"Anyone who is food," he said.
I gave him a look.
He spoke quickly to the look in my eyes. "You will be seated at table, ma petite, just as Angelito will sit at table."
"What about Jason?"
"Pomme de sangs will eat from the floor."
"So Nathaniel, too." I said.
He gave a small nod and let me see how worried he was about how I'd take all this.
"If you were this worried about how I'd react, why didn't you warn me ahead of time?"
"In truth, there has been so much happening that I forgot. This was once very normal for me, ma petite, and Belle holds with the old ways. There are older still than she, who would not even allow the food to sit on the floor." He shook his head, hard enough that his hair touched my face, smelling of his cologne and that indefinable something that was simply his scent. "There are banquets, ma petite, that you would not wish to see, or even know of. They are indeed horrible."
"Did you think they were horrible while you were participating in them?"
"Some, oui." His eyes filled with that wistful look, that lost innocence, centuries of pain. It didn't happen often, but sometimes in his eyes I could glimpse what he'd lost.
"I won't argue if you tell me there's worse out there than this arrangement. I'll just believe you."
He gave me a look of disbelief. "No arguing?"
I shook my head and leaned back into his chest, held his arms around me like a coat. "Not tonight."
"I should leave this miracle alone, but I cannot. You have taught me bad habits, ma petite. I think I must ask, once more, what is wrong?"
"I told you, it's the dark."
"You have never been afraid of the dark before."
"I'd never met the Mother of All Darkness before." I said it softly, but her name seemed to echo into the darkness, as if the darkness itself were waiting for the words, as if the words could conjure her to us. I knew it wasn't true. All right, I was pretty sure it wasn't true, but it made me shiver just the same.
Jean-Claude tightened his grip around me, pulling me tight in against his body. "Ma petite, I do not understand."
"How could you?" came a voice behind us.
Jean-Claude turned me in his arms as he moved to face the voice, making it a dance-like movement, ending with my left hand in his right. His coat and my skirt swirled out and settled in a cloth whisper around us. Our outfits were designed to move and flow like some goth version of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Asher walked quickly to us, and even the way he moved was wrong. His posture was still perfect, but there was a hunching to it, like a dog that expects to be hit. He hurried in those white boots, hurried, and though still beautiful, there was little grace to his movement. There was too much fear in him to allow for grace.
Jean-Claude held out his hand, and Asher took it. We stood there, the three of us holding hands like children. It should have been absurd, considering the vampire we faced, but it wasn't Valentina that we wanted to huddle together against. I think for all three of us, it was the night in general. It was everything in the next room, and what it represented.
Valentina stood in front of the drapes. She looked like a tiny doll dressed all in white and gold so that she, like Asher, would match the table settings. Everyone in Musette's party matched the table, which meant that that, too, had been something they negotiated. Somehow clothes wouldn't have been high on my list, but then that was me.
Valentina's outfit was a miniature seventeenth-century dress with the skirt flared out to either side so that she was shaped like an oval. The skirt was very full and gave glimpses as she walked of tiny gold slippers and numerous petticoats. She even had a white wig that hid her brunette curls from view. The wig looked too heavy for that slender white throat, but she walked as if the jewels and feathers and powdered hair weighed nothing. She had absolutely perfect posture, but I knew that was from the corset that was under the dress. Those dresses don't fit right without the proper undergarments.
There had been no need for powder to make her skin white, rouge and red lipstick had been enough. Oh, and a black beauty mark in the shape of a tiny heart near that rosebud mouth. She should have looked ridiculous, but she didn't. She was like a sinister doll. When she flipped open her gold and lace fan with a sharp snap, I jumped.
She laughed, and only the laughter was childlike, a hint of how she might have sounded long ago.
"She has stood on the brink of the abyss and stared into it, and the abyss has looked back, has it not?"
I had to swallow hard to be able to answer, because my pulse was pounding, and I was suddenly shivering. "You talk like you know."
"I do." She walked towards us, gliding and graceful. She wore the body of a child, but she didn't move like one. I guess centuries of practice can teach anyone to glide.
She stopped farther back than an adult-sized person would, so she didn't have to strain to look up at me. I'd noticed she did that while everyone was mingling. "Once I was truly the child this body pretends to be. I wandered away from everyone, exploring as children do." She looked up at me with enormous brown eyes. "I found a door that was not locked. A room with many windows..."
"And none of them looked outside," I finished for her.
She blinked up at me. "Exactement. What did the windows look out upon?"
"A room," I said, "a huge room." I looked up at the cavernous roof. "Like this one, but bigger, and the windowed room sits above it all."
"You have not been in our inner sanctum, of that I am sure, but you speak as if you stood where I stood."
"Not physically, but I have stood there," I said.
We looked at each other, and it was a look of shared knowledge, shared terror, shared fear.
"How close did you get to the bed?" she asked.
"Closer than I wanted to," I whispered.
"I touched the black sheets, because I thought she was only sleeping."
"She is sleeping," I said.
Valentina shook her head, solemnly. "Non, to say she sleeps is to say any vampire sleeps. It is not sleep."
"She's not dead, not dead the way the rest of you are when you sleep."
"True, but she is not asleep either."
I shrugged. "Whatever you call it, she's not awake."
"And for that we are truly grateful, are we not?" She spoke softly enough that I leaned in towards her to hear the words.
"Yes," I whispered back, "we are."
She reached up and touched my neck, and I flinched, not from the touch, but from the tension of our words. She didn't laugh this time. "Only you and I have been touched by that dark."
"Belle Morte, too," I said.
Valentina looked a question at me.
"Belle has called me into some kind of dream when the Darkness rose around us."
"Our mistress has not informed us of this," Valentina said.
"It only happened today, early today," I said.
"Hmm," Valentina said, folding her fan tight, running it through her tiny hands, each tiny nail done in gold. "Musette should know of this." She gazed up at me, and there was so much more of her than there should have been. She would always appear to be eight, a petite eight, but her eyes held an adult's awareness, and more.
"There are some unexpected guests that are about to make their appearance. I cannot spoil the surprise, for that would anger Musette, and through her, Belle, but I think that you and I will be equally unhappy with them. I think that you and I more than any will see it for the disaster it is."
"I don't understand," I said.
"Jean-Claude will explain their presence to you, when they appear, but only you and I will truly grasp why the mere fact that they are here is bad, very bad."