Ah, well. That is what hospitals are for.
I regained full consciousness in a private room. An IV snaked into my arm, and the bliss of hydration and painkiller flowed through my veins. Scarlet sat there, looking remarkably concerned for someone with such monochromatic red hair.
“Rhys?” I gasped, my throat barely working.
Scarlet was wise enough to say, “He’s just a few doors down, he’ll be fine,” before she began to gush. “You couldn’t imagine the reporters who want to talk to you. I wouldn’t mind some pictures myself, but hello, friend first, photographer second, right? Still, look at all the flowers!”
Finding the correct buttons on the bedrail, I sat myself up to see the room. Mon Dieu. I might as well have died, to deserve such arrangements…although the balloons and fruit baskets might have been less apropos for my demise.
Or not, depending on whom I’d alienated.
“They are….” Just as well that I could not speak until Scarlet gave me some ice chips.
“I know,” she said, grinning. “It’s because you’re celebrities, for returning from the dead. A lot of them are from strangers. But that one over there—” she pointed at a large teddy bear holding more balloons “is from a certain Léon Chanson. There’s a note asking you to call him to reschedule last night’s date. I hope it’s okay that I looked.”
I could not find the strength to mind. I’d forgotten the geophysicist, what with the almost dying…and Rhys.
“The carnations? Those are from the tourist who hit you. No good can come from ghost tours. And that one—” she pointed to a tasteful basket of heather with a curling arch of willow over it “—that’s from the Cluny. Your boss brought it himself. He asked me to tell you…” She pulled out a notebook. “‘He has found sponsors for further study of the artifacts.’ They’re some philanthropic Italian family, the Adrianos. Ever hear of them? I’ve never heard of them.”
I thought I had. Instead of answering, I asked, “Shower?”
She popped to her feet. “I’ll get the nurse. But once you’re cleaned up, I have to tell you about the Sisters of Mary. After you gave me the name, I did some research. So far I’ve only found two references to them. Catrina, the Sisters of Mary weren’t nuns at all!”
I imagined an underground resistance, or disguised nobles, or spies. What I did not expect was for Scarlet to announce, “They were a literary salon!”
“The Sisters of Mary were a book club?” repeated Rhys, when I got to visit his room that evening.
My IV had been removed, but not his. He looked worse than I did, despite being clean and, now, clean-shaven. He no longer looked like a bad boy. His beautiful chest, which I knew by feel better than sight, was tightly wrapped in gauze. According to Scarlet, he’d badly cut his hand—on the broken bottle, I assumed, when I fell—and despite wrapping it, had lost too much blood. Between that and the dehydration, he’d almost died.
“A literary salon,” I corrected. “Like the Hôtel de Rambouillet or the bluestockings who met with that romance writer, Madame de Scudéry.”
He arched his brows doubtfully.
I leaned back in my chair beside his bed, tucking my feet under the edge of his mattress. After three days not only in his company but in his grip, our separation felt strange. “Fine. But those book-club ladies, they are trouble. Oh, they seem all innocent and readery. But look beneath the surface…”
“Then they were executed as upper-class intellectuals?” But surely Rhys knew better. Some citizens had been guillotined for the sin of wealth. But who else had seen the proof of their existence destroyed with them?
“Many leaders were intellectuals. Robespierre and Danton were both lawyers. Marat studied medicine before he went into publishing. I thought…do you think the Sisters may have been killed for their religious beliefs?”
Rhys frowned.
“It was dangerous to be openly Catholic during the Revolution,” I reminded him. “The church had abused its power in France for centuries, with torture and executions—”
“And hundreds of priests were murdered. Churches converted to secular use. It became illegal to display the cross.”
So why was he not convinced? “But…?”
“But something about that Mary medal that we found.”
I leaned forward, across my knees. “What?”
“I will need to study it more closely to be sure. But something just didn’t…fit.”
I nodded, watching his lips. And the fall of clean, black hair over his forehead, shadowing his bright blue eyes, which darted to and away from me as he spoke. Perhaps he was just as aware of what we were not saying. That our intimacy might not survive outside the catacombs.
