First Blood

by S. Cedric

  “I’m looking for one of your professors,” Eva said.

  “Are you a student?”

  Eva smiled.

  “I haven’t been for a long time now. Police.”

  She pushed her badge across the desk.

  “Oh, okay. Sorry,” the secretary said. “Who exactly are you looking for?”

  “That’s the problem,” Eva said. “I’m not exactly sure.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you have a list of professors who’ve taught mythology?”

  “You don’t need a list for that,” the woman said, breaking out into a smile.

  “Mr. Haas teaches mythology. He’s the only one. He took over when his predecessor retired.”

  “Who was the former teacher?”

  “Mr. Parme. Marc-Henri Parme. He also taught history.”

  “Was he teaching twenty-five years ago?”

  The receptionist nodded. “Yes, he taught for more than thirty years. He retired three years ago.”

  Bingo. She had not expected it to be so easy. Maybe Lady Luck was finally looking down on her.

  “How can I get in touch with him?”

  “Unfortunately, you can’t. Mr. Parme died last year.”

  Eva just looked at her, hope vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

  “Do you know if he had a family? Or children I could contact? I need to talk to someone who knew him at the time.”

  “You mean twenty-five years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman thought.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask.”

  She turned and called out to her colleague, who came out from the back office. The woman was older, with graying hair.

  After a quick exchange, the older woman shook her head.

  “I don’t think Mr. Parme had any family. But I suggest that you contact Loana Wilson. She was one of Mr. Parme’s students. She teaches here now.”

  “How old is Mrs. Wilson?”

  The older woman rubbed her chin, then said, “Well, I don’t know. Around fifty, maybe.”

  “So she was his student thirty years ago?” Eva asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do you know if Mrs. Wilson is on the campus now?”

  “She’s not here today. I can give you her number and her address, if you’d like.”

  Eva wrote down the information and thanked the two women for their help. Her mind was already racing.

  Loana Wilson.

  She was there when this whole thing began.

  Maybe she knows something.

  Back outside, Eva zipped up her leather jacket. She wandered, ending up at the cafeteria. An expanse of snow-covered ground spread out in front of the building. Behind the building were steps and a fenced-in park.

  Eva breathed in the icy air. Her heart was turning to ice again.

  So what exactly happened here?

  Thirty years earlier, other students had been here. They were just out of childhood, discovering life, building friendships, searching for their identities. The pictures in Constantin’s case file flashed in her mind. A young man from Niger, a girl from the Aveyron whose name was Madeleine Ferrand at the time. And then Guillaume Alban and Pierre Loisel. Had they met here, in front of this cafeteria, like all these students? Had they smoked cigarettes in the cold of winter as they discussed how to change the world?

  And swearing to do what?

  Joining what sect?

  She was lost in thought as she observed the park and the cheap apartment buildings beyond it. Snowflakes began to fall.

  She had already seen photos of this university. But she had never been here in person. Sometimes, she had wanted to come.

  Her mother had attended school here for three years, before becoming pregnant with Eva and Justyna.

  For some stupid reason, she began to tear up. She looked around, wondering if anyone could see her like this.

  But the only person was a little girl, standing in the middle of the snowy lawn. Despite the snowflakes circling around her, the girl was wearing nothing but a pink summer dress. Her white hair hung in braids. Her red eyes burned like flames.

  Eva took a deep breath.

  “You had to come here someday.”

  The inspector closed her eyes.

  I know.

  Her telephone vibrated in the pocket of her jacket. She brought it to her ear without opening her eyes.

  “Svärta.”

  “Eva, it’s Rudy. The guys in Rodez exhumed the body this morning, like you asked. There was a baby there. Can you be at the autopsy this afternoon?”

  “I’ll be there,” she said in a flat voice.

  You had to come here someday.

  59

  The wind started blowing up from the valley. The penetrating cold attacked them. Yet neither the man with the bloody shoulder nor the woman with the slashed face seemed concerned about the weather.

  “What are you planning to do?” Loisel asked, leaning against the car for support.

  The women opened the trunk and took out a wooden-handled instrument.

  “Exhume the past. Our past.”

  Loisel quivered when he saw the pickaxe. Madeleine set the heavy mining tool against the car. It was primitive, designed to break stone.

  “Okay,” Loisel said.

  He touched his injured shoulder. Madeleine’s spell had knitted the fracture and cauterized the skin, but he felt his muscle fibers pulsating and trembling, still unstable, ready to tear again with the next wrong movement. If that happened, he feared he would bleed out and die.

  Or worse.

  He was shaking.

  “We don’t even know what we are going to find there,” he said. “Will he still be there? It’s been so long.”

  “All the more reason to check.”

  She headed toward the path between the trees, steeped in clouds. She dragged the pickaxe behind her.

  “Stop complaining and follow me. We have to do this together.”

  “Oh, dammit.”

