Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement Read online

  They were motivations she could understand.

  She’d seen the footage of Annja going to town on those idiots Dugarry and Rameaux when they tried to bring her in, but even seeing Creed conjure her sword from out of thin air hadn’t made her a believer. She had studied the footage, trying to disprove the illusion, looking for the trick in it. The only aspect of the attack that excited Monique was the proof that, despite all appearances, Annja Creed was dangerous. The thrill she took from that was undeniably disturbing, but as long as she harnessed that deep-seated need to give and receive pain she was a tool he could use in this game. She was wrong to underestimate the old man, but how could he tell her that?

  “Roux is more dangerous than he looks, believe me.”

  “Once upon a time, maybe. But that was twenty years ago. It has been a long time since he was anything but an old man. And yes, I know this—” she pointed at his wheelchair “—is all his fault. And I know that he’s the one that this—” this time she gestured all around them “—is all about. But let’s not turn him into some sort of bogeyman.”

  “He wanted me dead, Monique. I will never forget that.”

  “And neither should you. But he’s twenty years older now… He isn’t the man he once was.”

  “Neither am I. Tell me, would it surprise you if I said that looking at him now, it’s impossible to tell that he has aged a single day?”

  There was no change in her expression.

  He knew she heard him, but didn’t—couldn’t—believe him.

  Why should she? It was impossible in the world she lived in. A world where demons didn’t live hidden away beneath the skin suits of immortal men.

  “He’s still an old man. Just because he uses product for young-looking skin doesn’t change anything,” she said dismissively. “Once he takes possession of this relic you’re so keen to get your hands on, I can take it from him. There is no need for us to bring him here. Why take the risk? Just kill him. An accident on one of those old Pyrenees roads in these conditions would hardly raise an eyebrow of suspicion. Why make things more difficult than they need to be?”

  “I understand what you are saying, Monique, I do. But I want him here. I want him to see who has brought this all down on him. I want him to know that this is all his fault. Everything that is happening to the people he holds dear is because of him and his actions. I want to see him suffer. It is as simple as that. I haven’t planned this for nearly half of my life just to be denied the opportunity to savor it.”

  “I get that,” she said. “I do. So if you want to bring him here, then that’s what we’ll do. But I’ll be honest. I’d feel a lot happier if I went out to get him, like I did with the girl. Roux wouldn’t trust the man who has already stolen from him once this week to collect something so precious, would he? So Roux is in that car. The only question is whether he is alone or not.”

  “Go. But do not engage if he isn’t alone. Understood? If Braden is there, you keep your distance. You may be a unique woman, my dear sweet sister, but I am not sure even you could take this pair side-by-side.” He waved off her objections. “We wait until they have the treasure and then we make sure that only one of them comes up the track. That is how it is going to be.”

  He wasn’t a fool; he’d made the mistake of trusting Roux once—and underestimating him. That wouldn’t happen again. He’d surrounded the property with dozens of surveillance cameras. There wasn’t a single angle of approach he couldn’t monitor from his wheelchair.

  He would be ready for whoever came up the mountainside.

  In the meantime, Cauchon intended to savor every moment of the old man’s struggle; this would be his test. His inquisition.

  The small flashing light on the screen of the laptop had remained stationary for the past few minutes, confirming that the car was no longer moving.

  His fingers moved deliberately across the keyboard, calling up information about the car’s location. It had crossed the border into Andorra. He would never admit to the flutter of panic that had risen in his chest when he’d thought the old man had somehow found his location and was driving to his door. As much as he longed for the final confrontation, he just wasn’t ready for it. Not face-to-face. He wasn’t some blind idealist who couldn’t see reality; he knew that he couldn’t stop the man in a physical fight. He needed Monique for that. More importantly, he needed to complete his preparations. There was nothing that said the fight had to be fair.

  The papers he needed were spread out on the table, the incantations prepared for when the armor and the woman were brought together again.

  Did Roux have any concept of the power contained in those writings of Gui and Manchon?

  A small pop-up opened on the screen.

  The car had stopped in the parish of Canillo. As far as he could recall, there was nothing there to interest the old man unless he planned on taking the gondola to the ski resort of Grandvalira.

  But those mountains were remote enough to provide a good hiding place.

  Of course, there was nothing to say he was going to pick up the armor; that was just wishful thinking on his part. The old man had two days to do that. If not the armor, then what? Could he be meeting someone?

  40

  Annja’s shoulders screamed with pain.

  She stretched out her arm in the dim light of the basement, trying to keep the blood circulating. She clenched her teeth as she rolled her shoulders, working the muscles. The pain was deep-rooted, but not so desperate she needed to do something stupid. Not yet. She did a series of squats to work life back into her legs, and make sure she had good movement in them.

  Her legs were going to be important in the coming fight, and she was in no doubt that it was coming.

