Page 108 of Besieger
After the portrait, Silvio had developed an interest in paintings. Like all vampires, he found portraits fascinating. They were drawn and made through the lens of a mortal’s eye, capturing a visage as deceitful as the flesh. The paintings differed from how vampires actually looked. Photographs, once they entered their lives, held an even stronger allure to them. Made by a lifeless contraption, a machine rather than an organism, they captured a vampire’s true likeness. Silvio had many photographs of him and Emerick. Or only Emerick. He enjoyed commissioning those, for he liked to watch Emerick struggle to remain seated in one place, silent and still. Silvio liked to look through the eyes of the painter or the photographer, seeing his beloved as they captured the beauty of the dead and immortalised it upon canvas and plate.
“Beautiful, is it not?” A man’s voice startled Dulior.
She was on the landing, studying a tapestry. It depicted a medieval garden where a maiden with long flowing hair waited at the base of a tall structure. Rapunzel cast from the tower, entrapped in the web of her long hair, stumbling in it and the vines that crawled from the stones. A shadow was watching her from the trees, its eyes yellow, bleeding crimson.
Dulior turned, expecting to see her husband, but Jean-Étienne had gone astray along the way, taking the staircase down towards the kitchens and ladders. The vampire who greeted her was a man with short chestnut hair and sad grey eyes. He looked at her with such naked fascination that she almost mistook him for a human.
“My apologies, Madame. I did not mean to startle you.” He bowed his head, his chin bobbing down too fast. He kept one hand bent and hidden behind his back, like a servant. His clothing was simple, befitting someone with no plans or errands to run. “I was not made aware of your visit. The butler told me you were here.”
“And you are?” Dulior scrutinised him. How unremarkable he looked.
“Elay Hébert, Madame, your servant.” And he bowed again, this time bending his body in half, his hair falling over his face.
Dulior had no need for servants, let alone another man. She was about to dismiss him when Jean-Étienne emerged, turning around the corner.
“What a gaudy house,” the Count remarked, tilting his head as far back as he could to see the ceiling and all its monstrosities. He reached out and pushed at a vase, toppling it over, scattering the velvet petals of the flowers arranged in it.
The house was an aberrant altar, with its gilded mirrors and frames, golden halos and the faces of statues melting in tears and ecstasy. The master bedroom was the worst of all: it reeked of carnality and excess. What a glutton Silvio had become without Dulior by his side to keep him in check, to feed him morsels of obedience and restraint. Thatfille de joiehad always ruined her husband.
“I would advise against entering that room, Madame,” Elay said but he did not stop her from striding through the door.
Something crunched under her shoe. Dulior looked down at shards of glass. On the wall behind the massive bed, a multitude of mirrors replicated her movements. One of them, the one at thecentre, was broken. Fragments of it had spilled over the bed and the floor, as though something had pulled itself out of the glass and dragged itself across the room. The sight of the wreckage was a telltale sign that Emerick had not been here either.
Nor is he planning on coming back.
When the rumours of Emerick’s disappearance had first reached her, Dulior had dismissed them. She had long since grown tired of hearing about theMarquisand theComte, of their travels and acquisitions over the centuries. Raffaelle, for his part, had been nothing but gleefully accommodating, keeping her informed of the Regent’s visits to the Coven, some even well before Silvio’s arrival, never failing to invite her to come and stay in Berlin as well. Since Ingenuar’s death, Dulior had made a point to ignore Raffaelle’s reports, no longer inclined to indulge in his games.
The next time she received an invitation from the Coven, Dulior frowned at the few lines it contained: It appears we have misplaced our Marquis. Would his mother care to join the search and gain favour in Court?
If Emerick was truly gone, and with Silvio in Berlin, then there would be no one to stop her from going to Béziers. And even if that man was there by all by himself, he would still let Dulior in the tower only for the sake of spiting her, so that she may witness with her own eyes how the two men fared without her. Yet it was curiosity that gnawed at her, driving her forward until she found herself standing once more before Silvio’s gate, waiting for the doors to finally open for her.
Back in the bedroom, Dulior scoffed and turned to leave, nauseated by the display and the heavy lingering smell of Silvio’s perfume and candle wax, when her eyes landed on the wall opposite the bed. Atop the many shelves hung two swords, keeping watch. She recognised them instantly.
“What fickle tokens,” she whispered, as though bringing Emerick through the veil had not been enough of a horrid reminder of their mortality…of Dulior’s error of judgment.
“Madam??” Elay called out to her from the doorway. “You are welcome to stay with your husband. I will arrange a room to your liking.”
There is nothing in this house to my liking.The one she wanted was in Berlin, destroying the facades and the gardens in service of his vision, in a desperate attempt to replicate this place.
“We are leaving. Ready the car,” she ordered, whether to Elay or Jean-Étienne—it did not matter, both could do no better than grovel at her feet, and still be found wanting.
When they arrived back in Berlin, Silvio had gathered an interim council, the topic of discussion a continuation of her displeasure and annoyance. He wanted Emerick summoned from Béziers.
“He is not there,” Dulior said, breaking the news to him, having invited herself to the meeting. The Coven Master had been too preoccupied to notice her arrival and banish her. When Silvio glared at her, she added, “I am just coming from the tower. He is not there.”
“You were at my house?” Silvio spat the question, and she savoured the passion, however curdled, in his voice. The way he recoiled, the very idea of her walking through the halls of Béziers nauseated him. The light in his eyes had died. Once, their green had welcomed and enchanted her; now it shimmered with poisonous loathing.
“He never went to France,” Jean-Étienne added, making it even worse.
“What?”
“Your servants do not know where he is or where he might have gone.”
“You,” Silvio snarled, his face a mask threatening to crumble. A face Dulior had seen once, in a field of corpses, the wretchedness and terror making him vapid. That was how she preferred him, grumbling and desperate. “You, who are so eager to trespass upon my domain, go and find him. Find and bring me my consort!”
“No,” Dulior said calmly. She took Jean-Étienne by the hand and guided him away, the long skirts of her dress gliding across the marble floor. She had chosen to wear an evening dress of dark green velvet, the shade of myrtle, which accentuated the curves of her body, and a pair of high heels so that she may look down undisturbed on the Coven Master and his court of disappointments. “You want him, you find him. And that tower,” she breathed the words, frowning at the taste of the memory. “That mausoleum you built for him—you need not worry. I will not set foot in it again. I detested his face in the flesh; I detest it even more now, seeing it in every monument you erected and every portrait you commissioned. I would rather crawl through the catacombs of Paris than be assaulted by the sight of your hysteria.”
Ungrateful, she scolded, her fingers digging into the Count’s sleeve.Ungrateful and sick, like that thing you made. And I, an accomplice to its conception.She wanted to bite her tongue and spit crimson at his feet.
