The moment his fingers began to curl around her wrist she pivoted, sliding her hand out through his so quickly he ended up with only a little soil in his palm. She moved around him as if he were nothing more than an object in her way, her eyes still searching the floor, until she made a strange sound and bent to pick up something.
Korvel looked over her shoulder. The long green sack had been fashioned out of velvet and embroidered with golden thread. A symbol worked in the fabric, a tiny triad formed of three circles, had been stitched over and over to form two long cylinders side by side.
“What is it?” he asked her.
She removed the long gray metal case inside before dropping the sack. The hasp on one side of the case had been carelessly pried apart, and when she opened it he saw that the inside had been lined with the same embroidered green velvet.
Whatever the case had once held, however, had been removed.
With some difficulty Korvel bent and picked up the sack to examine the design again. Touching the fabric sent an unpleasant tingle through his fingers, but it faded almost as soon as he felt it. The arrangement of the two embroidered cylinders, however, finally made sense to him. “This was used to hold the scroll.”
“It was.” The nun’s eyes shifted up, and in them he saw a strange weariness. “Who are you?”
Since she knew where the scroll had been, she had to be an ally, but he would be sure of it. “I mean you no harm.” He reached for her, resting his fingertips against her throat. “Give me your name.”
“Simone Derien.” She turned her head and took a deep breath. “You smell of larkspur.”
She had a Frenchwoman’s discerning nose; the few mortal females he encountered remarked most often that he smelled like a pastry shop. Korvel frowned as his body swayed, and only then realized that his leg was buckling. The nun was too slight to bear the brunt of his weight, so he removed his hand and reached for the edge of a plant stand to brace himself. “Were you sent here?”
“I was summoned.” She stared down at his leg. “You are bleeding all over the ground, Englishman.”
He glanced at the small, wet red pool in which he stood. “So I am.”
The plant stand insisted on tipping over at that moment, and took Korvel with it. He marveled that such a flimsy object could fell him, a feat not even the shrewdest, most skilled warrior among the guard had ever achieved.
He landed on his side, his vision alternately blurring and sharpening, which allowed him to snatch glimpses of Sister Simone as she dropped down beside him. Why had he not noticed until this moment how unusual and lovely the green of her eyes was, or the intense perfection of her fair, delicate skin? Every feature on her face shouted purity, from the smooth arch of her pale brows to the sweet bow of her full, rosy lips.
“It is good that you chose the Church,” he told her. “You have the face of an angel.”
“You are delirious,” she replied, removing her head veil to reveal what seemed to be a crown of braided copper and gold. “Were you shot in the leg?”
“Stabbed.” And with him on his back as he was, she could not remove the broken blade from the wound. That no longer seemed to trouble him as he fixed his gaze on the wondrous treasure she had been hiding. “God in heaven. Is that your hair?” He tried to touch it, but his arm refused to obey him.
“Be still.” Her strong, capable-looking hands tore a long strip from her veil. “I will see to your wound, but then I must go. The others will notice the smoke and come for you.”
“Everyone leaves me.” The thought of her doing the same seemed to penetrate the muddle of his thoughts and bring back a measure of sanity. “You cannot go. The mortal’s blade broke off in my leg. Unless you remove it, I will sicken and die.”
She sat up, trailing her fingers through the blood that had soaked through his trousers and then lifting them to her nose. “You are one of the Kyn.”
“Aye. Korvel, seneschal to Tremayne.” He heard his voice slurring the words, and seized her wrist, using the last of his strength to drag her down atop him. His blood loss had filled the air with his scent, but he focused, releasing even more until he saw her eyes go dark. “You will not leave me like this. You will take the copper out of my body. You will remain with me until nightfall.” He kept his eyes on hers until he heard her slowly agree with him, and then brought her hand to his lips. “Thank you, my angel.”
“I don’t get what the big deal is,” Nicola Jefferson said as she peered through the bulletproof glass between her and the portrait on the museum wall. “She’s yellow. She’s crackly. And she’s not smiling; she’s smirking. Seriously smirking. Like she’s been stepping out on the sly with her brother-in-law or her best friend’s husband or something.”
“Perhaps she did.” Gabriel Seran tugged on one of Nick’s white curls. “The lady’s contemporaries considered her a great beauty of her time.”
