at a sane future, but not if that future sanity was promised at the death of children. "They're yours."
I closed the cell and stood, looking down at the witches. "I have some evidence." Rick looked up at that, his expression saying clearly that he wasn't sure he should be here. "Don't ask," I warned him. He sat back and set down his spoon.
"I have a feeling this stuff isn't pretty. It might involve the ceremonies where vamps sacrifice witch children." Molly touched her mouth, her fingers quivering. "If you can't handle it, go upstairs. And you," I said to Rick, "you stay out of sight and don't look at the deliverymen." I went to the door.
Derek Lee already had a half dozen paintings on the porch. I grabbed two in each hand and carted them inside. They were in heavy gilt frames, each weighing about forty pounds, a lot heavier than they'd felt back at the lair, with adrenaline surging and Beast close to the surface. I propped the paintings against the couch and went back for more. The van roared off as I worked. There were fifteen paintings. Rick was lining them up on the floor, propped along the furniture.
Her mouth in a tight line, Evangelina was changing the order, separating the paintings into two groups, one group on one side of the room, facing the other. I closed the door when I brought in the last one. Molly was in Evan's arms, her face in his shoulder. I could smell her fear. Evan's fear was subsumed beneath a rising anger. Evangelina's scent was more complex, her emotions tightly controlled.
Rick was ignoring me, studying the paintings. I joined him. This wasn't the first time that I had gotten important info from vamp paintings. "Good thing vamps chronicled their every important move in oil on canvas," I muttered. "Self-obsessed bloodsuckers that they are."
Evangelina said, "That trait may have come from the fact that silvered mirrors reacted to them and didn't show their reflections well. So they sat for paintings to see how they looked." She had separated the paintings into two groups according to time period, one batch with the female participants dressed in belled skirts, big sleeves, and corsets that came to a point below the navel, and for the men, knee pants, lace and satin, ugly big-buckled shoes, with white hair piled up tall. The other batch depicted people--well, vamps and witches--in high-waisted, slender dresses that showed a lot of cleavage, delicate shoes, and natural-colored hair.
Though the participants changed through the years, all of the ones in charge of the ceremonies held knives and had fangs. Some of the vamps in the center of the witch circles and pentagrams had fangs and were clearly raving; in several paintings, they were the two teenagers I'd seen in the warehouse, the long-chained ones. The sacrificial children were dead, their throats cut, lives forfeited in the pentagram's center. In others, they were being drunk from as they died.
In the later depictions, the experiments had changed several times. One showed the long-chained ripping out the throats of the sacrifices and drinking them down. In one, the adult was, I guessed, Renee. Her husband and her two children were in the circle, savaging a human. Two younger, fangless children were being sacrificed by Renee, a silver knife held high. On the latter canvases picturing both Damours, a bearded vamp was assisting the ceremony. The brother? Wasn't he supposed to be the last of the three to find sanity? I rearranged the order of two paintings and smiled grimly. "Evangelina, you're the educated one. What time periods are we seeing?"
"I never made a study of fashion," she said dryly, "but I'd say the older batch is from the seventeen hundreds and the more recent from the early eighteen hundreds. This one"--she tapped a painting in which the participants wore modern-looking clothes--"I'd say came from the nineteen seventies."
"That's what I figured." In it, only the children were in the circle, feeding on a witch child. Adults stood outside, at points of the pentagram. They bore striking resemblance to one another. They had to be the Damours.
"You understand this?" Rick asked. "Because I sure don't."
"There were no notes of the Rousseau experiments from the seventeen hundreds. Nothing was destroyed in the fire." I turned one of the oils into the light better to study the face of the strange vamp. I wondered who he was. "These paintings were the records of experiments, shipped to the States, probably in the frames, but behind other, less important paintings. Some of the later ones were maybe painted here. But whenever they were painted, this is the Rousseau record of the experiments to rid the clan of insanity."