Stones throe, p.18
Stone's Throe, page 18
"My stepfather's surname," Kiera spat. "He married my mother, ruined though she was, and he taught me to fight, so that when they died I was able to care for myself until I worked my way under his wing. Yes," she snarled at the now immaculate Monstre, "I knew. I always knew, and all I ever wanted to do was destroy you. But then you had this!" She flung her arms wide, embracing the whole of the room. Paul-Gabriel and I both tensed subtly, watching the crown in hopes that it would fly free, but non: she kept it tightly gripped in one hand. "All of this, and once I understood, I knew I could live forever once you perfected it. I have been waiting, Father, so that on your day of greatest triumph I could take it all from you! The crown. Baker. Your lust for les divas, for the purity of their voices, is pathetic. When you traded me to the Führer's men, I knew the time was right; with their help I could be certain you would be left to die with nothing."
Her mouth curved into a cruel smile. "And then who should come back but Amelia Stone, for whom you spurned my mother. I could not have asked for more. Now you will die here together, and I will make certain that it is in flames."
With thunderous clanks the coffin door handles disengaged, and from the opening doors stepped dozens of men with the perfect, unspoiled features of my childhood angel, le Monstre aux Yeux Verts.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
"Paul-Gabriel, what have you done?" The question barely passed my lips, but his rough laugh said that he had heard me. Like me, he could not take his eyes from the copies of him. They were perfect, and yet not; those beautiful faces were not as I remembered him from my youth, charming and clever, but rather they began to distort and contort with the blackest of emotions: hatred, rage, envy, fear. All they lacked was the will to act, and not one of us thought, in those first stunned moments of their lives, to command that will. I was too awestricken, too horrified; Kiera too enamored; and le Monstre, too filled with pride.
"They were meant to be filled with Obedience," he replied nearly as softly. "They were meant to be sculpted, perfected, until I could distill all that was my own essence, and with the crown, command them all to take that essence and become me. I have spent a lifetime creating these elixirs, Amélie; did you never wonder why? I have always meant to rule, though for a time I despaired of it; the burns," he said, as if those two words were enough, and en vérité, they were: he had led as much with his beauty as his wicked wits and cruelty, and to have one of those weapons stripped away must have seemed like the end of everything to him. I had meant it to be, and I still found no regret within myself for that. He was a vile criminal, and I would loathe and love him in equal parts, perhaps forever, but I would also not hesitate to strike him down a second time.
"But then Kiera came," he murmured, "and I could not face her, not with this face. Not as a father, and so I devised another plan, and realized I could do more than rule: that I could live forever. I have spent years growing these doppelgängers, years developing armor that might protect their fragile bodies against all weaponry. I am so close on both counts: I have spoken already with Monsieur Viccini, and today I felt the pliable power of his new metal beneath my hands. Had you not come, Amélie, then Josephine might have sung me into one of these bodies and I, embraced in unassailable armor, would have sought you out."
A coldness settled in my belly, a spectre of the shock that would have been. I could almost feel it, the numbness of my body, the thickness of my hands, the slowness of my thoughts, if my angel had appeared before me again, whole, handsome, young: younger than I had ever known him in life. The ease with which he might have then dispatched me was laughable, if imagining it turned me so thoroughly to ice. "For revenge."
"For forgiveness." A kind of laughter rode his reply, and he completed it swiftly: "The armor, in this case, would be to protect me long enough to beg that forgiveness, mon Amélie."
Fire came as fast as the ice had, thawing me, heating the cold humors and finally breaking the doppelgängers' spell: I was able to look away from their many perfect faces as I growled, "Do not presume, Paul-Gabriel. Do not even dare to ask."
He looked at me, smiled, and opened his hand, his gloved hand, to show me the doppelgängers. "I dare," he said, and the charm, the sweetness, the cajoling, was gone from his voice, leaving only the merciless monster I knew him to be, "I dare everything, Amelia Stone, and I dare it most of all with you, who took everything from me."
