The Watchtower (42 page)

I barely recognized the refined woman I knew. Her face was puffed and mottled, her arms had grown suckers that pulsed like open mouths hungry for more prey ... which had just appeared in the doorway. The second torturer stood gaping at this creature that was beyond any fictive nightmares he might have dreamed up to frighten his comrade. A small sound came out of him--like air escaping from a punctured tire--and then she was upon him. This time there was no gentle squeezing to death. Madame La Pieuvre tore him limb from limb, tossing pieces of him into the air. When she was done, she shoved the remains down the steps into the water.

"There," she said, wiping blood from her mouth. "Let the crocodiles he was laughing about feast on his remains."

I would have asked her then if those crocodiles really existed, but she had already swept past me into the torture room. She went from body to body, tenderly touching each one with the suckered fingers she'd only recently used to tear a man apart. "Some of these poor souls have been dead for several days and"--she knelt at the ground and sniffed at the rank stone floor--"blood has been spilled before that. How long have they been collecting blood and
why
?"

"For Marduk. They must have needed it to make him strong enough."

"Marduk's never needed any help getting his own blood. Dee and Ruggieri must have some reason to collect this much blood. Something special they have planned."

I shivered at the thought of any plan that required such wholesale bloodletting--a shivering that wouldn't stop as I followed Madame La Pieuvre further, keeping within the circle of her glow in case we ran into any of those crocodiles. We went through passages lined with bones and skulls piled high above our heads and curio cabinets full of strange instruments and stuffed exotic animals.

"Catherine was quite the collector," Madame La Pieuvre remarked when she saw me staring at a stuffed aardvark. "And an amateur sorcerer. She dabbled in the black arts and poisoning, collecting whatever she thought might come in useful to protect her children and further her own dynastic ambitions ... and yet when she died, she had outlived eight of her ten children, and of the two survivors, Henri the third died seven months after her, leaving only her daughter Margot, whom she had disowned during her life. A sad life. I'm not surprised that Dee and Ruggieri have chosen her abandoned palace for their evil purposes."

She shook her head sadly and then continued on, leaving me staring at the cabinet full of strange instruments. They reminded me of something, but I couldn't recall what. Only when Madame La Pieuvre's glow had faded and I couldn't see the instruments in the case anymore did I hurry to catch up with her.

She had come to a stop at the end of a hallway. She held an arm out to keep me back ... and I saw why. Hers wasn't the only source of light anymore. A glow was coming from around the corner. She motioned for me to stay put and then cautiously crept around the corner. After another moment she waved for me to follow her.

The scene in this room was not as blatantly horrific as the one in the dungeon. It was even peaceful. The room was hung with rich tapestries and lit by banks of candles. A body was laid out on a raised dais like a corpse laid out for viewing at a funeral, except that above the head of the "corpse" was suspended a leather bladder connected to the body by a long, supple reed. Walking closer, I revised my impression from funeral parlor to hospital ER. Liquid was dripping from the bladder, down through the reed, and into a metal shunt fitted into the crook of the man's arm. Amazed, I looked at the face of the man on the table--and was even more amazed to find Will's face.

"It's not Will, you understand," Madame La Pieuvre whispered as she came up beside me. "It's Marduk."

"I know ... only when I saw him last, he had only partly taken on Will's features. You could still see the monster below the skin, but now..."

"He looks like an angel. This hy Dee and Ruggieri are draining their victims. If Marduk fed directly from his victims, he'd take on their features, but feeding like this, he continues to look like Will."

"But why? Why do they want him to look like Will?"

Madame La Pieuvre shrugged. "Why
not
choose a beautiful face for your monster? With this face he'll be able to mingle with aristocracy and lure unsuspecting victims to their doom. He's fooled you, hasn't he?"

I tore my eyes away from Will--from Marduk--looked into Madame La Pieuvre's keen eyes, and I knew I'd been looking at the monster with love. "He looks
so
much like Will. I'm not sure I can destroy him."

