by Cédric Sire
She still did not dare fire her weapon.
The body of the Lombard girl was still exposed in front of her tormentor. Between her ribs, where the blade had gone in, blood continued to gush in spurts, streaming down her legs in the swirling black rain. If Eva fired, she might miss her target and hit the girl.
“The will of the gods shall be granted!” Saint-Clair exulted. “No matter what you do, they’ll give me my reward!”
“This is your last chance! Let go of the girl!”
“Or else what? What do you think you can do?”
“I’m going to kill you,” Eva insisted. “You bitch from hell, I swear I’m going to blow your fucking head off!”
“Go ahead, then,” Saint-Clair said, grinning at her.
And with her eyes still on Eva, she slit the girl’s throat with one single, swift move of the scalpel.
Her blood, propelled by arterial pressure, shot into the rain in a great steaming spurt.
Eva screamed at the top of her lungs.
100
The past always repeated itself.
Eva stopped having any coherent thoughts.
Screaming with anger and helplessness, she began to fire, not caring anymore about the consequences. She just squeezed the Beretta’s trigger, firing bullet after bullet, submerged in a frozen and relentless wave, a mix of despair and absolute fury. Nothing else existed, save the familiar recoil of each detonation, which sent shock waves along her arms all the way to her shoulders.
And with each shot, she could see Judith Saint-Clair’s body jolting. The masked woman had let her victim’s body fall, and she moved backward, one step after the other, struggling to remain on her feet. The bullets were going right through her, opening red holes in her chest and stomach.
When Eva ran out of ammo, she continued to pull the trigger reflexively, not understanding why the monster had not collapsed, why she was not dead.
Saint-Clair came to a stop at the edge of the roof.
She stood perfectly straight, arms outstretched, palms turned skyward.
She roared with laugher.
Her hair had grown even longer. It was now long and thick, coiling around her like snakes.
The woman’s entire body was rippling wildly.
With absolute horror, Eva saw her wounds closing. Each wound boiled, as the churning substance of the woman reconstructed itself and filled each gaping hole in her body.
“Zalmoxis!” Saint-Clair howled. “You who rule over the empire of death! Quench your thirst with this blood, and let me drink from the black spring of eternity!”
Eva ran through her pockets, looking for another clip, though she knew that her gun would be no help. Something terrifying was happening, and there was nothing she could do about it. Nobody could do anything anymore.
And then she witnessed something that her eyes refused to believe.
Eloïse Lombard was being lifted from the concrete rooftop, as though a gigantic hand had grabbed it. And this invisible force began to suck the blood out of her broken body. Streams of blood rose from her wounds, from her open mouth and from her eyes. The streams flowed toward the sky in the middle of the storm.
Eva’s heart skipped several beats, and she lost control of her fingers. The clip she had just retrieved fell in a puddle. She wanted to take a step, pick it up, but she realized that she was unable to move. She dropped the Beretta now.
The pressure in the air was rising by the second.
From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of slender figures working their way closer.
The wolves.
They were gathering. She could see dozens and dozens of them.
A silent pack, forming a circle, preparing for the final onslaught.
Bent in two, Eva could hardly breathe. Absolute terror overwhelmed her.
What if Saint-Clair was right? What if dark gods really were there, above them, in between worlds?
If the ceremony had been completed, then…
What would happen now?
Soon she would see, with her own eyes. All of the surrounding roofs had started to vibrate. A ladder fixed to a chimney came undone and collapsed against the tiles. The concrete rooftop below Eva’s feet shook and cracked.
Eva dropped to her knees. The invisible force that was taking over the atmosphere was crushing her. She couldn’t help wondering if it was air from another world. It was a thicker air unfit for human lungs. And it was getting even thicker
A door really had opened. The blood had been the key. The blood of seventy girls. Judith Saint-Clair had summoned the gods with it, and the gods were now coming into this world. The black beasts with eyes of flame were only their messengers.
“Spirits of the shadows who never sleep! You who never dream! Come to me with all your love, all your suffering, and all your sacrifice! Quench your thirst with this blood and these tears! May they flow down your invisible throats and appease your hungry souls!”
Eva gasped.
She saw Saint-Clair coming her way, radiating with a new and fiery power.
She knew that she was about to lose what remained of her strength.
Saint-Clair stopped in front of her, surrounded by the wolves.
She raised the bloody blade.
As the scalpel came down on her, the inspector suddenly understood. She quickly moved aside. The blade struck her shoulder, near her neck. Eva felt the blood flowing.
In one quick motion, she grabbed Saint-Clair’s mask.
She tore it off her face.
And, at the sight of what lay behind it, she let loose a horrified scream.
Judith Saint-Clair no longer had a face.
Where her features had been, there was a continuous flow of flesh. Facial features appeared, vanished and shifted. Eva recognized the faces. They were the faces of the girls Saint-Clair had murdered. They were now taking hold without being able to stabilize for more than just the briefest moment. The continuous buzzing of the shifting faces shook the woman’s body and escalated her metamorphosis.
