Marguerite led her to a sidewalk café not far from the restaurant where she and Julian had dined only days before. They found an empty table and claimed it. Marguerite sat down heavily in one of the chairs and dropped her shopping bags by her feet.
“
Zut
! Let us sit for a while to catch our breath. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been up since before the sun went down.” She waved to a passing waiter, catching him before he disappeared into the building. “
Monsieur, deux cafés, s’il vous plait.”
The man nodded, and Marguerite looked back around at Eleni. “Coffee is good?”
“Yes, thank you.”
They sat a moment, waiting. Marguerite excused herself when her cell phone rang. While she took the call, Eleni found herself drawn to someone across the square dressed as the grim reaper, complete with a hooded black robe and an obviously plastic sickle, the tip painted red to appear bloodstained. The hooded figure teased a group of school aged girls who shrieked like a flock of birds when he levered the sickle at them as they passed by on the street.
Amused, Eleni was still smiling to herself when the waiter appeared with the coffee, the sound of heavy stoneware cups rattling against matching saucers tugging her from her reverie.
Marguerite uttered a polite good-bye into the phone, then set it down on the table so she could thank the waiter and pay. Her handbag in her lap, she dug for change, shuffling through the contents of her purse. Eleni unzipped her wristlet, willing to pay, but Marguerite refused to let her. In the end, the vampiress paid for the coffee and offered the waiter a tip of a few Euros because he’d had stood by with practiced patience, and on such a busy night.
Once he was gone, Eleni tore open a thumb-cup of liquid creamer and poured it into her cup while Marguerite watched. The vampiress sipped her coffee, and talked about idle things, things in passing, how much the festival had grown over the years. Then she fixed Eleni with a quiet look from over her coffee cup, her red lips hovering just near the chalk white rim.
“So, do you know where Gisele is?” she asked gently. “Are you going to need a ride home?”
Relief poured through her like blessed sunshine. “Could you do that?” Eleni asked. “Drive me home, I mean?”
Marguerite’s brows lifted. “Certainly. I wouldn’t dream of leaving you stranded.”
Eleni’s shoulders sagged, and she breathed deeply. “Thank you. Really. I know Gisele will have to go back to the car eventually.” She glanced back toward the town square, wary. “But I can’t remember where we parked. It was on a little side street, and there was a lot of traffic.”
“No worries.” Marguerite shook her head. “Though I will say, you should watch yourself with Gisele in the future. She is rarely trustworthy.”
“I suppose you would know,” Eleni said wistfully. “Julian said she lived with you for a while.”
“That much is true. I took her in for several years. She was very young, so I hired a local woman from the village to be a nurse to her. She grew up in my house, although admittedly, there were times it wasn’t easy to live with her. She was strong willed as girl, so angry at the world.” Marguerite shook her head. “But I am sure you likely know that or you wouldn’t be sitting here with me.”
Eleni looked down into her coffee to escape those knowing eyes.
They finished their coffee, then left the little café, heading toward a side street around the corner from the central square. It wasn’t far from the café or the restaurant where Eleni had dined with Julian, but it was perceptibly darker. Cars lined the streets, which were far quieter and less traveled than the ones at the opposite side of the square.
Even so, there were revelers—late arrivals parked out here, people that grouped together, traveling in packs from their cars to the festivities in the square.
“What you must understand about Gisele,” Marguerite told her confidentially, “is that she lived with me as a sort of trainee. I was expected to show her how to be a proper lady, and yet, she was told she would be a servant. I tried to tell Julian that you can have it both ways. There were places we could send her so that she would be brought up properly, but he was hesitant to send her. He felt sorry for her, I think. She had no family, no one but us to care for her.” They reached Marguerite’s car, and the vampiress turned and faced her on the sidewalk.
“Julian paid for Gisele’s boarding school, and when she was sixteen, he took her into his household as a servant. We both knew she wasn’t prepared, but she was a smart girl, and Julian figured she would catch on. I feared he would cross the line and make her some…bastard lover. But he surprised me. I realized at Christmas the following year, his feelings were more like a father to a daughter—not romantic. Still, I could see the admiration in her eyes, and I warned him she was at an impressionable age, and he would only complicate things for himself and her, if he didn’t place her under the care of the council.” She shook her head. “He feared the council would dismiss her, and likely they would have…for just reasons.”