Someone had gotten him a pair of pajama bottoms, damn it. But Scarlet had brought me a nightgown, peignoir and slippers, so I suppose I ought not complain. I’d kissed that chest, rubbed my face in the sweeping whorls of hair, nuzzled under the holy medals he still wore. He’d held me so tightly with those bare arms….
He cleared his throat. “So where do we go from here?”
“My boss at the Cluny has found sponsors for our study of the site—what we salvaged of it, in any case. Nobody knew about the bomb, so they have no leads. And—”
Rhys gently touched my hand. “I meant, where do we—”
My foot almost slipped off his bed. “You said you were not looking for another relationship,” I suggested casually.
“So did you,” he reminded me. I’d been right to say so, then. Who needed the agony of being regularly compared to his dead love—the virgin, Mary? If men saw women as one of two extremes—the Madonna and the whore—I understood where I placed. If I ever made the mistake of wanting more from Rhys Pritchard than his friendship, more than his body…
I feared he could break my heart. Despite the assertions of those who believe I do not have one.
Thinking of people who doubted my heart gave me the perfect escape. “I almost forgot my grand-mère. I should go see her and break the news that I survived.”
“You…?” Rhys looked understandably confused.
“My grand-mère is on another floor of the hospital,” I explained, standing. Not surprisingly, we’d been brought to the Hôpital Saint-Vincent de Paul, the one nearest the catacombs. “She will be asleep soon, so I should see her now.”
One crisis at a time.
The nurses protested my leaving the floor, but I went anyway. I even brought one of the smaller of my aberrant teddy bears. The toy would not hurt overmuch when she threw it.
Getting off the elevator at the cancer ward, I went to the nurse’s desk. “I know visiting hours are over,” I admitted, letting her understand from my nightgown that I, too, was a patient. “But I wish to simply check in with my grandmother. I have been…unavailable, for the last few days. If she heard anything of it, she might have…” Not worried. “Wondered.”
The night nurse could not seem to place me.
“Room three-fifteen,” I prompted. “Catrina Gide?”
“Yes,” she said, finally. “We’ve been trying to reach you.”
Trying…? But then I understood.
Suddenly, foolishly, I did not want to hear the rest. I strode toward room 315. The nurse grabbed my arm, but I shrugged her off and pushed open the door.
A middle-aged man lay in the bed, his luggage still out, surrounded by his loving—and now startled—family.
The nurse closed the door firmly between them and me.
Rhys was watching the overhead television in his room when I went back to him. He looked over from a news show with a grin. “You did not tell me you’re a hero.”
From the TV I heard a young woman. “Before poor Eduard could reach me, the road, it tore in half! But Mademoiselle Dauvergne—the one they found in the catacombs? She took my hand, and even when I fell in, she did not let go! She—”
I reached up and turned it off. “She had such a tight grip on me, I would have had to chew off my own arm to escape.”
“Of course you would,” agreed Rhys with excess solemnity. “Because you are haughty and indifferent, and…Catrina?”
He said that last as I drew the curtain around us and climbed onto his bed. “I do not want to sleep alone to- night,” I explained, finding the button to lower the head of his bed.
“I—” He gave it up. “My IV might complicate matters.”
That almost made me smile. Almost. “Just to sleep.”
He rolled onto his side, gritting his teeth against lingering pain. “Is your grandmother all right?”
“Better than ever,” I lied.
He looked unconvinced—so apparently the belief in my duplicity would survive Grand-mère. Still, he erred on the side of acceptance, turning off the lights over the bed and easing himself down. “It is odd. Suddenly trying to sleep alone.”
I nodded, my head on his shoulder. “No strings attached,” I promised quietly. Though who I was promising? I could not say.
The yell woke us.
It came from down the hall—in the direction of my room. I sat upright, suddenly cold without Rhys’s arms, then swung my feet out of his high bed and headed for the door.
“Wait,” he protested, trying to free his IV lines so that he could follow me. I went on ahead. Nurses and a security guard were rushing toward my room, calling about police, and I needed to see what had happened—and, if it were merely my absence that startled them, to let them know I was here.