  He pulled himself away from the car and walked as best he could, climbing over the snow-covered rocks toward the mountain peak and the chapel ruins perched there.

  60

  Doctor Axelle Couplet arrived to give Alexandre Vauvert a lecture. Once again. And she did not pull any punches. It was the fourth time he had been in the hospital in less than a year. This time, he had three broken ribs and a dislocated wrist. He would need to take some time off work.

  “No, I don’t need any time off,” the giant assured her.

  “And I say that you don’t have a choice. I’ve had enough of your childish behavior.”

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his massive torso wrapped in bandages. He stared at the tall, thin woman in a white coat. Her arms were crossed, and she looked exasperated.

  “A few scratches have never kept me from working. You know this is not the first time.”

  Doctor Couplet rolled her eyes.

  “That is one more reason, inspector. This time, I insist that you take a break. You don’t realize how lucky you are. Such luck will not follow you all your life. You understand, don’t you?”

  Vauvert grabbed the fresh T-shirt that Blanca had brought him and put it on, scowling.

  “I don’t question your skill, Axelle. But please believe me. I have a very important job to finish before I can rest. Give me the medication I need. I swear, you will not see me soon.”

  “You made the same promise two months ago.”

  “But you did such a good job of getting me back on my feet,” he answered with a challenging smile.

  Ten minutes later, the woman in the white coat was furious but resigned. She changed the bandage on his wrist and prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs—enough for a horse. The police inspector’s unusual size would require at least that much. She asked him to be careful and to come back in a week for another scan. Vauvert lied to make her happy, and she seemed to believe it.

  Anot
her ten minutes later, the police officer was walking out of the hospital. He felt a childish relief. He hated hospitals.

  The cold was bitter. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets. He heard a honk just before he crossed the street to the subway entrance. He turned to see an Audi A4 parked on the street.

  The driver honked again.

  Vauvert walked toward the vehicle. When he was a few feet away, the tinted window rolled down with an electric purr. White hair spilled into the icy cold. He saw his own reflection in the driver’s dark glasses.

  “Don’t make such a face. Get in,” Eva said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

  61

  She had not been lying. The drive was long.

  The rented Audi sped along a road framed in endless snowy fields. They were heading toward Albi.

  Vauvert did not like it.

  He was huddled in his seat, his face against the window. The white horizon rolled past. Rabastens. Lisle-sur-Tarn. Gaillac. The long, dark clouds in the sky did not promise anything good. After his adventure the day before, he was in no hurry to return to the mountains.

  But for now, something else was bothering him.

  His heart was racing.

  He clenched and unclenched his fists, not knowing what to say. He was terrified he would put her off and lose her again.

  Eva pulled into the left lane to pass a line of cars, only to end up behind a truck. She swerved into the right lane to pass the truck.

  “You’re going a bit fast, don’t you think?”

  “Why, because you drive slower?”

  “No. But usually, I’m the one driving.”

  Eva gave a small smile.

  “So where are we going?” he said, massaging his bandaged wrist.

  “Rodez. Does that remind you of anything?”

  Vauvert frowned.

  “You bet. That’s where Judith Saint-Clair lived. I haven’t been back there since.”

  He fell silent, pulled into his memories of meeting Eva. It was two years before, the case of the Black Mountain vampires. It had been his worst nightmare. Judith Saint-Clair was a monster—a real monster, who had succeeded in thwarting the laws of nature. She had kidnapped Eva, tied her up, tortured her, and nearly killed her. Eva owed her life to Vauvert and Detective Leroy and what they did at an isolated farm in Rodez. The horrors that had occurred there and the unbelievable things they had witnessed were something he could never put in any report. They would probably haunt him to his last day.

  Just like what he had experienced at the Beaumont house.

  Some live, and some die.

  Life is a game.”

  Madeleine Reich’s words were still branded in his mind.

  Fortunately, you can cheat.

  He knew that he had not dreamed it. He had not imagined that sensation of the world opening up, of the actual texture of the air ripping open.

  These supernatural events had occurred. He had witnessed them and not just with his eyes. He had witnessed them in his own flesh. He knew that, yes. You could invoke the powers that ruled the universe, and sometimes you could command them. Worse, he seemed to be the only one to realized it.

  You are a medium, you dumbass.

  That was Loisel’s voice.

  Loisel and the beasts of the apocalypse. How could he forget such an experience? Those monstrous forms, the eyes that spit fire, those powerful hooves hitting the walls. Loisel had used some kind of dark, terrible magic when he recited his spells.

  If life is at play, what role do I have?

  He observed Eva from the corner of his eye. She was so beautiful and so unattainable.

  What was her role?

  He had so much to say to her, to yell at her about. He wanted to grab her and hold her until she listened. He felt like a lost child when she was around. He was paralyzed. His thoughts were all jumbled.

  Every time this woman entered his life, he realized, it was under the same circumstances. When the irrational lines of fire crossed his life to leave their mark on him.