“What did he do?” Eleni asked quietly.
“He sent Gisele to live with me, part time, and without consulting him, I had a life coach come in from Paris, a vampiress with much experience. It was not a success. I knew Julian wanted her to have a “motherly” influence in her life, you see. But Gisele turned against me completely. She has a vicious side once she feels you have wronged her. Mark my word on that. Julian has a soft spot for her, one that I don’t entirely understand, but an important thing to know.”
She turned with her keys in hand and unlocked the passenger side door, which automatically unlocked all the other doors in the car.
An undercurrent of tension hung in the air. Eleni noticed Marguerite’s shrewd tone and ventured carefully, “Something happened between you and her?”
“That depends on who you ask,” Marguerite said as she walked around the car to the driver’s side door.
“As I was saying, the trouble…it depends on who you ask. But I will tell you Gisele is unquestionably ambitious. It is only my opinion, of course, but I believe Julian should have severed the bloodline when her mother left the servitude. Gisele never should have been brought into our homes. It takes years, generations, to build loyalty and trust. We place our lives in the hands our servants, when you think about it. Julian, he…how do you say?” Her eyes clouded thoughtfully, then cleared. “With Gisele, he created a monster. Gisele covets immortality too much, and doesn’t have the discipline of a proper servant.”
“You think she’s dangerous?”
“That depends on what you consider to be dangerous,” Marguerite said without guile. “Not long after Gisele came of age, she presented herself to me as a lover. She said she would do anything I desired of her. But, in return, she wanted me to make her a vampire. That was when I packed her clothes, and sent her to Julian.” Her eyes glittered dangerously, her lips thinned in anger. “Honestly, I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to seduce him. But who am I to criticize, yes? After all, Gisele is not a demon of my making. In the end, she is Julian’s problem. All I have ever tried to do is keep my cousin from being lost to loneliness and despair.”
Marguerite climbed into the car. For a moment, Eleni stared after her, dumbfounded by this new and surprising information. It explained so many things—Gisele’s anger when she was asked to serve the household, and her curious dislike of Marguerite. Also, it at least partially explained her argument with Claudette.
Of course, Julian would be furious if he ever found out what Marguerite had told her. He was a private man, and in some ways, what she’d been told changed the entire dynamic of the household. Eleni knew she could no longer look at Gisele as merely an idle threat.
While it disturbed her that Gisele was so driven to seek immortality, it wasn’t necessarily a problem she hadn’t faced before. Many Acolytes thought the way Gisele did. The only difference was that the uninitiated, foolish women like Gisele had no idea how rare it was to be chosen for such a gift. Most Acolytes never entered a blood bond with their Biter. Overall, maybe one percent was spared a mortal’s death—like her sister Anya. Eleni didn’t anticipate being so lucky. And after her disastrous relationship with Rubio, she had finally come to terms with that.
Marguerite started the engine, and as Eleni climbed into the car, an odd sense of dread trickled through her at the thought of going back to the chateau. The vampiress rummaged around in the center console for a moment and came away with a pair of gradient sunglasses that were a translucent, smoke gray along the lower half of the lenses for driving. She put them on and looked over at Eleni.
“
Voila
. Are we ready to go?” she asked.
Eleni sucked in a deep breath and nodded. A thousand questions churned in her mind as they pulled away from the curb. Although she wasn’t too thrilled with what she’d learned tonight, if she hadn’t allowed Julian to shove her out of the nest to attend the festival, she might have never known the truth about Gisele’s behavior and her past.
They’d gone less than two blocks when the car slowed and Marguerite swore softly, drawing Eleni’s attention to the road ahead, the view a bleary sea of gleaming red taillights. The traffic had bottlenecked along a narrow but main artery running through the village, and up ahead a police officer was waving drivers along a perpendicular street, trying to untangle the snag in traffic.
