Jack Templar and the Lord of the Vampires (14 page)

This time Rusty smiled. That was the question he wanted. He pointed to the south. “See that big white church on that hill over there? The one that looks like it popped out of an Arabian Nights book?” We all looked and saw what he was pointing at, an enormous church on the tallest hill in town that glistened bright white.  “The basilica is Sacre Coeur and that hill is called Montmartre. The Mountain of the Martyr. That’s in reference to St. Denis. His head was chopped off there, and he supposedly walked nearly all the way here, over ten kilometers. Which is almost six miles. Preaching a sermon along the way.”

“That seems a little unbelievable,” Eva said. Given the things she’d been exposed to as a monster hunter, I knew she was just goading our guide to tell us more.

“There were hundreds of witnesses who all swear it was the truth. And you can Google it.” Rusty leaned in close to her, pretending to carry a head in his hands, milking the drama. “At the end, he walked up to a woman, handed his head to her, then fell over dead.”

“Who was the woman?” I asked.

Rusty looked annoyed that I’d bothered him ogling Eva. He answered me without looking away from her. She pretended to be flattered by the attention. “I don’t know. A nobody.”

“Where is he buried?” Xavier asked.

Rusty swung around, looking tired of the game we were playing. “Look, I’m glad you like history and all. But I’m a paid tour guide. I don’t mind telling you,” he nodded at Eva, “but you boys are going to have to pay if you want big Rusty’s knowledge.”

“Big Rusty?” Will mouthed the words silently behind Rusty’s back, barely able to keep from cracking up.

I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket and handed it to Rusty. He reached for it, and I pulled it back out of his reach.  “Tell us the rest of what you know,” I said.

“What? You guys don’t know how to use Google?”

“We lost our phones,” Daniel said, glaring at him. Rusty shifted uncomfortably on his feet. He glanced around as if seeing us for the first time. All our pretense of being tourists with an idle curiosity was gone. We all stared at him, waiting for him to continue.

“Uhhh…the Basilica of St. Denis is north of here,” he said unsteadily. “It’s where all the French Kings are buried too. Can I go now?”

“No one’s keeping you, Rusty. Of course you can go,” I said. Rusty tried to leave but Daniel stood in his way. He turned a different direction and ran into a serious-looking Eva. “But if you’re staying, I have one more question for you,” I finished.

“Yeah? What’s that?” he asked nervously.

“There’s this nursery rhyme that’s stuck in my head. I thought maybe you might know what it means.”

Rusty swallowed hard. “OK, what is it?”

“
Look for a roost that a creature defends. Once it ate someone who carried his head.
Does that mean anything to you?”

Rusty gulped, and I found myself feeling bad for him. Even though he’d acted like a pig to Eva, he looked really nervous now. I was about to give him a break and let him go when I saw something click, and he twisted around to look at the top of Notre Dame. “Of course,” he said.

“Of course what?” I said.

He turned to me, looking smug. “I know the answer. But the question is, what’s it worth to you? I work the streets. I know desperation when I see it.”

“Do you know a broken arm when you see it?” Eva said, dropping her schoolgirl persona once and for all. I put up my arm and held her back.

“Twenty dollars,” I said. “And you get to keep all your bones intact.”

Rusty nodded and shrugged apologetically. “You can’t blame me for trying.” He took the twenty and stuffed it in his pocket. He walked away from the cathedral and Daniel stepped in front of him. “If you want your answer, tell this oaf to get out of my way.”

I waved Daniel off and we all followed Rusty out into the courtyard. After a while, Rusty turned to walk backward, craning his neck as he watched the roofline. “There,” he exclaimed. “As the locals say, voila.”

We all looked at the top of the cathedral and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Okay, what are we looking for?” I asked.

“Look farther back, right between the two bell towers. What do you see?” Rusty asked, clearly enjoying the game.

An immense spire attached to the center of the cathedral roof rose to the sky. “I see a spire,” I said.

“But what do you see at the very top?” Rusty asked.

We all squinted, but all I could make out was a dark blob on top of the thin spire. “I give up. What is it?”

“Believe it or not, it’s a canister that holds three relics,” Rusty said. “You do know what relics are, right?”

Xavier came to the rescue. “Relics can either be items touched by the saints or parts of their bodies. All cathedrals have a relic of some kind. Like a leg bone or something.”

“That’s kind of gross, isn’t it?” T-Rex asked.

Rusty ignored the comment and kept going. “In that canister are three relics. A piece of the crown of thorns, a relic of St. Genieve, and…”

“A relic of St. Denis,” Will guessed.

