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CHAPTER NINETEEN


I stood there, staring dumbly at the broken door. It was made of stone, and would have fit smoothly into the surrounding wall if someone hadn’t taken a hammer to the hinges. A brass plaque etched with the date 1066 covered the lock. The plaque had been peeled back like the corner of a cheap paperback, exposing the mechanism. The door hung open a couple inches. Air wafted through the gap, smelling like grave dirt and snuffed candles.

“What happened to the vampire?” Ida asked. “Did you kill it?”

“He ran away,” I said. “Away from this door, I might add.”

“Well, he’d already done the damage.” She reached for the door. “Maybe I can still repair it. Or figure out what they—”

“Wait!” I grabbed her hand. There was a whole cabal of vampires hidden behind that door. Last thing I wanted to do was explain that to Ida. “We should wait for Evelyn.”

“Speaking of whom . . .” Chesa craned her neck, looking around the chamber. “Where’d she get to?”

It took us several minutes to confirm, but Evelyn had completely disappeared. Other than a paw print burned into the floor of the room with the hidden door, there was no sign of either Lady Lumiere or her hellhounds. We met back at 1066 Rue de la Mort.

“That’s weird,” Ida said. “Maybe she went through here.” She reached for the door, then looked at me. “You’re not going to grab me again, are you?”

“No. But maybe it’s better if I went first. We don’t know what’s through there.”

“How chivalrous,” she said. “But I’m a modern girl.”

The door swung open, revealing a winding stone staircase descending into the earth. The steps were worn down by generations of feet, and a guttering torch hung just inside the door. Flickering light from below indicated further torches.

“Huh. This feels like an odd design for an aetheric dampener.” Ida started forward, the blazing blue light from her torch held high. As soon as she crossed the threshold, the mechanical wonder in her hand dimmed and went out. She paused to shake it. The device came apart in her hands, sending pieces of clockwork bouncing loudly down the stairs. “What the Samantha Hill was that?”

“It’s the Unreal,” I said. “We’ve found another pocket of it. Which makes me think we should call for backup.” I shot Chesa a meaningful look. “Ches, maybe you and Ida should go back to the entrance and try to get a message to the Silverhawk. I’ll stay here and watch the door.”

“I’m not sure that’s safe. What if Evelyn went in there?” Chesa edged forward. “We should—”

“Ches!” I hissed, nodding vigorously at the clueless Ida, who was still shaking her broken torch. “Maybe you and Ida should GO? AWAY? So I can GUARD the DOOR?”

“Oh! Oh, yeah, right. Good call. Come on, Ida.”

“Hm?” Ida looked up, a little baffled. “You know, I think this thing is broken.”

The device in her hand had turned into a medieval torch, complete with pitch-soaked rags and gnarled wooden handle. A couple cogs were stuck to the pitch, and a stray electrical wire wrapped around the handle, but other than that it was straight out of the Player’s Handbook.

Chesa took Ida by the hand and led her back toward the entrance of the crypts. As soon as they were gone, I pulled my own torch-and-tinder kit out of my satchel, sparked it up, then started down the stairs. A trail of sooty smoke plumed off my torch and flattened against the curved ceiling, following a line of blackened stone that spoke of generations of use, and lifetimes of torches. The stone stairs were butter-smooth beneath my feet. This place was old, the way ruins and mountain ranges were old.

The stairs curled down and down into the earth. Black iron sconces lined the walls every dozen yards or so, the flickering light from each one giving out just as I caught sight of the faint glimmer of the next torch. I lost count of their turning, and began to worry that I had missed another secret door when the sound of music reached my ears: piano, tinny and distant as it echoed off the stone walls and drifted up the spiral stairs. It felt out of place this far beneath the streets. I made a final turn, and came out onto a balcony overlooking a formal dining room, and the last refuge of the vampires.

It was a slaughterhouse. The smell of blood choked the air, rising from the dozen bodies that lay sprawled across the floor. Plush carpets ruined by pools of gore covered the floor. The furniture, what little of it wasn’t already in splinters, looked like it had come out of a Victorian funeral home, ornate and macabre in equal measure. As I came into the room, the music hit a sour note, pausing for a long heartbeat before starting again. Sterling silver skull candelabras lay toppled across the shattered banquet table that ran the length of the room. A fire roared in the enormous hearth at the far end of the room. Both logs and bones crackled in the flames, sending thick black smoke billowing up the chimney. Oil portraits lined one long wall. The other, closest to me, was covered by a detailed, age-stained tapestry that seemed to depict a history of war, banquets, slaughter, and violence. A lot of red thread had been used.

The music came from a grand piano at the head of the table, offset from the fireplace by a giant bearskin rug. The body of a young woman lay akimbo in the center of the rug. Her blood turned the matted fur of the dead beast as slick as tar, and just as dark. A man sat at the piano, dressed in crisp white and startling red, his black hair slicked back from his face, revealing sharp features and long, pointed bat-like ears. As I paused on the balcony at the top of the final flight of stairs, I could see that his features were less human than I expected. He looked more like a wolf pressed into the shape of a man, all feral angles and snarling violence. Yet there was deep sadness in the music tapping out of the piano, teased out by his long, talon-tipped fingers. A dirge, as delicate as lace, as soft as smoke from a funeral pyre. I waited at the top of the stairs, almost afraid to disturb this strange and horrific moment.

