by Lynn Viehl
“Hello, Quatorze.”
Simone tried to sit up, but he planted his boot between her breasts and bore down on it to keep her in place. She did not recognize the priest’s young, handsome face, which seemed flawless. Only when he spoke had she noticed a degree of unnatural immobility that suggested he had not been born with such perfect features.
The voice, however, she knew as well as her own. “Pájaro.”
“You remember me.” He seemed delighted by this, his mouth curling up in a Cupid’s bow as he produced a dark blade and bent down to cut open the front of her robe. “I had not thought he would permit it. He made you put all the others out of your mind, didn’t he? After he cut their throats.”
“I’ve never forgotten you.” She saw the murderous glee in his eyes, and in it recognized her last chance to escape. “I am glad to know you are still alive.”
“Still the little liar.” He made a chiding sound as he bent down and used the blade to slice through her harness, stripping it from her and throwing it into the bushes. He did the same with the two pistols he removed from her pockets. “I considered taking you with me when I left, but my chances of successfully faking two deaths seemed rather improbable.” He tugged on a torn piece of her robe. “He finally gave you to the convent, I see. Has locking you up in the nunnery kept you from becoming a five-euro whore, like your mother? Where is he?”
“Helada.”
Simone looked at the man who came out of the château.
“Did you find it?” Pájaro asked.
The mercenary nodded. “In the back.”
“Recall the men.” Pájaro looked down as Simone seized his combat boot, clutching it. “You have something else to offer me, Quatorze?”
“I will go with you and your men, and do whatever they want. Whatever you want, mon frère.” The beseeching words tasted like acid in her mouth. “If you and your men will leave with me now, my body and my life are yours.”
He looked down at her with visible pleasure. “What happened to the girl who never lost a battle?”
“That is not my life anymore.”
“You sound like your mother.” Pájaro reached down and hauled her to her feet, jerking her close. His hot breath touched her face as he whispered, “I found her in Paris, you know. Yes, there she was, still peddling her diseased cunt under bridges and behind rubbish bins. I bought her with a swig of cheap wine and the promise of a needle. She pleaded for her life in the first five minutes. It took another hour before she begged me to end it.” He put his mouth next to her ear. “I was generous. I gave her another two weeks to live.”
She swallowed hard to keep from vomiting on him. “I will last longer than she did.”
“Anything is possible.” He clamped his hand around her throat, applying just enough pressure to make her vision dim. “Now, where is he?”
She had to gasp out her reply. “Everywhere.”
“Maudite garce. I don’t need you to tell me. When he discovers I have the scroll, he will run to me.” He shoved her at the waiting man. “You and the others can amuse yourselves with this one for a few minutes. She won’t fight you. She won’t fight anyone.”
The man grinned. “Can we take her with us? It is a long drive to Marseilles.”
Pájaro shook his head. “I have another slut to deal with there. When you’ve finished, gag her and tie her up inside. She can burn with the rest of the bodies.”
Chapter 3
A
fter tearing off and using his sleeve to temporarily bind his still-bleeding leg wound, Korvel limped through the gates and started up the drive toward the burning château. The broken copper blade lodged inside his flesh wouldn’t kill him immediately, but until it was removed its poisons would continue to weaken him. The cursed metal also affected his ability to move; already he felt numb from knee to hip. Soon he wouldn’t be able to remain upright, much less walk.
He came up behind a large unmarked truck, using it as cover when he heard men shouting and laughing. He gripped in each hand the greased blades he had recovered from the corpses by the gates and shifted his position from one side of the truck to the other. Silently he inched forward until he had a better view of the front of the château.
On the ground lay two elderly mortals; both had been shot and appeared dead. Four other mortals stood on the drive in a quad formation, shoving back and forth between them a young female in a long gray dress and white-banded gray kerchief. She cringed and stumbled but did not resist them, her features as tight as the hands she used to clutch together the remains of her bodice. They’d already ripped open her dress.
Not a dress, he realized, but a habit. The girl was a nun.
The game the men were playing became immediately obvious as well; they pushed and snatched at her, pawing and groping her body as she tried to evade them. Their laughter and the girl’s struggles breached Korvel’s self-control, igniting and feeding a killing fury, until the rage wiped clean every calculated thought from his head. Now he wanted only to feel bones snapping beneath his fists, and flesh parting against his blades.
One of the men, apparently impatient to be the first to inflict real harm on the girl, finally caught her and threw her to the ground, straddling her as he tore at his belt buckle. He had just begun to drop on top of her when Korvel reached them.
“Animal.” With one motion he hauled the mortal off the girl and snapped his neck. As the other men reached for their weapons, he used the dead mortal’s pistol to shoot two in the head.
The last man he shot in the knee as he was running away. Grim pleasure spread through him as he hobbled over and aimed at the back of his skull.
“Please don’t shoot him,” a low, soft voice said in French-accented English.
The next breath Korvel took came with the scents of green rosemary, thyme, and something sweeter and darker, warming his chest and stirring his hunger. It came from the nun, who was no longer cowering but moved with purpose as she came to kneel beside the groaning man and turn him over onto his back.
