First Blood

by S. Cedric

  He does not do any of those things.

  He remains seated in the middle of the lecture hall, his nose in his book. The curve of his bicep bulges when he turns the pages.

  The fat, sweaty red-haired girl is yelling that he is in the way. She needs to get past him. He sighs but does not bother to look at her. He is absorbed in his book and moving his lips ever so slightly. Perhaps he is reading out loud. An errant braid slips over his shoulder and falls in front of his eyes. He pushes it behind his ear and continues to murmur. Madeleine examines his slender, elegant hands.

  Now. She slowly steps down the stairs, approaching him, preparing herself mentally.

  She feels something move in the air. For a second or two, she even has the impression that a kind of veil has descended on the desks. It is like a spider web sticking to the surfaces all over the lecture hall. She thinks she must have something in her eye. A speck of dust.

  She blinks. The illusion dissipates.

  Then a shrill cry rises up.

  Madeleine looks down. The fat girl has slipped on the last step and twisted her ankle. The contents of her bag are spread out in front of her, and she is screaming like a pig with a slit throat. Her screeching draws a crowd of helpful students, who rush to her aid. She insults them copiously when they try to help her up, and she begins yelling again.

  The young man, sitting in his seat in the middle of the lecture hall, smiles ever so slightly. It is hardly more than a quiver on his lips. Madeleine smiles too. It is pure meanness, but she cannot help herself. Once again, she takes in the boy’s chiseled features, his soft braids that shine in the half-light of the room. She has an idea.

  “Are you planning to stay here?” she asks as she approaches him.

  Contact is made. He looks up. He has very pale eyes that contrast with his black skin; his arms look like forging rivers of ink. He’s something out of a graphic novel, and he is very dangerous. Madeleine has no idea why such an idea has crossed her mind, and she chases it away. He is handsome, school is starting, and she does not know anyone here yet. Those are the only things that matter.

  She wants to be the first person to know him.

  He nods. “The room is free. I looked at the schedule. There are no more classes here today.”

  Madeleine bats her eyes and tilts her head.

  “What are you reading?”

  The boy closes the book so she can see the cover. It has a black-and-white photo of a man with a guru’s face and a swastika on his forehead. The title spreads out in thick red letters: Rape and Ritual Cannibalism Among Serial Killers.

  She wavers ever so slightly. This is not what she was expecting. But he certainly does not seem to be boring, like the other boys she has known. He looks at her and smiles. His eyes have a metallic gleam. Madeleine chuckles as she gathers her wits.

  “You’ve got an intriguing taste in literature.”

  “I’m fascinated by the topic.”

  His voice is warm and powerful. It is the voice of a leader, the chief of a clan. He shows his very white teeth. His braids seem to have a life of their own when he moves his head.

  “Rape or cannibalism?” Madeleine asks, deciding not to appear too impressed.

  He laughs.

  “No. Rituals, that’s all.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Madeleine says.

  “You know, all those killers you find in books and on television think they are better than everyone else because they are getting a little attention, but they’re just losers. Like the guy they put on this cover.”

  He points to the swastika on the man’s forehead.

  “His name is Charles Manson,” he says.

  “I’ve heard of him,” Madeleine says. “He’s famous, isn’t he?”

  “Like a rock star. Members of his gang killed Sharon Tate, the movie director Roman Polanski’s wife, and the story was all over the news. But the freaks who did it were washouts, nothing but easily swayed failures. Manson was a disturbed kid who wanted to take revenge on society because it had rejected him. Now he is in prison, and what did he get? What did he accomplish? Nothing. He wasn’t even the one who committed the crimes; his followers did. He is nothing now. He never deserved any attention.”

  “What do you find so interesting about that?”

  “What I find interesting...”

  Below them, the girl with the twisted ankle is now sobbing as she is helped out of the room. Madeleine and the boy are alone in the lecture hall.

