“Get under the bridge,” my stalker insisted. “Now.”
“No,” I said—only partly because Rhys had risked a faint, negative shake to his head. He did not want to be used for leverage any more than did I.
“I won’t just shoot the two of you,” he warned. “I’ll finish the clip across the river if I have to.”
A quick glance showed me a cluster of teenagers in matching shirts, perhaps on a field trip—spring break? They ignored the wet, laughing and pushing at each other, taking pictures…
Someone who was sane would never go through with it. But I’d stared into this madman’s eyes, smelled his breath on my face. He was not sane—and more than likely he was angry about the horribly scabbed-over wound marring his cheek, and the one on his neck, where I’d nailed him with my high heels the other week. I obediently stepped into the shadows under the wide arch of the bridge and hoped no other innocents would come upon us. A nice gendarme, yes. Soldiers on leave. Not an innocent.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” the gunman mused. “For myself. I’ve decided that there’s good and there’s evil, and evil must be destroyed, no matter what my guides say.”
“But why do you think I am evil?” I asked.
He laughed, as if at a joke. “Because you’re the one who released them. You’re the one who brought their heresy back to the world. Besides, you are a woman. Original sin was Eve’s fault, you know. Women ruin everything.”
If Scarlet needed more proof of her either/or, Age-of-Pisces thinking, she need not look farther than this guy. “Even if I’m evil, this man is not. He—”
“Shut up!” His arm flexed as he pushed the gun barrel harder against Rhys’s neck. I saw Rhys wince slightly. “Kneel. I want you to kneel, submissive for once. Do it!”
Which was when Rhys made his move. Using his height advantage, he shouldered our attacker aside, grabbed his arm and tried to wrestle the gun away. “Catrina, run!”
I backed away only two steps before I saw the gunman knee Rhys below the belt, then slam the butt of the pistol into his head. If I had run, it would have bought me enough time to clear the stairs, out of immediate range. Instead, unable to leave Rhys, I saw him fall—and I flew at the bastard. I caught his wrist, bit deep into his gun hand, stomped his foot and scratched four deep furrows down his face with my bared claws. I tried to hit him in the crotch, the way he’d gotten Rhys, who was groaning. That part proved more difficult than I’d expected.
Suddenly, I found myself with the gun barrel hard under my chin, and the madman’s arm tight around my throat. He felt hot and sweaty against me, and he smelled of oily metal, and he was in control now. Merde. I’d hoped I could fight better than that.
Rhys, trying to push himself up into a sitting position, was looking judgmentally at me again. As if he had more of a right to risk his life than I did to risk mine.
“Stay there,” warned my stalker. I felt his hand on the pistol tremble as his finger tightened on the trigger. “You cannot get to me before I shoot her.”
“But I’ve got a fair chance of taking you down as you do it,” Rhys half grunted. That kind of blow really does take it out of men, doesn’t it? I wondered if he was bluffing, or if he’d suddenly become less of a pacifist. “And if you miss, she will most certainly finish the job.”
“I won’t miss,” the gunman assured us. “God is on my side.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “God is on his side. He’s a priest.”
“Catrina,” chided Rhys, who really did need to learn to prioritize. But I was the one with the gun barrel crowding my tonsils from the outside. I felt my attacker hesitate.
Not enough for me to risk trying to throw both of us into the river. Not yet. Beyond the bridge, mist turned to rain.
“Certainly you might consider me evil,” I continued, wincing as I swallowed. “You wouldn’t be alone there. But Father Pritchard has been, at worst, misled.” Get it, Father Pritchard?
Spit flew. “You’re a liar and a blasphemer!”
“She is not a liar. I am an ordained Catholic priest.” Rhys did not add that he’d left his calling. “What you are doing here is a grievous sin. This is not only murder, but suicide. You can’t get away. You’re destroying your life as well as ours.”
“I won’t kill you unless you force me. And…and at least I’m giving my life for the greater good!”
Neither of us missed that touch of deference to Rhys.
“If you have any faith at all,” I said, hunting for some way to buy more time, “you’ll let me give confession first.”
“I won’t wait for long!”
Startled into action by the unsteady threat, Rhys managed to stand. He crouched by the Seine long enough to scoop water into his hand, whispered something over it and came to me. His eyes, wider than usual, were asking me what to do next. Since I doubted a handful of water would make a difference to someone this unstable, I begged him, with my eyes, to go on. Stall, I mouthed. It seemed safer than playing chicken with a bullet.
