and satin, ugly big-buckled shoes, with white hair piled up tall. The other batch depicted people - well, vamps and witches - in high-waisted, slender dresses that showed a lot of cleavage, delicate shoes, and natural-colored hair.
Though the participants changed through the years, all of the ones in charge of the ceremonies held knives and had fangs. Some of the vamps in the center of the witch circles and pentagrams had fangs and were clearly raving; in several paintings, they were the two teenagers I'd seen in the warehouse, the long-chained ones. The sacrificial children were dead, their throats cut, lives forfeited in the pentagram's center. In others, they were being drunk from as they died.
In the later depictions, the experiments had changed several times. One showed the long-chained ripping out the throats of the sacrifices and drinking them down. In one, the adult was, I guessed, Renee. Her husband and her two children were in the circle, savaging a human. Two younger, fangless children were being sacrificed by Renee, a silver knife held high. On the latter canvases picturing both Damours, a bearded vamp was assisting the ceremony. The brother? Wasn't he supposed to be the last of the three to find sanity? I rearranged the order of two paintings and smiled grimly. "Evangelina, you're the educated one. What time periods are we seeing?"
"I never made a study of fashion," she said dryly, "but I'd say the older batch is from the seventeen hundreds and the more recent from the early eighteen hundreds. This one" - she tapped a painting in which the participants wore modern-looking clothes -
"I'd say came from the nineteen seventies."
"That's what I figured." In it, only the children were in the circle, feeding on a witch child. Adults stood outside, at points of the pentagram. They bore striking resemblance to one another. They had to be the Damours.
"You understand this?" Rick asked. "Because I sure don't."
"Therewere no notes of the Rousseau experiments from the seventeen hundreds.
Nothing was destroyed in the fire." I turned one of the oils into the light better to study the face of the strange vamp. I wondered who he was. "These paintings were the records of experiments, shipped to the States, probably in the frames, but behind other, less important paintings. Some of the later ones were maybe painted here. But whenever they were painted, thisis the Rousseau record of the experiments to rid the clan of insanity."
"They could be transported, hidden behind other paintings, but in plain sight, and no one would ever know," Evangelina said.
There were definite differences in the styles of the paintings as well as the experiments.
In the older set, there was no pentagram in the witch circle. No crosses on the trees. In the more recent batch, all the elements I'd seen in the young-rogue burial sites were present. Except . . . "In the older ones, the circles and pentagrams are made by cutting into the earth, like with a spade. In the newer ones, the circles are made with other things. Something that looks like powder or flour in one, flowers in one. Feathers. And stones in two, one with pebbles, one with shaped stones, like bricks."
"And the sacrificial athames in the older depictions are steel. The most recent ones indicate silver," Evangelina said. "The vamps in charge change."
"And there's this bearded guy. He's in . . ." - Evangelina counted - "six of the later paintings. Look at his position. Almost as if he's in charge now. And I'm betting that necklace on his chest in all the paintings is an amulet that lets him draw power from the others."
I studied the amulet. I didn't know much about gems, but it looked like a pink diamond or a washed-out, pale ruby, about the size of my thumb from the last knuckle to the thumb tip, faceted all over. It was on a heavy gold chain, a thick casing holding the gem, the casing shaped of horns and claws. It looked barbaric, brutal, and powerful, an artifact from a distant time and place.
"That's what they intend for my babies?" Molly asked. She was standing where she could see all the paintings at once, her hands fisted so tightly her fingers were white, fear and grief and fierce anger on her face. I wanted to promise that I'd get to the children in time, that I'd save them. But the promises were for me, not for her. Molly knew what we were up against now.