Night Lost

Page 43

A small group of startled Londoners had begun gathering, but they backed away as she helped Gabriel onto the bike and swung onto the seat.
"We'll get you, Seran," a man shouted, and Nick saw that one of the men inside the shop had gotten to his feet. "Every Brethren in England are hunting you and your thief bitch now. You can't hide forever—"
Croft stepped up behind him and slammed a large volume on the back of his head. The man collapsed in a heap.
"My apologies, dear boy," he called out to them. "It seems I've been compromised. If you need to reach me, you'll have to contact Geoff. So sorry you couldn't stay for tea, my dear."
"Next time." Nick looked down to see Gabriel's hands on her waist, and took off.
Michael left Phillipe and Leary with the van and took a horse from a nearby stable to ride along the boundaries of Dundellan.
Riding around Richard's stronghold should have calmed Michael, for it had been months since he had indulged his love of horseback riding and solitude. But Marcella's predictions had come true. Over the last days his temper had worn down his will, and not an hour passed that he did not feel as if his skin would crawl off his body. Often now he thought if he spent another day without her, he would go mad. In his head Michael understood it was the bond he shared with Alexandra, and the price of it, but in his heart all that mattered was to be with her again.
We are here. I will take back what is mine.
Michael led the horse out of the shadows, risking being spotted by the castle guard, but unable to resist looking up at the light shining from one of the narrow windows in the east stone tower. He had no way to know if Alexandra was being kept in that room or, as Leary suggested, had been locked away deep in the bowels of Dundellan.
A measure of calmness came to him as he focused his thoughts on her, the memory of her face, the smell of her skin. Soon, mon amour. I will be with you again, very soon.
Once Michael finished scouting the property, he put together the signs that all was not well at Dundellan. Richard had twice the usual amount of men patrolling, but they kept to the castle itself and did not stray out onto the surrounding acres. The neglected condition of the land indicated his household staff had possibly been locked in, dismissed, or perhaps killed. He suspected that as the high lord's mind deteriorated, his Kyn guards might begin quietly abandoning him. Perhaps, hearing of Lucan's attempt to assassinate him, they already had.
Michael met Phillipe back at the van. Inside, Leary sat watching the castle while the addicts they had taken from Dublin, made docile by Phillipe's compulsion over them, looked at nothing at all.
"The patrols are riding no more than two hundred yards out from the castle," he told his seneschal. "Six Kyn guard the delivery entrances at the west and north sides. The windows have been secured but the fences are falling apart. Nothing stands in our way."
"I called Marcella from the mobile," Phillipe said. "She has been monitoring the patrols, and says that Richard's men are carrying standard weapons as well as copper."
Armed to kill both humans and Kyn. "He's expecting someone other than us."
Phillipe brought a small case out of the back, which he placed on the hood of the van. He opened it and produced what appeared to be a Young Fine Gael campaign button and put it on his lapel.
"This is a radio transceiver," he told Cyprien. "It will pick up and transmit my voice and any others within twenty feet of me."
Cyprien fitted the earpiece. "When you are inside, find Alexandra and help her out through one of the second-floor windows, there," Michael told him, pointing to the least guarded area of the castle. "Whatever happens, do not engage Richard."
His seneschal nodded. "You will wait here for us."
"No." Michael stripped off his jacket, revealing the body armor and weapons beneath it. "I am challenging Richard."
"As a diversion?" Phillipe touched his arm. "Master, there is surely another way."
Michael shook his head. "To defeat him, I must kill him and take his throne."
Leary rolled down the passenger window. "It's time to go in now," he said, looking anxious. "They're waiting for us."
Nick rode through the night, stopping only for petrol as she headed north. She spoke little and seemed distant. Gabriel didn't disturb her, sensing that she had withdrawn into herself again. He was only grateful that she had returned to Croft's shop when she had. The Brethren who had cornered him there had fully intended to take him back to France and Benait.
He also didn't know how to tell her that he was no longer blind. Seeing her disable three men with nothing more than a baseball bat had left him speechless as well. She had moved like a trained warrior, with no hesitation and utter ruthlessness.
Whatever she was hiding from him, it had a great deal to do with the way she fought.
