Consumed by Fire (The Fire Series)

by Anne Stuart

  And leave a trail of blood wherever she went. She was about to rise when the old priest returned, this time with a richly embroidered drapery over his black robe, and he carried a tray with a heavy silver bowl of water, a little ewer of oil, a box, and a pile of linen cloths.

  “I’ve called for help,” he said. “And now you must let me tend to you.” To her absolute horror, the old man knelt at her feet, placing the bowl in front of her.

  “Father, no!” She protested, trying to rise, but he was in the way and she could scarcely knock him over.

  “My daughter, this is a rite as old as time,” he said calmly, dripping some oil into the steaming water. “Just relax.” He took one of her feet and placed it in the basin, scooping up the water with his hands and pouring it over her. “Tell me, my child, are you a Catholic?”

  “I’m afraid not. I wasn’t brought up in any particular religion.” She glanced nervously behind her, but the doors to the street remained shut. “Perhaps you shouldn’t . . .”

  “Nonsense. Your parents’ failings were not your fault. Do you repent of your sins?”

  At the moment she couldn’t think of any, except being stupid enough not to tell James she loved him. She hated the thought of dying without him knowing, but then, if she didn’t make it through the night, it would probably be easier on him if he didn’t know.

  Then again, she didn’t want to make her death easy on him, and surely that was a sin in itself? She needed to humor the old man, though, or he’d never let her go, and they’d both be sitting ducks. “Yes, Father.”

  “Then you are absolved, my child.” He made the sign of the cross, then removed her foot from the water and wrapped it with a heavy linen towel. He set it down on the stone and reached for her second foot. Blood filled the water, and the cut stung. The priest continued talking in a calm voice. It took her a moment to realize he was speaking in Latin, but the sound of his voice was as soothing as the touch of his hands. When he finished with her wounded foot and lifted it from the bowl, she could see the cut wasn’t nearly as bad as she feared, though it was still oozing; she wanted to protest that it was ruining the beautiful linen but decided it was a waste of time.

  The priest had his own agenda. She wondered what he was saying in Latin. Some blessing or prayer for healing, she imagined. She’d studied Latin—her parents had insisted on it—but she hadn’t heard it spoken conversationally, and she had no idea what he was saying.

  He dried his own hands on another towel—she felt sorry for the parish laundry—and then reached for a small case that lay on the tray. Opening it, he took out a small piece of almost paper-like substance. “Open your mouth, child, and let this dissolve. Don’t use your teeth.”

  She looked at it warily. “I don’t want painkillers.”

  His laugh was warm. “The only painkiller this contains is the Holy Spirit. Open.”

  He had the voice of authority beneath his kindly tones, and she figured she needed all the help she could get as he placed the wafer into her mouth, continuing in Latin. Next came a tiny glass of sweet wine, and she decided this must be some Catholic form of healing. Odd that the priest would give communion to a non-Catholic, but she decided he must be a very sweet man. The act of kindness made her want to weep in her exhausted state, but she simply went along with his directions, unable to summon the energy to protest.

  Where the hell were the police? He said he’d called them—how long could it possibly take? The priest kept on with his Latin, and some of it began to sound familiar. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. What sin had the priest committed? Oh, no, he was praying for her sins, wasn’t he? It was a good thing he didn’t know what she’d been doing with James Bishop or she’d probably be doomed to the fiery reaches of hell, at least according to the church.

  When he was finished, she would leave. Even in the sanctity of a church she didn’t feel safe, but at the moment she couldn’t make herself move. She simply stared at the candle flame, mesmerized.

  She could hear muted voices, and she sat up. “Is someone here?”

  The priest finished the rest of the wine and put the small bottle back in the heavy silver case, which was ornately engraved and monogrammed. “Only some of my helpers.” He took the little ewer of oil again, poured some on his hand, reaching up to make a mark on her forehead. Blessing her, she supposed. She knew that the Catholic faith was big on ceremony but even this seemed extreme to her, and she was about to protest when he began speaking again in what was clearly a prayer, and she dutifully bowed her head, not wanting to seem ungrateful.

  He’d switched to English somewhere along the way. “Through this holy unction and through the great goodness of His mercy, may God pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed . . .”

  He’d already pardoned her so-called sins. “Unction?” she interrupted. “What are you doing?”

  For a moment the old priest looked cross, interrupted mid-spate. “I am performing the holy rite of extreme unction.”

  The tiny amount of wine in her stomach threatened to erupt. “Extreme unction? Isn’t that the last rites? Do you think I’m going to die?”

  He made the sign of the cross over her, rising again. “No, my child,” he said kindly. “I know you’re going to die.”

  Panic sliced through her, and she surged to her feet, shoving at the old man, but he remained solid and immovable. “I have asked my men to make it painless,” he continued in his entirely reasonable voice. “It’s an ugly business, but a necessity. The Committee must learn to keep out of our affairs and we will keep out of theirs. Your friends will come searching for you, but it will be too late: you will be dead, and when they touch you, this entire building will disappear.”

  “By magic?” she said stupidly.

