Of Fever and Blood

Behind her, the mirror has split in two.

Rebecca experiences one last surge of energy. A scream of despair and absolute terror escapes from her throat.

“Yes,” the woman says again. “Finally. Finally.”

She takes the girl in her arms. The girl does not have the strength to resist. Rivers of tears flow from her eyes.

She lays the girl on the sofa, next to the corpse of her friend.

“No,” Rebecca whispers in an almost inaudible voice.

The woman crouches next to her. She kisses the gaping wound in her neck and rips off her clothes with growing eagerness.

“Can’t you feel it? The gods are watching us. The gods are so close now. They have come for you. The gods desire you, do you understand?”

The wolf, lying next to her, raises its head and bares its fangs.

The girl continues to cry, continues to sob.

The woman laughs.

The scalpel slides, slowly, underneath the wet sheath of her face.

83

5:30 p.m.

After the nurse had come by to retrieve her food tray, a vegetable soup she had hardly touched, and given her drugs that she swallowed hastily, Eva was left alone to stare at the ceiling through her sunglasses.

The waves of pain shot through her without respite.

Her fellow officers assumed it was a physical pain and told her all she needed was a boost in her medication. But that was not the pain she was feeling. Her colleagues also thought that she could not stop thinking about that woman-but she could, a little. No one knew the true cause.

The nurse advised her to get some rest. Eva’s bundled nerves prevented her from falling asleep.

Memories were spinning in her head. The image of that man with white hair would not go away. His eyes filled with boundless insanity and with a love just as immense. No one had ever looked at her that way. Only that man, whom she had meant to kill.

It was for this reason and this reason only that the memory of Justyna had remained with her all those years. Just so she could open her eyes. She had been such an idiot, and now she hated herself for not understanding sooner, for having walled herself up in her fortress of oblivion to avoid the black floods and the pain.

Her stomach in knots, she let the memories flow. All clearer, and with each one of them, there were more unanswered questions.

Why did my father track down my mother that way? What had she done to him? Was she only trying to save our lives? How did he find us? And, above all, how did he manage to evade the police so easily? Did he have accomplices? That was impossible, wasn’t it?

Along with those questions were the ones that she did not want to ask, the ones she refused to formulate in her head. They lurked insistently in the periphery of her consciousness.

Could he still be alive?

Do I want him to be alive?

Why?

Those thoughts set fire to her nerve endings.

Someone knocked, calling her back to reality. Vauvert stuck his head in the half-opened door.

“Okay if I come in?”

Eva fumbled with her sunglasses.

“Sure. Come in, Alexandre.”

As he walked in, she saw the flowers he was carrying. He was switching the bouquet from one hand to the other, as though he had no clue what to do with it.

“Thank you. But you shouldn’t have.”

Vauvert set the bouquet on the bedside table, pushing aside a glossy magazine one of her colleagues had brought her. He pulled out a chair and tried to make out Eva’s eyes behind the shades.

“It’s not much, really. When I saw them in the shop downstairs. Well.” He couldn’t find the right words. “I thought you might like some color in this room.”

“They look great,” Eva said.

She hated flowers. Her colleagues knew that, and so no one had brought her any. Still, she was touched by the gesture.

There was an awkward silence. Vauvert fidgeted in his chair.

“I’m so glad you’re in one piece.”

“One piece, I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Eva chuckled. “You don’t want to see me naked. I think I’m missing a few little chunks, here and there.”

Vauvert lowered his eyes. Not the best choice of words. She bit her lip, hesitated, and finally reached out to touch his arm. “Thank you, Alexandre.” Then, sensing another silence coming, she added, “Anything new?”

“Not yet. But we’ll find her eventually. And then all this will be over, once and for all.”

“You really believe that?”

Vauvert put his hand on hers.

“We know who she is. She’s wounded. She can try to crawl into any hole she wants. I doubt she can get very far.”

Eva looked into his eyes and saw that he was not believing his own words. Still, she was comforted.

“She almost did it, you know,” Eva said. “She called things from another world, things with a power we can’t possibly understand,” she said. “Her age really changed. I saw it.”

“But you stopped her.”

“I will be sure of that only when we find her body.”

She thought about what she had just said, and then she thought of the man with white hair leaning over her, devouring her with his red eyes. A man overflowing with pride for his daughter.

“I’m a monster, Alexandre.”

“Why would you say something like that?”

Because my father is a serial killer. And because when I tried to kill him, he was proud of me.

She looked distant.

“Because I wish this woman dead, don’t you get it? Not just for the sake of revenge, not even for the sake of justice. I just want to see her suffer. Every fiber of my body wants that swine to bleed out until she’s fucking dead. Just saying it, my heart beats faster.”

Vauvert looked at her silently.

“It’s not up to me to decide their fate,” Eva whispered. “And you know what? Before today, I never really understood that. Everything I’ve done, all those criminals whose brains I blew out, the ones I threw out windows without giving it a second thought because I couldn’t accept the idea of them spending six months in jail and then getting out. Every time I ever have a problem with someone, I wish him dead, do you understand? I have this in me. In my genes.”

“No, you don’t. What you have in your genes…” Vauvert fumbled for words. He gave her a smile full of emotion. “What you have in you, Eva, is an incredible ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes, even when you don’t want to. You can feel their sadness and anger and fear like nobody else can, because you suffer as much as they do. You can’t control the empathy you have been blessed with, as much as you would like to, that’s all.”

It was Eva’s turn to stare at him and to answer his smile.

“You really should be a profiler, Alexandre.”