He knew what remained: the Crown.
Guy Everett untied the robe, which, with a little shrug—all he could manage—slipped from his shoulders. Fell away. As surely as pain and doubt and fear. Fell clean away. His fingers stroked his naked ribs that jutted like a dozen lances of their own, aspiring to be stilettos penetrating through dying flesh to find the beautiful thick and golden air of Robus Christi. He touched the scar on his right side where he had lanced himself—privately—when Alaric had presented the holy object that the Roman had used at the Crucifixion; that’s how ecstatic he had been. The infection had finally cleared up. And he touched the white loincloth that was all that covered him. His feet, with his insteps tattooed with the bold images of nails, seemed very far away from him. As he leaned toward them, where he sat, it was as if his backbone was popping into brilliant nothingness, one bone at a time, like bulbs shot out by bored boys. His breath was very shallow now, and he realized with a strange, remote lance of fear, that he couldn’t see.
It was now.
With a cry, Guy Everett clutched the Crown of Thorns, and as he sank back, drove the barbs into his skull in a rush of what he could only call bliss.
29
This time, she arrived first for their drink together, about twenty minutes early. On some level, it was like finding high ground before a battle is enjoined. Not that Val expected a battle. But whenever she thought about this sizzling hot new Words on Fire author—based strictly on his prose, naturally—she found herself muddling around in military imagery. Find the high ground, keep your gunpowder dry, don’t go straight up the center. These, she knew, had nothing to do with metaphor, not really. And they had everything to do with survival, based on hard experience.
Val found a booth near the back, and when the bartender raised his eyebrows at her, she ordered her favorite, a Sam Adams Boston Lager, in honor of meeting James Killian and discussing a beer book. By him, it was an exposé of sex, intrigue, and general bad behavior in the craft beer industry. By her, it was a beer book. When the Sam came, along with a paper coaster, she felt herself settle down from the difficult day, her eyes straying back to the entrance. Outside, afternoon sunlight backlit the hurrying crowd, and there was nobody who was demanding a damn thing of her. Happy hour was officially early that day.
Sipping through the delicious head, Val turned the pages of Killian’s new book proposal to the table of contents. There was a regional order to the material she wasn’t sure she liked, because it might push readers into thinking there were more cultural explanations for whatever particular bad behavior Killian was describing than perhaps there really were. She’d have to think about it. Just then her eye caught the title of one chapter in the section on craft brewing in the U.K.—“Getting Mild in the Midlands.” She read the teaser: “The Stakes Get Raised at a Norfolk Brew Pub.” For a second, Val felt queasy. Then she thumbed through the pages of the proposal’s Overview until she found more information on the Norfolk Brew Pub.
Olde Bandylegs Brew Pub, Sidestrand, Norfolk, U.K.
And the beer was called the Olde Bandylegs Mild Caper. A “mild,” Killian described briefly, was a beer dark in color and light in alcohol, one in which malt is dominant and hops take a backseat.
And it struck her forcefully that the bottle cap Adrian had slipped absentmindedly into Val’s jacket pocket was from the Olde Bandylegs Pub. Val felt like a seven-year-old kid again the time Aunt Greta had taken her to Miami Beach and had held a mighty conch shell up to her little ear. Not the sound of the ocean so much as a great, deafening rush of air. With stiff fingers, Val drew the bottle cap out of her pocket and held it in her lap. Then she glanced down at it quickly. The graphic showed a bowlegged sprite capering lightly with a tabby cat. The proposal stated that Killian himself had visited each brew pub in the book and had sampled plentiful amounts of the signature brews.
What explained it? Val couldn’t take her eyes from the silver and vermilion bottle cap. There was only one place Adrian could have had that beer—at the Olde Bandylegs Brew Pub in Sidestrand, Norfolk, while she was wearing Val’s white jacket. And there was only one place Killian could have had that beer. But what if it had been months ago, or a year ago? Something she could put down to a weird coincidence, not this dread that was settling around her heart. Val grabbed her phone and Googled the Olde Bandylegs Mild Caper. What came up was the pub’s homepage, where the headlining image was the bowlegged sprite, capering with a cat. New Member of the Bandylegs Family! Meet the Mild! And the text stated that the beer had been brought to market three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago.
