The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (10 page)

She turned and leaned on the rail to look at me directly now.

“Who else could have told you?” she asked.

“A statue,” I said. Sometimes honesty is the best policy. Mainly because it confuses people.

“I see,” she said. “And what do I have to gain if I tell you?”

“I brought you back to life,” I pointed out.

“But not for long,” she countered.

“I don’t have the grace necessary to sustain you,” I said. “At least not in the life to which you are accustomed.” I made a gesture at her rags.

At least she had the goodwill to laugh again. “So what did you have planned?” she asked.

“I was going to find a nice bench overlooking the water where you could watch the sun come up once again,” I said. “I thought it would be nice for you to retire on the dawn.”

She glanced back at the sky, which showed no signs of letting the sun shine through the clouds. “That would have been a nice view,” she said. “In theory.”

I shrugged. “Even I can’t control the weather,” I said.

“What will you give me when you have more grace and time?” she asked.

“Dinner and dancing and all that,” I said. “Whatever you desire.”

“You have no idea what I desire,” she said. Which was true enough. Perhaps I could have guessed when she was mortal, but death had a way of changing people.

“Very well,” she went on. “A date in the future then. But you had better raise me in finer clothes next time.”

I bowed my head.

“So, what is it you want to know in return?” she asked.

“The angel Cassiel is willing to trade me the whereabouts of Judas for Mona Lisa,” I said. “I trust you know of my interest in Judas.”

She raised an eyebrow. “As in the biblical Judas?” she said. “I would have thought him long dead.”

“He’s not what he seems,” I said.

She nodded. “Who is?” she said. “And what is Cassiel’s interest?”

I shrugged. “Who knows with angels?” I said. I didn’t see any point in telling her what I knew. She was going to give me the information I wanted or she wasn’t. The little detail about Cassiel and Mona Lisa being lovers once wouldn’t change that. Besides, it was good to have secrets sometimes.

“Indeed,” Diana said, giving me a look that said she knew I was holding something back. I imagine it was just like life at court.

“So I would know of Mona Lisa’s relation to the Queen,” I said. “And I will work out the rest later.”

“She was tribute,” Diana said. “Meant for the Queen’s collection.”

“Tribute? Tribute from whom?” I asked. And collection? What sort of collection would include a gorgon?

“The faerie queen,” she said. “Part of the pact to keep peace between their realms. They exchange tribute every century.”

I damned Cassiel under my breath. I damned all the angels under my breath. Why wouldn’t they just come out and tell people this sort of thing?

“But something happened this century,” I said.

Diana nodded. “There was an attack,” she said. “It wasn’t the gorgon. She was delivered to the castle in an iron crate and with her eyes and tongue torn out, her ears branded shut, her mouth sewn closed. She was powerless. It was something else.”

“What was it?” I asked, but she shook her head.

“I wasn’t invited to that particular event,” she sniffed. “So the details are unclear to me. But the castle was damaged. Guards were slain. And after, the gorgon was gone.”

“The fire at the castle wasn’t any ordinary fire then,” I said.

She shook her head. “The family released a story about construction work causing it,” she said. “And they told the families of the dead guards there’d been accidents, although they said the deaths had happened all over the city so as to divert attention. The ones who asked questions they paid off. The ones who asked too many questions, well . . .”

I nodded. There’d been a day when the Royal Family wouldn’t have bothered with the payoffs at all, when they’d just have gone for the unspoken option.

“So what did happen?” I asked. “You must have an idea.”

She studied me for a moment. “No one’s really certain,” she finally said. “Some believe the faerie stole her back. But I don’t put any faith in that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It seems like a perfectly faerie thing to do.”

She smiled a little and looked away from me again. “I had a faerie acquaintance,” she said. “He assured me they were pleased to be rid of Mona Lisa.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised the princess had a faerie lover, but I was. And the fact the Royal Family probably knew about it—they had spies and eyes everywhere—brought me some amount of pleasure.

“I had drinks with the Queen Mother once after the fire,” Diana went on. “She told me she thought it was another collector. But she wouldn’t discuss names.” She shook her head. “I don’t know who or what would have the courage or the resources to raid the Queen’s collection.”

“And none of your subjects in your current kingdom have any insight into the matter?” I asked.

She smiled at my less-than-subtle flattery. “I am currently a princess in a land of kings and queens,” she said. “But thank you. Unfortunately, no. It as much a mystery in the afterlife as it is here.”

We were quiet for a moment then, as I thought things over and the princess breathed deep of the morning air. I didn’t bother asking where the faerie had found Mona Lisa. They were always finding and binding things. It is their way. Makes their court more lively. Actually, it makes their court. But it was unlike them to give up a prize like that.

I sighed. I could see only one course of action. “I’m going to have to talk to the queen,” I said.

“She’ll have you crucified again,” Diana said. “And that’s just for starters.”

“I meant the faerie queen,” I said. “I’m running out of clues, and I have a feeling she has the last one.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “Or perhaps you could let go of your obsession with Judas.”

“I tried that once,” I said. “It didn’t work out.” Which was true enough in its own way.