"Leave that to me. You only need to get what you came for." She withdrew a small, glass, corked vial and a slender Y-shaped metal pipe from inside her cloak. The end of the short arm of the Y was sharpened to a point. She took out the reed from Marduk's arm and showed me how to insert the sharpened pipe into his vein. "Physicians use this for bloodletting," she told me as drops of blood spilled from the pipe into the glass vial. I kept my eye on the vial to help keep it steady in my hand. When it was full, Madame La Pieuvre removed the pipe and corked the vial. Then I looked up and found Madame La Pieuvre staring into the monster's open eyes.

"Go!" she hissed, giving me the vial. "He's not fully awake yet. As long as I maintain eye contact, he won't be able to move."

"But--"

"Just go. I'll take care of him. It's almost dusk. Go to the tower. If you follow this passage further, you'll come to the courtyard. Climb to the top and wait there for Will. After I've taken care of Marduk, I'll keep Dee and Ruggieri away."

I tried to think of an argument against this plan. I started to ask why she didn't just kill Marduk now and come with me, but then I realized she didn't want me to see her tearing apart a creature who looked so much like the man I loved. I didn't want to see that either. So I followed her advice. I ran.

35

The Timepiece

And promptly got lost. The palace see
med to have been built like a maze, constructed according to some Machiavellian architect's scheme to confuse one's enemy. I ran through deserted salons occupied only by faded nymphs and fauns who looked embarrassed to be caught cavorting on their painted ceilings. The few remaining pieces of furniture were shrouded in ghostly canvas drop cloths. I nearly had a heart attack rounding a corner and coming face-to-face with a crocodile's open jaws, but saw that it was only a stuffed specimen.

Past the crocodile's tail I spied the courtyard through a large, grimy window. I couldn't get the window open, but a marble urn sitting beside the stuffed crocodile broke it just fine. I squeezed through, only cutting my hand a little on the broken glass.

The courtyard was full of debris--broken furniture, shredded drapes, three more stuffed crocodiles in varying stages of decay ... what was the fascination with crocodiles? I wondered as I picked my way across the littered ground. Whatever the reason for Catherine de Medicis's fondness for the beasts, I didn't have time to think about it now. Storm clouds still covered much of the sky, but in the west the sun had sunk beneath the clouds and hovered at the edge of the courtyard wall. It lit up the tower so that it seemed to glow against the inky clouds in the east. When I reached the low, arched door at its base, I experienced a moment of vertigo, recalling going through this same door only a few nights ago with Roger Elden. As I touched the handle, I could almost imagine that I was back in twenty-first-century Paris and that if I turned around, I'd find the metro stop. At the thought the watch pendant grew heavy and cold against my chest. I
could
be back, I realized, if I focused hard enough on the future, but I couldn't go
yet
. Not without Will.

I forced myself to focus on the here and now: the grate of the metal door as it opened, the reek of pigeon droppings in the stairwell, the clank of my feet on the metal stairs. I made myself count all 147 steps as I made my way to the top to keep my mind clear of everything but the present moment. When I went through the trapdoor onto the top of the column, I didn't have to battle my associations with the future. The metal structure was much more elaborate than the bare framework that had survived into the twenty-first century. Amid the iron framework were bright copper rings engraved with arcane symbols. Surrounding the perimeter of the column was a narrow metal catwalk. I moved gingerly out onto it and looked toward the west.

The sun was balanced over the rooftops of the city beneath a sky of fierce, roiling clouds. It looked as if the clouds were trying to squash the sun down into the horizon, to stamp out its light forever. A wave of lightning moved through the clouds--a dense network of veins that looked like the metro map of Paris. The clouds were moving closer to the tower, carrying the lightning with them along with colder air that smelled like the sea. I shivered, wondering what would happen to me if lightning struck the tower while I was on top of it--which surely it would. That's what it was built for. The whole thing was an enormous lightning rod.

The wind blew harder out of the west and the copper rings creaked into life, slowly revolving in their interlocking orbits. I was standing outside them on the catwalk; I thought I would need to be inside to make the time travel work. I'd wait on the catwalk until I saw Will.

