Fury (18 page)

He wrinkles his nose. ‘What you’ve got on still has to be the opposite of sexy.’

It’s done before I can call it back. In a fit of pique, I shift so that I’m wearing the filmy white blouse and slim-fitting dark grey skirt of Rosa’s uniform. ‘Sexy enough for you?’ I say through gritted teeth.

Ryan recoils, almost falling off the couch in his haste to put some distance between us. His voice is reproachful. ‘Now you’re just being a bitch. We were only
talking
. You don’t get the right to act like a jealous girlfriend when you won’t even tell me what I mean to you.’

I shift back into my black turtleneck and dark grey jeans, but Ryan doesn’t move any closer, and I say rawly, ‘What else do you expect from a monster? I’m no good at any of it. At being
me
, at being like this. The Eight should have put me down the way I begged them to. I was born to trouble, to bring trouble upon others. I’m a freak …’ I cover my face with my hands.

‘You begged the Eight to
kill you
?’ Ryan says in a hushed voice.

He pulls my hands away from my face fiercely, shaking me, his expression brittle with shock.

‘I woke in that place — that place we’re hurrying so hard to get to — so horribly burnt and wounded it was a wonder I ever woke at all,’ I whisper. ‘
They
were all staring down at me, mocking me with Their incredible beauty, Their terrible power. But though I begged to die, They refused. Michael said it was against everything we stood for to end the life of one of our kind — even though I was vain and proud and the personal muse of the greatest force of destruction our universe has ever witnessed. They would not do it, though I threw my unspeakable pain, my deep rage and confusion, in all Their faces. And
this
is the result of all that care of me, all that love and protection that has never been warranted and can never be repaid. I’m a mess. In. Every. Single. Way.’

Ryan pulls me into his arms, holding me, rocking me, until little by little I stop shaking and my hurt begins to ease, at the edges.

‘You should have seen the look on your face,’ he murmurs, changing the subject valiantly. ‘It was like you wanted to rip the poor girl’s throat out.’

I give a shaky laugh. ‘I always look that way. Get used to it.’

We don’t talk for a long time after that; we just hold each other, the heat of our two bodies mingling. After a little while, when Ryan’s hold slackens, I see that he’s fallen asleep, and it makes me smile, how he can sleep anywhere.

I reach up to place a small kiss upon his wide, full mouth and that’s when I notice a shadow falling down the aisle towards us. I look back up the plane, but Rosa’s already fled, making a small, terrified noise as she runs towards the cockpit. She knocks frantically, then pulls open the door.

Ryan’s still sleeping, one arm thrown across his chest, one leg bent slightly outward, when Rosa returns with one of the pilots. He’s in his shirt-sleeves, hatless, his shaved head gleaming under the lights of the cabin. He flicks his light, hazel-coloured eyes from Ryan back to Rosa, his lashes and eyebrows such a pale ginger-red, they’re almost colourless.

‘I don’t see the problem,’ he says quietly in Dutch-inflected English. He strides towards the washroom door, opens it, looks quickly around inside. ‘How could there be a girl? There’s no one here.’ He looks back up the plane and throws his hands out wide in confusion. ‘There’s nowhere to hide on this plane.
What girl?
’

When he shuts the washroom door with a firm
snap
, Ryan wakes with a start. He sits up, instantly alert when he sees Rosa and the pilot standing there looking at him.

‘What? What is it?’ he says, looking around warily, and I know that he’s searching for me. ‘Have we arrived?’

The pilot pins a genial smile on his face though I can tell he’s annoyed. ‘We’re about to start our descent, Mr Daley, so perhaps you would care to return to your seat now?’

He indicates the table for four behind him with a sweep of his hand, before turning and striding back towards the cockpit with Rosa following at his heels, flustered and upset.

‘But I saw her, I tell you. He was holding her. Why didn’t you ask him?
Ask him
.’

I see the pilot shake his head and reply shortly, ‘And what? Sound like a lunatic?
There’s nowhere to hide
. You probably saw the ghost of one of Maxi St Alban’s many mistresses; one he arranged to have thrown off the plane, I don’t know. Like people say, Rosa — suck it up, okay? We’re almost there.’

