Pyromancist (7 page)

“I just want to talk to you about the fires,”
he said again, glancing from Rain to Cloud. “It’s for an article
I’m writing. I’ll mention your name. Wouldn’t it be nice to see
your name in a national newspaper?”

“I don’t know anything about the fires,”
Clelia said.

“What’s your name?” he said again.

“What does it matter?” she said, regarding
him with mistrust.

His eyes were bright, and even through the
rain she could see the sparkle in them.

“Not a lot of people around here speak
English. It’s awful weather to be out. I can buy you a cup of
coffee at the bakery and we could just talk. Or, you could invite
me home, if you’d feel happier in your own environment. I just want
to get more information for my article.”

“Sorry, I can’t help you, Monsieur. I’m in a
hurry. Can you please move so we can get past?”

He narrowed his eyes. It was only a fleeting
movement and she couldn’t be sure if it was because of the rain or
because he was annoyed with her unwillingness to cooperate, but
after another second, he stepped aside.

He kept a wary eye on the dogs, but when he
fixed his gaze on Snow, the wolfdog went into a pouncing position,
crouching low, his head lowered and his eyes lifted. Snow wasn’t an
aggressive dog. The man’s lip lifted at one corner. For a moment,
Clelia thought the man was going to snarl. The other dogs had moved
around him, and when they growled, he looked away from Snow.

“I would get farther out of the way, but
maybe you should call your dogs off first.”

Clelia moved forward until she was ahead of
the man and only then did she flick her fingers. Immediately Rain,
Cloud, and Thunder left their positions to heel by her side. Only
Snow still crouched in front of the stranger, his lips quivering
with warning.

The man lifted his eyebrows. His expression
was mocking. “Impressive.” He took on a look of disappointment.
“Pity we couldn’t talk.”

Clelia didn’t spare him another glance as she
hurried up the slope that would take her around the cliff and to
the harbor. Snow only followed when she was at the top of the
hill.

Before they reached the end of the forest, it
stopped raining. As if a magic wand had been waved, the mist
cleared over the ocean to let the sun through a ring of clouds,
shining a fan of angelic light over the calm water. Clelia paused
to regard it. Never before had she seen the rain just stop like
that and the fog disperse as if it never covered the sea like a
blanket. She wondered if she could maybe consider it a good omen.
If the rain hadn’t stopped, she would have had to wait out in the
woods or somewhere on the harbor until the sea was clear. This was
no small blessing.

At the edge of the forest, she bade farewell
to the dogs. As she went on her haunches, they immediately came
toward her, sitting around her in a circle, their heads turned up,
Snow’s intelligent eyes knowing. Clelia bit back the tears as she
caressed each one, kissing them on their heads. Of all the animals,
she felt closest to the dogs. She had found the pack of puppies in
the forest next to their dead mother. Poor thing had been shot. The
farmers in the area had been complaining about a fox killing their
sheep and had been out on a rampage for a month. One of them
claimed to have shot a wolf. Turned out he had shot a defenseless
husky.

The hunting didn’t stop, not until every wild
fox and stray dog had been cleared from the forest and the valley.
Clelia had managed to hide the puppies in the shed where Erwan kept
his nets and fishing gear, and had raised them with a mixture of
buckwheat porridge and milk. They were her family, as much as Erwan
was, and all she had in the world. She kissed each one a last time
before she wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand
and stood, pointing a finger in the direction of their island.

“Home boys,” she said through her tears. “Go
home.”

They yelped, and when she turned, she could
feel their hesitation hanging in the air.

She slowly faced them again. “Please, go,”
she whispered.

They reiterated until they disappeared behind
the pine trees. By the time she got to the harbor, she could hear
them howling, although she couldn’t see them any longer. For a
second, Snow’s profile appeared on the hill, his head lifted to the
sky as he cried out a song of sorrow. She had trained them not to
bark or howl near the village in fear of the townspeople who could
come after them with their guns, but she knew that Snow could help
this cry as little as she could help her tears.

