First Blood

by S. Cedric

Of course, that’s it, she decided. He wasn’t human any more. Whatever happened had changed him.

  The path kept climbing. The sounds of the crows grew stronger, ratcheting up her anxiety. Even the creepy-looking trees seemed to be encircling her, waiting.

  Now the nightmare was a reality.

  She would not be able to scream and wake up from this nightmare.

  Eva chased away these dark thoughts and moved on, alert, her weapon in front of her and her boots sinking deeper and deeper into the snow.

  The fog closed in around her.

  81

  The crows were circling a tree.

  Eva moved forward on full alert, her finger on the trigger.

  She heard the groan before she saw anything. She also heard something that sounded like buckling and creaking wood.

  “Get out of here!” she yelled at the birds.

  They scattered but then settled on the trees and continued to caw.

  The sight was incredible. A woman was hanging in a tree. She actually looked like she was being crucified. Branches had wrapped themselves around her and were holding her above the ground. The branches had even crept into her mouth.

  Now Eva knew that it was the sound that she had heard.

  “Ma-de-leine!” the crows croaked. “Ma-de-leine! Ma-de-leine!”

  The woman opened her eyes. They were the color of zinc, and they looked desperate. Eva imagined the pain the woman was in.

  But she could not help. The branches were snarled too heavily all around her.

  “Did he do this to you?” she asked.

  The woman blinked once. Yes.

  Then she looked to the right.

  Over there.

  Eva nodded.

  “Is he there? Is he the one who did this to you?”

  Madeleine closed her eyes.

  Yes.

  How did he do it?

  Madeleine just looked at her. There was a flash of hope in her eyes.

  The crows in the trees were making a huge racket.

  “Stop!” Eva shouted.

  “Stop! Stop!” the birds mimicked and started circling again.

  Eva tried to get closer to the woman, but the trees seemed to have a mind of their own. They stretched out their branches to stop her.

  Then one of the birds dived at her, striking her jacked with its beak. Another grabbed her hair in its claws.

  Eva fought them off and backed up. The crows stopped when she had backed up all the way. They returned to their perches and took up their shrill cawing again.

  “I’ll stop the horrors,” she promised the crucified woman.

  Madeleine Reich opened and closed her eyes several times. Eva did not understand what she was trying to say. She hoped it was encouragement. She would need it.

  Leaving the witch on her cross, Eva continued up the mountainside toward the peak—and the chapel.

  The crows followed.

  You know that I’ll be back one day, and then I will kill you all.”

  82

  The fog separated when she reached the ruins.

  Eva spotted the stone archway. Behind it, the walls had collapsed. Some crows had landed on the rubble and were flapping their wings, clearly waiting for her to enter.

  She kept going.

  Someone had lit a fire in the back. The bright light hurt her eyes, and she had to squint.

  She passed through the archway, holding her breath.

  Her eyes adjusted. First, she saw a man lying on the altar. The flames illuminated the blood-spattered snow all around it.

  Then, in a game of shadow and light, she saw the man of her nightmares leaning over the corpse.

  Her secret wound—the man who murdered her mother and sister.

  She had found him. And he was as terrifying as he had been in her dreams.

  Louis Canaan was holding the heart from the body in his hands.

  He was devouring it with obvious, monstrous pleasure. Thick, sticky blood was trickling down his chin and onto the altar.

  “Oh, Lord,” Eva said.

  The sound of her voice broke the spell. The crows turned in unison, as though they were the same entity.

  The man looked up. She saw his pointy animal-like teeth as he opened his mouth in a red grin. Tearing off a moist chunk of human heart, he kept his eyes on her.

  “My daughter,” he said after swallowing. “Finally.”

  His meanness was palpable, like a cold wave flowing through the chapel. Eva pointed her gun at him, but she realized that she was shaking.

  “You are just like you have been in my dreams,” she said, not believing her eyes. “Exactly like my dreams.”

  “Of course I am.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His scaly jacket reflected a thousand flames with his every movement.

  “What else did you expect?”

  She clenched her teeth, trying to stay in control and not be impressed. But she felt frozen, as though his presence had turned her to stone. Was just seeing this monster enough to hypnotize her?

  The worst part was that he looked like her. She could see herself in him. This monster was her father. And that was unbearable.

  “In your dreams, it was you and me,” he said in a quiet voice. “The girl and her father. Life and death. Didn’t you like them? Those sweet dreams all those sweet nights.”

  She wanted to scream and expel once and for all the evil he had done to her. The life he had stolen. She just sighed. Her breath vaporized as it hit the air.

  “They were a way for me to get to know you,” he said with an obscene smile. “Your dreams showed me everything about you. They enabled me to be reborn from ashes and oblivion.”

  “Why did you send them to me?”

  “Oh, do you think I sent you those dreams?”

  He laughed. It sounded like a whistle. The birds perched on the ruins joined him with their shrill caws.

