by Cédric Sire
“That’s funny, you talk just like my boss, Kiowski,” Vauvert said with a forced smile.
Ô made an exasperated gesture and turned to his men around them.
“Chris, Florian, this man is in custody. He’s not going anywhere, even to take a piss. Internal Affairs will be here soon. They will sort this out. As for the rest of you guys, I want you back at your desks. Now! Then he turned to Vauvert. “I hope you’re proud of yourself. Like we need Internal Affairs around here right now!”
Vauvert said nothing. At this point, each word was a waste of time.
He waited for the furious chief to head back to his office. Then he looked over the two officers burdened with keeping an eye on him. Both wore dismayed expressions.
Leroy stepped in front of his colleagues. His face was solemn.
“Are you nuts? Or just plain stupid?”
“I should be asking you that. How can you work with such an asshole?”
“That’s not the point!” Leroy snapped. “Eva is in danger, we’re running out of time, and you, you have nothing better to do than bring administrative shit down on all of us. Jean-Luc Deveraux is an asshole, but he’s a good cop. Since this morning, he’s been busting his ass trying to find Eva, just like the rest of us here!”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Vauvert responded. “Good cop or not, an asshole is an asshole. And in our line of work, that’s extremely dangerous. It screws everything up.” He rose to his feet. “Anyway, you’re absolutely right. We’ve wasted too much time already.”
As he started walking toward the stairs, the two officers rushed to stop him.
“Sorry,” one of them said, grabbing his arm, “but we can’t let you do that.”
Vauvert shook off the hand and glared at the officer.
“You’re in custody, don’t you understand?”
“He’s right,” Leroy said. “Don’t make things even worse for yourself.”
“God dammit, guys,” Vauvert growled, “Eva’s going to get cut up like a piece of meat if we don’t do anything. Do you want her death on your conscience? Is that what you want? Sorry, but I’m not having it on mine.”
He started down the stairs as the two stunned cops watched.
“So? We’re not stopping him?” Benavente said. “Our asses are going to get kicked.”
“Yeah,” Mangin said.
Leroy, meanwhile, ran into Svärta’s office to retrieve the books about the Dacians. Then he flew down the stairs behind the giant.
“Wait! Wait for me, for Christ’s sake!”
46
When she opens her eyes, she is six years old.
Mommy is explaining how important it is to always lock the doors. And the windows. You never know who might try to sneak into the house. There are bad men out there who are waiting for a mother and her two little girls to forget to lock everything so that they can sneak in unnoticed. That is also why you must never talk to strangers. Never, ever tell them where you live.
She tells them this over and over again every day. It is hard for children to understand, but if Mommy is telling them this with such conviction, it must be very important. All little girls must have to do this, after all. Always lock their bedroom doors. And when they walk down the street, always check over their shoulder to make sure no one is following.
“Mommy,” Justyna asks, sitting next to Eva in the back seat. “Do we have to move again?”
“No, sweetie,” Mommy tells her. “We are going to stay here. Mrs. Rieux is taking good care of you when I’m not home.”
“But we don’t get to stay here forever, do we?” Eva asks.
Mommy doesn’t say anything.
She parks in front of Mrs. Rieux’s house. She lives just down the street—their new street, because they have been here for only six months. Mrs. Rieux, she is their babysitter. She is from those islands on the other side of the world where people have honey-colored skin and eyes full of laughter. When she is not taking care of Eva and Justyna, she cleans people’s homes. Mrs. Rieux is very nice. Her weathered, heavily wrinkled face has seen its share of children, and she knows what it is like to take care of them. She and Mommy became friends right away. To this day, Mrs. Rieux is the only person Mommy actually trusts, the only person the twins are allowed to talk to.
“Mommy has to go to work now,” she says, kissing each of them. “You will behave, won’t you?”
And the two little girls nod. They always behave. Mrs. Rieux sets her wrinkled hands on their shoulders as they watch the car drive away.
“Come on, my ’lil treasures, do you feel like drawing?”
As they go inside the house, Eva turns one last time to see Mommy’s car disappear at the end of the street.
This is the last time she will ever see her.
Because the river of darkness is coming.
The black river drowning everything but the fiery pain in her leg.
47
Wake up, Eva.
You have to be strong.
Wake… up.
It is the pain that pulls her back.
Or a little girl’s whisper in her ear, maybe.
But the pain erases everything else. This smoldering fire in the flesh of her thigh, in her mutilated hips, deep in her open wounds.
She tells herself that she is not six years old. She doesn’t want to be six anymore.
She tries to calm her breathing.
She remembers where she is now.
Lying down, bound, helpless.
She’s almost surprised to still be alive. This means that the psychopath who has kidnapped her hasn’t severed any arteries. In fact, it seems that she has stopped bleeding.
For now.
And deep inside, she is horrified by what lies ahead.
Calm down. Do not panic.
