The Watchtower (41 page)

"And you say Morgane told you Marduk's blood would make Will human again?"

"Yes. Do you think she was telling the truth?"

Madame La Pieuvre shrugged with typical Gallic resignation. "Maybe yes, maybe no. One never knows with Morgane. But one thing is clear. We must hunt down Marduk and destroy him.
Your
Will is free to do what he likes with him when we find him."

"But how will we find him? We don't know where he is."

"I think we do. Look again at Ruggieri's column."

I looked through the telescope. For a moment I thought I was back in twenty-first-century Paris where the Eiffel Tower lit up the skyline with pyrotechnic displays, but the flashing lights came from the Medici Column, which looked now like a Roman candle setting off sparks. At the center of the blaze, the metal cage was glowing and revolving, shooting fireworks into the Paris sky.

"I believe Ruggieri has been preparing the column for Marduk's arrival, and therefore Marduk, Dee, and Ruggieri will be in the Hotel de la Reine. I only hope they haven't gone ahead with their experiment tonight."

"They haven't."

The voice came from the doorway. Will stood beside a flustered maid, his face less pale than when I'd seen him last, but no less grim.

"I tracked Marduk down to the Hotel de la Reine and spied Dee and Ruggieri feeding him the blood of victims they must have previously slain in anticipation of Marduk's arrival. I overheard them say that they must let the beast rest today before 'transforming' him tonight."

"Were you able to get his blood?" I asked, taking a step toward Will. His cheeks had the flush of blood in them, but he shook his head.

"I couldn't risk it while Marduk was conscious. Hethe flashi019;s grown too powerful. But during the day while he rests..."

"I can draw his blood," I said. "If I can get into the Hotel de la Reine."

Will looked toward Madame La Pieuvre. They exchanged a look I couldn't decipher. For the first time I wondered how Will had thought to send me to her. How
did
they know each other?

"I can get us into the Hotel," she said. "I knew Catherine de Medicis well. She showed me the secret passages she had built. Like any Medici she was an inveterate intriguer--for good reason."

"Will you go with Garet, Octavia?" Will asked. "And make sure she comes to no harm?"

"Of course,
mon cher
. When we have Marduk's blood, we will go to Ruggieri's tower. I believe that with the watch Garet has made, the two of you will be able to travel forward to your own time." One of her arms drifted toward Will's face. At a warning look from him she let it flutter back down. The Medicis weren't the only intriguers, I suspected.

* * *

Madame La Pieuvre led us to a room with heavy drawn shutters. "You will be safe from the light here," she told Will. She offered to show me to my room, but I said I'd stay with Will until dawn.

"As you please, my dear, only remember that you will need your rest, too. We must be on our guard when we go into the Hotel de la Reine."

When she had gone, Will drew me down onto the bed and tried to kiss me, but I turned my face away. "You two seem very friendly. Was Madame La Pieuvre also one of your conquests?"

Will grasped my jaw firmly in his hand and turned my face so I had to look at him. "No. I did her a favor. When did you become so jealous? I wouldn't have thought you were the type."

"I suppose since I've had to take a seventeenth-century tour of your exes," I replied, hating the bitter tone of my voice but unable to get rid of it. "You mentioned quite a few in your sleep yesterday. Who is Bess?"

The corner of Will's mouth twitched. "I called out Bess's name? How extraordinary! I haven't thought of her in centuries. How strange to think she's still alive in these times!"

"Perhaps you'd like to go pay her a visit," I said, getting to my feet. "As long as you're in the same century."

Will was on his feet blocking my way to the door before I'd even seen him move, his hands gripping my shoulders, his face centimeters from mine.

"Is it really these trifles that concern you, Garet? Do you really care about the women I took to my bed over the centuries more than the men and women I took to their graves?"

I started to answer that I shouldn't have to choose, but then I saw the anguish in his blood-rimmed eyes. "You couldn't help taking blood. It's what Dee made you."

"But I could have helped killing. I started out believing I could drink without draining my victims, but I soon learned that the blood was too much of an addiction. The first deaths may have been accidents, but then I stopped caring whether I stopped in time or not. All I cared about was the blood. For centuries I was a monster no better than the creature who made me."

"But then you stopped killing?"

"Yes, about a hundred years ago I learned to control my thirst enough to leave my victims alive. It only becomes dangerous when I feed from the same source over and over." He caressed my neck and I felt his touch thrum through my body. I'd been holding myself tight with anger, but his touch made me vibrate like a plucked violin string. "As I've warned you."