Slowly she made her way to the jetty, every
step a step away from what was known, a step closer to the unknown,
to that world the islanders didn’t acknowledge. From that far away,
unknown place, a sound descended from the skies. She recognized it
long before

Chapter
Five

The helicopter circled over the ocean.
Josselin sat in the back, scanning the boats with his powerful
binoculars. He felt like shit this morning, having woken up in the
middle of the night in the megalithic site in the pouring rain. He
had a headache from hell and he cursed all the gods and idols for
waking up alive, because he was sure that when he embarked on his
mission, he had been determined not to leave it breathing. Then,
fucking miraculously, he woke up with his revolver gone,
disappeared into thin Shakespearean air. What a theatrical joke. It
was the best ironic, comical tragedy of the year.

He grimaced at the thought. He shouldn’t have
come back, shouldn’t have accepted this assignment. He couldn’t
stand the memories. But Cain would have personally kicked his ass
to his grave if he as much as tried to make excuses. He’d always
known that the truth would catch up with him. He couldn’t run
forever. His eyes focused on the moving boats, eliminating one
after the other, until Bono, the pilot, spoke into the
communication system link in his ear.

“Anything?”

“Nothing,” Josselin said darkly.

They were supposed to take the old fisherman,
Erwan, and his granddaughter into ‘custody’, well, unofficially and
off the record into custody, because their organization was one
that, as long as both the American and French governments were in
agreement, didn’t exist. Last night, while he was on his private,
unsuccessful suicide mission, the old man had slipped through their
fingers.

“Shall I turn a couple of more times?” Bono
said, glancing over his shoulder.

Josselin nodded at the muscled man with the
shiny skin the color of molasses who filled the pilot seat so
effectively that he actually crowded the cabin.

Bono gave a thumbs-up sign, tilted them left,
and down.

Josselin turned the binoculars to the harbor.
Someone was intent on burning down the whole damn village and it
wasn’t a simple open-and-closed case of arson. His team didn’t
operate on normal assignments. He headed a special task force of
paranormal crime investigators and the fact that they were called
in to his birth town for the mysterious and deliberate destruction
of properties left him clueless.

Sure, there was the speculation about Clelia
d’Ambois’ mother, but it was exactly that–only speculation. When he
was told about the fires, he recalled some stories about the
Japanese girl who was abandoned by a trawler. It could have been
nothing, just a bunch of superstitious fishermen blaming a dry
spell and their own negligence on the girl. He never knew Katik. He
was only four when she died. If she had indeed possessed the
ability the Japanese men had accused her of, she would have passed
it on to her daughter. Guesses. There was nothing concrete.
Besides, he had always been keenly aware of the very young Clelia.
If a supernatural force was at play, it wasn’t in her. He had
tasted her blood once, after all, and he would have known if there
was something in the frail girl. All there had been was angelic
goodness, which is why he stayed as far away from her as
possible.

He had been to every burnt house. There was
nothing. No signs to point them in any direction. Except for the
old man, Erwan’s DNA literally dripping all over every single one
of the sites and lots of talk about witches and witchcraft. No clue
as to how the fires had started. For all he knew, it could have
been the devil himself with a pointed fork setting the buildings
alight.

He should have point-blank refused the
mission on the grounds of conflicting personal interests, but that
would have raised questions about his past, and then Cain would
have known exactly how screwed up he really was and would have
booted him all the way to an early retirement, if not to some
mental institution, or God knows, elimination. And by God, he had
no problem taking himself out, but leaving it in the hands of
someone else ... that was a different matter altogether.

“We have a suspect in view,” Lann Dréan, the
slender blond Russian with the yellow eyes, said from the ground
station into the mic.

Lann was the wizard-like aeromancist on the
team, who had, only minutes ago, used his art, one of the seven
forbidden by common law for four centuries, to clear the weather
for the helicopter to take off. If Lann had spotted a suspect, it
meant he had picked up someone via their satellite tracking.

“I’m listening,” Josselin said.