“Bingo. And guess what creature the canister is shaped like?” Rusty said, stretching it out for effect. “Not a cow. Not a dog. But a rooster.”

Look for a roost that a creature defends. Once it ate someone who carried his head.
It fit perfectly.

“Okay, Rusty,” I said. “Time for you to go.”

Daniel pulled his sword from his side. Rusty’s eyes went wide and he took off running. I shook my head at Daniel. “I didn’t mean he had to
go
.”

Daniel grinned. “I know. I wasn’t going to hurt him. I just wanted to speed up his exit.”

We all laughed but then turned silent as we looked up at the spire. The roof where it was attached was about three hundred feet high, and the spire towered another three hundred feet on top of that. The first two thirds of it was a wide square base that sloped to a point. After that is was narrow metalwork. The top had to be about six hundred feet off the ground.

“You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?” Will said.

“I’m trying not to think anything until we check out this story,” I said. “Come on, let’s find an Internet café and see if big Rusty was worth his twenty bucks.” As we walked away, I tried to keep my composure, but I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. The thought of climbing that spire had my legs shaking and an ice ball churning in my stomach. I found myself hoping Rusty had made the whole thing up.

“
T
he good news is that Rusty wasn’t making everything up,” Xavier said as he scrolled through pages of information.

It was just Xavier and I at the terminal, the others waiting for us at an outdoor café nearby. We had started by all huddling around the computer together throwing out suggestions for search terms and sites for him to look at. After only one annoying minute of Googling by committee, Xavier shooed us out, telling us to wait for him across the street. For safety sake, I stayed behind with him even though I wasn’t much help. He moved too fast for me to read anything on the screen, scanning documents in seconds, deciding to print or move on before I even knew what the page was about. I wondered if this was the closest thing to seeing what Xavier’s mind must be like. Constantly processing data, sorting it, filtering it. After about five minutes, he suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” I asked, thinking he’d found something. I was too busy looking at the screen to notice Xavier’s face was red and he was on the verge of crying.

“I don’t know how I missed the clue,” he said. “The first one about the beginnings and ends. It was so obvious.”

“It all worked out,” I said. “Your wrong guess still put us in the right area.”

“But what if it hadn’t?” he sputtered. “What if I make a mistake like that again, and I send us in the completely wrong direction?”

Only then did I notice how upset he was. Tears rolled down his cheeks, but he left them alone. He refused to look at me. His fingers were back to dancing across the keyboard, bring up images of Notre Dame, schematics of the interior, architectural drawings of the exterior.

“What if I make a mistake and get everyone killed?” he whispered.

I put my hands over his and stopped him from typing. He froze but continued to stare at the computer screen, avoiding eye contact.

“Xavier, we’re all going to make mistakes,” I said. “The reason I was so mad at Daniel at that restaurant in Spain was because he was right. I’ve messed up so many times I’m losing count.”

He shook his head. “You’re doing the best you can.”

“And there isn’t a minute when I don’t worry that my best isn’t good enough,” I said.

“How do you keep that from driving you crazy?” he asked quietly.

I thought about the night with Eva on the cliff, how she had refocused me on how important our mission was to the unknowing world. I gave Xavier the only answer I could. “Because there’s no other choice. We’re it. If we don’t reunite the Jerusalem Stones and stop Ren Lucre, no one will.”

“Is that supposed to help with the pressure?” Xavier asked. “If so, it’s not really working.”

“I’m being honest with you,” I replied. “You’re one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met, so you’d know if I was trying to baby you.” He nodded. “I just know that all I can ask of myself is to try my best. And when I make mistakes, trust that my friends with be there to cover my back. Will you do that? Will you cover for me when I make mistakes?”

He finally looked at me, wiping the tears away. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“And I promise I’ll do it for you. Anytime. Anywhere. Deal?” I held out my hand, and he shook it. I pointed to the tidy stack of printouts in the printer tray. “So, did you find anything good?”

He broke out into a wide grin. “Of course I did. Come on, let’s show the others.”

A few minutes later he smacked the printouts onto the center of the café table where the rest of the team had gathered. I grabbed the top few pages and thumbed through them. The story of St. Denis was told with slight variations over and over on different websites. “So it’s all true?” I asked.

“I don’t know about true,” Xavier said. “A thousand years ago, people believed the world was flat. Just because a lot of people believe something is true doesn’t make it so.”

Will took a few more pages off the stack. “You don’t believe this guy carried his own head through town preaching a sermon? We’ve seen worse, haven’t we?”

“Not with a human though,” Daniel said. “The only time we’ve seen that kind of behavior is with…” His voice trailed off and he stroked his chin.