Easy to say. Her heart is pounding. Whenever she tries to gather her thoughts, she is overwhelmed with dread. And pain, following like a flame running along a ribbon of gunpowder.
She has the feeling that she might be alone.
She stops breathing for a few seconds.
No sound.
Her jailer is actually gone.
But for how long?
Drawing a long—and painful—breath, she tries to turn her head to the side. Moving her neck launches lightning bolts in her retinas. She can feel the air on her wounds.
Keep your mind clear.
She’s got to find a way to get out of here. False hope or not, she has to try.
Now.
Her eyes, usually shielded behind shades, can adjust to the darkness. She can see the support beams in the ceiling above her. She is being held in the basement of a house, maybe one that is not too old. The wood in the beams still looks fresh.
As she lifts her head, she can see steps at the far side of this basement. But there are no windows. No way anyone could hear her if she called for help.
“Help!” she screams all the same. “Can anyone hear me? Help me!”
48
Paris, Orly Airport
7:40 p.m.
No one stopped them during check-in or at the security gate. The plane would take off shortly. As Vauvert tried to get comfortable in a seat in the waiting area, his phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and turned it off without bothering to see who was calling.
Across from him, Detective Leroy sat, looking grim.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“I’m not forcing you to come with me,” Vauvert reminded him.
The young man gave a sarcastic laugh.
“Don’t give me that crap. I’m not going to let you down now. The way you acted, well… It’s exactly what Eva would have done, okay? That’s what she’s always done, and I think we both owe it to her.”
His phone, playing a Metallica tune, interrupted him.
He took it out of his pocket. When he saw the caller ID, he hesitated, his thumb poised over “Answer.”
“It’s the boss. And now, I’m going to get my ass cr
ucified.”
The electric guitar went silent as the call went to voice mail.
“See? It’s not that hard,” Vauvert said.
“Yeah, for you, maybe. But…”
His phone rang again, this time playing “Master of Puppets.”
The woman sitting next to Leroy, a hoary old lady sporting a loud ring on every finger and an enormous green hat, shot him an annoyed glare and sighed louder than necessary to make sure he got the message.
As for Leroy, his eyes were still glued to the phone, as though it were some beast, at once dangerous and fascinating.
“So, what do I do now?”
“Whatever you want,” Vauvert said. “I’m not your nanny.”
“Whatever your problem is,” the woman with the green hat hissed, “you’re bothering everybody in here, young man.”
“Uh, yeah,” Leroy said, his eyes shifty. “I’m sorry about that.”
He ran his thumb over the phone’s screen, hesitated over “Answer” and then turned the phone off.
“Finally,” the old lady said.
Across from Leroy, Vauvert smiled at him for the first time all day.
“Well, there you go.”
But his smile did not last.
His mind was on Eva. She had been kept captive, somewhere, for fourteen hours already.
He did not know how much time he had left to save her.
49
Eva has stopped calling.
Her vocal chords are nearly frayed.
Her body is an ocean of pain and cramps.
It is no use. Screaming, like thrashing, will not yield any result.
She must gather her strength. After all, it is only rope that is holding her down. It is impossible for her to move her ankles. But she can move her arms a little.
She tries to maneuver the rope against the edge of the table.
Just a little, upward.
Then downward.
The fibers of the rope scrape against the wood. There is new hope.
She does it again. Her wrist slides up, then down.
If she can wear away enough of the rope, she knows she will be able to break it. She doesn’t know whether she will have the time, but she has to try. She has to do something, and all of a sudden, nothing else in the world matters. There is only that up-and-down movement, up and down.
But the exertion is exhausting. Eva wonders how much she had accomplished. Just a little bit? Maybe nothing at all?
She stops working. She tries to ignore the cold that has settled in her flesh and bones. Her muscles petrified with terror, she waits.
That’s all she can really do, isn’t it? Wait until the flowing darkness comes back and takes her, yes. Until darkness carries her away from this world and drowns her once and for all.
No. Don’t think about that.
You have to fight.
The next moment, she is at it again, concentrating on sliding the rope down against the edge, trying to tear it, slowly, ever so slowly, one fiber after the other.
She doesn’t know how long she has been moving the rope up and down.
But she does know that her senses are a mess.
She also knows that without her pills, it’s going to get worse.
The hallucinations will come back.
Of course, the meds have only kept the hallucinations at bay—they have always been lurking—but she has never been able to live without her drugs. She has never even imagined living without them. Her doctor has told her that this is a psychological dependence, that she doesn’t need all the chemicals. But he doesn’t understand anything. He never held his sister in his arms. He never promised her that the monster would never come.
She had.
And the monster came anyway.
He snatched Justyna from her arms. He undressed her in front of her. So she could see, so she could watch. And Justyna screamed. Justyna cried. Eva had sworn that nothing was going to happen to them. She had sworn, hadn’t she?
