Hamish sucked in a quick, impatient breath that deepened the florid color in his cheeks. “So what did he look like?”
Again, that shrug of the shoulders. “He was a white man. All white men look pretty much alike.” He made a curious clucking sound with his tongue, and the cat leaped up into his arms.
Zach wondered if Hamish realized he was wasting his time, that the old man would tell them nothing he didn’t want them to know. Tipping back his head, Zach studied the bunches of dried plants overhead. Some, such as the foxglove and marshmallow, he recognized. Others were utterly unfamiliar. “They say you can read men’s minds,” he said suddenly, his gaze falling to where the voodoo king now stood, the white cat draped loosely about his neck.
“Read men’s minds? I don’t know about that.” His lower lip pushed out as he glanced at Hamish. “Fear’s not hard to smell.” He brought his gaze back to Zach’s face. “Or guilt to sense.”
Zach didn’t even blink. “They also say you can foresee the future.”
“People say lots of things.”
“They say Henri Santerre respected you, and that you were friends of a sort.” Zach went to lean one shoulder against the hut’s massive center pole, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the man with the cat. “So did you warn him of what you’d seen in his future?”
Long and bony and yellowed with age, the voodoo king’s fingers moved back and forth in the cat’s fur. “Henri was an old man. He didn’t need me to warn him to prepare to meet death.”
“A warning from you might have helped him to avoid it.”
“You can’t avoid death.” The cat still around his neck, Papa John walked to stand in the open doorway again, his back to the room, his gaze on the black waters of the bayou just visible through a break in the cypress thicket. “It’s arrogance, thinking you can change what’s meant to be. I learned that a long time ago.” Slowly, he turned his head to look over his shoulder at Zach. “It’s a lesson you still must learn.”
Zach shook his head. “I don’t believe in fate. We all make our own lives.”
“The conscious decisions, oh, yes.” His eyebrows rose as if in inquiry. “But who’s responsible for all the little accidents that can trip us up and alter the course of our lives, or even kill us? Hmmm?”
Outside the hut, the day was fading fast. They seemed suddenly, oddly isolated from the world, the three of them, caught together in the flickering golden light of the single kerosene lamp. “And if you had destroyed that vampire set,” Zach said softly, “instead of selling it?”
The old man kept his gaze fixed on Zach’s face. “Men are easy to kill. So are women . . . as you should know, Captain.”
Behind him, Zach heard Hamish draw in his breath as if in a gasp, but Zach’s own voice was level, controlled, as he said, “I’m a major now.”
“Yes. Of course. My apologies.” Papa John moved away from the door. “I’m being remiss in my duties as a host. Would you like something to drink? Some bière douce, perhaps?”
Zach shook his head. “We need to get back.”
He’d expected Hamish to object to leaving with nothing, maybe even want to ransack the place just to make sure the crossbow wasn’t here. But the big New Yorker evidently had had enough of Papa John’s silken voice and eerily pointed comments. At one nod from Zach, Hamish was out the door, his boots clumping on the rungs of the ladderlike stairs.
Zach started to follow, but at the top of the steps he paused to look back at the man who stood, unmoving, near the homemade table. “Not being told the name of a man you’ve never seen before is not at all the same as being unaware of who he is.”
Amusement, and something else, flickered in the dark depths of the old man’s eyes. “True. But a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, Major. The man who bought that fateful little oak box? He didn’t buy it for himself. He bought it as a gift for a friend.”
It was the first real piece of information Papa John had given them, and he’d given it freely. Zach held himself quite still. “Did he tell you the name of this friend?”
Papa John shook his head. “There was no need. Such was his friend’s interest in both vampires and crossbows, that the set might have been made for him.”
From the edge of the swamp came the hoot of an owl, low and mournful. It was almost dark now, the horses below mere shadows in the moonlight. Do you need another clue, Captain? whispered the voice from Zach’s past. How about another corpse?
“It’s Philippe, isn’t it?” Zach said. “The set was a gift for Philippe de Beauvais.”
His face impassive, the black man simply stared at him.
“But Philippe is dead,” said Zach.
“So they say.”
“So did you.”
The other man’s eyes widened in delighted surprise. “Did I?”
“You said, Such was his interest, not, Such is his interest.”
“So I did. Careless of me, wasn’t it?”
From below came Hamish’s low hiss, and the chink of a bit as one of the horses shook its head. “I don’t think you’ve ever been careless in your life,” said Zach.
“Oh yes I have.” The black man stepped forward so that the dying light caught the white frills of his shirt in a way that made him seem almost to glow. “At times, we are all careless, Major. Because we’re all human.”
“I want you to find out everything you can about Philippe de Beauvais,” Zach said as he and Hamish turned their horses’ heads toward the city. “What he was like when he was alive, and exactly how he died.”
“Aye.” Hamish threw him a closed, troubled look. “I hope this means you’re finally planning to rest that wound of yours, lad. This ride can’t have been good for it.”
Zach smiled into the warm velvet night. “As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of paying a visit to the Hospital de Santerre. Madame de Beauvais has some explaining to do.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Zach found her in the small, semiprivate room on the hospital’s second floor.
