Destiny

by Alex Archer

  But that hadn’t been the case when he was a child. He’d been the son of a serving wench. Unacknowledged by his father. An object of scorn for his father’s wife. An embarrassment to his blood mother. And a target for villainies perpetrated by his half brothers and half sisters.

  Roux had taken Garin away from all that. But the old man had not done him a kindness by dragging him out across the harsh lands they traveled. He had used him as a vassal, to wait on him hand and foot.

  Taking another breath, Garin calmed himself. Then he walked to the adjoining restaurant. Roux would see that he had changed. Even if Garin had to kill the old man to prove it.

  14

  Seated in a booth by the window overlooking the restaurant parking lot and the Mercedes, Annja glanced up at Garin’s approach. She took in the man’s dark mood at once and felt a little threatened.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  “No,” he lied, then sat in the booth across from her.

  “Oh,” Annja said in a way that let him know she was fully aware that he was lying. She’d learned that from the nuns at the orphanage. The soft vocal carried a deadly punch of guilt that usually demolished the weaker kids. Annja had always continued stoically until she knew for certain she’d been caught. She’d been punished quite often for exploring New Orleans after lights-out.

  “I’ve got a long history with the man we’re going to see,” Garin said.

  Maybe he’d been raised on guilt, too, Annja thought. “What kind of history?” Annja asked.

  “We don’t exactly get on.”

  “I’m not surprised. He comes across as very arrogant and selfish.”

  “Those,” Garin said with a grin, “are his redeeming qualities.”

  Annja decided she liked him a little then. Not enough to trust him, but enough to explore working together. Saving her life—or at least saving her from capture—back at the coffee shop in Lozère had been a mercenary action. She just didn’t know what the price tag was yet.

  “You called him?” Annja asked.

  To his credit, Garin hesitated only a moment. “Yes. To let him know we’re coming.”

  “He’s okay with that?”

  “Yes.”

  Annja leaned back in the booth and thought about Roux. “Going to his house doesn’t exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

  Garin bared his white teeth in a predator’s smile. “It’s not exactly a trip to grandma’s house. But you don’t have a lot of choices, either.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Really?” Garin leaned back as well. “Do you know who is trying to kill you?”

  “A man named Corvin Lesauvage and the monks of the Brotherhood of the Silent Rain.”

  Garin’s eyes flicked to the book on the table. “You’ve been reading about them.”

  “You,” Annja said distinctly, “can read Latin.”

  Garin shrugged. “One of several languages.”

  “You share that with Roux.”

  “I should. He taught me.”

  “What kind of work do you do, Mr. Braden?”

  “Me?” Garin held a hand to his chest and smiled brilliantly. “Why, I am a criminal.”

  Somehow, Annja wasn’t terribly surprised. From the way he’d moved back at the coffee shop, she might have guessed that he was in the military. She nodded.

  “You knew that?” Garin asked in the silence that followed his declaration.

  “I’d thought you were a soldier—”

  “I’ve been a soldier many times,” Garin said. “The tools change, but the practice and methodology remain much the same.”

  “But I realized a soldier would have stayed in Lozère and straightened things out with the law-enforcement people.”

  “The police and I, we’re of a different…persuasion.” Garin waved at a passing server. “Staying in Lozère was not an option. I could not protect you there.”

  “Or take me to Roux.”

  “Exactly.”

  The server took their order. Garin ordered for them both, which Annja found somewhat old-fashioned and pleasant. He was, she admitted upon reflection, an oddity. He had undoubtedly killed men only a short time ago and evidently gave no further thought to it.

  Then she frowned at her own line of thinking. She’d more or less done the same thing herself yesterday. Or at least tried to. She didn’t know if she’d actually killed anyone. Roux certainly had.

  For a moment she felt stung by the guilt the sisters at the orphanage had worked so hard to foster in her. Then she pushed it out of her mind. If she’d learned one thing in those gray walls filled with rules and recriminations, it was to take care of herself. She’d learned the hard way that no one else would.

  “Do the monks work for Lesauvage?” Garin asked when he’d finished speaking to the server.

  “No.” From Lesauvage’s reaction to the situation, Annja was firmly convinced of that.

  “Then they’re working independently.” Garin picked up a package of crackers, tore them open and started eating. “Who is Lesauvage?”

  “A criminal.”

  “I’ve never heard of him. What does he want?”

  “The charm your friend Roux stole from me.”

  Garin frowned. “Roux is not my friend.” He shifted. “Why does Lesauvage want the charm?”

  “I don’t know. Does Roux?”

  “If he does, he hasn’t told me. What about the monks? What do they want?”

  “During their attempt to abduct me, they didn’t say.”

  Garin pointed at the book on the table. “Did that offer any clue?”

  “No. According to the authors, who were monks, the brotherhood was a peaceful group. Big on vineyards and cheeses.”

  “Must have been very profitable being a monk back in those days. Or at least a good time.”

  The server returned with two glasses of wine and placed them on the table.

  Garin hoisted his glass and offered a toast. “Salut.”

  “Salut,” Annja said, meeting his glass with hers. “Why does Roux want the charm?”

  Garin hesitated.

