First Blood (40 page)

Vauvert had just clicked on the first attachment. A picture of damned souls twisting in the flames of hell filled the screen.

He clicked on the next picture. It was the other side: gilded wood and the end of the inscription.

“Saint-Jean-du-Pic,” Vauvert called out. “That’s the place. Saint-Jean-du-Pic.”

“Like that old fallen-down chapel?”

“What chapel, dammit? Do you know one with that name?”

“Well, yeah. It’s in the Pyrenees, near where my parents live. But I think it’s just a pile of rubble now. I’ve never been there, but I have heard a lot of stories about the place. People say it’s haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“You know, just the usual legends—talk about black masses and zombies.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Vauvert said as he bent over to put on his boots. “I need the GPS coordinates. And backup. Right away. It’s a question of life and death.”

She was almost there.

The Audi’s headlights lit up the steep mountainside. The shapes of pine trees spread as far as the eye could see, and their branches were covered in layers of white.

About fifty yards ahead, a car was blocking the road. Eva understood why when her own wheels started spinning on the ice, refusing to move forward.

She hit the parking brake. The Audi slid at an angle for several seconds before it came to a stop alongside a snowdrift.

Eva gripped the steering wheel and took several deep breaths.

There’s no turning back now.

She turned off the lights.

The night was darker than India ink. It did not bother her. The white snow reflected enough light for her to see as well as she did in full daylight.

She opened the door and stepped into the icy night.

What hit her senses first was not the cold. It was the noise.

Cawing crow. The sound of their frantically beating their wings.

That brought back terrible memories.

She tightened her grip on her Beretta.

Then she started up the narrow path leading through the trees.

She just had to follow the noise.

As she walked through the snow, every muscle in her body tensed in anticipation of what she would discover. She recalled the nightmares that had haunted her for so many years. In them, her father was feeding flesh to enormous black birds. Could he have been sending her those dreams?”

Of course, that’s it,
she decided. He wasn’t human any more. Whatever happened had changed him.

The path kept climbing. The sounds of the crows grew stronger, ratcheting up her anxiety. Even the creepy-looking trees seemed to be encircling her, waiting.

Now the nightmare was a reality.

She would not be able to scream and wake up from this nightmare.

Eva chased away these dark thoughts and moved on, alert, her weapon in front of her and her boots sinking deeper and deeper into the snow.

The fog closed in around her.

The crows were circling a tree.

Eva moved forward on full alert, her finger on the trigger.

She heard the groan before she saw anything. She also heard something that sounded like buckling and creaking wood.

“Get out of here!” she yelled at the birds.

They scattered but then settled on the trees and continued to caw.

The sight was incredible. A woman was hanging in a tree. She actually looked like she was being crucified. Branches had wrapped themselves around her and were holding her above the ground. The branches had even crept into her mouth.

Now Eva knew that it was the sound that she had heard.

“Ma-de-leine!”
the crows croaked.
“Ma-de-leine! Ma-de-leine!”

The woman opened her eyes. They were the color of zinc, and they looked desperate. Eva imagined the pain the woman was in.

But she could not help. The branches were snarled too heavily all around her.

“Did he do this to you?” she asked.

The woman blinked once.
Yes.

Then she looked to the right.

Over there.

Eva nodded.

“Is he there? Is he the one who did this to you?”

Madeleine closed her eyes.

Yes.

How did he do it?

Madeleine just looked at her. There was a flash of hope in her eyes.

The crows in the trees were making a huge racket.

“Stop!” Eva shouted.

“Stop! Stop!”
the birds mimicked and started circling again.

Eva tried to get closer to the woman, but the trees seemed to have a mind of their own. They stretched out their branches to stop her.

Then one of the birds dived at her, striking her jacked with its beak. Another grabbed her hair in its claws.

Eva fought them off and backed up. The crows stopped when she had backed up all the way. They returned to their perches and took up their shrill cawing again.

“I’ll stop the horrors,” she promised the crucified woman.

Madeleine Reich opened and closed her eyes several times. Eva did not understand what she was trying to say. She hoped it was encouragement. She would need it.

Leaving the witch on her cross, Eva continued up the mountainside toward the peak—and the chapel.

The crows followed.

You know that I’ll be back one day, and then I will kill you all.”

The fog separated when she reached the ruins.

Eva spotted the stone archway. Behind it, the walls had collapsed. Some crows had landed on the rubble and were flapping their wings, clearly waiting for her to enter.

She kept going.

Someone had lit a fire in the back. The bright light hurt her eyes, and she had to squint.

She passed through the archway, holding her breath.

Her eyes adjusted. First, she saw a man lying on the altar. The flames illuminated the blood-spattered snow all around it.

Then, in a game of shadow and light, she saw the man of her nightmares leaning over the corpse.

Her secret wound—the man who murdered her mother and sister.

She had found him. And he was as terrifying as he had been in her dreams.

Louis Canaan was holding the heart from the body in his hands.

He was devouring it with obvious, monstrous pleasure. Thick, sticky blood was trickling down his chin and onto the altar.

“Oh, Lord,” Eva said.

The sound of her voice broke the spell. The crows turned in unison, as though they were the same entity.

The man looked up. She saw his pointy animal-like teeth as he opened his mouth in a red grin. Tearing off a moist chunk of human heart, he kept his eyes on her.

“My daughter,” he said after swallowing. “Finally.”

His meanness was palpable, like a cold wave flowing through the chapel. Eva pointed her gun at him, but she realized that she was shaking.

“You are just like you have been in my dreams,” she said, not believing her eyes. “Exactly like my dreams.”

“Of course I am.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His scaly jacket reflected a thousand flames with his every movement.

“What else did you expect?”

