by Alex Archer
At a gesture from their leader, the pack descended upon Avery. Working quickly, as if they’d done this sort of thing countless times, they bound his hands and feet and draped him over a rounded stalagmite in the center of the cave.
One of them brought out a goat, yanking the poor creature savagely. Lesauvage stepped over to the goat and dragged his knife along its throat.
Blood spewed out. One of the pack members held a stainless-steel pot under the flow. But the dying creature fought and kicked, spattering the stone floor with its lifeblood. Finally, it grew still.
Chanting and cheering, two of the pack members seized the goat and heaved the animal into the shadowy crevasse. There was no thump of arrival. No one had ever measured the waiting fall.
Another pack member passed out tin cups and each person took a portion of the blood. Lesauvage passed among them, dropping powder into the steaming liquid. They stirred the brew with their fingers and drank it down.
Howling like madmen, their faces red with goat’s blood, the pack danced with savage abandon as the drugs worked into their systems.
Avery had seen a sacrifice only once before. It had been two weeks ago, after his father had been murdered and before the American woman—Annja Creed—had arrived to search for La Bête. It had scared him then. Tied up as he was on the rock, potentially their next sacrifice, he was now even more frightened.
Lesauvage gestured to Avery.
Immediately four members, including Marcel, descended upon him like carrion feeders. They forced open his jaws and poured down a cup of goat’s blood and drugs, howling in his ears the whole time.
At first, Avery thought he was going to drown. He tried not to drink, tried to turn his head away, but they held him firmly. He swallowed, gagging as he almost inhaled it. Once he’d drawn a full breath, they filled his mouth again.
Over and over, the salty taste of the blood coated the inside of his mouth. He thought he was going to be sick. I didn’t want this! I only wanted justice for my father!
Finally they left him alone and returned to chanting and singing. They whirled and slammed into each other, laughing when they knocked each other down.
And the drugs hit Avery’s system like surf smashing across a reef barrier, gliding through in a diffused spray that hit everything. The fear inside him evaporated. Energy filled him.
Lesauvage came and stood over Avery. The knife in the man’s hand dripped blood.
“You can still serve us,” Lesauvage told him.
Avery thought the way the man’s voice echoed and rolled and changed timbres was amusing. So amusing, in fact, that he was laughing out loud before he knew it.
Then Lesauvage leaned in close to Avery. Light exploded all around, glinting from the crimson-streaked edge of the knife.
“Now!” Lesauvage shouted. “Now you will serve us!”
Avery watched as the blade rose and fell. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to scream.
16
“Are you nervous?” Annja asked as Garin slowly approached the huge house built into the hillside.
“A little.” Garin shrugged. “Roux and I never part on good terms. Not since—” He paused. “Not for a very long time.”
“The last time I saw him, he walked out on a dinner tab on me.” Annja gazed up at the house. She didn’t know where they were. Garin had taken a number of turns after they’d left the highway. All she knew was that they were somewhere south of Paris.
“A dinner tab?” Garin chuckled.
“It was nothing to laugh about. My credit card took a serious hit over that.”
“The last time I saw Roux,” Garin said, “he tried to kill me.”
Annja stared at him.
“I attempted to blow up his car first,” Garin explained as if it was nothing. “With him in it. So I suppose he was entitled.” He shrugged. “He was dazed at the time, or maybe he would have got me. I truly didn’t expect him to survive.”
“Then why isn’t he meeting you at the gate with a rocket launcher?” Annja asked while wondering once again what rabbit hole she had fallen down.
“Because I’ve got you and he’s interested in talking to you. Right now. Perhaps getting out of the house will be more…risky.”
“Oh.” Annja thought maybe she should have opted for the airport and a chance at escape.
But she would have left behind the mystery and she didn’t like unfinished business.
“Maybe Roux has gotten over your attempt to kill him,” Annja suggested.
“I doubt it. He can be rather unforgiving.”
She thought about Lesauvage and the Brotherhood of the Silent Rain. She didn’t feel very forgiving toward them.
Garin eased to a stop at the gatehouse. His gun rested in his lap. He dropped his right hand over it.
“How long has it been?” Annja asked. “Since you tried to blow him up, I mean?”
“Twenty years. In Rio de Janeiro.”
“Twenty years ago?”
“Yes.” Garin’s attention was on the armed guard approaching the car.
Annja thought he had to be joking. But as he thumbed down the window, he was tense as piano wire. It wasn’t a joke. But twenty years?
“You hold your age well,” she commented dryly.
“You,” Garin assured her, “have no idea.” He raised his voice and spoke to the guard. “Stay back from the car.”
The guard started to lift his assault rifle.
“If you raise that rifle,” Garin said, showing the man the big pistol, “I’m going to kill you.”
The guard froze. “Mr. Roux,” he said in a calm voice.
“Yes,” Roux’s unmistakable voice came over the radio.
“Your guest is armed.”
“Of course he is. I wouldn’t expect him any other way. Let him pass. I’ll deal with him.”
“Yes, sir.” The guard waved to his counterpart inside the gatehouse.
