Alex Archer - The Devil's Chord

After an afternoon of going through the footage, Annja determined they did have some great shots. She could cobble together a short segment for the show. Though Doug would still want to see fins slapping the water’s surface or some other bit of silliness. He could add that himself.

During supper Ian suggested they do a follow-up with Sirena, perhaps in a week or two. By then she would have had some time to think about what Annja had said to her today. It sounded like a good idea. Annja was not beyond extending her stay in Italy for a few weeks. If Doug would cover her expenses, she’d dig around for another story idea. She’d start with Rosalia, the patron of Palermo, who had lived during the twelfth century and saved the city from the plague. Her bones were interred here.

After supper, and still waiting for the okay from Doug to stick around in Italy, Annja and Ian headed back to the shore to capture some night shots. Moonlight glimmered across the water’s surface. She stood back, toeing a thatch of ragged grass while Ian strode the rocky shore.

The clatter of stones and footsteps alerted her just as someone grabbed Ian’s camera and shoved him hard enough to make her colleague fall backward and land on the ground.

Recognizing the man who’d pushed Ian, Annja rushed him and prevented him from swinging a fist toward the fallen cameraman.

“Shove off!” Matteo hissed at Annja as he wrestled away from her. “You two get out of town and stop harassing Sirena.”

“We’re filming a story,” Annja defended. “And we were invited by Sirena. Is there something you want to tell us?”

“I just did. Keep away from Sirena. You are not putting footage of her on TV.”

“Why? Because she believes she is a selkie?”

The dark-haired bruiser with a few days’ beard growth stared at her. He seemed overly worked up considering the circumstances. Why was he so uptight about them and what Sirena could tell them? Annja noted the reek of alcohol, which was likely only fortifying his mean streak.

Sirena had been afraid of him.

Matteo lunged for her. Annja bent at the waist, twisting, and kicked low, catching him below the knee. He yelped and toppled forward, but managed to grip her by the hair as he went down. She rolled over his body, landed on the loose shore stones and came up to her feet in a squat.

“Do you hurt her, Matteo?” she asked.

He sneered and pushed off the ground, coming to a stand.

Annja jumped up before him. She could feel the sword hum from within the otherwhere, there if she needed it. But she didn’t want to introduce a weapon to this scuffle. She didn’t suspect Matteo was armed with anything more than fear of exposure.

“She tells lies,” he hissed.

“So you’re not keeping her with you against her will?”

“She...she said that? You’re lying to me!” He swung at Annja, but she dodged him easily. The man wasn’t so drunk. He maintained his footing and, bouncing back and forth, showed her his fists. “Stay away from her!”

Out the corner of her eye, Annja saw Ian fumble to his feet. He didn’t go for his camera. Thankfully, he had the good sense that this would not make for good television.

Matteo dived for her and gripped her about the waist, pushing them both to the hard ground. “You give me what’s on that camera.” He punched, landing a bruising set of knuckles against her throat.

Annja kicked, connecting her boot toe with his gut, but not hard enough to injure. Instead, she flipped him onto his back and crawled on top of him, straddling his hips. A right fist to his jaw spattered blood across the rocks. She’d never backed away from a fight, and admittedly, it adrenalized her. Frankly, it was easy when she fought against a man like this.

“You let her go,” she insisted, landing another punch that served to loosen his tense jaw muscles.

His shoulders dropped and Matteo stopped fighting, though he hadn’t been knocked out.

“Let her do as she wishes. If Sirena wants to leave you, let her go.”

“But...” He fisted the ground at his sides. Growling in frustration, he sputtered, “I don’t know where it is!”

“Where what is?”

Behind her Ian scrambled with his equipment.

“The pelt!” Matteo cried.

Annja frowned and delivered another swift strike up under the man’s jaw. That tilted his head to the side sharply, stealing his consciousness. Blood drooled from his mouth. “He’s out.”

She rose and wiped her hands down her pant legs.

“He believes it, too,” Ian said, the camera pointed toward the ground, the green run light showing he’d filmed Matteo’s confession. “Now what?”

The cell phone in Annja’s pocket vibrated. She swiped a loose strand of hair from her face and over her ear and strode toward the parking lot, gesturing for Ian to follow. Matteo would be fine.

Annja answered the call in a harsh tone. “Seriously? This had better be good.”

“Sounds like someone needs a nap.”

The French accent had become a familiar voice in her life. Yet it had been a while since she’d talked to the old coot. Usually it was she who contacted him.

“Roux.” She blew out a breath, calming her thundering heartbeat. “Sorry. It’s been a long day. And I think I’ve spent most of it with a selkie.”

“Selkies, eh? A bit fantastical, even for your wild adventures. I thought you preferred kneeling hunched over a pile of dirt?”

“I do, but I do work for a television program that tracks monsters. Selkies are not so fantastical when you think about it. You do know it’s—” she cast her gaze toward the sky, then turned the phone to check the time display “—close to midnight?”

“Not where I am. The sun is shining and I’m, well... What can I say?”

No details. Never any details unless the man considered them salacious or wanted to tease her, which was often. But Annja wasn’t interested. She didn’t want to do the math to calculate what time zone he could be in to be calling her during the day.

“Like you said, I need to get some rest, so make this quick.”

“I’ve a simple question. One I thought would intrigue you.”

She closed her eyes and blew in and released a deep breath. A half-hour shower was the only thing she could think about. Her neck ached. She’d have a bruise there by the time she hit said shower. “What’s that?”

“Very well. Do you know what Leonardo da Vinci and Joan of Arc had in common?”

Any mention of Joan of Arc straightened Annja’s spine. She opened her eyes wide and, seeing Ian’s intent interest, turned her back to him. Some things she only talked about with certain people. And those few people—actually, only two—also had a keen interest in the sainted martyr.

“Bonus points if you can name their common benefactor,” Roux added cheerily.

Well, that narrowed it down to one person. Annja liked a good quiz. But she needn’t the clue.

She’d read a lot on the young woman who had boldly led the French army to war in the fifteenth century, only to be labeled a heretic and burned at the stake by the English forces. Joan interested her because Annja had an inexplicable connection to her. One that she could never completely explain and so had accepted on blind faith. And there was the fact that whenever she was in trouble and needed protection, she could call Joan of Arc’s sword to hand from the otherwhere.

Cool. Weird. Fortuitous when she was in a bind. And she tended to find herself in a bind more often than the average archaeologist. Just call her a jet-setting dirt digger and sometime crime fighter and defender of the innocent.

It worked for her.

“Let’s see...” Annja kicked at the smooth stones that had been turned over and over by high tides and infinite time. “Joan was burned in 1431. Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t born until 1452. So someone who had known Joan and was very young at that time, who then later traveled to Italy, possibly— Aha!