Kiss of Fire (19 page)

She had a feeling it had something to do with Quinn's past.

And maybe something to do with the Wyvern.

Either way, she needed expert help. Sara surveyed the silent store, then took a chance. “Go ahead: help me, Magda,” she invited.

“Please,” she added when nothing happened.

Sara had two beats to feel silly, then the air conditioner whirred to life.

And a book fell to the floor in the back of the shop.

As she headed toward it, she had to admit that it was handy to have a ghost on her side.

Q
uinn didn't believe that Sara was going to do what he asked, but short of parking outside of her shop for the day—and earning her animosity—he didn't know what to do. He set up his booth in poor humor, taking pride in lining up his wares in an orderly fashion. It was going to be another hot day and he was too short of sleep to be amiable.

He had just arranged the drawer pulls and door hardware to his satisfaction when a coin fell and rolled.

Quinn froze.

The silver coin rolled between his feet, spiraled, and fell heads-up right in front of him. He glanced over his shoulder, not really surprised to find Donovan leaning on one pole that supported the awning over Quinn's booth.

“Blood duel,” Donovan murmured in old-speak.

Quinn snorted. He bent down and picked up the coin. It was a silver dollar, one of the old ones with a higher silver content.

“I save them for special occasions,” Donovan said.

“Glad to know that I'm special,” Quinn replied and put the coin down on his display table.

“Didn't you hear me?” Donovan demanded. “I challenged you to a blood duel. Or maybe you've been away from our kind so long that you've forgotten how things are done.”

“I haven't forgotten anything.”

“Then let's go.”

Quinn slanted a glance at the other
Pyr
. “You really don't want to do this.”

“Wrong, Smith. I really
do
want to do this.”

Quinn picked up the silver dollar, his gaze locked with Donovan's, and closed his fist around the coin. He blew into his closed hand and willed the coin to change. He opened his hand a moment later and tossed the coin to Donovan, who caught it despite his surprise.

It had been transformed to show Quinn's hammer on one side and his mermaid on the other.

“So, you really are the Smith,” Donovan said without admiration. “And you really do have a clue what you're doing.” He looked Quinn up and down, his attitude unchanged. “That only makes it worse, in my opinion.”

“Makes what worse?”

“Delaney was hit years ago and he never healed right. I used to look out for him; I thought Erik would look out for him.”

“Your argument is with Erik. Call him out for your blood feud.”

Donovan laughed. “My argument is with you, Smith, and we both know it. What's the matter? Afraid you'll lose before you've secured your legacy with your mate?”

Quinn met the other
Pyr
's gaze steadily, giving him one last chance to let it go. “You don't know what you're getting into.”

“Then let's find out.” Donovan tossed the coin back and this time Quinn snatched it out of the air.

“You're on,” he said, knowing there was only one way to solve this dispute. “But don't come whining to me when you get hurt.”

Donovan laughed but Quinn had learned a lot since the last time they had seen each other fight. Sara was safe in her shop, with his territory mark around her.

The mermaid was stone cold.

And this wouldn't take long.

Sara glanced down the aisles and quickly spotted the fallen book. It was splayed open on the floor. Sara picked it up, fearing that one of the pages had been bent.
The Cathars.
Who were they? She hadn't reached this section in her reading yet and didn't have any idea what the book was about.

The book had opened to a double page spread entitled “The Massacre at Béziers.” Sara might have thought she had the wrong book, at least until she noticed the photo at the bottom of the right page.

It was a photo of a coin, one that was identical to the one left in her purse. It was labeled as being the coinage of Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Béziers and Car-cassonne.

Sara took the book to the cash desk, sat down, and started to read. In half an hour, she knew that the house of Trencavel had controlled much of an area that had been associated with a heretical sect known as the Cathars. The Cathars had also been known as the Albigensians, a name taken from the Languedoc town of Albi where many of them had resided.

The Cathars didn't seem very shocking at eight centuries removal, but in those times, their presence and their teachings had been considered a threat to nearby Christians.

The Cathars had believed in a kind of reincarnation, by which a soul could be reborn in any life form. They did not consider plants or fish to have souls, so those foodstuffs composed their diet. They were essentially vegetarians, in a time during which most people relied heavily upon meat for sustenance.

They read the Bible for themselves and discussed its lessons among themselves, instead of letting priests read and interpret it for them. Again, after the Reformation and establishment of Christian denominations that promoted exactly that teaching model, Sara couldn't find the practice very awful.

Certainly not worth a death sentence.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, the Cathars tithed to their own priests instead of to the Roman Church. Sara tapped her finger on the book. The language of money was one that she spoke fluently and she suspected that this item was the real root of the issue.

The house of Trencavel, it seemed, had been remarkably tolerant in terms of religion. As long as the secular tithes were paid, they didn't worry much about ecclesiastical tithes being collected. Perhaps predictably, in time the Papacy took exception to that policy.

In the early thirteenth century, the crusading fervor that had gripped Europe turned from the Middle East to battlefields closer to home. It was expensive to travel—there was the financial side of things again—and matters had turned against the crusaders in Palestine. After the conquest of Spain and Portugal from the Muslims, the crusaders looked within Europe for new objectives. There were crusades in the Baltics, in the Italian peninsula, and the Albigensian Crusade in Languedoc.

The Cathars had to be exterminated, by thirteenth century logic, for the good of the faith, the protection of orthodoxy, and the uninterrupted flow of ecclesiastical tithes.

A town ruled by the tolerant Raymond-Roger, Béziers had been targeted by the approaching army, despite Raymond-Roger's attempts to negotiate at the last minute. It was believed that some two hundred Cathars were among Béziers's population of twenty thousand.

