laughed. “I don’t believe I’ve been called that.”
“I mean a protector.” But I had to grin at his deliberate misunderstanding, as well as the face he made. Lex Stuart, even when he was being funny, came across as solemn, as if he’d taken the weight of the world onto his solid shoulders. Rhys Pritchard…
He’s hiding the weight of the world in his heart. My insight surprised and intrigued me—assuming I was correct. He smiled so easily, laughed so easily. I probably wasn’t.
“He has been my assistant since I began drafting my book on Melusine. He knows most of what I know,” Aunt Bridge insisted, when he opened his mouth to protest. “Since I cannot come with you, and my files have been stolen, he must go. In any case, he has the keys to my car.”
I didn’t want to be rude. Or ruder. But I glanced toward Rhys and asked her, “You really trust him?”
“Like my parish priest,” she said, which for some reason made him frown. They had some kind of secret between them. But clearly they weren’t ready to share it.
Either way, her recommendation was good enough for me.
It wasn’t like I’d been divinely chosen for this myself.
Rhys took the first shift driving. Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice them at first. I was busy watching dusk settle over the City of Lights, before we reached the A6 motorway.
You can see the Eiffel Tower from anywhere in the city, of course, and other landmarks like Nôtre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe are hard to miss amidst the glitter and the centuries-old bridges crossing the Seine. I loved it. I used to spend a month here every summer with my cousin Lil and our maternal grandmother. Lex once called Paris my maison away from maison.
It was a coincidence, him coming to Paris today. Wasn’t it?
“I know to head south,” said Rhys, who looked a little long for Aunt Bridge’s 3-door Citroën Saxo VTR. “Have you got anything more specific in mind?”
“We might as well start in Lusignan,” I said. “Since their claim to Melusine is the strongest.”
“Mère Lusigne,” he murmured, by way of agreement. That’s where some believe Melusine got her name. So he did know his stuff. “The closest city would be what, Poitiers? At least we oughtn’t to have trouble finding a place to stay. They have that big amusement park, nowadays. Not Disney—the futuristic one.”
Good thought. “I’ll call ahead for a reservation,” I said, reaching for one of the cargo pockets on my pants. “What with all my overseas relatives, I got a satellite phone as soon as they came on the market.”
“We can just see what’s available when we get there.” When I stared silent questions, he admitted, “I don’t have a credit card.”
“At all?”
“I haven’t had time to build a credit history.”
I laughed. “What, you’ve been in prison?”
All Rhys said was, “It’s not there I’ve been.”
I shrugged. Aunt Bridge trusted him.
And if she was mistaken, I could probably take him.
“We’ll use my credit card,” I said, calling Information.
“I can pay my way,” he assured me. “I have cash.”
This was so unlike any road trip with Lex Stuart that I had to grin at the irony. But after making a reservation at the Holiday Inn, I thought back to Aunt Bridge in that hospital bed, and my sense of humor faltered.
“Why now?” I asked, of the darkening French landscape as much as anything. “Our family has passed down a rhyme about the Melusine Cup for centuries—how did someone suddenly notice us?”
“Brigitte didn’t mention her lecture to you?”
I turned to better face him. “What lecture?”
“Three nights ago,” he said. “She gave a presentation on ‘Le féminin perdu en archéologie du dix-huitième siècle.’”
“‘The lost feminine in eighteenth-century archeology’?”
“How they dismissed the countless goddess figurines they found as dolls or pornography. That’s it. At one point, someone in the audience mentioned the Kali Cup. It had just made the news. Some of them thought its destruction was part of a—how did they put it—a patriarchal conspiracy for the continuing subjugation of women. “If destroying the Kali Cup was part of a great masculine conspiracy, I never got my ballot. Should I be insulted, do you think?”
He followed the signs toward Orléans. “I think the trouble started when Brigitte reassured the audience that there were more goddess grails, and that she and her brilliant American niece were working toward locating one in France.”
I groaned. “She didn’t.”
But of course she had. Aunt Bridge never backed down from anything. She had to have known the danger of her announcement. That didn’t mean she’d deserved the consequences.
It was the men who’d attacked her who perverted our world, who made it a darker place, not my aunt speaking the truth.
“She threw down the gauntlet, and someone picked it up.”
“At the risk of sounding sexist,” I said, “were there any other…?”
“Penises there?”
I choked. “Rhys!”
“There were,” he assured me. “Quite a few. Assuming the attackers were men in the audience we cannot narrow it down to one or two suspects.”
“It wasn’t just the men in the audience,” I said grimly.
Rhys glanced toward me, intrigued. “Why isn’t it?”
“Because they wouldn’t have had time to fly to the East Coast and break into my apartment. It has to be some kind of group or association, some kind of…”
“You think it’s a conspiracy?” Rhys prompted.
But that sounded far too dramatic for my comfort.
About an hour later, we stopped and ate a late dinner outside Orléans—the place Joan of Arc rescued before she got burned as a witch. While Rhys refilled the tank with petrol—his word—I phoned my mother. She insisted on going by my apartment to clean up the damage from the break-in. It wasn’t a battle I would easily win, so I forfeited.
When Rhys tossed me the keys to the Saxo, I slid into the driver’s seat, adjusted the mirrors and merged us back onto the motorway heading southeast.
I hadn’t driven ten kilometers before I noticed it.
There, in the rearview mirror, hovered a dark-green, four-door sedan made of sleek, curved lines.
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