  “What I find fascinating are the forces that push ordinary people to twist nature, to break it, to tear it,” says the boy, his eyes shining with a cold fire. Is there any difference between a madman and a saint? What makes the voices they hear different?”

  “I see,” Madeleine says, although she does not see anything at all.

  She hesitates again. The boy is crazy. That is for sure. He talks about murderers as though they were the most interesting people in the world.

  She does not care.

  She likes the crazies.

  She loves them.

  “Do you want to sit down?” he asks.

  Madeleine determines the number of seconds her hesitation should last. Two. Three. That should be enough.

  “Why not?” she answers, blushing.

  When she sits down next to him, she takes in his scent. It is wild and musky.

  “My name is Madeleine,” she says, with a contrived shyness. .

  Another smile.

  “I’m Ismael.

  “Have you been interested in that for a long time, Ismael?”

  “In rituals?”

  “Yes, rituals. All that stuff about madmen and saints.”

  His slender fingers caress the book.

  “Quite awhile. That is why I’m majoring in history.”

  “Me too,” Madeleine says, with a sparkle in her eyes. “So we’re going to be together in all our classes then?”

  “It looks that way,” Ismael Constantin says and grins.

  13

  Paris

  January 21

  Heavy snow began to fall as Eva drove back home at five in the morning. The large cottony flakes stuck to her windshield. Beyond the wipers, the world seemed to slow as the snow fell to the earth. The inspector took Rue d’Avron, Boulevard de Charonne, and Rue de Bagnolet before arriving in her own neighborhood. She stopped in front of the parking garage. There were two security gates to go through, then a spiral descent to the second underground level. The concrete emptiness was immense and silent. She took the elevator to the ninth floor. Her apartment. Subdued lighting, delicious warmth. She set her service weapon on the coffee table and took off her smoke-filled clothes. Finally.

  She spent twenty minutes under the shower getting rid of the soot on her skin and the smell in her hair. But the blood-chilling sensation in her belly could not be washed away. Nor could the image of that baby with its throat cut in the freezer, its eyes open and empty, its little hand cracked from the cold. How long had it been there? How could such horrors exist? Even after all her years on the force, a sight such as this could undo her. She was still trembling, ever so slightly, her hair against her face. Water dripped down her body, not truly washing her.

  Eva felt overwhelmed. Too much had happened tonight. She did not know how to make sense of it all. She did not know what to think. Even though she was trembling badly, her muscles felt immobilized in a painful knot. She couldn’t scream, move or think.

  She braced herself against the tiled wall of the shower and waited for her limbs to stop shaking, for her tears to stop flowing. She closed her eyes, but the images kept parading past in a kaleidoscope of burned walls, tall flames, and dead babies staring into the distance. Gang members circling her, rocks and iron bars in their hands, embers of hatred burning in their eyes. And the flames, rising, whistling, eating up the building, buckling it, shattering windows, billowing smoke, unbearable heat, the smell of burned plastic. Constantin’s body, his heart torn out. The smell of torture mixed
with ashes. And the final discovery—that tiny body, mutilated. A baby.

  She gasped for air, coughed and spat. Her lungs felt like they were full of sticky tar.

  Whenever there was violence against a child, Eva lost control. It took only a minute for the self-discipline she cultivated to crack and vanish, to be replaced with rage and distress, all of humanity’s violence flooding through her.

  But drowning in those feelings was out of the question. She could not let these dark rivers swallow her up.

  Not now. Never again.

  Leroy had admitted that everyone knew her story, her personal puzzle of shadows. Okay. So be it. She would manage. But she could not let them see how much this case was affecting her.

  She turned off the water and looked at her body in the mirror, her pale skin, her snow-white hair, and her eyes. She had never gotten used to the way she looked. She thought she looked like a monster.

  Like the monster that begot me.

  The wound she carried in her heart, in her soul, would never leave her in peace, simply because it was the kind that never healed. It would always be there to haunt her.