A lamp on the painted table against the far wall lit the room with a pale glow. She was standing alone in the middle of the scrubbed bare floor—just standing there, her cupped hands holding her elbows tight against her sides, her back straight and rigid. She was turned away from him, so he couldn’t see her face, but he knew she must have heard him, must have heard his uneven footsteps echoing hollowly as he limped into the room.
The doors and windows had all been thrown open to the night breeze blowing in warm and sweetly scented by the gardenias and honeysuckle and sweet olive of the courtyard below. The room’s four cots all stood empty except for one, where an ominously still form lay beneath a crisp white sheet near the far window. The face was covered, but Zach knew who the man was—or rather, who he had been. Lieutenant Emile Rouant.
“Please go away,” she said, not turning, not looking at him, her voice cracking as she spoke. “Please just . . . go away.”
He put his hand on her shoulder and swung her around. Her eyes glittered brightly, but she wasn’t crying, for all that her face was ravaged with grief and anger. “He lived longer than you expected.”
She drew in a quick breath that shuddered her thin frame, but her gaze stayed fixed somewhere in the vicinity of the third button of his coat. “And yet he still died.”
Zach kept his hand on her shoulder. “It was inevitable. You always knew that.”
She raised her head to look at him then, and he saw the anger in her flare up wild and bright. “Inevitable? It shouldn’t be inevitable. We are so ignorant. How can we save a man’s life if we don’t really understand what’s killing him?”
“You will understand someday,” he said softly.
He stared down into her beautiful face and watched the anger drain out of her, watched the tears she’d been trying to hold back well up hot and unstoppable, watched her full lips tremble, watched her self-control break.
He had come here to accuse her of knowing far more about the m
urder of Henri Santerre than she’d been willing to admit—maybe even to try to scare her into telling him some of the things he knew she’d been hiding from him. Instead, he found his palm shifting to enfold the back of her head as he drew her close.
She resisted, but only for a moment. He heard her breath catch in her throat. Her hands came up to his chest, her fingers clenching at the dark blue cloth of his uniform. A sob shook her, then another. She smelled sweetly of lilac water and the night air and herself, and he breathed her in as he drew her closer and she buried her face against his shoulder and wept.
She wept, and he held her, warm and pliant against him. Just held her.
Afterward, he walked beside her through a sleepy city lit only by flickering lamp shine and the pale glow of the full moon, and cooled by the breeze from the river.
They walked in silence, their footsteps echoing in the Sunday-quiet streets as they turned toward the rue Dumaine. There was an edginess between them that he could feel, an edginess that came from those moments at the hospital when he had held her in his arms and she had found comfort in his warmth and his nearness. Except that it wasn’t the physical intimacy of that incident that was causing this profound, mutual disquiet; it was the emotional intimacy, that underscoring of the indefinable, inescapable connection between them that she didn’t want . . . that he didn’t want, any more than he wanted the slow burn of desire that was always there between them, too, simmering along with the animosity and the mistrust.
Finally, as if she could bear the silence and suspense no longer, she said, “You’ve been to see Papa John.”
He could hear the wary defiance in her voice. Throwing back his head, he stared up at the sprinkling of stars overhead. Usually they were obscured by the heat haze that hung over the city, but tonight they were brilliant in their clarity. “Why didn’t you simply tell me about Philippe’s vampire-killing set yourself? Why send me out toward the bayous?”
“I didn’t know until this afternoon where it had originally come from.”
“Ah.” He didn’t believe much that she told him, but he believed that. “So the trip to the swamps was meant to be a distraction, was it? How unfortunate for you that it turned out to be informative, instead.”
“Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”
“Are you going to tell me where it is now?”
“The set?” From the tavern beside them came a spill of light and the twang of banjo strings, underscored by a man’s voice raised in laughter. She shook her head. “I don’t know. I saw it in the cabinet in Philippe’s room, shortly after he was killed. But it’s no longer there.”
In Philippe’s room. Zach gazed at the woman beside him, at the regal curve of her cheek and the pale glow of her skin in the soft moonlight. She was so cool, he thought; so cool and controlled on the outside, so seething with vital passion beneath. Yet she and her husband had kept separate rooms. “I could have your house searched, you know. And the hospital.”
She turned her head to meet his gaze steadily. “And you know that if I still had that crossbow, it wouldn’t be in my house. Or the hospital.”
“You have no idea who could have taken it?”
“You think I wouldn’t tell you, if I did?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” The stone bulk of the Cabildo rose up beside them, its massive, Spanish-built walls dark and somber. From here, he could see the dark shapes of the elms and sycamores in the square and, just visible beyond the levee, the silhouettes of the tall masts of the ships tied up at the wharves. “It’s a peculiar collection of interests,” he said. “Vampires and crossbows.”
“Philippe was fascinated by death, by its legends and rituals, by its”—she paused, her face intent as she searched for the right word—“nature.” She let out her breath in a sigh of sadness and weariness tinged, perhaps, with regret. “I used to think it was half the reason he became a doctor—not so much to save lives as to beat death.”
“He sounds a very different man from Henri Santerre.”
