Connor pointed to a bowl of greens. “There’s a salad, and we have plenty of mashed potatoes.”
She sat next to Liam and covered her plate with romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and a heap of potatoes. Then she shared the news from her phone call. “Josh and Nana bought their plane tickets.”
Connor swallowed a bite of meatloaf. “The credit card number worked?”
“Just fine, thanks. I need to verify with Nana, but Josh says they’ll be here the morning after tomorrow.”
“Excellent. I look forward to seeing them again.”
Beside Dianne, the younger hunter consumed a mouthful that would have choked her. “Does that mean Dianne and I are traveling without you?”
“Much as I’d prefer to chaperone you two, I’d like Nana and Josh to see a familiar face when they arrive.”
The comment irked Dianne. “We don’t need a babysitter.”
“Yeah, Father. We’ll get along smashingly without you.”
Though she wanted to be alone with Liam, the idea of traveling with him made her nervous. “It should be productive, but it could be fun, too. I’ve hardly set foot any European countries.”
The young hunter swallowed another herculean bite. “Where have you been already?”
“I’ve got cousins I’ve visited in Denmark, and I did a study abroad in Italy, you know, to keep up with fashions.”
“Well, then. I’ll have to take you to new places.”
It sounded exciting. “Where do we start?”
“We’ll start in the crossroads of Europe. I’m taking you to France.”
The next evening, she and Liam arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport and registered at the Sheraton. For an upscale airport hotel, she found its carpets worn. She entered her room and tossed her luggage onto the queen bed. Seeking an improvement to her hosts’ Irish home cooking, she thumbed through a list of dining opportunities, and the lobby restaurant offered a good menu.
She picked up her phone and called the hunter. “Let’s go to the hotel restaurant.”
“Fine with me. Just let me finish something here.”
She was curious, but she also wanted to keep him from disappearing for an hour in his work. “Can I see what you’re doing?”
“Sure, I guess. Come on over.”
After a quick check in the mirror and a swig of mouthwash, she walked to his room and knocked on the door.
With a stern face, he opened the door and let her in.
“Why do you look so serious?”
“This is serious work.”
She followed him to a desk he’d cleared for his dagger but tripped on the carpet. “Ouch!”
“Are you okay?”
Her arm against the wall, she’d caught herself before breaking or spraining anything. “I’m fine. Just my usual clumsiness.” As she regained her orientation, she looked at the desk. The bronze weapon appeared steady on a bearing, next to a handheld electronic device she didn’t recognize. “What’s that?”
“It’s a GPS compass. That’s how I can tell what direction it’s pointing.”
“What’s it say?”
“It’s pointing on bearing one-zero-three.”
Forgetting her hunger, she became curious. “What can you tell from that?”
“In theory, it geolocates the spot where he killed his last tribute.”
“Why only in theory?”
He leaned into his laptop computer and tapped its keys. “The answer’s only as good as the accuracy. The two bearings are too close together to be useful.”
“Which two bearings?”
“The one from home and the one from here. They’re almost on top of each other. Take a look.”
She stooped towards the screen. The lines looked thick and touched each other all the way from Serbia to Syria. “I see what you mean. Stopping here didn’t help much.”
“Unfortunately not. We need to change our geometry and come at this from the side. Looks like Athens or Sevastopol would work best for our next measurement. We could also do Sicily, Malta, Bucharest… you see the pattern?”
“You had me at ‘Athens’.”
He rotated the laptop back towards his face. “Alright, I’ll book the tickets.”
“Not now. I’m hungry.”
“We need to leave tomorrow. This won’t take long.”
She glared at him.
He got the point. “Dinner, it is. Let’s get moving, then.”
Exercising her prerogative, she changed her mind. “If this is my only night in Paris, let’s forget the hotel restaurant and head out and explore a little.”
“Well, I suppose that’s okay. Where do you want to go?”
“No idea. I’ll know when I see it. I want to see the city.”
“All the tourist sites are closed.”
“I don’t care about that. Let’s just walk around.”
“Is there anything in particular you want to see?”
“No.”
“Fine. I’ve been to this city a few times. I’ll show you around.”
After a ride on the Metro, she climbed into the warm evening air. The underground scents of musk and burned rubber gave way to the stench of dry urine, which seemed to rise from the sewer system and the very bricks of the city. Hoping to acclimate herself to the smells, she kept her observations silent.
“Follow me. I’ll give you a nice walking tour before dinner.”
She followed him over a bridge, and as she looked to her right, she saw the back of a Gothic structure. Flying buttresses, thin spires, and two front towers caught her eye.
“That’s Notre Dame.”
“Cool.”
He played tour guide while they walked along its north wall. “It took about a hundred years to build the bulk of it and then another hundred years for the finishing touches. They didn’t finish most of it all until about eight hundred years ago.”
The famous north rose window showed a rainbow of colors. Then, as she rounded the building, its western front came into view. Between its twin rectangular towers, a smaller stained glass window reflected the setting sun’s rays.