  “No, dynamite.” He moved away from her, heading back to the altar, and when she rose, ready to run, she saw that the doors were now open, and the men were advancing down the center aisle, some in priests’ garb, some in street clothes, but they moved as a unit, purposeful, deadly.

  She must be imagining the sound in the distance. Was it real, or had her mind simply given up in terror and she was hallucinating? Merlin would do anything to find her—she trusted him. If James and Ryder realized she was gone, they’d let Merlin out to find her.

  She heard the bark, closer now, and she knew it was real—the familiar bay of a dog on the scent. The men had their guns drawn, even the three priests, and she had to find some way to stop them, to slow them down, long enough for Merlin to find her.

  She rushed the altar, shoving the old man aside as she grabbed one of the heavy candlesticks. Wax dripped onto her hands and the ornate carving bit into her fingers, but she didn’t hesitate. “Come any closer and I’ll bash his head in, you motherfuckers.”

  The priest looked up in shock. “This is a place of holy worship! You watch your language, young lady!”

  She wanted to laugh, and she realized she was getting hysterical. The old man rose to his feet, but she kept herself behind him, out of range. They couldn’t shoot her without risking killing the priest, and she knew they wouldn’t.

  The old man grabbed for her, but she kicked him. Big mistake—he went down, and she was an open target for the men advancing on her. One of them raised a gun at her, and she ducked behind the altar, rolling onto the floor, still clutching the huge, ornate candlestick, when she heard the eruption of gunfire, the familiar snarl of a furious animal, and she flattened herself against the stone.

  “Angel!” James’s voice was laced with desperation.

  “Angels won’t help you now, Bishop!” she heard the priest cry out, and she felt the hysterical laughter rise again. There was the sudden howl of a man in pain and she edged along the floor on her stomach, around the side of the altar.

  It looked like a war zone, the blood and gunsmoke and bodies and noise. One of the younger priests lay spread-eagled in
the middle of the floor, lying in a pool of blood, a gun near his outstretched hand, while another man was trying to fight off Merlin’s jaws clamped around his forearm. James was circling a priest, both of them armed with knives, the holy father looking even more dangerous than her murderous lover, and she almost screamed when the man lunged, slashing across James’s stomach, ripping through his shirt and drawing blood.

  He’d made a mistake, though, overbalancing, and James caught his arm and pulled it straight up behind him, the sickening sound of cracking bone warring with the man’s scream of pain. He went down in a welter of black, and then James was on top of him, grappling with him. There was no sign of the old priest.

  She could make out Ryder at the back of the church along with two of the men who’d taken turns guarding her. They were in the midst of a pitched battle, and she ducked her head in horror as one man fell back, his head seeming to explode from a hail of bullets. She couldn’t hide forever, and she scrambled to her feet, limp with relief when she saw Merlin astride the man he’d been chewing on, growling fiercely. She saw James slowly, methodically beating the shit out of the man who’d knifed him, though the priest wasn’t putting up much of a fight by this point; then she caught a glimpse of the black robes from the corner of her eye.

  It was the old man, the priest who’d given her the last rites before he planned on killing her. He was so intent on James he didn’t notice her, and there was a gun in his hand. She wanted to call out, warn James, but there was no time. If she screamed the old man would probably shoot her and still manage to kill James.

  She had no choice. All conscious thought left her mind then, as something outside of her seemed to take over her body. She lifted the heavy candlestick high over her head and brought it crashing down on the old priest’s skull.

  He collapsed on top of James and the man he was beating; blood and brain matter splattered everywhere, and all feeling and strength drained from Evangeline. She sank down on her knees, just as Merlin leapt forward, whining with relief and love, licking her face, her hands, licking the gore off her while she stayed there, dazed. She hugged him, dry-eyed, in shock, ignoring the blood splatter on her bare arms. It was over.

  Everything was over.

  Ryder was the one who came to her. At first Merlin didn’t seem like he’d let anyone close to her, but a one-word command came from a few yards away, the only proof that James was alive and unharmed, and Merlin sat back, a warning growl still rumbling in the back of his throat.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” Ryder said in his cool, emotionless voice. “You don’t need to be tied in with this, and it would be better all-around if you weren’t.” He had taken her arm, half supporting her, and she didn’t want to think what she was walking through as he led her away from the altar, toward the back of the church. She tried to turn, to find James, but Ryder was too strong.

  “He’s fine,” Ryder snapped. “And he can’t afford to be distracted by you. You’ll see him as soon as he’s taken care of business.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck,” she said bitterly, but the words came out in no more than a whisper, and he ignored her. Merlin was pacing by their side, and Ryder stopped.

  “Call the fucking dog off, Bishop! I can’t bring him with me to the hospital.”

  “I don’t need . . .” Evangeline began.

  “Shut up,” Ryder snapped. “Call the dog.”

  “Merlin, come.” The only words she heard from him. The last words she would ever hear from him, the heartless bastard. She could walk away from a hospital, walk away from Ryder, who would no longer give a damn what she did.

  Merlin protested noisily, sitting on his haunches and whining. But he obeyed James, and she knew she would never see Merlin again either.

