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She raked her hands through her hair, lifting the long strands and letting them sift through her fingers. What were some synonyms for power? Authority, right, might, will. All of those would fit, yet each differed somewhat in meaning. If she interpreted the sentence literally, then what power did the Guardian have? Power over the Treasure, absolute control of it? Money was power, as the old saying went, but the chronicles had also said that the Treasure was “greater than gold.” It followed, then, that though there had likely been a monetary treasury, that wasn’t the Treasure referred to so reverentially.
So what had the Treasure been, and what sort of power had the Guardian wielded because of it? If Black Niall had been the possessor of such mighty power, why had he spent his life as a renegade in the remote western Highlands? How had a Templar, supposedly a religious man, become a man as renowned for his sexual appetite as he was for his skill with a claymore?
Two more hours of work still left her in the dark. The Treasure was either “a knowing of God’s will,” something that was certainly ambiguous enough, or “proof of God’s will,” which was equally unenlightening. It possessed the power to “bow kings and nations before it,” and “vanquish evil.”
She read aloud the words on the screen. “The Guardian shall pass—or travel, or walk—beyond the bounds of time, or season—in the way of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to do His battle with the Serpent.” That sounded as if the Guardian would emulate Jesus’s struggle with Satan, which hardly translated into any great power, but rather an effort to live an honorable, blameless life—something difficult enough, and from what she’d read about Black Niall he hadn’t even tried.
So what was the Treasure, and what was the Power? Religious myth? Parrish evidently believed the gold was real; on the surface that was motive enough, yet she kept coming back to the Treasure that was greater than gold, and wondering if more than wealth was involved. If so, what? No Templar had ever betrayed the secret of the Treasure, though some of them had been hideously tortured. Perhaps most of them hadn’t known anything to tell, but certainly the Grand Master had known, and he had gone to the stake with the secret untold. Instead he had cursed the King of France and the Pope, and within a year both Philip and Clement had died, giving credence to the superstition of the time that the Templars had been in league with the devil.
Slowly Grace paraphrased the unwieldy sentence. “The Guardian shall walk beyond time to vanquish evil.” Sometimes putting the words in a more modern context helped her see through the lapsed centuries to find the most logical translation. She tried again. “The Guardian shall pass the season in battle against evil.” What season? The years following the destruction of the Order? Was the Guardian supposed to fight Philip and Clement on behalf of the Order? If so, Black Niall had instead fought his skirmishes in bed and in the mountains and moors of Scotland.
It didn’t make sense, and she was too tired to keep at it. Grace saved the file, then turned off the computer. In six months she had translated all the tales of Black Niall’s battles and conquests, the Latin and French and English, but parts of the Gaelic still defeated her. Come to that, some of the Latin didn’t make sense, because for some reason a diet had been included. What did a carefully regulated consumption of salt have to do with a history of the Templars? And why was the amount of water they drank based on their weight? But there it was, right in the middle of a long passage on the duties of a Guard
ian: Victus Rationem Temporis, the diet of time, or for time.
She paused in the act of removing her sweatshirt. Time. What was this about time, that it cropped up in both Latin and Gaelic? Come to think of it, there had been something similar in the French documents. Swiftly she returned to the rickety table she used as a desk, flipping through the documents until she found the page she sought. “He shall be unbound by the chains of time.”
Walking beyond time. Unbound by the chains of time. Diet for time. There was a common thread here, but she couldn’t make sense of it. They had all been fixated on time, but was it in a metaphorical sense, or a conceptual thing? And what did time have to do with the Templars?
Well, it wasn’t a puzzle she was going to solve by worrying at it; she would have to complete her translations, a project she could see the end of now. Another three weeks, perhaps a month, and she would have the Gaelic section completed. Gaelic was so difficult she’d saved it for last and she couldn’t be certain of her translation, but she’d done the best she could. Whether it would tell her anything beyond the supposed location of the Templars’ gold remained to be seen.
After undressing for bed, she neatly placed the computer and all her papers in the computer case, and set it within easy reach beside the bed. If she had to leave abruptly, she didn’t want to waste time gathering everything together.
She turned out the light and lay on the narrow, lumpy bed, staring out the dingy window at the softly falling snow. The seasons had changed, summer giving way to fall, color dulling into the monochromatic shades of winter. It had been eight months since her old life had ended. She survived, but she couldn’t say that she lived.
Her heart felt as bleak and stark as the winter. Her hatred for Parrish kept the pain at bay, untouched and undiminished. She knew it was there, knew she would someday lose control over it, but she would pay that price when the time came.
She blessed Harmony every day. She had a passport in Louisa Croley’s name, in case she had to get out of the country in a hurry. After obtaining that, she had left Louisa behind and taken another name, as well as another job. Marjorie Flynn had existed for two months, then she’d moved on and become Paulette Bottoms. Another low-paying job, another cheap room. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area was large enough that she could lose herself in it, never meeting anyone she knew from before, so she had no difficulty in changing names. She made no friends, on Harmony’s advice. She saved every penny she could and had amassed almost four thousand dollars, counting what she’d had left after buying the truck. She would never again be as helpless as she’d been after the murders.
