A.K.A. Goddess (11 page)

My breathing had fallen shallow again. This was starting to sound like the mob. I didn’t want this to sound like the mob.

Liverpool avoided the question. “What’s so sodding important about some old cup in the first place?”

To my frustration, Frenchie didn’t answer. All I heard were footsteps and shuffling.

Goddess worshippers would not have really met in a tower, would they? Much less a watchtower.

But I supposed the priestesses could have hidden the cup anywhere. With evidence that there had once been more castle, here, perhaps there had been other towers. Three fair figures…or four nobles, depending on which edition you used.

A voice above me—Liverpool’s—said something I couldn’t quite make out. They’d climbed more stairs. I was losing them.

I climbed higher, too, surrounded by the darkness.

Then I put my hand on something that moved under my touch.

As I bit back a scream, it fluttered off. Bird? Bat? It took everything I had to keep hanging on to more rock instead of losing purchase to rub my hand on my hip. Eiw. Eiw-eiw-eiw.

Then the voices came closer again, descending the stairs.

“We’re not done,” Frenchy insisted, while I reluctantly felt for another hold.

“Maybe not you, mate, but I am,” said Liverpool. “If they won’t even tell us why this thing is so important—”

“It is important because they say so. It’s enough that they’ve always been correct before. Correct and generous.”

I found my hold and eased myself higher yet.

“But we’ve been doing this for a bloody week!”

“A week?” Frenchie made a disgusted noise. “Compared to generations of loyalty? Compared to centuries of power?”

My hand hit metal above me. Reaching up in the darkness, I felt across what was clearly a secured grate. Someone, somewhere along the way, had wanted to make sure tourists didn’t plummet to their death.

I wouldn’t get any higher. I wouldn’t see their faces, either—not from here.

Damn it!

Somewhere above me, Frenchy had reached the end of his patience. “If you do not embrace this, do not believe in the Order, then why are you even here?”

“I am, all right? Isn’t that enough?”

“No. This is not just a job, this is your inheritance. It is the Comitatus. Those idiot women do not, cannot understand, so they work to destroy us. But what is your excuse?”

“I’m not trying to destroy anything, right?”

“You are not working to uphold it, this I see.”

“Enough with the sermons already!” Now Liverpool was ticked. “Look, I just wanted the damned contract! My uncle said he knew these guys who could get the bid for me if I told them who my dad was, you know? If they thought we were blood. So we did it, okay?”

Frenchy said, “If they thought you were blood?”

“Yeah.” Liverpool laughed, sounding nervous now. “My mum was already knocked up when she married my dad, right? But he was still my dad, legal and all.”

Frenchy said nothing. I hung there in my hole with an uncomfortable prickle deep in my stomach as if my body already knew something the rest of me hadn’t yet worked out.

“Look,” said Liverpool. “Never mind. I’m just pissed off about Greece. Let’s find this stupid cup and we can—”

The diffused light above me wavered, then darted about with a clatter and stilled, as if the flashlight had been dropped. Someone grunted. Bodies thudded, hard, against rock above me. Someone’s breathing rasped into a gurgle, then a strain—

And then, to my horror and relief, nothing.

Nothing?

Well…there was the steady, forgotten glow of a dropped flashlight. A scuffle of footsteps, maybe, and then a dragging sound. But the noise was moving up, away from me. I curled my fingers through the grating and pushed, unsure what I’d do—rescue? threaten?—but determined to do something.

The grate held fast. Nothingness stretched….

Then, from below, I heard one of the most unassuming, most truly awful noises in my life. Half thud. Half splat.

Goodbye, Liverpool.

It really was about blood, wasn’t it?

I heard footsteps. The flashlight’s glow moved as if picked up. It arched a slow, steady light across the top of my tunnel, grillwork casting a lace of shadows onto the stone by my hand before continuing. Then…

I moved my hand as the light slid slowly, firmly back.

Uh-oh.

At least I could finally see the stone I’d been clinging to, and the grill that had trapped me like some Dark-Ages glass ceiling. The grillwork was old, and rusty, and cemented into place—I saw it even more clearly as the light brightened, moving closer.

Time to climb down. But it was slow work, stretching downward, trying to verify footholds before I risked sinking my weight. I didn’t want to go the route Liverpool had.