  At least she wasn’t bound anymore. Monique had shoved her down the ramp into the basement no more than a second after she’d sliced through the plastic ties. As she lost her footing, Annja had thrown her hands out in front of her face, expecting stone steps where there were none and taking the brunt of the fall as she went down into the darkness. Monique hadn’t turned on the light until she was sure Annja was lying at the bottom of the ramp, and for all her heightened reflexes and martial arts, a fall into darkness was indefensible.

  The muscles and ligaments in her shoulders took the worst of the impact because she twisted as she fell, landing on her side rather than flat on her face. It wasn’t a graceful maneuver, but it saved her a few broken bones.

  The door slammed closed.

  She heard the sound of a key turning in the lock, and that was it. She was alone.

  Annja didn’t move for a full minute, and even then it was just to bring herself into a sitting position, propped up against the whitewashed wall. She reached into the air before her face, seeing the raw wounds around her wrists and the slick blood on her skin even as she felt the blade in her hands. Despite its incredible heft, the blade felt weightless in her grip. Even so, it would take time to get a full range of movement back into her shoulders. And the only way she was going to do that was by forcing her body into action. Annja ran through an agonizing series of katas, keeping the blade low because of the confines the ceiling imposed.

  When that door opened, she was going to use that one chance it presented.

  Each kata felt like a thousand needles being pressed into her bones.

  Annja embraced the pain.

  The woman wouldn’t know what hit her when she opened the door.

  Her blood ran down her palms, staining the sword’s hilt. She pushed herself harder, working her body as she moved around the room in a solo dance.

  The basement was sparsely furnished, giving her plenty of room to maneuver. There was a desk with a gooseneck lamp illuminating papers that lay on its surface. The papers were weighted down by a piece of rock. A bookcase was crammed with books in a variety of languages, all of them seemingly obsessed with the occult and witchcraft.

  After twenty minutes, breathing hard, sweat sheathing her skin, Annja stowed th
e sword in the otherwhere, willing it away, safe in the knowledge it was never out of reach.

  At the far end of the basement there was a single bed covered with a plain blue comforter, which she took to mean she was going to spend a lot of time down here. Or at least that was their plan. Not that Annja was a stickler for plans, especially when they belonged to other people and involved her. She was more for improvising.

  A door beside the bed led to a cramped bathroom that had clearly been specially equipped for wheelchair access.

  Annja glanced back at the desk, realizing what was missing. A chair.

  So this was Cauchon’s working space.

  Did it double as his bedroom?

  Was he so devoted to his obsession that he spent his life down here, immersed in it, hiding away from the light? Annja couldn’t imagine spending most of her life cooped up in a cell, hidden away from the light. There was nothing like being outside, breathing in that invigorating fresh air. Nothing came close to making her feel so alive.

  She checked the small cabinet in the bathroom, aware that it was much lower on the wall to facilitate easy access from the wheelchair. There was a first-aid kit inside. She took it back to the bed, perched on its edge and checked the kit’s contents.

  There wasn’t much to treat the abrasions and torn skin, but she found disinfectant and dressings to bandage the raw wounds. The bite of the antiseptic went way beyond a sting, but it had to be done.

  She dressed and bound the wounds, then flexed her fingers over and over until she could feel the life returning to them. After the workout she was in a much better state both mentally and physically. She knew that she was special. Her body reacted differently than other people’s. She should have been broken. Instead, she was in better shape now than she had been two hours ago, despite the blood. She brought her hands together, bracing the muscles in her shoulders, then pushed them apart. Standing, she slowly worked her way through a dozen slow-motion katas without the sword, testing the feel of her muscles as the burn slowly subsided.

  She closed her eyes, concentrating on the image of the sword in her mind until her fingers closed around the hilt again, and this time when she drew it out of the otherwhere the move was almost painless.

  She still didn’t fully understand the changes her body had undergone over the past few years, that it was capable of superhuman strength, speed and agility. That was something she took for granted now, but the recuperation period? The recovery period? The fact that, like a broken bone, it came back stronger? That was still new to her.

  Annja looked at the door, knowing that if it had opened outward rather than inward she could have broken through it. But there was no point hurling herself at it, because the frame would take a battering before it surrendered. Better to just prepare herself for Monique’s return. She found a pair of nail scissors in the first-aid kit that would transform a punch into a lethal blow. They would do nicely.

  She riffled through the desk drawers but failed to turn up anything particularly interesting. Certainly not as interesting as the papers on the desk.

  The pages were covered with a tight scrawl, barely decipherable, and all of it seemed to relate to theories of medieval witchcraft and the casting out of demons. She turned over a couple of the papers, reading both the Latin and English notations. Lots of them referencing back to other material, documents held within the Holy See or lost forever, and to specific cases of demon possession and the symbiotic relationship between host and demon that granted the host immortality in exchange for the use of the body.

  She was only just beginning to grasp the level of delusion Cauchon was living under.

  How could he possibly think there were things like demons in this day and age of enlightenment?

  Six hundred years ago this kind of thinking was dangerous.

  Now it was so much worse.

