Beast padded into the basement room. Whoever was breathing and snoring, wasn’t in here. There was no furniture, no washing machine or dryer, nothing except walls and ceiling, which were painted white, and the floor, which was painted black . . . and the white witch circle in the center of the room. The paintings on the walls were equidistant apart, and were arranged according to century. Though the fashions changed, the people in the paintings did not. They were the vampire witches, the Damours, Renee and her brothers—and husbands. She had married her siblings. I’d helped kill them.
In the earlier paintings, the female vamps wore high-waisted, slender dresses showing a lot of cleavage, delicate shoes, and lots of natural-colored hair. The adult Damours were depicted through the ages, and sometimes their whacked-out teenaged children. In some paintings, the teens lay in the center of the witch circles and pentagrams, vamped out and clearly raving; in others, they were outside the circles. And there were always the sacrifices. In several paintings, the sacrificial witch children were dead, their throats cut, lives forfeited in the pentagram’s center. In others, they were being drunk from as they died.
The experiments had changed in each depiction. In some, the circles and pentagrams were made by cutting into the earth, as if with a spade. In others, the circles were made with other things: powder or flour, feathers, flowers, broken stones, pebbles, shaped stones, bricks. The sacrificial athames in the older depictions were steel. The most recent ones were silver. One painting showed the long-chained teens ripping out the throats of the sacrifices and drinking them down. In another, the husbands and their two children were inside the circle, savaging a second man. Two younger, fangless children were being sacrificed by Renee Damour, the mother, a silver knife held high.
The fourteenth painting was different from the previous ones. In it, a vamp raced downhill, white dress flying back with her speed, eyes blazing, holding a flaming cross. Sabina Delgado y Aguilar, the vampire priestess, coming to the rescue, vamped out, her face in a rictus scream of pain, her arms on fire, flames licking toward her body. The vamps in the circle were running away, faces full of terror.
The fifteenth and last painting came from the 1970s, just before the advent of digital cameras. Vamps hadn’t had the use of silvered mirrors or silver-based film, so, until recently, if they wanted to see themselves, they had to pay for art. I had killed the Damours, the original owners of the blood-diamond amulet, to keep them from killing Angelina and Little Evan. I had done what seemed wise in giving the paintings to the strongest, most ethical witch I knew, the children’s aunt. And she had stolen the diamond and reunited it with the paintings. But Evangelina was not a vamp with vamp children, and she was no longer ethical. What was she doing with all this? Nothing made sense. The snoring grew softer as I stood there. Monotonous. It seemed to emanate from the back wall, from a thin, dark line, a narrow crack.
Beast took the last step to the black floor and stopped, paws together, neck outstretched, facing the white-painted witch circle in the center of the big room. The outline of the circle on the floor was covered in salt, sealing it, indicating that, when Evangelina left, she left a working in progress. As we stared, Beast took another step, and I felt a quiver pass through us, electric and painful. The ward over the circle flared, bright and sharp, red as blood. Stinging.
Beast hissed. The shock settled low in our belly, deep in our joints. And tugged. The room went brighter, whiter, as our pupils dilated. Beast took another step forward and stumbled.
Crap. Beast? Black lightning and scarlet motes flashed through the ward, much like the hedge of thorns, a protection ward Molly had once made for me, and similar to one Evangelina had made for Leo, back when she was still part of the witch/vamp negotiations. But Leo’s had been built like a cone which had stopped just short of the ceiling, and it hadn’t worked perfectly. This one was bowl shaped, a far stronger ward.
Beast took another step. Something dark flowed up from the center of the circle, like smoke, but cohesive. Like a shadow, but three dimensional. It threw itself at the ward. The lightning coalesced at the impact point, blacker than night, flickering with purple and blue lights. Scarlet motes swarmed out and around the ward, as if looking for escape. The shadow fell back, expanded horizontally for a moment before reshaping. It looked vaguely like a person, one with extra-broad shoulders. Something about its form also looked angry and, maybe, hungry. The ward returned to its bloodred color and the lightning resumed its flickering.
Beast’s breath sped up, panting. Hunger lanced through her stomach and bowels. She took another step toward the thing inside.