The Conspiracy of Us (7 page)

D
on't do well with blood, I see.” The boy helped me limp to the white couch in the foyer.

My knee hurt so badly from the fall down the stairs that I wanted to curl into a ball and cry. But then the throbbing in my head overpowered it. Then the blood still oozing out of my shoulder. Then the body. The headless body on the floor, and the sick coppery smell and the music: the ridiculous chime of the Bach playing over the bloodbath like some kind of twisted parody.

I leaned on the armrest but winced away from a small, bloody handprint—my
own
handprint—which contrasted gruesomely with the white upholstery.

“Why would he try to kill me?” I whispered.

“A mistake,
cherie.
He was Order. Must have thought you were someone else.”

Order. Like Madame Dauphin and those men had been talking about. I knew it hadn't felt like just a robbery. But it also hadn't felt like a mistake.

The boy lit a cigarette, then offered me the pack. I shook my head. “You are Avery, I presume. I am Luc.”

Madame Dauphin's son. I'd overheard someone asking about him earlier at the Louvre. His cologne was almost strong enough to overpower the scent of blood. How was it possible he was so nonchalant? Celebrities and politicians and ball gowns—fine. That was everyday life for some people. But politicians and Prada and
murder
?

Luc blew a stream of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I was looking for Stellan. Where is he, by the way? Luckily, I heard you scream from down the block. Nice lungs.”

A commotion sounded from the back of the store, and Jack came out of the other room. He had the other man who worked here, Frederic, in a choke hold, pressing the gun to his side when he struggled, all while nudging Aimee and Elisa along in front of him. I perched on the edge of the couch, but just then the door opened, letting in street noise.

Everyone turned as heavy footsteps came into the foyer, then stopped dead. Stellan's eyes widened as they flicked to the body, to the blood, to me, and finally to Jack, hovering over Frederic and the girls.

He met my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and he came savagely alive. He was across the floor in three long strides, glaring first at Jack, then down at Frederic.

“What's going on?” he asked, and yelled again, in French. “
Ce qui s'est passe?
What the—” He broke off into another language, which sounded like Russian.

“The Order tried to kill Avery.” Jack's quiet anger was almost more frightening than Stellan's rage.

“Tried to kill—” Stellan's gaze shot to me. He reached down to Frederic and yanked at his collar, exposing a tattoo on his chest, of a circle split by two lines. Then he pulled out his dagger and drove it into Frederic's chest.

Frederic coughed once, and then his body slackened and fell to the ground, his blood mixing with the stain already spread across the floor.

“No,” I tried to say, but it came out as a strangled gasp. Elisa wailed. Stellan ignored us both.

“How the hell did this happen?” he said to Jack. He pulled out the dagger. “How did the Order get in here?”

“
You
were supposed to be watching Avery.” Jack hauled Aimee and Elisa up by their arms and moved them away from the spreading pool of blood.

“Like I knew they'd come for her!” Stellan said. “Unless you've been lying about who she is, there is absolutely no reason for this.”

Elisa spoke in rapid, garbled French. Stellan pointed the bloody tip of the knife at her.

“Don't!” I found my voice and tried to stand, but had to grab on to the couch to keep from falling. “She didn't do anything.”

Stellan whirled on me. The beautiful, arrogant boy I'd been talking to in the car was now a beautiful, arrogant boy with a knife in his grip and blood on his hands. “Why did he try to kill you?”

“What?” I choked in disbelief. Was he angry with
me
? “I have no idea! Why did you kill
him
?”

He stalked across the floor until he towered over me. “Did you not get the
tried to kill you
part?”

“He didn't. The other guy did.” I tried to yell, but my voice broke.

“And this one was Order, too.”

“So why didn't you question him? Or lock him up? Or—”

I quaked, looking from the headless body to the newly dead Frederic and back.

“You don't reason with the Order,” Stellan spat. Blood dripped off his dagger, and he held it like he was about to plunge it into someone else.