“Do you see what the gods gave me?” Saint-Clair exulted, dozens of voices overlapping in her throat. “I am they! And they are me!”
“Not quite yet,” Eva replied.
A desperate surge of hope welled up inside her. It was the hope that things were not over yet. After all, the invisible gods were busy feeding on Eloïse Lombard’s blood, sucking it through the clouds. Their attention was not fully focused on Saint-Clair yet. This gave her a bit of time—a tiny bit—to act.
Eva played her very last card.
101
It was the only possible answer. Eva overcame the vertigo that had gripped her and did what she knew how to do better than anyone else. She let her gift of empathy blossom deep inside her. She opened her senses up, tried to understand the other, to be her. And the process began immediately in its natural, organic way, as it always did. Eva let herself be carried by its wave toward the woman’s madness, and she accepted it as hers, as though she was that woman, as though she had always been.
There was no more room inside her for fear. For the first time, she willingly dove into the ocean of darkness, and, ironically, no transfer had ever felt so easy, so natural. But maybe she had always had that drop of evil flowing in her veins, that urge to defy death one last time.
Life and death were but a game of mirrors. The entire picture came to her suddenly in its entire extent and cruel irony. The gods were watching the world through those mirrors. The mortals stayed away from the abyss to avoid meeting their devouring gaze.
Eva, she had to look.
She raised the mask and put it on her own face. To see like her. To be her. To understand this mad woman in order to annihilate her once and for all.
Deep in the recesses of her mind, she thought she heard her father laugh. It was a prideful laugh.
The mask came in contact with her skin.
The porcelain was ice-cold. She felt an external skeleton locking onto her features. And she felt, yes
, all the distress bubbling inside the woman. This distress that had turned into hate, into a dazzling energy of destruction.
She could see the world with her eyes, the world transfigured.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Saint-Clair’s seventy voices roared.
“Becoming you,” Eva whispered. “Being you.”
“You will be, don’t worry! You’ll be a part of me too!”
The monster lunged at her.
Eva did not do anything to stop her this time.
The blade penetrated her stomach and was driven all the way in.
The world shook.
Intense pain ran through her.
In that one moment of abandon, she had lost everything.
In that same moment, she had gained everything.
It was the only way. The law of the world of mirrors. The obvious rule of chaos.
She collapsed in the pouring rain.
As in a dream, she felt the wave of pain radiating from her wound, and, against all odds, running in her veins all the way to her face.
The mask was absorbing the pain.
She began to smile below the porcelain, which had turned black.
Judith Saint-Clair leaned over her, her horrible bubbling skull filled with contradictory emotions.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because the gods are watching you,” Eva gagged, her mouth filled with blood. “You just killed yourself, right in front of them.”
“I did nothing of the sort.”
“Oh yes, you did. You don’t understand what this means, do you?”
The chasms of Saint-Clair’s eyes filled with darkness. No, the monster did not understand.
While streams of blood gushed from her pierced stomach, Eva started hoping with all her heart that she really had been right.
She raised her blood-stained hands toward the stormy skies and felt that the red eyes of all the wolves were now on her. They held the still and attentive silence of divinities. And she knew that, yes, she had been right. Streaks of lightning crossed the clouds.
“You heard her, gods of death or whoever you are!” Eva screamed. “Dark sons of Zalmoxis, you saw her! Answer this crazy bitch’s prayer! Grant her the eternal death that she is asking for!”
“No!” Saint-Clair cried. “No!”
Her voice changed abruptly, becoming high-pitched.
The reason was simple. Her throat was now compressed, suddenly pushed back into her own flesh. And her body was changing yet again. The skin on her neck and arms was becoming flaccid. Wrinkles were deepening and expanding on her face. Her hands were veined and bony. Saint-Clair shuddered from head to toe.
She lifted her hands in front of her face and studied them as they aged with incredible speed. Black liver spots spread across the translucent skin. Her brand new hair turned gray, from its roots to its whirling ends, before falling out in huge chunks.
“No!”
She tried to scream but couldn’t. A trickle of ink-black blood oozed between her lips as she backed away, hands pressed against her temples, where the last strands of hair were stuck to her blotchy skull.
“Eva!” a voice called out above her.
The inspector raised her eyes and saw Vauvert on the adjacent roof. He slid down to her and landed in the chaos. He staggered but steadied himself. His sluggish movements, his mouth twisted in exertion—everything about him made it clear that he was struggling with the abnormal pressure too, and he was not doing any better than Eva. That didn’t prevent him from raising his gun.
Saint-Clair’s decaying figure turned toward him. Where she once had a mouth, the jaws of an animal taking shape.
Vauvert fired.
The bullets hit her in the chest, and the woman stumbled backward, her gnarled hands raised in front of her.
“The head!” Eva screamed. “It’s her weak point! Aim for the head!”
Vauvert was happy to oblige.
A bullet pierced Saint-Clair’s right eye. The back of her head spattered into the rain in black swirls.
Several more bullets followed the same path, blasting the bones of her nose and her eye sockets. The bubbling skull was wiped out, drowned in a mess of bloody, bony splinters.