While Marguerite drummed her nail on the steering wheel in impatience, Eleni looked through the window and noticed a bistro less than ten feet away with a wrought iron balcony and chipped plaster front. In the glowing, amber-sconce ambiance of the front window, which was partly covered with sheer lace, a woman with long, curling blond hair sat with her elbow on the candle-lit table.
Gisele.
Anxiety trilled up from the core of Eleni’s stomach and lodged in her chest as the car inched along, closer to the window and Gisele. Her lips parted slightly as she watched Julian’s troubled servant having a very animated discussion with someone—a man. She couldn’t get an immediate good look at him, his back was turned to her, but she could see the reddish brown hair and a pale hand clasped around a steaming cup of coffee or tea.
At last, the car began to roll forward, and as Marguerite drove past the window, the man leaned in as if to share something in confidence with Gisele. Eleni caught a glimpse of his face and paled in shock and disbelief. A dart of alarm stabbed her straight in the heart when she realized the man was Liev Sidorov, the vampire who had come to Julian’s house to threaten her.
At that same moment, as if somehow Eleni had drawn her gaze with a thought, Gisele glanced out at the street, her eyes skimming absently over the traffic absently…until they touched on Eleni’s face. Gisele registered an instant expression of shock that made the vampire turn his head to see what had alarmed her so.
A shiver passed through Eleni as the woman’s dark brown eyes locked with hers in a remote expression of disbelief.
Intense but brief, the connection lasted until the traffic began moving again. Their eyes slid away from each other as the car passed the bistro, but the chill warning that settled in the pit of Eleni’s stomach didn’t go away even as she faced forward in time to watch Marguerite navigate them through the slow flowing traffic to freedom.
She knew in her heart the real battle with Gisele had just begun.
Chapter Fifteen
Marguerite dropped her off in front of the chateau shortly after midnight, and waited with the car running to see her go into the house before driving off. Eleni watched through the slim window by the door as Marguerite’s car turned around in the driveway and left.
Eleni locked the door, set the code for the alarm, then turned and began to strip off her pea coat. Her worry over the vampire and Gisele meeting in the square had secretly grown into anger on the on the ride home. She knew a threat when it presented itself to her, and she couldn’t think of another damn reason one of Rubio’s men would contact a member of Julian’s household unless it meant trouble for her.
She hung her coat in the closet and headed across the foyer to the stairs. If Julian wanted to see her, he could seek her out. Tired and irritable, she went up to her room, wondering what Rubio hoped to get out of it by sending people to track her down in France. Revenge?
Did he think loss of her status wasn’t enough? The threat to her bloodline? Why come after her now? She hadn’t concerned herself with him since…she couldn’t remember exactly when, but certainly not since she’d received treatment for her Biter’s Addiction. She just couldn’t understand it.
He had put her through hell—cutting her ties with him was the best thing that could ever have happened to her. Now she had this possible connection with Gisele to worry about. If her suspicions were right, the young woman was a perfect target for Rubio’s lies—angry at the world, not well versed in the rules of vampire society, and hungry for someone to make her immortal—something Rubio had no problems promising if it were for his own gain.
Of course, Gisele would have no way of knowing that a bastard like Zander Rubio promised the blood bond time and again to women, never with any intention of making them immortal. He had made the very same promise to her, and led her down a destructive path that had nearly cost her everything, including her life.
“Where is Gisele?” Julian asked from the doorway. She hadn’t realized he’d followed her upstairs.
“You’ll have to ask her,” she said stiffly as she sat on the edge of the bed to pull off her boots. “She abandoned me by the car the minute we arrived in the village.”
He stared into her eyes, studying them. “You’re serious. How did you get home?”
“Marguerite drove me. We ran into each other in the Square.”
“How convenient,” he said, and something about his tone sounded struck her as suspicious and insulting.
“Yes, it was. Very convenient, and I’m grateful for that.” Her voice simmered with quiet intensity. She wondered vaguely if he had been waiting up for her. If so, she wasn’t in the mood for his jealousy. “I would have called the chateau, and asked you to come and get me, but it occurred to me that I don’t know the phone number here. I don’t even have your cell number, Julian, but then what do I need that for when your trusty servant knows the number, right?”