The Damned - Renee Ahdieh Page 0,21
up shop. “Something you regretted.”
“An immortal life is too long to dwell in regret.”
“I welcomed Celine into our world.” Odette sighed. “Perhaps if I had not, none of this would have happened.”
“Perhaps. But it was the girl’s choice to relinquish her memories.”
“Was it?” she asked quietly. “Bastien said he would have preferred the true death.”
“He is yet a boy. A man does not hide from his fears. He faces them.”
“I wish I could make him a boy again.”
“You wish to unmake him, then.” Jae’s voice was harsh.
“Haven’t you ever wished to be unmade? To return to simpler, easier times?”
“No.” He met her gaze, the light in his dark eyes fierce. “Because then I never would have found my family. My purpose. To me, that is worth a hundred thousand cuts and every piece of my lost soul.”
Odette squeezed his hand. “See?” she said. “So sentimental.”
The suggestion of a grin ghosted across Jae’s lips. Then—arm in arm—they walked from their street corner into the comfort of the growing darkness.
JAE
Shin Jaehyuk glowered at his charge from across the room.
Correction. No longer his charge. Now his brother in blood.
Sébastien Saint Germain. The Court of the Lions’ newest vampire, barely a month young.
A pity corporal punishment was frowned upon between their siblings. Jae could think of none more deserving of it.
As if Bastien could hear Jae’s thoughts, a surly smile curved up one side of the young vampire’s face, his eyes half-lidded. Glazed with debauchery. He stroked his index finger beneath Toussaint’s chin, as the cursed serpent lashed his tail back and forth like the pendulum on a clock before settling into a coil of scales by Bastien’s feet.
Jae considered standing to deliver yet another lecture, but a tawny young woman with pointed ears and a nose turned upward at the tip—likely the offspring of a mortal and some kind of dokkaebi—frolicked past him, plump grapes falling from her slender fingers to stain the priceless carpet by her bare feet. A gaunt warlock followed in her shadow, stooping to retrieve the trampled fruit, licking his fingers with a dangerous gleam in his purple eyes.
Jae’s nostrils flared. He’d had just about his fill of these unwanted guests. True, the Saint Germain family often provided refuge for the magical folk in the city. The exiles, the half bloods, the warlocks and their hollow-eyed acolytes. Better they all gather beneath the auspices of the Fallen than seek succor with the Brotherhood.
But this unending display of depravity was beyond the pale. A single month ago, it had been nothing more than subdued nights of gaming and gambling. A few drinks passed among friends. Magical business negotiated amid hushed laughter and the occasional clink of glasses.
At present, the scene before Jae rivaled an event hosted by Dionysus himself. Discarded decanters and broken crystal littered the floor, alongside articles of rumpled clothing and the occasional apple core or orange peel. Red wine dripped from a narrow sideboard, the dark liquid staining the cool Carrara marble like dried blood. Hot air collected near the coffered mahogany ceiling, mixing with the blue-grey smoke of opium and the suspiciously sweet tinge of absinthe.
Droplets of champagne showered Jae’s shoulders as a dark-skinned young man Jae had never seen before uncorked another bottle. Half its contents sprayed around the room, staining the paneled walls and trickling from the corner of a priceless painting Nicodemus had acquired in Madrid two months ago.
Jae leaned back in the chamber’s most uncomfortable chair and continued to glare at Bastien, who lounged along the far wall on a chaise covered in navy silk, champagne dripping from his short black hair, a goblet of warmed blood and absinthe dangling from his fingertips.
A half-dressed kobold, banished from the Wyld for selling empty wishes to unsuspecting mortals, and a giggling spriggan wearing a laurel crown were sprawled on the floor beside Toussaint’s pile of coiled scales, inebriated past the point of reason. At Bastien’s back, a passel of admirers—two half sprites, a boy with the white hair of a phouka, and a girl with the telltale fox eyes of a gumiho—loitered in a semicircle around the chaise, exchanging expressions of open hunger.
Little fools. They knew what Bastien was. What a vampire could do. All guests of La Cour des Lions were required to know the truth, per Bastien’s orders. What happened to their memories afterward was not his concern. Only that they enter the space aware of the danger present. They knew what a newborn vampire was capable of doing. And still they