“A beauty?” Nick made a rude sound. “She doesn’t even have eyelashes or eyebrows.” She glanced at him. “Oh, I get it. You knew her?”
“Her name was Lisa del Giocondo, and no, I never met her,” he admitted. “The artist, however, accepted an invitation from the king and came to stay at Clos Lucé, near my home in Amboise.”
“You met Leonardo da Vinci.” Nick chuckled. “Get out of town.”
“I did meet him several times, thanks to his insomnia, which often compelled him to go walking at night.” Gabriel eyed some approaching Japanese tourists before taking her arm. “You would have liked him, I think. The two of you share many qualities.”
She followed him to the next exhibit. “Is that a diplomatic way of saying I’m as cranky and bad tempered as he was?”
As the tourists began snapping photos of the Mona Lisa, Gabriel bent his head and brushed a gentle kiss against her lips. “As old as he was when we met, he still had the incandescence of a much younger man. You could look into his eyes and see all the passions and fires inside him, waiting to be unleashed.” He touched his mouth to hers again. “Exactly like yours.”
“Keep kissing me,” she warned, “and I’ll get very hot on you. Right here in public.” With a sigh she scanned the room. “I don’t like this. Our informant should have been here an hour ago. Assuming she is an informant and not some double agent for the holy freaks.”
Gabriel ran his fingertip along the curve of her jaw. “Our friends investigated her thoroughly, and confirmed her as a reliable source.”
“Baby, she’s a Paris street hooker. That tends to put a big ‘un-’ before reliable.” Nick caught a trace of something salty and unpleasant in the air: the smell of old blood and fresh fear. She turned around, zeroing in on a woman who stepped inside the entrance to the Salle des États. “Trouble at six o’clock.”
Gabriel breathed in and his mouth tightened. “She’s injured.”
The two immortals casually approached the veiled woman, who wore a heavy coat, hat, and sunglasses with enormous lenses. As she noticed them she shuffled back a step and looked from side to side before closing the gap between them. “You are les détectives?”
“That’s us,” Nick said, studying the puffy lips and swollen nose under the other woman’s heavy makeup. “I’m Detective Nick. This is Detective Gabe. What’ve you got for us?”
“Not here,” the woman snapped. She turned to walk out of the gallery.
Nick caught her arm. “Hold it, sweetie,” she said when the woman flinched and whimpered. “We’re not going to hurt you.” She focused on the sunglasses, and the scent of juniper enveloped the three of them. “Why do you want to take off?”
“I’m afraid he has someone following me,” the woman said, her voice soft and drowsy. “If he catches me with you, this time he’ll kill me.”
Gabriel eyed the Japanese tourists, who had lost interest in da Vinci’s masterpiece and were now watching them. “Nicola.”
“Yeah, I see them.” She held the woman’s hand. “Why don’t we go find a quiet place where we can have a drink and talk?”
The woman flashed a smile and a broken front tooth. “I’d like that.”
A half hour later they sat down outside a mostly deserted café to share a bottle of wine. As Gabriel kept watch on the pedestrians and the waiters, Nick poured a full glass for the woman.
“What’s your name, honey?” she asked as she handed over the wine.
“Oksana.” The woman gulped down three swallows before she took off her sunglasses. Someone had blackened both of her eyes and left a nasty graze across the top of her left cheekbone. “Oksana Gravois.”
Nick nodded toward her wounds. “Who worked you over?”
“One of my clients.” She took another gulp. “Antoine. The shithead. I want him to pay.”
“We’ll see what we can do.” Nick wondered whether this valuable information was going to turn out to be nothing more than working-girl spite. “You told the police that you had information about an arson job.”
The prostitute nodded. “Antoine bragged about it. He said he’d been hired onto a crew that was going to rob an old place in the country, and then burn it to the ground.”
For the last several years the Brethren, a group of fanatics who posed as Catholic priests while they hunted, captured, and tortured the Darkyn, had been using arson to cover up their attacks on immortal strongholds. Nick knew they also hired muscle outside the order to help them, muscle that sometimes took the blame for the crime when things went down the wrong way. “What old place, and where in the country?”
“A château in some country pisshole called Garbia.” Oksana gingerly toughed the swollen lid of her right eye. “Antoine said they were going to kill everyone in the house before they took the treasure.”