Die for Me

“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 millennia, so understandably, by the seventeenth century all the city’s tiny churchyard cemeteries were overflowing. Some accounts told of bodies floating around the city whenever the Seine River flooded. Finally the government condemned the city’s small graveyards, dug up the bodies from the existing graves, and moved the bones to the underground caverns beneath Paris’s streets.

 

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 tunnels run for miles around the area.”

 

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.

 

“Okay,” said Jules. “If Lucien wants us to meet him in the Catacombs while he’s giving this big party, I’m guessing there is an entrance through the club he owns. Almost every basement in the neighborhood has stairs leading down to the Catacombs. One of us should watch that access point.”

 

“I want to go too.”

 

The group fell silent, and everyone gaped at me in astonishment.

 

“Whatever for?” Jean-Baptiste asked.

 

“My sister’s in danger.” My voice cracked with emotion.

 

Jules put his arm around me tenderly. “Kate, your sister’s not in danger. Lucien and his crew have bigger fish to catch tonight. They’ll be thinking about how to destroy us. A human will be the last thing on their minds.”

 

Ambrose nodded. “And no offense, Katie-Lou, but with your fighting skills you’d be more liability than asset.” He glanced at Jean-Baptiste. “However, we shouldn’t leave Vincent’s body alone if the numa knows it’s here.”

 

Jean-Baptiste looked at Gaspard and nodded. “I’ll stay,” Gaspard agreed, and then spread the map across a table. The group huddled in to look at it over his shoulder, everyone contributing their personal knowledge to develop the plan.