"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.