‘Rumbled,’ I whisper in Ryan’s ear ruefully, and his eyes widen in understanding. ‘See you on the ground.’ After the plane comes to a stop outside the dedicated StA Global Logistics hangar at Le Bourget and the customs and immigration men enter the plane, I slip down the collapsible staircase and immediately see the anonymous, black, luxury sedan with the tinted windows waiting about thirty feet away. There’s a slender, youthful-looking man of average height leaning against the front of the car. He has dark eyes, a triangular, clean-shaven face, and short, light brown hair that’s been waxed so it sticks up in artful spikes all over his head. He’s wearing a stylish camel overcoat over his navy suit, everything tailored to fit him perfectly, and his hands are buried deep in his coat pockets.

The wind is icy — the temperature can’t be more than about five degrees, and the sky is slate grey — but all looks and feels normal for this time of year. December in Paris. The notion suddenly fills me with so much dread I almost can’t bring myself to move towards the car.

But I make myself drift closer, circling the vehicle and its driver at a wary distance. He has an observant, watchful air about him, an expression that reminds me of Gia Basso. He gives out the same kind of muffled, complicated energy she does, too. It’s hard to get a handle on what he’s thinking.

After a roughly twenty-minute interval, the officials re-emerge onto the staircase of the aeroplane, one of them roaring with laughter at something the other has said. As they descend, I see Ryan appear at the door of the Gulfstream. I get a brief glimpse of Rosa behind him, her expression as frozen as her body language.

The driver pulls himself upright languidly when he sees Ryan and moves to open the rear passenger door on the driver’s side. Though he seems relaxed, I see him size Ryan up with narrowed eyes.

As he comes off the stairs, Ryan checks to see that the officials have driven away before jamming his cap back onto his head, placing his fake spectacles onto his nose and hunching his shoulders a little to make himself seem shorter, like a different person.

I’m just a drift of energy on that chill, chill wind as I circle him and whisper, ‘Tell the driver to stop the car just as you round the hangar marked
IRL Industries
. I’ll be waiting.’

Ryan’s a pro, because he doesn’t even check his progress at my words, just sweeps on towards the car, shouldering his pack, keeping his head down. The guy nods at him and he nods at the guy, and the door’s shut, the driver’s back behind the wheel turning the engine over, and I almost don’t make it to the corner before they do.

The black car slides to a stop beside me — the me of the Duomo, black puffer jacket and all — and the driver gets out and opens the rear passenger door again. He nods, says neutrally in his gravelly voice, ‘
Mad’moiselle
,’ without a hint of surprise, before helping me into the car.

The word actually makes me wince as I slide in next to Ryan. He reaches over and buckles me in tenderly, like I’m a child, like I even
need
a seatbelt.

The driver shuts the door. There’s no window between us and him; it’s just a normal car, like the one that picked us up at Villa Nicolin — if you count a top-of-the-range black European sedan that’s almost as wide and heavy as a tank as normal. So when the driver picks up the radio handset and says in his own language, ‘Yeah, I got him. He’s some big, dumbass rich kid who can’t even tell me where the hell we’re supposed to be going. We stopped to pick up his girlfriend — too tall for me, nothing to hold onto. Maybe she’ll have more idea. I will let you know directly,’ my first reaction is to cover my ears and put my head on my knees.

Ryan’s shaking me suddenly and saying, ‘Now you’re really scaring me,’ while the guy mutters under his breath, ‘
Que Dieu nous défendre contre les mioches riches et idiots!
’
God defend us from rich and stupid brats!

I curl into an even tighter ball, trying to block out the sound of the mellifluous language. I can’t bear its cadences, its rhythm, even though it’s one of the most glorious man has ever devised. Hearing it again is like having hot irons placed against exposed skin. This is something I
know
I’ve tried to erase. To survive what I’ve survived, I must have put in place some formidable defences, must have sabotaged vast areas of my own cognition.

‘
Monsieur?
’ the driver says loudly. ‘
Mad’moiselle?
Where are we going?’ He adds beneath his breath, ‘
Une réponse aujourd’hui serait préférable. Nom de Dieu!
’
An answer today would be preferable. Christ almighty
.

