“Beautiful, yes, Henri.” Already he could taste the bouillabaisse he would make with them. “How much?”
The fishmonger beamed. “For you, I make the best of deals. Come, see the monkfish I just put out. They are—” He made a kissing sound.
Before Nathan could reply, someone called out, “Excuse me. Are you American? Excuse me.” Nathan looked around until he spotted another man dressed like a tourist waving and walking toward him. The stranger wore a straw hat and carried a hot pink plastic tote filled with even tackier souvenirs.
“Henri, go back to your stall,” Nathan said softly as he reached into his back pocket.
The fishmonger scowled. “But mon ami—”
“Now, please.” He took out the butterfly blade he always carried but kept it concealed in his palm. “I’ll be along shortly.”
Henri grumbled as he trudged off, leaving Nathan to face Straw Hat alone.
“It’s awfully good of you to wait,” the man gushed as he wove around a couple of Spaniards before stopping a few feet away. The jacket covering his free hand effectively disguised the gun he had pointed at Nathan’s chest, but he made sure Nathan got a good look at it. “I don’t meet too many Americans around these parts. Could I ask you to step over here and have a private conversation with me? I could use some advice.” He shuffled closer. “And we wouldn’t want anyone else to become . . . involved . . . in this conversation.”
Four years of his life crumbled before Nathan’s eyes, but he didn’t bother to put on an act of ignorance. The one thing about himself he had not altered was his face, and the man pretending to be a tourist had been one of his trainers in the catacombs. He was also one of the best of their human hunters. “How did you find me?”
“Your pretty wife’s doctor. After her last checkup, he was quite concerned. He sent a consult to Paris.” The man moved the jacket to the left. “If you want to know more, you’ll walk quietly to the parking lot. We don’t want to cause a scene, Mr. Nathan Frame.” He chuckled. “Such pedestrian names you have been using, Dancer. What do they call you? Nathan?”
“I’m not Dancer anymore, and I’m not going back with you.”
“Of course you are, my son.” The man smiled broadly. “You forget, you are in France, not America. We control the authorities here.” His mouth flattened. “And you belong to us, Dancer.”
He’d cut his own throat before he voluntarily went back to the Order or used that name again.
“All right. I don’t want any trouble,” Nathan lied. He headed for the parking lot. As the man followed him, he looked ahead for some private spot where he could deal with the hunter.
The crowd thinned and then disappeared as Nathan made his way down a short side street between two boutiques. There he saw a mound of empty shipping boxes stacked neatly by the wall, high enough to provide cover. He stopped beside them, gathering himself for the strike.
“If you are thinking you will disarm me, drag me over there, and break my neck,” Straw Hat said just behind him, “there is something you should first know.”
Nathan turned, kicking away the hunter’s weapon before he hauled him behind the boxes and slammed him into the building’s brick wall. He flipped the blade open and held it under the man’s sagging chin. “What?”
“Gisele will be joining us, too.” The hunter smiled. “My men have just arrived at your father-in-law’s restaurant.” He glanced at his watch. “By now they should have her in custody.”
Nathan’s blood turned to frost. “She has nothing to do with this or me. She is an innocent.”
“Didn’t Gisele tell you the reason she saw the doctor? No? Ah, perhaps she meant it to be a surprise, for your wedding anniversary next week.” The hunter chuckled. “Your wife is pregnant, Dancer. Good job.”
“You’re lying.” He had taken every precaution with Gisele to be sure he didn’t impregnate her.
“We retested her blood in our Paris facility, just to be sure.” The hunter grinned. “She’s already developing a lovely and quite unique set of antibodies to share with your son. If she retains them, we may even breed her again. Not with you, of course. You will have to—”
Nathan slammed his head into the brick until the man lost consciousness. Then he ran. He ran as he had never run, with all his strength, through the markets and the crowds, knocking over bags of grain and people and bins of fruit, leaving a wide wake of shouting, furious merchants and frightened shoppers. He ran beyond thought, beyond breath, and as he reached Giusti’s he hurled himself at the locked front door, breaking it down.
“Gisele.”
He found the old man first, sitting on the floor beside the freezer chest, a bloody butcher knife still clutched in his fist. The hunter’s men had shot him in the chest six times.
Nathan whipped his head around to see a work-worn hand, still holding a tied leek, on the floor.
“Marie. Oh, God.”
