First Blood (17 page)

In other circumstances, he would have left, filled out some forms, and called the Beaumonts into the station another day. That is what anybody else would have done.

He would have done that, too, if it weren’t for the big black car parked in the back, as if someone had tried to hide it.

It was a Chevrolet.

He had read the Beaumont file before he had come. He knew they did not own a car like that. They had an old Peugeot, which was nowhere to be seen.

“Who do you belong to?” he asked under his breath.

The gate was not locked and opened easily.

If someone were here, he would know soon enough.

He made his way through the thick snow, examining the Chevrolet’s tire tracks. It had a powerful engine and Parisian license plates.

He memorized the numbers.

Then his entire attention turned to the large window. He thought he saw movement behind the shutters.

“Is someone there?” he asked as he approached the door. “Mr. Beaumont?”

He knocked.

“Police. Is anyone there?”

Silence.

Movement.

This time, he was sure.

“Is someone there?” he called out.

His right hand went to his Smith & Wesson. With his left hand, he turned the doorknob.

The door opened.

“Police. Show yourself.”

The house was dark.

The stench hit him immediately. It was almost palpable. He knew the smell all to well.

The odor of decomposing flesh.

He kept one foot on the threshold as he tried to fight back the nausea. He recognized the buzzing sound. It was a cloud of flies.

He pointed his gun in front of him and shouted, “Who’s there? Show yourself!”

A pale shape appeared at the end of the hallway. It had long hair and wore a white fur coat. It was a woman, standing motionless in the cloud of flies. Her eyes shone in the dark.

“Don’t shoot,” she said. “Please.”

“Get out of there,” he shouted, taking a step back. “Good God, get out of there now.”

The woman obeyed. As she stepped into the hallway, the fur swayed around her body. She came into the light, where Vauvert could see her. She was around forty years old, and she was beautiful. A bright red silk scarf covered the lower part of her face.

She showed no traces of fear.

The inspector had picked up a slight accent when she had spoken. She could be foreign. Or simply a snob. Her scarf fluttered in the wind from the still-open door, and now Vauvert spotted the deep wounds that she was trying to conceal. This woman was seriously injured.

“Step out of the house,” he ordered, backing away from the threshold himself. “Show me your face.”

“It is not a pretty sight, I fear,” the woman said, pulling the fur around her to ward off the chill.

“I want to see it,” he said.

“If you insist, then.”

Calmly, she undid the red scarf and revealed her face. Two horrible gashes ran across her cheeks, one from the corner of her mouth to her ear, and the other passing under her eye and exposing her cheekbone.

Somewhere in a field, a group of birds flew into the dusk with shrill cries.

Vauvert was petrified at the sight of the gaping flesh and the line of bone showing under the moist wound. Only in traffic accidents and knife fights had he seen such injuries.

“Are you satisfied now?”

The woman smiled, and the gaps in her cheeks widened obscenely.

“Jesus, what happened to you?”

She did not answer and just kept smiling. Vauvert did not understand what the wounds meant, where they had come from, and how she was able to walk around as if nothing had happened to her. Worse, he did not like that smile. And he did not like what he saw in her eyes. It was beyond sadness. It was a cold threat. There was no fear of consequences in those eyes. And they were focused entirely on him.

“You are not Mrs. Beaumont,” he said, still pointing his gun at her.

“True.”

Three flies flew out of her sleeve and circled her before going back into the house to feast with the others.

“Who are you, then? What are you doing here?”

She smiled again, the slashes also grinning. There was still that sadness and the cold threat deep in her eyes.

“I came to see the Beaumonts. I arrived too late.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, although his senses were screaming that he knew very well what she meant. The characteristic smell of carrion could only mean one thing.

She shrugged.

“It was too late,” she said again, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

“Give me your name,” Vauvert insisted. “And tell me what happened here.”

She looked at him for a few more moments. She seemed to be thinking. Then she answered, but he did not understand what she was saying. It was a foreign language.

