The Watchtower

than when I had last seen him, but I still recognized Roger Elden from the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles.

31
    The Beast
    Before I could do anything to stop them, the coach with Dee, Marduk, and the friar with the striking similarity to Roger Elden pulled away. Should I try to follow? But there was no way I could catch up to them on foot. The coach was racing up the hill toward the north coast road. Even if I could get back to our coach in time, it would be unable to get across the beach on the damaged south coast road. Besides, there was my Will to attend to—if he was still alive.
    He lay in the shadow of the tower as still and cold as the stones looming above him. I crouched beside him, unable to see his face well in the dusk. I tried listening for breath or heartbeat before remembering that a vampire had neither. I stroked his hair back from his brow and my hand came back sticky. Even his blood was cold.
    I wept then, leaning against the tower wall, my Will’s head cradled in my lap. He’d risked everything to become mortal by drinking Marduk’s blood and died in the attempt. All my fears that he loved Marguerite more than me were gone. He had chosen mortality—and me—and died for his trouble.
    While I sat there, someone came out of the tower and stumbled in the sand—a figure so familiar I thought it was the ghost of the man who lay dead in my lap until I remembered it was young Will, inexperienced Will as he had been in 1602.
    A seething, all consuming, completely irrational hatred for young Will seized me. It was his fault all of this had happened— his self-absorbed quest for immortality on the pretext of being in love that had led us here. The least he could have done was kill Marduk thoroughly enough that his future self wouldn’t get killed by him! In the next few minutes my hatred turned to contempt as young Will fell to his knees on the sand, tore his shirt open, raised his face to the moon, and howled. Perhaps he thought he’d become a werewolf, I thought snarkily.
    “My day now night, and night now day,
    eternity’s my enemy!
    Instead of solace, treachery.
    Instead of love, blood has its way!”
    A poem? Was he really composing a poem?
    “You were right,” I said to my Will. “You were an idiot. How did you ever become the man I love?”
    “Four hundred years of living the consequences of my mistakes,” he answered hoarsely.
    I peered hard into the shadowy face below me. “Will? Are you…?”
    “Still dead,” he answered, struggling to sit up, and rubbing his head. I touched the back of his head gingerly and felt the skull solid where a moment ago it had been broken. In return he touched my face and brushed my tears away. “I failed. And I let loose that monster … Marduk. What happened to him?”
    “He left with Dee in a coach. There was someone else with them. An old man I think I recognized.”
    “The abbot, no doubt, that rogue Charles Roget. Which way did they go?”
    “They took the north road.” I could wait to tell him that his abbot looked like a man I’d met in twenty-first-century Paris.
    “We have to get back in our coach and try to overtake them on the south road at Quimper. We have to destroy … that thing .”
    “What about…?” I gestured toward young Will, who was still ranting in verse, too caught up in his own drama to notice us.
    Will sighed. “He’s almost done. He’ll spend the day cowering in a cave. At nightfall he’ll walk to Audierne, buy a horse, and then ride to Paris to find Marguerite. He still thinks they have a future. There … he’s found her ring.”
    The moonlight caught a glint of gold in the sand. Young Will crouched down and kissed it.
    “He thinks that now at least he has the ring to give back to Marguerite, but she’ll refuse it…”
    Will’s voice trailed off, his head drooping. I shook him, alarmed that he’d lost consciousness again. It had been too long since he’d fed. I still had Marguerite’s brooch, its sharp pin stained with Marduk’s blood. The thought of that tainted blood mingling with my own was the only reason I hesitated before drawing the little dagger across my wrist. Will stirred when he smelled my blood and this time he was too weak to turn it down.
    *   *   *
    Once he’d revived, we returned to the coach, woke the still-snoring driver, and set out after Dee and his colleagues. On the road to Quimper I told Will about recognizing Roger Elden.
    “Roger Elden?” he repeated the name