A.K.A. Goddess (10 page)

“I’d like to see it.” Preferably before I’d spent almost half an hour on mine!

“It was stolen with the rest…”

Rhys stopped, and stared at me.

I stared at him. “With the rest of Bridge’s research.”

“They have the list.”

“They have the freaking list.” I looked out the window, at the worn black hulk that was so aptly named the Tour Melusine.

Somehow I wasn’t surprised to catch a flash of artificial light from within it.

“And they’re using it.”

I’m fourteen and sitting beside Lex on a flight to Paris. His mother convinced mine to “let them have a few more hours together” before we part, me to my grandmother, him to an exclusive camp in the Alps.

Lex’s efforts to regain his health have worked—his shoulders are broadening, and he’s inches taller. He is also leaving me. We’ve been to dances, to movies and spent time at each other’s houses—or my house, his palace. But I’ve known how badly he wants to get “back to school,” meaning his school.

Once summer is over, he will.

He is so oblivious, he just wants to play cards to pass the flight. “I’ll teach you how to cheat,” he offers at last.

“I don’t want to know how to cheat,” I say.

“It’s the best way to make sure you’re not being cheated.”

“I don’t plan on playing with anybody who would cheat me.”

He snorts. He is healthy and happy and bound for the most prestigious prep school in the country—even this summer camp is somehow connected. He can afford to be smug.

“You would never cheat me, would you?” I ask, suddenly worried in a way that thickens in my stomach.

His answer—”Not for money”—hardly satisfies me. I know the importance of standing up for myself, even to him.

Maybe especially to him.

I say, “You can’t be my friend if you cheat me.”

Lex just teases me. “But if I cheat well enough, you would never know.”

“And you still wouldn’t be my friend!” The sharpness in my voice startles him. “Even if I thought you were. Because you would know. I wouldn’t be your friend, Lex. I’d be your victim.”

Now he’s angry, but it’s that quiet, smoldering kind of angry he gets when he’s thinking very hard about something that troubles him. We hardly speak during our descent to Paris. I feel worse and worse, both because my prince has admitted to something so unheroic as cheating and because our argument has ruined what little time we have left together. But as we are waiting to go through customs, Lex turns to me and earnestly says, “I won’t cheat you again.”

I let him hold my hand then. I’m glad he said it.

But I wonder how I will know, if he breaks his promise.

That summer I get my period and officially “become a woman.” Grand-mère and Aunt Bridge give me my own chalice-well pendant to celebrate.

The next time I see Lex—between his coming home and leaving for boarding school, he kisses me goodbye, on the cheek—before he leaves again. He asks me to his school’s formal autumn dance. It’s easier to let him go, the more secure I feel that our separations are only temporary.

But I still wish he’d never cheated at cards.

F rom our room I could see bits of flashlight beam glancing out of the occasional arrow slit. Someone was definitely in the tower. Melusine’s tower. The one that was closed until morning.

“Sons of bitches.” Turning from the window, I yanked my damp jeans off the radiator and wedged myself into their tight denim confines.

Rhys politely averted his eyes. “It could be vandals. Or teenagers out for a spot of fun.”

“Or little kids, scaring each other with ghost stories.” Damn, but wet denim’s hard to zip.

“Or tourists, too impatient to wait for official hours. Perhaps tourists with lock picks?”

“I’m decent,” I announced. “Once I have my boots on, I’ll be ready.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Ready for what, exactly?”

To find out who they were, who they were involved with. To torture them into confessing everything before turning them over to the authorities….

Okay, so I wouldn’t be torturing anybody. That’s a line I won’t cross. And maybe a professor of comparative mythology wasn’t the best candidate for making citizen’s arrests. But…“To go learn something. Knowledge is power, right?”

Unfortunately, even as I said that, I crossed the room to my boots and almost drowned myself out with the scritch, scritch, scritch of wet denim. Well…crap.

“Turn around again,” I instructed.

“I’ll change in the bathroom,” he said.

This time, as we headed out, I wore his damp swim trunks. They doubled nicely for shorts, and I was a lot stealthier that way. And far more comfortable.

“How,” whispered Rhys, as we edged through the shadows, “do you propose to get close enough to learn anything?”

