S. Cedric - Of Fever and Blood

“This has to do with Raynal, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it has to do with the incidents that took place at the Raynal Center. The missing girls.”

“It’s a long story. But I don’t know what I could tell you that isn’t already in the reports.”

“Still, can you meet with us? We are on our way already.”

“Sure. I’m home right now, and I’m not going anywhere. Do you have my address?”

“Yes, I do. Thank you very much, doctor.”

An icy wind invaded the vehicle as Vauvert opened his window to toss the coins into the toll booth basket. The gate lifted. The next moment, they were rushing down the highway. The sign read “ALBI 66 KM.”

We’ll be in Millau in two hours,” Vauvert said.

As he drove past an automatic speed camera the flashing light went off.

“Shit,” he growled.

Meanwhile, Leroy checked his voice mail. He listened to several messages, then glumly turned off his phone.

“Trouble?”

“What did you expect? Deveraux is unleashing hell to nail you. And me, by the way. The boss is going to hang me by my balls if I don’t come up with one hell of a good justification for what happened tonight. This was out-and-out desertion for the both of us. We could, at least, have tried to tell them what we came up with.”

“Sure, we could have tried,” Vauvert said. “And we’d still be in custody in Paris, in the hands of those Internal Affairs clowns. We’re running out of time already.”

Leroy knew his colleague was right.

He reached for the two books he had brought along. The first was an academic work on Countess Bathory’s crimes, which he still had not had time to look through. As for the second, it was an essay on the Dacian religion and its legacy in Medieval Europe. One way or the other, the two had to be connected. He just had to find out in what way. Leroy turned on the dome light and opened the book on the Dacians.

So little time.

11:30 p.m.

Leroy poured over the book, flipping page after page, as they drove down a country road that snaked endlessly around the mountainside. He knew he would soon have to put it down, because the dome light and Vauvert’s impatient driving were starting to make him sick.

Outside, the night was black as ink. The temperature was plummeting. The SUV’s headlights splashed the tall fir trees on both sides of the road. The locals did not seem to know about roadside reflectors, so Vauvert had to stomp on the breaks periodically to navigate a sudden curve. Occasionally, they passed though a tiny village-the streets empty and the houses’ shutters closed-before winding through more fir trees and more darkness.

Minutes flew by.

They had passed the town of Villefranche-d’Albigeois when Vauvert’s phone rang. Mira’s name was on the screen.

“Yes, Damien.”

“Holy mother of Christ, what the fuck are you doing?” his anxious colleague exclaimed. “Everyone is talking about you now!”

“You know how it is. Let them talk. I’ll deal with the paperwork later on.”

“No shit, man! I don’t think you realize how deep in the shit you’ve gotten yourself. There’s a warrant for your arrest. The word from Paris is you attacked a colleague. Is that true?”

“The guy’s a cunt, and I’ll have my own version of events to tell when the time comes.”

“You’d better. The boss is on the fucking warpath. If he ever finds out I talked to you, he’ll have my ass, too. Do you understand that you’re wanted just like a criminal now?”

“I swear I had no choice. We don’t have time for this bullshit. Eva is in mortal danger.”

“I understand. And I guess I would have done the same thing. I just wanted to let you know about the warrant. And that Leila came to see me. The DNA test you requested freaked the shit out of her, you know that?”

“Don’t tell me she told the boss?”

“No, not yet. But she’s going to have to, at some point.”

“Please ask her to wait just a bit longer.”

“I will. Anything I can do to help?”

“Thanks for the offer. There’s something I have to check out first. Then I’ll call you. I promise.” Vauvert paused, then added, in a softer tone, “Don’t worry about me, okay?”

“I’m the one who showed you the ropes when you got here. I’ll always have your back, so let me worry about you if I want to. Where are you right now?”

“Where am I?”

Vauvert paused for a second. Illuminated by the headlights, a sign ahead read: “MILLAU 70 KM.”

“I’m still in Paris. But I’m in the Metro. I’m going to have to call you back, okay?”

He hung up, a look of fierce determination on his face.

“Interesting,” Leroy said.

“What?”

“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 Chick boardroom.”

“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.”