She clenched her teeth, trying to stay in control and not be impressed. But she felt frozen, as though his presence had turned her to stone. Was just seeing this monster enough to hypnotize her?

The worst part was that he looked like her. She could see herself in him.
This monster was her father.
And that was unbearable.

“In your dreams, it was you and me,” he said in a quiet voice. “The girl and her father. Life and death. Didn’t you like them? Those sweet dreams all those sweet nights.”

She wanted to scream and expel once and for all the evil he had done to her. The life he had stolen. She just sighed. Her breath vaporized as it hit the air.

“They were a way for me to get to know you,” he said with an obscene smile. “Your dreams showed me everything about you. They enabled me to be reborn from ashes and oblivion.”

“Why did you send them to me?”

“Oh, do you think I sent you those dreams?”

He laughed. It sounded like a whistle. The birds perched on the ruins joined him with their shrill caws.

“If you only knew. You got it wrong. It wasn’t me who came to you but the exact opposite. You should know that. You wanted so much to find me. You thought about nothing else but me.”

Eva swallowed hard. She knew he was right. Since the time Judith Saint-Clair had tortured her, and the memories had come back, he had been her obsession. This had been the unhealthy vengeful fire in her heart. She had spent the past two years living for nothing but finding him and finally facing her past.

But she had never expected
that.

“You hunted me,” he hissed. “You’re the one who sent your thoughts to me. Only you, my marvelous child. My blood, my pride. All I did was answer you, finding you in your dreams, just like you wanted. All I did was satisfy you.”

She wanted to scream and tell him to be quiet.

(
My blood, my pride.
)

Then, he came toward her, swaying slightly. The constellations reflecting off his jacket dazzled her. She felt them in her head, like swarming slivers of light.

(
All I did was satisfy you.)

She tried to pull herself out of her paralysis, to keep a firm grip on her gun, but her hand was numb. She was having trouble holding the pistol in front of her. She felt her fingers slipping off the Beretta.

“You still haven’t understood that you are the one who freed me from their sorry spell.”

Eva felt rivers of ice run through her veins.

“What?”

“And now you are here. You came to me, like a loyal child.”

“What did you
say
?” she screamed. She did not recognize her own voice.

“You heard me.”

“I never freed you from anything!”

“Of course you did,” he hissed. “You did it. It was two years ago that you did it. Have you forgotten? Oh, I didn’t think you could forget that.”

He pointed a clawed finger at his forehead.

“Thoughts, my little girl, never die. You can chase them away, but they wait. They wait to reincarnate. The only currency the gods accept is blood, the first blood, to be exact.”

His finger moved to his chest, pointing at his heart. The scales on his jacket glittered with myriad lights.

“The blood that flows in your veins. My precious blood that you saved for me all these years.”

“I don’t understand.”

Louis shook his hair. The crows cried out hysterically all around them.

“Blood! Blood!”
they cawed.

Now he was so close, he could reach out and touch her. His face was emaciated, almost snake-like. But his skin looked translucent. His eyes were two pools of blood. Yes, there was a similarity.

“Those stupid black sorcerers did not have the courage to do the exorcism on me. They thought that banishing me to the other side of the veil would be enough to keep me from harming them. And they could have been right, because nobody could bring me back. Nobody, except my first blood.

Eva shivered.

“The first blood was Justyna.”

“Yes,” he said, still smiling. “And no.”

The crows took flight. They started circling.

“That is what those idiots thought,” Louis Canaan said. But they forgot about you, my dear little one. They forgot that the blood of identical twins is all first blood. It doesn’t matter which one was born first.”

Eva shook her head. It could not be possible.
It could not be true.

“You are as much the first as your sister,” the ogre said.

“You’re lying,” Eva said, in a voice that was nearly a sob.

“And why would I do that?”

Her father’s red eyes widened. She felt absorbed in a constellation of dying stars. Her mind was dark and frozen.

“Two years ago, your flesh opened, your blood flowed, your wonderful blood, and the gods were there. The gods listened to your wishes.”

Eva did not understand at first. Her whole being denied what he was suggesting.

But the memories of what Judith Saint-Clair did to her came back with new meaning.

She felt each scar on her body. Each tattoo of thin white lines screamed out at her. The scars would never leave her. They were permanent signatures of human cruelty and folly.

Two years earlier.

She saw herself tied up, powerless, in that basement.
She felt the scalpel cut into her flesh again and the rivers of blood flow from her wounds.
The blood feast
, as Saint-Clair had called it.

“No,” she said. “No,” she screamed.

The madwoman who had kidnapped her had tortured her, invoking ancient gods. It was a red-magic ritual to open the doors and call out the darkest threads from the most distant darkness.

“That does not mean...”

The divinities of the shadows had focused on her, on her open skin, on her offered secrets.

“That is not possible.” She continued to deny it, fiercely, desperately.

Yet the evidence was there.
That was when the memory of him had returned
. The memories had come back during the torture, between bloody dreams and nightmarish waking moments,
in fever and in blood.
It was the physical pain. She thought she was dead, and that had opened the door to her past. That brought back the horror, the memory of that terrible night—her sister’s death, throat slit before her eyes.

And the memory of her father’s face. Of his words.

Of everything it meant.

“You called me,” Louis said, taking joy in his daughter’s distress. “You called me right from the other side of the veil, where those idiots had banished me. But you cannot banish a thought eternally.”

“I did not.”

“You beseeched me with all your soul while your blood flowed out. Your so-precious blood—that of a firstborn child who is albino and a medium. Your blood was a nectar for the gods, my daughter.”

“No.”

“It’s the only thing they listen to. It was your spilled blood that brought me back, because at that moment you wanted only one thing, which was to find me again and to face me.”