The Beautiful (The Beautiful #1)(88)

    Welcome to the Battle of Carthage.

You are mine.

Death leads to another garden.

To thine own self, be true.

Die in my arms.



She shuddered at the memory of how the demon’s cool breath had rippled down her back. Of the warm copper scent he’d left behind after raking his bloodstained fingers across her face. Celine looked away, her eyes catching on the chalkboard’s most recent addition: the one pertaining to Nigel’s murder last night in the suite at the Dumaine. The tallying of another horrific clue to their collection of symbols.

She sighed, her shoulders bowing forward as if burdened by an invisible weight.

It was the same as it had been for the last few hours.

Celine could make neither heads nor tails of it.

The letters themselves could be as they appeared at first glance: an L, an O, and a Y. But strung together, they held no meaning for Celine, nor did they appear to resonate with Michael or any other member of the Metropolitan Police. They could be initials. Or directives. Or utter nonsense meant to worry them to distraction.

If they were in fact another kind of script altogether, their significance remained beyond Celine’s reach. The first letter could be a backward or sideways L, in either ancient Greek or Latin. Or perhaps even a C? Maybe the killer had written it incorrectly, or perhaps the perspective had been skewed. The second letter was arguably an O, if it was indeed a letter at all. And the last? It could be any number of letters. A or Y or W. Perhaps a U, depending on its origins. It could even be from a language that predated ancient Greek.

Maybe they weren’t letters at all, and Michael had been right to assign them mathematical meaning.

It was exhausting. All the unending possibilities had plagued Celine well past dawn. As the hours had passed, the events of last night had tangled through her mind, leaving behind an eerie mélange of memory. What struck Celine most was the contrast of coldness and warmth. Of darkness and light. The way the air had felt in the maze, thick and heavy. The remembrance of the young girl spilling cool champagne down the skin of her throat, the sparkling glass in the garden silhouetting her shape. The way Celine’s nerves had iced at any threat, her bones pulling taut as if she’d stepped into a bracing winter’s night. The feel of Bastien’s hands searing across her skin, his lips a brand in the hollow of her throat. The delicious warmth pouring down her body even now at the thought. That horrifying moment when a scream had frozen on Celine’s tongue.

The warm smell of blood.

The bitter cold of death.

She clutched the silly note tighter in her palm. The one handed to her in passing by a stone-faced Odette a mere minute after Michael had separated Celine and Bastien upon his arrival to the hotel, intent on squirreling her away to the tri-storied police headquarters in Jackson Square beside Saint Louis Cathedral.

    Wherever you are, I will find you at midnight.

—B



It shouldn’t have mattered to Celine that Bastien had thought of her moments after discovering his murdered friend. But it mattered more than she could find the words to say. The note she held in her palm proved they were not simply the “passing acquaintances” they’d agreed to be only days before. They were beyond such inanities. Perhaps it mattered to someone somewhere that Celine was not a proper match for Bastien, nor was he at all the proper suitor she’d envisioned for herself.

But it no longer mattered to them.

Celine saw past Bastien’s masks. He looked beyond her lifetime of artful lies. And when confronted with these truths—the worst things that had happened to them, the worst things they had done—Bastien did not flinch nor did Celine turn away.

These were the only truths that made sense amid such chaos.

Hooking an errant curl behind an ear, Celine strode toward the slate chalkboard to take a closer look at the worn map, pockmarked with metal pins from prior investigations. Again she struggled to understand what had made the killer shift his attentions to her. What had driven him to murder that poor girl along the docks weeks ago. Whether everything was connected and, if so, what the killer’s next step might be. Her gaze caught on the name of the street running in front of the police station, Rue de Chartres.

Come with me to the heart of Chartres.

The phrase was missing from Michael’s collection. Evidently Celine had neglected to mention it to him. Did it matter? Did it hold any meaning? Who was this madman, and why was he killing people around them? Where was he hiding, in plain sight or in a shadowy labyrinth of his own? He could be among so many of the people she had met thus far. Or he could be none of them at all.

One thing was clear: Celine was finished waiting for him to make his next move.

Frustration clutched at her throat, the heat of barely checked rage warming across her skin. Her resolve hardened further. She would bait the killer into a trap the night of the masquerade ball, when he believed her to be preoccupied by drink. She would appear to indulge herself in the carnival festivities, and then leave the ball to wander the Quarter alone, just as she had the first evening the killer had followed her, a mere fortnight ago.

The fiend wouldn’t know that members of the Court would be lurking nearby in an ever-tightening circle, waiting for him to reveal himself. To finally make a misstep.

And if it didn’t work?

Celine would simply set the trap again at a different time and place.