I sighed and felt the tightness in my muscles melt further. The release brought me an inch closer to him. I could feel the heat of the blood he'd drunk moving through his flesh. Suddenly it didn't matter to me where he'd gotten the blood--or what other women he'd loved in the past. What did the past matter? I had warped time with the timepiece I'd made--couldn't I wipe our pasts clean?

"After tomorrow you'll be free of this curse and free of your past. You can start over....
We
can start over." I closed the centimeter gap between us and pressed myself against the heat of him. I lay my head on his chest, tilting my head so my throat was bared to his lips. I felt him hesitate.

"Perhaps there is a way to start over," he murmured as if to himself. Then he lowered his head to my neck. As his lips grazed my skin he whispered in my ear, "But tonight I want to be with you one last time ... like
this
."

As his teeth sank into my neck, every muscle in my body turned to liquid. I would have fallen straight to the floor if he hadn't caught me. I might, I found myself thinking, fall straight into hell in his arms, but it no longer mattered to me. I'd go to hell to be with him. But I didn't fall. Once he had hold of me, I felt the blood in my veins catch fire as if they were filled with that green liqueur Madame La Pieuvre had fed me earlier. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pressed my mouth against his, tasting my blood on his lips. I could taste, too, the venom his fangs released. It made my mouth tingle and sent a ripple of electricity through my veins. I undid his pants as he carried me to the bed. He was inside me before we hit the bed. I felt his urgency and matched it.

34

The Hotel of Crocodiles

I watched death come
upon Will at dawn. It wasn't just sleep, I realized, it was as if he died at every dawn. I couldn't bear the thought of his dying one more day. I had to find Marduk.

I closed my eyes, meaning to rest a few moments beside him, but when Madame La Pieuvre woke me, she told me hat it was past six in the evening. "I let you sleep,
ma chere,
so you could be rested for what we have to do, but we must find Marduk before the sun sets."

When we walked outside the chateau, the late-afternoon sky was so overcast I was afraid the sun had already set. Black storm clouds hung in the western sky. Madame La Pieuvre looked at them worriedly.

"Another storm. More lightning to feed Ruggieri's machinery. We must hurry."

"I'm sorry if doing this puts you in any danger," I told her when we were settled in her carriage.

She shrugged. "You, being from the future as you are, are a descendant of the Watchtower. It is my duty to help you. Besides, it sounds as if you did me a favor in your time by taking me to the Summer Country."

"I'm not sure how much of a favor that was. I'm afraid you might have gotten lost in the Val sans Retour."

"And yet I was willing to risk the journey. I must have loved--
will
love--this woman Adele very much."

"Yes, I think you did--I mean, will." I described Adele Weiss to her and told her what I knew about how they had met during a war. Then, taking my notebook from my pocket, I drew a picture of her.

"She is lovely," Madame La Pieuvre said, smiling at the drawing. "I'm glad that I will love someone enough to want to give up my immortality. It gives me something to look forward to." She gazed out the coach window, her gray eyes as serene as the overcast sky. Four hundred years seemed a long time to wait, but perhaps to a creature who had already lived for millennia it wasn't.

"We're here," she said as the coach came to a stop. We were in a narrow side street bordered by a high, windowless stone wall.

"This is Catherine de Medicis's palace?" I asked skeptically as we stepped out into a lightly falling rain.

"The southwest corner of it. You didn't think we were going in the front door, did you?"

"No, but..." I couldn't see any door at all, just a shallow niche decorated with a large bronze bas-relief panel depicting Venus rising from the sea. Above the wall I could see the Medici Column, and beyond that I saw the spires of Saint-Eustache. I turned around in a circle, recalling the visit I'd made with Roger Elden.

"We're standing right at the entrance to the metro," I said. "Or where the metro will be in four hundred years."

"And what is the metro?" Madame La Pieuvre asked.

"An underground"--I was about to say
train,
but remembered that she wouldn't know what a train was--"passage," I said instead, "that people use for transportation."

