She peered into the mirror. Actually, her face wasn’t so bad. A little makeup here, a little there, a bit of lip gloss, and she would be a girl again. She would be —

She stopped. Like the fall of evening or a black cloak dropping over her, a shroud, a sorrow so great fell upon her heart that it inspired not the usual gnashing anger, but a deep questioning of her own value as a creature, and indeed of the worth of the Keepers as a species upon the earth.

Look around you, she thought, at the complex life that had been unfolding in this atelier, at the wonders in the looms, their colors glowing in the faint light that came in from the street. Look at the book beside the bed, thumbed, earmarked, a book of poems with which Noelle Halff had put herself to sleep at night. Les Fleurs du Mal—“The Flowers of Evil.” Miriam knew the poems, appreciated them as well.

The girl might not have any pills in her cabinet, but she kept lip gloss and other cosmetics of the very highest quality. Miriam started to make up her face, to return to it an approximation of the endless youth that lay beneath her wounds.

She felt the weight of sleep urging at her brain, at her exhausted muscles, increasing the weight of her bones. She tossed her head, her eyes gleaming with a kind of fury. Even without drugs, she would not sleep. She could not, must not.

For she knew without question, if she lay down in this atelier—if she slept—they would certainly catch her.

NINE: Lady of the Knife

NINE

Lady of the Knife

The lower condyles of human femurs lined the walls, joint-end out. Above them were stacked skulls. Paul had known about the Denfert-Rochereau ossuary, but only vaguely, as the sort of grotesque that tourists of a certain kind—fans of horror movies, say—might visit. For ten francs you could spend as much time as you wanted to with the bones of seven million Parisians.

“What’s that smell?” Becky asked.

“Maybe there’s a fresh corpse.”

“Thank you, Charles.”

“No bodies were ever buried here. Just skeletons,” Colonel Bocage said.

Still, there was a certain smell, and smells were important to this work. Paul inhaled carefully. They all knew the fetors of the vampire—the sour, dry odor of their unwashed skin and the appalling stink of their latrines. Their waste was dead human plasma.