A.K.A. Goddess (12 page)

Giving Rhys a chance to stand.

I only saw that peripherally, since I didn’t dare focus on Rhys. Instead I flipped my hand in the direction of Frenchy’s handgun as if in demonstration. “Why are boys so much more likely to play with guns in the first place, huh?”

Frenchy extended his arm slightly, eyes a touch wider, as if hoping I would finally figure out what he was pointing at me before he had to use it. Hello, had he heard nothing? I knew I was babbling—it was on purpose—but I also couldn’t help wishing he might learn something.

Then again, me kicking the crap out of him would make the same point, right? Considering how, with a sneeze, he could end my existence, I thought he more than deserved it.

Rhys was edging closer to us; this would be so much easier if he were more violent himself. Ironic, huh?

I kept talking. “It’s a power thing with you—the need to have power over other people. You all but force the rest of us to play, too. But you know, there’s a problem with that kind of power. Sexy though power can be.”

Which is when I realized that Rhys and I needed a distraction to pass over the gun. Something. Anything.

So I went from one uniquely feminine weapon to another.

I sighed. “At least promise me something?”

We both knew Frenchy’s promises weren’t worth the breath he used to make them, but curiosity is human nature. He widened his eyes, silently inviting me to make my request.

I licked my lips, as if nervous. Then I said, “Let’s go up in that tower for a threesome, first.”

As I’d hoped, Frenchy kind of, well…froze. His logical side had to know I was bluffing. But logic isn’t everything.

I looked quickly to Rhys—and damn it, he’d momentarily stilled too, Liverpool’s gun dangling uselessly from his hand.

So I lunged for Frenchy’s gun instead.

He recovered his senses at my sudden movement, tightened his hold on the weapon. Calling my Chi, I clasped my two hands around his one and spun, using the strength of his own grip to wrench his wrist. He cried out, but didn’t quite drop it. Damn!

“You bitch,” he snarled into my face, grabbing the gun with his left hand before his right hand gave up.

Yeah. Whatever. I caught his left elbow and drew it farther, faster, in the direction he was already moving it.

He lurched off balance, shoes scuffing at cobblestone.

I danced backward, matching my direction to his, close enough to swing one foot out—and nudge his stumbling ankle even farther forward. Farther than his sense of balance could take.

He dropped. I rolled onto his shoulders to help him and gravity finish what they’d started. Riding him down, I extended one hand for the gun I knew would drop—

But with a spit of blue flame, it fired.

In his stubborn determination not to let go, the bastard had fired it blindly, and now—

I used both hands to force his head downward, like a basketball, except skulls don’t bounce. He did cry out, and something—his nose?—gave. Gun clattered onto cobblestone.

With my left hand I snatched it up—it was heavy, and the barrel was hot. With my right I formed a fist, channeled all my Chi into one direction, and struck downward against his head.

One blow. He sank onto stone at the base of Tour Melusine, bloody and unconscious.

Dogs were barking. I looked in the direction Frenchy had blindly fired—the tower, thank heavens, not the town, not my friend—and sent up a quick prayer of thanks that he hadn’t created another statistic.

In the meantime, lights were coming on in buildings around us. We were still hidden in shadow—but only until someone was brave enough to investigate.

I checked Frenchy’s pulse before rolling off him. Still alive, and yes, I felt relief. I’m allowed to be complicated.

“The problem with power over other people,” I muttered unloading his pistol, “is that as soon as they can, people then take power over you.”

Then, crouched beside him, I turned spy. I wiped my prints off his weapon and pressed it back into his hand. On a hunch, I pointed it—my hand holding his—toward Liverpool’s body and fired. Another blue spurt. The gun lurched.

So did the corpse.

I’d read something about a bullet remaining in the chamber.

“What are you…?” asked Rhys, sounding shaken. Well my suspicion of what he’d been doing with that corpse was pretty damned unsettling, too.

“That was so the police will hold him,” I murmured, patting Frenchy down. “This is to steal a little power.”

I took his driver’s license, but not his money or credit cards. I took his cell phone. Information, every bit of it.

“C’mon,” I said, rising easily from my crouch. I took Liverpool’s gun from Rhys, before he dropped it.

“Where do you mean to go?”

“Somewhere we can hide and see if the police actually pick this guy up before he comes to.”

“You don’t plan on waiting for the constabulary?”