  “If you start holding out on me, I’ll have to reconsider my options,” Annja said.

  A look of seriousness darkened Garin’s face. “Have you studied Joan of Arc?”

  “Roux asked me that, too,” Annja said.

  “What did he say about her?”

  “Nothing really. He moved the conversation on to the charm.”

  “Did he? Interesting. Obviously he didn’t want you to know what he’s working on.”

  “What are you talking about?” Annja asked.

  “Roux believes the charm was part of Joan of Arc’s sword.”

  Annja was stunned. She remembered the histories and the stories. The young woman had been burned at the stake, labeled a heretic by the church. Some tales claimed that her sword had magic powers, some that it had been shattered the day she was burned at the stake.

  “Does Roux have other pieces of the sword?” she asked.

  “With the acquisition of the piece you found, Roux thinks he has them all. That’s why we’re going to his house. That’s why I’m risking my life taking you there and trusting that he will at least set aside our differences.”

  “Why?” Annja asked.

  “Because I am convinced you have something to do with the sword.”

  “But I’ve never even had any real interest in Joan of Arc.” The story was one Annja had read as a girl in the orphanage. She’d been fascinated by Joan’s heroism and bravery, of course, but the whole “called by God” thing had left her skeptical.

  “The earth,” Garin stated, “opened up and let you find the final piece of the sword. Even after it had been hidden from sight for hundreds of years.”

  “That was an earthquake.” Annja was beginning to feel that she was stepping into a side dimension and leaving the real world behind.

  “It was a miracle,” Garin said.

  She looked at him,
wondering if he was deliberately baiting her. “Do you really believe that?”

  Pausing a moment, Garin shook his head. “I don’t know. And I’ve got more reason to believe it than I’m willing to go into at this moment. For the rest of the story, we’ll have to talk to Roux.”

  “Even if that charm was part of Joan of Arc’s sword, that doesn’t mean it was the last piece.”

  “Roux says it is.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “In this, of all things, I do.”

  “Then how do I fit in?”

  “I don’t know. I know only that you must. As ego deflating as it is for him, Roux has had to face that, as well. That doesn’t mean he accepts it.”

  The server returned, carrying a massive tray piled high with food.

  “Let’s eat,” Garin suggested. “At the moment, there’s nothing more to tell.”

  Despite the confusion that spun within her, Annja hadn’t lost her appetite. There was more to Garin’s story. He was holding something back that he considered important. She was convinced of that. But she was also convinced that he wouldn’t tell her any more of it at the moment.

  As she ate, she kept watch outside the building. Part of her kept expecting to see local police roll up at any moment.

  Night filtered the sky, turning the bright haze to ochre and finally black by the time they finished the meal. Then they were on the road again. The answers, at least some of them, lay only a few hours into the future.

  15

  “Put this on.”

  Avery Moreau accepted the robe fashioned from wolf pelts. It was heavy and itchy against his bare skin. He wrinkled his nose in ill-disguised disgust. And it smelled like wet dog even more this time than the last.

  Without a word, he pulled the robe on and stood waiting in the small room lit by the single naked bulb. The air felt thin and tasted metallic. He struggled to catch his breath but couldn’t quite seem to.

  Where he had expected to feel only anticipation at this moment, he now felt dread. He hadn’t succeeded in his assignment. Surely Lesauvage wasn’t going to initiate him now.

  But here he stood, clad in the furs of the Wild Hunt, called to one of the secret meetings.

  Marcel stood before him, already wearing the wolf’s-head helmet that masked his features. He was big and blocky, one of the older boys whom Avery had grown up in fear of. Like most of Corvin Lesauvage’s recruits, Marcel had been a bully all his life and had developed a taste for violence.

  Avery had never truly felt that way. He’d been violent over the years. Growing up as the son of a known thief would do that to someone. If his father had been a successful bank robber or knocked over armored cars on a regular basis, perhaps things would have been different. There might even have been money in the house.

  But Gerard Moreau hadn’t done those things. He’d barely stolen enough to keep his family fed and a roof over their heads most of the time. He’d been too lazy to work at an hourly wage, which wouldn’t have fed them, either, and too unskilled to find a job that would.

  Gerard Moreau had been trapped by circumstance into the life that he had. Until the night Inspector Edouard Richelieu shot and killed him in cold blood. The act had been nothing less than premeditated murder.

  That night, Avery had been with his father. Posted as a lookout, Avery had to keep watch and make sure no one approached from outside.

  No one had approached from outside the house. The police inspector had been inside the house. Richelieu had been entertaining Etienne Pettit’s wife that evening, unbeknownst to anyone in Lozère.

  Pettit was a powerful man in the town, and not one who would have put up with being cuckolded in his own home by a police inspector who lived with his mother. If Pettit had found out about his wife’s infidelities, the man would have divorced his wife and left her with nothing. And he would have broken Inspector Richelieu, had him tossed out of the police department onto the street.

  That was why Richelieu had shot Gerard Moreau six times. The police inspector loved his job because it validated him in ways that Avery didn’t understand but knew existed.

  When he closed his eyes, Avery could still see his father fleeing for his life through the window to the backyard. He’d slipped and fallen in dog feces, and tried to get back to his feet.