Vouvant’s worn buildings of pinkish terra-cotta with orange tiled roofs and shutters, had looked charming earlier. So had the looming old church and the crumbling medieval ramparts that ran through town. Now the whole place reminded me more of decay and despondency, like something out of a fairy tale. And not one of the nice ones.

The Tour Melusine sat in the middle of it all, ringed with a small field. There were not enough bushes or trees to cover our approach.

“I propose that we do it very quietly.” I glanced his way, saw his hesitation. “You keep watch. I’ll go first.”

Rhys caught my shoulder, surprising me. “You do realize that if these are the same men as before, both of them were armed.”

“I do realize that,” I whispered. “Thanks.”

“And you realize they had firearms.”

“Yeah. Too bad they aren’t using swords.” I meant that.

“And you’ll be outnumb—”

I whirled to face him. “You’re not helping!”

Wow. That was a moment. We stared, his hand still staying me, both of us vibrating with adrenaline. I may not be able to see auras, but damned if I couldn’t feel mine pushed up against his, personal space warring with personal space, dangerously close to coming to a mutual agreement over the disputed territory….

Heavens, his eyes were blue. And worried. About me.

He stepped back first. Three full steps. “Be careful.”

His unintentional echo of Lex’s warning helped me turn away to face this latest threat, annoyed all over again. Did I give off I’m-an-idiot vibes, that I needed this advice? Or, worse…were the vibes more along the lines of I’m a helpless damsel?

Tower there. Me here. Time to change that.

Slowing my breath to center and balance myself, I melded into the shadows. Yep, Tai Chi again. It’s the art of becoming all but invisible, substantial only when connecting with an opponent’s weak point.

Appear, then disappear. Of course, my sifu generally said that during quiet, push-hands exercises. But I was willing to extrapolate.

Stepping as smoothly and deliberately as if I were doing forms, synchronizing my Chi to the night around me, I crept into the open. Farther. Farther…

Light flickered halfway up the tower, from inside. I heard Rhys hiss a quiet warning from well behind me. For a moment I tensed; then I breathed it out, refusing to hurry. It’s the rabbit who bolts from hiding that gets chased.

The light glanced away without ever reaching me, and I made it to the shelter of a tree. Then I turned and lifted a hand toward Rhys, to reassure him.

He was hanging back, just as I’d asked.

Using the same technique, I glided like a ghost to the next tree, then the next. Like easing through water instead of a soft, cricket-filled, flower-scented night. Like Melusine.

As I reached the marginal safety of the tower’s thick, blocky base, I felt downright proprietary about it.

It was an odd ruin. The bottom half was squared, with doorways opening into thin air at different heights—clearly it was once part of a larger edifice. To one of these second-story doorways someone had built a flight of stairs to a banded door, which the tourist office kept locked.

It sat slightly open.

Someone was inside. Probably there was only one set of stairs. I wasn’t close enough to hear anything, but neither was I stupid enough to trace their steps, knowing they would have only one way out—through me—when they changed directions.

I mean, it’s only Tai Chi. I don’t actually become invisible. And I’d left my sword at home.

So I stood there in the flower bed at the base of the tower and looked for other options.

Unlike its blocky bottom, the top half of the tower was rounded, with framed arrow slits. Where it met its bottom half, the round tower flared wider than its squared base, shifted slightly to one side like a child’s toy that had been put clumsily together. And up inside that overhanging edge, almost impossible to see through the shadows, seemed to be some kind of…shaft? Yes, almost a tunnel into the upper part of the tower. It had crumbled open toward its base, not five feet from the main door.

I frowned at the mystery, wanting to understand this before I considered taking advantage—then almost laughed to realize that it was a toilet.

A garderobe, they were called. Once there would have been a seat at the top with a hole in it, built over a long shaft down to the moat or river. Like a medieval outhouse. Unfortunately, those garderobes were lousy security risks. Richard the Lionheart’s famous fortress, Chateau Gaillard, withstood a siege for who-knew how long before enemy soldiers crawled up from the moat and successfully invaded through the potties.

I hesitated. Logically, I knew this shaft had been unused and open to the cleansing powers of dust, wind, sunshine and rain for centuries. Lots of them. But…it was a sewer.

