The fact that Smith and Mitch were willing to help him meant a lot. It just reminded him, yet again, that the guys who were born into the Comitatus didn’t have to be jerks.Not that he’d stay, even so. The pain of his healing bruises he could handle. They were almost an afterthought. The pain of not being able to help Sibyl? That, he wasn’t sure he could stand.“This is all about one thing,” Smith explained, leaning over sheets of paper in the study at his girlfriend’s big, Highland Park estate. They had all agreed that, after the attack during their earlier meeting, they couldn’t risk keeping either the swords or themselves at Greta’s house.They’d made sure to carry both swords out during the middle of the day, when anyone who might be shadowing them—and surely Charles had paid someone to shadow them—might get good pictures of the assumed retreat. Now Sibyl, and Arden’s former-cop friend, Val Diaz, were staying to protect the older lady.All about one thing. Sibyl, thought Trace.“The sword of Charlemagne,”