She shuts her eyes. She refuses to remember. She doesn’t want to relive this.
But she knows that it is happening again, as it does every time. Before even looking.
She opens her eyes. She slowly lowers her gaze.
At the other end of the basement, on the stairs, there she is. Eva knew she would be there.
The little girl with the white hair.
Justyna, her twin sister. Her sister, dead twenty-four years and still there, stuck somewhere in the puzzle of her mind.
She is sitting on the steps.
“No,” Eva whispers, not knowing whether any sound has actually left her lips.
She tenses her muscles, igniting again the river of lava in her right thigh.
“I will not lose it.”
But for once, the ghostly little girl does not seem to want to mock her. She has the sad eyes of a helpless soul.
Eva shuts her eyes and breathes slowly. Her hallucinations are usually very brief. All she has to do is keep it together somehow. She will be okay. She has to be okay. She won’t let her imagination get the better of her.
Again, she opens her eyes.
The little girl is no longer at the far end of the room, no.
Now she is standing in front of her.
Justyna, her sister, is staring at her with a solemn expression in her small red eyes.
“Go away,” Eva whispers, a sob in the back of her throat.
The little girl comes closer. She opens her arms and snuggles against her, against her naked body. And even though Eva knows that this is only an illusion, a strange mirage, she can feel the warmth coming from her twin sister, a relic of her past, like some bitter joke made by Fate.
“Don’t be scared. I’m here,” the little girl says.
For the first time, Eva knows that Justyna has not come to bother her. Maybe that was never her intention. She has come as a sister to keep her company, to offer her the comfort of her little arms around her shivering body. The little girl’s hug, loving and reassuring, actually warms her.
“Everything’s going to be all right. If we stay together, the monster will not come,” her sister tells her.
“No, that’s not true. It didn’t work. He did come, do you remember? We thought it would be enough, but no. He took you, Justyna. And now he’s back. The monster’s back, and this time it’s for me. This time I won’t make it.”
“Shh,” the little girl says. “Don’t think about that. Not yet.”
Eva does not realize that tears are streaming down her cheeks and that her chest is heaving with uncontrollable sobs.
She knows that she does not have much time to live.
50
Toulouse
9:30 p.m.
So little time. And even less of it with every passing minute.
Once the plane had landed at the Toulouse-Blagnac International Airport, they picked up the SUV in the parking lot. Vauvert took the Toulouse beltway and stomped on the gas pedal.
Leroy turned on his cell, and this time he managed to reach Doctor Fabre-Renault on his private number. He told him that he was a homicide officer and that he needed to pay him a visit. The doctor asked why, and Leroy explained that it was a matter of life and death. They needed his cooperation right away.
“This has to do with Raynal, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it has to do with the incidents that took place at the Raynal Center. The missing girls.”
“It’s a long story. But I don’t know what I could tell you that isn’t already in the reports.”
“Still, can you meet with us? We are on our way already.”
“Sure. I’m home right now, and I’m not going anywhere. Do you have my address?”
“Yes, I do. Thank you very much, doctor.”
An icy wind invaded the vehicle as Vauvert opened his window to toss the coins into the toll booth basket. The gate lifted. The next moment, they were rushing down the highway. The sign read “ALBI 66 KM.”
We’ll be in Millau in two
hours,” Vauvert said.
As he drove past an automatic speed camera the flashing light went off.
“Shit,” he growled.
Meanwhile, Leroy checked his voice mail. He listened to several messages, then glumly turned off his phone.
“Trouble?”
“What did you expect? Deveraux is unleashing hell to nail you. And me, by the way. The boss is going to hang me by my balls if I don’t come up with one hell of a good justification for what happened tonight. This was out-and-out desertion for the both of us. We could, at least, have tried to tell them what we came up with.”
“Sure, we could have tried,” Vauvert said. “And we’d still be in custody in Paris, in the hands of those Internal Affairs clowns. We’re running out of time already.”
Leroy knew his colleague was right.
He reached for the two books he had brought along. The first was an academic work on Countess Bathory’s crimes, which he still had not had time to look through. As for the second, it was an essay on the Dacian religion and its legacy in Medieval Europe. One way or the other, the two had to be connected. He just had to find out in what way. Leroy turned on the dome light and opened the book on the Dacians.
So little time.
51
11:30 p.m.
Leroy poured over the book, flipping page after page, as they drove down a country road that snaked endlessly around the mountainside. He knew he would soon have to put it down, because the dome light and Vauvert’s impatient driving were starting to make him sick.
Outside, the night was black as ink. The temperature was plummeting. The SUV’s headlights splashed the tall fir trees on both sides of the road. The locals did not seem to know about roadside reflectors, so Vauvert had to stomp on the breaks periodically to navigate a sudden curve. Occasionally, they passed though a tiny village—the streets empty and the houses’ shutters closed—before winding through more fir trees and more darkness.