“Nefesh kedosha shel hahoshech, ata she be kolcha metzaveh, adon kol hadevarim alei adamot, shmah koli.”

“What?”

The woman continued to speak. Her voice had changed. It was deeper, authoritarian and dangerous. It was as if she were speaking to someone else, as if she were asking for something, insisting. As she went on, she raised a hand in his direction and made signs in the air.

“Cherev lohetet shamesh monim, ez boeret metschuka artzit, nachash mistareah al adama noshemet, ele hadevarim.”

Stop that, he wanted to say. Shut up.

But then he realized that he had not opened his mouth.

He could not talk.

“
Nefesh kedosha shel hahashech, zara tamim, betula lo mehulelet, ele hadevarim,”
the woman said. With her right hand, she slowly drew a circle. “
Lev mukaf nachash, zel al nishmati, pkyiat zera almavet, ele hadevarim.”

Vauvert tried to move. Impossible. The hand holding his gun was paralyzed. There was nothing he could do about it. Then, against his will, his fingers opened. The weapon fell to the ground and disappeared in the snow. Then his arm dropped to his side, inert.

He tightened his muscles. He prayed to be able to move them, but his body would not react.

A primal terror, unlike anything he had ever experienced before, took over.

The woman continued to smile, reciting the strange words in her hypnotic litany.

She moved toward him with the confident gait of a predator.

“
Zel al nishmati, shmah koli ve-protz betochi.”

The power emanating from her was terrible and blinding. It warped the light around her, as if she were moving a little too quickly or just a little too slowly, and even the air didn’t know how to interpret her movements. Everything became blurry. Her smile, her seeping wounds. A surrealistic painting.

“
Nefesh kedosha shel hahoshech, shmah koli, zrom letochi.”

When she finally stopped her incantation, she was standing in front of him. He could see nothing but her eyes, which were filled with that sadness and danger, and the dead smile in the terribly disfigured face.

She bent down to pick up the gun from the snow.

No, no, he begged mentally.

The woman pressed the gun against his head. All she had to do was pull the trigger, and his brain would splatter over ten yards.

The woman lifted her left hand.

Slowly, she caressed his cheek, playing with his two-day-old shadow. Vauvert felt sweat beading on his skin, despite the cold.

What are you going to do to me, he wanted to ask. Are you going to kill me, just like that, for no reason?

The woman smiled. He could see her muscles distinctly in the open wounds. And he saw his death in her pale eyes.

“Some live, and some die,” she said, as if she had heard his question. “Life is a game. Fortunately, you can cheat.”

The woman ran her long fingernails along his neck, and then he felt a burning fluid seeping under the collar of his shirt. It was not sweat, as he had thought for an instant. It was not sweat at all.

I’m bleeding. Why am I bleeding? She only touched me with her fingernails.

Blood was flowing from his neck, from his torn skin.

And he could not do anything to defend himself.

He could see nothing but the woman’s eyes and the leering slashes on her cheeks.What is she doing to me?

“Do you think you have all the answers? You know nothing about her,” she whispered.

Vauvert swallowed hard. Tried desperately to move. He couldn’t. He felt the pain of the cuts he could not see. He felt his blood running down his chest, not understanding why. For a minute, he felt dead. Then he heard the woman whisper in his ear.

“I knew this day would come, Alexandre. You had those dreams too, didn’t you? You, too, could have been one of us. I find that really ironic, I have to admit. But now, everything depends on her. Only the first blood.”

With these enigmatic words, she let the gun fall to the ground and left.

Her fur coat brushed him as she walked away.

He heard the door of the Chevrolet slam shut, and the engine roar.

Then he collapsed like a marionette with cut strings, and he was certain that he had barely escaped death.

Temporarily.

He stayed like that for a while, paralyzed, curled up in the bloodstained snow. It was his blood. His life, which he thought he was losing once and for all.

When he started to regain his strength, he rolled to his side. He felt the cold again, along with his limbs.