It had not been my absence. When I pushed past the other onlookers, I saw that my hospital room was in pieces.
Broken flowers lay in lumps of crumpled stems and scattered petals, yet their vases sat whole on the shelf. Foam stuffing from the pillows spread across the room like a snowdrift. The mattress had been gutted. The curtains that hung from the ceiling, to be drawn around the bed for privacy, fluttered in shreds. The large teddy bear that Léon Chanson had sent hung by its fuzzy neck, a length of bed-curtain tied like a hang-man’s noose. It had been gutted, its button eyes cut out…and yet three balloons still bobbed merrily from its plush paw.
In fact, none of the balloons had been touched. Why…?
He did it silently, I realized, trying to fit my mind around the destruction. He did not break machines or pop balloons because they would have made noise….
But the worst stained the walls in red: Stop the evil. Fear God. Death to false prophets.
“You’re all right!” exclaimed the night nurse. “I was so afraid that you’d been taken, harmed, when Moe called out….”
Her expression of relief stilled, as if at a worse thought.
“Is that blood?” I tried to ask. My voice wasn’t working.
“Enough,” insisted the security guard, herding health workers out of the room. “This is a matter for the police. Go on, mademoiselle. And you, monsieur. Back to your rooms.”
“This is my room.” I managed enough voice for that, unwilling to leave before I understood. To my relief, Rhys appeared at my side, his pajama top hanging open. I noticed that he no longer wore the IV—and that a drop of blood stained the back of his hand. Getting the IV pole through the crowd must have proved too difficult.
One of his hands caught my waist as he looked at the gory grafitti. The other made the sign of the cross.
“Mademoiselle Dauvergne,” asked the nurse, too gently. And here it came. “Did you do this? The third floor called to let us know. Your grandmother’s death, on top of everything else you’ve been through this week, would upset anybody.”
“Do not be ridiculous,” Rhys chided. “How could—” Then he frowned down at me. “Your grandmother died?”
A guard interrupted their stereophonic demands on me. “Out of the room until the authorities arrive.”
I swallowed, ignoring Rhys’s arched disbelief and the nurse’s cloying pity both to repeat, “Is that blood?”
“I believe so,” she admitted.
Rhys’s hold around me tightened to steer me from the room. He leaned closer to murmur, “Better than ever?”
But I had no explanations. Let him believe the worst of me, if he must. People generally did.
Instead, I stared at a small card on the floor—the kind that accompanies floral arrangements. It must have come since Scarlet left, or surely she would have mentioned it.
It read: The earthquake was deliberate. Reclaim the Black Madonna before it is too late.
Grimaud stabbed his knife into his kitchen table. He wanted to cry, but not from the self-inflicted cuts, just enough for blood, on his arms. It wasn’t fair that she’d not been in her room! But nothing had made sense today, not since he saw on the news that the demoness and her consort had been found alive. How?
God approved of what he was doing, didn’t He? Or…did He?
The doubt that bloomed in his gut felt awful. What if his grandfather had made up the tales? What if he himself was insane? If his ancestors had really pledged allegiance to such a power, and to people who knew how to wield it…would those people not have contacted him by now? This possibility felt like waking from a glorious dream into a hellish reality. He’d risked his life stalking the demoness—rather, the woman. He’d bombed an archeological site. He could have killed people! And all based on…what?
Old stories and a faded address in the family Bible.
That, and the dream that he might be special. Now he stared at himself in the hall mirror, his face unshaven, his arms bandaged, his eyes wild. He did not like what he saw. He was not special. He was the worst kind of fool. He needed help.
He almost didn’t hear the ringing of the telephone, despite the early hour. But years of providing a service had trained him well. He picked it up, managed to form words of greeting.
“Your loyalty impresses us,” whispered the voice on the other line. “Your discretion does not. Let us decide what must be done. Then…you only need do it. Yes?”
Grimaud closed his eyes to a joy beyond description.
He had not imagined it.
He was not alone.