Terrific. This chapter is a beautiful rendering of the cage built around the founding families, specifically the Leclaires.
Thank you for draining Kylie first! For some reason (because she was horrid?) it made my day. But then I began to wonder, was she worse than the spawn of the founding families (who inherited their place in the system and did not rebel) or not? By surviving the system, then actively knowing the full extent of the system and participating, was she more or less culpable? Then, is Nora as the archivist more culpable than Sasha, who may have almost no knowledge of the system behind the Vespers? My mind has turned to comparisons to other ‘systems’; Roman gladiator contests, Nazi concentration camps, slavery in the US, slavery in the West Indies (that benefited a large portion of the British aristocracy) as systems of institutional power that existed by the sacrifice of human blood. Today will be an introspective day. I thank you for that. Perhaps I will be less complacent and consider what systems of power that rely on the ‘sacrifice’ of others benefit me.
I hope Remy has to watch the others die before Lucien drains him, and he understands that his tightening of the system condemned 15 (14?) more people died to ‘feed’ the system over the last 60 years.
On a lighter note, I would hazard a guess that after feeding on five people tonight Lucien is going to be insatiably horny. Poor Eli’s ass is going to be VERY sore.