The Watchtower

wouldn’t hang a victim up to drain his blood. And the Beast of Gévaudan was abroad in the eighteenth century. Perhaps Marduk terrorized the countryside before then and the legends of strange beasts can all be traced back to him. At any rate, I’ll have to wait till Paris to feed. The hunting’s always easy there.”
    It was a sign of how far gone Will was that he’d say something so unguarded to me. I tried not to dwell on the many, many years of preying on innocent victims the remark revealed. Will looked too pathetic to blame for anything right now. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes glassy, and his limbs trembled like an epileptic’s. I had hoped that when dawn came he would fall into an easier rest, but he continued to shake and now called out in his sleep. He called my name, but also Marguerite’s and even someone named Bess. Through my own chattering teeth I muttered, “One more woman’s name, mister, and I’m pushing you out into the sunlight.”
    But he’d already sunk from articulate syllables into moans and sharp cries. I drifted into sleep myself eventually, a broken, restless sleep, punctuated by feverish dreams.
    I was running down a wide, flat allée, Hellequin’s hunt hard on my heels. They’d been pursuing all along, through Brittany and into the past, and now they were almost upon me. I looked back over my shoulder and there was Hellequin, a vicious grin below his bloodred/night-black mask, his tattered cloak billowing behind him. I saw Octavia La Pieuvre’s face surrounded by her fluttering tentacles, and Monsieur Lutin’s, and Melusine’s, her wings flapping dryly in the wind, her eyes green flakes of lichen.
    “All your friends are here,” Hellequin said, grinning. “Come join them.”
    Something about his voice was different. It wasn’t the voice I remembered from Fontainebleau, but one I’d heard somewhere else … recently …
    “Even your darling Will is here.” He held his cloak out and I saw Will’s face, desiccated as an autumn leaf, his mouth frozen in a scream of pain. I looked up into Hellequin’s eyes—but they weren’t Hellequin’s eyes, they were the yellow eyes of John Dee.
    I turned to run but was blocked by a dark figure. I looked up into Will’s face. Relief flooded through me, but then he lifted a clawed hand to his brow and tore his skin away revealing Marduk’s face—only he now had the face of a wolf. This was the beast Hellequin pursued. The famous Bête du Gévaudan.
    I startled awake in the coach. I must have slept through the whole day because Will was awake also, staring at me as if a monster’s face were hidden beneath my flesh. Perhaps he’d had his own nightmares.
    “We’re here” is all he said.
    “Here?”
    “Paris.”
    He drew the curtains open. We were crossing a bridge lit by torches. Looming above us was the dark mass of Notre Dame, gargoyles silhouetted against the violet dusk.
    “How will we find Dee, Ruggieri, and Marduk?”
    “We’ll follow the trail of blood they leave behind them,” he answered glumly. “But now, my dear, I have to … go out.” He said it as if he were going to a play. “I’ll instruct the driver to take you to a house where you’ll be welcome and safe. I’ll come there before dawn … unless…”
    He didn’t have to finish his sentence. If he found Marduk and won, he would drink his blood and come back to me a mortal. But if he found Marduk and lost, he wouldn’t be coming back to me at all.

32
    The Watchtower
    Young Will spent his first day as a vampire cowering in a seaside cave, hidden from the sun, watching a family of crabs burrow in the sand. Was this his fate, he wondered, to spend eternity with the lowliest creatures of the earth?
    At dusk he walked to Audierne and rented a horse to ride to Paris. He thought it would take him days, but soon the horse was moving at a supernatural speed, as if he had transmuted his own frantic energy into the horse. The horse now had the ability to jump substantial obstacles in their path, like a stream thirty feet across. When he looked back at it, Will suspected that this ride marked the beginning of his ability to transmigrate his own atoms over distances. In this case, he was actually transmigrating the horse.
    By midnight he was within twenty miles of Paris and it was there that he experienced the second phenomenon of his enhanced powers. He “saw” Marguerite. Not in the flesh, but in a sort of vision. He saw her sitting by the Seine in