Madonna Key 03 - Dark Revelations

by Lorna Tedder

  “Aubrey.” He turned my chin toward him with a single index finger. His face had softened, and for a second I almost thought he might kiss me. “I’m sorry.”

  He held his finger against my skin as we stared at each other. He meant it. Damn. He meant it. Scorpio rising, Scarlet had called him. I didn’t know much about astrology, but I knew that an ascendant in Scorpio was special. All that emotion just under the surface, always hidden but utterly intense passion.

  He blinked and looked toward the alley entrance.

  “Shit!” He went stiff.

  I followed his gaze. The gray BMW blocked my view.

  Chapter 10

  I’m good at finding ways out, I told myself. I couldn’t go forward. We were blocked. I had to find an alternative.

  I gritted my teeth and threw the gearshift into Reverse. Hands hard on the wheel, I turned to look behind me and plowed backward through the alley and its garbage, then spun out into the street behind me, across traffic and into another alley. My earlier luck didn’t hold out, and I scraped a wall as I backed out onto another street and spun into a courtyard full of flowers and small statues. We waited, Eric and I exchanging nervous glances. No gray BMW. In another silent minute, I maneuvered out the courtyard and back to the main road out of the city. No one followed. I looked in the mirror for the next few kilometers, but still no gray BMW.

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  “So what’s the plan?” I asked, finally expelling a breath. “You and Benny tour the countryside for an extra day and then go home to Daddy?”

  “Something like that. I’ll spend the next day chasing you and finally report in from a pay phone to give Josh my status.”

  “And me? What happens to me? How will you justify your existence when I don’t return with you? Benny may be too young to explain, but you’ll be expected to.”

  I looked at him hard. “I’m not going back with you, right? Now that you’re here with Benny, there’s no reason for me to go back.”

  “No, you’re not going back with me. You’re to meet your friend Catrina in Paris. If she’s not there, then go directly to her farmhouse in Lys. Take the tiles and manuscript to her for safekeeping. Meanwhile, you’re going to make a daring last-minute escape befitting one of Dr. Moon’s famous getaways.” His lips twisted in slight amusement. “Me? I will heroically save the child from your dastardly clutches and return him to his father. Consider it a win-win situation.”

  Wait a minute. “How did you know about Catrina?”

  Before he could answer, a single raindrop splashed on the windshield in front of me. We were well out into the countryside, and on both sides of the road patches of sunflowers bowed their heads under a sudden light breeze.

  Then just as quickly they dipped low, their heads touching the ground and stems bouncing upright again and again as a heavier wind swept through the fields around us.

  Clouds zipped in front of us, across the sky above the 172

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  road ahead. The single raindrop became two, then three, then a deluge.

  I checked the rearview mirror. Benny yanked off his headphones and stared, horrified, out the passenger window. He began to whimper.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” I called back to him, fumbling as quickly as I could for the windshield wipers. I flipped them on high, but even then the wipers couldn’t keep pace with the rain. “Put your headphones back on,” I told him. “Close your eyes and listen to your story.”

  His reflection obeyed and he leaned back in his seat with his arms folded and his eyes squeezed shut.

  The wipers slapped back and forth with little effect.

  I braked gently, then again, until I slowed to a crawl.

  Eric turned in his seat to check on Benny, whose eyes were still tightly closed.

  “Answer me,” I shouted over the pounding rain.

  “How did you know about Catrina?”

  I could no longer see anything in front of me except for gray. I maneuvered toward the roadside, but Eric grabbed the steering wheel and swung us back onto the road.

  “You can’t stop,” he said. “Do not stop. No matter what.”

  I wiped at the foggy windshield with my left hand and gripped the wheel with my right. “We have to stop.

  It’s not safe to keep going.”

  “Do not stop!” Eric roared. “Keep going!”

  “No.” I swerved toward the roadside again, but he seized the steering wheel and angled the automobile back onto the road.

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  “If you can’t drive in heavy rain, I will.”

  “I can drive just fine. This is ridiculous! I will not put that child in the backseat at risk when I can’t even see the hood of my own automobile.”

  “If you do not continue to drive, you put us all at risk, including yourself. Including me. Including that boy.”

  He leaned back in his seat. “Keep moving. See if you can get ahead of the storm.”

  “Get ahead of— There’s no way! It’s all around us.”

  “Exactly. It’s all around us. ”

  I veered sharply to avoid another car that had pulled onto the roadside in front of me, but I didn’t see its blinking hazard lights in time. I heard the crunch of metal. My front bumper plowed the length of the automobile, denting in both doors and fenders.

  “Do not stop!” Eric yelled as the other driver honked furiously back at me. “Keep driving!”

  “But I just—”

  “Keep driving!”

  In the backseat, Benny started to cry. “Want my mother.”

  “Do not stop!” The veins in Eric’s forehead bulged.

  I didn’t like the look in his eyes. Not anger. Terror. The Adrianos’ most important bodyguard was scared. When Benny whimpered again, Eric lowered his voice. “No matter what happens, you must keep driving. If we have a chance to get out from under this storm, we have to try. It may already be too late. They’ll have to try for a visual of the car to follow you. They can’t track you in the storm. Not until it stops.”