He grabbed his gun.

Snowflakes landed in his eyes.

He waited for his breathing to become regular, and then he rose to his knees.

The scarred woman’s car was already far down the road. How had she done that?

She knows my name.

He inspected his throat carefully and felt nothing under his fingers. Yet he was covered in blood. It was all over the snow, as well. He coughed. It hurt, and he doubled over, spitting up blood.

“What did you do to me? Shit.”

He stood up. He did not understand why the stranger in the white fur coat had not taken his Smith & Wesson, but he was glad she had not. He took out his phone and called headquarters while looking into the house. Blanca answered.

“I’ve got a problem.”

“At the Beaumonts?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s happening?”

He still felt dizzy, but he slowly entered the house. Inside, the smell of decomposing flesh was suffocating. He knew from experience that this kind of stink seeped into the floors and walls of a house and never went away.

The buzzing intensified as he approached the living room.

“What’s going on, Alex?”
Detective Blanca repeated.

He did not need to go into the room. He saw the forms of two people. They were tied to chairs facing each other. Someone had cut their throats to the bone, and their heads were dangling to the side. The flies swarming around them droned mechanically.

“Alex? Answer me. What’s that sound?”

“They are dead.”

“The Beaumonts?”

“I think it’s them.”

“Holy mother of god. I’m sending backup now. Tell me what happened. Can you hear me? What happened?”

Vauvert looked at the two bodies tied up with barbed wire. Their rotting bellies were swollen like balloons. He looked at his own clothes again. They were covered in blood, even though he felt nothing.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Benjamin, I don’t understand what happened here.”

Night had fallen, and Boris and Helene Beaumont’s bodies were being put in the hearse. Vauvert still did not understand what had happened. It made him furious.

He stood on the side of the road, under the slow waltz of the snow, and lit a cigarette. He had to think.

The doctor who had examined him a little earlier had not managed to come up with any explanation. There wasn’t one. For the first time in a long while, Inspector Alexandre Vauvert felt like he was losing control.

“You are not hurt at all,” the doctor said. “You don’t have a scratch.”

“I know. But it’s my blood.”

“That would be strange, I must say. How would you have lost it?”

“Get that shirt tested. You’ll see it’s my blood.”

The doctor took the shirt, not at all convinced.

The other squad members were clearly concerned. Their leader had a reputation for being different, but they had never seen him in this kind of state. He had dried blood on his cheeks and such a lost look.

Vauvert watched the lights from the hearse disappear on the horizon. Then he turned to the Beaumont house, which was now swarming with agents, technicians, and other people whose jobs even he did not know--other than to add to the confusion and lose precious evidence.

He preferred to leave that swarm of activity. He had enough questions to work with. The woman in the fur coat knew his name. She had called him Alexandre.
I knew this day would come, Alexandre.
Those were her exact words before she left.
You had those dreams too, didn’t you?

He bit his lip. How could she know about his dreams? He did not talk about them. His dreams were his cross, his mystery.

But now, everything depends on her.
Those were the woman’s last words, just as cryptic. They were like the pieces of a puzzle, but he did not understand their meaning—if there was anything to understand. Who was she talking about?

And what had she done to him?

She paralyzed you just by talking and waving her hand in the air. That’s what she did. She opened your skin with her nails, and then the injury closed up. That was not a dream.

How can you explain that?

He could not. There was nothing rational about it.

His only hope was the license plate number. He called Inspector Damien Mira, who had just started his night shift. Damien was the oldest member of the squad—and one of the rare people he considered a true friend. It was a rental car. Mira was contacting the rental company.

If I had a name, I could find her and try to understand.

He tossed his cigarette butt into the snow when he saw State Attorney Anastasia Chanabé leaving the house, deep in discussion with the crime-scene investigators. She strode in his direction. She was very tall, very thin, and very beautiful. The flashing blue lights of the police cars illuminated her face. She raised her collar against the bitter cold that came with nightfall.