Garin smiled but never moved the pistol from the center of the man’s chest. “Thank you.” The gates separated and he rolled forward, following the ornate drive to the big house.
“A lot of testosterone in the air tonight,” Annja commented. She had to work to make herself sound calm. She was anything but.
“There is a lot,” Garin said, “that you don’t know.”
ROUX STOOD outside the house, defiant and confident, as if he were a general in control of a battlefield instead of a lion trapped in his den. He wore a dark suit that made him look like a wealthy businessman. His hair and beard were carefully combed.
A young man in butler’s livery opened Annja’s car door. He said, “Welcome, miss,” in a British accent sharp as a paper cut.
Annja stepped out, still wearing the blouse and shorts she had worn for her research trip through Lozère that morning and afternoon. She felt extremely underdressed.
Garin’s black clothes suited the night and the surroundings. He slipped the big pistol under his jacket.
“Miss Creed,” Roux greeted her with a smile, as if they had just been introduced and none of the previous day’s weirdness had occurred between them. “Welcome to my home.”
Annja tried not to appear awestruck.
The home was huge. Palatially huge. Ivy clung to the stone walls and almost pulled the house into the trees that surrounded it, softening the straight lines and absorbing the colors. The effect was clearly deliberate.
The butler stood by Roux and his eyes never left Garin. In response, Garin bared his teeth in a shark’s merciless grin.
“You have a new lapdog,” Garin said.
“Do not,” Roux growled in warning, “trifle with Henshaw. If you do, one of you will surely be dead. I will not suffer his loss willingly.”
Roux even talked differently in his home, Annja realized. He’s really buying into the whole lord-of-the-manor thing.
“An Englishman?” Garin snorted derisively. “After everything we’ve been through, you trust your life to an Englishman?”
“I do,” Roux sa
id. “I’ve found few others worth trusting.”
Garin folded his arms and said nothing.
Roux turned his attention to Annja. “You must be tired.”
“No,” Annja replied.
“Hungry?”
“No,” she said. She returned his bright blue gaze full measure. “Eating with you is too expensive.”
Roux laughed in honest delight. “I did hope you had enough to cover the bill.”
“Thanks,” Annja said. “Tons.” She held out her hand. “You owe me for your half of the bill.”
Amused, Roux snaked a hand into his pocket and pulled out a thick sheaf of bills. He pressed several into her hand.
Annja counted out enough to cover his half of the bill, then gave the rest back.
He frowned a little. “I’m sure the tab was more than that.”
“It was,” Annja said. “I only took half. Plus half the tip.”
“I would have paid for it all.”
“No,” she told him. “I don’t want to owe you anything.”
Roux put the money way. “There’s still the bit about me saving your life in the cave.”
“Really?” Annja smiled sweetly. She spoke without turning around, but she could see the man in her peripheral vision. “Garin?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Do you want to kill Mr. Roux right now?”
“Nothing,” the big man said, “would make me happier.”
“Please don’t.”
Garin’s smile broadened. “If you insist.”
“I do.” Looking directly at Roux, Annja nodded. “We’re even. I just saved your life.”
A displeased look filled Roux’s patrician features. “You’re going to be trouble,” he declared.
“I find I’m liking her more and more all the time,” Garin said.
“If nothing else, this should be interesting,” Roux announced.
“I want to see the charm,” Annja said.
Roux ushered them into his house.
IF THE HOUSE HAD APPEARED wondrous and magical on the outside, it was even more so on the inside.
Annja gave up trying to act unimpressed. Paintings, ceramic works of art, stained glass, weapons, books and other pieces that should have been in museums instead of a man’s home adorned the spacious rooms. Most of them had private lighting.
If Roux wasn’t already wealthy, he would be if he sold off his collections. And a crook besides. Several of the pieces Annja saw were on lists of stolen items or had been banned from being removed from their country of origin.
The trip back to his personal office took time. Garin—obviously no lover of antiquities—looked bored as he trailed along after them, but Roux took obvious delight in showing off his acquisitions. He even offered brief anecdotes or histories regarding them.
Annja didn’t know how long it took to get to the sword, but she was convinced it was a trip she’d never forget.
“The sword, the sword,” Garin said when he could no longer hold his tongue. “Come on, Roux. You and I have waited for over five hundred years. Let’s not wait any longer.”
Five hundred years? Annja thought, realizing only then what he’d said. She figured it was only an exaggeration meant to stress a point.
Roux’s office offered an even more enticing obstacle course that cried out for Annja’s attention. Evidently he kept his favorite—and unique—items from his collections there.
Finally, though, with much prodding from Garin, and a promise of physical violence that almost triggered an assault from Henshaw, they reached Roux’s vault room.
The huge door swiveled open. Roux disappeared inside the vault and returned carrying a case. He placed the case on the huge mahogany desk and opened it.
Something deeply moving attracted Annja’s attention even more strongly than all the priceless objects she’d passed to reach this point. She stared at the pieces that had once made up the sword blade. Some of them were only thin needles of steel. Others looked as if they’d burned black in a fire. None of them would ever fit together again.