“At your twelve o’clock,” Lann said. “She’s
on the jetty.”

Josselin turned his head and saw the profile
of a person at the top end of the quay in a navy blue rain jacket
and red fishing boots.

“Got it,” Bono said, “turning a
hundred-and-eighty degrees. Shall I take this baby down, Joss?”

“Is there space to land?” Josselin said.

He sure as hell didn’t feel like dropping
down with the rope again as he had in Cairo just a week ago. He
didn’t feel in top form this morning and a Tarzan act might just
have him spilling his guts all over the sea and the pier,
attracting sharks the likes of Cain, who’d start asking questions
about his wellbeing and insist on a renewed psychological and
physical examination. This time, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to
prevent the demons in his soul from making themselves known.

“I can land her, no problem,” Bono said with
a tinge of excitement in his voice, which should have had Josselin
worried. Bono was an air cowboy who only enjoyed his job when it
required crazy, impossible stunts that put his skill to the
ultimate test.

“Let’s go,” Josselin said nevertheless,
feeling stranger by the minute. It was more than his physical
hangover. He wiped a hand over his unshaven face, the stubble sharp
under his palm. He suddenly wished that he hadn’t vomited the
bottle of pills out, and wondered what the hell had happened. Maybe
he should ask a geomancist to toss a few rocks into the sand to
tell him, he thought grimly.

His thoughts dwelling in a different
location, he kept his eyes trained on the target in question. The
young female remained in her position at the top of the jetty. She
wasn’t the fish they were after. She was the bait, so to speak.
Even with the distance still too far for him to form a visual,
Josselin already had a bad feeling about this.

“We’re on level zero,” he heard Bono say,
which was the cue for the ground team to move in.

Before Bono cut the blades, Josselin already
had the door open. He tried to shake the uneasy feeling that
wouldn’t let him go. He felt like he was on the other end of the
fishing line. It had
him
hooked like the damn fish, and
experience had made him clever enough not to ignore his instinct.
For some strange reason, he was in no particular hurry to capture
the ‘suspect’ who couldn’t legally be called a suspect, as he
wasn’t in charge of any ‘officially’ approved operation.

Slowly he got out and turned to face the
woman he was supposed to take in, with or without her cooperation.
They didn’t exactly do things by the book, and now he, for the
first time since joining the team, wished there were some kind of
law they operated within to protect the fragile looking being who
stood dead still at the end of the walkway, as if she expected
him.

At that moment, she looked back over her
shoulder, no doubt taking stock of her escape routes. A man in a
brown leather jacket and jeans tucked into his boots exited the
woods. He stood watching the helicopter and the female, and her
head turned back to him, Josselin.

Just looking at her he knew she would go
without a fight. Not because her spirit was weak. There was
something else. He couldn’t be sure. He only knew he wasn’t looking
forward to this interrogation. It didn’t seem ‘right,’ which was a
strange word in his vocabulary.

He saw the black SUV making its way down the
hill as he closed the distance between himself and the woman. As he
got nearer, she looked like she was, in fact, going to bolt, but he
was close already.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he called to
her.

His words had the desired effect. She stayed
put, stealing another glance at the man in the brown leather jacket
behind her. Josselin kept the message in his eyes clear as he moved
them from Clelia to the man. Fuck with me, or her, and you’re dead.
He was a step away from his ‘suspect’ now. The man with the brown
jacket was probably a holidaymaker, an early riser, attracted by
the helicopter that had landed on the broad end of the jetty. The
stranger now tilted his head, regarding the scene, and then, as if
sensing that he was in danger of having his throat slit for
witnessing what he wasn’t supposed to, he walked briskly in the
direction of the square.

The woman removed the hood of her rain
jacket. She looked young, fragile, vulnerable, and too damn pretty.
He took everything in with a practiced eye. There were bruises and
cuts on her knees, which stabbed at him like a thorny irritation.
He didn’t like seeing her white skin marred. And he was probably
going crazy because he experienced an unjustifiable sense of
responsibility for those injuries.