Page 25

Fifteen

Lydia sat at the battered kitchen table at Chateau de Laurier, watching the rising sun slice through the morning mist like a scalpel.

“Did you sleep?” Henry asked. Lydia hadn’t heard him come in.

She shook her head. “You?”

“On and off.” He sat. He looked puffy and tired. “Have you found a car?”

“I believe so,” she said, although in truth, she wasn’t so sure.

She’d been too exhausted to project again after the previous night’s efforts, and now she had no idea where Rebecca was, or whether she’d managed to escape.

Lydia imagined Rebecca as she’d last seen her—dazed and bleeding in some Nazi interrogation room—and felt a quick pang of terror mixed with regret.

Henry grimaced at the morning light. He hadn’t looked at her since they’d left the cave.

She imagined it had something to do with the things she’d seen inside his head or, perhaps, something he’d seen in hers.

Strangers weren’t often afforded such a private glimpse into each other’s minds, and the effect could be disconcerting, to say the least. She’d wanted to ask about what she’d seen—the dozens of lifeless eyes, the fear she’d felt, the sense of violation—but she didn’t dare.

“I’ve decided I’d like to come with you. To Auvergne,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised. “What about your art?”

He made a sound that was almost a chuckle, but not quite. “It won’t miss me. It’s just one day.”

“You’re very kind, but you don’t need to do that.”

Henry turned and looked at her then. His eyes were bloodshot, and Lydia realized that the heaviness she saw in his face wasn’t sleeplessness at all, but grief.

“René is my family. If he’s—” He stopped, took a breath. “If that’s his body you saw, then I need to go. I need to see that he’s taken care of.”

“You don’t know that it’s him. Maybe it’s someone else. Maybe he’d already moved on by the time—”

“I hope you’re right. Either way, I need to go.”

Lydia watched his face. The pain seemed to be caught there, like he was holding his breath to keep it from pouring out of him. She understood that pain and felt a stab of guilt for having caused it.

“All right. Of course. Yes.”

Henry nodded, and the tension seemed to seep out of his shoulders, just a little. He looked up at the window and frowned.

“A car is coming.”

Lydia jumped from her place at the table.

“Lydia, wait, what if it’s—” But Lydia was already outside, walking swiftly to meet the approaching car, with Henry on her heels.

The Citroen came to a halt a few meters from where they stood. Slowly, painfully, Rebecca opened the door and got out. Her bruises had darkened. The left side of her mouth looked discolored and swollen, and her right arm was seeping blood.

“You made it,” Lydia said.

Rebecca nodded with her eyes on the dirt at her feet.

“Rebecca?”

Rebecca didn’t look up. Lydia approached slowly and tried to embrace her, but Rebecca backed away, and Lydia didn’t push. She could hear Rebecca’s shaking breath and saw the tremor that ran through her body.

“You made it, Rebecca. You’re safe.”

Rebecca shook her head. “My friends are dead. I went to the safe house. André betrayed them, just like he betrayed me. They tried to fight back, but they—” She fell silent, unable to continue.

“I’m so sorry.” Even as they came out, the words felt hollow. Useless.

Rebecca looked up, and Lydia saw that her eyes were glassy. “So, where are we going?”

Henry looked from Rebecca to Lydia. “Auvergne. But—”

“But you should stay here and rest,” Lydia said. “You’re in no condition to travel.”

Rebecca looked at Henry. “Who the hell is he?”

For a moment Henry looked like a schoolboy caught talking in class. “Henry Boudreaux,” he said. It sounded like an apology.

“Well, Henry Boudreaux, where my car goes, I go.”

Lydia shook her head. “Rebecca—”

“I have to do something. ” She held Lydia with her eyes, which were somehow too large, the irises swimming. When she spoke again, her voice was small and empty, almost too quiet to hear. “They killed all my friends.”

Lydia looked at Henry, who lowered his eyes.

She took Rebecca by the hand; Rebecca let her. “Give me five minutes. Let me see what I can do about that arm.”

···

The cuts were many, but shallow, and Lydia was able to heal Rebecca’s arm with relative ease.

“That’s a good skill to know,” Rebecca admitted grudgingly, watching as Lydia ran her fingers along the wounds like rivers on a map.

“These are mostly superficial. Any deeper and—” She stopped short, wincing as a bloody vision streaked through her mind.

Isadora on the chamber floor, lifeblood pouring out of her as Lydia spoke the words of power, and watched the wound open under her fingers again and again.

She cleared her throat. “I’m not a healer.

I’m useless with anything deeper than a scratch. ”

She carried on speaking the words of power until she came to the sigil she had commanded Rebecca to carve into her skin.