Then I thought about those sons of bitches up in the tower, using information they’d stolen to search for evidence that women had worshipped Melusine there, and I would’ve climbed the damned thing fresh.

Glancing at Rhys once more, I climbed the modern stairway to the main door. That alone took me over a story high. I looked at the crumbling rock ledge that led around to the inverted corner, where once the shaft had continued.

I took my boots off, stuffing my socks inside and hiding them under the stairs. I seemed to be doing that a lot this week, didn’t I? Then, barefoot and using the outside wall of the tower for balance, I stepped precariously onto the stony remains of what had probably been a curtain wall.

My toes clinging to rocks and tufts of determined grass, I stole to the ragged, inside edge of the shaft.

Then I craned my neck to look up at the looming space above me, four or five stories high. Wow. That looked pretty small. I saw darkness—but heard muffled voices.

Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could tell they were men. I thought I knew which ones. Taking another deep breath, I ran my hands over the rocks to find good holds—and pulled myself shakily upward.

Climbing down the drainpipe of Turbeville Hall had been a lot easier. It hadn’t been as high, for one thing, and I’d been working with gravity. Still, I found enough niches and nooks to wedge my fingers, or my toes, or occasionally my knees—let’s hear it for erosion.

Once, my foot slipped and I almost fell. Twice, I kicked small stones loose, and they clattered down the rock beneath me. I froze, unable to breathe—but nobody investigated. So I worked on that inhale/exhale business some more and dragged myself doggedly higher.

Amazing, how easily determination can stand in for skill.

As I reached the rounded upper half of the tower, the garderobe tunnel closed around me on all sides. That made it horribly, eerily dark. This was nighttime, I reminded myself. It had been kind of dark, anyway.

I could now use opposite walls to brace myself—especially as they leaned closer…and closer….

High enough, I thought finally, and found an uneven inch of ledge to balance against as I listened.

At first there was just shuffling. A lot of shuffling. Sometimes, a scraping noise like a file; I winced to imagine what the intruders might be doing to the historical integrity of the stone. Maybe I wasn’t close enough. Or maybe Rhys had been right, and these were vandals.

Then—“This is a bloody waste of time.”

Not only could I hear the man pretty well, here in the little sound tunnel I’d claimed, but he was also speaking English. British-English, with an inflection like the Beatles.

Liverpool ?

“Complain if you will,” chided voice number two, clearly French, but speaking English for the sake of his companion. “I won’t be the one to admit I gave up too soon if she finds it where we already looked.”

One of my feet, bracing me on my little ledge, started to slip. Compensating with my hands to readjust my balance in the darkness, I almost missed the next words.

“Why not let her do the boring part?” Liverpool asked. “Then we take the damned cup. Everyone’s happy.”

“You were not so confident outside Orlèans.”

I grinned to myself, even as I found a new toehold. It was a strange sensation, huddled in darkness as I listened. Like I really was invisible. Like that invisibility gave me some kind of extra power.

“She was aiming a Saxo at me!” Liverpool protested.

Frenchy snorted. “Were I in charge, I should not count on our ability to take the cup once she has it.”

“We can take what we want, if we kill her.” Well, wasn’t Liverpool the bloodthirsty bastard?

Frenchy’s voice kept shifting in volume, giving me the impression he was moving around, still searching. At least he had as little idea what he was really looking for as Rhys and I did. “Like you almost did with the old woman?”

“They overreacted. Our instructions were ‘whatever it takes.’ Well that’s what it took. If she’d stayed home where she belonged then we wouldn’t have had to do it.”

If she’d stayed home where she belonged, you wouldn’t have had any notes to steal in the first place, you idiot!

“In any case,” said Frenchie, “the scholar is useful.”

“Sod it!” Something metal clanged against stone—like a file being thrown?—and again I winced. Liverpool’s frustration seemed even greater than mine.

Good.

“I could be in Greece with Monique right now,” he whined. “We had this holiday planned for a month.”

“Did you complain like this when you got that contract last year?” Frenchie asked. Intriguing. “Or when the authorities did not press charges against you before that? Me, I am grateful the insurance board looked the other way. I am grateful my father won the election. This is how we show our gratitude.”