  Ryder’s manner was brusque but his hands were gentle as he pushed her into a dark sedan. “Put your seat belt on,” he said, climbing in the driver’s side. “I need to get away from here fast, before New Orleans’s finest show up.”

  “What about James?” She wanted to kick herself the moment the question came out. She didn’t care about him. He didn’t care about her.

  “He and the dog will be gone by the time they show up. He just has to take care of a few things, and it’s better if I look after you.”

  “Why?” She told herself she didn’t care, but her questions kept coming.

  “Because you distract him, and he’s already furious with himself for letting this happen. I want him to take care of business, not get distracted. Things need to be cleaned up as quickly and efficiently as possible, and he’s better off where he is.”

  She wanted to ask why again. Why would she distract him, what the hell did it matter, but she finally had the sense to shut up, to shut down. She didn’t care. She wanted to go home. She wanted her dog. She wanted the man she loved. She wanted to run away.

  She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. She wasn’t going to think, to feel, to remember. She just wanted to shut everything out, the sickening feel of the old man’s skull cracking beneath the candlestick, the mess, the smell, the unbearable hideousness of it. She was past crying, past fear, past everything.

  But curiosity got the better of her. She at least needed some answers. “Will you tell me what was going on? Why were those men pretending to be priests? Why did they want to kill me?”

  “They weren’t pretending,” Ryder said grimly. “The man you did such a fine job with was a man we call His Eminence, one of the bishops in New Orleans named Raphael Corsini. He was a monster—that’s all you need to know. You did the world a favor.”

  “That’s not all I need to know. I killed a man tonight. I have to know why.” Her voice sounded desperate, and she decided she was glad that James wasn’t there to hear her break down.

  “He was going to kill Bishop. Wasn’t that enough reason?”

  She remembered the sickening sound of the ornate candlestick crushing the man’s skull. “Reason enough,” she said, thinking of James.

  Ryder sighed. “Okay, I can’t tell you much. Corsini was in charge of human trafficking for the crime family. It all started when he was a young priest, assigned to a small town in South America. It was easy enough to send the young girls and children to the States, supposedly to devote themselves to the church and live better lives. Of course, they never saw the outside of the container ship until they reached their final destination, where they were to work either as sex slaves or cheap labor, and the villagers never asked questions. It worked so well that Corsini expanded the operation, bringing promising young men into the priesthood to help him branch out his activities, and when the family moved him up to New Orleans, it made a perfect headquarters for the operation. We’ve been after them for more than a decade, and this won’t end their business, but it will put a big crimp in it. The man Claudia killed in Italy was in charge of bookkeeping for the operation, and we’d hoped his elimination would screw things up enough for us to take everyone down, but the Corsinis are more resilient. And that’s all I’m going to tell you, and it’s a hell of a lot more than I should have, so don’t bother asking me any more questions. Just know you delivered payback for a lot of women and children who lived lives of abject misery and died before their time. And you kept Bishop alive while doing it, though I’m not sure whether you think that was a benefit or not.”

  She could see his face as he drove through the still-lively city, and it looked cold and brutal in the reflected lights. “Just one more question.”

  “No, I don’t know when Bishop will come and see you, if he will at all. He’s an idiot.”

  “Yes, he is,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I wanted to ask. Where is Odila? And Jenkins?”

  Ryder hesitated. “They didn’t make it.”

  And then, finally, she wept.

  “Where the fuck is she?” Bishop snarled. He hadn’t slept in three days; instead he’d fl
own to London to report to Madsen, paid off all the necessary people, had the already deconsecrated church torched, dealt with Merlin’s extreme case of the sulks, and worked out help for Odila’s family and Jenkins’s brother, all the time expecting to find Evangeline waiting for him when he finally got back to the shell of a house that was slowly being renovated and retrofitted for their headquarters.

  She wasn’t there, and Ryder wasn’t saying anything. In fact, he did his damnedest to always be around someone else so Bishop couldn’t demand to know where she was. Bishop ended up lying in wait, and when Ryder was finally alone, he slammed the man against the crumbling wall of the old house in the Garden District.

  “You know I let you do that, right?” Ryder said. “You’re just lucky I knew it was you or you’d be dead by now.”

  “One of us would. Where is she?”

  Ryder’s smile was cool and inscrutable. “That all depends what you want with her.”

  It was the last thing James was expecting. “What the fuck business is it of yours?”

  “Because I know where she is, and I have no intention of telling you if you’re just going to keep putting her through the wringer. She’s good people, Bishop. You know it and I know it. She deserves better than you, but for some reason it’s you she wants. She’s in love with you, and if you aren’t going to do right by her, then leave her the fuck alone.”

  Bishop blinked. “She’s not in love with me,” he said instinctively. “How could she be?”

  “Beats me. I never said she was levelheaded. In fact, she’s a fool for you, and if she can’t protect herself, then I’ll protect her from you. So I’ll ask you again. What do you want with her?”

  “We’re still married,” he said stubbornly.

  “You said you were going to have Madsen take care of that. Did he?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “Did he?”

  “No!”