No one was in the courtyard, unless you counted the stuffed crocodiles, who, in the murky green light of the approaching storm, appeared to be back in their native habitat of primordial swamp. I scanned the windows along the courtyard, walking around the catwalk, but there was no sign of life in any of them. What had happened to Octavia? Had she been able to kill Marduk? Should I have left her alone with him? But then I remembered how efficiently she had torn apart the second guard and figured she was probably able to deal with Marduk herself. It was too late to do anything but wait. The sun was about to disappear beneath the rooftops of Paris. Will would be on his way now. I knew from experience how fast he was.

When I'd summoned him to Governors Island, he'd come in a heartbeat. When I'd been in danger in the tunnels am, ching the High Water Tower in Manhattan, he'd saved me. He'd waited months for me in a cave in the Val sans Retour--and we'd come out of the Val sans Retour together, which was only supposed to be possible for faithful lovers. But was he a faithful lover? I wondered, staring into the stygian gloom of the courtyard as the faltering light in the sky started to vanish. After hundreds of years of carousing was he capable of loving one woman?

A flash of lightning lit up the courtyard, bringing the white bits of broken marble statuary and underbellies of the crocodiles to ghoulish life, as ugly as the jealous thoughts that preyed on me. They would devour me, I suddenly saw, and devour whatever chance Will and I had of loving each other. I had to put them aside. I didn't know what the future would bring for Will and me--didn't even know if we'd be able to get back to our own time--but the only chance we had was to trust ourselves to that future and not dwell in the past. Whatever Will had done in the four hundred years that stretched from this time to ours, those things had helped make him the man--or vampire--I'd fallen in love with.

At the next flash I saw him. He was coming through the same broken window I'd come through. He tilted his face up toward the tower, no doubt looking for me. I called his name, but my voice was drowned out by the rumble of thunder, which was followed by the sharp crackle of fresh lightning, this time directly above the courtyard. This flash lit Will midstride, just past one of the leering crocodiles, and at the window, another figure.

"Will!" I screamed, trying to warn him that he was being followed, but of course he couldn't hear me. The lightning was coming every few seconds now, each flash giving me the briefest, most frustrating glimpse of Will and the cloaked figure following him across the long courtyard. It was like watching the action through strobe lighting. I was so intent on the scene that I didn't notice at first that the metal rings behind me had begun to revolve faster, but when the groan of metal drew my attention and I glanced back, I found that not only were the gears of Ruggieri's contraption spinning, they were also glowing. The metal rings were collecting the light and energy of the storm and throwing them off in a great geyser of sparks that shot fifty feet into the air and then drifted down into the courtyard. Looking back down, I saw that the broken furniture and scraps of cloth had caught fire. Will had vanished. He must have reached the door. The other figure was still threading his way through the debris and smoke.
Good,
I thought,
by the time he gets here, Will and I will be gone.

I stepped tentatively into the metal cage, into the center of the glowing, revolving circles, and opened the timepiece. The watch gears were revolving and glowing just like the rings on the tower. The watch hands were spinning just as they had when I got lost in the Val sans Retour. The timepiece was working--but
how
did it work? How did I get it to take me and Will back to 2009?

The door in the floor opened. I held my breath until I saw it was Will coming up the steps, then threw myself into his arms so hard he stumbled and nearly backed into the revolving wheels.

"I was afraid you wouldn't make it!" I cried.

He looked down at me, his eyes flashing as green in the glow of the sparks as the Chareuse I'd drunk at Madame La Pieuvre's. "I was followed," he said, his voice hoarse. "We have to move quickly. Do you have the timepiece?"

I held it up for him. Another flash of lightning hit the top of the cage, and a thin filament traveled down and struck the timepiece. I felt a charge go through me that nearly made me drop the watch, but I held on to it with one hand while drawing the vial of Marduk's blood out of my pocket with the other. "I have this, too. Do you want to drink it now?"

He shook his head. "We'll wait until we get to the future. We may need my strength right now."