Madalen, Lina and several other girls were singing the refrain, gathered around the tables outside the bar, their voices high and clear in the night’s air. It was heady and exhilarating. They beckoned her over to join them, but she really didn’t belong here.
Ari retreated, looking for a way to fade back into the shadows. Parties were not her thing. Jason should know that. Once upon a time, they might have been bearable, but without Simon, without his easy charm and love of life, she just felt lost.
So lost.
The cold weight of grief closed itself around her again.
As she wandered down the narrow cobbled street, she found her vision blurring, her eyes stinging yet again. This had been his home once. Before he lost his parents, before he moved away. But he had never stopped dreaming about it. He’d never stopped loving it. Even when they’d been in college together, all those years he lived abroad, he always talked about it. You could hear the love in his voice. When he had eventually moved back here, it was like he finally relaxed.
A true Sirènois.
She paused, a thought niggling at her. This place couldn’t have been called Sainte Sirène originally. That was a French name too, wasn’t it? And, come to that, she strongly doubted the du Lac family had borne that name all those years ago. Why had they changed it? And what had the original been?
Rafael might know. Or Madame du Lac…
Folklore often lingered in names. In Irish, it wasdindshenchas, the lore of the place, and many of their legends began with the details of why a place bore a certain name and the stories that had named it.
High walls loomed out of the darkness. The cemetery. She’d walked out beyond the edge of the village and it was dark here. If she’d wanted to get lost and avoid other people, she was doing a bloody good job of it. She leaned against the high metal gates, her forehead pressed against the cold black curls and twists. She expected it to be locked, but to her surprise, the gate opened.
On the other side, in the darkness, a host of little lights twinkled, like Christmas lights. She stepped inside, following them. They hovered over gravestones and vanished as she approached. There was just enough light to read the names on those graves as she passed. Kerdaniel, Heussaff, Pascal, Poullain…
Ari sucked in a breath and the air was cold as it filled her lungs. It formed mist in front of her face as she breathed out. And through that mist, she saw a figure.
He stood by a crypt in the centre of the graveyard, a huge ornate thing, grey and cold, a tiny fortress with the name du Lac carved over the sealed door. Almost as if he was waiting for her. As if he had called her and she had come, unable to resist.
He wore the same black coat and hat as last night, his long white-blond hair whipping around his face, even though there was no storm now, no wind or rain. And he had never had hair like that. Not while he was alive.
But this time there was no mask. It was Simon.
Unmistakably, irrefutably, Simon.
It shouldn’t be. He hadn’t been buried here. He shouldn’t be here at all. They had done exactly as he requested. He’d been cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, in the bay. Jason and Nico had seen to everything. He didn’t have any living family. He had been alone in the world, he had said, before he found her.
But his family could be here, she realised. Here in these neat and regimented rows, surrounded by the high walls, in the heart of Sainte Sirène.
‘Simon?’ she whispered.
He didn’t move. His face didn’t alter, but she sensed the hardening in him, the disquiet that rippled through the air around him. She knew it wasn’t Simon. Not really. Not anymore.
And yet it was.
‘Simon,’ she said again, more insistently. She would name him. If whatever she was looking at would insist on wearing his face, it could stand to hear his name and wear that too. The simmering rage inside her demanded it.
He opened his mouth in a snarl, an expression Simon had never worn, all those teeth on display, and Ari took an inadvertent step back, but stopped herself running. Behind her, the gate slammed closed with a clang of metal and she bumped into it. Nowhere else to go.
Deep silence swept over them both. She couldn’t hear the music anymore, or the sounds of merriment from the crowd at thefest noz. Not even distantly. All she could hear was the sea.
The Ankou swept forward, the long black coat flying out like a cloak behind him, until he stood right in front of her. The cold air around him enveloped her and he looked down into her face. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Ariadne Walker.’ His voice was very soft, little more than a whisper.
‘What are you?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘Why, Simon?’
He smiled, a knowing languid expression. It wasn’t kind. ‘Why not?’
Because she had loved him. Because he would never behave in this way. Because…