Not that she ever could be, even without the assets of cash and transportation. Part of her helplessness had been her own total lack of knowledge about survival on the streets, and she was no longer ignorant. Her face was a cool, expressionless mask, and she walked with an alertness, a readiness, that told seasoned street predators she wouldn’t be easy prey. At night, alone, she practiced the moves Mateo had taught her, and she carefully arranged her grim little rooms to provide the maximum in protection and opportunity for herself.
She was never unarmed. She had bought a cheap revolver and kept it with her, but she also had the knife in its sheath, tucked out of sight under her shirt. She had a sharpened screwdriver in her boot, a hatpin threaded in her shirt cuff, a pencil in her pocket. Finding a place to practice her nonexistent marksmanship hadn’t been easy; she’d had to drive far out into the country, but she had achieved, if not true skill, at least a degree of efficiency and familiarity with the weapon, so she could carry it with some confidence.
She doubted anyone from her former life would recognize her now, even if she came face-to-face with a friend. Her long, thick hair was let down only in the privacy of her room; she wore a cheap, light brown wig to work, and at other times she twisted her hair into a knot on top of her head and covered it with a baseball cap. She was thin, weighing barely a hundred pounds, her cheekbones prominent over hollow cheeks. She had managed not to lose any more weight, but she had to make a deliberate effort to eat, and she exercised faithfully to stay strong. She wore tight jeans and sturdy black boots, and a fur-lined denim jacket as protection against the frigid Minnesota winter. On Harmony’s excellent advice she’d bought some cheap cosmetics and learned how to use mascara, blusher, and lipstick so she didn’t look as if she were fresh out of a convent.
A couple of men had hit on her, but a blank, frozen expression and a terse “No” were enough to turn them away. She couldn’t imagine even having a cup of coffee with a man. Only in her dreams did her sexuality reawaken, and she couldn’t control that. Black Niall was so firmly in her thoughts, preoccupied her so many hours of the day, that she had found it impossible to shut him out of her subconscious. He was there, living in her dreams, fighting and loving, grim and beautiful and terrifyingly male, and so lethal she sometimes woke shivering with fear. She never dreamed that he threatened her, but the Black Niall of her imagination was not a man one crossed with impunity.
She felt alive, painfully so, when she dreamed of him. She couldn’t preserve the vast emptiness that protected her when she was awake; she ached, and yearned, and trembled at his touch. Only twice more had she dreamed of actual lovemaking, but both times had been shattering.
It was a mistake to remember those dreams now, when she was trying to sleep. She knew that, and turned restlessly on her side. She was all but inviting a recurrence. But the dreams of lovemaking were more welcome than the dreams of battle, which had been occurring incessantly for the past four months. He hacked and slashed his way through her sleep, wading through blood and body parts, the images so intense she could hear the clang of swords striking together, see the men slip and stumble, hear them grunt with effort, hear the screams of pain and watch their faces distort in death throes. Given a choice between carnage and sex, she would definitely choose sex, were it not for the guilt that haunted her afterward.
After an hour of lying there she sighed, resigning herself to a sleepless night. She was tired but her brain refused to stop working, going over and over the papers, thinking about Niall, trying to piece together some feasible means of revenge against Parrish. She had hoped to find something in the papers to use against him, but if she’d been thinking straight she would have realized there couldn’t be anything incriminating about him in papers that were almost seven hundred years old. The papers fascinated her so much that she hadn’t been able to see past her own obsession. No, if she could manage any sort of revenge against Parrish it would have to be something much more straightforward, like killing him herself.
She got out of bed and turned on the light, her eyes stark, her soft mouth set in a grim line. Over the past eight months she had learned she could fight to protect herself, perhaps even kill in self-defense, but she didn’t know if she could kill in cold blood. She paced back and forth, hugging her arms around her to ward off the night chill. Could she kill Parrish? Could she walk up, stick the revolver to his head, and pull the trigger?
She closed her eyes, but the vision that came to mind wasn’t of herself shooting Parrish, but of the utter disregard, almost boredom, with which he had shot Ford and Bryant. She saw the sudden blankness on Ford’s face, the bonelessness of his body as he slumped over.
Her teeth clenched, her hands knotted into fists. Oh, yes, she could kill Parrish.
Why didn’t she just do it, then?
She had driven by his house a few times when she’d been working for the cleaning service; she had never seen him or his car, but then she hadn’t expected to. If he were at home, his car would be in the garage, and Parrish wasn’t the type of man who enjoyed gardening. She knew nothing of his schedule, hadn’t spent her days watching his house in order to follow him. She had taken self-protective measures, but in reality she had done nothing to avenge her family. Instead she had concentrated on the papers, persuaded herself that there could be something useful in them, deluded herself so she could merely mark time and lose herself in the translations.
But self-delusion was at an end. She needed either to do something about Parrish or to go away quietly and spend the rest of her life grieving and hiding.
All right. She would do it. She would track Parrish down, and kill him.
Grace felt the weight of the decision settle on her. She didn’t have the stuff of which killers were made, and she knew it. On the other hand, she hadn’t sought any of this; Parrish had begun the dance. The Old Testament said, “Thou shall not kill,” but it also said, “An eye for an eye.” Perhaps she was rationalizing, but she took that to mean that once a murder was committed, society or the wronged family had a right to put an end to the murderer’s existence.
