The woman had finished her cigarette. She crushed it out in an ashtray with a boar emblem stamped into it. Emile’s mother was not very old, Catherine realized, and once must have been very fit, but she seemed used up and frail, as though fear and the loss of her son had taken decades from her.
Catherine asked, “Do you have some idea where he—”
The woman shook her head emphatically, cutting Catherine off. She got to her feet and took a framed photograph from the mantel.
“Emile is our only son, but my cousin has sons, Emile’s closest friends.”
She took a seat again and handed the picture to Catherine. Catherine stopped breathing when she saw it. It was a photograph of Emile and four other boys. On Emile’s left was a young man with dark brown hair and an easy smile playing across his lips. She had seen that smile. His face had been covered in dark blue paint, but she’d seen those lips sneering at her. Where is the athame? he’d demanded, straddling her on the floor of the club bathroom in Hong Kong. Emile was just as slow, and things ended just as badly for him.
Catherine tapped the boy’s face. “This…is Emile’s cousin?”
The woman nodded. “Second cousin. There are four brothers. I would have told you to ask his oldest cousin, Anthony, where Emile went. But Anthony is missing now as well.”
He’s not exactly missing, Catherine thought. She’d crawled out from under him as he bled to death in Hong Kong. She swallowed, attempting to push the memory from her mind.
“He…Anthony was never on the estate,” Catherine said softly, trying to keep her voice even. “But he trained as a Seeker?”
The woman nodded distractedly. “His father trained him and his brothers himself—though, why, I don’t know. They’d lost their family athame—house of the horse—three generations ago. And yet still Anthony has disappeared, like Emile disappeared, like many Seekers disappear. And one of his brothers was recently attacked and left injured.”
That must have been Anna’s attacker, Catherine thought.
Monsieur Pernet looked uncomfortable. He was shifting in his chair and staring at the floor.
Hesitantly Catherine asked, “It’s only— Do you think it’s possible the cousin had something to do with Emile’s disappearance? If his family didn’t have an athame anymore…isn’t it possible he was after Emile’s?”
“They were family,” the woman said in a harsh whisper, as though the very thought of what Catherine suggested was overwhelming. “Of course that’s not possible. They were the best of friends.”
Emile’s father raised his eyes to watch Catherine closely. His face was red with some suppressed emotion, and Catherine wasn’t sure if he was on the verge of throwing her out of his house or if he was about to cry. At last the man drove one of his fists into the open palm of his other hand. “He can’t kill Seekers himself,” he said.
The wife looked up at her husband quickly, her expression frightened.
“Who can’t?” Catherine asked.
“You must know who by now.”
At once she understood. This man was trying to tell her something very like what Briac had hinted at. “You’re talking about the Middle Dread,” she said evenly.
The man nodded his head once slowly.
Catherine said, “But—of course a Dread wouldn’t kill a Seeker…unless a crime had been commit—”
“You misunderstand me,” the man told her, cutting her off. Then, his voice rough with the weight of the subject, he said, “He wants them dead. He desires to kill them himself. But he can’t.”
“Why would…A Dread has his oaths. He would never—”
She was interrupted by a rumbling sound from the man’s barrel chest, which she recognized after a moment as a disgusted laugh. He said, “Oaths? No. You can’t think of him as a Dread. He is…his own creature. With his own plans. He desires to kill Seekers but he can’t do it himself.”
Catherine stopped herself from speaking as she wrapped her mind around what Monsieur Pernet was telling her.
At last she asked, “Why can’t he kill Seekers?”
“That is a bit of a mystery,” the man answered gravely. “It is something between the Middle Dread and the Old Dread. I have my theory. Are you able to read another’s thoughts, Catherine?”
Catherine was startled by the sudden question. “Not—not on purpose,” she answered him. She recalled the cold mind that had touched hers before she went to Mont Saint-Michel. “But it’s happened a few times.”
“So you know it is possible.”
She nodded a bit reluctantly; it was a part of being a Seeker that