"Not everything," said Kiera, whom I had almost forgotten, and who lifted the crown of Hatshepsut high as I looked to her again. "She left you me, Father, and now all that was yours, is mine!"
The crown fit upon her skull as if it had been made for her; it had fitted Josephine that way too, and I wondered if there was some occult spell that molded it to the skull of its wearer. This frivolous thought occupied me as I sprang forward, forgetting le Monstre in my haste to silence his daughter before she spoke. I was too late, of course; I knew even as I leapt that I ought to have made use of my pistols. Her voice was great and terrible as she cried out, "Slay them, les monstres! Slay them both!"
Where Josephine had wakened adoration through her skill as much as the crown, Kiera simply demanded power from it. Her demands were met: presence rippled from the crown, smashing through each of us as a physical force. I was thrown back, so great was the pschent's magic; les monstres, as she called them, had no chance at all. As one they became mad things, driven by her command and by the dark emotions that had wakened them. One fell upon me with inhuman speed, his teeth bared as if he would, dog-like, rip my throat out. It was only the reflexes of a lifetime spent fighting that brought my hands to his nape and jaw in time to snap his neck before he tore into me.
As quickly as that, le Monstre—the true Monstre, my angel—seemed to die at my hands, and a terrible joy filled me. There were so many more to enact vengeance upon; it was as if I had been offered an unexpected gift. Greedy to claim it, I came to my feet again.
A second monstre came at me; my intentions of laying waste to him were thwarted only by another pair of hands seizing me and flinging me halfway across the laboratory. I slammed through one of the glass-doored cabinets and slid to the floor, soaked by a medley of brightly colored liquids.
Freshness surged through me, washing away all the aches and pains of the past few days, and deep rage came with it. The latter might have been my own untempered spirit; the former was without question the power of an elixir, perhaps of Resilience. For the first time I not only understood, but appreciated, the usefulness of le Monstre's experiments, even as I disgusted myself by doing so. Each emotion was so intense, so refined and focused, I could not say if they were mine or not, but they made me feel powerful, and so I chose not to question their origins.
Two of les monstres converged upon me, each seizing an arm and a leg both, and pulling. A scream tore from my throat as Fear coursed through my veins as well, a thousand other imagined horrors adding a pain no less real as les monstres pulled at me. Left with no other limb to use, I flung my head sideways, hoping to shatter some vial that might wipe the terror from my mind. A sweet scent arose and Peacefulness washed over me; my muscles relaxed and even the agony of being pulled apart seemed remote and unimportant.
Without warning, one of the two monstres screamed, then fell forward, narrowly missing me as he collapsed. The other dropped me while I turned a lazy gaze upon the fallen monstre, no more than mildly interested to see that a knife—no, a scalpel—protruded from his spine. Above me, to my disinterest, the other monstre died as well, and in nearly the same moment a vial crashed beside my face, releasing bright blue liquid that smelt of Ambition. My lethargy passed and I surged upward, trying to escape the effects of other elixirs.
A hand thrust itself into my view: le Monstre, his fingers still gloved, his silver-headed cane in his strong hand. I seized the offering without allowing myself to think. He pulled me to my feet and for a moment we were as we had been a hundred times, a lifetime ago: face to face, nearly lip to lip, his green eyes intent on my brown. Were it not for the pig-iron masking half his face, I might have been able, in that moment, to forget, but it was not to be. It was never to be, and the faint quirk of his lips, the slightest twitch of his eye, said that he knew it too.
He released me and spun; in the blur of black cloak and speed, he withdrew a sword from the cane and flourished it against the oncoming doppelgängers. I could not help but laugh: the theatrics of it were flawless, and I had not anticipated them. I seized my knife from its thigh-sheath and settled in beside him, and then—as we moved deeper into the room to pursue a common quarry—at his back, as if we were old friends fighting familiar battles. He, with his height and his sword, struck high; I, with my litheness and speed, went low, and together we circled, back to back, cutting down all who threatened us. There was a terrible, heart-soaring glory to it; I could have fought at his side forever, and again could not tell if it was the elixir's magic working in me or a long-buried truth surfacing. I was not certain it could not be both.