  At least the Homicide Unit has the case, she told herself. The discovery of the frozen baby changed everything, and the state attorney had to hand the Constantin case over to them. Eva had no illusions. Larusso would make their life difficult whenever he could. But that was in the future. It had not happened yet.

  She dried herself and put on a silk nightshirt, leaving her hair wet. Right now, another day is over. And soon, there will be one less night.

  As she did every other night, she slipped a sleeping pill onto her tongue and swallowed it with a gulp of vodka. Then, taking her glass with her, she went to light a final cigarette in front of the living room window.

  Because she lived on the ninth floor, she had a sweeping view of the city, which was now sleeping under the swirling white flakes. On the other side of the street, she could see a thin layer of snow covering the branches of the trees in the small park.

  The melancholy of the scene made her think about Alexander and their affair. It was short and passionate. That was two years ago. It seemed far away now. He, too, was a cop. He went back south to his job, his squad, and his responsibilities. He had never asked anything of her, and she had never promised anything. They were both too similar and too different. Their ghosts were too present. She suddenly realized how alone she felt, now more than ever.

  Do I miss him?

  Yes. She missed him, terribly. His powerful body made her feel so small and so protected. His rough hands on her skin. His sensitive teenager-like awkwardness, always trying to do things right and never quite managing. There was a time when they had recognized each other for what they were: two lost souls. They were both trying to find their way in a river of shadows. They had both found it in the police uniform, in hunting killers, in blindly moving forward. The bitter irony was that she knew nothing about his secrets, and he knew scant about hers.

  Alexandre Vauvert, was the cop she could have loved if life had not robbed her of that ability, if her sister and her mother had not been torn from her when she was only six years old. How could you love someone after that? Have could you give that essential part of your being when it could be ripped away for no reason at any moment?

  The telephone was on a mahogany secretary, in the corner of the room. It sat on a rectangle of glass that covered a newspaper photo of the two of them. It was taken on the day they had brought down the two murdering brothers Claude and Roman Salaville, the Black Mountain vampires. The way they met was old news. All she had to do now was call his number. Alexandre suffered from insomnia, so she would not be bothering him. She knew he would be waiting for her call. He had left her so many messages, which she had not answered. She did not want to appear weak. She did not want him to see how far she had drifted, how much she needed to reach out to a giant, a savior.

  “What a waste, girl,” she said to her pale reflection in the picture window.

  Calling him was out of the question. She had hurt him, as she had hurt everyone else who was close to her. Erwan Leroy thought she was heartless. He believed she was toying with Alexandre, when it was just the opposite. She didn’t want to involve him in her torments. That was all. When she needed sex, she brought strangers home. She picked up handsome young idiots in nightclubs and threw them out as soon as her desire was quenched. It was better that way. Much better.

  The digital clock displayed six a.m.

  She enjoyed the end of her cigarette and emptied her glass in one final, large gulp.

  She went to bed.

  She dreamed. It was a nightmare, so familiar.

  She dreaded these vicious, terrifying visions that tortured her on the nights when she was weakest or when the pills were not enough to bring on sweet forgetfulness.

  When she was a child, right before going to sleep, she would say, “Tonight, I will not have a nightmare.” It was like a magic formula, naive wishful thinking that worked. So she had started doing it again. “I will not have a nightmare,” she would repeat to herself. It got results. That is, when she remembered to do it.

  Tonight, she had forgotten. Before thinking about repeating her protective mantra, she had fallen into a deep sleep, thanks to the pill.

  The nightmare returned, of course.

  But she did not dream about the basement. She did not see herself as a six-year-old. She did not dream about her sister or her mother, even though the dark tentacles of her childhood were still there in the depths, quivering on the edge.

