The Lovely and the Lost by Page Morgan
For my parents, Michael and Nancy Robie
Because you believed in me
PARIS
RUE SAINT-DOMINIQUE
EARLY FEBRUARY 1900
The quiet ached.
After all the crying and screaming, the pleas for Léon to stop!, silence crushed the dining room. Now Léon trembled on the rug beside the table, his arms wrapped tightly around his knees.
He wanted to shut his eyes, but terror froze them open. He wanted to clap his palms over his ears so he wouldn’t have to listen to the weak, muffled cries coming from all around him—but his fingertips were still leaking.
Léon’s father was at the head of the table. Every inch of the man, from his thinning crown to his polished brogans, even the spindle-back chair upon which he sat, had been bound in a cocoon of thick white silk. The untouched plate of coq au vin still steamed in front of his father’s mummified figure. The scent of mushrooms and wine, a sauce his mother had spent the afternoon stirring at the stove as she hummed little songs, now turned Léon’s stomach.
Unblinking, Léon turned his head. The lacey trim of the tablecloth hung low, but not low enough to block the sight of his mother’s cocoon as it wriggled on the floor. And moaned.
Léon jumped to his feet and crashed back into his chair. A third, smaller silken cocoon, the one imprisoning his younger brother, had already gone still. The venom had worked its way through his sticklike limbs the quickest. Léon’s wriggling mother would stop moving next. But his father, whose meaty frame was fully upright in his chair, might remain conscious another few minutes. Five at the most.
Léon hadn’t wanted to hurt them. But he’d lost his temper when his father had started to shout the way he always did whenever Léon had done something wrong in their patisserie downstairs. He had thought he’d become immune to his father’s blustering, but lately, things had started to change. With every flare of Léon’s temper, Léon himself had started to change: the swelling pressure at each of his fingertips and the piercing pain in the roots of his eyeteeth were always the first signals.
Tonight, they had come on too quickly.
With his father’s insults pounding in his ears, the white drops had pushed through Léon’s skin and beaded at each of his fingertips. Within seconds, marble-sized globules had dripped free like white icing, distending toward the floor as long ribbons of silken web.
Léon’s eyeteeth had erupted from his gums next. They had pushed past his lips into plain view, transforming into thin, hooked fangs and shocking his father into silence.
And then the screams had shattered the air.
Léon had wanted to assure them that this body wasn’t his. That the sticky tangle of webbing was as repulsive to him as it was to them. But they had all kept wailing, and Léon had lost himself. It was the only way to describe it. It hadn’t been Léon sinking his fangs into his father’s neck, or his brother’s forearm, or his mother’s shoulder. It hadn’t been Léon who had then used the endless strands of silken thread oozing from his fingers to swathe each of them in tightly wound pods.
But this was Léon now, eyes blurred by tears, body shivering. There was no way to help them. The antivenin Monsieur Constantine had promised was still at least a week away from being complete. There was nothing Léon could do. Nowhere he could go. Constantine had said Léon would be able to get better, that he’d be able to control himself. All he’d wanted to do was hide what he’d become from his family—and now they were dying. Because of him.
Léon gasped for air and stumbled away from the table, toward the dining room door. He whimpered as he passed the white cocoons, trying to ignore the way they twitched.
CHAPTER ONE
PARIS
CLOS DU VIE
EARLY FEBRUARY 1900
Ingrid’s body had gone numb in the snow. She lay on her back, staring up at steel skies, and wondered how long this was going to take. The grounds surrounding Monsieur Constantine’s home, set in the airy outskirts of the city, just beyond the Bois de Boulogne, were quiet, just as he had promised. Ingrid needed privacy, and here, she could have as much as she wished.