by Alex Archer
“You’re looking for the sword?” Garin seemed amused. He wore a black turtleneck, jeans and heavy black boots. A leather jacket hung on the back of the chair.
“How did you get in?” Annja demanded. She stood in the open door, ready to flee immediately.
“I let myself in,” he said. “I did knock first.”
Suspicion formed in Annja’s mind. She had the definite sense that he’d waited for her to leave, then broke in.
“You weren’t here,” Garin said.
“Odd that I happened to miss you,” Annja said.
Garin smiled. “Serendipity. You can never properly factor that into anything.”
“You could have waited for me to get back,” Annja pointed out.
“And stood out in the hallway so that your neighbors would gossip about you?” Garin shook his head. “I couldn’t do that.”
Deciding that she didn’t have anything to fear from the man—at least for the moment—Annja walked into the kitchen area and placed the groceries on the counter.
“Breakfast?” Garin asked.
“Yes.” Annja took a big skillet from the wall.
“We could order in. I noticed there are some places nearby that deliver,” Garin said.
“I’ve eaten restaurant food for days,” Annja replied. “Here and in France. I want to cook.” She put the skillet on the burner to warm, then cracked eggs into a bowl.
Glancing over her shoulder, Annja saw that he looked amused. She resented his presence in her home, the fact that he had broken in, and she was distrustful of him. Still, she couldn’t just pretend he wasn’t there when she was about to eat.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
“No. I just got in from LaGuardia.” Garin sat at the desk. “But that’s all right. You go ahead.”
“Nonsense. There’s enough for both of us. More than enough.”
“That’s very kind of you. Can I help?”
Annja chopped the basil and Garin grated the Parmesan. She mixed both with the eggs, then poured olive oil into the skillet. “Have you really lived over five hundred years?” she asked, suddenly aware of feeling comfortably domestic with this mysterious stranger.
Garin smiled. “You find that hard to believe?”
Annja didn’t answer. She sliced the garlic bread and the melon.
“You know what happened to the sword, don’t you?” Garin asked. “You’ve got it.”
Annja poured the eggs into the skillet, then popped the bread into the toaster.
“Where is the sword?” Garin asked.
“It disappeared,” Annja replied. “Somewhere outside Paris.”
Grinning, he said, “I don’t believe you.”
“We share a trait for skepticism.” Annja scrambled the eggs. “Would you care for some orange juice?”
Garin walked around the loft, gazing at all the things Annja had collected during her years as an archaeologist. “You have a nice home,” he said softly.
Annja had deliberately left the bread knife close at hand. So far, Garin didn’t appear to be armed. “Thank you,” she said, watching him closely.
“I know you’re lying about the sword,” Garin said, looking at her.
The bread slices popped out of the toaster. She laid them on plates, buttered them. “That’s not a polite thing to say to someone about to serve you breakfast.”
“The sword was on the bed when I arrived,” Garin told her.
For a moment, Annja felt panic race through her. She concentrated on the eggs, removing the skillet from the heat. If he’d taken the sword, he wouldn’t be here now.
“It disappeared when I tried to touch it,” Garin said.
“Maybe it was just a figment of your imagination,” Annja said, flooded with relief.
Garin shook his head. “No. I’ve seen that sword before. And I’ve lived with its curse.”
“What curse?” Annja asked.
Approaching her but staying out of arm’s reach, Garin leaned a hip against the kitchen counter. “A story for a story,” he told her. “It’s the only fair way to do this.”
Annja dished the scrambled eggs onto the garlic toast. She added slices of melon.
“Very pretty,” Garin said.
“I prefer to think of it as nourishing.” Annja handed him his plate.
Garin looked around. “I don’t see a dining table.”
“That’s because I don’t have one.” Scooping up her own plate and orange juice, Annja walked to the window seat. She thought about the Mercedes Garin had driven in Lozère. “Probably isn’t exactly the lifestyle you’re used to,” she said, feeling a little self-conscious.
“Not the lifestyle I now have,” he agreed. “But this is a lot better than I started out with.”
Annja folded herself onto one end of the window seat. “Where did you grow up?”
“One of the city-states in Germany. A backwoods place. Its name is long forgotten now.” Garin sat and ate his food. “I was the illegitimate son of a famous knight.”
“How famous?”
Garin shook his head. “He’s been forgotten now. But back then, he was a name. Famous in battle and in tournaments. I was the only mistake he’d ever made.”
For a moment, Annja felt sorry for Garin. Parents and relatives who simply hadn’t wanted to deal with kids had dumped them at the orphanage. It was an old story. Evidently it hadn’t changed in hundreds of years.
If Garin could be believed.
“I like to think that my father cared for me in some way,” Garin went on. “After all, he didn’t give me to a peasant family as he could have. Or let my mother kill me, as she’d tried on a couple of occasions.”
Annja kept eating. There were horrible stories throughout all histories. She wasn’t inured to them, but she had learned to accept that there were some things she couldn’t do anything about.
“Instead,” Garin went on, “my father gave me to a wizard.”