  Is there some meaning in this, as well?

  Despite himself, when he watched her drive, he imagined her red eyes behind her glasses, and memories of their liaison drowned him. How many days had their idyll lasted? A week? A month? How many times had they really been together? Had they ever been, even just for a minute? He still remembered the feel of his lips against hers and the crazy smell of her skin. He remembered her body, so slender and firm, so perfect, yet covered with deep scars, stigmata of the abuse she had suffered that one autumn. A map in relief on human skin. A perfect doll slashed by a psychopath.

  But these wounds were nothing, he knew. Eva hid others that were a lot more secret. Scars in her soul. And even though those scars were invisible, Vauvert knew they were deeper—so much deeper—than the scars he could see.

  That was all he had left now. These memories. That handful of nights she gave herself to him, when he thought she was opening up to him. But just as quickly, she closed herself off. “Eva is like that,” Leroy had tried to explain.

  He shook himself.

  “So. Why there?”

  “We are going to attend the autopsy of a baby,” Eva said without looking at him.

  He snorted.

  “Spit it out.”

  She did. She told him everything she had lived through in the past few days, from the fire in the tenement to listening to Guillaume Alban’s recordings and their physical effect. She explained her theory, her near-certainty that Madeleine Reich had killed her own child and passed off the death as a stillbirth. And the more she talked, the more horrible the reality became.

  “What kind of people are we dealing with?” He was thinking out loud. “Is this some kind of war? Is someone tracking them down to exterminate them?”

  Eva honked at a car that swerved in front of her.

  “I have no idea, Alex. But more and more people are dying. We need to do something.”

  He thought about everything she had told him. Then he made a decision. In turn, he told her the truth about what had happened with Madeleine Reich. Her chanting, the torpor it had caused, and all the blood that had flowed from his body without leaving the slightest wound. He described the ghostly horses Loisel had called up at the farm in the Pyrenees, knowing that at least she would believe him, because she had already experienced things of this kind. She had traces of it on her body.

  “They do it with nothing but words. Reich and Loisel did it in the same way, both of them. They recited spells.”

  “The power of witches resides in their voice,” Eva explained. “These people have figured out how to use this power. They opened forbidden doors. Just like...”

  She stopped for a while. When she started speaking again, it was in a slow voice, one he did not recognize.

  “Like Saint-Clair did two years ago.”

  Vauvert nodded.

  They were dealing with a kind of red magic, a magic connected to blood and death. And once again, they were the only ones able to understand it and perhaps the only ones able to stop this wave of death.

  “They sacrificed children,” he said. “They took the flesh of their loins, the greatest taboo of all.”

  “And their lives changed immediately,” Eva reminded him. “It was as though all of their dreams came true.”

  “Is that why someone is killing them? And who could it be? Could one of their children have escaped the massacre? Or is it some nutcase who learned what they were up to?”

  “That’s what we have to figure out fast. Maybe this autopsy will give us a lead.”

  She passed another truck on the right and then weaved into the left lane, provoking honks from other drivers.

  Vauvert held onto the handle above the window.

  “Why didn’t you ever call me back?”

  He realized that he had spoken out loud. He had said it.

  Shit.

  He looked at Eva, waiting for her to lie to him.

  She drove, looking
straight ahead.

  “It would never have worked between us,” she said. “You know it too.”

  “No, I really don’t understand,” he said.

  Eva adjusted the rearview mirror. Then she licked her lips.

  “Did I do something?” Vauvert asked, noting how her behavior had changed.

  She shook her head, almost imperceptibly.

  She hit the gas, passing a line of cars.

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “Someone is following us.”

  “What?”

  He turned around.

  “Which one?”

  “The blue Volvo.”

  “I see it.”

  It was a dark-colored station wagon. A powerful car. It was a few cars back, but it was keeping pace with the Audi, which was about twenty miles an hour above the speed limit.

  “He was behind me earlier,” Eva said.

  Spotting a service station, she put on the blinker and swerved into the right lane. Cars flashed their lights and honked as she took the off ramp at full speed.

  She passed the gas pumps. Most of the parking spots in front of the station were free. She skidded to a stop.

  The Volvo drove on.

  Vauvert looked at his partner, a little concerned. He realized she was shaking.

  “I must have been wrong.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just let go of the handle he had been gripping. It was bent.

  62

  When Madeleine Reich reached the peak, she started feeling the excitement.

  Behind her, the pickaxe was scraping over the sharp rocks.

  She neared the edifice.

  An archway of large stones formed the gateway to the chapel. Inside, most of the walls of the nave had collapsed. A carpet of snow covered everything as the gray winter light seeped into the ancient place of worship.

  Even from where she stood, Madeleine could see the massive altar in the back.

  She looked up to the tower rising up out of the fog. It had not had a bell since they had taken it down to shatter it. That was one of the many profanations they had committed here.

  The place of their secret Sabbaths.