Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay Read Free Book Online

way, along the corridor.” He had a thought. “Kate . . . if someone was buried there, they’d have walled him up, right? Not left a coffin lying around.”
    She nodded her head. “Sure.”
    “So maybe he was thinking the wall might have just been opened up. For some reason.”
    Kate leaned back in her chair. “God, Ned Marriner, is this, like, a vampire story?”
    “I don’t know what it is. I don’t think so.”
    “But you said he made that carving in the cloister. You do know how old that thing is?”
    “Look, forget what I said there. I was a bit out of it.”
    “Nope.” She shook her head. “You weren’t. When he came down from the roof I thought he was going to kill you. And then he said when it was done.”
    He sighed. “You’re going to ask how I knew,” he said.
    “It did cross my mind.” She said it without smiling.
    “Bet Marie-Chantal wouldn’t bug me about it.”
    “She’d be clueless, checking her eyeliner and her cellphone for text messages. Am I bugging you?”
    “No. Does she really get text messages on her eyeliner?”
    Kate still didn’t smile. “Something did happen to you back there.”
    “Yeah. I’m all right now. Since he left, I feel normal.” He tried to laugh. “Wanna make out?”
    She ignored that, which was what it deserved. “You figure it’s over? Just something to do with . . . I don’t know.”
    He nodded. “That’s it. Something to do with I don’t know.”
    He was joking too much because the truth was that although he did feel all right now, sitting here with agirl from New York, from now , drinking a Coke that tasted exactly the way it was supposed to—he wasn’t sure whatever had happened was over.
    In fact, being honest with himself, he was pretty certain it wasn’t. He wasn’t going to say that, though.
    He looked at his watch. “I should check in before lunch, I guess.” He hesitated. This part was tricky, but he was a long way from home and the guys who would needle him. “You got a phone number? We can keep in touch?”
    She smiled. “If you promise no more comments on my roommate.”
    “Marie-Chantal? My main squeeze? That’s a dealbreaker.”
    She made a face, but tore a sheet out of a spiralbound agenda she pulled from her pack and scribbled the number where she was staying and her cellphone number. Ned took from his wallet the card on which Melanie had neatly printed (in green) the villa address, the code for the gate, the house phone, her mobile, his father’s, the Canadian consulate, and the numbers of two taxi companies. She’d put a little smiley face at the bottom.
    When she’d handed the card to him last night he’d pointed out that she hadn’t given him their latitude and longitude.
    He read Kate the villa number. She wrote it down.
    “You have school tomorrow?”
    She nodded. “Cut this morning, can’t tomorrow. I’m there till five. Meet here after? Can you find it?”
    He nodded. “Easy. Just down the road from the skull in the underground corridor.”
    She did laugh this time, after a second.
    They paid for their drinks and said goodbye outside. He watched her walk away through the morning street, then he turned and went back the other way, along a road laid down two thousand years ago.

CHAPTER III
    T he morning shoot was wrapping when Ned got back. He helped Steve and Greg load the van. They left it in the cathedral square, illegally parked but with a windshield permit from the police, and walked to lunch at an open-oven pizza place ten minutes away.
    The pizza was good, Ned’s father was irritable. That wasn’t unusual during a shoot, especially at the start, but Ned could tell his dad wasn’t really unhappy with how things had gone this first morning. He wouldn’t admit that, but it showed.
    Edward Marriner sipped a beer and looked at Ned across the table. “Anything inside I need to know about?”
    Even when Ned was young his father had asked his opinions whenever Ned was with him on a shoot. When Ned was