As weak dawn light creeped into the cell, Gabriel drained the last of his wine while Jean-François finished transcribing the night’s testimony. The vampire chronicler, pleased with the progress for his Empress, prepared to depart, noting there remained much still to cover. Gabriel, craving a "smoke," asked for sanctus; Jean-François produced a phial of reddish-brown dust.

Gabriel then sprung his ambush, asking whether the Empress had locked whom in with whom. He grabbed Jean-François’s wrist and throat with preternatural speed, and Gabriel’s touch burned the vampire, blackening his flesh and boiling his blood. He slammed Jean-François into the wall, fulfilling his earlier threat to make him scream.

Meline burst in, driven by fervor, and stabbed Gabriel in the back multiple times with a silversteel dagger. Wounded and coughing blood, Gabriel realized the blade’s material as his strength faltered. Jean-François escaped by bursting apart into a swarm of rats, leaving only his finery behind as the rodents flooded out of the room.

Meline snatched up the fallen manuscript and fled, slamming the door as the last rats squeezed beneath it. Alone and bleeding, Gabriel retrieved his bone pipe and the sanctus phial, loaded the bowl, and lit it from spilled lantern oil, inhaling the sacrament with desperate intensity as the smell of hollyroot and copper filled the cell.

Jean-François slid open the door’s barred hatch, glaring with bloodstained tears. Gabriel, unfazed, exhaled a plume of bloody smoke and quipped that one could not blame a man for trying. With the historian’s hissed response, Gabriel closed the exchange by saying, “Until tomorrow, vampire,” setting the stage for their next session.