“What does that bastard know about my Jolie?” Renny cried out.
Seichan easily sidestepped his assault, keeping the phone to her ear and spinning him with one hand. She tossed him facedown on the bed and held him in place with a knee planted at the base of his spine.
He struggled, swearing angrily.
“Stay still,” she said, digging in her knee. “Who is Jolie?”
He twisted his head around to glare at her with one eye. “My girlfriend. She disappeared two days ago. Looking for some group called the Solar Temple. I was in that pub last night trying to drum up a search party among the other cataphiles .”
She didn’t know what that last word meant. But before inquiring, her attention focused on the kid’s naked back and the sprawl of his tattoo. This was the first chance she’d had to get a good look at it.
In black, yellow, and crimson inks, a strange map had been indelibly etched into his skin — but it was not a chart of streets and avenues. In meticulous detail, the artwork depicted an intricate network of crisscrossing tunnels, widening chambers, and watery pools. It looked like the map for some lost cavern system. It was also clearly an unfinished work: passages faded into obscurity or ended abruptly at the edges of the tattoo.
“What is this?” she asked.
Renny knew what had drawn her attention. “It’s where Jolie disappeared.”
Claude, still on the phone at her ear, answered her more directly. “It is a map of the Paris catacombs, our city of the dead.”
Fifteen minutes later, Seichan was gunning the engine of her motorcycle and speeding over the twelve stone arches of the Pont Neuf, the medieval bridge that spanned the River Seine. She wove wildly around slower traffic, crossing toward the Left Bank of Paris and aiming for the city’s Latin Quarter.
Seated behind her, Renny clung to her with both arms. He squeezed tightly as she exited the bridge and made a sharp turn into the maze of streets on the far side. She did not slow down. They were quickly running out of time.
“Take the next right!” Renny yelled in her ear. “Go four blocks. Then we’ll have to continue on foot.”
Seichan obeyed. She had no other guide.
Moments later, they were both running down the Rue Mouffetard, an ancient pedestrian avenue that cut a narrow, winding swath through the Latin Quarter. Buildings to either side dated back centuries. The lower levels had been converted into cafés, bakeries, cheese shops, crêperies, and a fresh market that spilled out into the street. All around, merchants hawked their goods while patrons noisily bartered.
Seichan shoved through the bustle, noting the chalkboard menus being filled out, the huge loaves of bread being stacked behind windows. Breathless, winded, she drew in the musky headiness wafting from a tiny fromagerie and the fragrant displays of an open-air flower stand.
Still, she remained all too conscious of what lay beneath this lively tumult: a moldering necropolis holding the bones of six million Parisians, three times the population above.
Renny led the way with his long legs. His thin form skirted through the crowds with ease. He kept glancing back, making sure he hadn’t lost her.
Back at the hotel, he had found his clothes in the hotel closet: ripped jeans, Army boots, and a red shirt bearing the likeness of the rebel Che Guevara. Additionally, they’d both put on scarves to hide their steel collars. While they got dressed, Seichan had explained their situation, how their lives depended on searching the catacombs to retrieve the historian’s lost son. Renny had listened, asking only a few questions. In his eyes, she noted the gleam of hope behind the glaze of terror. She suspected that the determined pace he set now had little to do with saving his own life and more to do with finding his lost love, Jolie.
Before donning his shirt, he had awkwardly pointed to his lower right shoulder blade. That corner of the tattooed map was freshly inked, the flesh still red and inflamed. “This is what Jolie had discovered, where she had been headed when she disappeared.”
And it was where they were going now, chasing their only lead, preparing to follow in his girlfriend’s footsteps.
Claude Beaupré also believed Jolienne’s whereabouts were important. Her disappearance had coincided with the last day he’d seen his son. Before vanishing, Gabriel had hinted to his father about where Vennard and the other members of his cult were scheduled to gather for the purge. It was this same neighborhood. So when Claude heard about Renny searching for his lost girlfriend in this area, he began moving his chess pieces together: lowly guide and deadly hunter.
The two were now inextricably bound together, headed toward a secret entrance into the catacombs. Renny had shared all he knew about the subterranean network of crypts and tunnels. How the dark worlds beneath the bright City of Lights were once ancient quarries called les carrières de Paris . The ancient excavation burrowed ten stories underground, carving out massive chambers and expanding outward into two hundred miles of tangled tunnels. The quarries had once been at the outskirts of the city, but over time, Paris grew and spread over the top of the old labyrinth, until now half of the metropolis sat atop the mines.
Then in the eighteenth century, city authorities had ordered that the overflowing cemeteries in the center of Paris be dug up. Millions of skeletons — some going back a thousand years — were unceremoniously dumped into the quarries’ tunnels, where they were broken down and stacked like cordwood. According to Renny, some of France’s most famous historical figures were likely interred below: from Merovingian kings to characters from the French Revolution, from Clovis to the likes of Robespierre and Marie Antoinette.
Seichan’s search, though, was not for the dead.
Renny finally turned off the main thoroughfare and ducked down a narrow alley between a coffeehouse and a pastry shop. “This way. The entrance I told ye about is up ahead. Friends — fellow cataphiles — should have left us some gear. We always help each other out.”
The alley was so tight they had to pass through it single file. It ended at a small courtyard, surrounded by centuries-old buildings. Some of the windows were boarded up; others showed some signs of life: a small dog piping a complaint, a few strings of drying laundry, a small face peering at them through a curtain.
Renny led her to a manhole cover hidden in a shadowed corner of the courtyard. He fished out a crowbar from behind a trash bin, along with two mining helmets with lamps affixed to their front.
He pointed back to the bin. “They left us a couple o’ flashlights, too.”
“Your cataphiles ?”
“Aye. My fellow explorers of Paris’s underworld,” he said, letting a little pride shine forth, his brogue thickening. “We come from every corner of the world, from every walk o’ life. Some search the old subways or sewer lines; others go boggin’ and diving into water-filled pits that open into flooded rooms far below. But most — like Jolie and me — are drawn to the unmapped corners of the catacombs.”
He went silent, worry settling heavily to his shoulders, clearly wondering about the fate of his girlfriend.
“Let’s get this open,” Seichan said, needing to keep him moving.
She helped pry open the manhole cover and rolled it aside. A metal ladder, bolted to the wall of the shaft, led down into the darkness. Renny strapped on his helmet. Seichan opted for a flashlight.
She cast a bright beam into the depths.
“This leads down to a long-abandoned section of the sewer system, goin’ back to the mid–1800s,” Renny said, mounting the ladder.
“A sewer? I thought we were going into the catacombs.”