Camille nodded.
James’s eyes were too wide, too wild, as he cast around the room. ‘I need a needle and thread. Something to sew up the wound.’
Al and James went digging and Ada found herself alone with Guil, looking at the mess that used to be his thigh and side.
Camille had sunk to the floor wheezing, eyes closed. Olympe was pacing the crypt, the dirt and ash on her cheeks stained with tears.
‘Found something.’ James reappeared with a slender needle and spool of white cotton thread. His hands shook as he threaded the needle. ‘It’s supposed to be a curved needle but it’ll have to do.’
Al held up a flickering candle stub to light him as he worked.
‘Show me.’
Carefully Ada lifted her hands, feeling the torn flesh move unnaturally. James cursed under his breath.
A muscle twitched in James’s jaw as he made the first stitch.
As Al held the light steady, Ada pressed the two lips of the cut together so James could stitch a neat line, first along Guil’s thigh, then more sloppily snagging together the edges of the tear in his side. For a moment she felt as if she was lighter than air, floating in the hot air balloon again up, up, up out of the coppery smell of blood and panic.
A blue spark caught her eye.
‘It’s my fault.’ Olympe had stopped pacing and was staring at Guil transfixed. The make-up had faded around her temples and eyes where she kept rubbing them. ‘I did this.’
A dart of blue lightning snaked down her hand.
‘Just stay calm.’ Ada couldn’t look up from the wound for long or risk holding it crooked. ‘This isn’t your fault.’
‘It is. All of it is. They wouldn’t be coming after you if they weren’t coming after me. You were only trying to help me and I did this to you.’
‘No—’
‘I hurt people. The bodies … all those bodies in the street.’
Ada saw another spark crackle between Olympe’s fingers.
‘Al – take her upstairs. And for god’s sake don’t let anyone see you.’
He nodded, leaving the candle balanced on the lid of the stone casket, and led her, weeping, up to the abandoned church.
In the fetid silence, Ada and James worked quickly. Blood covered everything. It congealed under her fingernails and gathered in the wrinkles of her knuckles.
At last James knotted the thread and dropped the needle. He closed his eyes and let out a shaky breath.
‘There. The rest is out of our hands.’
Ada carefully sponged the blood from Guil’s side. The stitches had soaked through dark red against his ashen skin, cutting a puckered line across muscle.
They had the information they’d been hunting for.
She wasn’t sure it was worth the price they’d paid.
2
The Charnel House at the Saints-Innocents Safe House
‘Well, congratulations, everyone, on a job well done.’ Al took a cup of coffee, giving Camille a meaningful look.
They’d moved Guil into the drier, warmer charnel house above, after checking it was secure. It was less dank than the crypt but just as morbid. A crumbling fresco of theDanse Macabrewound its way round the walls showing Death leading beggars and kings alike to their end. The Saints-Innocents cemetery had been stripped of its dead ten years before when the overflowing graveyards of Paris had been emptied into the old mines; now a herb and vegetable market took its place. It did a good job of hiding their presence: a cacophony of sellers hawking, horseshoes on flagstones and street performers singing drowned any noise they might make inside the forgotten building. The smell of the herbs hanging in dried bundles and heaped fresh on the ground outside was overwhelming, mint and thyme and rosemary and basil and sage twisting together in a sickly mess. But at least it would mask the smell of blood.