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  So there was another tracker on the Mercedes? I motioned to the pounding water on my windshield. I could hardly see the metal rim of the hood at the base of the windshield wipers. Our entire universe had shrunk to no more than a finger’s length outside the car.

  The road ahead was straight, but I wasn’t sure I could navigate by the feel of the ground under the tires.

  “How can anyone be expected to drive in this kind of storm?” I asked.

  “That’s what they’re counting on.”

  “They who?”

  “Simon. Caleb. If Simon catches us, I can salvage myself. I’m adept at cover stories. With Caleb, I don’t know. I’d have to take the boy and run, hope to get to Josh before Caleb gets to Benny. But if they catch you?”

  He shook his head. “If they catch you, Aubrey de Lune, they will kill you.”

  I swallowed. Yes. That much I knew already.

  “When it comes to torture, Simon is very efficient.

  Trust me, Aubrey. I’ve seen it.” Eric caught my gaze for a split second but long enough. “Simon will use whatever emotional attachments you have—to anyone—to find out whatever it is you know.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  He took a deep breath. “Then that’s unfortunate.

  Because rather than torture you directly, he’ll make you watch while he dismembers the people you care about.”

  “I told you—I don’t know anything. All the artifacts I’ve acquired for the Adrianos, I’ve given to them.” I considered the contents of the trunk. “Until now. I never Lorna Tedder

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  held anything back. I was always honest in my dealings.”

  An honorable thief. My last sliver of integrity.

  “He’s not so much interested in your artifacts as your ancestors. The women you descended from. The women they told you about on y
our eighteenth birthday. The history of the tiles. In your family branch, that was the tradition.”

  “How would you know anything about my family?”

  Or that I was Aubrey de Lune? As for my family, I’d lost them long ago, but the wound was still fresh. “How would you know anything about me? ”

  “Because I’ve researched you thoroughly.”

  “Oh.”

  “In your family, on the eldest daughter’s eighteenth birthday, the daughter is told the story of the tiles and given the oral history of your family tree. That’s how your mother learned about the tiles. And her mother before her, and her mother’s mother.”

  White-knuckled, I clutched the steering wheel. I leaned forward, flattening the accelerator as much as I dared. “I don’t know any stories,” I told him. Why couldn’t he understand? Was that what Myrddin had meant? “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My mother died before I was eighteen. My grandmother died when I was a little girl. My father vanished when I was barely old enough to remember his face. I never heard any stories about the tiles. I saw them a couple of times, but that’s all. The only stories I ever heard—

  ever—was how I was descended from Joan of Arc, but that was just a bedtime story my grandmother told me.”

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  Eric stared at me, then started laughing. “All this time! All this time he kept you alive so you could lead him to the other women like you, the other descendants.

  And you knew nothing.” He shook his head and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “Incredible! They lured you back to Europe, set you up, turned you into a criminal, made you useful to them, paid you a fortune with each completed assignment, and all with the hope that you would flit around Europe and eventually contact others of your kind. Didn’t you ever wonder why so many of your acquaintances disappeared into thin air?”

  Catrina. I pressed my fingers to my lips and then gripped the steering wheel again. She was the only acquaintance I had much to do with anymore, and because I didn’t entirely trust her, I’d been extremely discreet with my connections to her. Other than an occasional professional contact, I’d simply never been able to keep a female acquaintance for long, so I’d pulled back, I’d withdrawn, isolated myself. I’d thought somehow it was my fault, that I was too cold, too distant. Why else would my newest women friends, year after year after year, not return my calls or ever show up for a planned lunch?

  Friendships seemed out of the question for me. As soon as a promising friendship started, it was over, and not once did I ever know why the other woman had dropped me. If what Eric was saying was true, becoming friends with me had probably cost them their lives.

  “Catrina. How did you know about Catrina? The old man knew about her, too.”

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  Eric sobered. “I work for him.”

  “Who?”

  “Myrddin.”

  “I thought you worked for Josh.”

  “I do. But I’m Myrddin’s inside man. I’m the one who took him food through the tunnels and kept him alive. Unfortunately I couldn’t get him out of there without blowing my cover, so he insisted on staying. Everything he knows, I know. He’s given me full authority to speak for him.” Not even a smile. “So you don’t know why all this is happening?”

  “No. I mean, Myrddin was talking crazy stuff in the vault, but…I’m not sure about any of it.” Too much had happened in the past twenty-four hours. Everything I’d thought was real had been shown to me for what it was: an illusion.

  “Centuries ago, there was a group of women. They were enemies of the Adrianos. Quite possibly the only people the Adrianos ever feared. They were scattered to the corners of the earth and nearly wiped out. Max Adriano dedicated years of his life to tracking down their descendants and decimating their growing ranks.

  The manuscript in the trunk—that’s what he used to find them.”

  “Myrddin told me. The family crests in the margins. A reverse genealogy,” I murmured above the patter of rain.