He hurried over to discover his mother-in-law, shot once through the forehead, staring up at him with wide, lifeless eyes. Nathan felt bile rise in his throat before he stumbled away through the kitchen door and blundered over the body of a man dressed entirely in black. From the look of his wounds, Renaud must have stabbed him with the butcher’s knife several times before he’d died.
“Nathan,” his wife screamed.
He saw her at the end of the road, being dragged by one man toward a waiting van. He bent to take the gun from the dead man and went after them.
His wife fought desperately, scratching her attacker’s face and kicking him as she shrieked Nathan’s name. He reached the van just as the man had shoved her inside. A tray of glass vials fell out of the van’s side door, shattering and spilling the blood and tissue in them all over the ground. Nathan felt something burn across the side of his head.
“Get in the van with her,” the man behind the wheel snarled, cocking the hammer on the pistol as he adjusted his aim. “Or this time I will blow your br—”
The rest of what he said was lost in a gush of blood. The gun fell from his hand as he tried to pull Nathan’s knife from his neck, and then slumped over the wheel. The van began rolling forward as Nathan lunged at the second man.
“You bastard.” Nathan knocked him to the ground, driving his knee into his solar plexus before the other man shoved the heel of his hand into his nose. Bone and cartilage crunched, but Nathan stayed on top of him, battering him with his fists over and over, shattering his jaw, his teeth, his eye sockets. Only when the man went limp did he stagger to his feet and turn to get his wife.
The van was halfway down the sloping street, gathering speed as it hurtled out of control, striking the back wall of the restaurant before careening in the opposite direction, directly toward a busy intersection.
“God, no.” Nathan ran toward the back of the van, where he could see his wife’s pale, blood-streaked face staring out at him. “Gisele, jump out,” he shouted. “Jump!”
The driver of the tractor-trailer passed by the traffic light and then hit his brakes just as the van entered the intersection from the opposite direction. The squeal of grinding metal shattered the air as the massive vehicle swerved, but the trailer jackknifed, slamming into the van, which crumpled like a cheap tin toy.
Screams and shouts erupted around Nathan, and then the truck’s gas tank exploded. Windows all around the square shattered simultaneously as a huge fireball expanded outward, enveloping the truck and the van and several other cars.
“Monsieur,” someone cried out, and hands clawed at Nathan. “Monsieur, get back!”
He shook off the tearing fingers and ran into the fire, just in time to take the full brunt of the blast as the van’s tank exploded.
“He has not spoken?” a strange voice asked in French.
“Not a word since they brought him in,” another replied in the same language. “I do not think he will before he dies.”
Nathan could open his eyes a little, but as before he saw only a swath of black-and-red-stained gauze in front of them. He knew from other awakenings that bandages covered his head and most of his body. He felt no pain, only an absence of feeling and an inability to move, as if his body were dead and only his mind were alive.
“It has been two weeks since they brought him in,” the first voice pointed out. “He may live.”
Two weeks, here, like this. Nathan tried to understand it. The last thing he remembered was walking through the market to buy herbs and butter. He’d spoken to Henri, the fishmonger. Then . . . nothing. Nothing but opening his eyes now and then and seeing through the slits of his swollen eyelids the stained bandages.
“He has third-degree burns over most of his body, and an infection we cannot identify has taken hold. It will only be a few hours, I think.” The second man sighed. “But he cannot be the one who did this thing, Inspector. He ran into the fire. He did this to himself trying to save them.”
“Save them, Doctor?” The cop laughed. “All of the witnesses who saw the accident agreed that no one could have survived that explosion. So why would he run into it, to save people who were already dead?”
An explosion? Dead people? A fragment of Nathan’s memory emerged, vague and disjointed, bringing with it terrible sounds and burning light, but no faces. No people.
“I do not believe he murdered the Giustis,” the doctor said firmly. “No man who murdered two people could do this to himself trying to save others a few minutes later.”
“He was seen running after the van involved in the accident,” the inspector said. “We know Giusti’s daughter was inside; we were able to identify her remains with her dental records. Perhaps she saw everything and was escaping him. He could have been pursuing her. He may have even caused the accident himself to kill her.”
“And then, in a fit of instantaneous remorse, he hurled himself into the explosion?” The doctor made a disgusted sound. “Inspector, you have spent too much time with killers. You suspect everyone, even a man like this poor fool.”