After several hours, Nick turned off the main roadway and took a series of country roads toward a farming community. Gabriel's vision, always better in the dark, expanded to take in the hedgerows and slumbering sheep herds. She went down a long drive and came to a stop in what appeared to be an old farmhouse.
She tugged off her helmet and tucked it under her arm as she climbed off the bike. "This is my place."
From the stones and portions of ancient walls scattered to the right and left of the farmhouse, her place appeared to be built within the ruins of a far older structure.
"Come on." She took his arm, reminding Gabriel that she still thought he was blind, "Don't worry. My house is in better shape than yours."
Nicola guided him to the door, which she pushed open with her hand.
"You do not secure your property?" he asked.
"I don't live in the house." She led him through an empty kitchen and to a padlocked door, for which she took a key from the heel of her boot. "I live under it."
Gabriel put his hand on Nick's shoulder and climbed down a long incline of stone steps through a cellar and into a sublevel basement that was equally bare.
"I wish you could see this. Stay here." She went to one of the bare walls, tapped it in three places, and pushed. The entire wall made a low scraping sound as it swung out, revolving on hidden bearings. "My stepdad meant to fill in this part with dirt, but he died before he could get to it." She came back and took his hand in hers. "It's okay. It's perfectly safe."
She thought he was afraid of her secret underground dwelling, when he was nearly shaking with anger. "Why do you live down here? Why not live in the house?"
"I have to travel a lot," she said. "I rent out the pastures to neighbors and they watch the house, but they think I live in America and visit only once or twice a year. If I lived upstairs, they'd expect me to go to church and hang out at the horse club and be part of the community. It's more private for me this way."
She wanted him to admire this hole in the ground; to her it was a home. "Then please show me the way."
Nicola tucked her arm through his and steered him through the opening in the revolving wall.
"My stepdad thought this might be where the commander of the fortress hid his wife and kids when they were attacked," she said as they walked down a narrow corridor. "A lot of the Brits didn't like the Romans coming here and taking over, while the Romans brought their families and tried to live normal lives, so I guess this was their version of a bomb shelter. Evidently the Saxons never found it."
She walked him through a room so dazzling that he stumbled, and she stopped. "Hey, you okay?"
"A brief dizziness. Give me a moment." He needed a week, a month, a year, for he could not believe his eyes.
The room was filled with Templar gold. Gabriel recognized the crosses and chalices, for he had pressed his lips to them and drunk the blood of Christ from them during his human life. A stack of ivory tablets, sculptured with figures and animals from the Scriptures that had been gilded with fine gold leaf, sat neatly atop an eagle lectern of bronze; boxes in which the Templars had kept the gold and silver coins of pilgrims visiting the Holy Land had been stacked like milk crates.
It was Aladdin's cave, come to life.
In the corner Gabriel glimpsed one of the few traveling altars his brothers had brought back intact from the Holy Land stand, its polished ash-and-black marble still gleaming, the embellishments showing the martyrdom of Saint Paul, and the image of the Trinity in silver gilt. It had vanished in Paris on Black Friday, when the pope had ordered all of the Templars to be arrested, and it had been rumored to have been destroyed in the flames of a temple burned by its own retreating warrior-priests. And yet here it was, almost as it had been seven hundred years before, when he had knelt and prayed before it.
"Your head clear yet?"
He had to leave the room. "Yes." Blinded now by the sight of the treasures the Kyn had thought plundered and looted and lost forever, Gabriel took her hand and let her take him into the next room.
He expected to see more grandeur, but she brought him into what appeared to be a simple, whitewashed root cellar that had been converted to basic living quarters. A modest dresser and bed were the only furnishings; a plain wooden cross hung on the wall over the bed.
"Where are we now?" he asked her.
"This is where I live and keep my stuff stashed," she said, "until I can sell it."
"Sell it?"
"I steal things, Gabriel. Old things from churches and chapels, like the one where I found you. Sometimes I've taken them off the bodies of the dead people I find hidden away, like you were." She sat down on the bed and folded her hands in her lap.
"I don't understand."
"I started doing it in England ten years ago, when I began looking for the Madonna. I went through every chapel, church, and shrine in the country looking for her. I found other things and took them to sell. I moved on to Scotland and Ireland, and now I'm working in France. It's how I make a living."
"So you never took photographs."