He wondered whether she was in shock. “You would show mercy to this one, sister? He had none for you.”
“I don’t care about that.” The nun leaned forward and murmured something in Italian to the man, who said, “La serre,” and jabbed his finger toward the side of the château.
Korvel reached down to help the girl to her feet, but with one fluid movement she stood and brushed past him, running in the direction the man had indicated. “Sister, wait.”
The nun didn’t look back.
“Damn me.” He drove his boot into the wounded man’s temple, knocking him out, and then started after the girl.
The tangle of shrubbery and hedges crowding the grounds formed an impromptu yet effective labyrinth, forcing Korvel to track the nun by her scent. That led him to the open door of an enormous glass greenhouse behind the château.
Broken glass crunched under his boots as he stepped inside. The men had left the place in ruins; what they hadn’t smashed they’d knocked over or thrown through the glass panels of the walls. He worked his way back to the gardener’s benches, where the nun crouched beside a large pot that had been cracked in two. Spilled black soil and the pale green, broken wands of paper, whites littered the ground around her.
“Sister, what are you doing?”
She did not respond as she used her hands to claw through the contents of the shattered pot, stopping only when her fingernails scraped the bottom. She rose quickly and looked all around her.
“Sister.” He didn’t want to touch her, but she seemed unaware of his presence, so he reached for her dirty wrist. “Please, stop—”
The moment his fingers began to curl around her wrist she pivoted, sliding her hand out through his so quickly he ended up with only a little soil in his palm. She moved around him as if he were nothing more than an object in her way, her eyes still searching the floor, until she made a strange sound and bent to pick up something.
Korvel looked over her
shoulder. The long green sack had been fashioned out of velvet and embroidered with golden thread. A symbol worked in the fabric, a tiny triad formed of three circles, had been stitched over and over to form two long cylinders side by side.
“What is it?” he asked her.
She removed the long gray metal case inside before dropping the sack. The hasp on one side of the case had been carelessly pried apart, and when she opened it he saw that the inside had been lined with the same embroidered green velvet.
Whatever the case had once held, however, had been removed.
With some difficulty Korvel bent and picked up the sack to examine the design again. Touching the fabric sent an unpleasant tingle through his fingers, but it faded almost as soon as he felt it. The arrangement of the two embroidered cylinders, however, finally made sense to him. “This was used to hold the scroll.”
“It was.” The nun’s eyes shifted up, and in them he saw a strange weariness. “Who are you?”
Since she knew where the scroll had been, she had to be an ally, but he would be sure of it. “I mean you no harm.” He reached for her, resting his fingertips against her throat. “Give me your name.”
“Simone Derien.” She turned her head and took a deep breath. “You smell of larkspur.”
She had a Frenchwoman’s discerning nose; the few mortal females he encountered remarked most often that he smelled like a pastry shop. Korvel frowned as his body swayed, and only then realized that his leg was buckling. The nun was too slight to bear the brunt of his weight, so he removed his hand and reached for the edge of a plant stand to brace himself. “Were you sent here?”
“I was summoned.” She stared down at his leg. “You are bleeding all over the ground, Englishman.”
He glanced at the small, wet red pool in which he stood. “So I am.”
The plant stand insisted on tipping over at that moment, and took Korvel with it. He marveled that such a flimsy object could fell him, a feat not even the shrewdest, most skilled warrior among the guard had ever achieved.
He landed on his side, his vision alternately blurring and sharpening, which allowed him to snatch glimpses of Sister Simone as she dropped down beside him. Why had he not noticed until this moment how unusual and lovely the green of her eyes was, or the intense perfection of her fair, delicate skin? Every feature on her face shouted purity, from the smooth arch of her pale brows to the sweet bow of her full, rosy lips.
“It is good that you chose the Church,” he told her. “You have the face of an angel.”
“You are delirious,” she replied, removing her head veil to reveal what seemed to be a crown of braided copper and gold. “Were you shot in the leg?”
“Stabbed.” And with him on his back as he was, she could not remove the broken blade from the wound. That no longer seemed to trouble him as he fixed his gaze on the wondrous treasure she had been hiding. “God in heaven. Is that your hair?” He tried to touch it, but his arm refused to obey him.
“Be still.” Her strong, capable-looking hands tore a long strip from her veil. “I will see to your wound, but then I must go. The others will notice the smoke and come for you.”
“Everyone leaves me.” The thought of her doing the same seemed to penetrate the muddle of his thoughts and bring back a measure of sanity. “You cannot go. The mortal’s blade broke off in my leg. Unless you remove it, I will sicken and die.”
She sat up, trailing her fingers through the blood that had soaked through his trousers and then lifting them to her nose. “You are one of the Kyn.”
“Aye. Korvel, seneschal to Tremayne.” He heard his voice slurring the words, and seized her wrist, using the last of his strength to drag her down atop him. His blood loss had filled the air with his scent, but he focused, releasing even more until he saw her eyes go dark. “You will not leave me like this. You will take the copper out of my body. You will remain with me until nightfall.” He kept his eyes on hers until he heard her slowly agree with him, and then brought her hand to his lips. “Thank you, my angel.”
