The Damned (The Beautiful #2)(8)

Two predators appraising each other, deciding whether to strike.

After a beat, Toussaint sighs with resignation. Then he glides over my shoulder, the rest of his long body trailing behind him, his scales glistening over the bloodstained silk of my ivory waistcoat. I’ve always thought snakes to be prescient. The kind of all-knowing creature that thrives in the space between worlds.

At least my oracular pet seems to have accepted this unfortunate turn of fate.

I sit up, my motions blurred. Inhumanly fast. It would have been disconcerting were I unaccustomed to seeing immortals move about in such a fashion. The next instant, I douse the lone candle between my fingertips, longing to feel the fire singe my skin.

I feel nothing. Not even a whisper of pain. Nor do I need time to acclimate to the darkness. Without the light—through layers of shadow—I see every detail of my surroundings, down to the gold foiling on the wallpaper and the sixteen sparkling rubies in Odette’s cameo brooch. Each strand in my uncle’s black hair and all forty-eight brass rivets in the gleaming wooden table beneath me.

Revulsion grips me as the truth settles on my shoulders like a leaden thing. I am no longer of the living. I am a demon cursed to the shadows. There is nothing I can do to alter this twist of fortune. No prayer to chant. No quest to take. No bargain to strike.

I suppose this has always been my fate.

My uncle clears his throat and steps forward.

The sight of the seven otherworldly creatures gathered in a circle around me should be alarming—to mortals and immortals alike—but I keep a cool head, taking measure of my immortal brethren with the gaze of a vampire for the first time.

Odette Valmont, with her brown hair and sable eyes, watches me closely, her expression guarded. She is dressed in the garments of a gentleman, her silk cravat loose about her pale throat, her fétiche dangling from it. At first blush, she appears to be a girl of no more than twenty with a face to charm the devil.

But looks are deceiving by design.

Wrath threads through my veins, my cool-headedness lost to the winds. If Odette possessed any knowledge of my fate and kept it from me, there will be hell to pay. She’s done this once before, in some misguided attempt to steer me down the path she deemed correct, as if she were judge, jury, and executioner.

Before I lash out at Odette, I look through her, willing myself numb.

Shin Jaehyuk, Nicodemus’ foremost assassin, lingers in a fall of darkness at Odette’s back. The second vampire Nicodemus ever turned, Jae ruled the night in the heyday of Korea’s Joseon dynasty. A master of weapons and sleight of hand, this vampire—with his penchant for blades of all shapes and sizes—frightened me the most as a child. The way he loomed ever present, his pallid skin marred by countless scars, from a story told to me in pieces.

“Welcome to forever, my brother,” another voice intones with its characteristic Carolina drawl. Boone Ravenel leans his left shoulder against the damask wallpaper as he sends me an insouciant grin, his features tan, his expression the portrait of charm. But beneath his angelic mien skulks a fiend with a shark’s sense of smell and a hawk’s eye for tracking. Fifty years ago, Odette dubbed him the Hellhound, for a variety of reasons. As with many such things, the name stuck.

To Nicodemus’ immediate right stands Madeleine de Morny, her eyes and skin the color of dark teak and her expression culled from quartz. The first of my uncle’s undead children to be turned, Madeleine is also the vampire Nicodemus consults before any other. Over the last hundred years, she’s become his equal in many things, though I would never dare to say so in my uncle’s presence. Alas, I know very little about Madeleine’s past along the C?te d’Ivoire, beyond the fact that she begged Nicodemus to turn her younger sister, Hortense, in exchange for her eternal loyalty. And that her greatest passion in life—aside from her family—is to lose herself in the pages of a good book.

Hortense de Morny lounges on a chaise of tufted velvet, toying with the ends of her long, thick hair, groomed like the mane of a lion. Amusement ripples across her face, a wicked sparkle in her russet eyes. She wears a gown of translucent tulle dyed the exact color of her dark skin. Of all Nicodemus’ undead children, Hortense relishes immortality the most. A lover of the arts, her favorite pastimes include an evening in Nicodemus’ box seats at the French Opera House—scandalizing the lily-white members of New Orleans society with her presence—followed by a sampling of the city’s finest musicians. She favors the violinists the most. Their song is like spun sucre, she likes to simper.

One immortal among them remains outside the circle. Though it is not readily apparent—for his hazel eyes possess a similar inhuman luster, his brown skin the same subtle sheen—Arjun Desai is not a vampire. He came to New Orleans last year at Jae’s behest. Trained as a barrister under the auspices of the British Crown, Arjun was denied access to the profession’s hallowed halls as a result of his heritage. Born nineteen years ago in Maharashtra, a state in the East Indies, Arjun is an ethereal, the son of a mortal man and a fey huntress of the Sylvan Vale. Another being straddling the line between worlds. His arrival to the Crescent City solved two problems: that my uncle’s interest in New Orleans’ hotelier industry necessitated a lawyer with a particular set of skills and that the Fallen was forbidden from bringing any more vampires into the city, following their treaty with the Brotherhood a decade ago. In less than a year, Arjun has established himself as a proper member of La Cour des Lions.