“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.
Like some kind of water creature. Like a shark.
Maybe it was instinct that locked me on to it. Or maybe instinct is just our subconscious noticing something—a driver’s face or a suspect maneuver—that our conscious mind hasn’t caught on to. At first I hesitated to mention it to Rhys.
What if I was imagining this?
I took the Blois/Vendôme exit, just to test them.
They took the same exit. At the next cross street, I U-turned under the motorway.
They followed. Crap.
Rhys inhaled deeply as he sat up, unable to ignore the centrifugal force of my turn. “Is something wrong?”
I turned right, past an anachronistic McDonald’s, and divided my attention between the road ahead of me and the car behind me. “What kind of car has a silver lion on its grill?”
“Rampant?” he asked, rubbing a sleepy hand across his face.
“Yeah.”
“That would be a Peugeot.” Yet another gender stereotype, proven out.
I made another right.
So did they.
I signaled a third right, as if lost—then turned hard left.
They followed. Worse, despite the illusion of activity given by that McDonald’s, I’d somehow driven us into a dark, industrial neighborhood. No, no, no! You’re supposed to stay in a populous area when you’re being tailed.
“Then we’re being followed by a Peugeot,” I said grimly.
Rhys turned in his cramped seat to look—which is when the Peugeot behind us picked up speed, looming increasingly closer in my rearview mirror.
“Ah,” he breathed.
“Yeah. Merde.”
I hit the gas.
Hard.
Chapter 5
“W ould you prefer that I drive?” asked Rhys. The question kind of squeezed out of him. He was pressed firmly back in his seat, only partly by choice.
“No.” I toed the gas pedal to the floor—after all, if the police stopped us it would be a good thing, right? Most tails don’t stick around to talk to the authorities. “Do you think they followed us all the way from Paris?”
“I don’t know. How would I?”
By looking in the rearview mirror once in a while? That wasn’t fair, and I knew it. I had to focus on now.
The Peugeot was gaining on us. It was a larger car than Aunt Bridge’s Citroën. It had more power.
We shot onto a bridge over the Loire—luckily, a regular, two-lane bridge, and not one of those scenic medieval landmarks. For a moment, as we left the upgrade onto the bridge, the Saxo’s tires left the road.
It landed about as smoothly as the jet I’d ridden into Paris earlier today. I managed to hang on to the steering wheel and felt disproportionately proud of myself, which seemed preferable to feeling terrified.
We were leaving the industrial area behind for more open landscape and less chance of police intervention.
Who were these guys?
“Do you know where we’re going?” asked Rhys, his voice not quite as tight. He was trying to stay cool, anyway.
“Away from the damned highway,” I confessed. “And I want to be back on it. You’re wearing your seat belt, right?”
He