  “If you only knew. You got it wrong. It wasn’t me who came to you but the exact opposite. You should know that. You wanted so much to find me. You thought about nothing else but me.”

  Eva swallowed hard. She knew he was right. Since the time Judith Saint-Clair had tortured her, and the memories had come back, he had been her obsession. This had been the unhealthy vengeful fire in her heart. She had spent the past two years living for nothing but finding him and finally facing her past.

  But she had never expected that.

  “You hunted me,” he hissed. “You’re the one who sent your thoughts to me. Only you, my marvelous child. My blood, my pride. All I did was answer you, finding you in your dreams, just like you wanted. All I did was satisfy you.”

  She wanted to scream and tell him to be quiet.

  (My blood, my pride.)

  Then, he came toward her, swaying slightly. The constellations reflecting off his jacket dazzled her. She felt them in her head, like swarming slivers of light.

  (All I did was satisfy you.)

  She tried to pull herself out of her paralysis, to keep a firm grip on her gun, but her hand was numb. She was having trouble holding the pistol in front of her. She felt her fingers slipping off the Beretta.

  “You still haven’t understood that you are the one who freed me from their sorry spell.”

  Eva felt rivers of ice run through her veins.

  “What?”

  “And now you are here. You came to me, like a loyal child.”

  “What did you say?” she screamed. She did not recognize her own voice.

  “You heard me.”

  “I never freed you from anything!”

  “Of course you did,” he hissed. “You did it. It was two years ago that you did it. Have you forgotten? Oh, I didn’t think you could forget that.”

  He pointed a clawed finger at his forehead.

  “Thoughts, my little girl, never die. You can chase them away, but they wait. They wait to reincarnate. The only currency the gods accept is blood, the first blood, to be exact.”

  His
finger moved to his chest, pointing at his heart. The scales on his jacket glittered with myriad lights.

  “The blood that flows in your veins. My precious blood that you saved for me all these years.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Louis shook his hair. The crows cried out hysterically all around them.

  “Blood! Blood!” they cawed.

  Now he was so close, he could reach out and touch her. His face was emaciated, almost snake-like. But his skin looked translucent. His eyes were two pools of blood. Yes, there was a similarity.

  “Those stupid black sorcerers did not have the courage to do the exorcism on me. They thought that banishing me to the other side of the veil would be enough to keep me from harming them. And they could have been right, because nobody could bring me back. Nobody, except my first blood.

  Eva shivered.

  “The first blood was Justyna.”

  “Yes,” he said, still smiling. “And no.”

  The crows took flight. They started circling.

  “That is what those idiots thought,” Louis Canaan said. But they forgot about you, my dear little one. They forgot that the blood of identical twins is all first blood. It doesn’t matter which one was born first.”

  Eva shook her head. It could not be possible. It could not be true.

  “You are as much the first as your sister,” the ogre said.

  83

  “You’re lying,” Eva said, in a voice that was nearly a sob.

  “And why would I do that?”

  Her father’s red eyes widened. She felt absorbed in a constellation of dying stars. Her mind was dark and frozen.

  “Two years ago, your flesh opened, your blood flowed, your wonderful blood, and the gods were there. The gods listened to your wishes.”

  Eva did not understand at first. Her whole being denied what he was suggesting.

  But the memories of what Judith Saint-Clair did to her came back with new meaning.

  She felt each scar on her body. Each tattoo of thin white lines screamed out at her. The scars would never leave her. They were permanent signatures of human cruelty and folly.

  Two years earlier.

  She saw herself tied up, powerless, in that basement. She felt the scalpel cut into her flesh again and the rivers of blood flow from her wounds. The blood feast, as Saint-Clair had called it.

  “No,” she said. “No,” she screamed.

  The madwoman who had kidnapped her had tortured her, invoking ancient gods. It was a red-magic ritual to open the doors and call out the darkest threads from the most distant darkness.

  “That does not mean...”

  The divinities of the shadows had focused on her, on her open skin, on her offered secrets.

  “That is not possible.” She continued to deny it, fiercely, desperately.

  Yet the evidence was there. That was when the memory of him had returned. The memories had come back during the torture, between bloody dreams and nightmarish waking moments, in fever and in blood. It was the physical pain. She thought she was dead, and that had opened the door to her past. That brought back the horror, the memory of that terrible night—her sister’s death, throat slit before her eyes.

  And the memory of her father’s face. Of his words.

  Of everything it meant.

  “You called me,” Louis said, taking joy in his daughter’s distress. “You called me right from the other side of the veil, where those idiots had banished me. But you cannot banish a thought eternally.”

  “I did not.”

  “You beseeched me with all your soul while your blood flowed out. Your so-precious blood—that of a firstborn child who is albino and a medium. Your blood was a nectar for the gods, my daughter.”

  “No.”

  “It’s the only thing they listen to. It was your spilled blood that brought me back, because at that moment you wanted only one thing, which was to find me again and to face me.”

  She wavered.

  Get it together.

  She would not be able to do it.