The epithet cuts through me. I must have heard it spoken at least a thousand times — by fishwives, barrow boys and innkeepers, by casket makers and clergymen and those whose job it was to dispose of the dead.

I raise my head suddenly and almost roar in fluent but rusty-sounding French, ‘Take us to the Cimetière des Innocents. Take us there and wait until I say you can go. Do you understand me?’

The guy’s good at hiding his surprise. He raises his eyebrows only slightly before facing forward again. He says smoothly, without turning, in insultingly fluent English, ‘You are sure you want the Cimetière des Innocents? The place where it
was
?’

There’s a strange emphasis on that word ‘was’, but I’m in so much agony — an agony of remembrance that has given rise to an almost physical pain — that I snarl, ‘
Oui
.’

And he floors it in response.

‘There’s no point asking if you’re okay,’ Ryan says quietly with a quick glance at the driver’s back, ‘because clearly you’re not.
Tell me what’s wrong
. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.’

Our entwined hands rest upon his jeans-clad thigh, and I think I might be breaking his fingers, I’m gripping them so tightly. But, as always, he takes what I dish out without complaint.

I whisper, ‘You’re my compass, remember? You’re here to light my way in the darkness of this world. This place is just a shadow from a distant past, but for me it has such a long and terrifying reach …’

I try to ease my hold, but he won’t let me move away. So I continue to grasp his hand in silence while we travel through a vast urban sprawl I don’t recognise in the slightest, passing motorway signs that read
La Courneuve
and
Aubervilliers
. But it’s hardly any time at all before we enter central Paris with a tide of other traffic, and I begin to see, here and there, a building, a church, a tower, a narrow street that brings with it a suffocation of feeling. Years ago, I crawled across a landscape that is buried now, submerged under a weight of modernity and progress. But the footprint of the old city I once knew is still here, underneath. I feel its pull.

As we pass a massive train station that was centuries from existence when I was last here, and motor down a broad boulevard that crosses over one unfamiliarly named street after another, I know where we are. I look up to see a sign that reads
Boulevard de Sebastopol
. The name of the street is no longer the same, but it’s here, that place, under our feet. I tell the driver to stop, and he does, leaving the engine running.

‘Where are we?’ Ryan asks, looking out the window.

‘Les Halles,’ the driver replies in his gravelly voice, shooting us a quick glance before staring back through the windscreen. ‘In the first arrondissement.’

All I see are large apartment buildings of great beauty and symmetry, well-tended stands of trees, their branches largely bare, everything regular and orderly and clean.

‘Les Halles, yes,’ I mutter, ‘but where is the great market itself? It stood alongside a vast parish cemetery filled to overflowing with the dead. A horrifying place, stinking of lime and decomposing flesh, bounded by the bones of the exhumed on all sides, piled high, like kindling …’

The young man at the wheel turns and gives me a strange look. ‘That “great market” you speak of, it has not been here since, eh, the 1960s. Many years before I was born.’

‘I don’t care about the market,’ I say sharply. ‘Where is Cimetière des Innocents? The place bound by bones?’

That was how Nuriel spoke of it. Surely there could not be two such hideous places in all of Paris?

In reply, the driver starts the car and turns one corner, two, draws up in front of a small square with a large stone fountain at its heart. When I peer through the tinted glass at the fountain, I’m almost overwhelmed. I cover my mouth with my hands. I know it, I recognise the carvings on it. It was once located elsewhere on this street, the Rue St Denis, which has also altered almost beyond recognition.

Ryan doesn’t ask if it’s okay, he just leans forward and enfolds me tightly in his arms from behind.

The driver disengages the window on my side of the car. ‘This is all that remains of Cimetière des Innocents,’ he says. ‘This square, this fountain. The bones, they were all moved a long time ago, over two hundred years. Nothing remains here of the cemetery you seek.’

‘Where were they moved to, the bones?’ I whisper, staring at the gently playing fountain, the pretty square beneath the bleak winter sky that is like smoky grey glass.

‘Officially? To Place Denfert-Rochereau,’ he says, ‘in the fourteenth arrondissement. I will take you there.’

