“I know it too,” Ned said. “I saw you this afternoon, remember? That was no weekend rugby thing.”

“You haven’t seen our team play,” his uncle said. “Ned, you want your uncle killed soon as you meet him?”

Ned shook his head. “Not in a hurry for that, no.”

Dave said, “The truth? I do know how to fight. I’ve made sure I still do. But this one—both of these—are in their own league, their own world. I talked a good game in the villa because I wanted them taking us seriously, but I’d have died up there if he wanted me dead.”

Silence. They were completely alone at the end of the road, in the middle of a night.

“What’d he wind up doing?” Dave asked.

Meghan said, “Kim cleaned him up again, then Ned told him he’d sensed Ysabel in Arles. He’s going there.”

Dave looked at Ned. “Why did you do that?”

Ned shrugged. “I told Phelan when he said goodbye. Guess I was being fair.”

“Think anyone else will be?”

Ned scuffed at the gravel. “Maybe not.”

Kimberly let go of her husband, stepped back a little. Her hair was very white in the moonlight. “I’ve decided not to like her,” she said.

Uncle Dave pretended to be startled. He looked at Meghan. “What? After all these years!”

Kim punched him in the chest. “Not my sister! I adore my sister.”

“I haven’t deserved that a whole lot,” Ned’s mother murmured.

“Not the point,” Kim said.

“Shouldn’t it be?”

Her sister shook her head. “No. And the one I don’t like is Ysabel.”

Her husband laughed aloud, startling Ned. “Oh, God. Don’t let her know,” he said. “You’ll completely ruin her life this time around if she finds out Kim Ford feels that way.”

His wife hit him again. “Be quiet, you.”

Dave was quiet. It was Ned who said, after a moment, “Don’t hate her. Don’t even dislike her. She’s outside that. Even more than they are.”

The other three looked at him.

“Can’t help it,” his aunt said stubbornly. “The two of them play this game of hide-and-seek and then the loser gets killed for her? I don’t like it, that’s all.”

“You haven’t seen her,” Ned said. “It…makes a difference. It’s what they’re all about. I don’t think she has a lot of choice either.”

“Hold on,” his mother said.

They turned to her. The moonlight was on her face.

“You didn’t say one would be killed, Ned.”

“But I did,” he said. “That’s what she…”

He stopped. His heart was suddenly hammering again.

“You didn’t, dear,” his mother said, very gently. “Neither did Kate. I wrote it down.”

They were staring at her.

Meghan Marriner looked at her son.

“You said sacrificed.”

CHAPTER XVII

Sunrise, the first gift in the world. Promise and healing after the hard transit of night. After a darkness beset with beasts—imagined and real—and inner fears, and untamed, violent men. After sightlessness that could lead one astray into ditch or bog or over cliff, or into the clutch and sway of whatever spirits might be abroad, bent on malice.

Morning’s pale light had offered an end to such fears for centuries, millennia, whatever dangers might come with the day. Shutters were banged open, curtains drawn, shop doors and windows were unlocked, city gates unbarred, swung wide, as men and women made their way out into the offered day.

On the other hand (in life there was almost always another hand), daylight meant that intimacy, privacy, escape from the unwanted gaze, silence for meditation, the solace of unseen tears on a pillow—or of secret love on that same pillow before, or after—were so much harder to claim. Rarer coinage, in the clear light.

It is more difficult—much more difficult—to hide and not be found.

BUT SHE WANTS to be found. That lies at the heart of this. She is prepared to become angry that they have taken so long and she remains alone.

Unfair, perhaps, for she’s made this difficult, but they are supposed to love her beyond words, need her more than breath or light, and she has spent a second night outside and solitary, and it has been cold.

She is not unaccustomed to hardship, but neither is she immune to longing. Seeing them both at Entremont when she came through to the summons has kindled need, desire, memory.

She would not let them know this, of course.

Not yet, and only one of them, after. But these sensations are within her now and, lying awake, watching stars traverse the open space to the south, as if across a window, she has been intensely, painfully aware of them, of lives lived and lost.

And of the two of them, somewhere out there, looking for her.

She isn’t certain why she’d said three days. No need to have done so. A small hard kernel of fear: it is possible they might not find her in time. She knows herself very well, knows she will not back away from this. Is aware that having arrived now in this place she has chosen she will not go forth again. Will not make it easier for them, or for herself.

If one of them needs her enough he will be here.

Meghan Marriner, showing no signs of fatigue, had taken Greg to the hospital at first light. She’d said last night she was going to do it, was not the sort to back away from that. Steve drove them in the van.

Kate, briefed over breakfast, was at the dining-room table poring over Melanie’s notes and the guidebooks she’d accumulated. Ned, at the computer, was googling as fast as he could type and skim. He’d had about three hours’ sleep, he was running on adrenalin, aware that he was probably going to crash hard at some point.

They were looking for clues based on what his mother had realized by the car barrier last night. Kate had gone pale when she’d woken in the morning and they’d asked her about it. But she’d remembered the words exactly as he had.

Up at Entremont, setting the two men their task of finding her, Ysabel hadn’t just spoken of killing.

She’d said the loser would be sacrificed.

They had nothing else to go on. Had to treat this as what they needed it to be: a clue to what might be happening.

Ned typed a different search combination: Celts + Provence + “places of sacrifice.” He started finding things about fées and fairy mounds and even dragons. Dragons. Not much help, though from where he sat he was a lot less inclined to dismiss all that than he would have been a week ago.

There really was too much junk online. Personal pages, Wiccan sites, travel blogs. Stuff about witches and fairies—folk beliefs from medieval days. He skipped past those.

Further back, it looked like the Celts had merged their own gods with the Roman ones. Right. Conquered people—what else were they going to do? Except they did believe in human sacrifice. In worshipping skulls. They hanged sacrifices from trees, he read—that didn’t help a lot. Trees were everywhere.

They performed rituals on hills, high places, which offered a little more, but not a lot. Entremont had been such a place, but they’d been back already, and Ned was certain Ysabel wouldn’t have returned to where she’d been summoned. There was that other ruined hill fort—Roquepertuse, towards Arles—but Kim and Kate had gone there yesterday.

He clicked and typed and scrolled. Earth goddesses linked to water, pools, springs—Ned had been at one of those, and so had Cadell, at Glanum. Nothing. Goddesses were associated with forests—all the deities were, it seemed.

Much good that did them.

He found another site, read: “They usually began with a human sacrifice, utilizing a sword, spear, a sickle-like knife, ritual hanging, impaling, dismembering, disembowelling, drowning, burning, burial alive…”

He shook his head, looked away from the screen, over his shoulder. Kate had Melanie’s notes and books spread around her on the table, was scribbling like a student with a teacher lecturing. Ned turned back to the computer.