First Blood (32 page)

“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.

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.

None of them had returned in the past twenty-five years. It looked like the chapel had not changed. It could have been frozen in time. Maybe that was the case. This isolated spot was so hard to get to and seemed to protect itself from intruders.

The magic was still powerful.

These old stones had bathed in their impious rituals. They had witnessed real power. Yes, these ruins had seen their secret faces, their hidden vices—and their weaknesses. Those of all five of them.

She breathed in the icy air, holding the pickaxe with dwindling self-assurance.

The relics of their youth lay in this place.

She felt it in her blood. She felt the presence, intact. Waiting.

Behind the altar. In the tomb. Where they had buried it.

Loisel caught up with her, looking as beaten-down as ever. He leaned against the stone archway and started coughing. He spit reddish bile on the pure snow.

“Good God, I can’t believe we are back here,” he said.

“It feels like yesterday,” Madeleine replied, fascinated in the absolute silence of the place.

Loisel coughed again, harder this time.

“We met here so many times,” he said.

“For five years,” Madeleine added.

“We woke the forces lying dormant behind the veil.”

“And we are going to do it again,” she said.

She advanced into the ruins, dragging the pickaxe behind her.

Her boots sank into the snow.

Loisel, pale, limped behind her.

The bones of their victims had to be here, buried somewhere under the snow. Madeleine remembered slitting the dog’s throat on the altar. That stupid little poodle. She had pulled out its guts with her bare hands in front of the others and in front of the gods.

The cross she had urinated on and broken into pieces had to be somewhere, too.

She shivered at these memories.

Doing all those things had given her such a feeling of power.

Illusions.

She walked over to the altar and brushed it off. Freed of its blanket of snow, it had not changed much over the years, either.

Their sacrificial altar was intact.

“It happened here,” she said.

Memories—so many memories—came back. Five years of her life. Five crazy years, full of taboos they had systematically transgressed. Together, they had pushed the limits. They had tasted blasphemy and had experienced the devouring desire to walk with it.

When they had found this place, they had uncovered an ancient altarpiece in the rudimentary tomb behind the stone altar. They had divided it among themselves. It was a game. Maybe superstition or simply fascination. The panel—actually, it was half a panel—represented the Last Judgment. Madeleine was the first to find it ironic and a sign of encouragement. That was the day they decided to return here to continue their initiation, their training, and, little by little, to start spilling blood.

“The red magic,” Loisel said. “Our pact.”

“Our relic.”

Madeleine stepped behind the altar and into the remains of the apse. She dug around in the snow with her boots.

“It was here. Somewhere over here.
There
.”

She knelt and plunged her arms into the snow. She felt around. After a few minutes, her hands brushed a hard, rough surface. She knew she had found it. She scooped up the snow in heaps and threw it behind her. Finally, she uncovered the gray cement that had been poured here to close up the pit, once and for all.

“The cement hasn’t been touched,” she said, brushing it off with her arm. “Look.”

Loisel sat on the altar.

“Don’t be crazy,” he begged. “If we use the magic, he’ll be here right away. Especially here. It will be our death sentence.”

“Why do you think I brought the pickaxe?”

He looked at her wide-eyed.

“Do you realize how deep you’ll have to dig? We used two bags of cement.”

“I’m not going to do it alone. You’re going to help me.”

“I don’t have the energy for that, Madeleine. You know it.”

“You might die doing it, but you’re going to dig.”

Loisel threw his head back and breathed out, making steam.

“Bitch,” he said. “You’re such a bitch.”

Madeleine grabbed the pickaxe with both hands.

“I’ll start.”

“Even if we manage to get it out of there, we don’t know what will happen,” Loisel said.

The woman in the fur did not answer. She lifted the pickaxe and brought it down on the cement. The impact was violent. But if it had caused any damage at all to the cement slab, it couldn’t be seen.

Pierre Loisel sighed and said nothing more.

He watched as she lifted the tool again and brought it down with a hoarse, determined grunt. She struck again. And again. Madeleine had always had unbelievable discipline. She continued to beat down on the slab, breaking off small fragments. A little more with each swing.

Yes, it would take a long time.

They had filled the whole pit with cement so that nobody could exhume the relic.

How ironic.

Loisel closed his eyes.

He asked himself if he would have the strength when it was his turn to dig.

Rodez

The autopsy room looked like all other autopsy rooms. The floor and the walls were tiled. There were rectangular metal tables equipped with sinks, lined up workspaces, and tools of torture. And there was the characteristic pestilential smell that was so hard to mask and impossible to chase away—the odor of death.

An employee dressed in rubber boots and a long green smock was washing away fluids that had dripped on the floor during the previous autopsy. A police officer handed them a sealed bag. The man’s face was wrinkled with age, and an impressive gray mustache spilled out from under his mask. He seemed to be terribly uncomfortable.