“He was.” The breeze was stronger here, lifting the long, loose ribbons of her mourning bonnet and ruffling the black lace that edged her slim white throat. “But don’t misunderstand me,” she said, “Philippe was a brilliant doctor. Knowledgeable, skilled, dedicated—”
“And utterly self-obsessed,” he finished for her.
She shrugged. “Most brilliant people are.”
“And Henri Santerre? What had he to do with vampires and crossbows?”
“Nothing. He thought Philippe’s interests bizarre but essentially harmless—as long as they didn’t interfere with his work.”
“Did they?”
He saw something leap in her eyes, something dark and quickly hidden as she turned her face away. “Not those.”
He put his hand on her arm, swinging her around to face him. “So why was Philippe’s crossbow used to kill Henri Santerre?”
She backed away from him, into the shadow of a massive stone pillar of the building looming behind her. “How would I know?” she said, her voice husky with what he knew now was fear, fear of what was happening around her, and fear of him.
He took a step toward her, trapping her against the pillar and holding her there with the powerful threat of his size and his maleness and the authority of the blue uniform he wore and she hated. “I think you know far more than what you’ve let on.”
She shook her head slowly from side to side, her neck arching back so that she could stare up at him. She was such a tiny thing, he thought; so delicate and small that a man would need to lift her up onto her tiptoes just to kiss her.
“No,” she said.
He pressed his hands flat against the smooth stone on either side of her, his body almost but not quite touching hers. There was a fine trembling going on inside her, a trembling of fear, and something else, too. “What is it you want me to believe? That you’ve told me everything you know about Henri Santerre and the people who might have wanted him dead? Goddamn it,” he swore, leaning into his spread hands. “When will you understand that I’m not your enemy?”
Her gaze swept him, taking in the blue uniform he wore and the saber with which he killed. He saw her eyes darken with emotion, the muscles in her throat working hard as she swallowed. “You are my enemy.”
He bracketed her face with one hand, his thumb curving beneath her chin, forcing her to look at him when she would have turned away. “Not in this. Not unless you know the killer and you’re deliberately protecting him.”
He saw the flare of surprise in her eyes. “I was under the impression you suspected me of killing Henri.”
Beneath his touch, her skin felt as soft and warm as the seductive Southern night around them. He shook his head. “Crossbow bolts flying out of the night aren’t your style.”
“So you do believe I could kill.”
“You could kill,” he said, his fingers moving across her cheek in a whisper of a caress. “But not in an act of cold calculation. If you killed, it would be in the heat of the moment. A crime of passion.”
She stared at him, her lips parted, her breath coming hard and fast. “I’m not a woman of passion.”
“Aren’t you?”
He had been wanting to kiss this woman since that first night he had seen her wet with the rain, her features glowing pale in quick flashes of lightning. She was a woman only recently widowed, a Confederate sympathizer and a suspect in a brutal murder. And yet when he held her close and looked at her mouth, none of that seemed to matter anymore. It wasn’t that he forgot, only that those things suddenly ceased to be of such all-consuming importance.
She knew he wanted her. The awareness was there, in each shuddering breath, in the quiet stillness of her eyes as she stared up at him. If she had said anything, made any move to put some distance between them, he wouldn’t have done it. But she only looked at him, and the night hushed with expectancy and want and the high, wild rush of the dangerous and the forbidden. Keeping his gaze still locked with hers, he tipped
his head and covered her mouth with his.
He heard her moan, a woman’s low murmur of want and surrender as her eyelids slid shut and her arms crept up to circle his neck and pull his head down to her. He felt her lips move beneath his, open to him, and he lost himself in her, in the taste of her mouth and the scent of her flesh and the warm, giving softness of her woman’s body.
With a groan, he crushed her up against the length of him, his hands sweeping down the narrow curve of her back to grip her hips. She was hunger and heat, damnation and redemption, and he wanted her with a reckless need that subsumed all logic and sense, a wild sweet yearning that thrummed in his blood and dimmed his sight and swept away all trappings of civilization and civility. And if he didn’t put her away from him, now, he would take her, right here, in the moonlit street, whether she wanted him to or not.
He tore his mouth from hers, his hands tightening on her shoulders. Yet before he could thrust her from him she wrenched from his grasp, as if she, too, realized how near they had come to disaster.
“That shouldn’t have happened,” she said, backing away from him, her eyes wild, her body shuddering with a passion and reaction that matched his own.
He brought up one hand to touch her, then let it fall to his side again, once he realized what he was doing. “No. But we’ve both known it was going to happen, sooner or later.”
She shook her head, not to deny the truth of it, but to deny the rightness of it. “I am less than three months widowed.”
He took a step toward her, then stopped. “And for how many years before that did your husband keep his own room?”
She hugged herself, her hands gripping her arms so tightly, he could see her fingers digging into the stiff bombazine sleeves of the mourning gown she wore. “That has nothing to do with it.”
“No. No, it doesn’t,” he said, although he wasn’t sure they were talking about the same thing.
They stared at each other. The wind blew warm and heavy with damp around them, fluttered the fine curls at her forehead, and it was all he could do not to reach out to her, to touch her face and let his hand slip behind her head and draw her to him again.
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