The vampire ended my reverie. A note struck wrong, then another, and he smashed his fists into the keys. Ivory shattered under the blow, sending a dissonant chord crashing through the hall. I flinched back. He lifted his eyes to me, and they burned with amber light and ancient hatred.

“Have you come to finish her cursed work?” His voice was smooth as silk passing over a silver blade. He stood, and I recognized him as the vampire I had seen in the bakery. He loomed over the piano. “Well? Speak, child. Are you here to kill me?”

“What? No, why would I want to kill you?” I noticed something about the corpses strewn around the room. “These are vampires?”

“My family, my kith and kin, the only remaining sire of my bloodline, and the hope of my people.” The vampire came around the piano. “And now they are dead. Surely, if you found your way through that door, you knew what you would find.”

“Yeah, I just . . . I wasn’t expecting this.” I descended the stairs, stepping over pools of blood on the polished marble. It was only once I was on the ground floor that I noticed a series of heavy wooden doors partially hidden by the tapestry. Most had been broken open, their splintered frames hanging like loose teeth in the stone. “What happened here?”

“Who are you?” the vampire asked. His hand lay on a fencing rapier at his belt. It very much looked like the kind of weapon that could kill a knight. “We have not seen a mortal soul in a thousand years. Two in one night is more than curious.”

“Sir John Rast, of Knight Watch,” I said. “And you?”

“Jakub Everlasting, Earl of Darkhaven, and Sire of the Thousand Bright Moons.” He surveyed the room. “Though they have passed from this earth, it would appear.”

“Wait, a thousand years? Esther told me she helped set up this enclave. She’s no spring chicken, but a millennium seems like a stretch.”

“Ah, Esther MacRae.” Jakub nodded. “So she has finally decided to betray our trust? Typical mortal perfidy. Such short lives, crammed with so much deceit and misery.” He took his hand from the sword, but only to return to the piano and tap out a few sad notes. His earlier rage had destroyed most of the keys, and the only sound to come out was the discordant twang of broken strings. “To answer your question, our mythos is one of age. Time moves differently in our domain. Not so much that you’ll return to a different world. Assuming you leave at all.”

“Ah. Right.” I took that as a threat, but was determined not to acknowledge it. “Something’s going on in the Gestalt. Esther sent us to warn you, should things get dangerous.”

“As you can see, your warning is too late.” Another disjointed cacophony of notes from the piano. I began to wonder if my new friend was properly insane. “Go back to Esther and tell her that you have failed. As mortals always do.”

The closest corpse was a young girl, dressed in crushed velvet, with a heavy necklace of silver chain looped around her throat. She stared sightlessly at the ceiling. There was a wound in her belly, and another on her exposed thigh. Beyond her was an elderly vampire, crook-backed and swathed in velvet robes. A trail of blood leaked from a narrow hole in the middle of his forehead. The rest of the bodies had similar wounds. Things that would certainly kill a mortal, but something about it sat wrong in my head.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you had to stake a vampire to kill it.”

“They are not dead,” the vampire said. “Merely empty. Their souls have been taken. Stolen by that vengeful bitch.”

“What? Who?”

“Evelyn Lumiere, of course,” Jakub said. “The scourge of the night.”

“Evelyn did this?” I asked, incredulous. “How’d you survive?”

“My brother and I were away. At least, I assume he must also have escaped, as I don’t see him here.” Jakub closed his eyes, then shut the keyboard. “Alekzander will be frightened. I must find him, before he does something untoward.”

“Big guy? Shoulders like Chicago?” I asked. “He’s fine. Though I sent him running just before I came down here.”

“I sincerely doubt that,” Jakub said, rising. “My brother has not seen defeat in a thousand battles. He was not driven away from his home by a child in toy armor.”

“Look,” I said, ignoring his jab. “If you weren’t here, how do you know Evelyn did all this? I’ve met her, and let me tell you, I doubt she was up for killing a whole room full of vampires.”

“Pardon the expression, but it is in her blood.” Jakub stood mournfully over the dead girl, his hands folded at his waist. “The Lumieres have been hunting my kin for generations. It is second nature to her.”

“Generations? But I thought—”

“Hello? John?” Chesa’s voice echoed down the staircase. “Ida and I are back, and we’ve brought electric friends.”

“Tesla.” I swore. “You need to get out of here. The Eccentrics can’t know about you.”

“And how are you going to explain all this?” Jakub asked.

“I’ll think of something. Just . . . get out of here. Find your brother.”

“Fine. But be warned, Sir John of Rast—”

“Yeah, yeah, if we betray you, there will be blood in the halls of my domain. Your brother mentioned that.”

“Ah, so you truly have met Alekz.” He smiled, an unsettling feral expression. “Think on what you have seen and what you have been told. There are stories even Tesla’s science cannot fathom. The Lumieres are monsters.”

“What does that even mean? She’s a nice old lady.”

“Nice old ladies do not keep company with hellhounds, Sir John.” Jakub looked up at the sound of footsteps on the staircase. “We will talk, once this is finished.”

A cloud of bats erupted from Jakub’s chest, and he dissolved into their fluttering wings. With a screech they circled the room once, then spiraled up into the ceiling, to disappear among the rafters. The leathery flap of their wings faded into silence, echoing through stone corridors, until there was nothing.

“I sure hope not,” I muttered.

Just then, Nikola Tesla, flanked by Ida, Adelaide, and The Good Doctor emerged from the staircase. They spread out on the balcony, staring at the carnage with wide eyes. Chesa followed timidly.

“Well,” Nik said. “I hope you have a good explanation for this.”


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Framed