Jack pushed between us, his hands on Stellan's chest. “Stop,” he said. “It's the Order's fault, not hers.” After a second, Stellan's arm dropped to his side, but his eyes never left my face, even after Jack let him go.

Luc stood up, running a hand through his messy hair, his lanky shoulders more tense than they had been a few minutes earlier. “If I may propose a theory. The Order learned we would have family members here today, in whatever way they've been learning of all our movements. They planned another strike. They may even have wanted
me.
” He paused and took a long drag of his cigarette, and I thought again of that conversation. The Order.
Attacks.
“It seems our guest was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

From the other side of the room, Aimee piped up again.

“She says these two”—Luc gestured to the bodies with his cigarette as he translated—“came a few hours ago. Said the other branch of the store sent them. The girls thought nothing of it until Frederic tied them up in the back room.”

Luc had to be right—the men wanted someone else. But then again, that was what I'd thought at prom.

“Doesn't matter now.” Luc put out his cigarette on an issue of
Vogue
on a side table. “Get these girls out of here so we can have someone clean up this mess.” He said it like milk had been spilled on the kitchen floor.

My hands started shaking.

Luc flipped through a rack of coral-colored dress shirts. “Would you call these pink or orange,
cherie
? Pink is not my color, but I need to change for dinner. I'm starving.”

It took me a second to register what he'd said. “What?”

“There's an adorable bistro around the corner, or that little cafe on Rue de Rivoli,” he continued.

Stellan, too, wiped blood off his dagger with nothing more than a scowl. Jack, at least, was covering the bodies.

I blinked. “What is wrong with you?”

Luc pulled a shirt off its hanger and cocked his head to one side.

“People are dead.” My breath rasped. “Who cares if the shirt's pink?”

Luc draped the shirt on the rack. His face softened. “
Cherie,
I apologize. This all is new to you. I must appear so callous. You've got to understand—killing Order members is not the same as killing normal people. Even if he hadn't hurt you, if you knew all they'd done to our families, you'd understand.”

I shook my head. I wouldn't understand. I didn't understand.

Across the room, Jack dropped a patterned scarf over the killer's head and stood. “You should get cleaned up,” he said. I shook my head again.

“There's a bathroom upstairs,” he said pointedly. I bit my lip, hard. I could tell he thought I was about to lose it. Maybe he was right.

“Show me?” I whispered. He started to point up the stairs, but I steeled myself. Jack would give me some answers. He had to. “Show. Me.”

He frowned, but nodded. On the way to the stairs, he flipped through a rack of floral sundresses and pulled one off its hanger. “Here. Put this on.”

I held the dress by the tips of my fingers. “I can't just take this—”

“It doesn't matter.” He climbed ahead of me up the stairs.

I stared at the dress. It did matter. It mattered that this dress cost more than my entire wardrobe at home. Probably more than we paid for a month of rent at home. But to these people, it didn't. It didn't matter that there were two dead bodies on the floor downstairs and that I could have been a third. That beheading someone—in one of the fanciest boutiques in Paris—was nothing more than a minor delay of your dinner plans. And that someone had attacked me, right as I learned that I had family who associated with some of the most powerful people in the world, and that it hadn't
felt
like a case of mistaken identity.

Just how much had my mom been hiding? Was it possible that she'd kept my father's family from me because of more than hurt feelings?

Jack opened a door off the hallway.

“Please,” I said. He held the door wide open with one arm, peering in like he was making sure it was safe. “Tell me what's going on. Was this really a mistake? Luc said it was nothing.”

He looked both ways down the hall, chewed his lip, then finally met my eyes. “Clean up, and then we'll talk about it. But no, it's not nothing. And I don't think it was a mistake.”

T
he blood wouldn't come off, and none of it was a mistake.

There was non-mistake, not-nothing blood everywhere. The dried blood from my hands and the fresh blood still oozing from my shoulder turned different shades of pink as they swirled down the drain.