“Roux?” That news startled Annja.
“Yes. At least that’s what men like him were called in the old days. Once upon a time, Roux’s name was enough to strike terror in the hearts of men. When he cursed someone, that person’s life was never the same again.”
“But that could simply be the perception of the person cursed,” Annja said. “Zombies created by voodoo have been found to be living beings who are so steeped in their belief that their conscious minds can’t accept that after their burial and ‘resurrection’ they are not zombies. They truly believe they are.”
“What makes the sword disappear?” Garin asked, smiling.
“We weren’t finished talking about you.” Annja took another bite of toast, then the melon, which was sweet and crisp.
“I was nine years old when I was given to Roux,” Garin went on. “I was twenty-one when he allied himself with the Maid.”
“He allied himself with Joan of Arc?”
Garin nodded. “He felt he had to. So we traveled with her and were part of her retinue.”
“Fancy word,” Annja teased, surprising herself.
“My vocabulary is vast. I also speak several languages.”
“Joan of Arc,” Annja reminded.
“Roux and I served with her. He was one of her counsels. When she was captured by the English, Roux stayed nearby.”
“Why didn’t he rescue her?”
“Because he believed God would.”
“But that didn’t happen?”
Garin shook his head. “We were…gone when the English decided to burn her at the stake. We arrived too late. Roux tried to stop them, but there were too many English. She died.”
Annja turned pale. It was all too fantastic to be believed, yet she didn’t feel any sense of danger—just curiosity. Who is this man? she wondered. What is going on?
“Are you all right?” Concern showed on Garin’s handsome face.
“I am. Just tired.”
He didn’t appear convinced.
“What about the sword?”
Annja asked.
Garin balanced his empty plate on his knee. “It was shattered. I watched them do it.”
“The English?”
He nodded. “Afterward, Roux and I realized we were cursed.”
Annja couldn’t help herself. She smiled. Anyone could have read about the legendary sword. The details were open to interpretation or exaggeration, as all historical accounts were. Where will this elaborate hoax lead? she wondered.
Then she remembered how Bart McGilley had told her that the fingerprints—friction ridges—she’d pulled from the euro Roux had given her belonged to a suspect in a sixty-three-year-old homicide. She thought about the sword.
“Who cursed you?” she asked.
Garin hesitated, as if he were about to tell her an impossible thing. “I don’t know what Roux thinks, but I believe we were cursed by God.”
23
After Garin finished his story, Annja sat quietly and looked at him. The fear that he had felt all those years ago—and, in spite of herself, she did believe him about the five hundred years—still showed in his dark features.
“You helped Roux look for the sword?” Annja asked.
Garin shook his head. “No.”
“Why?”
“I was angry after Joan’s death and I had no idea there would be consequences if the pieces of the sword weren’t found.”
Annja had to admit the man had a point. “So when did you start to believe?”
“About twenty years later.”
“When you didn’t age?”
“No,” Garin answered. “I aged. A little. It was when I saw Roux again and saw that he hadn’t aged. I began to believe then. I’d thought he would be dead.”
“So he has looked for pieces of the sword for over five hundred years?”
Garin nodded. “He has.”
“And you didn’t help?”
“No. I tried to stop him. I tried to tell him that as it stood, we could live forever. I was becoming wealthy beyond my grandest dreams.”
“That was when you started trying to kill him.”
Grinning, Garin asked, “Wouldn’t you? If you were promised immortality by simply not doing a thing, wouldn’t you take steps to make sure that thing didn’t happen?”
Annja didn’t know. She regarded Garin with renewed suspicion. “Why are you here now?”
“I’m still interested in what happens to the sword.” Garin shrugged. “Now that it is whole again, does that mean I no longer have untold years ahead of me?”
“Noticed any gray hairs?” Annja asked.
He smiled at her. “Your humor is an acquired taste. When you were in Roux’s face, I found you delightful. Now I feel that you have no tact.”
“Good. But keep in mind that I fed breakfast to a man who broke into my home.” Trying not to show her anxiety, Annja took her plate and Garin’s to the sink.
“Tell me about the sword,” Garin said.
Turning, Annja leaned a hip against the counter and crossed her arms over her breasts. “What do you want to know?”
“Mostly whether it can be broken again.”
Annja shook her head. “Honesty’s not always the best policy.”
“I’ve never thought it was.”
She grinned at that.
“If I had lied,” he asked, “would you have known?”
“About this? Yes.”
“I already know about the sword,” Garin pointed out. “I could have left before you returned.”
“After you happened to arrive while I was out.”
“Of course.”
Annja respected that. He could have done that. She reached out her right hand, reached out into that otherwhere and summoned the sword. She held it in her hand.
Garin’s eyes widened as he got to his feet and came toward her. “Let me see it.”
“No.” Annja leveled the sword, aiming the point at his Adam’s apple, intending to halt him in his tracks.
In a move that caught her totally by surprise, Garin tried to grab the blade in his left hand and slam his right forearm down to break it. Instead, his hand and arm swept through the sword as if it weren’t there.