  Instead, she found herself on a sidewalk covered in snow. She was helpless as she watched a fire consume her building like a giant dazzling beast, the same way the flame-hungry creature had devoured Constantin’s apartment complex. But in this fire, no one was able to escape. Behind the windows were dozens of people who had been bound to their kitchen tables or to their beds or hung cross-like from the ceiling. They were sacrifices incapable of escaping and sentenced to be eaten by the fire. She was sure that this blaze was a huge pyre, a purifying holocaust, where the evil souls of sinners were being purified.

  She knew her own soul was evil, of course. She was born a sinner. It was in her blood. The blaze was seeking her. Perhaps it had already picked up her scent. This anxiety was the linchpin of her soul. One day she, too, would be tied up and sentenced to death. She, the white-haired witch, would burn, as she would have in the Middle Ages.

  In a panic, she ran across the street to distance herself from the swirling smoke and the inferno, which was casting its blood-red color on the snow. Her shoes made a dull crunching sound as she dashed across the snowy carpet.

  Eva pulled her jacket tighter, but it did not ward off the cold. Her hands were frozen. She watched them turn blue, her veins slowly appearing under her skin. Now her breasts and stomach were covered in a layer of ice.

  Off balance and out of breath, she heard the cries of the birds.

  Crows. Enormous crows. There were dozens of them. The black birds circled just above her. Their shrill cries sounded like wails. They were terrible, almost-human sounds.

  One of them flew in front of her, beating its large, powerful wings.

  “E-va!” it cawed.

  The others joined in. “E-va! E-va! E-va!”

  She shivered, but she had nowhere to hide. The building collapsed behind her, its foundation already in cinders. She heard the roar of the flames racing along the sidewalk. It was a blinding, red tidal wave.

  The fire spread down the street. The parked cars turned into exploding balls of fire. Blazing columns rose to the sky.

  The flames were seeking her.

  Eva kept running faster, even though the snow was getting heavier underfoot. She headed deep into the park, which seemed much bigger.

  Suddenly, the birds converged in the middle of the park.

  And there he was, in the vortex. He was the one attracting the crows, just as she had expected.

  It was always him.
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br />   He had white hair and was sitting on a bench, feeding the agitated crows, which were flapping all around him and still crying, “E-va! E-va!” At first, Eva thought he was feeding them bread.

  But an instant later, she spotted his sticky red hand. He was holding out huge chunks of flesh. The birds were ripping them from his hand, and the man was smiling as he watched them fight to get the best pieces.

  Eva froze.

  Her father threw out another chunk of flesh. A crow flew past and grabbed it. Then the man looked up.

  His dark red eyes met hers.

  He had an angular face, not that old, and white hair.

  Eva lost herself in the red lakes that were his eyes.

  “You,” she whispered. “You.”

  “Soon,” her father said with a smile.

  The crows turned on Eva like a wave of black feathers, claws, and beaks. They cawed her name, “E-va! E-va!”

  Her own screams woke her up.

  She threw off the sheets. She was out of breath and shaking with fear.

  Her father was dead.

  It had to be that way.

  She had looked for him everywhere. He did not exist anymore. He had vanished overnight twenty-five years earlier. It was impossible to disappear so completely and not be dead.

  That meant that he would never find her again. He will never be able to hurt me again.

  Eva kept saying that to herself.

  One day, she would be completely convinced of it. Perhaps.

  She slipped out of her bed.

  The clock read seven fifty. She felt her way along the wall and brushed past a chest of drawers. She calculated that she had slept roughly two hours.

  She crossed under the archway that separated her bedroom from the living room and went to the window. In the faint light of dawn, the street was filled with headlights, pedestrians, and the other ordinary palpitations of Paris.

  The park was like it was in her dream. White with snow and deserted.

  An island of calm in the middle of an urban ocean.

  She looked for the bench she had dreamed about and spotted it in the back, buried in cottony snow. There was no man sitting on it, of course. There were no crows feasting on raw flesh. There was not even a pigeon in sight. There was nothing but whiteness and the twisted shapes of the trees.