“What does it mean?” Rebecca asked. Her voice was flat, eyes cast down.

“It’s for protection. A hex-breaking sigil.”

Rebecca nodded. “Does it work forever? Or just once?”

Lydia hesitated. “I’m not sure. We don’t normally go around carving things into our skin.

I wasn’t even sure it would work, what with you not being a witch.

I think…” She faltered. “I think it was your need that gave it power.” She looked down at the ugly, bloody wound, already beginning to scab over. “I can take it away, or…”

“Leave it,” Rebecca said.

Lydia closed the wound but left the scar. “How did you escape?”

Rebecca stared at the floor in front of her, never looking at Lydia.

“I put on the dead woman’s jacket and walked out the front door.

” She sniffed. “It was a police station. One of the policemen stopped me on my way out. I was sure I’d been caught.

But he thought I was her . Turns out he wanted to take the Nazi bitch to dinner.

” She made a disgusted sound. “ Men . He didn’t even notice the bruises.

He was too busy trying to look down my shirt. ”

Lydia looked at Rebecca’s face, the way it had been morphed by grief. “I’m sorry about your friends.”

Rebecca said nothing.

“You were close?”

Rebecca nodded. “Like a family. The closest thing to a family some of us had left.” She looked down at her bloody blouse.

“This belonged to Colette. She loaned it to me the last time I saw her. It was her favorite. Ruined now.” She rolled up her sleeve, revealing a long, curved scar on her right bicep.

“Her boyfriend Alain stitched that himself. I have half a dozen just like it, all by him.” She laughed—a wet, sobbing sound.

“Colette used to say Alain was a better seamstress than she would ever be. Roland, he once said that—” She stopped, the muscles in her throat tremoring as she pressed one hand over her mouth.

“I’m glad you survived,” Lydia said softly. “I’m…” She struggled for a moment, looking for the right words. “I’m grateful you’re here.”

“I’m not staying.” Rebecca swiped at her eyes and kept her face turned away from Lydia when she spoke, as if looking at her would tear open something newly healed. “You saved my life, so you can use my car. Once you’ve found your book, I’m leaving. Understand?”

Lydia nodded. “Where will you go?”

Rebecca did not answer.

···

When they returned to the car, Henry was standing by the driver’s side door.

“I’d like to drive,” he said.

Rebecca’s chin shot up. “Like hell. No one drives my car but me.”

“I understand. It’s just that if we’re stopped, they might think I’m…” He drifted off.

“What?” Lydia searched his face, confused.

Henry let out a breath. “Fraternizing. With white women.” Lydia and Rebecca were silent as the implication sank in. “If you both sit in the back, you can tell them you hired me to drive.” Henry held his head high, but there was a tension in him that was new, a strain through the neck and jaw.

“Your papers are in order?” Rebecca asked.

“They say I was born in Paris, and my accent will confirm it.”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow at that.

“Je suis un excellent conducteur. Je serai très prudent . ” He extended his hand, waiting.

Rebecca looked at Lydia. “You could take a lesson from him.”

“Yes, I know.”

Rebecca handed the keys to Henry, then opened the passenger side door and tossed herself onto the back seat. “Allons-y!” she shouted.

Lydia lingered for a moment with Henry. “If we do get stopped, will they really believe you’re only the driver?”

“I have no idea. Probably not.” He peered out across the hillside, never looking at her directly.

“What’s the punishment for you if they don’t?”

Henry rocked on his heels, considering. “I suppose they’ll sterilize me, if I’m lucky. Then again, they might just shoot me.”

Lydia felt slightly ill. “You don’t have to come. René would forgive you.”

Henry nodded. “I know he would. But I wouldn’t.”

Lydia looked into his eyes and saw that there was no sense in trying to change his mind. “Right.” She peered out anxiously at the miles of road ahead of them. “Back roads, then.”

“Back roads,” he replied.

···

Lydia watched out her window as hills rose and fell alongside them like slowly cresting waves.

Clouds rolled in, turning the sky a velvety gray.

All around them the remaining leaves shone in shades of copper and gold, looking otherworldly in the November fog.

Next to her, Rebecca sagged against the car window, fast asleep.

Henry was, in fact, an exceptionally careful driver.

Normally Lydia would have appreciated his prudence, but today it took every ounce of her self-control not to scream at him to drive faster.

She imagined arriving at the farmhouse only to find the floorboards torn up, the book already long gone.

She felt herself spiraling in the silence of the car, imagining all the horror that would come to pass if she failed; in that moment, it seemed inevitable.