The man groaned again, the last residues of pain numbed by doses of the drugs that were weakening his resistance. Geraint hoped they weren’t also making him unable to explain himself.
“I’m not a senior figure,” he pleaded in a cracked voice. “Them is much I don’t know.”
“The book. You sent the book,” Geraint guessed. “Why?”
“As a message.”
“How was it a message?”
“It was a clue. To the nature and location of the man Seratini was seeking. The one you seek,” Gianfranco managed to say.
“How was it a clue? I don’t understand,” Geraint said plaintively.
“The topic. Water…” Gianfranco’s eyes were beginning to flutter now, the drugs obviously taking over his mind and senses.
“Who is he, Gianfranco? I have to know” Geraint pleaded.
For a second, the man’s vision cleared and a mixture of base cunning and intelligence shone out at the Welshman.
“There is one statue left in the city,” he grinned, and his grip of Geraint’s wrist relaxed as he fell into a narcotic slumber.
“Damn,” Geraint cursed. He got back to his feet and turned away. The scent of coffee greeted his senses. It wasn’t his newly discovered favorite, but at this time of night it smelled awfully good.
“If you want to get him to a hospital now, we’ve got to leave at once,” Streak said. “We go to Toulouse, dump him at the airport, ring security from the plane, take off and get home. We can’t risk anything else. If I drive him to Toulouse they’ll ID him, get a trace to Rennes-le-Chateau, and then the police will descend on Clermont.”
“Actually, given what’s happened up there they’ll be doing that anyway,” Geraint said. “Think about it. There’s a village up there. Someone must have noticed that the place has been flattened by now, not to mention all that magic lighting up the night sky and a few score corpses littering the farmlands.”
Streak’s eyes widened. “Frag me! I never thought of that. These bloody French villagers. What a damned nuisance they are!”
He was absolutely serious. Geraint almost doubled up in laughter, and the elf saw the funny side and laughed himself.
“Well, then, we’ll have to pack up and move out whether we like it or not,” he said briskly. “Come on, people, time to book. Back to Blighty. Job done. Game over.”
The other samurai were already packed and ready to leave. Juan cheerfully waved the credstick Geraint had. given him.
“A pleasure,” he said. “Work for you any time, Your Lordship. You can always trust a British aristo, I say.”
“That last fragger stuffed us,” Xavier growled.
Juan shrugged. “Yeah and look what we did to his boyfriend.”
Geraint started checking through his mental files for who they might be referring to, then decided he really didn’t want to know. The pair of samurai left, with one last goodbye and a complicated handshake with Streak that seemed to portray torture as some kind of friendship ritual. At least, it would have been torture if normal sinew and muscle had been involved,
“We’re ready.” Kristen said simply. Almost unseen, she’d packed everything they had, even weaponry, into their bags. Geraint had to smile. A clear head in a crisis was a valuable quality to have in a team member.
He looked doubtfully at the car, and then at Streak. “We can fit three recumbent people into that little thing?”
“Just. However, I hope you two are good friends. Either you’re going to have to sit on his lap, missy. or you go in the boot.” The elf avoided the playful kick the girl aimed at him. “No, honestly, I mean it.”
Geraint got to the doorway of the bedroom just in time, or he’d never have known what happened. Hovering above the man on the bed was a ghastly imp-like form, a wrinkled creature of spirit and yet tangible, almost earthy. It drew a long pin from which some corrosive liquid dripped and drove it through Gianfranco’s ribcage and into his heart.
The imp turned, looked at him, spat, and disappeared. There was a smack as air rushed to fill the gap it had left.
To the Weishman’s utter horror, Gianfranco suddenly jerked into an upright position on the bed. His eyes bulged in their sockets, and his tongue protruded from his mouth, blackened and swollen. Flecks of gray foam sputtered on his lips, and his hands clutched at midair in a final spasm of agony.
Then he screamed.
Clermont-Ferrand is in strange territory. Southwestern France has more than its fair share of tales of lycanthropes, hauntings, malign spirits, and other unseen horrors of the night. Grisly deaths don’t really cut it, not on their own. It needs more than that to make tongues wag in this part of the world.
They say in Clermont, and in villages around it, that you could have beard the scream five kilometers away, and people who live that far out confirm it.
Geraint reeled back into the living room, his head full of nightmare, guts churning, heart beating like a hammer on an anvil in Vulcan’s realm. For a moment, he actually wondered if this was what it was like to die of shock. A stunned elf was looking at him, white-faced, next to him a girl whose face mirrored the expression, the two of them clutching each other for support. They just managed to keep each other from falling over.
When they began to calm down, the three of them tottered to the doorway and opened it to get the cold, fresh night air into their lungs.
“Let’s get the frag out of here,” Streak croaked. “I don’t want to know what happened, man. I just don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. I don’t ever want to know.”
He was barely coherent, but at least he could speak, which was more than the others could. And, somehow, they had to get two unconscious bodies into a car and drive away.
The third body they no longer had to worry about.
17
It was a distinctly jaded huddle of people who managed to bluff and shuffle their way through the apparently equally tired and more than disinterested security at the Toulouse airport. They’d already soaked Michael’s jacket with a generous dose of brandy and proclaimed him dead drunk to account for his unconsciousness. Serrin, in contrast, had made a fairly swift recovery during the drive, surprising them all, though he was still not entirely himself. He seemed vacant, not attending to his surroundings, but he was able to talk coherently and seemed to be suffering no more than physical fatigue. Coffee from a flask, and a nip of the brandy left over from anointing Michael, had had a powerful restorative effect on him.
Streak talked them through without incident, and they were just fastening their safety belts in the Yellowjacket when a pair of airport security guards came racing up to their chopper.
“Oh, drek,” Geraint said. Streak frowned, but had no choice but to push open the chopper door again.
“You forgot to sign this,” one of the men announced. proffering a form that looked as if it had outgrown “triplicate” and was now heading for double digits.
“Yes, and this,” the other one grinned.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s chill. Sorry, we were in a hurry. Guess I forgot,” Streak said, managing to sound bored as he signed the top copy with a pen borrowed from one of the men. That pen, when it found its way back to the officer, was wrapped in a high-denomination French banknote.
The man smiled broadly. “That will do nicely, monsieur,” he said, and the pair retreated slowly back to their concrete watch-house.
“I was so busy trying to be casual I forgot the bleeding bribe,” Streak explained once he’d closed the door of the aircraft. “Sorry.”
“Thank God that was all,” Geraint said. He was overtired and jumpy. Of them all, he alone had seen the malefic spirit that had killed Gianfranco, and the sight had seared his nerves.
“London?” Streak asked again. Apparently no one had heard him the first time.
“Guess so. I’m too tired to think of anywhere clever,” Geraint said feebly.
Streak turned briefly to his fellow elf, but Serrin had his nose buried in paper. With Michael still unconscious, the mage had apparently decided to take over the task of plowing through the morass of data he’d unearthed in his investigations. His brow furrowed, he ticked off something on one page. then resumed chewing the end of his pen absentmindedly as he scanned the next. Beside him. Kristen gazed absently out the window, apparently mesmerized by her light-spotted reflection.