Above the sounds of les monstres fighting—not just us, but each other, in their eagerness to reach us—Kiera's raging objection rose: "She is your enemy! You should have finished her, Father!"
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," le Monstre called to his infuriated daughter in a voice dangerously near to laughter. "We do not fight for each other, ma fille, but for survival. I believe you may trust that we will turn upon one another the moment these other concerns are dealt with. It would, after all," he said more softly, to me, "be a shame to allow our story to end any other way."
"Ça, c'est vrai," I muttered, "as I have already tried once to end it that way, and have no intention of being cheated again."
"I should have corrupted you, Amélie, instead of playing with you. We would have been unstoppable."
"I would rather have died." Thankfully, at that moment les monstres ceased their in-fighting and turned all their attention to us, bringing a welcome and abrupt end to the discussion. We turned again, slaughtering copies of a familiar face, until a hand grasped my ankle and pulled me backward. I fell with a shout; le Monstre drove his sword down, piercing the doppelgänger who had seized me, but we were parted, and though I came to my feet and continued the battle, I could not again reach Paul-Gabriel's side. Still, our enemies were fewer; we were individually in less danger than we had been, or so I thought.
I did not correctly perceive Kiera's path as she, too, worked her way through les monstres, pausing to whisper to each of them as she went. Too late, I saw the circle opening around le Monstre, leaving only enough doppelgängers to distract him; too late I realized that circle was closing around me. I fought wildly, but their purpose was no longer to kill, but to subdue; as I reached for my last weapons, they seized my arms, my legs, even my head, with a hand held firmly over my mouth. I bit and screamed regardless, struggling with all my strength, but there were a dozen of them to my single person, and I could do nothing as le Monstre dispatched the last of his opponents and swung, triumphant, to face the next comer.
Kiera met him on the empty floor in an embrace that buried a knife in his belly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
"Ange!" Too late, le monstre whose hand covered my mouth loosened his grip under the rending of my teeth; too late, the lover's name burst from my lips. Le Monstre's gasp was audible in the following silence, his astonishment pure even on his scarred and ruined face. He fell back a step from Kiera, body bent around the pain, hands shuddering near the knife's hilt. It could not have been long, and yet it seemed like only a heartbeat shy of forever before he lifted his gaze, first incredulously to Kiera, then, slowly, as if knowing it to be the last thing he would do, to me.
His eyes seemed to be all green, endlessly green, dying green, when I looked into them. He did not speak, only extended one hand—leather-clad, blood-slicked—toward me, and then silently, easily, fell backward into death.
Les monstres released me, which could not have been their orders, but even for the newly born, to see their progenitor fall must have been a great shock; they could not have helped but notice that their faces were his. They might, for all I knew, have been wakened from time to time in the past, so they might know the face of their creator. Whatever the reason, I was freed, and stood, one woman amongst many men, all of us alike in our loss.
I did not know what I felt. The elixirs staining my clothes offered many choices, alternating with each shift of my body and wrinkle of my shirt: shock, sorrow, anger, fear, disbelief, but all of it weakened by a great emptiness inside me that seemed the only real emotion of my own. I had meant to kill him, bien sûr; I had tried once before, and raged at my failure, and yet there was no gladness in me to see him fall. Perhaps it was that I had been cheated of his death; perhaps it was that I had so long defined myself by the hunt for le Monstre aux Yeux Verts that without him I did not know who I was.
Perhaps it was that hate only burned so deep when it was born of love, and that the ever-kindled fire of hatred could not help but also keep the flames of love ignited. My center; my heart, was broken, bitter and ironic as I knew that to be. I took a breath, perhaps the first since Paul-Gabriel Laval had fallen, and with that breath I hurt. Not just my heart, my chest, where my breath stabbed like knives, but in every part of me, so shockingly that my fingers curled with it; my muscles tightened and I bent as if I, too, had been cut through with a blade. The second breath was no better, save that it hurt so badly that in order to encompass it and survive I was forced to straighten, to stand tall and let agony course through the whole of my body. My feet ached as if the task of standing on them was too much to bear, and yet I could not allow myself to fall as le Monstre had done; not yet and, I knew as deeply as I felt this pain, not ever.
