Once Korvel squeezed past the back end of the trailer, he saw the road branch off in two directions, one toward the distant blur of Garbia and the other curving around into the heavily wooded hills. Small but plainly lettered signs that read Propriété Privée had been nailed to the trunks of the outermost trees. By the time he had walked half a kilometer the road virtually disappeared from sight, obscured by massive silver-trunked trees with twisting, riotous branches that formed an effective natural barrier.
Korvel smelled wood smoke tinged with the sweet-tea scent of sycamore, but the leafy canopy barred his view of the sky, so he couldn’t see from which direction it came. He stopped and listened for several minutes, intent on discovering the source of the smoke, but heard and smelled nothing out of the ordinary. The local farmers would have lit their fireplaces, he decided, to dispense some of the morning chill from their homes. With the high price of heating oil and coal, and France’s perpetually dismal economy, it made sense that they would burn wood.
He knew why every little thing was setting him on edge. He had entered territory unfamiliar to him—a strategic disadvantage he always attempted to avoid. While the Darkyn no longer actively occupied southern France, centuries of respecting the boundaries between immortal strongholds had become a matter of form for his kind. Thus traveling into strange lands made every Kyn warrior uneasy. That, and without his sword Korvel felt almost naked. But he knew he could bespell any mortal who saw him before they could expose his presence—
The smell of hot, sweet, smoky tea grew stronger, distracting him from his thoughts, and he realized a faint opaque haze was now visible in the air. A lightning strike might have set some of the woods ablaze, but then the birds and the other creatures inhabiting it would be making a racket. All he heard was birdsong and the flutter of leaves in a breeze.
A breeze that felt a few degrees warmer than it had by the main road.
Korvel eyed the nearest sturdy tree, measuring the width of its branches before he went to it and jumped up to catch the lowest bough. He boosted himself up easily and began to climb in search of a better vantage point. Forty feet from the ground the branches began to thin, and another ten feet higher a gap from a broken limb afforded him a view of the surrounding hills.
Frost had begun to kill the grazing grasses, leaving behind wide, irregular brown patches on the gentle slopes like some giant’s muddy, erratic footprints. From his position he could see a stretch of road leading up to a high stone wall and iron gates; beyond them shrubbery and shorter trees masked the grounds around a large structure with a tiered roof of gray slate shingles. Steady streams of white smoke poured from the slate roof’s three chimneys.
It had to be Château Niege. It seemed Helada’s mortal servants also disliked the cold October mornings.
Feeling once more like a fool, Korvel stepped off the branch and dropped to the ground. Once he had the scroll, he would go to the nearest city and take his rest there until nightfall. Then, when he rose, he would find a willing female and feed. Perhaps he would fuck her, too, and relieve his other, long-denied needs. Sex had never been a particular pleasure for him, not when he could have any woman just by willing it, but he had let too much time pass. He could no longer remember the last time he’d taken a female to his bed.
He knew he had not touched any female in an intimate fashion since his master had abducted Alexandra Keller and put the American doctor in Korvel’s care. Another painful indicator that it was high time he dispensed with the last dregs of his idiotic adolescent obsession.
Korvel picked up his pace and in a few minutes arrived at the gates of the château. The guardhouse stood empty, and the gates had been opened. Fresh tire marks left twin tracks in the dirt before disappearing on the concrete slab of the drive.
The unmistakable reek of mortal blood made Korvel halt and draw in the smoke-fogged air. A trace of the wet-scarlet bloom came from inside the gates, but a stronger source was much closer. He shrugged out of his coat, letting it drop to the ground as he spun around to face whatever had crept up behind him.
Two mortals dressed in military fatigues and black cloth masks stood silently watching him. Both held combat blades in their hands and carried handheld radios. The automatic weapons slung over their shoulders had not been fired, but the dark red spatter on their uniforms was still wet.
Korvel felt a crowding sensation as more men emerged from the tree cover and spread out, encircling him. Their efficient movements and effortless formation testified to their training and experience; this ambush was not their first. A whirring, mechanical sound brushed against his ears as the only avenue of escape they had left him, the open gates behind his back, began to close.
“This one has hair like a little girl,” one of the mortals said.
“He smells like one, too,” another muttered. “We should slice off his cock and put him in a dress.”
“I like his mouth.” Another man openly massaged the bulge in the front of his trousers. “You save the head for me, eh?”
