87. Angélique
87
Angélique
I nteresting isn’t the word I should have used. Waiting for Micha?l to show up is anything but interesting—it’s dreadful.
Elhyor left with the recovery team half an hour ago, and I’m already wondering if we didn’t mess up something or even if I was right about the fact Micha?l was trying to lure us out.
I’ve been taught things in tactics, and I know that would be the sensible things to do if I were him. He wants Notre Dame and since he can’t manage to kill Elhyor—or more exactly since the person he sent aka me, refuses to do it now—the best way to do so would be to take the building when the big bad dragon isn’t there anymore.
This is why I told Elhyor to leave.
If we want a chance at beating Micha?l, we need to strategize and catch him at his own game.
But it’s been half an hour since Elhyor left and still, nothing happened.
The plan was to fly out fifteen minutes with the bats, wait about ten minutes just outside of Paris, and come back. Knowing the speed of a dragon, Elhyor should almost be there already.
I should be thankful because it means that whatever might happen, I have a chance that Elhyor could be back by the time it starts.
It’s still stressful, anyway.
And I’m not the only one getting antsy. Everyone is sitting inside of Notre Dame with weapons drawn. It’s not like the mission in Versailles this time, though. Today everyone is armed to the teeth, and I can see as many people with guns as there are with knives and swords. There are also a few people on the rooftop with bows and arrows. There are guns up there too, but not too many as the technology didn’t evolve so much the last few years. It’s not the case for arrows, though. Some of the ones I’ve seen get carried up on the rooftop are explosive ones or even tearing ones.
The tearing ones are the nastier in my opinion, because with an explosive one, it’s finished in less than a second but the tearing one has a searching head that hunts for any vital organ and tears through them one by one until they reach the heart. It takes about twenty seconds, but they’re the worst of your life. If you can’t manage to open your own skin in time, you’ll bleed out inside your own body and no one is going to notice.
Except the screams. Everyone will notice the screams.
I might be the only one carrying only daggers today, but I’m wearing my bulletproof shirts and pants, so I’m not scared that it would not be enough. I’m as ready as I can be.
“There is someone coming up the parvis,” Luc says in my earring device. I didn’t know it, but there are cameras installed all around Notre Dame and Luc has been monitoring them since he was a teenager. He always says he’s better with holo-puters than people, so the control room is his happy place.
“Well, wish me luck,” I answer him before getting my daggers out of their garters and opening the double doors at the entrance.
I’m going alone, and I know Elhyor would hate the idea, but it’s not like I can’t defend myself and there is a whole team up on the rooftop ready to defend me.
As I walk to the center of the parvis, I release my wings from my body smoothly.
I love how they’re still a shock for most people and especially for Micha?l’s men, if I rely upon the gasps I hear from the groups that pour out from the streets surrounding Notre Dame.
I truly don’t know how they arrived so discreetly that none of the cameras saw them coming until Micha?l was already front and center.
I stop about five meters away from him and cross my arms.
If he’s here in the middle, it means he has something to say. He wouldn’t make a show of it if there wasn’t something he wanted demonstrated or made an example of.
I’m not about to start talking, though.
Every second I make him wait is one that gets Elhyor closer to us again.
It takes him another full minute since I arrived for him to talk, and in the meantime, he eyes with a mean glare my whole attire but even more my fully displayed wings.
I can see that he hates that, that he hates those wings, and most likely that he hates me, too.
“Good job, daughter. Finally found a way to give me Notre Dame’s keys?” Micha?l asks in a booming voice. I know it’s all for show. I don’t think Micha?l is stupid enough to think Elhyor left Notre Dame unguarded, and he’s saying this in hopes that it would lower Elhyor’s men’s morale if they think I’m betraying them.
“You know as well as I do that there is no key to the church. All churches in Paris were built with the idea that they could greet anyone in need, even if it was in the middle of the night, so the doors are never locked,” I answer bluntly.
“And yet I can’t seem to be invited inside unless I sell my own daughter to do just that,” he answers with a sneer.
“And yet, you can’t seem to know where to stop in your ascension for madness,” I tell him in a somewhat nicer tone.
“Where did the dragon go, anyway?” Micha?l asks, as if he doesn’t know already. He might not and I could be wrong, but I highly doubt that.
I’ll entertain him, anyway.
“He’s got a distant relative who asked for his help,” I answer in a pensive way.
Oh yeah, I’m pensive about it, because I’m wondering how far he is in this instant and how long I am going to have to stall my asshole of a father before my husband arrives.
In the meantime, I’m not above making up stories. My answer is actually the closest I could get to the truth. There have been no more dragons in the whole of France for a while; there are no more dragons in any other part of Europe, actually. Once upon a time, there were two of them: Elhyor and his father. But that was a while ago, and now the only recorded dragon-shifters left are in Japan and New Zealand. They were already almost extinct in their world, but the collision of the two worlds didn’t help. Half of them joining Earth and the other one staying on Aléa made it much more difficult for them to reproduce and almost no dragonlings have been born in three hundred years.
But Brice is his best friend and the closest being he has to family. Or maybe Brice was the closest thing to a family member…until me.
Anyway, Brice is like family, and I’m not lying.
My father always seemed to know when I was lying, so I’m not about to cut short that conversation and let him believe this is a trap.
It is one, for sure, but he can’t know just now.
“I doubt the dragon decided to fly abroad without using a jet, but let’s do as if I believe you,” he says, his sneer making an appearance once again. “Why would he leave you home alone, when you just attacked my facilities and he knows very well that not acting in retaliation would make it seem like I can’t handle the people I’m governing? That’s preposterous.” The sneer is gone, and in its stead, Micha?l’s face is painted with outrage.
The real outrage is you being my father.