Without my conscious command, my feet took me a step forward; without deliberation, I spoke a single, uninflected word: "Kiera."
She whirled toward me, a maniacal grin dying on her face as, unhurriedly, I withdrew one of my pistols from its holster, aimed, and without hesitation shot her through the heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I had not forgotten my pistols; I never forgot them. I had delayed with them deliberately, not because I preferred the intimacy of fists and knives, but because once fired, bullets did not return; guns did not reload themselves. I often carried some small amount of extra ammunition, but it was in the coat that had been thrown so carelessly to the moulin's gears; I had a dozen bullets, no more, and I had not, until this moment, felt the need for them was insurmountable.
The sound might have shattered the laboratory walls; it certainly shattered les monstres' numb composure. It hurt my ears, but no more than I already hurt; it was strangely easy to stand and watch Kiera as wetness bloomed on her brown shirt.
Her astonishment was, if anything, greater than le Monstre's had been. Her lips parted, eyes wide, as if surprise was far greater than pain. As her father had done, she looked down; as he had done, she curled her hands to her breast. She crumpled then, falling down, not over, and her blood spread across the polished black marble floors to meet her father's. The pschent, the coveted double cobra crown, fell away and rolled across the floor.
As if madness had taken them one and all, les monstres let forth sobbing howls and as one rushed wildly for the crown. Not wanting to hurry, not wanting to move at all, wishing only to stand and absorb all that had happened as I waited for the pain to fade, I was obliged instead to act swiftly. The pschent's curious shape gave it a particular trajectory, and it was little effort to anticipate where it would most likely roll. I went there whilst les monstres followed where it had been, and I collected it just before the most fortunate of the remaining doppelgängers laid hands upon it.
His lovely face contorted in a snarl and I, for once having no heart to fight, jammed the cursed crown on my head and snapped, "Arretez-vous! All of you, stop!"
An ease of leadership that I had never before felt washed over me, replacing even the bone-deep ache of loss. "Stop," I said again, more wearily, and one by one they did, to once again stand as if lost and undirected. I wondered if they had minds of their own, or were merely empty vessels to be commanded. The latter seemed likely, though perhaps if given a life outside their coffin-like chambers they might grow into individuals with thoughts and hopes of their own.
I swayed, wondering too if that was what I intended for them. There were no more than a dozen left; le Monstre and I had been thorough in our housecleaning, but a dozen men with the same face would be at best difficult to hide and at worst impossible. A dozen identical men without a hint of native intelligence amongst them would spawn wild stories of being raised by wolves, or apes, or perhaps even tales of the truth, if anyone was left who could recognize le Monstre in their fine features. And yet I could not in conscience strike them down when I was not fighting for my life; they had done nothing save carry out the orders they had been given, and lacked the experience to have judged those orders as ethical or immoral.
Khan would better know what to do; I would command them to remain and find my friend, whose wisdom I trusted. Between us all, the Century Club could make lives for les monstres—and watch over them to see that they did not become as their progenitor had been.
"Amélie."
The sound of my name was so weak that had there been any other noise in the room I would not have heard it. As it was, I thought I imagined it before realization seized me and I whirled, falling to my knees at le Monstre's side. "Amélie," he said again, and I could neither deny nor regret that tears once more stung my eyes. He chuckled, though it must have cost him an enormous amount; his pale face whitened further, and blood trickled from his lips. "The crown suits you."
I lifted my hand to throw it away, but with a shocking surge of power he caught my wrist, though he could not then control the descent of either his hand or my own. "No. No, Amélie. Amélie, will you not...sing me to sleep? It has been so long...since I heard you sing."