The men spoke in gutter Italian with Napoli accents, something Korvel would have to ponder later. The easy certainty with which they spoke of desecrating his remains gave him pause; they already assumed they would prevail. He studied them again, and saw that their combat blades had been greased black, a tactic foreign to him. As one turned his dagger, Korvel saw beneath the coating the rosy glow of copper, the only metal on earth that could inflict injury and death on him.
They not only knew what he was; they had learned how best to deal with and dispatch him.
All Korvel had left to him was his Darkyn ability to compel any female to desire him. Unlike l’attrait, his power was not based on scent, but on touch or proximity, obliging Korvel to lay hands on or move close to the mortal he wished to bespell. Although it usually had no effect on men, some who were attracted to their own gender occasionally fell under his power. He focused on the man with the obvious erection and imagined Alexandra Keller standing in his place, her arms extended, her petite, naked body gleaming in the pale sunlight. Forcing himself to visualize her filled Korvel with self-disgust, but channeling his own desire into his ability made it strong enough to cross the physical gap between him and the aroused man.
The blade fell from the man’s hand, and he took an uncertain step toward Korvel. His movement drew the attention of the other men, one of whom spoke sharply.
“Watch hi—”
The warning ended in a gurgle of blood as Korvel’s blade buried itself in the man’s neck. The others rushed in, hoping to close the circle, but Korvel crouched and jumped, soaring over their heads before he flipped and landed on his feet behind them.
He cut the throat of the man closest to him, pushing him into another and relieving both of their blades, throwing them into the bellies of two more. The terror of the remaining men radiated as they collided with one another and retreated in a desperate attempt to elude Korvel’s counterattack. He opened the femoral artery of one with a single sweeping strike; another shrieked and toppled as the long dagger sliced across the back of his knees.
Korvel put his back to the gate as the three remaining men regrouped, one fumbling as he pulled around his assault rifle to aim and fire. A spray of bullets pinged against the iron gates and the wall stones while Korvel dropped and rolled behind one of the injured, rising to hold the gasping mortal in front of him. Now a living shield, the body writhed as more bullets pierced his clothing, and Korvel threw his second dagger into the chest of the shooter, who staggered backward. He then pulled free the automatic weapon from the shoulder of the bullet-ridden body, dropping the dead man to fire on the last two left standing.
One managed to fling his knife before he fell, a move Korvel did not anticipate. He turned, but not quickly enough, and felt the weapon strike the back of his thigh. The burn of the copper did not end when Korvel reached back to yank out the dagger; from the jagged condition of the blade it was evident that part had broken off and remained lodged in the wound. He fired one final time, turning in an uneven circle to finish off the wounded before he threw away the weapon and staggered toward the gates.
The scent of smoke made Georges rear his head, his ears flicking back and forth as he tasted the air.
“Doucement, mon ami.” Simone tugged back on the reins to slow him to a walk as she looked ahead. The path wound through the back of her father’s property, and lack of use and maintenance had caused weeds and shrubbery to overgrow and narrow it. “They’re just keeping the old place warm for the mice now.”
Simone dismounted as soon as she was within sight of the château’s walls, and slapped Georges on the right flank, sending him back down the trail to the convent. During her father’s absence Piers, the butler, had taken to secretly lighting the fireplaces. Although Simone had never enjoyed such comforts when she had lived here, she didn’t blame him. Her father had always believed physical comfort dulled the senses and encouraged complacency, which he regarded as intolerable. He never considered the comfort of his staff, all of whom were in their sixties and seventies now. Enduring the long winter months in a house with no central heating had simply become too much of an ordeal for them.
Purpose, Quatorze. The only fire you will ever need.
She went to the section of the wall ten paces from the end of the path, where she pressed three bricks in sequence. Unseen hinges groaned as internal locks released and a three-foot-wide section shifted slightly. She had to push hard to create enough space to step through—she would have to speak to Piers about oiling the rusting mechanism—and once inside the wall, she pushed it back in place. As she reached to reverse the sequence of bricks to lock it once more, she heard a series of rapid pops and froze.
Gunfire?
She spun around and ran along an unmarked path through thorny hedges, not stopping to free herself when untrimmed branches tore at her fluttering habit. The burning scent of wood grew intense, and smoke whitened the air, until she emerged from the ground cover at the front of the château.
Several new, black all-terrain vehicles and an enormous unmarked truck blocked the drive, while smoke poured from the eaves and window seams on the château’s top floor. One of the maids lay by the front door, her sightless eyes staring at Simone, her features painted with congealing blood that gravity had drawn from the small black crater in the center of her brow.