She forced herself to construct a timeline, to see if an overlap between two people and a new beer was possible. Killian was, in a sense, easy. Val herself knew Killian was in New York for the past week, since Adrian had died. Where he was before this past week, she couldn’t say, except for the new fact that he had sampled the Olde Bandylegs Mild Caper, which put him firmly in Norfolk between two and three weeks ago. Adrian’s trip to England to visit her brother was a week long, and it would have been over the second week of the Mild Caper’s appearance. It meant that Killian and Adrian overlapped for a single week in Sidestrand, Norfolk of all places. At the end of that week’s overlap, the Crown of Thorns was stolen from Burnham Norton Abbey, Bale’s boy monk Fintan McGregor went over a cliff, and Adrian had written in her Trip Journal about a sexy shaggy-haired stranger in the Olde Bandylegs Pub. And, without knowing, she had made off with the Crown of Thorns on her trip back to the States.
Val pulled herself up straight, shutting her eyes, thinking it through again. It was only a disturbing coincidence, that’s all. Both Killian and Adrian may very well have been in Sidestrand over the same time, never met, never even seen each other, and gone their separate ways, story over. Just two New Yorkers who happened, over the course of a week, to be traveling in Norfolk and turning up in the same pub to sample the new beer on entirely different days. Although the general overlap was possible, there was absolutely nothing that put them in the very same location on any given day. Killian was researching his new book; Adrian was visiting her brother the monk.
Just two New Yorkers.
But even as she put it all down to a crazy coincidence, it struck Val that she didn’t really know how much of a New Yorker Killian really was. Didn’t he tell her he had grown up in the Midwest somewhere? And hadn’t he worked out in L.A. as plumber to the stars? When it came right down to it, where did he call home? Then or now? She had a sense from a few vague answers he had given her that he bounced around, a rolling stone, that sort of thing, and she had never pressed him enough for more information. She didn’t even know where he was staying over the last number of days while they met to talk about edits on Plumb Lines.
Did Killian have a family? A wife and kids? A partner and kids? What did he do when he wasn’t tracking scandals in the beer world or bringing to light the strange bathroom habits of the clogged and famous? His jacket bio was, when she thought about it, colorful and unspecific—bouncer, ski bum, short-order cook—the sort of transient jobs no one would question because we all think we know exactly what they mean. One day Killian had appeared, and because he was handsome and charming, that was really everyone’s lucky, lucky day. The world is just that welcoming when you’re handsome and charming. Just that unquestioning. Just that fatally incurious…
Quickly, Val thumbed through author photos she had on her iPhone, looking for a shot of Killian. And then she remembered. No, no, he had waved away the very idea of an author photo—no jacket photo for me, let my words do the talking—besides, he had laughed in a way that had charmed Ivy and two editorial assistants, I’m actually pretty shy. With that he had scratched the side of his nose in what Val had privately scorned as a Gary Cooper kind of way. So she had no photos of her author James Killian, the humble and shy. This—this, she thought as she paged back to Killian’s table of contents, slipping the bottle cap back into
her pocket—this was an inexcusable oversight on her part. Her eyes shut in sheer disgust at herself.
“What’s the matter?”
She opened her eyes to see James Killian standing, smiling, at the table, slipping off a leather bomber jacket and flinging it lightly into his side of their booth.
She wasn’t sure. But until that changed, Val wanted the time together to be utterly seamless. While she pushed back against the little wormhole of some terrible truth in the part of her mind that never tired of jumping out at her in those few dark and endless corridors, her eyes found a close alternative answer to the question what’s the matter? “This chapter,” she tapped the exact place on the page, “‘The Brewmeister of Bavaria’s Dark History, and We’re Not Talking Stout.’”
