Read Chapter 12: The Corpse at the Altar

The knock came again, harder this time—not the tentative rap of a traveler seeking a room, but the flat, insistent pounding of authority.

Étienne was already on his feet, hand going to the knife at his belt out of habit. Claire moved to the window, parting the curtain a finger's width. Giancarlo stayed seated, but his good hand had drifted to the pistol resting on the table beside his half-finished glass of wine.

"Gendarme," Claire said. "Alone. He looks... rattled."

Étienne crossed to the door and unlatched it. The man on the threshold was young—mid-twenties, perhaps—with the ruddy cheeks of someone who spent his days in the wind. His uniform was crisp, but his eyes were not. They darted past Étienne into the room, checking corners, checking shadows.

"Monsieur Marchand?" The gendarme's voice cracked on the name.

"I'm Marchand."

The man swallowed. "I'm Officer Beaumont, from the Martigny station. I was told you were here. That you deal with... animal attacks."

"I investigate them," Étienne corrected. "Sometimes."

Beaumont nodded too quickly. "There's a body. Up at the chapel of Saint-Bernard-des-Neiges, about an hour's walk east of here. A monk." He paused, and something flickered across his face—fear, or disgust, or both. "He's been torn apart. But that's not why I came to you."

"Then why?"

"Because the prior says Brother Antonin never left the chapel last night. The doors were locked from the inside. The windows are barred. There's no other way in or out except through the vestry, and the vestry door was bolted too."

Giancarlo rose from his chair, his bulk casting a long shadow in the lamplight. "And yet something got in and tore him apart."

"Exactly." Beaumont's eyes finally settled, found something steady to hold onto. "Prior says it's not the first time. Two years ago, a pilgrim was found the same way in that chapel. They ruled it a wolf attack, but no wolf opens a locked door and locks it again behind itself."

Étienne exchanged a glance with Claire. She gave him the smallest nod.

"We'll come," Étienne said.

---

The chapel sat at the end of a narrow switchback road, its stone walls the color of old bone against the black mass of the mountain behind it. Snow had begun to fall—light, tentative flakes that melted on contact with the path but clung to the slate roof.

The prior met them at the gate. He was a small man with a monk's tonsure and a face like crumpled paper, and he did not invite them inside so much as step aside and let them pass.

The body lay on the stone floor before the altar, covered by a white cloth that had once served some liturgical purpose. Blood had soaked through in places, dark and still wet. The air smelled of copper and candle wax.

Étienne knelt. He pulled back the cloth.

Brother Antonin had been a large man once—broad-shouldered, thick-necked, the kind of build that came from decades of physical labor. None of that mattered now. His chest was a wreckage of torn flesh and splintered ribs, wounds that gaped like hungry mouths. His right arm was nearly severed at the shoulder, hanging by a strip of tendon and skin.

But Étienne had seen the work of claws before. He'd catalogued bite patterns, measured the spacing of punctures, traced the arc of slashes across a hundred victims. And he knew, with the certainty of a man who had spent twenty years reading the language of violence, that something here was wrong.

He leaned closer, studying the edges of the chest wound. The tissue was ragged, yes—but the pattern was too uniform along one edge. Almost as if—

"Claire. Bring the light."

She moved to his side, holding a lantern low. The glow caught the wound at an angle, and Étienne saw it clearly now: beneath the torn flesh, along the margin of the deepest laceration, a thin line of perfectly even tissue. Cut, not torn. And then another cut, perpendicular, angling down toward the sternum.

"Somebody opened him up," Étienne said quietly. "Before the animal got to him."

Claire leaned in, her face going still in that way it did when she was working. She reached into her coat and produced a pair of surgical forceps—she never traveled without them, Étienne had learned—and gently teased apart the edge of the deepest wound.

"Cyanoacrylate," she murmured. "Surgical glue. But not medical-grade. This is... older. Cruder. The same compound back at Roches Perdues."

Étienne's jaw tightened. The same compound the killer had used to suture the shepherd's body shut before inflicting the animal wounds. The same deliberate hand, the same precise work.

"If you'd just found this body," Claire said, "you'd think the beast came, killed, and left. You'd write it off as another attack. You'd never look closer." She met his eyes. "It's not hiding its work anymore. It wants us to find it."

"Or someone wants us to find it," Étienne said.

He rose and began to circle the body, his eyes tracking across the chapel floor. The prior hovered near the door, wringing his hands. François had taken a seat in the back pew, head bowed, lips moving in what might have been prayer or might have been something else entirely.

Étienne stopped.

The monk's left hand lay outstretched, fingers curled in the rigor of death. But it was the right hand—the one nearly severed—that caught his attention. The fingers were closed, clutching something. A thin gleam of copper caught the lantern light.

Étienne pried the fingers open. The hand released its grip with a wet sound, and a small object fell into his palm.

A key. Copper. Ancient-looking, green with oxidation in the grooves. A tarnished loop at the top, a complex bit at the bottom. And there, at the junction of shaft and bow, a symbol etched into the metal.

His own key, hanging from the cord around his neck, suddenly seemed heavier.

He pulled it out. The two keys were identical in every detail—the same worn edges, the same strange mark, the same weight in the hand.

"A match," Claire breathed.

"It's not just a match." Étienne turned the dead monk's key over in his fingers. "This is the exact same key. Same wear pattern. Same scratches. This key was in a lock before. Many times."

François rose from the back pew, his face pale in the candlelight. "How did a monk come to have a Warden's key?"

Étienne didn't answer. He was looking at the body—at the wounds, at the surgical work, at the staged violence. At the key that someone had placed in the dead man's hand.

"They're not trying to hide anything," he said slowly. "They're sending us a message."

"The key," Giancarlo said. "They know you have one. They're telling you that you're not special. That there are others."

"No." Étienne shook his head. "They're telling me where to go. Look."

He held the key up, turning it so the lantern light caught the metal. And there, barely visible against the darker patina of age, was a fresh scratch running along the shaft—a thin, bright line that could only have been made recently.

"A direction," Étienne said. "Someone scraped a path marker onto this key. Pointing east."

Claire took it from him, studying the scratch. "Toward what?"

Giancarlo had moved to the chapel's small window, peering out at the darkening valley below. "Forclaz Pass," he said. "The old route through the high peaks. Dead ground. No towns, no roads, no radio coverage." He turned back to face them, his expression grim. "It's a box canyon. If you went in there, there'd be no way out except through the mouth."

Someone had been very careful.

Étienne looked down at the body of Brother Antonin. A monk, dead in a locked chapel. The beast didn't do this. The beast was a tool, a weapon. This was the work of a human hand—a surgeon's hand, working with the patience of someone who had decades to plan.

"Le Vieux said the shaper replaced the original maker," Étienne said quietly. "Sylvie replaced the tool, too. She's not trying to kill us with this." He gestured at the corpse. "She's sending a guide."

Claire's face hardened. "It's a lure."

"I know."

"Then we shouldn't take the bait."

Étienne looked at the key in his hand. At its twin, hanging against his chest. He thought of his brother, Marc—of the day he'd watched him taken by something he couldn't understand, of the years he'd spent failing to answer the question of what had happened in that pass.

"To the Forclaz," he said, and pocketed the dead monk's key.