Once I’d shoved her through the curtain as gently as I could, I ventured out farther for two more girls, tugging them behind me as if we were dancing. The daimons of Paradis were doing their job well, keeping their partners’ faces turned away from the curtains. Somehow, the men missed the fierce cast of their smiles; the girls were working their seduction as an act of revenge, and it was as natural as a lioness hunting the man who had taken her cubs.
I was going back for my fourth girl when a scuffle began, and one of the men shouted, “Dammit, girl. Let go of me!”
The sound of his open hand striking her cheek didn’t even stop the musicians. But the sound of her boot cracking his chin did.
“You dare to strike your master?”
In answer, she kicked him again. The room went so quiet that I heard the clatter of his tooth hitting the floor. Vale rushed past me, carrying two girls under his arms like sacks of flour. I fetched the last drooping daimon victim through the curtain as the girls stepped away from their partners and drew their weapons.
“Magician! What is the meaning of this?” a familiar voice called, and I followed the duke’s gaze to a balcony up above, where an acid-yellow daimon stood in a red-and-white-striped suit, his taloned hands curled around the balustrade. Without a word, Monsieur Charmant turned and fled.
“It means your little club’s over, monsieur le duc,” the nearest girl spat. The duke grabbed her hair and yanked it, and she shoved a letter opener deep into his stomach. With that thrust, the fight was on.
The daimon girls had originally taken on the matching skin tones of the dancing partners they’d replaced. But as they whipped out their weapons and howled their war cries, they burst into vibrant, angry hues of red and black and fierce tiger stripes. Vale rushed past me and waded into the fray, the ornate silver Wolverine claw sweeping before him and striking home in the back of a double-wide tuxedo. Of course, he was here, my first interviewer, the gatekeeper. Monsieur Philippe. The blades slipped into the black fabric, right under his ribs where the kidneys nestled in fat, smooth as butter. Philippe fell to his knees hard enough to make the floorboards creak. I should have been fighting, should have taken up a weapon, but I couldn’t stop watching Vale. His fragility terrified me, but the man was damned beautiful in a fight.
Vale ripped out the claw and wiped the blood spatter from his cheek before kicking Philippe over. The overfed gentleman sobbed on the floor, flailing like a turtle on its back.
“You’re, what, Philippe—the curator? You choose the girls?”
“I meant no harm. I didn’t know—”
“You were dancing with Limone. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
Philippe covered his eyes with sweaty fists. “Please, monsieur. I beg you. Whatever you wish is yours.”
“There’s only one thing you have that I want.”
“Women? Money? Riches?”
Vale snorted, his humor gone completely. “Revenge.”
I turned away before I saw the final slash of the claw, but I couldn’t plug my ears against Monsieur Philippe’s gurgles and the wet sound of gizzards hitting the wood. Then I smelled the blood and remembered my best weapon. Vale’s hand brushed over my cheek as he went to help Lexie, who was struggling with two men. His knuckles had painted me with a slash of red, and I licked it greedily from my lips.
“They owe you blood, bébé,” he said, voice husky. “Take your due.”
I nodded and turned away from what was left of Philippe. He was cooling quickly, so I scented the air for something strong that needed to be destroyed. My hands were already curled into claws before I found my prey, and I was across the dance floor, leaping over bodies and slipping in puddles of blood, aiming for his throat.
The gentleman was familiar to me, one of dozens of nameless faces from the boxes of Paradis. His fine, smooth hands were wrapped around Leola’s slender neck, his thumbs boring into her windpipe as her eyes rolled back. I slashed his throat open with my claws and began drinking before he’d even let her loose. Leola shook herself and stood.
“Merci,” she mumbled, before wading in to help the next struggling girl.
Something tugged my leggings while I drank, and I spun around, hissing. It was the prince, as I’d never seen him before. Dirty, deflated, bruised, covered in blood, and sniveling in a puddle of snot, his colorful suit stained and slashed to show pasty white skin underneath.
“Demitasse, my beloved. Help me. Heal me.”
I shook him off and wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist. Licking the blood from my chin, I tossed the man in my arms halfway across the room and stared at the prince as if he were an alien. An animal. A fluffy little bunny.
It was difficult remembering how to use words and talk around my fangs. “Heal you?”
He rubbed his face on my ankle, and I kicked him away. “Your blud. Make me what you are. We will rule together. You will be my queen.”
I remembered how to laugh then. Throwing my head back in a wild half-cackle, half-howl, I kneeled over him, noting the pulls in the silk of his silly jacket. A few sad worms of hair scraggled over the bald pate he’d hidden under his turban.
Putting on a kind smile, I leaned over him until my lips brushed his ear. “No one owns me,” I whispered. “No one ever will.”
