"The earth," Garin stated, "opened up and let you find the final piece of the sword. Even after it had been hidden from sight for hundreds of years."

"That was an earthquake." Annja was beginning to feel that she was stepping into a side dimension and leaving the real world behind.

"It was a miracle," Garin said.

She looked at him, wondering if he was deliberately baiting her. "Do you really believe that?"

Pausing a moment, Garin shook his head. "I don't know. And I've got more reason to believe it than I'm willing to go into at this moment. For the rest of the story, we'll have to talk to Roux."

"Even if that charm was part of Joan of Arc's sword, that doesn't mean it was the last piece."

"Roux says it is."

"Do you believe him?"

"In this, of all things, I do."

"Then how do I fit in?"

"I don't know. I know only that you must. As ego deflating as it is for him, Roux has had to face that, as well. That doesn't mean he accepts it."

The server returned, carrying a massive tray piled high with food.

"Let's eat," Garin suggested. "At the moment, there's nothing more to tell."

Despite the confusion that spun within her, Annja hadn't lost her appetite. There was more to Garin's story. He was holding something back that he considered important. She was convinced of that. But she was also convinced that he wouldn't tell her any more of it at the moment.

As she ate, she kept watch outside the building. Part of her kept expecting to see local police roll up at any moment.

Night filtered the sky, turning the bright haze to ochre and finally black by the time they finished the meal. Then they were on the road again. The answers, at least some of them, lay only a few hours into the future.

Chapter 15

"PUT THIS ON."

Avery Moreau accepted the robe fashioned from wolf pelts. It was heavy and itchy against his bare skin. He wrinkled his nose in ill-disguised disgust. And it smelled like wet dog even more this time than the last.

Without a word, he pulled the robe on and stood waiting in the small room lit by the single naked bulb. The air felt thin and tasted metallic. He struggled to catch his breath but couldn't quite seem to.

Where he had expected to feel only anticipation at this moment, he now felt dread. He hadn't succeeded in his assignment. Surely Lesauvage wasn't going to initiate him now.

But here he stood, clad in the furs of the Wild Hunt, called to one of the secret meetings.

Marcel stood before him, already wearing the wolf's-head helmet that masked his features. He was big and blocky, one of the older boys whom Avery had grown up in fear of. Like most of Corvin Lesauvage's recruits, Marcel had been a bully all his life and had developed a taste for violence.

Avery had never truly felt that way. He'd been violent over the years. Growing up as the son of a known thief would do that to someone. If his father had been a successful bank robber or knocked over armored cars on a regular basis, perhaps things would have been different. There might even have been money in the house.

But Gerard Moreau hadn't done those things. He'd barely stolen enough to keep his family fed and a roof over their heads most of the time. He'd been too lazy to work at an hourly wage, which wouldn't have fed them, either, and too unskilled to find a job that would.

Gerard Moreau had been trapped by circumstance into the life that he had. Until the night Inspector Edouard Richelieu shot and killed him in cold blood. The act had been nothing less than premeditated murder.

That night, Avery had been with his father. Posted as a lookout, Avery had to keep watch and make sure no one approached from outside.

No one had approached from outside the house. The police inspector had been inside the house. Richelieu had been entertaining Etienne Pettit's wife that evening, unbeknownst to anyone in Lozère.

Pettit was a powerful man in the town, and not one who would have put up with being cuckolded in his own home by a police inspector who lived with his mother. If Pettit had found out about his wife's infidelities, the man would have divorced his wife and left her with nothing. And he would have broken Inspector Richelieu, had him tossed out of the police department onto the street.

That was why Richelieu had shot Gerard Moreau six times. The police inspector loved his job because it validated him in ways that Avery didn't understand but knew existed.

When he closed his eyes, Avery could still see his father fleeing for his life through the window to the backyard. He'd slipped and fallen in dog feces, and tried to get back to his feet.

Then Richelieu, totally nude, stood in the window with his pistol in his fist and opened fire. The rolling thunder had driven Gerard Moreau to the ground and ripped the life from him in bloody handfuls.

Avery had hidden. He'd been too afraid to act, and too inexperienced to know what to do if he had tried. He'd held himself and cried silent tears. In the end, he'd had to clap a hand over his mouth in order to keep from crying out.

Later, Richelieu told everyone that he had been the first to respond to the burglar alarm at the Pettit house. After he'd dressed, he'd obviously told Isabelle Pettit to set off the alarm.

No one asked why Richelieu felt compelled to shoot a fleeing suspect six times in the back. The police inspector had simply stated that it had been dark, which was the truth, and he claimed not to have known who the burglar was.

Everyone knew that Gerard Moreau never carried a weapon. He'd always stolen what he could, laid out his time in jail, and lived a mostly quiet life.

Gerard Moreau had tried to stop his son from becoming a thief. In the end, though, there hadn't been any other way for Avery to get the kinds of clothes he needed to wear or any of a thousand things it took to be a teenager in today's world.

When he'd seen he couldn't curb his son's ways, Gerard Moreau decided to properly train Avery in the ways of a burglar. He'd claimed that as his father, he could do no less than offer him the trade that he had employed to sustain his family.

That night at the Pettit house had been the first – and last – time father and son had worked a job together.

Knowing that his voice would never be heard – if it was, his tale would only land him in jail and would not bring his father's murderer any closer to justice – Avery ran that night. Later, when the policemen came calling at his door, he'd acted surprised about his father's death. Even if they'd suspected anything, his grief was real and they'd left him alone with it.

Three days after he'd been shot and killed, Gerard Moreau had been laid to rest in a pauper's grave in the church cemetery. And Avery had sworn revenge.

The only way he could conceive to get it, though, was through Corvin Lesauvage and his secret society. Avery had known about them through some of the other guys his age who had become part of Lesauvage's gang. Pack, they called themselves. They were part of what Lesauvage termed the Wild Hunt. And Lesauvage had a magic potion that could make men invincible.

"Are you ready?" Marcel asked.

Not trusting his voice, Avery nodded.

Turning, Marcel knocked on the wall of the basement beneath the big house Lesauvage owned. Gears ground within the wall, then a section of it pulled back and away to reveal a doorway.

"Praise be to the name of the Hunter," Marcel intoned as he stepped through the doorway.

"Praise be to the name of the Hunter," Avery echoed as he followed Marcel. He didn't know who the Hunter was.

But Lesauvage and his pack took their mysticism seriously.