He led her over the plaza in front of the cathedral, towards another bridge. “We’ll cross the Pont Neuf. It’s famous.”
The sun painted the stone arches a golden beige. Cars and foot traffic covered the bridge, and below the structure, scattered individuals stood by the river’s shore.
“Now you can say you’ve walked on the oldest standing bridge in Paris.”
For the first time since meeting the young hunter in person, she saw the opportunity to probe his personal life. To start, she picked a simple subject. “You know a lot about France. Do you speak French?”
“Yeah, Father made me learn French, Spanish, German, and Italian. I wouldn’t call myself fluent in any of them, but I can get by in each.”
“That’s still impressive. Why’d he make you learn them all?”
He shrugged. “The same reason he made me do anything.”
“Hunting a maniac.”
“Since I was old enough to aim a toy pistol, he told me I was going to be a hunter. Over the years, I realized I was called for a special purpose, not that I’m sure I liked it.”
She enjoyed hearing him open up about himself. “What’s it like when you realize your future’s been planned out for you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Great question. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me before.”
“Not even your friends?”
“I had friends in school, you know. I was a very good athlete. So that made it easy to have blokes to hang out with. But I had to keep the whole wraith thing a secret.”
“That must have been tough. You’re kind of like batman.”
He chuckled. “Looking back, I would have thought it impossible for me to keep the secret, but there must have been divine intervention. It wasn’t always easy, but I managed.”
A few emotions rolled through her. Gratitude, for him saving her life. Sadness, for hi
s lack of choice. Envy, for his certainty of purpose. “You still didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
She followed him onto the street that curved with the Seine. “What’s it like having your future planned out for you?”
“I don’t know any different. What’s it like having a choice?”
Unsure if he tried to deflect the question or just needed guidance on how to share about himself, she took the lead and risked a verbalized stream of consciousness. “Choice is tough. I feel turned around. I have to take care of Josh, I’m trying to get a degree, and I’m trying to pay the rent. Then, well, you know the rest.”
“I have no idea what it’s like having to earn money. That’s always been covered for me.”
“I’m so jealous.” She felt silly for blurting out the comment.
“Understandable. I’ve never felt the pressure, but I knew schoolmates who had to work from really young ages. Some families suffered every sort of problem you could think of from financial stress.”
“We were never poor. I’ve seen poor. We had food and a roof over our heads.”
He walked in silence and led her around the side of a building with the squared and expansive architecture of a Middle Age castle. Around a corner, he pointed towards a glass pyramid she’d seen in countless photographs. “That’s the entrance to the Louvre. This entire castle used to be garrison, but it evolved into the largest museum in the world.”
“Nice.” She took in the Louvre and then turned. Against the setting sun, she raised her hand. Beyond a fountain she saw a narrow tapering column of stone that reminded her of a miniature version of the Washington Monument. “What’s that?”
“That’s the Obelisk of Luxor. And that huge arch over there is the Arc de Triomphe.”
She stopped. “Hey.”
He turned and faced her. “Why are you stopping? I thought you were hungry.”
“What about your vow of chastity?” Though acknowledging her words as awkward, she had to know.
“What about it?”
She opened up first, hoping he’d follow. “It hasn’t been easy for me, but it’s about choice again. I had a choice in my belief system, and I’m saving myself until marriage. I want to know what it was like for you, having no choice.”
“It’s different for me because it’s permanent. No sex, ever. No children. No bloodline. No family other than my father until he dies, and then I’ll wait until I’m fifty years old to inherit a baby boy that a mysterious order will place on my doorstep. And then I’ll teach him to help me kill a savage.”
She considered it ten to twenty years of loneliness followed by a bizarre fatherhood, but it beat a sentence of permanent solitude. “And there’s nothing you can do to change it?”
“I would if I could, at least I think I would. But who am I to challenge a thousand years of tradition?”
She saw herself as a living reason to challenge it. “But you’re the first hunter to save a wraith’s victim in a thousand years.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“What do you mean? Have you been brainwashed? You don’t have to follow anyone’s rules anymore. When you saved my life, you did something nobody had done in a thousand years, and you did it so fast that you saved a half dozen extra lives.”
“Yeah, I feel great about that, but why would that change anything? We’re dealing with supernatural divine forces here that we barely understand. The last thing any of us should do is make up the rules as we go.”
Recognizing the limitations of his paramilitary upbringing, she attacked it from the flank. “I don’t think I ever thanked you properly for saving my life.”
He gave a dismissive wave. “No need. I never thanked you properly either. I was a bullet away from death until you saved me.”
She stepped into him, moved quickly, and pressed her lips against his. A jolt of electricity ran through her before he recoiled.
“Why’d you do that? You know I’m sworn to chastity.”
“Nothing wrong with thanking you properly.”
He turned and started walking. “Please don’t do it again.”
Behind her back, she crossed her fingers. “I won’t. I promise.”
