you to go to San Francisco first. There was a similar murder there. It is closer to you than Paris, and there were witnesses.”
“Similar? Who was murdered in San Francisco?”
“A man named Matthias Gregory. He was—”
“High priest of the House of Lucifer,” Viktor murmured. That was indeed news. The House was the world’s largest official Satanic religion. “And the connection to the Paris murder?”
“There are several,
oui
, which we can discuss after you view the crime scene. But the most obvious connection is the identity of the victim, Monsieur Xavier Marcel.”
Viktor was lifting his glass to take another sip, and he eased the absinthe down. Xavier Marcel, also known as the Black Cleric, was both a wanted criminal and the underground leader of L’église de la Bête, or the Church of the Beast, Europe’s most infamous and dangerous Satanic cult.
News indeed.
MANHATTAN
T he long shadows of dusk greeted Dominic Grey as he stepped out of the teen homeless shelter and into the twilight world of Washington Heights. After a few months of teaching jujitsu in a makeshift gym, Grey now had seven semiregular students. Most of the troubled kids tried his class once and never came back.
That pained him. He understood the martial arts were not for everyone, but he wanted to help each wary face that came through his door. Most of the kids yearned for knowledge and structure but weren’t ready to accept Grey’s strict code of honor.
Grey’s step was especially heavy that evening. One of his favorite students, a fourteen-year-old Latino gang member named Frankie, had cursed another student in class. Grey showed him the door, and Frankie had cursed Grey on his way out. Though thin and wiry, Frankie was scrappy, smart, and didn’t know how to quit. He reminded Grey of himself.
Frankie was also very proud, and Grey doubted he would come back. But that was the way it had to be. Grey had studied the martial arts since he was five, some of that time under one of the top Japanese jujitsu masters in the world. Grey’s own
shihan
had insisted that respect came before all else; no one should learn how to harm another human being before learning how to value one.
Like the kids he now taught, Grey had also once been homeless. His father was a lifelong Marine who had mentally and physically abused Grey and his mother throughout Grey’s childhood. Mortally afraid his skinny, introspective son would fail to become a
real
man, he’d trained Grey to fight since he could crawl.
When his father was assigned to Tokyo soon after Grey’s tenth birthday, he forced Grey to study Japanese jujitsu, one of the most brutal and effective martial arts in the world, designed to use an attacker’s own energy to exploit the weaknesses of the human body: joints, pressure points, organs, digits, soft tissue. Zen-Zekai, the style of jujitsu taught at Grey’s school, was particularly violent. Barely a day went by that Grey came home without blood on his
gi
.
Grey’s mother died of stomach cancer when Grey was fifteen, and on the first anniversary of her death Grey’s father came home drunk yet again, reached for his nail-studded belt one too many times. Grey had never quite forgiven himself for beating his own father that night, but he wasn’t sure he would do anything differently if given the chance, and that pained him even more.
After leaving his father crumpled on the floor, vowing to kill Grey as he walked out the door, Grey took to the backstreets of Tokyo, staying alive by fighting in underground street fights. Already a black belt in Zen-zekai, Grey thrived on Tokyo’s human cockfight circuit. But the underbellies of Japan’s throbbing neon cities were dangerous for a teenage boy, no matter how tough. He drifted to other cities and countries, yearning for a place to call home, grasping onto his fierce personal ethos as a lifeline. For to compromise his ethics, to mute that quiet inner voice, was to lose the one thing he