  Then Richelieu, totally nude, stood in the window with his pistol in his fist and opened fire. The rolling thunder had driven Gerard Moreau to the ground and ripped the life from him in bloody handfuls.

  Avery had hidden. He’d been too afraid to act, and too inexperienced to know what to do if he had tried. He’d held himself and cried silent tears. In the end, he’d had to clap a hand over his mouth in order to keep from crying out.

  Later, Richelieu told everyone that he had been the first to respond to the burglar alarm at the Pettit house. After he’d dressed, he’d obviously told Isabelle Pettit to set off the alarm.

  No one asked why Richelieu felt compelled to shoot a fleeing suspect six times in the back. The police inspector had simply stated that it had been dark, which was the truth, and he claimed not to have known who the burglar was.

  Everyone knew that Gerard Moreau never carried a weapon. He’d always stolen what he could, laid out his time in jail, and lived a mostly quiet life.

  Gerard Moreau had tried to stop his son from becoming a thief. In the end, though, there hadn’t been any other way for Avery to get the kinds of clothes he needed to wear or any of a thousand things it took to be a teenager in today’s world.

  When he’d seen he couldn’t curb his son’s ways, Gerard Moreau decided to properly train Avery in the ways of a burglar. He’d claimed that as his father, he could do no less than offer him the trade that he had employed to sustain his family.

  That night at the Pettit house had been the first—and last—time father and son had worked a job together.

  Knowing that his voice would never be heard—if it was, his tale would only land him in jail and would not bring his father’s murderer any closer to justice—Avery ran that night. Later, when the policemen came calling at his door, he’d acted surprised about his father’s death. Even if they’d suspected anything, his grief was real and they’d left him alone with it.

  Three days after he’d been shot and killed, Gerard Moreau had been laid to rest in a pauper’s grave in the church cemetery. And Avery had sworn revenge.

  The only way he could conceive to get it, though, was through Corvin Lesauvage and his secret society. Avery had known about them through some of the other guys his age who had become part of Lesauvage’s gang. Pack, they called themselves. They were part of what Lesauvage termed the Wild Hunt. And Lesauvage had a magic potion that could make men invincible.

  “Are you ready?” Marcel asked.

  Not trusting his voice, Avery nodded.

  Turning, Marcel knocked on the wall of the basement beneath the big house Lesauvage owned. Gears ground within the wall, then a section of it pulled back and away to reveal a doorway.

  “Praise be to the name of the Hunter,” Marcel intoned as he stepped through the doorway.

  “Praise be to the name of the Hunter,” Avery echoed as he followed Marcel. He didn’t know who the Hunter was.

  But Lesauvage and his pack took their mysticism seriously.

  Another young man dressed in wolfs’ hides stood in the middle of the narrow, twisting flight of stairs that led down into the bedrock. He held two flaming torches. He passed one to Marcel.

  In silence, they marched down the stairs. The wavering torchlight made footing tricky. Several times Avery made a misstep that could have sent him plunging down the stairs. He didn’t think anyone waiting down there would have bothered to carry him back up.

  The pack waited at the bottom. There were at least thirty of them standing together, each of them with a torch.

  The first time Avery had come here, he’d been scared to death. There were caves all throughout the area, but he hadn’t expected to walk around i
n one under a house near the center of town. According to the tales he’d heard, the cave had once served as a smuggler’s den for pirate goods hauled up from the southern coast of France and bound for Paris.

  Bats hung among the stalactites. Several of the corresponding stalagmites had been removed. Avery thought the cave smelled like death. It also smelled like wet dog and bat guano.

  Marcel put a hand against Avery’s chest and stopped him. Then Marcel and the other pack member went to join the group.

  Avery felt the fear returning. Being set apart from peers had always been a bad thing. Either as punishment or as a reward, getting singled out nearly always resulted in negative consequences. He’d learned that in school. It was one of those lessons that stayed with a person the rest of his life.

  “Avery Moreau.” The deep voice echoed within the vast cavern.

  “Yes.” Avery had to try twice to get his voice to work. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the light. Even squinting didn’t help against the bright torchlight.

  “You failed me.”

  Fear gripped Avery’s heart then and he stood—barely—trembling. “I did everything I could. I led you to the woman. I told you where she would be in the mountains.”

  “Annja Creed escaped, and she took something that belonged to me.” Lesauvage, dressed in hides and wearing a helmet that sported huge deer antlers, stepped forward from the pack. His helmet came complete with snarling deer features that were stained muddy scarlet. His light-colored eyes glittered.

  “That wasn’t my fault,” Avery said. “I didn’t do it.”

  “You bear the blame for this,” Lesauvage accused. “You brought the outsider to the woman.”

  What about the other guys? Avery wanted to ask. What about those men dressed in black? It’s not my fault they showed up!

  “Look,” he said desperately, “that wasn’t my fault. I’ll do anything you want me to.”

  Lesauvage stepped toward him.

  Avery backed away.

  “You failed us,” Lesauvage said again. “But you can still serve us.” He drew a long-bladed knife from the sleeve of the robe he wore under the wolf hides.