CHAPTER 13
Liam opened the door to the airport hotel room in Athens, Greece. Having accepted the empath’s insatiable curiosity in France, he escorted her into his work area.
“Can I help you set up?”
“Clear the desk, please.” While he heard her decluttering the surface, he withdrew his GPS compass from his pocket and handed it to her. “Here. Just set it down.”
The compass clinked against the desk as she lowered it.
Liam lifted the weapons case from under his arm and set it on the bed. Facing it away from his body, he opened it, closed his eyes, and reached around the lid. He ran his fingers over the crossguard, grabbed the handle, and raised the weapon. Aiming it to the northeast, he opened his eyes, and the dagger adjusted its orientation as he clutched it.
“Is it pointing itself or are you pointing it?”
“I’m only helping it overcome gravity to keep it off the floor. It’s doing the rest by itself.” He stepped to the desk and set the dagger beside the electronics. It oscillated through several small wobbles while settling in a direction. Eyeballing its orientation against the compass, he announced the bearing as he committed it to memory. “Zero-five-two.”
“Is that good?”
The sections of the globe he’d committed to memory gave him the answer. “I hardly need to check the map. That’s Istanbul or real close to it.”
“Is that where we’re going next?”
“Don’t bother unpacking. It’s where we’re going now.”
“You know, you could save yourself a lot of time and effort by avoiding hotels and doing this somewhere private, like in an airport.”
Of course, he’d thought about it. “Have you ever seen someplace with guaranteed privacy in an airport?”
“Yeah, a bathroom stall.”
She had a good point. “I can’t say that you’re wrong, but I like having the space to move about and think without people watching me.”
“And you’re thinking about giving up this nice hotel room and catching the next plane to Istanbul?”
He grabbed his knife and put it back in its case. “Now that the dagger has spoken, there’s nothing left for us here.”
For lack of precise tactical knowledge, Liam had selected a four-star hotel near a park that curved down a hill towards the Bosporus. His Turkish being terrible, he appreciated the taxi driver’s rudimentary English skills.
“You have easy walk to the strait and to Blue Mosque. You walk further along the water, and you can find the Hagia Sophia. There’s lots of good food, too, especially over there on the Asian side. Many ferries run all day.”
Liam glanced out the window at the passing buildings. Standing four to five stories tall, they lined the curved and hilly street “Sounds great. Are you sure you know which hotel is ours?”
“Of course, just one more block.” After the driver continued driving in silence to fulfill his promise, he double-parked and hurried to help his passengers with their bags.
Appreciating the safe drive and the helpful English advice, Liam pressed a large tip into the driver’s hand and then led Dianne into the hotel. Being within walking distance of the latest kill tested his patience as he checked in, but he reminded himself that his working timetables spanned weeks and months, He could remain calm when waiting minutes.
Dianne stood next to him. “There’s a lot to see in this city.”
He appreciated her enthusiasm. Somehow, being imprisoned, seconds from death, and now in a hunt for a monster he suspected was worse than the one she’d escaped left her unfazed. “Sure. We may be here for a while.”
The clerk reached across the desk and handed both room keys to Dianne. She darted around a corner and towards a stairwell while leaving the baggage by Liam’s feet.
> “Dianne!”
She stopped. “What?”
He referred to the dagger by its public pronoun. “If you’re going to leave me with all the luggage, can you at least take the artifact with you?”
Surprising him, she shifted the weapons case that had been hidden around the corner. “You mean this?”
“Yeah. Good work. Set it up for me, please.”
Unable to match her pace, he trailed her as he carried two suitcases up three flights of stairs. He found her door and yelled through it. “Dianne!”
The latch unlocked, and her big, beautiful, brown eyes appeared. “Hi.”
“Hi. Can we get started?”
“Sure. How do we do this?”
“Take the bags and put them out of the way.” He extended hers, which was by far the heavier one, and then he gave her his lighter suitcase.
“Okay. The bags are on the bed, and everything’s set up on the table.”
“Not everything.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the GPS compass.
Grabbing the electronic direction-finder, she smiled. “Oops. Forgot that minor detail.”
“Put it on the table out of the way of our artifact. I don’t want to risk them touching each other.”
“Got it.” She disappeared and then returned.
“Now. Just make sure our artifact’s free to rotate.”
“I did. I’m not an idiot.”
He found her playful, but her forced kiss in Paris–the first kiss for the young hunter who’d sworn himself to chastity–made him doubt her judgment. “Agreed, you’re not an idiot, but I had to verify.”
“Fine. You verified.”
“Okay, this one’s worth recording. Get your phone ready and let me know when it’s capturing a video of our artifact.”
She stepped back from the door, raised her phone to her face, and pressed her thumbs into the touchscreen. “Okay, I’m recording.”
“Here I go.” He reconsidered. “No, wait. Did you close the curtains?”
“Oh, shit. Sorry.” She made noises as she trod about the room closing curtains. “Okay, now we’re ready, and I’m recording again.”
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