  She gathered the papers and retreated to the bed to read them properly, adjusting the lamp on the nightstand to better see them. They weren’t the originals. Each of these pages were copies of ancient pages. Some of them, she realized quickly, had to have been the missing chapter of Bernard Gui’s book, the pages stolen from the museum in Carcassonne. That helped another piece of the puzzle drop into place. Obviously Cauchon hadn’t signed out the papers. Someone would have remembered the man in the wheelchair. So he’d used someone else to do it in his stead.

  She struggled to decipher a lot of the notes, but the same three letters kept appearing.

  JdA.

  They sent a shiver up her spine.

  Surely she was wrong in her thinking.

  She had to be.

  But no matter how much she tried to convince herself she was jumping to conclusions, Annja knew instinctively that those three letters could only represent one thing. Or, more accurately, one person: Joan of Arc.

  Dread came with that realization—dread that this was so much more screwed up than any of them had ever considered and went beyond the insanity of demons into a very real and very chilling place right at the heart of their lives.

  How much did Cauchon know?

  Really?

  Had he somehow stumbled on the truth?

  How was that even possible? It wasn’t like any of them ever broadcasted the nature of their relationship or the ties that bound them.

  And yet…how could it be anything else?

  Roux was right. There was no such thing as coincidence, meaningful or otherwise, and not when it came to something like this.

  Looking at the pages again, she realized what the madman upstairs believed, as incredible and ridiculous as it was: that she was possessed by a demon, and that demon was the same entity that had possessed the Maid of Orleans all those centuries ago.

  That changed everything.

  She couldn’t just wait for this to play out anymore.

  41

  “Roux?” The man’s voice left his mouth as a shout, arriving as a whisper. Roux stared down the hill at him. The wind and snow whirled around his blurred outline, transforming him into something almost ethereal.

  “That’s my name,” Roux replied, taking another stumbling step in the snow. He was cold to the bone, despite being dressed for the elements.

  The man held a hand out to help him take the next few steps. Roux took it with gratitude, glad of the firm grip that both supported and stabilized him until they were looking at each other eye to eye.

  “This way,” the man said.

  The shape of a building emerged through the snow with each stride.

  The church of Sant Joan de Caselles.

  The church was dedicated to a different Joan, predating the Maid’s time, but Roux had always felt like it was the right place to hide the breastplate. He could never have explained why, what link it was he felt with the place, but he had always known he needed to hide her armor, and where. Now, though, for the first time in centuries, he was beginning to think he had made a mistake and that it should have been smelted down all those years ago.

  They turned the helping hand into a handshake.

  “Is it still safe?” he asked.

  “But of course, my friend,” the man said. “Still safe.”

  Roux did not know the guardian’s name; that was part of the arrangement. He could never give up what he didn’t know. The man, like his father and his father before him down the generations, had been entrusted with the safekeeping of the armor.

  He had spoken to this man only once before today, or maybe it had been his father. Sometimes it was difficult to be sure with normal lifespans feeling like mayfly-years to him. There had been a time when he had received a letter once a year, posted from anywhere in the world, that always said the same thing, one word: safe. Nothing more.

  Roux followed him to the church.

  A lamp burned on the altar, casting a dull glow at one of the windows. It looked bleak in this weather and yet it still remained a haven, a place of tranquility.

  The door opened under the lightest pushes, swinging open
. He’d been wrong, it wasn’t a lantern. At least twenty votive candles burned on the altar table.

  The man shook the snow from his long coat and hung it on a hook near the door.

  Roux didn’t remove his.

  The man wore the vestments of a priest, as had been the case with the first keeper to whom Roux had first entrusted the armor.

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” Roux asked.

  “I am in here every day. If it was ever to be disturbed, I would know about it, believe me.”

  Roux nodded. He knew that the man was right. He had chosen the hiding place carefully. He struggled to remember the name of the first priest who had colluded with him and was now old bones somewhere in the ground outside the church.

  “I never expected to meet you,” the man said. “I never thought anyone would actually come. I know that my predecessor was never visited.”

  “Did he tell you what you are guarding?”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t think he knew, even at the end. He had his suspicions, as have we all, but all I know for sure is that the box is well preserved, and has not been opened for a hundred years or more.”

  “You’ve never wanted to know what was inside?”

  The man shrugged. “At first, maybe, idle curiosity, but then it just became part of the many rites and rituals that are part of the job. You carry them out without question knowing that there has to be a meaning or a purpose to everything that you do. Beyond that, it doesn’t really matter, only that you preserve the rite.”

  Roux wasn’t sure he believed the man.

  “Have you been told what’s inside?” the man asked.

  It took Roux a moment to realize that, of course, the man couldn’t possibly know that he had been the one who had first placed the box in its hiding place. Obviously he assumed that Roux was a descendent of that man, just as the priest was a successor of the first caretaker.

  “I know what’s inside,” he said, neither lying nor completely telling the truth.

  The priest nodded, but didn’t press further. The man understood the meaning of the word discretion and wouldn’t push for more just because of curiosity. He walked the length of the church, a small chapel never meant to service more than the spiritual needs of a small mountainside community. Now, under the snow, the landscape bore the scars of the leisure industry.