There was no great chance gendarmes or soldiers would stroll up in the rain, but perhaps a tourist with better night vision than sense would notice us and go for help.
Rhys said, “In nomine Patris, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti.” In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Latin was a nice touch. He drew a little cross on my forehead with a thumb dipped in river water…which I suspected was now holy. Or, him having left the priesthood…holy-ish?
The gun under my chin was starting to hurt. The chances of knocking it away before it went off hadn’t improved. Not yet.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been, um…” Damn. I’d gone to confession only as long as Grand-mère could force me, and again sometime in my twenties when, lost after a bad breakup, I’d considered returning to the Church. But…
“Years?” prompted Rhys, with a faint twitch of his lips.
“It has been years since my last confession.”
For a moment, all we heard was the rain, the splash of traffic over the bridge above us, and the breath of the gunman beside us. Rhys widened his eyes, prompting me, but I couldn’t remember. So he asked, “Do you have any sins to confess?”
“One or two. Ouch!” The gun had pressed harder.
“Do not mock the sanctity of the confessional!” warned our attacker. So…his madness had boundaries, did it? At least once in his life, he’d been Catholic. And part of him still believed.
Maybe he wasn’t wholly alone, in that. I found a sanctuary of sorts in Rhys’s steady, concerned gaze. Sins, huh? “I’ve doubted God,” I confessed, trying to remember what counted. “I’ve missed more Sunday masses and holy days of obligation than I can count. I’ve also had carnal relations. Quite a bit.”
But of all of that, only one part struck me as an actual sin. “I seduced a man who was pure before I got to him—”
“None of us is especially pure,” Rhys interrupted sharply, not missing the fact that I was talking about him.
“Yes, but I certainly didn’t help.”
“I’m sure….” But a slide of his gaze warned me that Rhys must have seen the gunman’s belief in our little ruse weakening, because he let his argument drop. “Anything else?”
“I did steal something, an old cup. Even if I thought I was doing it for a good reason at the time, I was probably mistaken. Oh, and some letters hidden in an old hotel. The hotelier didn’t know about them, but I suppose that counts as stealing, too.”
“She doesn’t sound penitent to me,” complained the gunman.
“That is not for us to judge,” Rhys snapped, with surprising authority. “Did you mean anyone harm, when you committed those thefts? Were you acting out of greed?”
“I…no.” His question, and my admission surprised me. “Though I may have relished my triumph a little too—”
“Let’s stick with mortal sins, this man is in a hurry. Have you committed acts of deliberate violence?” Again, Rhys slid his disapproving gaze to the scarred man with the gun under my chin. “Other than in self-defense?”
“Other than self-defense? No.” Except for slapping him. But I thought I saw where he was going.
Rhys turned to the gunman. “And you?”
He started, and I swallowed back a whimper. “I…no,” he protested. “This is her confession. I don’t go to church anymore. The Church became too lenient. Too progressive.”
With a look of stern disapproval, the kind a father gives to a disappointing son, Rhys turned back to me and made the sign of the cross. “Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat—”
“Wait!” protested the gunman. “You can’t absolve her yet. You haven’t given her a penance.”
“You mean to kill her,” Rhys reminded him. “She hardly has time to say her rosary.”
“But she hasn’t made an act of contrition!” He jabbed the gun again and I winced, mostly from the thought of a bullet exploding through my brain. I readied myself to try knocking him and me off the walkway, into the Seine—
Then Rhys’s hand closed, solid, around the gun barrel. “We are hardly in any position to judge her.” Slowly, he drew the gun barrel away from my bruised jaw and upward. He was upward.
“Father Pritchard,” I protested.
“Catrina,” he responded, with the same low authority. “Go get help. In nomine Patris, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti.” But this time, he wasn’t praying for me. He said that over the now-trembling man, a man who might kill us at any moment. “Please, my son. Tell me your name.”
“I…” The gunman’s breath caught. “I am called Pierre.”
Behind his back, Rhys made a shooing gesture with his free hand—before settling it on Pierre’s shoulder. “How long has it been since your last confession? How long have you been lost?”
I backed away, stepping into a wall of rain outside the privacy of our confessional. I reached the stone steps, hating to leave Rhys—who was suggesting Pierre wanted to do the right thing—with a madman who thought guns were right.