I glanced at the beautiful gold dress balled up in the corner, bloody, ruined. A whole swatch of sequins was ripped off the front, like a gaping wound. I must have grabbed my necklace earlier, because there was a bloody thumbprint on it, and a smear of red where it lay on my chest.

The shaking that had started in my hands expanded, until my whole body was trembling and I couldn't stop it.

I scrubbed my hands until the water ran clear, and then scrubbed some more.

A rap at the door startled me, and in the mirror I saw Jack slip into the room. The door clicked shut behind him.

He came up behind me at the sink, and I felt him watching over my shoulder. I opened my mouth, but I didn't know what to say. Instead, I held up my hands. My skin was pink and scrubbed raw, darker red stains still under my fingernails. I dropped them back under the tap.

We stood in silence, both watching the water splash over my skin, and after a few seconds, he put his own hands under the faucet, too.

I tensed, but he didn't let go. He ran his thumb down my fingers, one by one. I felt myself trying to say it's fine, I'm fine, I don't need your help, but it wouldn't come out. All I could do was stare at his hands, big and strong and scarred and cradling mine so gently.

“Look away a second,” he murmured.

The window next to the sink was streaked with dirt and age, so the Paris I saw outside was as hazy and distorted as it was oblivious to what had happened on this side of the glass. My eyes skimmed over the cream buildings, the cobbled street, the dark ironwork of the Eiffel Tower in the distance, lighting on the bursts of red that slashed the neutrals of the city. A little girl's jacket, a bright store awning, a wide flower bed running down one side of the street.

The cold scraping under my fingernails told me Jack was cleaning them with a knife, which should have scared me but didn't. I watched him in the mirror, his dark brows knitted together, his lower lip caught between his teeth. I hadn't noticed earlier, but a new bruise was spreading under his left eye. When he said I could, I looked back down and the bursts of red on my hands were gone. My heart flared with gratitude.

And then I realized my hands were still in his, and cradled them to my chest. They left wet blotches on the flowered sundress.

He watched me in the mirror. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have left you alone. You've had quite a shock.”

Absurdly, I couldn't stop thinking about his perfect, proper British accent.

“I'm fine.” I grabbed a paper towel and turned away from the mirror, from him.

While I was changing clothes, he'd gone to a pharmacy down the street. He held out an assortment of painkillers, and I plucked two ibuprofen from his palm. He handed me a third, and I watched him put the rest in a bag. This was Jack Bishop, Lakehaven High new kid. In a Prada store, in Paris, offering me painkillers after I'd almost been murdered.

A laugh choked up in my throat, and I very nearly lost it again. Instead, I sat on the closed toilet seat and swallowed the ibuprofen dry.

The music still tinkled out of the speakers. Why had no one stopped it? Someone should have stopped it. “Turn off the music,” I said.

Jack stared at me, pharmacy bag in hand.

“Turn off the music,” I said again. “Please. And can I use your phone?” After a second, he handed it to me and left.

I made myself take a deep breath.

I probably
was
close to going into shock. I had this fuzzy, half-there feeling, the constant replay of the knife cutting into my skin, the smell, the squishing noise as the killer's head hit the marble floor. The thought that I'd seen both Stellan and Luc kill people, which probably meant Jack had killed people, too. That my family killed people. And people wanted to kill them.

I dialed my mom's number, then our house. Both rang and rang, and finally clicked over to my mom's tinny voice on the voice mail again. I couldn't leave what had just happened on a message.

The music stopped in the middle of a note. I almost wished I hadn't told Jack to turn it off. It was too quiet now. My breath echoed, too fast. Too panicky.

No. I was alive. I was fine. I really wished I could talk to my mom. I took deep breaths over and over, in through my nose, out through my mouth.

I sat up straight as the door opened and Jack slipped inside. He spread bandages from the plastic pharmacy bag across the sink.