I shook my head, almost as surprised at myself as he seemed to be. But from the discussion I’d overheard between Frenchy and Liverpool, this Comitatus had a very long reach. “How big a sin is leaving the scene of a crime, anyway?” I asked, a touch sarcastic. “Mortal or venial?”

His eyes brightened with understanding—he knew that I knew. “It is venial,” he admitted. “But a rather large illegality.”

Holy crap. My instincts were dead-on. Rhys had been administering last freakin’ rites!

Well, I could lose it once we were someplace safe. Our hotel was far too well lit. The bar would attract too much attention and the café or pharmacie would require breaking and entering. Which left…

I grabbed my boots. “Here’s a wacky thought. How about the church?”

“Sanctuary it is,” he said, grim.

I led the way through the shadows, from tree to tree, to the looming Romanesque church that dominated the town.

Where Father Rhys Pritchard should feel right at home.

Lex’s prep school feels British. School sports include polo and sculling. The boys wear uniforms, ties, sweaters.

I visit twice a year for formal dances. This fall is my fifth time to attend. I’m beginning my junior year in high school. Although Lex and I are the same age, he is a senior.

His drive to succeed would frighten me, if he weren’t Lex.

Late Saturday morning, we are out together exploring the quaint Vermont town near the academy. We don’t talk much. We don’t have to. We just hold hands and enjoy each other. Lex has almost reached six-two. He is quietly handsome, with a long curve to his jaw and with serious eyes and a mouth that I have recently learned was made for kissing. So whenever we find a very private place, we kiss.

Languid, intense, hard-not-to-squirm, full-mouth kissing. Fingers itchy to touch—but not yet. Not yet.

Our romance has progressed very slowly, to judge by movie standards. Or my friends at home. But Lex and I know that rushing things can cheapen them. Slowing down allows savoring. We’ve been kissing, when it seems appropriate, for almost two years, but it’s just been this last summer that something clicked and we suddenly got the hang of making out.

We are very, very good at it. Why not enjoy that for a while, before hurrying into anything new?

This particular Saturday, we end up at a soda shop. To my disappointment, Lex’s older cousin Phil—also a senior—shows up. He drags up chairs for himself and his date, Fonda Wills, assuming they are welcome.

Lex catches my gaze. He knows I dislike Phil. But we both understand that Lex has to be polite. Phil’s bone marrow saved Lex’s life.

I squeeze his hand under the table, understanding.

Then I realize that, despite talking about yachts, Phil is there to show off Fonda.

To show off that they’re having sex.

He has a mark on his neck that I realize is a hickey. Fonda keeps sliding her hand into his lap, and he laughs each time he pushes it back. Slowly.

At first Lex looks equally disgusted with Phil and Fonda. But then he looks…angry? At Phil.

I don’t get it, even when I notice Phil leering at the base of my ice-cream bowl, where I’ve set aside the cherry to eat last. All I know is that an energy is roiling off Lex that I haven’t felt before. I don’t like it.

I turn to him and whisper, “Let’s go.”

His nod is sharp, as if he has to force it. He stands.

Then Phil says, “Hey, Maggi. If Lex doesn’t want your cherry, can I have it? Fonda let me have hers.”

I realize what he’s getting at, and I want to hit him—

But Lex does it for me. Except…Lex doesn’t just hit Phil.

Lex picks up a tray and axes it into Phil’s face, hard, right between the eyes.

Phil lets out a roar, stumbles out of his chair and back against the wall, clutches at his face. Blood gushes across the table and down his academy sweater. Fonda keeps screaming, not even stopping for breath—her screams just gasp in and out. Phil is staring over his blood-washed hands at his younger cousin, horrified and outraged and agonized and…

And he almost looks proud.

Lex, however, looks wholly at ease.

“Shall we?” he asks me, offering his arm.

I take a quick step back from his cool violence. “No!”

The waitress is calling for an ambulance. The shopkeeper is yelling. Lex ignores them both and, for a moment, confusion flickers across his hazel eyes. “He deserved it.”

“Nobody deserves that! You could have killed—Lex, he’s your family!”

“Exactly. Come on.” And he holds out his hand.

I stare at it, fully aware of everything his hand promises. The quiet connection we’ve always shared, soul to soul.

But that connection isn’t there right now.