The monster took one last step and collapsed against a chimney.
Bolts of lightning uncoiled in the sky with increased fury.
“Eva!” Vauvert shouted as he ran to her.
He took her in his arms as the thing that had been Judith Saint-Clair, which now looked like nothing more than a misshapen and liquid creature, let out a piercing scream.
Eva took the mask from her face, and the world swayed.
The pain in her belly came back right away.
She looked at the porcelain, still black between her fingers, and flung it away. The mask shattered on the concrete.
“You’re bleeding,” Vauvert cried, pressing both his hands against her gaping wound.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Eva told him. “The mask. It’s as if it were filled with her energy. It saved my life. Well, I hope it did.”
“I’m going to carry you. We have to get out of here right away.”
He took the deepest breath he could in the scarce air, wincing from the pain it caused his lungs, and wrapped his arms around Eva to lift her up.
On the rooftops all around, the beastly figures were approaching in a proliferation of red circles. The pack was tightening around them.
“They’re going to attack,” Eva gagged.
Her colleague, grimacing with the effort, carried her to the broken skylight.
“They’re the souls of her victims,” she said.
The wolves leaped in unison with a single roar.
102
The creatures streamed onto the roof in a huge wave of mangy bodies.
Vauvert let Eva slide down through the skylight first. Then he pivoted and put his legs inside too.
The wolves leaped over him.
Saint-Clair was the target of their rage.
It was toward the witch that they swooped en masse.
Vauvert saw her one last time, contorted at the far end of the rooftop, her flesh in throes, as the first animal reached her and bit into her hand, taking away several of her fingers.
Saint-Clair’s screams were harrowing. She did not have time to raise her arms to protect herself as the black beasts charged her. One of them seized a leg and took away a foot and part of her calf. The other creatures followed, claiming their body parts in turn. Between their ferocious jaws, the woman’s bones cracked and splintered.
Eva had been right, as always. Those things really were the souls that Saint-Clair had torn out of her victims. Seventy souls in all—seventy beasts mad with rage to whom the powers above had finally given permission to exact revenge. Or maybe to take back what was theirs? Yes, that’s exactly what those monstrous things were doing. They were tearing through Saint-Clair’s flesh, looking for the part of themselves that had wound up in the fibers of this woman.
Vauvert did not want to see any more of this. He let himself drop down the skylight. He landed on a rain-soaked bed, next to Eva.
Still, Saint-Clair’s screams of agony rang out on the roof, louder than the roar of the pack.
103
When Vauvert emerged into the entry of the building, Eva’s inanimate body in his arms, a police cruiser had just arrived. Leroy was on the sidewalk across the street, engaged in a heated conversation with Jean-Luc Deveraux. He stopped talking abruptly when he saw the giant come down the steps, and he ran toward him.
“I couldn’t find you! Oh God, Eva!”
“She’s alive,” Vauvert yelled. “We have to lay her down, quick!”
Deveraux and another officer rushed over too, and the four men joined forces to carry Eva to the car. With extreme caution, they lay her in the back seat, out of the rain.
She gagged in pain. Vauvert, crouching next to her, caressed her hair.
“Hang in there. We made it. Ev
erything’s fine now.”
“The ambulance is going to be here in no time,” Deveraux assured her, his face waxy. “It should have been here already.”
He looked at Vauvert and Leroy in turn before telling them, “I swear I called it in immediately. I did it as quickly as I could, okay? I had to go through the proper channels first. I couldn’t have known.”
A deafening crash interrupted him. Curious onlookers cast their eyes skyward.
Wild arcs of lightning seemed to be raining down on the roofs.
Deveraux whistled between his teeth.
“They must have one hell of an electrical problem up there! Looks like something is attracting the lightning.”
Neither Vauvert nor Leroy tried to contradict him.
Eva moaned.
“Hang in there,” Vauvert said again, his eyes brimming with tears he could not hold back. “Please, Eva, hang in there.”
The lightning raged for a few more moments before calm returned to the sky. Even the rain began to let up.
As though the gods were satisfied, Vauvert could not help thinking.
On the top floor of the apartment building, the windows revealed the red glow of a fire. “Can’t they hurry?” Vauvert pleaded.
“Don’t worry,” Eva managed to utter.
“I’m not worried,” Vauvert lied with a ferocious smile.
“I’ll be… just fine… Remember, I’m a monster… killing monsters.”
He smiled at her tenderly.
“You’re no monster, you idiot.”
Eva smiled too. Then her eyes rolled upward in their sockets.
A fire truck appeared in the street, sirens blaring, and Leroy ran toward it, waving his arms.
The last thing he remembered that night was being placed next to Eva in the ambulance. The medics had put the woman on a respirator and kept telling him that everything was going to be fine, that it was a miracle she had made it through with such a wound, yet her vital signs had stabilized.
Then they had forced him to lie on the second stretcher.
“Inspector, it looks like you have a couple of broken ribs. You have to let us take care of you.”