On July 22, 1209, the crusaders sacked the town. The residents fled to the churches for sanctuary, which should have saved their lives. In the cathedral, however, the priests conducted a mass for the dead.

Sara read with horror that it proved to be a mass for those who had taken refuge there. The crusaders sealed the doors from the outside and razed the church while it was fully occupied. The rest of the city's inhabitants were used for target practice or simply slaughtered.

The town was then burned to the ground.

By the end of the day, Arnaud Amaury, the Cistercian abbot-commander of the assault, sent triumphant word to the Papacy that twenty thousand people in Béziers had been killed, regardless of their age, rank, or gender. It was recorded that not so much as a single baby survived that day's massacre.

It was a horrific account of terrible events, made even more horrible by the fact that it had been recorded by ecclesiastics who crowed about their triumph in Béziers. Sara could think only of all those people who had been viciously killed, of a town that had been eliminated because 1 percent of its population was Bible-reading vegetarians.

The closing words of the summary were the ones that made Sara's blood run cold. At the launch of the assault, Arnaud Amaury had been asked how to tell Cathar from Catholic within the city walls. His reply resonated with the brutality of that day:

“Kill them all, for God will surely recognize his own.”

Sara shut the book, shivered, and stared out the windows of her shop. Her instincts told her that this church fire might be the fire in which Quinn's mother had died. But that made no rational sense: Quinn would have been more than eight hundred years old, for that to be the case.

She thought of his joke that he was old enough to know better and wondered.

Maybe this was just another impossible thing to believe.

Maybe she had a couple of new questions for Quinn.

She thought of calling him for escort service and decided not to bother. After all, it was only midmorning, and the arcade was filled with tourists and shoppers. It couldn't be a hundred yards to his booth. He'd probably be busy at this hour. Maybe he'd be glad enough to see her that he'd forget to be annoyed.

Maybe she needed to prove to both of them that there were still some times she could be alone.

She turned the sign to read
BACK IN FIVE MINUTES
, took the coin and the book that Magda had chosen, and stepped out into the arcade. The mermaid was glowing faintly when Sara locked the door and she hesitated for a moment, then decided that the mermaid was simply resonating with Quinn's anxiety.

She hadn't taken more than a dozen steps toward State Street before she knew she'd called that wrong.

After Quinn asked a volunteer to mind his booth, he and Donovan moved quickly in search of a good spot. Donovan suggested a cluster of trees to the east of downtown that housed a business park. The density of the trees and the comparatively small number of businesses combined with the hour to mean that few humans would observe them.

“Stay low,” he advised Donovan. “The less beguiling that needs to be done, the better.”

Donovan grinned. “Maybe we'll just leave it be. It's about time that humans knew we walked among them, in my opinion.”

“It's never been our way,” Quinn said.

“It's honest,” Donovan said with force and Quinn had to agree with him.

That same directness characterized Donovan's fighting. Once they were in the clearing they'd chosen, he turned on Quinn.

“This is for Delaney,” he said and threw a punch at Quinn's face.

Quinn seized his fist and turned it behind him, forcing Donovan toward the ground. “We can end this now,” he offered, but Donovan snarled.

He changed shape with impressive speed, shifting within Quinn's grip to a dragon too large and sinuous for Quinn to hold. Donovan was dark blue in dragon form, as if he were made of lapis lazuli set in gold, and moved with power. He wrestled free of Quinn's grip, pivoted, and slashed with his claws.

Quinn leapt backward, shifted shape, and met the attacking Donovan in midair. They locked claws in the traditional fighting pose and he felt the strength of his opponent. Upright, they were both beating their wings, which kept them a dozen feet off the ground.

Donovan was fighting to win. This was no play match: it was a blood duel in the old style. Quinn was more than ready for it.

“No room for mistakes,” Donovan whispered in old-speak, with a mischievous glance at the ground. The pair grappled with each other, each trying to force the other to break his grip or to roll backward.

“It's better to win when the stakes are high,” Quinn replied.

No sooner had he said as much than Donovan made his move: he swung his tail to strike at the same moment he bent Quinn's claws backward. Quinn snarled and retaliated in kind. They rolled in the air, tails locked and teeth bared, their powers evenly matched.

Quinn didn't really want to injure Donovan, but the other
Pyr
didn't share that perspective.

Donovan ripped his tail free of Quinn's grip, then swung it at Quinn with killing force. When Quinn ducked the blow, Donovan slapped him across the face from the other side with one leathery wing. They dropped in the air, but Quinn beat his wings higher, bearing the other
Pyr
's weight upward.

Neither of them was breathing hard.

Donovan lunged upward at Quinn, baring his teeth to bite Quinn's scaled chest. Quinn slashed at the other
Pyr
with his legs and while Donovan evaded the full force of that blow, Quinn saw the flash of his sharp teeth. He breathed dragonfire to protect himself and Donovan loosed his grip.

Quinn let him fall.

Donovan caught himself just before impact. He glared at Quinn as he winced at the singe he'd taken.

“I won't be retaliating in kind,” he muttered. “I've heard about the Smith and dragonfire.”

“You can't believe every rumor you hear,” Quinn said with a smile.

Donovan snorted. “You won't talk me into making you stronger that easily.” He'd barely finished his old-speak when he dove at Quinn again.

Quinn realized he'd felt only a fraction of Donovan's power. This time, the other
Pyr
locked claws with Quinn with surprising vigor. Quinn couldn't tear his claws free. Donovan wrapped his tail around Quinn's as if he'd hold him captive.

“Now you can surrender,” he taunted, but Quinn had other thoughts.