In minutes, we are on a bridge crossing over the mighty River Seine that bisects Paris into north and south, right bank and left bank. Ryan gazes in awe at the crowds of people on the tree-lined boulevard, the ancient and vast complexes of buildings lining both sides of the street, the gothic facade of Notre Dame Cathedral flying by. I recognise it, and recognise, too, the delicate spire of Sainte-Chapelle towering over the streetscape. There are centuries of ‘modernity’ all around me, one layer intruding upon another, but there’s no time to reflect further on how much the Île de la Cité has changed because we’ve already left the island in the slipstream of a fleet of minibuses bearing southwest. Every few feet, I see something that triggers an image or stirs up some strong feeling that I thought I’d never see or experience again. I feel as if I’m under attack by random ghosts.

There’s a sense of unreality about everything I’m looking at, as if I see two cities superimposed one on top of another and the only real things in this world are Ryan and I, the driver and this car. I lean against the solid wall of Ryan’s chest to try to contain the sensation that I’m floating, that this is all a hallucination. All I let myself hear is his heartbeat; I do not admit the voices, the sounds, the chaos, of those days.

I’d assumed Selaphiel was being held in the Cimetière des Innocents, and my foolish assumption has cost us precious time. If we had any kind of lead at all on Luc and his forces, it’s probably vanished.

‘Stupid,’ I snarl aloud before I realise I’m doing it.

‘It is not a common mistake,’ the driver says over his shoulder, ‘but no matter. If you wish to see bones, you will see millions at the Catacombes de Paris, all arranged most strikingly. The tourists, they love it.’

When we finally reach Place Denfert-Rochereau, the car sliding in between a couple of maxi tour buses with side mirrors like the down-bent antennae of insects, Ryan says in surprise, ‘Uh, it looks like a museum.’

There’s a line of people dressed in layers of colourful, cold-weather clothing — hats, scarves, coats, gloves, boots — outside an unremarkable stone building. Some are sipping from thermoses or eating food from paper bags. Most carry backpacks and cameras, some have umbrellas. There are children among them. It has to be some terrible mistake.

Ryan reaches the same conclusion almost immediately. ‘Would it make sense, do you think, for, uh, Selaphiel to be imprisoned in a place with a queue of people outside —’

‘— wearing polar fleece and waiting to pay an entry fee?’ I cut in, my voice rising. ‘No, it would
not
make sense. This can’t be the place. But if this isn’t the place Nuriel saw, then where could he be?
They cannot abide the cold, having turned away from first light
, that’s what she told me. He’s in a place bound by bones, yet there can be no such place accessible by the general public. Nothing she told me lines up.’

Our driver’s voice is studiously casual as he interjects. ‘This is only the visitors’ entry. There is a mile of tunnel underground that the visitors are permitted to see, and they are pushed through it like sheep and emerge, blinking, into the light on Rue Dareau. But l’Ossuaire Municipal stretches much farther than this. There is a giant network of tunnels, of old quarries —
carrières
— beneath our feet. The Left Bank is riddled with them. We took the stone from under the ground to build Paris, and now much of Paris is built on air.’ He chuckles darkly, before continuing. ‘Yes, the bones were first brought here. But they had men below, moving the remains, night after night, year after year. There are many more bones — from des Innocents, from all the ancient, condemned graveyards of Paris — scattered throughout
les carrières
. The bones of millions of Parisians could not fit into this pleasant display that has been constructed for the tourists. There are many, many more entrances to the underworld, and many, many more bones.’

His words are electrifying.

I sit straighter within the circle of Ryan’s arms and say eagerly, ‘Can you show me another way into this … underworld?’

He gives me a quick glance. ‘I could,
mad’moiselle
. But it is not worth my neck, you understand. The catacombs, they are dangerous. They say some do not return from playing there …’

Ryan leans forward. ‘We’ll take care of ourselves. You just get us down there, then tell your bosses you left us on a street somewhere: we wanted to explore, we didn’t come back.’

Our driver shakes his head. ‘Still not worth it to me,
monsieur
. If rich young foreigners go missing, there are many unpleasant consequences for men like me.’

