athame, then? Catherine wondered. Wouldn’t this mean he’d had Emile’s already by that time?
Emile’s mother leaned into Catherine and whispered, “Do you want all of our family to disappear?” She gestured at Catherine’s pregnant belly. “And yours as well?”
Catherine was still holding the man’s gaze. “Do you know where Emile was going at the end? Where his killer took him?” she asked, sensing the answer would be different now.
The man released his wife, who curled into herself, as though she could shrink away from their conversation.
“I believe he went to a cave—a place that belongs to our family, to the house of the boar,” he said.
Catherine’s breath caught in her throat. She was coming full circle, back to the hidden caves, which she’d been certain must hold traces of where the missing Seekers had gone.
He took up a pen and a piece of paper and carefully wrote out a series of symbols. Beneath these, with a sure, quick hand, he sketched a landscape with a cave at its center.
—
“Have you ever been to Norway?” Catherine asked when she’d left the house and joined Archie outside.
The day was fine and warm, and the slight breeze carried the scent of flowers and the distant ocean. From the Pernets’ house, they looked down a steep cobbled lane to the village spread out below them, and to vineyards and fields beyond that.
“Why do I get the feeling it doesn’t matter how I answer that question?” Archie asked as they began to walk.
“Look at this.”
She held up the slip of paper with the coordinates Emile’s father had written out for her, and the drawing of the cave.
“You know I can’t read those made-up hieroglyphics,” Archie said. He was teasing her, because he could read them, a bit; she was teaching him.
“We have to go to Norway,” Catherine told him. She tucked the paper into her pocket and slipped a hand into Archie’s.
“You can’t go to Norway now,” he said.
“It will be all right, Archie. I came here, didn’t I? I’m fine.”
He fell silent without agreeing, and Catherine was already thinking about ice fields and warm boots. If she could get proof of the Middle causing Seekers’ deaths, the Old Dread and the Young Dread would have to listen to her.
When they reached the bottom of the lane and emerged into the open square of the medieval village, Catherine tumbled forward onto her knees and cried out.
“What is it?” Archie asked, catching her and pulling her gently upright.
She didn’t know how to answer him. She’d felt a warm wetness down her leg, which she knew immediately meant she’d started to bleed again. But there was something else that was harder to explain: The moment they’d emerged into the square, she’d had the strangest vision. She’d seen herself and Archie from afar, as though watching herself from the other side of the square. Along with that vision, she’d experienced such a surge of hatred and fury, her knees had given out.
“Catherine?” he said urgently.
“I’m seeing…He’s here…”
She was peering inside the mind of another person. It was the same mind she’d touched once before, that morning when the words “Mont Saint-Michel” had fallen into her thoughts. The connection had disturbed her then, but now—now she grasped whose mind it was, and she was terrified.
Archie held her up. “There’s a man looking at us,” he said. His eyes were on the other side of the square.
“Where?” She tried to follow the line of his gaze. It was summer, and great numbers of locals and tourists milled about the sidewalks. “Where?” she asked again.
“That way, but he’s gone.”
“Archie, what did he look like? Was he wearing a cloak? Was he tall?”
“A cloak? Like something from the olden days? Of course not. He was wearing a T-shirt.”
“Was he tall?”
Archie shrugged. “Big, at any rate. Like a bull.”
She didn’t need more description. This time, when their minds had touched, she’d recognized him. She hadn’t, as she’d thought before, heard the thoughts of a Seeker who was willing to kill; she’d stumbled into the mind of the Middle Dread himself.
Though Catherine had been looking for proof against the Middle for a long time, she’d always felt protected by his role as a Dread. She’d believed he was a terrible judge of Seekers, but a judge nonetheless—a Dread and not someone who would target her. After her conversation with Monsieur Pernet, she had no such illusions.
Past incidents appeared to her in new light. When Anthony had attacked her in Hong Kong, he hadn’t been