Frenchy murmured, “‘In the hole where hid her queen.’”

This? He thought worshippers of Melusine would hide her grail in a toilet?

Light crept toward my hand.

I found a hold and dropped lower before it could catch me, moving my hand just in time. I dangled my foot, seeking another toehold, and found it. I reached down and under with my other hand, fumbling for another grip, hoping that—

Light suddenly flooded across me, lacy shadows and all, and I had two choices. Choice one: keep heading downward, fully aware that he had a gun that could outrun me, and let what could be my last living moments be one of flight?

I chose choice two, flung my head back and glared angrily up into blinding light, up at the murderer above me. I couldn’t see anything of his face, but I could see the gleam of his gun. I tried to radiate “Screw you” with every ounce of my being.

He politely said, “Dr. Sanger, I presume?”

W ell…he didn’t shoot me. That’s always a plus.

“Here is the plan,” he said, smooth as only a Frenchman can be. “You will climb down. I will meet you at the bottom. And we will come to a reasonable agreement, eh?”

“New plan,” I said. “I wait here until hell freezes over, and you give up and leave before the gendarmes catch you with an illegal firearm.”

Assuming I could hang on that long.

“You think my weapon is illegal?” He chuckled unpleasantly as that sank in. “How charmant. Sadly, my counteroffer to that would simply be to shoot your friend. I believe…”

For a moment the light moved away from my face, away from my stony tunnel—I realized he was checking an arrow slit. Before my eyes could readjust to the darkness, his silhouetted head reappeared, then full wattage light. “Yes, he is kneeling beside my former partner. I assure you, I have a clear shot.”

Why would Rhys do something that stupid? Did he have some medical training I wasn’t aware of? Did he think someone who’d been dropped off a tower this high could have survived?

Still, the words felt…right. Not a lie. Either way, I was less likely to risk Frenchy shooting Rhys than me.

“But if you shot him,” I countered, “you would advertise your presence to all of Vouvant.”

“The town is not known for its superb police squad. I could have you in my trunk and be halfway to Calais before they got close enough to discover the bodies.”

He had a point. As with Tai Chi, a certain strength comes from knowing when to yield. “Then my counteroffer,” I suggested, “is that if I do climb down, it’s on the agreement that you put the gun away and nobody gets hurt.”

Nobody else.

He probably wouldn’t think I was stupid enough to believe any agreement of the sort. We both knew I’d heard too much. But damned if the man didn’t say, “As you wish, mademoiselle. I give you my word. Now…after you.”

So either he was stupid, or he was also pretending.

“No, really, after you.”

He tapped the rusty grate with his pistol’s barrel, sending a metallic echo through Melusine’s tower, like a cry. “You meet with me. I put away the gun. No sooner.”

So I began my slow descent. But what I was thinking was more along the lines of, Remember that word Comitatus.

And, He’s not the man with the power. Someone else, an inner circle, has the power.

And, Halfway to Calais? He means to take me to England.

What’s in England?

Soon, I was edging across that last slant of rocks to the railed stairway, then pulling myself over.

I looked one last time up the sheer side of the tower. Had I climbed that?

Then I got my first look at Frenchy, standing several paces back from the foot of the stairway, half-lost in shadows. Still anonymous—he wore a ski mask. He was aiming his pistol at Rhys.

Rhys knelt beside the remains of what had been Liverpool, holding the corpse’s hand, murmuring something. I suspected he knew Frenchy and I were there. He just didn’t seem to care.

“Back away from him,” ordered Frenchy.

Rhys firmly said, “I will not. Not until I’m finished.” Then he went back to murmuring. Murmuring what?

“We had a deal,” I said, as a distraction. “I come out. You put away your gun.”

“It must have suffered in translation.”

So I turned to go back in—body language being universal.

I stopped when I heard him chamber a round. “Another step and your friend dies.”

Considering that he’d just committed murder, I wasn’t going to chance it. I turned back. “Over a cup?”

“Apparently.” He wasn’t kidding.

“You don’t even know what it is, do you? What it means?”

“All I must know—” he angled the gun away from Rhys to me “—is where it is. And this, you will show me.”

“Because…?”

“Because I have the power to make you.”

