Sweat trickled down John's face as he repeated the message to Michael. Although Jamys's telepathic voice didn't cause pain, it usually rendered the humans in contact with it unconscious after only a few minutes.
"You'd better make this quick," John told the youthful-looking vampire. "I already feel light-headed."
Through John, Jamys told Cyprien about a Brethren interrogator named Orson Leary, who had been acting strangely just before Richard's former chief assassin had arrived to free the Durands.
"If Leary is the high lord's informant, he may have access to Dundellan that we don't," John said. "Jamys thinks we should talk to him, learn what his connection to Richard is and how much he knows." His vision doubled, and he stepped out of reach, abruptly breaking contact. To Jamys, he said, "Sorry. I'm ready to pass out."
Cyprien turned to his computer and went to work. After a minute, he nodded. "Orson Leary is in London. We can collect him before we go to Ireland."
"Collect?" John knew better. "You mean abduct."
"I do not play games with humans," Cyprien told him. "If this man can help us gain access to Dundellan, we will take him to Ireland with us."
"I doubt he'll be willing." John resented the easy way the Kyn took and used human beings for their own purposes. Their smug indifference to anything but their own interests might become as destructive as the Brethren's zealous, irrational persecution. "But that doesn't matter, does it?"
"Nothing matters to me but Alexandra." Cyprien stood. "Leary is attained interrogator; he will recognize Kyn. I will need you to make the initial contact and bring him to me." When he saw John's expression, his eyes narrowed. "You said that you wished to help, and that you would do anything for your sister. Have you changed your mind again?"
He could change his mind; that was what Cyprien was saying without saying. For a moment John was tempted. He had seen, firsthand, how the Kyn fought their enemies. Heads would, literally, roll. Leary's might be the first.
John knew how the Kyn had suffered at the hands of the Brethren, and how much Leary likely deserved an unpleasant, painful death. But he believed, just as Alexandra did, that violence wasn't the answer.
The killing had to stop, and these two old enemies had to find some measure of peace. With a Kyn sister and a Brethren mentor, John might be the only one who could make that happen.
"As long as you promise not to hurt Leary," John said slowly, extending his hand, "I'll do it."
"I vow I will not hurt the priest." Michael shook hands with him. "Go up to the garage and wait there; Phillipe will bring the car around shortly." He turned to Jamys. "I must speak with your father before we depart. Come."
John left the study and climbed the stairs to the upper public level of Knight's Realm, where the last show had finished. He merged into the crowd of weary but happy tourists heading for the parking garage.
As he entered the first level of the garage, he smelled peppermint. It grew stronger as a red-haired girl in a party dress bumped into him and hurried past. She slowed from a run to a walk, glanced back, and gave him a contrite smile. "Excuse me, mister."
John rubbed his hand—her sharp little nails had stabbed into the back of it—but he smiled back. "It's okay." Night made the garage seem darker than he remembered, and he squinted, trying to spot Cyprien's limo.
Beneath his feet, the ground tilted slightly.
A white sedan came to an abrupt stop in front of John, and a tall, thick-bodied man in a dark suit climbed out. He walked toward John. "Are you feeling all right, Father?" he asked, some sort of accent blurring the words.
"No." John saw a miniature of himself reflected in the man's mirrored sunglasses, and stopped between two cars. As the thick scent of cloves filled his head and the ground began to roll in concrete waves, he reached out blindly and braced himself. Something dripped from the end of his nose—sweat?—and his lungs burned. The man had called him "Father," but John was wearing street clothes. "How did you… ?"
The girl joined her father and grinned up at John. A trickle of blood stained the tip of her index finger, which looked like it ended in a silver claw. The scent of peppermint became smothering. "Hey, daddykins. Want to go for a ride?"
Nick pulled on her helmet and jerked the chinstrap tight. Dark yellow flecks of petals from the marigolds taking over the front lawns of Chateau St. Valereye speckled the toes of her boot. She didn't stop to look back at the jagged walls of the manor house, or the corner occupied by the chapel, which seemed to have escaped the ravages of time and neglect.
She could feel the old man watching her from the filmy windows of the caretaker's cottage. He was making sure she was leaving, and if she came back, she had no doubt he would make good on his threat and call the police.
Why did he lie to me?