She opened her mouth to say something else but then looked over my shoulder. “Friend of yours?” she asked.

I turned to see a man wearing a coat and hat walking toward us. I had time to register the bandages flapping around his feet and face, his eyes burning at me. The mummy from the British Museum. Then it lunged at me, grabbing on to my jacket with both hands and carrying us both over the side of the bridge with its momentum. I managed to knock its hands free of me as we fell, and we hit the river separately.

I’d once wasted an afternoon taking a tour boat up and down the Thames. The guide told us the water of the Thames was actually quite clean, that it just looked dirty from the sediment stirred up by the tides. He said you could dip a glass in it and once the sediment settled at the bottom, the water would be clear enough to drink. I didn’t believe him.

Don’t swallow the water, I told myself as I sank under the surface. Don’t swallow the water.

The mummy reached for me again as we went down, some of its bandages floating free around it now, but I kicked off in a random direction and it faded away. I dove deeper and zigged this way, zagged that way, hoping to lose it in the murk, until my lungs couldn’t take it any more and I rose back up into the light.

Directly into the path of a tugboat. I threw myself to one side in the water, it swerved the other way, and everything worked out. A man on the deck threw a life preserver into the water and hauled me in, pulling me up over the side of the boat. I spat up the water I’d swallowed and then looked back at the bridge, a few hundred feet behind us now. I saw the princess running away, disappearing into the city. I wasn’t sure how much grace she had left, but it would probably keep her alive long enough she could cause some trouble. Oh well, what was done was done. But I was glad I hadn’t raised her in her own body. An anonymous body turning up somewhere was one thing, but the body of a dead princess showing up outside the official tomb was something else entirely.

I thanked the man who’d fished me out of the Thames, and he just shook his head and muttered something about tourists. The captain of the tug steered us toward the nearest dock.

I squeezed the water out of my shirt and watched the wake of the tug. There was no sign of the mummy, and no one else seemed to be looking for it. No one had seen us fall other than the princess. I wondered where the mummy was, and pictured it walking along the bottom of the Thames after me.

So, maybe there was something after all to the legends about pharaohs’ curses.

The tugboat pulled up alongside a wooden dock long enough for me to disembark, and then the men went down the river without so much as a backward glance, ignoring my wave of thanks. No doubt some code of the sea thing.

I climbed the steps up to street level, before there were any more surprises, and lost myself in the crowd of people heading to their early-morning jobs. It being London and all, no one paid any attention to my soaking clothes. I dried them with a bit of grace and then stopped at a pub for a breakfast of eggs and toast and black, black tea. The British do tea like the Spanish do wine. Which says a lot about their respective histories. I flipped through a paper while I ate. I tried to come up with a plan to deal with the mummy, because I had a feeling it was going to keep chasing me. The undead are kind of single-minded that way.

But I forgot all about that when I turned the page of the newspaper and came across a photo of the art dealer I’d talked to on the train. There was also a photo of a bloody knife. It was the knife I’d used on Remiel. The one I’d left behind in the Gaudí church.

I stared at the photos for a moment, then read the story that went with them. It said the art dealer had been coming back from the fair at Maastricht when he’d been stabbed to death in the washroom of the train. His eyes had been gouged out. A cross had been carved into his face using the knife. Police figured it happened before the train had even left the station. A conductor said someone had hung an out-of-order sign on the washroom door shortly after boarding began. I thought again of the feeling of danger that had woken me on the train.

So the art dealer I had been talking to hadn’t in fact been the art dealer. Who
had
I been talking to on the train then? And why?

The only witness to Remiel’s death had been Cassiel. He was the only one who could have found the knife. But I couldn’t think of any reason why he’d kill and mutilate the art dealer and pretend to be him to engage me in small talk.

I replayed the Barcelona trip in my mind, but I didn’t see any moment where I thought someone else had been watching. And even if they had, why this?

And why the eyes and the cross?

There was only one answer.

I downed the rest of my coffee and stared out the window, at the passing crowd.

Judas.

Penelope took me back to her cabin, which was more of a shack in a clearing in the woods than any sort of proper structure. It took us an hour to hike there, and I didn’t notice any paths among the trees, which meant people didn’t come this way often. I offered to carry Penelope’s camera gear for her, but she just laughed.

“If I needed a man to carry my camera, I’d be back in the city, sipping tea and waiting for you to hold the door open for me,” she said. “Do you see any doors out here?”

I couldn’t help but smile, despite feeling the way I usually feel after a resurrection. Hung over, hungry and angry. Yeah, she definitely had spirit.

“No doors,” I agreed.

“Not except for the one you came through,” she said, eyeing my clothes again.

I still couldn’t shake the feeling there was something familiar about her, but I didn’t sense any danger, so I didn’t know what to make of it. I put it in the back of my mind for the moment, because there was another subject I was more curious about.

“So have you actually seen any angels out here?” I asked.

It was a bit of a trick question. Most people who said they saw angels or gorgons or any of my other acquaintances were generally a bit mad. Or a lot mad. The smart creatures and gods had learned to make themselves invisible and blend into the crowd once humans had taken their place in the world and history. The ones that weren’t smart were extinct. But every now and then I’d come across a person who had an eye for them. Usually they worked in museums or libraries or for certain government organizations. But not all of them. And if Penelope
had
seen an angel, well maybe she knew which way Gabriel had gone.

