Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

Three's Company: Part One

Paris, 1794

The air reeked of blood.

There was so much of it running in the streets these days, black and rotten, attracting clouds of flies and hordes of rats, and terror hung over the city like a dense bank of cloud.

The monarchy was gone, and war had come to France, and at first there had been something hopeful about it. Poverty didn't affect vampires the way it did humans – they didn't need food or water, and poor weather was nothing more than an inconvenience, so they could easily cope without a roof over their heads – but Ludovic had been a vampire for more than seventy years, and though some of that time had been spent in solitude, trying to avoid people as much as possible, he had come to understand the desperate struggle that so many thousands of French peasants faced. Ludovic had been glad when those peasants started fighting back against a system that crushed them into the dirt.

Then the Terror had arrived, and that sense of hope was washed away in a sea of blood.

The rich were suffering, true, but so were the poor. It wasn't supposed to be like that – at least, not as far as Ludovic was concerned.

Sometimes he thought he should have stayed a hermit.

Hooves clattered behind him, and he stepped to one side as a wagon rolled past. Ragged children with bare feet ran alongside the wagon, laughing and jeering, some of them throwing rocks, and Ludovic realised that it wasn't an ordinary wagon – it was a tumbrel, filled with prisoners on their way to the guillotine. He looked away. He didn't want to see their faces.

But another tumbrel followed close behind, swaying as it bumped and jolted over the uneven ground. More ragged children followed, hurling abuse at the prisoners, and Ludovic wondered if the children and their families had noticed that their own lives hadn't improved.

The poor were still poor.

They still suffered.

They still died.

Two women stood at the edge of the tumbrel. One of them was quietly sobbing, her blonde ringlets in disarray; the other was dark-haired and steely-eyed, looking imperiously over the street as if she were on her way to a ball, rather than to the bloody blade of the guillotine. Her eyes locked with Ludovic's, and she lifted one challenging eyebrow.

Everything froze for a moment.

Then the tumbrel trundled past, and her stare was broken. All Ludovic could do was watch as the tumbrel moved away, heading for Place de la Revolution, where heads rolled and blood ran in rivers and the crowd roared with glee.

Ludovic had never been there.

He'd never intended to come to Paris, but as the years had passed, and the wounds caused by the deaths of Elise and Claudine had begun to heal, the loneliness of a hermit's life had become too much to bear. He'd wandered into the city one day, and it was so vibrant, so full of life, so endlessly fascinating that he'd found himself staying. He still lived alone, and rejected friendships or relationships, and all the entertainment that had drawn him in was something he watched from the shadows, never actively participating in, but it was better than a life in the hills.

At least, it had been.

Now he didn't recognise it anymore.

With a start, he realised he was following the tumbrel, and he didn't know why.

He'd seen these wagons before, and he'd always looked away, not wanting to meet the eyes of those condemned to death.

But he couldn't look away this time.