“Well, do you always lie to your partners like that?”
Vauvert smiled sadly.
“Only when I have no choice, Erwan. We just can’t be too careful.”
Leroy nodded and went back to his book. A minute later, he whistled between his teeth.
“Listen to this. One of the rituals that the Dacians practiced was called the Scarlet Feast or the Feast of Blood. Ring a bell?”
It rang a bell, all right.
“The inscriptions on the window in the
“Exactly. According to what I read in here, the Dacians believed it was possible to summon the souls of the dead with this ceremony. It was used to obtain gifts from the gods.”
“What kinds of gifts?”
“All sorts of things, I guess. Money, power.”
“Eternal youth?”
“Why not? The ritual was not that easy to perform, though. The gods were demanding. To please them, you had to sacrifice young flesh. And not just a little flesh. Seventy girls in all.”
“Seventy? That’s mass murder.”
“Anyway, it’s a ritual that only a witch can perform, according to the book. First she has to bleed her victims and cut off their faces. The goal is to free them from both life and death. Then the wolf spirits come to take their souls to the gods. Sounds just like what our killer is doing, doesn’t it?”
“Hell yeah,” Vauvert sighed. “That’s the one ritual she’s reproducing in detail.”
He hesitated.
“Erwan…”
“Yes?”
The black fir trees were whizzing by. Shortly now, they would be in Millau. He had to tell him. God dammit, he couldn’t postpone this any longer.
“I saw them.”
“What?”
“The wolves,” Vauvert said. “I went back to the Salaville farm yesterday. Something strange happened to me over there. A kind of hallucination. I saw two wolves. I even shot at one of them. Except it wasn’t a wolf at all.”
“Uh, sorry, but I don’t get it.”
“I know. It’s impossible to believe, isn’t it? But something attacked me, and that thing had human blood in its veins.”
“Because you killed it?”
“No. It vanished. One moment the beast was there, and the next it was gone. And I have no rational explanation for it. All I know is that it really did happen. There was blood on my bullets. I had it analyzed. It turned out to be the blood of one of the Salaville brothers.”
Leroy digested the information. Vauvert kept on driving, his face inscrutable.
“The blood of a man who died a year ago, right?”
“Yes,” Vauvert said.
“And at Eva’s, there was the blood of a girl who was already dead.” Leroy understood where this logic was leading them. “You think this ritual actually works? That stuff like this is possible? Freeing yourself from death like the Dacians believed you could?”
“What do you want me to say? I don’t know. All I know is that someone is following an ancient ritual and that this person does believe in its power. She’s going to keep on killing until she gets her seventy victims. Real or not, she’s going to see it through to the end. She will slaughter them one by one. And the next one on her list is Eva.”
Leroy thought about it for a few moments.
“She’s up to twenty-six, if we count the twenty-four girls in Ariege and the two we found in Paris. Maybe even up to thirty if the four patients missing from the Raynal Center were actually her first victims.”
“Thirty, that’s a minimum,” Vauvert said. “If the murders did start in the city of Rodez and if she managed to hide them all this time, then it’s possible that the list is a lot longer than that.”
A sign told them that they were arriving in Saint-Affrique. The SUV crossed a bridge, then rushed into a series of narrow deserted streets.
On the dashboard, the clock read 11:47.
Time kept ticking.
52
“I’m scared,” Eva whispers.
She has shut her eyes, and she is trembling.
Against her, she can feel the reassuring presence of her sister. Whether or not she really exists does not matter any longer. She is there. With her. That is all that counts.
“Don’t be scared,” Justyna whispers in her ear.
“You know she’s going to come back. She’s going to torture me. I won’t be able to stand it.”
“You will have to hold on.”
Tears stream down Eva’s cheeks and onto her dry lips. They’re salty, burning tears.
“I won’t be able to. I know I won’t be able to.”
Her sister snuggles against her, reassuring.
“I’m so sorry, Justyna. I don’t know why he took you and not me.”
“That’s all in the past,” the little girl says softly.
Eva shakes her head.
“I promised you that nothing was going to happen to us.” She gags and spits out blood. “I told you that if we stayed together nothing would happen to us. It was a lie. You died because of me. And the monster, he didn’t even want me.”
“It was never your fault. You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have known. Like I should have known that one day or another the monster would come back, that it would be for me. That time has come, you know. The monster has changed. He’s wearing a mask now, but deep down, he’s the same. He came to finish his job.”
Justyna gives Eva two light and loving kisses on her closed eyes.
She was only six years old.
She does not want to remember any of this.
She has tried so hard to banish what happened from her mind.
But here she is. It never worked. Every time she shuts her eyes, it is as though she’s reliving that day.
The day when everything fell apart.
The very last time Mommy kissed them as she went to work, leaving them with Mrs. Rieux, that kind woman who always had fruit juice and cookies in her house and so many channels on her television. Eva and Justyna spent a good part of the afternoon watching episodes of
Mommy told them, often. It was very difficult to recognize the bad men. You could never go by first impressions. Sometimes, someone who looked very nice could be a bad man in disguise, a man who wanted only one thing, to catch you and do very bad things to you. That is the reason you had to be on your guard and watch out, always. The idea was a bit difficult for little girls to grasp, of course, but what they did understand-and had for a very long time-was that Mommy was very afraid of bad men. That told them more than all the explanations in