Yet she knew they all belonged together.
Somehow, on a level that she truly didn’t understand, Annja knew that all the pieces were there. And that they had at last come home.
Unbidden, she stepped forward and reached out her right hand. Heat radiated against her palm.
“The pieces are hot,” she said.
Standing beside her, Roux stretched out a hand. “I don’t feel anything,” he said.
Annja shook her head. “These pieces are giving off heat. I can feel it.” She studied the pieces, finding the charm she had discovered in La Bête’s lair.
It lay with the wolf and mountain side up. Bending down, the switched on the desk light and peered at the image.
“What do you know about the charm, Roux?” she asked.
The old man shrugged. “Nothing. I only knew when I saw it that it was part of this sword.”
“Joan of Arc’s sword?”
Roux turned on Garin. “You told her?”
The younger man looked impassive. “Does it matter?”
“You’re a fool,” Roux snapped. “You’ve always been a fool.”
“And it’s taken you over five hundred years to find the pieces of this sword,” Garin returned. “If you’ve found them. I’d say that’s pretty ineffectual. Perhaps recruiting people to help would have moved things along more quickly.”
Annja moved her hand slowly over the sword fragments.
Roux, Garin and Henshaw all drew closer.
“Is this really her sword?” Annja asked. She moved her hand faster. “Joan of Arc’s?” The heat was back, more intense than before.
“Yes,” Roux said hoarsely.
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw her carry it.”
Annja looked at him. “That was more than five hundred years ago.”
“Yes,” Roux agreed seriously. “It was. I saw the soldiers break Joan’s sword. I watched her burn at the stake.” Sadness filled his face. “There was nothing I could do.”
Numb with disbelief, but hearing the echo of truth in the old man’s words, Annja tried to speak and couldn’t. She tried again. “That’s impossible,” she whispered.
The old man shook his head. “No. There are things you don’t know yet. Impossible things happen.” He paused, studying the pieces. “I’m gazing at my latest reminder of that.”
Annja held her hand still. The pieces seemed to quiver below her palm. Before she knew she was doing it, she shoved both hands closer.
Her fingers curled around the leather-wrapped hilt.
An explosion of rainbow-colored light filled the case and overflowed into Roux’s den. The shadow of something flew overhead on wings of driven snow. A single musical note thrummed.
For one brief second, Annja lifted the sword from the case. In that second, she was amazed to see that the sword’s blade was whole. The rainbow-colored light reflected on the highly polished metal.
Images of other lights were caught in the blade’s surface. A hundred pinpoints of flaming arrows sailed into the sky. Small houses burned to the ground. Running men in armor and covered with flaming oil died in their tracks, their faces twisted by screams of agony that thankfully went unheard.
At that moment, more than anything, Annja wanted to protect the sword. She didn’t want Roux or Garin to take it from her. She had the strangest thought that it had been away too long already.
The sword vanished. The weight dissipated from her hands. She was left holding air.
“Where did it go?” Roux roared in her ear. “What did you do with the sword?” He grabbed Annja roughly by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. “What the hell did you do?”
At first, Annja didn’t even recognize he was speaking in Latin. She reacted instinctively, clasping her hands together and driving her single fist up between them to break his hold on her. Still moving, she swung her doubled fists into the side of his head
.
Roux spilled onto the Persian rug under the ornate desk where the empty case now sat.
The sword was gone.
17
Garin and Henshaw froze. Annja knew if either of them had so much as flinched, someone—perhaps both—would have died.
Getting to his feet with as much aplomb and dignity as he could muster under the circumstances, Roux cursed and worked his jaw experimentally, a bad combination as it turned out.
Annja dropped into fighting stance, both hands held clenched in fists before her. “I didn’t do anything to the sword,” she told the old man. “It disappeared. I lifted it from the case—”
“The pieces disappeared as soon as you touched the hilt,” Roux snarled. “I saw that happen.”
“Pieces?” Annja echoed. “It wasn’t pieces that disappeared. I drew the sword out of that case. It was whole.”
Roux searched her face with his harsh, angry gaze. “Poppycock. The sword was still in pieces.”
He’s insane, Annja thought. That’s the only explanation. And Garin, too. Both of them as mad as hatters. And they’ve given you something—a chemical—something that soaks in through the skin. Or maybe the room has something in the air. You didn’t see what you thought you saw. Something like that can’t have happened.
She told herself that, but didn’t completely believe it. She’d been under the influence of hallucinogens strong enough to give her waking dreams and walking nightmares before.
Once, in Italy, she’d come in contact with a leftover psychotropic drug used by one of Venice’s Medici family members that had still been strong enough to send her to the hospital for two days.
In England, she’d been around Rastafarians who had helped with packing the supplies on a dig site who had smoked joints so strong she had a contact high that lasted for hours. She’d never used recreational drugs. But she knew what kinds of effects to look for.
There were none of those now.
“Think about it, Roux,” Garin insisted. “If she took the sword pieces, where are they? She has no pockets large enough to store them. We were all watching her.”
Roux cursed more as he searched the case and came up empty again.