“I don’t get what the big deal is,” Nicola Jefferson said as she peered through the bulletproof glass between her and the portrait on the museum wall. “She’s yellow. She’s crackly. And she’s not smiling; she’s smirking. Seriously smirking. Like she’s been stepping out on the sly with her brother-in-law or her best friend’s husband or something.”
“Perhaps she did.” Gabriel Seran tugged on one of Nick’s white curls. “The lady’s contemporaries considered her a great beauty of her time.”
“A beauty?” Nick made a rude sound. “She doesn’t even have eyelashes or eyebrows.” She glanced at him. “Oh, I get it. You knew her?”
“Her name was Lisa del Giocondo, and no, I never met her,” he admitted. “The artist, however, accepted an invitation from the king and came to stay at Clos Lucé, near my home in Amboise.”
“You met Leonardo da Vinci.” Nick chuckled. “Get out of town.”
“I did meet him several times, thanks to his insomnia, which often compelled him to go walking at night.” Gabriel eyed some approaching Japanese tourists before taking her arm. “You would have liked him, I think. The two of you share many qualities.”
She followed him to the next exhibit. “Is that a diplomatic way of saying I’m as cranky and bad tempered as he was?”
As the tourists began snapping photos of the Mona Lisa, Gabriel bent his head and brushed a gentle kiss against her lips. “As old as he was when we met, he still had the incandescence of a much younger man. You could look into his eyes and see all the passions and fires inside him, waiting to be unleashed.” He touched his mouth to hers again. “Exactly like yours.”
“Keep kissing me,” she warned, “and I’ll get very hot on you. Right here in public.” With a sigh she scanned the room. “I don’t like this. Our informant should have been here an hour ago. Assuming she is an informant and not some double agent for the holy freaks.”
Gabriel ran his fingertip along the curve of her jaw. “Our friends investigated her thoroughly, and confirmed her as a reliable source.”
“Baby, she’s a Paris street hooker. That tends to put a big ‘un-’ before reliable.” Nick caught a trace of something salty and unpleasant in the air: the smell of old blood and fresh fear. She turned around, zeroing in on a woman who stepped inside the entrance to the Salle des États. “Trouble at six o’clock.”
Gabriel breathed in and his mouth tightened. “She’s injured.”
The two immortals casually approached the veiled woman, who wore a heavy coat, hat, and sunglasses with enormous lenses. As she noticed them she shuffled back a step and looked from side to side before closing the gap between them. “You are les détectives?”
“That’s us,” Nick said, studying the puffy lips and swollen nose under the other woman’s heavy makeup. “I’m Detective Nick. This is Detective Gabe. What’ve you got for us?”
“Not here,” the woman snapped. She turned to walk out of the gallery.
Nick caught her arm. “Hold it, sweetie,” she said when the woman flinched and whimpered. “We’re not going to hurt you.” She focused on the sunglasses, and the scent of juniper enveloped the three of them. “Why do you want to take off?”
“I’m afraid he has someone following me,” the woman said, her voice soft and drowsy. “If he catches me with you, this time he’ll kill me.”
Gabriel eyed the Japanese tourists, who had lost interest in da Vinci’s masterpiece and were now watching them. “Nicola.”
“Yeah, I see them.” She held the woman’s hand. “Why don’t we go find a quiet place where we can have a drink and talk?”
The woman flashed a smile and a broken front tooth. “I’d like that.”
A half hour later they sat down outside a mostly deserted café to share a bottle of wine. As Gabriel kept watch on the pedestrians and the waiters, Nick poured a full glass for the woman.
“What’s your name, honey?” she asked as she handed over the wine.
“Oksana.” The woman gulped down three swallows before she took off her sunglasses. Someone had blackened both of her eyes and left a nasty graze across the top of her left cheekbone. “Oksana Gravois.”
Nick nodded toward her wounds. “Who worked you over?”
“One of my clients.” She took another gulp. “Antoine. The shithead. I want him to pay.”
“We’ll see what we can do.” Nick wondered whether this valuable information was going to turn out to be nothing more than working-girl spite. “You told the police that you had information about an arson job.”
The prostitute nodded. “Antoine bragged about it. He said he’d been hired onto a crew that was going to rob an old place in the country, and then burn it to the ground.”
For the last several years the Brethren, a group of fanatics who posed as Catholic priests while they hunted, captured, and tortured the Darkyn, had been using arson to cover up their attacks on immortal strongholds. Nick knew they also hired muscle outside the order to help them, muscle that sometimes took the blame for the crime when things went down the wrong way. “What old place, and where in the country?”
“A château in some country pisshole called Garbia.” Oksana gingerly toughed the swollen lid of her right eye. “Antoine said they were going to kill everyone in the house before they took the treasure.”
“Treasure?”
“Something like a book, but rolled up.” She paused to think. “A scroll. He said it was made of solid gold, and worth billions of euros.” She flicked her fingers. “Nothing in the country is worth that kind of money. Then he said it was written by some magician who knew how to make someone live forever. He was going to steal the secret of eternal life. That’s when I laughed at him.”
