A.K.A. Goddess (23 page)

Lex had said nobody had been actively trying to kill me before.

But they sure were now.

After a mile or two, my wheelwoman pulled over long enough to introduce herself and make sure I was all right. Her name was Edmee, she worked at McDonald’s, and she didn’t trust the authorities, either.

I didn’t think it polite to ask why.

“Where will you go?” she asked. “My friends and me, we have a flat if you need to hole up.”

Between her generosity and the help of the Metro onlookers, I was in danger of crying for a completely different reason than I’d worried about before.

Lex and the Comitatus were clearly not the majority. There really were good people in this world. A lot of them.

“Nôtre Dame would be fine,” I said, instinctively naming one of the greatest monuments to divine feminine energy in all of Europe. “But if you can…make sure we aren’t being followed.”

“A-okay,” said Edmee in enthusiastic English, and off we zipped. She spun me through more tiny roads, alleys and twists than I’d known Paris even had. By the time she dropped me off at the square before the cathedral’s famous facade, even I felt lost.

I tried to pay her, but she shook her head. So I lifted the vesica piscis pendant from around my neck—the one Grand-mère had bought for me when I was fourteen—and pressed it into her hand, along with one of my business cards. “If you ever see a woman wearing one of these, say ‘Circle to circle,’” I instructed. “If she says, ‘Never an end,’ you can trust her.”

Edmee looked delighted, before buzzing away on her scooter.

“E-mail me if you want to know more,” I called.

Then I crossed the square to the shelter of the cathedral’s intricately carved doorways, calling Aunt Bridge on my cell phone.

De Montfort had asked, How’s your friend? I had a sick feeling that my suspicions about Rhys—Father Pritchard!—had been as misplaced as my trust in Lex Stuart.

“Have you talked to Rhys?” I demanded when Bridge picked up. “Is he okay?”

“He’s right here,” she said. “I’ll put him on.”

Before I could respond, the receiver changed hands.

“Maggi?” That was him all right, Welsh accent and all. He was okay. “Thank God you’re safe. What happened to you?”

“To me? What about to you? They said you helped them, but then today they asked how you were and I was afraid—”

“Today? You ran into them again?” He paused. “Maggi, you thought I was helping them?”

In the background, I could hear Aunt Bridge’s protest. She’d always trusted Rhys. But she’d known him longer.

“Not completely!” That sounded inadequate, for all that it was true. “But…not enough to contact you right off, either. There were extenuating circumstances, but…I am sorry, Rhys.”

“You’re forgiven,” he said. “They tracked the phone.”

“What phone?”

“The one we took off the murderer in Vouvant. It seems to have had a GPS chip in it. When I got to our hotel, they were waiting for me.”

Oh, no. “Rhys! Are you all right?”

“I am. They mainly postured about, took our maps.”

I didn’t want to be paranoid anymore today. I preferred to live in a world where strangers helped strangers off subway tracks or gave them Vespa rides, no questions asked. A world where even laicized priests were the good guys.

“So they didn’t tail us after all,” I said. At least I could stop wondering how I’d missed them.

“They did not. But clearly they had some connection with abbey security, to get in as they did. I was so worried.”

Which made two of us. I sat down on the steps of the large left door—the Porte de la Vièrge—before my legs gave way. Rhys hadn’t betrayed me. “But you’re all right?”

“I am. But keep asking me that, and I’ll think you doubt my survival abilities,” he chided. It sounded so much like something I would say that I laughed, which felt good.

Rhys said, “Your aunt found, um, someone. You know—a professional? To take care of that matter we discussed?”

James Bond, he was not. But if he meant some kind of trustworthy museum curator, willing to accept, protect and display the Melusine Chalice, I didn’t care.

“That,” I said, aware of the weight of the grail in its backpack, “I want to hear about. In person.”

We made arrangements—using personal references only my aunt and I knew—for him to pick me up. Bridge assured me that she would be safe with her lover, Sergio, who’d fought in the French Résistance. “Worry about yourself, chou. Let me worry about me.”

I didn’t have a long wait at the spotlit Cathédrale before a car pulled up to the curb across the square—a wonderfully familiar, horribly dented Citroën Saxo VTR. From what I could see, nobody seemed to be tailing it. Rhys ducked his head to see out the passenger window, and waved.

Pigeons scattered as I ran to the passenger door and climbed in. “You brought Aunt Bridge’s car home—thank you!”