He flashed her a crooked smile as he slid easily in across from her. “What about it?”
Let the games begin.
Val lifted her chin, then folded her hands in a way she thought he’d believe. After all, she was Val Cameron the Unassailable. “Your research needs to be unimpeachable.” She shot him a frank look. “Otherwise it’s libel. So, is it?”
Killian sat back, sizing her up. Val kept her expression neutral. “You don’t think a lawsuit is good PR, is that it?”
“Yes,” she said in that starchy way she was pretty sure amused the man sitting across from her, “that’s it.” It took all she had in her at that moment to wrinkle her nose at him in what she hoped was a way he’d think was flirtatious. Wasn’t that what he was after all along? “Convince me Schlesinger Publishing can trust your research on Herr—” she waved a hand dismissively, “Zussen of Zossen—”
Killian barked a laugh and seemed to loosen up. “Herr Heidrich of Augsburg,” he corrected her. She waited in silence. Then he added, “You can trust it.”
“What else can I trust?” She said, looking away, then back at him, with a slow smile.
After a moment of measured surprise, Killian leaned closer. “I’d say what you’re feeling.”
Val let her gaze drop in what she thought was a shy way, then she ran a finger slowly down her frosty glass. “Thank you for teaching me some German,” she said softly. He was watching her closely. Then: “Is that all you’ve got?” The sexiest challenge she could muster.
“I thought you’d never ask.” With that, his lips barely moved. When his eyes slid to her breasts, Val was grateful for the table between herself and James Killian.
“How do you know I’m asking?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Asking or telling,” he said. “I’m good either way.”
Val blinked at him slowly. “I’m counting on it.”
Killian gave her a long look that, for a moment, worried her. “What about that line you warned me about?” he said wryly.
She let her eyes rove his face. His green eyes, his crooked jaw line, evidence of old scraps left untreated. In the pocket of the long white jacket Adrian had borrowed for her trip to England, Val’s hand tightened down around the bottle cap until the metal grooves dug into her palm. In a crazy way it gave her the strength to ease out of the booth, his eyes still on her, and slide in next to him. Val set her lips very close to his ear. “I think it got lost in a sandstorm.”
“There are a lot of those around.”
The way he said it—his mind shifting to something outside the moment—made Val think she could lose him. “Not named James Killian there aren’t.” She reached across him to run her fingers along his neck, underneath his collar. And when his eyes closed for an instant at the touch, she glanced at the tattoo inked on the pressure point above his collarbone. R.C. When those eyes opened with a start, as though he never indulged a moment of inattention, she very slowly planted a kiss on his clean-shaven cheek, looking for all the world as though her glance had never shifted anywhere else.
“There’s something I want to give you,” she told him.
“Besides that?” he whispered, setting one hand on her inner thigh.
Val pulled a business card from her purse, and scribbled her address on the back. With a very frank look at him, she slid the card under his hand that was lingering on her thigh. “My place,” she said with a confident smile. As his fingers closed around the card and his eyes never left her lips, she knew with perfect conviction that the man knew damn well where she lived. “I’ve got some work to finish…first…so, let’s make it eight.” She needed time. “I like punctuality,” she said earnestly, her lips brushing his cheek. “It’s very important.” James Killian murmured something about aiming to please. Val’s left hand slipped out of her jacket pocket, and she covered his hand with the imprint on her palm of a bottle cap from a Norfolk pub that was going to determine his fate. It had already determined Adrian’s. She gave his hand a squeeze he might even interpret as fond. “I’ll be right back.”
On the way to the ladies room, she turned and snapped three quick pictures of him with her phone. He was smiling lazily at his beer, unaware, even with his eyes open. In a post-coital haze before anything had happened. She almost felt sorry for the bastard, slick and clever and ruthless until there was a shot at sex. R.C. The same logo as the flag on the brownstone in Gramercy Park. What the hell did it mean? What did her plumber to the stars have to do with the strange little former librarian who lived there? Val made it inside the ladies room, where she leaned heavily against the cool tiled wall, and thought of Adrian describing the stranger. Sleek moves, dirty blond hair, weathered face, his eyes on her thigh. Best sex I never had. Now it was Killian’s turn. She emailed the photos to Bale with the note: New developments, send ASAP to Melanie for ID, need answer within hour.