Would mafia families have somebody bring me bandages when I was hurt? I wasn't sure why I wasn't just asking it straight out: Who are you?
What
are you? Maybe I didn't really want to know. In the space of one day, I'd turned into what I thought I'd never be: a naive, hopeful idiot. Despite my wariness, I'd convinced myself this was fun. I'd spent all day smiling at famous people and admiring Paris and playing dress-up. I was thinking about going to a
ball.
All the while I had willfully ignored the ominous signs I didn't want to see.

I smoothed the pleats of the dress over my knees. I just had to do it. I had to ask. I opened my mouth just as Jack turned, his gray eyes darker than usual, a deep crease between his brows.

“Who are you?” he said.

I closed my mouth. Blinked. “Who am
I
?”

He leaned against the sink, spinning the top on the bottle of painkillers. “I agree it wasn't a mistake. But you don't fit the pattern in any way, and the Order is more careful than that.”

“Pattern? Shouldn't I be the one asking who
you
are, since it's so common for all of you to be attacked?” I started to stand, but I felt dizzy. I sat down again, rubbing the knot on my forehead.

“I just want to know if you're telling me the truth,” he said, a little more gently. “Are you really as in the dark as you seem?”

I wanted to be calm. I wanted to be rational. Why was this not making enough sense for me to feel rational? I clenched my hands between my knees and spoke in a slow, measured voice. “What are you talking about? What do you think I'm supposed to know?”

“I'm talking about the fact that I was sent to small-town America to gather information about a distant family member. Unusual, but nothing unheard of. Considering everything else that's going on, it wasn't shocking for the Dauphins to send Stellan to investigate. But then, just as we'd gotten it all sorted and I was about to take you to meet your family, I got this bizarre message from my mentor, telling me to put myself on the line to keep you safe.”

I squeezed my knees together until my rings dug into my skin. It all made sense—that phone call I'd overheard, Stellan at prom. Even that text Jack had gotten that had made him turn me over.

“And now, I can't reach my mentor,” Jack continued. “Fitz. I was on my way here to find out what you know about him, and you're nearly being killed by the Order.” He pulled a brown bottle from the pharmacy bag. “You tell me—does that not sound suspicious?”

My mouth felt like sand. “But I don't know you. I don't know the Saxons, or the Dauphins, or your mentor. Why would these Order people care about me?”

“That's the question, then, isn't it?” Jack crouched in front of me with a cotton ball soaked in peroxide.

“Who
are
the Saxons?” I said finally. “Politicians, or . . . something else?”

His eyes were directly on level with mine, but carefully avoiding them. He ripped open a packet of gauze. “Politicians, in a sense,
and
something else.”

Like I'd suspected, I guess. “The Dauphins, too? All twelve?”

Jack was so close, I could feel his body tense, but he nodded. With the cotton ball in one hand and a gauze pad in the other, he brushed my hair aside, and I watched his rough fingers slide the strap of the yellow sundress off my shoulder, carefully avoiding the knife wound.

I thought about downstairs, where I wanted nothing more than for him to stay with me. At the sink, with my hands cradled in his. Even now, his body was like a magnetic force. I realized I was leaning toward him, and I abruptly pulled back.

I might be upset, but I wasn't helpless. And I was not going to let myself start depending on anybody now, especially not here. Especially not
him.

“I don't need you,” I said. I reached for the cotton ball. “I don't need you to do this, I mean. I can do it. I'm
fine.
”

He held it out of my reach. “This isn't just a scratch. Unless you happen to know first aid, let me handle it.”

I glanced down at the cut, and the flap of skin hanging off it. I shivered. “All right,” I said, but I sat stiffly while he leaned in again, careful not to relax into his touch.

The wound had mostly stopped bleeding, but it throbbed with every beat of my heart. Jack pressed the cotton ball to it, and I hissed at the bright bite of peroxide.

When he'd cleaned it and smoothed on a bandage, I brushed past him to the sink. I pulled up the strap on my dress, then wet a paper towel to wipe off the blood on my necklace while Jack washed his hands.

“What did the message say?” I finally asked. “The one your mentor sent.”