Then he says something he has never before said to me. “Maggi, you’re embarrassing me.”

My heart hurting, I turn my back on him to help tend to worthless, stupid, broken-nosed Phil—and to Fonda, who has fainted—until the ambulance arrives. And that is that.

Lex and I do not speak again for over a year.

“Y ou’re a priest?”

Rhys and I paused on the church’s front steps, sheltered by massive pilasters framing its looming double doors. Freakish stone creatures and wide-eyed saints, hundreds of them carved into the Norman archways, watched our arrival.

In the distance, we could hear sirens.

I’d used Frenchy’s cell phone to place an anonymous call.

“It’s not that simple,” said Rhys, defensive.

“It’s not that complicated either, is it? You attend seminary, you take vows, you become a priest. You risked both our lives to give last rites to that thug out there—”

“It’s called extreme unction, now. And there was nobody else to do it.”

“—and those women in Lusignan…have you been in that church before? They acted just like you were a priest.”

He shrugged. “The older women who attend church every day develop a kind of sixth sense about those things. But, Maggi—”

“I was going around thinking you were married.”

“I almost was!” His protest echoed from the twisting, bestial sculptures crowding over us, and not because he’d raised his voice. It echoed with anguish.

Oh, yeah. He’d said he’d been engaged. That she’d died a year ago. I asked, more softly, “Are you an Anglican priest?”

“I am not,” he said. Then, “Look. Here’s the police.”

The gendarmerie arrived, with an ambulance. Despite not being done with Father Rhys, I left the refuge of the church’s sculpted doorway to make sure that when Frenchy was rolled into the ambulance, handcuffs and gendarmes were involved. Excellent.

At the very least, he might be caught in red tape for a few days. Better, he might be charged with Liverpool’s murder—here came the coroner’s wagon now—

I backed my way up the church steps. It didn’t look like the tower would be open to tourists for a few days. And the usually sleepy little town of Vouvant wasn’t likely to settle down anytime soon. So much for finding clues to the Melusine Chalice here.

A police car turned down the street in our direction.

“Uh…Rhys?” I sped my step.

He tried one of the four doors behind us, two pairs of two. It didn’t open. He quickly tried the next one.

I stepped back against a fluted pilaster as the squad car eased closer. “What happened to the concept of sanctuary?”

“Vandalism?” He tried the third, and I could hear it rattle, locked. “Theft? People fornicating in the pews?”

Slow as the police car was moving, they hadn’t seen us. Yet. But we were pretty well trapped—

Yes! The fourth latch turned under Rhys’s hand and we slipped into our second ancient church of the day, shouldering the heavy door shut just as a searchlight washed past.

This church was larger than the one in Lusignan, with massive arches and vaulted ceilings. Lit by low-wattage wall sconces and the twinkle of blue-glass votives, it felt eerie. Not dangerous eerie—not with that scent of incense and candle wax, that hush of echoes, that reserve of holiness wrapping itself around us. But somehow…demanding.

Like the church expected something of us.

“If the police come looking, the rector’s more likely to do a walk-through for them.” Rhys looked around the church with now-understandable familiarity. Then he beckoned me to the eastern transept where a blocky crypt sat near the curve of a rounded wall. We circled it—a simple tomb, without even the usual effigy—and settled into the space between it and a recessed window. “He’d have to be serious to spot us here.”

I sat on the marble floor and leaned back against the tomb. And sighed. It’s possible to reach a point of exhaustion where even bare rock feels like a cloud of comfort.

But I wasn’t ready to rest yet.

“You’re a Catholic priest,” I said. Accused.

“I am,” he admitted, sinking into a crouch. Then he shook his head. “I mean, not exactly. I used to be….”

Ah. Things became more clear. “You’re an ex-priest?”

Rhys’s blue gaze lifted to meet mine in the shadows. “There’s no such thing as an ex-priest. Not in Catholicism. Only priests who have been dismissed from their clerical duties.”

I squinted at him. “I’m not getting it.”

“I was born to the church.” With a finger, Rhys traced the patterns on the stone tiles between his knees. “True, my mother is a Grail Keeper. But we Welsh aren’t like you Yanks, drawing solid lines between the old ways and the new. The old gods may have given the field, but they’re hardly dead. My mum’s faith may well have strengthened my own. I went straight from school into the seminary. I’ve never felt so complete as the day of my ordination.”