“No,” I heard Pierre protest, as I started up the steps to street level. “I can’t betray the guides…but you’re not evil…”
“Don’t do that,” warned Rhys sharply, and I had to stop. I had to look. Pierre was turning the gun. Rhys shouted, “No!”
It fired, a spurt of flame lighting the shadows under the bridge like a camera flash—or a bomb. I screamed, and started back down. But Rhys was moving, unhurt. He stripped off his own shirt to apply pressure, cradling the bloody head of a man with half his face gone—a man who was still trying to talk, blowing bubbles of blood as he did. I thought I heard Pierre slur something about, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Rhys looked over his shoulder at me, half-naked now, his eyes wild. He didn’t need to ask me again. I bolted up the wet stone stairs as fast as I could and went for help.
It wasn’t as hard to find a police officer after the gunshot. But somehow I managed to convey that they needed to call an ambulance before dragging them back down to the riverside walkway. What if Pierre wasn’t willing to die alone? Had Rhys thought to take his gun?
Rhys still knelt with the man who’d tried to kill me more than once, for reasons I might never understand, now. Rhys was drawing a tiny cross with his thumb on what was left of Pierre’s bloody forehead, having already closed his remaining eye, and he was saying a long, long prayer in Latin. Despite the number of Amens in it, it went on for a while. “Per sacrosancta humanae reparationis mysteria….” It continued. “Amen. Benedicat te omnipotens Deus….”
He knew it all, I realized as if that should have surprised me. The entire rite of extreme unction. By heart, and in Latin. In so many ways, too many ways, he was still a priest.
I’d been sleeping with a priest.
With a last trinity, Rhys looked slowly up to show the police that he was done. For their part, they’d come close enough to keep watch, several had crossed themselves and one had taken the gun out of the corpse’s hand, but otherwise they had waited for this.
I hung back, and not because Rhys had blood on him now.
Once the police drew him away from the body, Rhys turned and slammed his hand, hard, against the stone wall, and swore. I think in Welsh. He looked haunted. I had to go to him.
“What…?” But to ask what was wrong, standing beside a bloody body, would be heartless even for me. I was already having to deal with the way my relief, that my stalker would no longer threaten me, warred with my concern for Rhys.
He answered anyway, a gritted, “I can’t tell you.”
“What do you mean you can’t…?” But then, with dawning dismay, I figured it out. “He told you something.”
Rhys neither confirmed nor denied it—not with words. But his tortured gaze did it for him.
“If he told you something important in his confession, Rhys, tell me. Tell someone! You already left the priesthood. The confession doesn’t count…does it?”
“I told you once before—parts of ordination are permanent. That’s why I can give last rites, if necessary. I really did hear his confession and grant him absolution.”
“But if he told you something important—”
“Then telling anyone would violate the sacramental seal!” He wanted to tell. I could see that much—if he didn’t want to, then he wouldn’t be as upset. But Rhys didn’t always do what he wanted to do, not anymore. He did what was right.
And that was that. We waited together, leaned against each other for support and warmth, while the police cleared the scene. I looked at Rhys’s hand, which didn’t seem broken, and made sure the medics did the same before they took the body away. We were brought to the Préfecture de Police, where they found us dry shirts and took our statements.
It was near midnight before we were able to head back to my building. The rain had stopped. But only then did I face facts.
“He’s dead now,” I said, not quite meeting Rhys’s eyes. “I don’t need you to bodyguard me anymore. I think…I think tomorrow, you should go back to your own flat.”
Rhys caught me under my bruised chin with a gentle finger, urging me to meet his gaze anyway, so at last I did. But I willed him not to make me say it. I had been a form of spiritual suicide for him, and I deserved to be more than that. And he was far more of a priest than I’d realized, maybe than he had either. I wasn’t angry anymore, not really.
I thought I even still loved him.
But I don’t sleep with priests.
Perhaps he could read my concerns in my face. Perhaps not. He merely nodded. “I don’t have to wait until tomorrow,” he said. “Be careful, Catrina. Please. Try to stay out of danger.”
“I will if you will,” I whispered. He bent….
And he kissed me on the head. Chaste. Kind. Good-natured.
That was goodbye.
When I got upstairs, Scarlet was still there, waiting for me—and her own brand of furious. “How could you leave me worrying like this? What happened? Did you two make up?”
I shook my head and shivered. The issues that separated me from Rhys, now, went far deeper than a simple fight.
