“Well, I know who isn’t going to teach me his technique, anyhow,” Ned said.

“Listen to the lot of you! Bandage me already,” Greg interjected.

“Is this how doctors treat wounded patients? Family arguments while we die on the table?”

“An under-reported statistic,” Kimberly said soberly.

Ned was opening his mouth to make another joke, out of sheer relief, when he felt a flaring, imperative presence inside himself. Awareness flashed in his aunt’s face in the same moment. He saw her look past him.

He wheeled around. And looking out through the glass doors he saw, in the late-day sunlight, a slender, bald-headed man in a grey leather jacket step onto the terrace and stand there, waiting patiently.

CHAPTER XV

He accepted a glass of wine from Ned’s father at the table, dealing easily with the scrutiny of a large number of people, but Ned could see how tightly wound the man was. There was a sense that Phelan was keeping himself under control, but only just. As before, when he’d seen this man, had been with him, the world suddenly felt more intense. And how could that not be so, Ned thought—with what they knew about him?

Ned glanced at his mother, and saw Meghan Marriner’s alert, appraising look at the newcomer. She kept still, watching. She’d finished with Gregory, wrapping his wound.

Phelan saw that. “An injury? How did this happen?” The low voice, precise.

He had spoken to Ned, even with the adults present, so Ned answered, “In Arles. Wolves.”

“Cadell attacked you? Where? Why?” Eyebrows raised. Control at the brink of violence.

He hasn’t found her, Ned thought. And he knows time is running.

He said, “The cemetery. But no, it was Brys. On his own.”

A hard look. “On his own? You are certain of that?”

Ned nodded. “Yes. What are you doing here?”

The obvious question, really. He was pretty sure he knew the answer.

“Perhaps a proper introduction first,” his mother said. Her voice was cool, but not hostile. “I’ve just arrived, and I’m missing some critical information.”

Ned looked at Kate. The two of them were the only ones here who’d ever seen Phelan.

The Roman—the Greek, the stranger—smiled briefly at Meghan Marriner, a wintry smile. “I fear that, rude as it might seem, there isn’t time for proper introductions. My name is Phelan.” He looked briefly at Kate. “This time.”

Aunt Kim crossed her arms on her chest. “But it was Protis, wasn’t it? And she was Gyptis?” A challenge in the words.

Phelan looked at her, a different expression. “No, actually, though the tale produced those names eventually. It often happens that way. But they were never ours.”

He paused and then, as if reluctantly, “And you are…?”

“Rude as it might seem,” Kimberly murmured coldly, “there isn’t time.”

Ned, instinctively, looked at Uncle Dave and saw his mouth tighten, as if he was aware they were playing with danger.

“I see,” said Phelan, after a silence. He looked at her thoughtfully.

“You have some power, don’t you?”

“Some,” Kimberly said. “Enough to recognize it.”

Phelan nodded. He glanced at Ned. “You are related?”

“My sister’s son.” Kimberly gestured at Meghan.

The man in the grey leather jacket sipped his wine again. “This begins to make more sense, your presence among us.” He looked at Ned again.

“Your presence among us doesn’t, yet,” said Edward Marriner.

“And there is the matter of Melanie. We’d very much appreciate—”

They heard a knock at the front door.

Ned looked quickly that way, and swallowed hard. He knew who this was. Who it had to be. There had been no buzz to request admission from the locked gates.

Steve, who was nearest, opened the door. With no surprise at all Ned saw Cadell standing there. He smiled cheerfully and entered, dressed as he had been at the Glanum ruins in the morning.

The two men looked across at each other, one at the front entrance, the other by the glass doors to the terrace.

Ned tried again—and failed again—to get his head properly around how long they’d known each other, and fought with each other for the woman he’d seen between fires at Entremont. The past infusing the present here, entering, defining it.

It is not just about the three of them, Brys had said.

Brys was dead. Ned’s uncle had killed him. But perhaps it really was about the three of them, Ned thought, and everything else was bound up in that.

“Am I too late for a glass of wine?” Cadell said in that deep voice, standing where Dave Martyniuk had been a moment before.

No one responded, no one had time.

The blurred motion with which Phelan drew the knife and threw it was quicker than any possible reply.

It was in that moment, really, that an answer to another unspoken question came to Ned. He’d been wondering how Phelan could ever have battled the other man—so much larger, so obviously a warrior—on even terms in any sort of combat.

He ought to have remembered the smaller man spinning off the cloister roof, flipping himself outwards and landing with so much grace. Speed and poise and effortless intelligence could serve in a fight as well as power, he thought.

Cadell swore, an involuntary outburst. Ned heard Kate cry out, saw Steve back away from the door, at speed.

With greater speed—almost impossibly so—Cadell took a step forward and seized a metal serving platter from the table. He hurled it like a discus across the room. Phelan twisted urgently sideways and the plate whipped past his face to smash loudly against the wall, putting a long, jagged crack in it between the glass doors.

“What the hell?” Edward Marriner exclaimed.

Cadell had a hand to his left shoulder now. The knife was embedded there. Ned had seen that knife before. The cathedral, very first moments. He looked at Kate. She’d remember it. Her face was pale.

Phelan’s was white. That plate had been moving fast enough to shatter his face, kill him if it had hit his throat.

“A mild precaution,” he said. “To keep you from being tempted again. You don’t do well with temptation, do you? He’s been flying,” he explained, looking around the room. “Tracking me from the air. That’s how he came here. As an owl. She made him swear an oath not to fly. When a man disregards a sworn promise, he needs to have it enforced for him, or chaos descends upon the world, wouldn’t you say?”

It was a question, but not addressed to anyone in particular. He was looking at the Celt.

Cadell’s face had lost its colour as well. “I can kill you even with a wound, you know.”

Phelan smiled thinly. Ice in his eyes. “You can say it. There’s a doctor here. I believe she’s finished with one injury.”

“Two doctors,” Kim said quietly. “As I understand it, if you’d killed him here you’d have lost for this time and—”

“I have no interest in what you understand. Believe me, if I had wanted to kill, the blade would not be in his arm,” Phelan said.

Ned believed him.

Cadell, across the table, was controlling his breathing, as if stepping down—carefully—from a towering, annihilating rage. If Aunt Kim was right, killing the other man with that discus would have cost him Ysabel now. And he had been throwing for the face.

Cadell looked at Greg. After a moment, he said, “Again? You seem inclined to injure yourself.”

“Not before you guys showed up,” Greg said.

“Who did this?”

“You really don’t know?” Phelan said.

“I do not.”

The Celt turned to Ned. They kept doing that. As if he had the answers here.

He cleared his throat. “I told you this morning that we were heading to Arles, remember? Brys was waiting at the cemetery, or he followed us. Don’t know which.”

“And?”

“He had the wolves go for me. The others…Greg…defended me.”

Cadell’s expression slowly changed. He shook his head. “I told him to leave you. I shall tell him again.”