Damned if it wasn’t Charlemagne chopping down the sacred oaks all over again. So might makes right, huh? Not permanently. Never permanently.

On the other hand, might could generally mess things up for everyone else, even if it made wrong. And Frenchy and Liverpool had been the ones with the might. They’d both had—

Oh! Suddenly I had a better plan. But for it to work, somehow I had to get Rhys’s attention without Frenchy noticing it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Power. Your dead friend over there is doing exactly what you want him to, right?”

As I’d hoped, Frenchy glanced in that direction, as if on a dare to look at his handiwork. As soon as he did, I waved to catch Rhys’s gaze, pointed to the body and made a fake gun with my hand, thumb and index finger extended.

“Actually,” said Frenchy, “my friend is doing what I want. He is keeping his tongue. Or what’s left of it.”

Rhys’s brow furrowed. He didn’t understand—me, that is.

Frenchy glanced quickly back, suspicious.

I immediately tried to look innocent again, with a dollop of scared, which wasn’t hard. Bullies like to see you scared. “So those are my choices? Die with my secrets or betray a goddess?” Not that Melusine wasn’t used to betrayal….

“Your fairy is not real,” Frenchy assured me, sounding amused. “She will not mind.”

“But God is real,” Rhys interrupted—as his own distraction, I assumed. “Whatever face you may choose to give Him. And whomever you have mistakenly pledged your loyalties to, God is the one to whom you must eventually answer.”

“Shut up,” said Frenchy, trying to sound casual—and failing. He also looked toward Rhys again.

I quickly mimicked the make-believe gun and bounced it. Bang-bang. Didn’t they play cowboys and Indians in Wales? Oh…maybe not. Bobbies and robbers?

This time Rhys did a much better job at hiding his interest in my pantomime. Which was good, except I didn’t know if he understood or not. “Is pleasing your worldly masters truly worth the loss of your soul?” he asked.

He was beginning to sound like a priest.

I had a cold sense of suspicion, all of a sudden—but it wasn’t something I could focus on at this moment.

“In fact,” I added, to drag Frenchy’s attention back, “every major religion in the world admonishes against murder. I teach comparative mythology. I know these things.”

Beyond Frenchy’s shoulder, Rhys pointed at himself and widened his eyes, then did a bang-bang motion with his hand, then spread it. He understood that I wanted him to get Liverpool’s gun. He just didn’t want one. As during the car chase, he wasn’t willing to kill. Period.

“Mythology?” Frenchy sneered. “Fiction. You damned goddess worshippers would emasculate the world if you had your way.”

He glanced at Rhys again, which gave me a chance to mime that he should give me the gun. If there was a gun. True, I didn’t like them. I liked being held at gunpoint even less.

I said, “Is it any wonder people look for a better world than the one you clearly live in?” That bought Rhys a moment in which to look unconvinced by my plan. He clearly didn’t want me shooting anybody, either. Well, that made two of us. Probably.

Who can say with hypotheticals?

I tried to look my most innocent for both men.

Rhys, with clear reluctance but guarded faith, gingerly reached under Liverpool’s windbreaker. He closed his eyes.

Oh. Gross. Time to keep Frenchy’s attention for a minute…an idea that reminded me of another weapon in my arsenal.

Talking a lot without getting to the point. I’ve read that men find that amazingly disconcerting.

“What is it with men like you?” I demanded. “Most men are great, but the ones that aren’t…! And hey, how about war? It’s not women who start the things. Unless you count Helen of Troy, and even she just wanted love.”

Beyond the increasingly incredulous masked gunman, Rhys shook his head at the hope of a shoulder holster. He frisked the corpse’s hips.

I took a deeper breath—and took one step downward, bringing me a little closer to Frenchy, putting him on guard. “I mean, do you ever stop to think about what you’re putting out into this world with your guns and your threats and your chauvinistic attitudes? It’s time you were stopped. And if it takes a magical goddess chalice to stop you, then more power to the cup!”

Just as I’d hoped, Frenchy could only take so much. “For the love of God,” he warned me, “shut up and come with me. If you behave yourself, I will leave your friend unharmed.”

Behind him, Rhys triumphantly held up some kind of handgun.

“A perfect example of what I mean,” I told Frenchy, taking another step. He lifted his aim from my stomach to my head, reminding me of his weapon.