“Maggi, what happened to you?”

I jerked my leg away when Rhys extended his hand, uncomfortable to have any man touch me just now.

“I’m sorry,” he said, gesturing instead to the huge rip in my silk skirt. One of many. Oh.

“You remember René de Montfort?” I asked, stretching out my legs—as best I could in a Saxo—to get my first good look at what had recently been new, sexy stockings.

“The murderer,” he said, taking a good look as well.

“He and someone I didn’t see tossed me onto the Metro tracks. I’m okay,” I added quickly, glancing up—and gasping.

Rhys had a black eye and an abrasion across one cheek.

“What happened to you?” I demanded. “You said they were just posturing when they found you!”

His grin came out lopsided, because of the swelling. “I’m alive, aren’t I? And I’m okay, as well.”

“Those sons of bitches—you’re a priest!”

“That depends on whom you ask,” he said, judging the traffic before pulling into it. “And they didn’t know it. And it ought not have mattered.”

But I’d known it. “And then I didn’t trust you. I didn’t even call you when I got to a phone.”

“You left a message for your aunt,” he reminded me. “She’s the first person I called when I didn’t hear from you.”

“But if we hadn’t drawn you into all this—”

“Maggi,” insisted Rhys, far more patient than I felt I deserved. “I’m glad to be involved with this. With you.”

Oh.

“And with your aunt, of course,” he continued, before I could read more into that. “I’m as determined to see this through as anybody.”

I clutched the backpack to my gut, like a bumpy teddy bear, and felt bad anyway. Once we left the Ile de la Cité behind, there were a few—very few—more parking spaces along the curb. God must still like Rhys, because he found one and nosed the Saxo into it, killing the engine before turning to better face me. “Maggi, how long has it been since you started this?”

“This?” I’d heard legends my whole life. I’d known there really were Grail Keepers since I got my first period. Lilith and I began our Web site just over a year ago.

“Since you came looking for the Melusine Chalice. A week?”

Oh. “My apartment was broken into five days ago.”

“And you’ve been running full-out ever since, haven’t you? Give yourself permission to misjudge a person now and then.” When he grinned, easily showing more teeth than I may have ever seen on Lex, his hurt eye vanished behind the swelling. His grin became a wince. “Assuming you did misjudge me, of course.”

“Don’t even say it! I couldn’t stand it if you morphed into one of the bad guys, too.”

His eyebrows went up. “Too?”

“I ran into an old boyfriend,” I admitted, needing to tell someone. “Actually, he found me. Alexander Stuart?”

Rhys looked completely blank—and I could have hugged him. Him, and his jeans, and his faded black T-shirt. He hadn’t grown up in Connecticut. He clearly read neither the financial pages nor the gossip columns. Lex was nobody to him.

“He’s very rich,” I clarified. “I had reasons to suspect his family was involved in old conspiracies against the grails. But Lex and I…we’ve been close since childhood, and I believed he was different, and we…”

Okay, so maybe I’d leave out the details about me, Lex and the old iron bunkbed. But I edited myself as much because I felt ashamed—for my stupidity more than the sex—as because it would qualify as oversharing.

“You…?” prompted Rhys, sounding strangely wary.

“We planned to go out tonight,” I said, to explain the silk. What was left of it. “But…he’s with the Comitatus.”

“Ah, Maggi…”

Damn it! At Rhys’s sympathetic Ah, Maggi, all the hurt I’d tried to fight back as I left the Hotel Valmont, all my shock at being thrown in front of a train, found the weakness it needed to burst through. It drowned me in one overwhelming wave. Tears filled my vision, and my throat ached without threat of screams. “I thought I knew him,” I said, an awful warble in my voice. “But he’s involved in some horrible, murdering secret society, and he bugged my apartment when I thought he was there to check on me, and oh, God, Rhys, I’ve loved him so long….”

That was the true tragedy of tonight. My heart didn’t have a return policy. Even when I’d thought Lex and I shouldn’t be together, a large part of me had continued to love him for everything he’d been to me. And now…had it all been a lie?

I could barely see through my own tears, especially parked between streetlights, but I heard the click of a seat belt unfastening, then felt a fumbling at my own hip. Then Rhys was pulling me into his arms, and I went gladly.

Crying like an idiot.

“Shhh,” he soothed, petting my back, rubbing his jaw on my hair. “It’s all right, Maggi. Go ahead and cry.”

