“What are you doing?” I whisper harshly.
“What we normally do with the dead,” he says, reaching down and grabbing Elle under her arms.
“You can’t do that!” I walk over to him, my heart breaking at the sight of her pale and bloodied in his hands.
“It’s what’s done, Lenore,” he says, trying to be patient with me. “We put them in the Black Sunshine.”
“But that’s the way to Hell!”
“Only if you’re going there. She’s not. Don’t worry.”
“I worry!” I yell. “This is…she needs to be buried. She needs a funeral.”
“She won’t be buried,” he tells me solemnly. “There will be no funeral. Otherwise there would be questions, questions we can’t answer. Like who stabbed her. You can blame Poe, but it won’t look that way to them. Besides, this is just her body. Not her soul. Her soul is already at peace. I can tell.”
“How do you know?” I sniff.
“I know. Now please, let me do this.”
I exhale, holding my arms tightly, body still trembling. “Okay.”
I watch as he steps into the black and white world, pulling Elle along with him. Then he steps out and the flames disappear.
The hall goes back to normal.
And Elle is gone.
All that’s left is the blood.
“She’ll be reported missing soon,” Solon tells me. “We need to get into the messages you’ve sent with her and erase them. Ezra can do that. That’s why we keep him around.”
“What about the blood?” I ask numbly.
He eyes the crimson pool on the floor and then looks to me, brow raised. “We get rid of it,” he says simply.
My teeth grind against each other, a sick feeling in my stomach. “No,” I say shaking my head.
“You can do it,” he suggests.
I shake my head in quiet revulsion. “It should be me. But I can’t. I can’t.”
“Then you might not want to watch this,” he says, getting down on all fours in front of the pool of blood.
“Solon,” I gasp. “You can’t possibly…”
“I’m a fucking vampire!” he roars at me, his eyes going a shade of crimson. “Turn around!”
Shaking, I do as he says, pinching my eyes shut, placing my hands over my ears so I don’t hear anything I don’t want to.
A few moments later I feel a gentle touch on my shoulder.
I turn, looking up at Solon. He looks the same, except his eyes are much brighter. There’s not a drop of blood on him, nor anywhere else in the apartment.
“We need to leave,” he says to me, reaching down and taking my hand. “We could go through the—”
“No,” I say abruptly. “I’m not going in there if she’s in there. We go back like normal people.”
He gives me a stiff smile. “Okay.”