“Oh, honey!” She gave me a big hug—and only then, despite my best efforts, did I begin to cry. We ended up sitting on the settee, me sobbing my makeup off into tissues and onto her shoulder, trying to tell Scarlet everything that had happened. For once, she didn’t carry the conversation. She listened, and nodded, and made sympathetic noises, and mostly she held me, and rocked me, and was a friend. A really good, really kind friend.
“At least that crazy man won’t be bothering you anymore,” she said at long last, her arms around me, her head on my shoulder as mine was on hers. “Am I terrible to be glad for that much, anyway?”
“If so, we can be terrible together. But I don’t think it’s over. Whatever he told Rhys, it was important enough that Rhys hates not being able to share it.”
“Poor Rhys,” sighed Scarlet.
“No. No more about him. I can’t…”
“Well, then speaking of terrible…” Scarlet hedged.
I leaned back from her, sniffed wetly, and stared. “What?”
“I hate to bring this up, with you being brokenhearted and all, but I think it’s important. While you were gone, I got on your computer and tracked down Léon Chanson’s Paris address. We need to find him tomorrow, Catrina. Really.”
“Why?” I started to ask, but followed her worried expression to the coffee table, where lay my four tiles and the coiled remains of our extension cord. I’d almost forgotten about the Marians’ science experiments…but finally, I realized what Scarlet must have figured out some time ago.
“It didn’t just have to do with solar flares,” I said. “That first earthquake.”
“They didn’t know why it was so powerful right at the Denfert-Rochereau site,” Scarlet agreed. “But the tiles were there, weren’t they? Some kind of energy was passed through the tiles, even underground like they were, and they made it worse.”
“It can’t have anything to do with the Chartres earthquake,” I protested, wiping futilely at a mascara stain on the shoulder of her peasant blouse until she pushed my hand away. “How many tiles would be necessary to cause that kind of destruction?”
“I don’t know.” Scarlet pointed at the dent in my wall. “The energy seemed to increase exponentially with just two.”
They were crazy theories, true. But Léon was the only geophysicist I knew. And he’d agreed that there was such a thing as an induced earthquake. So perhaps…
“We’ll go to his flat first thing in the morning,” I decided. “Leave a note demanding he call us. We can camp there, if we must. Or you could…I’m still working on that benefit….”
“Oh sure. Too busy saving the world to save the world.” But Scarlet’s laugh managed to draw a weak smile out of me, anyway.
The following morning we did just that—went to Léon’s address which, it turned out, was an apartment in the 7th arrondissement—which means, the rich part of town. Aristocrats still live along the tree-lined boulevards of this district, as does the prime minister.
“How could a scientist afford this kind of real estate?” asked Scarlet, after we’d used the videophone to request entrance to see Monsieur Chanson.
But as it turned out, he no longer did afford it.
“The man vanished,” announced his concierge—polite and reserved, but disgusted all the same. “He left his flat open and empty, with no word. When the month is up, we will re-let. Will that be all?”
“Empty?” echoed Scarlet, disappointed, but I took a page from Rhys’s book.
“Could we perhaps see the flat?” I asked, lowering my sunglasses so that he could see the swollen eyes my makeup had not quite disguised. “For…personal reasons?”
Assuming, as I’d hoped he would, that my tears had been for Léon, the concierge made a slight bow and stood back to allow us entry. “If you do not mind the cleaning crew. We do have a waiting list, however.”
Just as well. The last thing I needed was more real estate. And even if I were a thief, I doubted I could afford anything like these two stories of splendor.
“No wonder he was able to take me to Le Jules Verne,” I murmured to Scarlet, as we looked around the loft-style home. One entire wall was of windows overlooking the street. Another was of windows overlooking the private terrace behind the building. There was modern lighting, a “bathroom” suite off every bedroom, and stainless-steel appliances in the kitchen, where a maid had just finished sweeping up from under the stove and the huge steel refrigerator. Those bits of trash might have fallen off the counters at some point.
I am unsure what drew me to the contents of the maid’s dustpan. Perhaps mere curiosity, or perhaps I was coming to sense them. But I said, “A moment, please,” and took the bits from her.
Scarlet, looking over my shoulder, gasped.
One of the bits that had been lost in the cracks was a tiny tile, like the Marian tiles. And the rest were nuts, bolts and bits of wire…such as are used in building electrical devices.