‘Give me your cell-phone number,’ Ryan says, turning on his own phone. ‘I’ll send you a message from my phone saying where and when we’ll meet you, and if we fail to show, you’re to assume your services are no longer required with no repercussions.’

‘Nice,’ I say with admiration.

Ryan gives me a dark look. ‘It’s called forward planning, and I learnt it from the best in the business. How else do you think Justine Hennessy now has a home to call her own?’

‘Lela wasn’t supposed to die,’ I remind him quietly.

‘Yeah, well, I have no intention of doing that today either,’ Ryan retorts. ‘So I’ll take care of the cover-
his
-butt part of the adventure, then it’s over to
you
to get Selaphiel and the two of us out of there, because I sure as hell can’t see in the dark.’

‘You have a torch,’ I point out evenly, trying hard not to smile.

Both of us start laughing, maybe out of sheer terror.

The driver watches us narrowly as if we are mad. Finally, he reaches across the seat back with his right hand extended. Ryan grips it and shakes it.

‘Henri Séverin,’ he says, returning his hand to the steering wheel. ‘And I must apologise — I misjudged you, I think. You are not —’

‘Rich and dumb?’ I interject acidly, remembering his conversation with his handler over the in-car radio.

Henri gives a self-deprecating shrug, unembarrassed. ‘I have been with this company for seven years. There is a type, you know? You look very much of that type. How was I to know?’

He starts the car and pulls away from the official entrance to the catacombs, rapidly leaving the snaking line of brightly dressed tourists behind.

‘Those tourists are the stupid ones,’ he snorts. ‘Underground it is always fifty-five, maybe fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. In summer, in winter, always the same. The living always overdress to meet with the dead. They fill themselves with food, with drink, only to discover that when they are deep underground, there are no toilets, no exits, no escape. It is not far to la Petite Ceinture,’ he goes on, looking over his shoulder as he overtakes a small lorry. ‘Nearby, there is a
grand entrance
the cataphiles use — one of Paris’s worst-kept secrets.’

I lean forward, my fingers twitching as if reaching for the grip of a weapon. ‘Hurry,’ I say. ‘We’ve lost enough time already.’

Ryan says sardonically, ‘With her, Henri, you made a bad mistake. She fits no “type”.’

Henri glances at him shrewdly in the driver’s mirror. ‘She may be more machine than human, I think, but you,
monsieur
, must be —’

‘Badly in need of a coffee, some breakfast and a toilet,’ Ryan interrupts ruefully, ‘like the tourist I am.’

Henri parks on a quiet street on the outskirts of the fourteenth arrondissement and we walk to a bridge that overlooks a set of overgrown train tracks. It’s just past noon, and traffic on the bridge is jarringly loud, incredibly fast. Hard to imagine such a place giving onto a gateway to Hell, but Luc was always imaginative.

Before we go over the bridge wall, Henri and Ryan bust out their mobiles. Ryan types up his butt-covering text message and hits
send
.

Henri types into his phone:
I understand, M. Daley. If you and your girlfriend do not return by 3.30 pm, I am to leave. I will inform my company. But please let me know if your situation changes. I am here to help. And please enjoy your explorations of this beautiful and historic region
.

He shows Ryan the message and Ryan nods. Henri presses
send
, and, like that, he has his alibi and Ryan and I are free to vanish underneath Paris.

Ryan, being Ryan, automatically offers to give me a boost over the wall. I can’t keep the look of offence from my face, and he throws his head back and laughs before pulling himself up and over.

Henri moves forward to assist me, but I say to him quickly and quietly so that Ryan will not overhear, ‘If we don’t make it back, Henri, try and ring the number he gave you. Keep trying, even if you’re far from here. He needs to get back to the plane that’s waiting for him at Le Bourget. I’m not important — I truly can take care of myself. But he’s the dearest thing to me in this world, and he has a whole other life without me that he can easily return to. Keep trying. Try until your shift is over, because he needs to get home. Would you do that for me?’

Mystified, Henri nods. ‘Sure, I will call. There is nothing to lose. It will show that I am a good guy, that I am concerned.’

‘Hel-
lo
?’ Ryan yells impatiently from the other side of the wall.