Annja reacted at once, throwing out a foot that caught Garin in the side and knocked him away. He scrambled to his feet and fisted the bread knife on the counter.
As Garin brought the bread knife around, Annja took a two-handed grip on the sword and slashed at the smaller blade wondering if it would pass harmlessly through. The bread knife snapped in two, leaving Garin with the hilt in his hand.
Annja planted the sword tip against his chest right over his heart. The material and flesh indented. Maybe Garin couldn’t touch the sword, they both realized, but the sword could touch him.
“Are we done here?” Annja asked.
Garin swept his left arm against the blade to knock it away, but again his arm passed through. His effort left him facing Annja, his chest totally exposed to her retaliation.
Annja pressed the sword against his chest. “I’ve fed you breakfast,” she said evenly. “I’ve overlooked the fact that you broke into my house. I’m even willing to forgive you for trying to break my sword.”
“Your sword?”
“Mine,” Annja responded without pause or doubt. The sword was hers. It had chosen her. That much was clear. “But if you ever make an enemy of me, if you ever try to kill me like you did Roux, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
“If I try,” Garin promised, unwilling to back up another inch, “you’ll never see me coming.”
“Then it would be in my best interests to kill you now, wouldn’t it?”
Garin stood stubbornly against the sword.
Annja pressed harder, watching the pain flicker through his features and hate darken his eyes. He stumbled back, then turned and walked away. She let him retreat without pursuit.
Garin wiped at the blood seeping through his shirt. “How much?” he demanded.
“For what?” Almost casually, as if she’d been doing it forever, Annja balanced the sword over her right shoulder.
“To break the sword.”
Annja shook her head. “I’m not going to break this sword.”
In truth, she didn’t know what would happen if she tried. An image of the lightning bolt passing through it filled her mind.
She had a definite feeling that whatever happened if she tried to destroy the sword wouldn’t be good. Also, she felt that she would be betraying the spirit of the sword. Joan of Arc had led people in a war against oppression with it.
“I could give you millions,” Garin said. He waved to encompass the loft. “You wouldn’t have to live like this.”
“I happen to like the way I live.” Annja watched the dark calculations take place in his eyes.
“You love knowledge,” he said finally. “With the money I could give you, would give you, you could go anywhere in the world. Study anything you like. With the best experts money can buy. You could open up any door to the past you wanted to.”
The idea was tempting. She believed Garin could provide that kind of money. She even believed he would.
“No,” she said. As if to take the temptation out of his hands, she willed the sword away.
He came at her without warning, rushing at her low and grabbing her hips as he shoved her back against the stove. He fumbled for one of the knives in the wooden block by the sink. Grabbing a thick-bladed butcher’s knife, he raised it to strike.
Freeing her right arm from Garin’s grasp, Annja drove the heel of her palm into his nose. Blood spurted as the cartilage collapsed.
He yowled in pain and tried to hang on to her. His knife hand came down.
Annja twisted and avoided the knife. The blade thudded deep into the countertop. She reared up against him, forcing him back.
Shifting, she butted him aside with her hip, heel stamped his foot, head butted him under the chin, and brought an elbow strike into line with his jaw.
Garin stepped back, his black eyes
glassy. He punched at her but she slapped his arm aside. Then he caught her with an incredibly fast left hand.
Annja dropped as if she’d been hit with a bag of wet cement. Her senses spun and for a moment she thought she was going to pass out.
Garin came after her immediately. On the ground, she knew from experience, his greater size and weight would take away every advantage her speed and strength gave her.
She rolled backward and flipped to her feet in the center of the loft. Annja only had to think of the sword for a split second and it was in her hand. Stepping back, right leg behind her left, hilt gripped firmly in both hands, she readied the sword.
Garin halted, completely out of running room.
All Annja had to do was swing. But he’d stopped his aggressions. Will it be murder? she wondered.
“Are you going to kill him, then?” a raspy voice suddenly asked.
Circling slowly, Annja maintained her grip on the sword. She turned just enough to see Roux standing in the doorway.
“Don’t either of you respect a person’s privacy?” Annja asked.
“I knocked. No one answered. Then I heard the sounds of a scuffle.” Roux entered unbidden. “I thought it best if I investigated.” He closed the door behind him.
Okay, Annja thought, at least I know he’s not a vampire.
Roux took off his long jacket. He wore a casual tan suit. “Are you going to kill him?” he asked again as if the question was a typical greeting.
Garin watched her carefully. He kept his hands spread to the side, ready to move.
Annja continued to slowly circle, never crossing her feet, so she wouldn’t trip. She stopped when Roux was behind Garin.
“I don’t know yet,” Annja admitted.
“My vote is no,” Garin said.
“You tried to kill me,” Annja said, “right after I told you that I would kill you if you tried.”
“I really didn’t think you meant it,” he said.
“You would have killed me.”
Garin was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Probably.”
“Miss Creed,” Roux said.
“Do you want to kill him?” Annja asked. Maybe that would be better. Although it would still be in her loft. She wondered if she could talk the old man into killing Garin somewhere else.