greed. Then I took responsibility for what happened in New Orleans, resigned my seat on the Congregation, and swore that you would make no more children until you were older and wiser.”
“You told me I was a failure—a disgrace to the family.” Marcus was hoarse with suppressed emotion.
“I had to make you stop. I didn’t know what else to do.” Matthew confessed his sins without asking for forgiveness.
“Who else knows your secret, Matthew?” Sarah asked.
“Verin, Baldwin, Stasia, and Freyja. Fernando and Gallowglass. Miriam. Marthe. Alain.” Matthew extended his fingers one by one as the names tumbled from his mouth. “So did Hugh, Godfrey, Hancock, Louisa, and Louis.”
Marcus looked at his father bitterly. “I want to know everything. From the beginning.”
“Matthew cannot tell you the beginning of this tale,” Ysabeau said softly. “Only I can.”
“No, Maman,” Matthew said, shaking his head. “That’s not necessary.”
“Of course it is,” Ysabeau said. “I brought the disease into the family. I am a carrier, like Marcus.”
“You?” Sarah looked stunned.
“The disease was in my sire. He believed it was a great blessing for a lamia to carry his blood, for it made you truly terrifying and nearly impossible to kill.” The contempt and loathing with which Ysabeau said the word “sire” made me understand why Matthew disliked the term.
“There was constant warfare between vampires then, and any possible advantage was seized. But I was a disappointment,” Ysabeau continued. “My maker’s blood did not work in me as he had hoped, though the blood rage was strong in his other children. As a punishment—”
Ysabeau stopped and drew a shaky breath.
“As a punishment,” she repeated slowly, “I was locked in a cage to provide my brothers and sisters with a source of entertainment, as well as a creature on whom they could practice killing. My sire did not expect me to survive.”
Ysabeau touched her fingers to her lips, unable for a moment to go on.
“I lived for a very long time in that tiny, barred prison—filthy, starving, wounded inside and out, unable to die though I longed for it. But the more I fought and the longer I survived, the more interesting I became. My sire—my father—took me against my will, as did my brothers. Everything that was done to me stemmed from a morbid curiosity to see what might finally tame me. But I was fast—and smart.
My sire began to think I might be useful to him after all.”
“That’s not the story Philippe told,” Marcus said numbly. “Grandfather said he rescued you from a fortress—that your maker had kidnapped you and made you a vampire against your will because you were so beautiful he couldn’t bear to let anyone else have you. Philippe said your sire made you to serve as his wife.”
“All of that was the truth—just not the whole truth.” Ysabeau met Marcus’s eyes squarely.
“Philippe did find me in a fortress and rescued me from that terrible place. But I was no beauty then, no matter what romantic stories your grandfather told later. I’d shorn my head with a broken shell that a bird had dropped on the window ledge, so that they couldn’t use my hair to hold me down. I still have the scars, though they are hidden now. One of my legs was broken. An arm, too, I think,” Ysabeau said vaguely. “Marthe will remember.”
No wonder Ysabeau and Marthe had treated me so tenderly after La Pierre. One had been tortured, and the other had put her back together again after the ordeal. But Ysabeau’s tale was not yet finished.
“When Philippe and his soldiers came, they were the answer to my prayers,” Ysabeau said. “They killed my sire straightaway. Philippe’s men demanded all of my sire’s children be put to death so that the evil poison in our blood would not spread. One morning they came and took my brothers and sisters away. Philippe kept me behind. He would not let them touch me. Your grandfather lied and said that I had not been infected with my maker’s disease—that someone else had made me and I had killed only to survive. There was no one left to dispute it.”
Ysabeau looked at her grandson. “It is why Philippe forgave Matthew for not killing you, Marcus, though he had ordered him to do so. Philippe knew what it was to love someone too much to see him perish unjustly.”
But Ysabeau’s words did not lift the shadows from Marcus’s eyes. “We kept my secret—Philippe and Marthe and I—for centuries. I made many children before we