“I don’t want to cry.”

“Don’t be a goose. Everyone cries. It’s good for you.”

Goose? I cried harder.

“Shhh,” he repeated. “The deeper you love, the deeper it hurts. Surely you know that. I’m even told it’s a good thing.”

A good thing? My tears were turning to sobs—ugly, wet, openmouthed sobs against his shoulder. “But I…was…so stupid!”

“I doubt you have it in you to be stupid. This man kept his involvement a secret, didn’t he?”

Hence the term, secret society. But I’d had concerns about his family. And he’d been on the same damned flight to Paris!

“Maggi Sanger.” Rhys pushed me back from him and wiped my eyes with what felt like a paper napkin. Then he wiped my mouth, and my nose. Yeah, some defender of god-dessdom I’d turned out to be. “Never regret love. Loving each other brings us closer to God than anything in this world.”

“Not when you love the wrong person.”

“God loves everybody.” He shook his head. “It’s true that sometimes we make poor choices.”

Oh. Everything in the world wasn’t about me, was it? I sniffed, hard. “Do you regret the choices you made with Mary?”

“Absolutely. But which choices depend on what day you ask.”

I had no argument left in me, only exhaustion, only tears. Rhys drew me back into his embrace, and I sobbed against him until his shirt’s yoke was damp. Once I ran out of tears, I still stayed where I was, struggling to breathe, struggling to collect myself. I was so tired of this. So damned tired.

Rhys continued to hold me, pet my hair, make comforting sounds until finally, blessedly, an edge receded from the ache in my chest. The void in my soul where the Lex I’d known had been wrenched away—had wrenched himself away, through his secrecy and lies—seemed a hint smaller.

If just a hint.

Slowly I returned to an awareness of things other than pain. An awareness, in particular, of strong arms around me. Of a solid shoulder supporting me. Of a friend, unexpected and necessary and so wonderfully there.

His fingers softly massaged the back of my neck. Mmm. I found myself remembering how, just last night in Fontevrault’s chapel, he’d kissed me. This could be something good.

And the timing was so horribly wrong, on so many levels.

“So,” I said. Snuffled. “You get that I’m on the rebound.”

“Are you?” he asked thickly. “I hadn’t noticed.”

I pushed back from him, because cuddling wouldn’t make this any easier. “And I don’t imagine that, after waiting so long for Mary, and how badly that ended…you’re looking to leap into the dating scene just yet either, right?”

He was looking at me the way a man looks at a woman he wants to kiss. But he said, “I’ve not asked a girl on a date since I was in school. I’m not even sure I remember how.”

“It will come back to you,” I assured him fervently.

“She ought to be Catholic,” he said, at the same time.

I stared, and he shrugged, eyes bright. “I’ve not even considered other women until you came along, Maggi, and I suppose I should thank you for that. But…wouldn’t I be a fool to date someone I didn’t feel I could marry? And to marry in the church, wouldn’t she have to be Catholic?”

Him being the expert, these had to be rhetorical questions.

“As opposed to a goddess worshipper,” I said. Because as of last night, I was one. “Who’s only Catholic-ish.”

Rhys touched my face. His touch felt gentle, healing. He drew his fingers down my cheek, his thumb across my lips—and I could see that he still wanted to kiss me. Even if he wouldn’t do it, if I wouldn’t have let him, the wanting meant something.

“As opposed to anyone who’s only Catholic-ish,” he admitted. “But you certainly do complicate matters.”

I felt a pitiful smile pushing at my lips, and I welcomed it. Blessed him for it. “So you’re saying that if only I weren’t upset about Lex, and if I weren’t a goddess worshipper, and if I were Catholic, and possibly if I didn’t live across the Atlantic Ocean from you, you might someday be interested. Right?”

“I’m already interested,” Rhys said, simple as that. “But if it weren’t for all that, I’d most certainly be acting on it. Fasten your seat belt.”

And he started the car, to take me to dinner—and to tell me about the museum curator whom Bridge had found to help us.

Dr. Catrina Dauvergne, a curator at the Musée Cluny.

“This is a much better fit than the Louvre,” said Aunt Bridge the following evening, after her lover, Sergio, dropped us off at the high-walled entrance of the Cluny. “Don’t you think?”

Rhys, holding her good arm as we walked, caught my gaze over her head. “It is. The chalice would be lost in a place the size of the Louvre.”