“No. We owe it to the human race to destroy them all.”
“You loved Adele too, once. I can’t believe you would wish this future on her. It is an act of violation. If you don’t care about your own good, then what about that girl? How will she live with herself knowing what she has done?”
Mamoru turned his head and met Sanah’s gaze with blank eyes. “She won’t have to live with it. She will not survive.”
Sanah tightened her grip on his hand. “What? You’re going to kill her?”
“Not I. The energies of the Event will destroy her. If she were conscious, she might survive. But she surrendered that right when she surrendered her humanity.”
The Persian woman stepped back and pounded her fist on the table, rattling the dishes, and shouted, “It’s you who has surrendered your humanity! You are like that girl’s father. How can you even conceive of this?”
Mamoru turned back to the maps and began to run his fingers along the lines.
Sanah screamed, “Answer me!”
The samurai tore the North African map out of the book and folded it. “Sir Godfrey, I’ll trouble you for antiseptic and bandages before I go. I injured my ankle in the fall from the airship.”
The old gentleman looked from Mamoru to Sanah with alarm, slowly moving to the door. With a nervous nod, he darted out.
Sanah seized the samurai by the sleeve. “You must listen to me.”
Mamoru replied quietly, “I will find the crystals elsewhere. Don’t worry yourself over it.”
“Mamoru.” She pulled him around to face her. “Taking Adele’s life won’t bring back your wife and daughter.”
He slipped the map page into his shirt.
Sanah stared at him. There was no life behind his eyes, no reason at all. She released him. He moved like a terrible, unhurried automaton. Every motion drove the story toward an irrevocable conclusion, a heavy curtain dropping over the last act of a play.
The door opened and Sir Godfrey returned carrying a glass bottle and several rolls of gauze. “Shall I attend your wound?”
“No.” Mamoru took the medical supplies and went to the sarcophagus. “I will contact you when I need you.”
Sanah began, “Mamoru, I beg you—”
He triggered the secret door and vanished into the shadowy passageway, pulling the lid closed behind him. Sanah sank into a chair with a long ragged exhalation.
The old surgeon started to touch her shoulder, then drew back his hand. “Sanah, we’ve trusted Mamoru for years. We can’t change horses now, so to speak. It will all be fine. He has given his life to this. We all have. There’s nothing to be gained by doubting it all now. Is there?”
Sanah closed her eyes, revealing the tattooed eyes on her lids. She clasped her hands together, seeking a moment of purity to cut through the confusion. She needed a sign, guidance, peace. She wished for a message of comfort and support from her beloved sister, Pareesa.
She opened her eyes suddenly. She needed to talk to the empress.
PARIS STRADDLED THE moon-flecked Seine River. The countryside, once threatened by urban expansion, was once again cloaked in gloom, and only the center of the old town was spotted with the lights of its human inhabitants.
Floating shapes rose above the city, while others clutched onto miles of broken chimney pots and once-magnificent colonnaded palaces. Flocks of vampires settled to the wide boulevards in their own sinister version of an evening promenade. People hurried about their business through narrow lanes while shuffling herds of humans also wandered in the wild green spaces.
Gareth had lived in Paris centuries before, but many of the old venous streets and crowded warrens he knew were gone, replaced by long straight avenues and uniform buildings. Lucky the city hadn’t been that way in his day because old Paris was a fertile hunting ground of shadows and corners. So much of this new city had been altered as an open display of human ego just a few decades before the Great Killing.
Now humans were no longer so proud.
No one confronted Gareth as he drifted toward the shambling old pile of the Tuileries Palace north of the river. Only when he reached the vast palace, and lit on the front façade, did several figures separate from the masonry and advance on him. Before they could speak, he said, “I am Prince Gareth of Scotland. I’m here to see King Lothaire.”
One of the vampires, an older fellow, smiled broadly. “Gareth! I know you. We fought together in Brittany.”
Gareth studied the creased face, and managed to recall it younger and covered in blood, but always smiling. “I remember. Fanon?”
The vampire laughed with joy at being remembered by a prince of the British clan. “That’s right, sir! I haven’t seen you in a long time. What’s it been, a decade?”