“He was a vampire,” Eva said flatly. “If this actually happened, then he had to have been not only a vampire but an extremely powerful one. Usually decapitation does the trick, but I’ve seen heads continue to live for a minute or two afterward.”

T-Rex turned squeamish. “See? This is exactly why I liked being a Ratling. Give me turnips and carrots any day.”

I thought through the evidence, trying to make sense of it. “So you guys think our Saint Denis was a vampire?”

Daniel nodded. “Think about it. An extremely powerful vampire hides in plain sight as a priest, using the position to direct suspicion away from other Creach when there are sightings. But one day, someone shows up with a powerful weapon strong enough to decapitate him.”

Eva picked up the story. “Because he’s so strong, he walks through town carrying his own head. In today’s world, that would be on Facebook and YouTube within minutes.”

“And people would think it was either faked or some science experiment gone bad,” Will interjected.

“Exactly,” Daniel agreed, retaking the lead. They directed the story at Xavier and me as if we were the judge and jury trying this eighteen-century-old case.  “But back then people were more superstitious. Something like this had only two possible sources. Heaven or hell. He was a priest, so they chose to see heaven. But they were probably wrong.”

Xavier joined in, showing that he was buying their theory. “But we know from experience that this phenomenon happens with vampires. Therefore, St. Denis was a vampire.”

He said this a little too loud, and Eva and I both looked around cautiously to see who might be listening. There were other customers on the small sidewalk patio, but they were a few tables away and were absorbed in newspapers, phone calls, and reading their electronic devices.

“I think we ought to keep that to ourselves. I get the sense the French really like this guy,” I said. Xavier looked embarrassed.

“Alright, so what’s in the rooster?” Daniel asked. “This guy’s ankle bone or something?”

“Could it be the Jerusalem Stone?” Will offered.

Xavier shook his head. “The timeline doesn’t work. This happened in the third century, and the Knights Templar didn’t find the Jerusalem Stones for another thousand years. Even this spire is weird. It wasn’t built the same time as the rest of the cathedral.” He dug through his stack of papers and found several sheets covered with black and white photos showing the construction of the spire. “They added the spire during a renovation around 1870.”

Something caught my eye. I grabbed at one of the pages and looked closer at the photo. Everyone watched me curiously as a smile spread across my face. “I think we found where Gregor hid the weapon.”

I slid the photo back onto the table. It showed a group of men in old-fashioned suits and top hats on a construction site in front of Notre Dame. The metalwork of the spire lay on the ground at their feet and the bronze rooster sculpture sat propped on a table. Even though the photo was dark and grainy, there was a face in the back row that was unmistakably familiar. Gregor.

I looked back in the direction of Notre Dame. Even though we were a few streets away, and there were townhouses blocking the view of the cathedral itself, the spire rose high into the air above it all. The bronze rooster was no more than a dot in the sky from this distance. Inside was the weapon that had killed St. Denis and that Gregor had used during his legendary career as a vampire hunter. He hadn’t wanted to destroy it in case it was needed later, but he also didn’t trust that he could keep it safe.  And now it fell to me to recover it. I imagined the view from the top of the spire was something incredible. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to see it in person.

“Looks like I’m going climbing tonight,” I said. “Xavier, can you hook me up with one of your inventions so I don’t…you know…”

“Fall to a grisly death?” Will offered.

“Yeah, thanks,” I replied.

Xavier looked over his diagrams and photos of the cathedral and the spire. Talking to himself under his breath, doing calculations. Finally he looked up. “Maybe I can help a little, rig some climbing gear, modify it for the surfaces you’ll encounter, trace a route for you, those kinds of things. Even with a week or two...”

“You have two days,” I said.

Xavier looked horrified.  “Then…I…I don’t think it can be done safely.”

“Then I’ll just have to do it unsafely,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “What else is new, right?” I half-expected everyone to pounce on that idea and talk me out of it. But no one did. We all wanted to know what was inside that rooster. “All right, it’s settled. Xavier, you have Daniel, Will and T-Rex to help you.”

“What are you and Eva going to do?” Daniel asked.

“Tiberon showed me an image of where the vampire lair is located. Turns out there’s a tour of it this afternoon.” I held up the brochure for the catacombs I’d taken from inside the cathedral. “We’ll scope that out and meet back here by eight. Let’s hunt some vampires.”

As Eva and I stood to leave, Xavier was already handing out assignments to the others. As we left the café, none of us had the slightest clue how terrifying and horrific climbing Notre Dame was going to be. But that was going to have to wait because Eva and I had a date with the remains of a hundred thousand dead people.

I know what you’re thinking…how romantic.