  He thought about my interpretation, then agreed. “A sort of reverse genealogy, yes. Instead of finding the ancestors, he found the descendants. He also found their tiles. Generations of his forefathers have been search-178

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  ing for them. But Max? He was methodical, ruthless.

  That’s why Myrddin and I hoped to keep you away from the palazzo. And to keep you from getting that manuscript in the first place.”

  The rain lightened and a ray of sunshine struck the automobile. I pushed the accelerator with more confidence.

  “The bad information you passed to me on the San Francisco job. You did that intentionally.”

  He nodded. His gaze raked across my face. Something sparked at me—a desperate tenderness, a wish, a desire that could not be requited. “Better that you be in jail and that manuscript in safe hands than you bring it back to Simon. Max lost it before the advent of photocopying, so there was only one copy. He took it with him to Poland to track down a family there, and while it was out of the Adriano vault, it was stolen and later fell into Nazi hands. All these years, it’s been lost. It showed up on Simon’s radar after the Berlin Wall fell, and he’s been chasing it ever since. The private investor you took it from refused to deal with the Adrianos—bad business deal from years ago—and would never have sold it to them. It was incredibly valuable to Simon, mostly because it was the key to finding his enemies and making sure they never discovered their heritage.”

  And I had delivered it to Simon personally. The book was my history—and apparently my destiny.

  “And Myrddin told you all this?” The story seemed to match the scant bit of information I’d been given in the vault.

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  “Yes. Myrddin told me he’s been fighting Max and his boys for several years now, since before the time I joined Adriano Security on the recommendation of my college roommate—Josh. Max and Myrddin were old friends, closer than brothers, the old man told me.

  Myrddin has dedicated the remainder of his life to tracking down those of your kind before the Adrianos can find you.”

  The rain in front of us suddenly vanished. The road was dry. I glanced in the side mirror and saw nothing but blackness behind me. Except the blackness was getting closer, closer. I urged the accelerator all the way to the floor.

  “Whatever happens to you and me,” he said, “we can’t let that manuscript or those tiles fall back into Simon’s and Caleb’s hands.”

  I glanced in the mirror. Benny sat calmly staring out the window at the sunny fields, his headphones securely clamped over his ears while he lost himself in what must have been an incredible story to hold his attention through most of the storm. He couldn’t see the storm behind us, only sunshine ahead.

  I could only hope that Simon hadn’t discovered my daughter, but I couldn’t think of any easy way to ask Eric, not without tipping him off. Eric had been astonish-ingly candid with me, almost as if he had only a short time to get his point across and disappear forever from my life as so many other acquaintances and potential friends had.

  There it was, then. All that hidden Scorpio intensity, 180

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  better seen with my intuition than my eyes. I wanted to see it close-up. I wanted to touch it. I wasn’t positive that I could trust him, but I could work with him. For the moment, at least.

  Eric shifted in his seat. His eyes glinted at me in the odd light of the sun ahead and the black clouds behind.

  “Faster,” he urged.

  I stomped the accelerator. He didn’t need to tell me.

  “They shouldn’t have found us,” I said. “The three men in the gray BMW. They shouldn’t have been behind us. They found us after you removed the tracker.”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “That, I do not know. Unless you had a second tracker on your car, and that’s entirely possibl
e.”

  A drop of rain hit the trunk of the car. Odd. The storm was catching up with us even though the wind outside was blowing against it.

  “Drive faster.”

  “The polizia—”

  “Don’t worry about the police. You can outrun them.

  The weather? No.”

  I kicked the accelerator to the floor. The fields and the occasional automobile we met all blurred past. The speedometer needle rose until I could no longer see it.

  “Myrddin said something about the Adrianos being able to control the weather. Is it true? Does Simon have some kind of new technology?”

  “No, not new technology. It’s ancient.”

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  storm was catching up with us. Again. We wouldn’t be able to stay out of it much longer.

  “I know you’re not fond of making plans,” I said to Eric in the seat beside me, “but I think it’s time to make an exception.”

  Eric shot me a resigned look. “All right then. We’ll find a place to stop. Defense will be a problem, though.

  We have only one weapon between the two of us. Unless you have something hidden under your seat.”

  I shook my head. The evening before, Eric had taken my sole weapon, the one I’d taken from the guard at the entrance. I knew better than to arrive at the palazzo with any kind of weapons hidden inside or under the automobile—Adriano security always confiscated them and made me look bad to Simon. I was expected to have some kind of weapon on my person, and in most cases I had to surrender that at the security gate, as well. So generally I didn’t even bother.

  “No other weapons,” I said. “Nothing but our wits.”

  A few raindrops splashed on the windshield. “If we could find a church—”

  He laughed. “You think sacred ground would keep the Adrianos at bay? That’s never happened before.

  They’re not vampires or zombies. They’re mortal men.”

  I sniffed. “Mortal men who never die of natural causes. I’ve heard the rumor.”

  “It’s because of the ley lines under the palazzo. And under their other estates. The ley lines keep them healthy. Since I’ve been at the palazzo, I’ve been more…vital than ever in my life.” He’d paused as if to 182