Jack pulled out his phone, pressed some buttons, and handed it to me.

The girl is in danger. Don't take her to Saxons. If the worst happens—follow what I've left you.

“That's it?”

Behind me, Jack carefully unrolled and rebuttoned the sleeves on the clean white dress shirt he'd changed into, and frowned as he rubbed away a slash of dried blood—probably
my
blood—from his neck. I wondered what the people at the pharmacy had thought about that. “That's it,” he said.

A pang of surprise and unexpected gratitude swelled in my chest. He'd sent me with Stellan to keep me safe—going against a direct order to bring me to the Saxons—all because of this vague message. Maybe he cared a little bit after all.

I studied the text again. Then I looked at the picture of the sender, and the phone almost fell out of my hands.

Staring up at me was a familiar face, laughing eyes peering out from behind small, round glasses. A face that couldn't be on Jack's phone.

“This is your mentor?” It suddenly felt chilly in the tiled bathroom.

Jack finger-combed his dark hair in the mirror and nodded. “Fitz.”

I stared at the picture. “Jack, I
know
him. This is Mr. Emerson.”

Mr. Emerson, my pseudograndfather, whose most recent postcard was sitting on my bedside table.

Jack was across the room in a second, snatching the phone out of my hand and squinting at the picture. “His name is Emerson Fitzpatrick.”

“When he lived next door to us years ago, he went by Fitzpatrick Emerson.”

Jack looked from the phone to me. “There's no way,” he said. “You must be thinking of someone else—”

“I'm not.” This time, I wasn't even going to entertain the possibility of a coincidence. I stalked to the bathroom door. “How do you know him?”

“He works for the Circle, and has for decades. Which means . . .”

I ran my hands through my hair and leaned against the mirror on the back of the door. “Mr. Emerson was
spying
on me?”

“No.” The single forceful syllable echoed off the walls. Jack paced. “He's one of the good guys. I just can't believe you know him.” Jack glanced at me, appraising, and I hadn't realized how closed off he'd been until he opened up again. It was like me knowing Mr. Emerson made him feel like we were on the same team. I still wasn't sure.

I stared at a copy of a Monet water lily painting on the wall above the toilet. “You think he's in trouble?”

“He just hasn't answered his phone since he sent that message.” Jack stared out the window, fiddling with a basket of fake fruit on the sill. He picked up a lemon and tossed it anxiously from palm to palm. “I've been to his place here in Paris, and he's not there. And he's not answering the phone at his flat in Istanbul.”

Istanbul. Like his postcard, from the Hagia Sophia. Jack was saying Mr. Emerson
lived
there, and wasn't just taking a vacation from Boston.

I turned and looked at myself in the mirror. “What does this mean?” I whispered.

I stared into my eyes, still bloodshot and haunted, and it hit me.

“Luc's eyes,” I said. “They're purple.”

“Yes . . .” Jack turned, letting the plastic lemon rest in his left hand. He met my eyes in the mirror like he heard the question in my voice.

“That's a Dauphin family trait?”

“Many of the Dauphins do have violet eyes, yes.” He set the lemon back in its basket.

I swallowed. “I know you said I'm distant family of the Saxons, but I think I might be related to the Dauphins instead. Could that be what Mr. Emerson meant?”

When Jack turned back around, I could see in the mirror that his face was pale. “Why would you think that?” he said.

I turned slowly. I didn't know whether they had lied about who my family was, or had bad information, or why it would change anything, but it was suddenly obvious it did. Cold moved up my spine.

“Avery.” Jack crossed the room and loomed over me. “Your eyes.” He lowered his voice to a murmur. “You don't mean your eyes are purple, do you?”

I wished I could back away, but the door pressed into my shoulder blades. “Um. I wear contacts, but yeah. My real eye color's a lot like Luc's.”

Jack brought his fingers to his mouth, dropped them. Started to say something, but stopped. His Adam's apple moved up and down with a hard swallow. “Your eyes are purple.”