some forces seem to have established some kind of immunity around the members of this family. However, using a knife, this illusion was broken.
Blaise! She herself was like a knife. He’ve been cutting his thoughts with a knife since he grew up. It is strange that now, at the moment of his triumph, he thought not about having finally removed his sworn enemy, but about his daughter. Blaise! Doesn’t that name mean «blade»? She was the blade. Cold, silent, beautiful. He wanted one of her, like many. Before killing her, he wanted to enjoy her. Just one time. Before a beautiful body becomes a corpse.
But who would then dare to kill her? So beautiful! At the decisive moment, he thought about this, and oddly enough, instead of using her, he raised a knife to her face. It was only necessary to make a couple of hand movements to make beauty disappear. He would have done it, but something happened that deeply shocked him.
He didn’t want to remember. He didn’t believe in the supernatural. The book on summoning demons, which the accomplices strongly advised him to hide, remained on the table. Having performed a ritual yesterday and not having summoned anyone except a gust of wind that extinguished the candles, he became convinced that otherworldly forces simply do not exist. And to hell with the family tales that Rosier were sorcerers, like everyone who ever collaborated with them, including his family. Including even those who later took up holy orders, like his friend Alistair. They argued that this did not help them, but only sharpened their perception of otherworldly evil even more. Aloud he did not say anything to them about this, but mentally laughed at them. Personally, he himself considered both religion and divination to be nonsense. Yesterday’s experience helped him to be convinced of this to the end. The demon did not respond. The very demon he summoned to forget about Blaise. It was better to spend on a good dose of narcotic powder than on candles for the ritual.
After that, however, he had a very strange dream. But aren’t dreams a kind of illusion? In this dream, Blaise was alive and winged like statues from her family’s legendary crypt, and she held a blade in her hand. She sat in the pose of a marble angel on his grave, embittered and beautiful. Bloody tears flowed from her eyes, and her eyes glittered with such hatred. Nemesis, not Blaise.
His grave? He rubbed his eyes wearily. Dream the same! The crumpled bed in front of him has almost become a grave since the devil grew up. Then his bed became empty forever. He could not share it with anyone else. Because Blaise existed. A girl thirty years younger than him, looking like an angel sculpture from a crypt. And what was so sexy about her? She hasn’t even grown to the end yet. And it will never grow up. He didn’t want to kill her. But she was dead.
The huge house with many bedrooms, rooms and servants was still completely asleep in the hour before dawn. Even the gardeners in the park below will be a long way off. But someone has already turned on the TV in the next room, opposite his office. Neil got up reluctantly and walked over there. There is no one around. The doors were bolted, but the screen glowed ghostly. The news bulletin was just broadcast. Pretty female reporter talked excitedly about the fire and disfigured bodies. It seems that she has never seen anything like that in her career, as, indeed, did everyone else who arrived at the scene. Neil recognized the facade of the gloomy building, even though it was completely burned. The de Rozier estate was not burned for the first time in the history of their family, but the reporter, of course, did not know about it. She was in a hurry to talk about terrible injuries, about mutilated corpses, and about one young body, on which a huge statue fell, as if embracing it. Angel statue.
Neil noticed that the caryatids at the entrance were intact. It’s strange. They had to burn. He remembered that they were not there when he left. Maybe it seemed to him?
The reporter’s annoying voice began to sound like a buzz. She kept talking about the young man’s body, which the doctors cannot free from the embrace of the statue that had fallen on him, because two bodies: a dead human and a half-destroyed marble one seemed to have grown together. She tried to explain this with fire and fire, and much more. It was assumed that some dangerous infection had settled in the building, and now no one would be allowed there. It’s for the best. Neil flinched when the report touched the found female bodies, so mutilated they could not be identified. Someone completely cut off their faces. He wonder who? Who finished that night what he could not? Alistair? Hugh? George? Angelo? Thomas? He went over in his mind had all his friends. Everyone who was now generalized by one secret. But couldn’t find the answer. They all acted in concert with him. How could he overlook something?
In the field of the cell there were female bodies under the covers, which were taken out of the crumbling house. Neil wondered which of them belonged to Blaise during his lifetime. Perhaps, it is worth finding out to which morgue they will be taken and going there… It is strange who whispered this thought to him. Does he really think so? Is this really what he really wants? Go and kiss her mutilated body with his lips in the last kiss, as Alistair advises the parishioners to kiss the shrines in which he himself does not believe.
How could he think that? But the thought was already firmly stuck in the brain. Let Blaise forgive him. But did he do it alone? And if he had another chance, he would have pity on her? Of course not.
Neil was always devoid of any sentimentality. What is done is done. And if he was given a choice, he would repeat everything. No fear, no conscience, no regrets.
He turned off the TV, not wanting to hear more about the events, and went to his office. It’s time to throw away the candles and hide the book away. However, someone has already done it for him. There were no candles. Bunches of rare herbs for the ceremony too. Only the book remained on the table, still open, but without the page needed for the ritual. It was torn out, leaving only a charred, scorched spine. Who dared?
Neil was about to call some of the servants, don’t care if you have to wake them up. Let them give a report. Who was here yesterday? But then another strange thing struck him. There was something lying next to the book. He did not immediately recognize this object, although it had previously belonged to him. Just yesterday. But today it was broken. The handle has disappeared somewhere. There was only a broken blade, on its edge the chipped places resembled serifs. Seven. He ran his finger over them and counted again. After all, there were seven of them yesterday, when they were deciding other people’s destinies. In his mind, he repeated the names of his friends. Serif for everyone. What does it mean?
Destiny? Nonsense. Of course, it was unpleasant for him that this particular knife broke. It was valuable, not only for its value, but also for the fact that it represented the historical heritage of its family. A knife that kills evil spirits. Now a broken knife with a broken blade. The same knife he brought to Blaise’s face yesterday.
Blaze means blade. The blade that will cut him. But the blade in front of him had already been cut by itself.
The art of fighting
Just a stick in her hands. Long and lightweight. The same as his. At first, Blaise thought Damian was joking about her. But his face was serious and in the semi-darkness it seemed somehow unusually focused. They walked in circles in some gloomy room, like an empty hall, and no one dared to strike first.
«Is it so difficult to fight someone with whom you could make love instead?» as if his eyes were mocking.
He probably would like something different now. His coldness was only external, behind it could be a fire. But she felt cold in the literal sense of the word. It was as if she had been frozen, and she became like a statue.
«Stronger hand, but not too strong,» he quietly admonished. «Imagine that the weapon is a part of you, whatever it is.»
«I can’t,»
