The Watchtower

the shadow of Notre Dame. For an instant, he was elated. Then she turned her head and Will could see the wan, almost tearful expression on her features, and his spirits sank. Perhaps she was simply missing him. But as a fellow immortal, he asked himself, shouldn’t she at least have been able to sense his arrival in her world? Shouldn’t the stunning news of his immortal transformation—wretched as its circumstances had been—have reached her somehow and outweighed his absence? It startled Will how, absent fangs, he could take a favorable view of the nightmare at Pointe du Raz. But he so needed this reunion with Marguerite to be harmonious.
    On the contrary, Marguerite looked so weary at the moment, it were as if disappointment over his absence had turned her blood to that of a mortal’s. Atomsight had given him the ability to look into veins; his own bubbled with vigor since Dee’s tower, with a diamond-blue sheen brimful with the depths of time. However cruel his new life might be, to himself and others, he recognized how immortal his new blood was. But Marguerite’s blood, as she sat by the Seine, had no such quality. He shuddered icily. No doubt it was the psychological effect of his absence, but the aura about her now, or the lack of one, made her look … mortal … and, worse, made him long for her blood.
    In a panic as bad as any he’d experienced in Dee’s tower, he urged his horse faster toward Marguerite now, not to attack her but to learn her situation before it was too late. He hoped for every inch of the ride that a reversal of their natures had not happened. Or that, if he was sensing one all too accurately, the reversal could in turn be reversed. For otherwise his world was about to come crashing down, and in the worst irony of all, forever.
    *   *   *
    Will tied up his horse a block south of Notre Dame, as he wanted to come to Marguerite as unobtrusively as possible. The moon was higher now, and he observed its rubied sphere reflected in the Seine’s black mirror as he walked to the top of the riverbank. He slowed with the beautiful sight, then thought about a dark similarity between this walk and his earlier one in Paris, the dawn walk on which he’d first approached Julien-le-Pauvre. That walk had brought, for the longest of intervals, futility. And he was afraid now that this one would be bringing him ruin, a most bitter ending. He paused, almost at the edge of collapse despite his physical powers. But he gathered himself together and went on. Better to know his fate now than to postpone it. And her fate as well.
    Marguerite had moved halfway down the bank in the time since he’d dismounted, as if gathering up the courage to dive in. Maybe she could sense his approach, he surmised, though why so morbidly he couldn’t fathom and was terrified to ponder. He started down the bank and called softly, “Marguerite.”
    She turned without getting up, and though she smiled, she looked so depleted he felt crushed. He sat down next to her, taking her left hand gently in his right. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. They sat holding hands for the longest while, in a strange immobility, gazing at the moon in the Seine as if it were an oracle and they were waiting for an answer.
    A breeze tore the gleam into a thousand shards, red knives, and they both sighed. Finally Will spoke. “I’m sorry I had to take off so suddenly. I had business.”
    She turned to him, cupped his chin in her palms, and kissed him. “I had business, too.” She shrugged, gazed up and down the river. “But all’s well that ends well. Now we are together.” She put her left arm around Will. “My comrade. My soul. My mate.”
    Will was thrilled by her words and unnerved by her listless tone. Why was she so subdued? Was it because he hadn’t returned box and ring, which she hadn’t even mentioned yet? And why hadn’t she made reference to immortality, that great gulf between them that had now been bridged?
    “Together at last,” he whispered back. “But tell me, my dear. Do I seem different to you in any way?”
    Marguerite replied in a livelier, almost jovial tone. “Why Will Hughes, I do believe you have that magical glow about you again tonight. The one that has so enchanted me many times, though not so much in recent weeks, when you’ve had that unfortunate preoccupation. Which, I have the grace to tell you, is vanished now.”
    “Preoccupation … it’s what?”
    “Vanished! The