"That's just what's here now," she said, bending down before the carved plaque of Venus. She looked as though she were paying homage to the goddess--I supposed that Venus might be one of her gods--but then her fingers found some hidden catch in the grooves of the shell Venus rose from, and the bronze sculpture swung wide-open. A cool, briny gust of air rose from the dark passage behind the plaque as if it truly led to Venus's ocean grotto. I followed Madame La Pieuvre into the dark passage, which became even darker when she swung the door shut behind us. The blackness closed in on me like a hand at my throat--then I snapped my fingers. The tiny flame that sprang out of my thumb lit up a flight of stone steps descending into a pit of darkness that my puny light couldn't penetrate. Madame La Pieuvre's moon-shaped face bobbed beside me. She smiled--a trifle condescendingly, I thought--at my thumb-light and then uncoiled her arms from her cloak. At a flick of her many wrists blue-glowing lights appeared up and down her arms. They cast a blue-green light that lit up the staircase down to the bottom, where it ended in a pool of water.

"Come," she said, "these passages flood when it rains. We must be quick."

I followed her, keeping an eye on her glowing limbs, which floated around her like seaweed. With the salt smell and the sound of water lapping against stone, I felt as though I were sinking in a bathysphere to the ocean floor, but the water at the bottom of the stairs turned out to be only a few inches deep. We had to hold our cloaks and dresses up, which meant I had to extinguish my thumb-light, but I didn't need it anymore. Madame La Pieuvre's bioluminescence, reflected in the shallow water, lit up a level tunnel in a turquoise blaze of light, illumining a lovely mosaic pattern of shells and sea creatures on the walls and ceilings.

"This is pretty," I said. "What did Catherine de Medicis use the underground chambers for?"

"A means of escape should her palace be besieged by enemies, a secret entranceway for the sorcerers and witches she employed, and when someone displeased her--"

A scream cut her off. She stopped so suddenly I bumped into her; she wrapped two arms around me to keep me from falling. "And for torture," Madame La Pieuvre whispered. "Only I had thought those days were over."

A second scream punctuated her sentence. In the hollow confines of the underground chamber I couldn't tell how close the sound was, or when the scream ended and its echoes began. The echoes seemed to surround us like the voices of all who had ever suffered in this dark, dank place.

A third scream rang out--and was abruptly cut off in a strangled gurgle that was even more awful and seemed to be echoed in the moving water at our feet. Tucking all her glowing arms but two in her cloak and pressing one finger to her lips, she pulled me forward. Her footsteps made no sound in the water, but mine sloshed and slapped. When we reached a flight of steps that brought us up onto a dry landing, I was grateful ... until I saw what lay beyond the landing.

The vaulted room was lit by torches set in iron sconces. Long, pendulous shapes hung from iron hooks in the ceiling. They looked like huge caterpillar cocoons hanging from atree branch after a rain, water dripping off them into buckets set beneath them.... I blinked, refocused, and opened my mouth to scream. A wet tentacle slapped over my mouth before any sound could come out. I stared at Madame La Pieuvre, whose face had gone inky black, her eyes wide with horror and rage, and then I looked back into the torture room.

The "cocoons" were human beings hanging upside down from the ceiling, some of them with blood dripping from cut throats into tin pails. Two men first wrangled one of the bodies onto a hook. When the body had been suspended, one of the men took a long knife from a scabbard at his waist and, while his companion held the body still, drew it across the neck.

Only when the blood gushed out did I realize that the body had been alive and I understood that we'd just stood helplessly by while a man was murdered. I moaned beneath Madame La Pieuvre's hand and she pulled me back away from the door and against the wall.

"What was that sound?" a man's voice asked in guttural French.

"A rat," his comrade answered. "Or one of the queen's crocodiles. Did you know the queen kept crocodiles down here to discourage her prisoners from escaping? Why don't you go have a look, Gaston?" The man laughed cruelly. I hoped that Gaston would be dissuaded from looking by his comrade's mockery--or by the threat of crocodiles. Did every city in every time period have that urban legend? I wondered. The sound of footsteps approaching put an end to that line of thought. Madame La Pieuvre shoved me behind her and, with one more warning finger to her lips, turned to face the door. A man appeared on the landing holding a torch at and above the steps leading back down to the water. I saw Madame La Pieuvre unfastening the clasp of her cloak, and then, in less time than it took the cloak to fall to the floor, she surged forward, all eight arms writhing in the air. The man turned at the breeze her movement must have caused and I had time to see the look of horror on his face before she was upon him. One suckered hand wrapped over his mouth and nose, stifling his scream, while the others wrapped around him, keeping him from falling. It looked as if she were gently rocking him to sleep, only I could see his face turning dark in the reflected light of Madame La Pieuvre's bioluminescence, his eyes bulging, then rolling back and freezing in death. She lowered him gently to the ground and then turned around.