“I wouldn’t.” Gavriel looked amused, though, as if this rhetorical style was familiar to him. As if it charmed him, not the show itself, but the memory of Lucien acting this way.
“Isn’t every hero aware of all the terrible reasons they did those good deeds? Aware of every mistake they ever made and how good people got hurt because of their decisions? Don’t they recall the moments they weren’t heroic at all? The moments where their heroism led to more deaths than deliberate villainy ever could?”
Gavriel was staring at Lucien as though fascinated, as though finally one of Lucien’s attempts to capture his attention had worked.
“You’ve been alone for ten years—and maybe longer than that. But you won’t be alone anymore. I know you. I know you better than anyone in the world, and if you forgive me, I will serve up vengeance enough to sate even you. Together, we’ll kill the Spider.”
Gavriel’s knife hand sagged.
He was going to do it, Tana realized. He was going to let a man who’d just murdered his girlfriend talk him into making an alliance, with her corpse still on the floor between them. She turned away, disgusted, through a door to the outside.
On the lawn, she felt dizzy from the mingled scents of incense and blood, and her head had started to throb. She leaned her hand against the wall near a collection of trash cans and garden tools, waiting to see if she was going to vomit. Then she’d walk to the front and see if Valentina was still there.
“Tana?” a girl’s voice asked. Tana looked up to see Midnight, coming toward her from the front yard in a shiny vinyl dress. Her blue hair hung around her shoulders, and she looked as sweet and calm as if the last two days had never happened. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” Tana said, taking another shuddering breath. “I’m okay. Just give me a minute.”
“I’d hoped you’d come to the party,” Midnight said, stepping closer. The scent of decay wafted off her. “I wanted to thank you for everything you did the other night.”
Tana was about to tell her that she was welcome, when Midnight grabbed for her throat.
CHAPTER 28
How shocking must thy summons be, O Death!
—Robert Blair
Vienna in 1912 was very different from Paris a mere twenty years before. The streets were full of motorcars and bicycles during the day, and at night the whole city glowed with electric lights. Phones rang and elevators whisked the bourgeoisie up the floors of their rent palaces along the Ringstrasse, where the walls of the old city had once been. Sigmund Freud had published Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie already and Carl Jung was just about to publish Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. The modern age was well under way, and everyone believed themselves to be marching forward to a better tomorrow. But prostitutes still prowled the ground where gallows had once hung, willing to lie down on top of tombs with a man for the price of a newspaper. Other things prowled there, too. Vienna was a city with its lights on, and no one wanted to acknowledge what happened in the dark.
Lucien Moreau strode through the night streets in his buttoned-up black sack coat, Elisabet beside him in a beaded, high-necked lace dress, all cream and gold and black. Gavriel was on the other side, in a charcoal coat that nearly matched Lucien’s own.
They were gorgeous creatures, wholly fascinating, and unequivocally broken, Lucien mused as they walked.
They were also likely to be executed before the night was out, all because of him. A vampire was supposed to seek permission before creating progeny, and he hadn’t. He would never have received it, not for either of them, unstable as they were.
Gavriel was half in love with death. He’d lost a lover to it and put his own brother in a grave, so maybe it was no surprise that he stalked murderers through the city streets, sinking his fangs into their jugulars and gulping down their blood. Every night, it was as though he avenged his brother by killing some stand-in for himself.