As Val was holding a wet paper towel against her face, and trying not to sway, Bale shot back: Who is he?
One of my authors. Worse, my date. Then she turned on the hand dryer and swiveled the nozzle to her face. How long could she take while Killian sat out there without suspecting a thing? How long could she put him off before he showed up at her building? How long could she put him off after he showed up?
Bale came back: Stall.
Won’t be the first time, she thumbed quickly.
On it. Stay tuned.
And Bale was gone.
At least when she was seven, and two years an orphan, lost in the rush of deafening air from the conch Aunt Greta had to help her hold up to her ear, at least then she had a pink and white shell. The shell explained it all. Like a small friendly monster breathing on her face in the dark with the sheets pulled up to her chin. A mystery, Greta explained, somehow knowing, of calcium and labyrinths and whorls, and little Val liked those words so much she didn’t even want to know what they meant. She had closed her eyes tight and listened. Labyrinths and whorls and calcium invited her into a place that held only rushing air and smelled slightly like the sea, and for those few minutes she couldn’t even hear her own terrible loneliness.
Now Bale was gone.
And Killian wasn’t.
She wondered if the deafening rush of air would turn out to be her own fatal ignorance.
Val stepped out of the ladies room.
30
You will know, Animus had told him many times. You will know, Alaric, when the time is near. Usually these assurances were followed with default phrases the visionary head of the organization would mutter, when man will shed his veil forever and become the new divine. That was the most recent one. With the certainty that Animus knew what he was talking about, Alaric had followed orders like the fine, holy lieutenant he was. He never questioned Animus about the prophecy that was meant—according to Animus—for no one’s eyes but his own.
But when it came right down to it, Alaric hadn’t known. Not a thing. Not a goddamn thing. There where he stood up the street from Leo House, the Christian Guesthouse where he had been staying, on legs stiff with an anxiety he had never known. Not even—to be quite fair—when he recognized the woman he had to
eliminate as she sat there in her museum office, steeped in whatever self-satisfaction she was feeling at the moment of her death at his hands. Not even when he had brained the indiscreet boy monk. In work, for Alaric, there was never any dread. But he felt it now as he stood with his phone loose in his hand. Had the rapture—or whatever it was—come and gone and he’d missed it? You will know, Alaric.
“Mr. Alaric,” came Millard’s voice in his ear.
The veteran who kept house for Animus had always been clear about not making contact with the elusive Alaric, so the agent of Robus Christi went on alert. “What is it, Millard?”
“It’s Mr. Everett, sir. He locked himself in the chapel almost a day ago, for a retreat, he said. I’m not supposed to interrupt him, but he’s not coming out and I’m—”
“Have you knocked?”
“I told you,” Millard brayed. “I was instructed not to interrupt—”
“I’m coming.” Alaric may not have sensed the time had come, but he could still get there in time to witness the fulfillment of the prophecy. He had sacrificed more than he could afford to review at this moment. A home, truthfulness in all things, the lives of others, and anything better than a nameless hour or two with women who never even needed to know his name. Good works, Animus had told him once over his nightly glass of port, are not always good for everyone, Alaric.
True, but the agent of Robus Christi wanted to witness the moment of fulfillment more than he desired what was offered to him, elsewhere, for this evening. Like the final eruption he felt with sex, his hands entwined in the red or blond or black hair of the nameless woman of the moment. A woman was never more elusive than when he was in effect pinning her to the sheets. It was wrong, no doubt, to compare those baffling times to what he could anticipate as the unspeakable joy of the fulfillment of prophecy, which would lift him for all times from inexplicable sheets and from the fine trajectory of his Glock.
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