“I haven’t seen him yet,” Penelope said. “But I’ll find him someday.”

Ah well. I’d have to search out Gabriel on my own again then. So it goes.

“And what will you do when you find him?” I asked. “Take a photo?” I nodded at the camera.

She glanced at me, then away again. “The camera isn’t for the angel,” she said. “It’s for the others.”

“What others?” I asked.

“Whatever others I can find,” she said. “Ghosts. Wood spirits. Faerie folk. I was about to take a photograph of what I think was a sasquatch when you erupted out of your grave and scared it off.”

I considered her words and she looked back at me and smiled again.

“You think me mad, don’t you?”

“Possibly,” I said. “Why else would you want a photograph of a faerie?” I didn’t add that faerie being what they were and all, there was nothing interesting about photos of them. They just looked like more people on the street. Or, I guess in this case, in the woods. Also, I was pretty sure sasquatches didn’t exist.

She laughed. “There are many people in the world who are interested in such photographs,” she said.

I thought about that for a second, and then it all came together for me.

“Spiritualists,” I said, and she nodded.

This was the age when many people thought they could communicate with ghosts in the afterlife, or even see other things walking among us, if only they had the right equipment. Ouija boards and crystal balls and the like. Their hearts were in the right places, but unfortunately most of them were victims of fraudsters, willing to believe in doctored photographs of the faerie dancing in wood glens and such. As if the faerie hung around in the forest these days.

“Now you think me a fraud,” she said, still smiling.

I shrugged. “I’m not one to judge what others believe,” I said. “If they’re interested in your photographs, so be it.”

But I had a hunch there was more to this situation than that. If she wanted to create fake photographs, she could have done it much easier in woods closer to her home, wherever that was. So why was she all the way out here? Was she actually searching for a real angel?

We waded through a stream and mist sparkled around us. A rainbow arched overhead. I caught sight of the skull of a goblin hidden among the rocks in the water but I didn’t say anything. She stepped over it without seeming to notice. Well, so much for her having the eye for such things.

“So why did you come all the way out here?” I asked her. “The wilds of British Columbia aren’t exactly where I’d expect to find angels.”

A clever bit of misdirection, that. Hopefully it would distract her from asking what I was doing out here.

She reached the other side of the stream and waited for me to cross. She looked at the rainbow, which would have made a nice shot, but didn’t bother setting up her camera.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just had a feeling. It’s as if I were drawn here.” She looked back at me. “What about you?” she asked. “What brought you out here?”

“We already covered that,” I said. “The climbing accident, remember?”

Her expression said we both knew that was a lie, but then she turned back to the woods and we carried on anyway.

We eventually arrived at her shack, which looked like it was in danger of collapsing into itself. Moss grew on every surface, and the roof sagged down in the middle. It looked as old as me.

“Did you build this?” I asked as she forced the door open. The frame was warped, so she had to put her shoulder to it.

She shook her head as she led me inside. “I’m a photographer, not a mad trapper,” she said. “I found it here when I hiked in. The place was abandoned, so I made myself at home.”

The inside was dark on account of there being no windows, but enough light came in through the open door I could look around while Penelope set down her camera gear. It was a simple affair: a table and stool made of rough pieces of wood, a bed in a corner, a stove in the other corner with some chopped wood nearby. Bottles of chemicals half-hidden by a curtain that was probably her darkroom area. Not your typical woman’s dwelling.

And then there were the photos hanging from clotheslines on the walls. They were of meadows or forests like the graveyard where Penelope had found me. And they all had the things that would have made the spiritualists happy: will o’ the wisps that could have been real wisps or maybe just swamp gas. A footprint in mud that could have been the mark of some strange creature even I didn’t know or simply a deformed bear. An insubstantial form moving between some crosses in another graveyard that could have been a ghost or could have been a trick of the light.

“How many graveyards are out here anyway?” I asked, looking at that photo.

“This area was home to a prospecting boom for a while,” Penelope said. She took a can of beans from a box on the floor and opened it with a can opener from the box. She stuck a spoon in the can and handed it to me without bothering to warm the beans. “A lot of people died out here with their dreams.” She shrugged. “But they left a lot of handy shelters.”

She sat on the lone stool and watched me eat the beans, which didn’t take long at all. They didn’t do anything to stop the hunger inside me, but I nodded my thanks like they did.

“So what’s your real name?” she asked.

“How do you know Cross isn’t my real name?” I said.

“You carry yourself like you’re hiding something,” she said. “And you looked away when you told me your name. I’ve known enough men to recognize that as a sign they’re pretending to be someone else, for whatever reason.”

Maybe she did have an eye after all.

“It’s a long story,” I said, and she nodded and let it be. She picked up her camera gear and carried it to the darkroom area. I spent some more time looking around the shack. It was only then that I saw the photo tucked into one corner. A closeup of the rocks of a stream bed. The goblin skull in the centre of the photograph.