  “I came. I came to put an end to this, to all of this,” she said. The sentence had required herculean effort.

  “Oh yes, you are going to do that.”

  He held out a blood-covered hand.

  “Come kiss me. I promise that I will turn you into an invincible star of the night.

  (Never...)

  Eva raised her gun. The movement was laborious.

  (Not that blood!)

  She pressed the barrel to her father’s heart.

  “Never,” she said.

  Then she pulled the trigger.

  The bullet entered the man’s chest. His blood spurt. The impact threw him back, but he was still standing. On his face, there was a mocking smile.

  Eva shot again, several times. Louis was thrown back each time a red chasm opened in his chest. But the animal-divinity smile did not leave his lips. He did not collapse.

  She stopped shooting.

  The bullets had lacerated his jacket. She saw gaping orifices open up in his chest cavity, though his organs, but the monster refused to die.

  He walked toward her again.

  Now he was whispering something barely audible. A quiver escaped from his lips and traveled toward her. Eva felt like she was hearing the monster’s voice deep in her bones, deep inside each of her muscles.

  The steeple started trembling, and clouds of snow fell to the ground. The crows circling overhead cawed more frenetically.

  “E-va! E-va! Blood! Blood”

  She pulled the trigger again.

  A single time.

  The nine-millimeter bullet lodged in his throat, pulverizing his vocal chords.

  Louis Canaan’s voice died.

  And his spell with it.

  84

  “Dammit. You’re driving too fast,” Damien Mira said. “The others can’t keep up.”

  Vauvert did not bat an eye as he sped around a hairpin turn and sent the back wheels of the vehicle into a spin. The flashing lights behind them were soon swallowed up in the dark night and the snow.

  “They know where we’re going. They’ll catch up.”

  Mira held on as tight as he could. They were the first of four cars rushing to the Saint-Jean-du-Pic chapel. Vauvert had managed to convince every available officer—that amounted to ten people—to follow him.

  “The chief is going to be furious,” Mira said. “You know that, right?”

  “Not if we find them.”

  “And you think they’re going to be up there?”

  “I know it,” Vauvert insisted. “Trust me, okay?”

  Another bend in the road appeared. He skidded again but did not slow down.

  In the headlights, the landscape was black and white. It was snowing heavily as they climbed the twisted road to the mountaintop.

  “I think she’s in danger, Damien. My gut hurts, I’m so sure of it, and I’m afraid we will be too late.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I know it, that’s all.”

  Mira sighed. The bumps in the icy, snow-covered road were making his double chin jiggle.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” he said, “You are both really freakish.”

  Vauvert looked at him from the corner of his eye.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, come on, you know as well as I do. She said the same thing about you when you went off to that Dupin horse farm. It’s like she knew.”

  “That I was going to have an accident,” Vauvert added.

  “Yep, exactly. You should have seen how worried she was. It was like she knew you were risking your life. Luckily, it ended well.”

  Vauvert did not say anything.

  It ended well for him that time, yes.

  But what about for her? Tonight?

  The fear was gnawing at his gut.

  The road got steeper and steeper, and the skidding became constant as the vehicle careened up the road. He looked at the
GPS.

  “We’ll be there soon. I hope we make it in time.”

  “I’d like to get there alive, if that’s okay with you,” Mira said, hanging on for dear life.

  Vauvert shifted into second gear and pumped the gas as they climbed the final hairpin turns.

  There was so much going on in his mind: the scenes from his nightmare, the forest filled with spider webs, the ghost of Justyna Svärta transforming into a man. You alone have the power to save her. You alone.

  “Damien, do you believe in magic?” he asked.

  “Magic?” his colleague asked.

  “You know very well what I’m talking about. This is not the first time in the last few years that our cases have, well, confronted us with things that can’t be explained.”

  Mira whistled and said, “Yep, that’s for sure, and I don’t like it, okay? You’ve got a knack for digging up out-of-the-ordinary things, don’t you?”

  He looked back again. The rest of the team was nowhere to be seen.

  “But to answer your question,” he added, “I’m sure there is always some rational explanation.”

  “Well, you’re about to change your mind,” Vauvert responded.

  85

  Eva lowered her gun.

  Snow was falling silently around her.

  She had done it. She finally had done it. The last two years had been nothing more than a long march through the desert to reach this precise moment.

  She felt immense relief.

  She watched Louis falter and finally collapse on the carpet of snow.

  “Sss,” he hissed. “Sss.”

  He opened and closed his mouth but could not say a word. The blood was spurting from his throat and spreading all over his clothes.

  But he still was not dying.

  The snow began falling more heavily, extinguishing the fire. She was happy about that. She saw better at night when there was no other light source.

  Eva approached Louis, pointing her gun with both hands.

  “It all has to stop now. You’ve done enough harm.”

  He stared at her with pure savagery in his eyes.

  Some of the crows that had been circling above started swooping down. A few brushed Eva. She waved her Beretta at them to chase them away.