I bit down too hard, and it was over quickly. His blood tasted of far-off spices and too much wine. And I smelled something else, something familiar. Abandoning his pulsing jugular, I put my nose to his collar, his lapel, his lips.
He smelled of Cherie.
I jerked away before he was completely dead and surveyed the scene. Most of the men were down, and the girls were working in pairs now to dispatch the rest, calling Vale and his claw over to finish off the gents who struggled. There was no sympathy in my heart for these men, not from the predator or from the girl. It was bad enough that they came to the cabarets and bought their pleasures with oranges and francs and empty promises. It was more damning that they forced the girls to give up their tails and their magic, an intrinsic part of their lives that they would never see again. Knowing that the dead-eyed girls had been brought to this underground lair of debauchery and used—the men deserved even worse than what they’d gotten.
But there was more I needed to know, and so I hunted out the one who was still the most alive and undamaged. Unsurprisingly, it was Auguste, the slippery bastard. Three girls had him cornered, but he still had his tail, and it curved over his head like a scorpion’s stinger, pointing at each girl in turn as she approached.
“Save him for me,” I growled.
Auguste’s head snapped up, and he spit on the ground at my feet, his normally pleasant face twisted into a sneer and his once-indigo skin as yellow as Charmant’s. “You should have done as you were told, bloodsucker. This is on your head.”
His tail pointed at me, his hands balled in fists at his sides. My nose quivered, but my eyes didn’t budge from his. I had to keep him talking. “Yeah, I’m pretty proud of that. So how much did they pay you to torture your friends?”
He leered. “They paid me in pain, not coppers. Your petite amie Cherie can really scream.”
My talons bit into my palms, my fangs grinding for a taste of his throat. Daimons weren’t satisfying, and no Bludman in her right mind would crave one’s blood; it was the same way I felt about Brussels sprouts back home. But as Criminy had always told me but never encouraged me to discover for myself, the enemy’s blood was always the sweetest, and you didn’t notice the taste so much in the heat of battle. All I had to do was find a way past that tail.
Just before I completely lost it, Vale appeared behind Auguste, bloodstained claw in hand, and said, “I wonder how loud you can scream.”
With one swift slice, Auguste’s tail fell to the ground. Seeing his only weapon disabled, I went for his throat. The girls gasped as I ripped into the yellow flesh, and after a few rage-fueled sips, I sat back on my haunches and spit on the ground.
“Ugh. That taste is just . . . wrong.”
Vale held my shoulders and helped pull me back up to standing. “Bad news, bébé. He was the last one.”
I looked around the blood-spattered ballroom, inhaled deeply. He was right. They were all dead. I wiped the dregs of Auguste off my lips. “Merde.”
“But where is Cherie? Can you smell her?”
I shook my head and looked to Bea.
Mel was on the verge of tears, her arm wrapped around Bea’s shoulder. Bea was back to her usual blue, covered in gore and sporting a line of four Malediction Club pins on her jacket like hunting trophies. At least it was less grisly than ears or scalps on a string.
With a general’s surety, Bea pointed to a nondescript corner. Since the walls of the ballroom were draped in indigo velvet curtains and tapestries to ward off the cold that seeped through the stones, I had imagined it was simply one large room. But as she crossed the boards and twitched the curtain aside, I saw another door. The last one had been ceremonial, carved, ancient, morbidly beautiful. This one looked as if it had been designed by a master artificer. It was thick, riveted metal, with heavy reinforcements and a complicated lock that I was willing to bet even Vale couldn’t pick.
“Can we break it down?” Mel asked, and Bea shook her head and pointed back to the ballroom, signing something. “She says the door is new and heavier than the one she escaped from. But one of the men will have a key.”
Without a word, we spread out, each girl kneeling beside a dead gentleman to rifle through his pockets. It was eerily similar to what I’d been doing every night in the copper elephant. I checked Auguste, but he carried nothing that resembled a key. Probably just a lackey, even after all this time. I did find a fang knotted into a handkerchief, which I retied and tucked into my own pocket. Chirurgeons in Sang could do amazing things, but I didn’t know much about reconstructive dentistry.
Several girls came up with keys, which was good, since it took two of them to open the damn thing. In the end, it was Bea and Mel who turned the keys and swung the door open on a scene more sickening than I had imagined. It was like Frankenstein’s laboratory crossed with the worst kind of animal shelter crossed with an art museum. Daimon girls were locked in cages, manacled to the walls, or strapped to beds like mental patients, the walls around them filled to the ceiling with portraits in heavy gold frames. The girls in the paintings all shared the unique, lively beauty of Lenoir’s masterpieces, and the girls curled in the cages and struggling against their bonds showed signs of being drained and nearly as dead-eyed as the girls we’d freed. Mel, Bea, and all the other daimon girls cried out and hurried to help their compatriots.