Whoever he was, he acted as if he owned the place. He might just be that, the last of an old French family, living out his golden years watching the old chateau slowly decay into a pile of rubble. It was already halfway there, and definitely uninhabitable.
But the chapel was a different story.
Nick had gotten the chance to do a quick if not too thorough survey of the interior. Unlike the main house, the chapel had been built almost entirely from brick and stone. Whatever had long ago burned the wooden structures of the chateau had only dusted the inside of the church with a careless, blackened brush.
The altar had been dismantled, but no one had bothered to take out the pews and chop them up for firewood. They faced the empty space behind the railing at the front of the chapel; as if filled with a ghost parish worshiping a God who had deserted them.
Nick didn't believe in ghosts, and that wasn't the vibe she was getting from the place anyway.
The chapel had not served its purpose in decades, maybe centuries, but the structure was solid. Only one of the roof's ornamental rafters had come down, and that had been pulled down deliberately, as if to make it appear that the roof was unsound.
As authentic as it looked, Nick knew a setup job when she saw one.
She put her bike into gear and rode six bumpy miles over dirt before hitting the paved road that led back to the village. As she went, she scanned the pastoral hills surrounding the chateau. Two farmhouses, both appearing as if they'd been abandoned at the turn of the century. No animals, no squatters, not so much as a single squab hunter or farmer with his pig rooting around the tree trunks for truffles. The chateau's only neighbors were trees, thickets of woody brash, and the fields and pastures they were slowly reclaiming.
No one came out here, either. The dirt road had been wind-worn smooth of ruts. She didn't pass a single car, bike, or truck until she had crossed the outer boundary of the village, and melded into the light traffic of delivery boys on Vespas, lorry drivers hauling produce and meat in from the south, and the occasional wandering tourist in a rental car.
The old man had lied to her to get her off the property, and to scare her enough to keep her off, but why? Why guard a decrepit pile of worthless rock like St. Valereye so jealously if no one ever went there, and there was nothing worth stealing?
She knew something was there. She could feel it again, the same way she did every time just before she found something old that had been lost. Was that who he was, the Green Man in her dreams? Was he waiting, as the Golden Madonna waited, for Nick to find him?
So I dreamed of the place. It doesn't make him real. He's just wishful thinking.
Nick didn't have time to overanalyze the situation. She had to know what was going on at the chateau, and she'd found nothing about it on the Internet. That meant gathering some information from the locals. She decided to start at the inn where she had taken a room for the week.
Jean Laguerre, a taciturn man in his mid-thirties, spent the day stationed behind a bar that had been converted to serve as his reception desk. When Nick approached the innkeeper, she saw that he was sorting through receipts and adding up figures.
Nick was grateful he spoke flawless English. She usually embarrassed herself trying to speak French to the natives. "Excuse me, M. Laguerre, but may I ask you something?"
"Of course." He scanned a yellow delivery slip while his fingers tapped the keys of an old adding machine.
"Is your wife here?" Nick kept her tone casual. "I'd like to ask her about one of the old houses around town."
"Adélie is in the kitchen." He nodded toward the back of the inn. "If you go in there, she will ask you to sample her fish stock. It tastes like dishwater and smells worse."
"Whoa."
He leveled a stern eye on her. "If you sample it, you will tell her it is ambrosia, or she will fret and burn my dinner for the next two weeks."
Nick cleared her throat, mostly to stop a rising chuckle. "I'm allergic to fish."
"I wish that I were." He flipped over the receipt and began adding in figures from another.
Nick went back to the kitchen, where she found Adélie Laguerre at the sturdy old wooden table, up to her elbows in chopped vegetables and mushrooms. Table grapes, two fresh, braided natte aux pivots loaves, and a small bunch of garlic bulbs sat waiting their turn in the double-sided willow basket she took when she went to the village market.
French kitchens were a lot like Brit kitchens, Nick had noticed. Well, the French always had a bottle of wine standing around to be added to whatever was simmering in the pot for dinner, and they were a bit obsessive-compulsive about having fresh bread every day of the week. But the British were just as much a pain with their pots of tea and after-dinner puddings.
The dark-haired woman smiled as Nick came in, but like her husband did not stop working. "I just made up your room, mademoiselle. You are very tidy for an American."
Accustomed to the French way of delivering backhanded compliments, Nick grinned. "I travel light. Madame, the petrol station owner told me that you've lived in St. Valereye all your life. Is he right?"