The Watchtower

member not help you out, seeing as circumstances have … changed?” His beseeching gaze was desperate, but he could tell from her expression what her answer was going to be.
    “Alas, Will, it’s not possible. My family member hates humans with a vengeance, and I would be coming to her as a human. She would not recognize me as kin, and she would never honor a human request. What’s worse, I have made a pact with her to guard the mortal world against supernatural creatures like yourself, whom she hates even more than humans, vampires in particular.
    “You’re benign enough at this moment, but who knows what sort of monster you may turn into in the future, with all the desolate years ahead of you, always needing to feed on your own kind, or what used to be your own kind. Eventually you won’t be able to feed without developing a hatred for your prey. No animal can. And your prey is a class of beings that I now belong to.”
    Will had to admit to himself that, teeth full in, he was starting to feel hunger pangs. In one unwilling moment he beheld the tenderness of Marguerite’s neck, pale flesh just to the left of … ugh!—he caught himself. But the damage to his esteem was done. He was not the same Will Hughes anymore. And would never be again.
    “And you can’t make the journey the other way,” Marguerite went on. “The only person who knows how to make that happen, except for Dee with my box and ring, is my sister, and she would sooner die than make me happy. Let alone you. If Dee hangs on to my box, he could do it, but he’d prefer to die also. Believe me.”
    Will could see a tear on Marguerite’s cheek, and her lower lip quivered. Moonlight made the tear look like a drop of blood. He felt a sliver of lust for it, then shuddered with despair.
    She wiped it away. “I shall not weep in front of you, Will Hughes. Though I shall weep many hours, indeed many years, once you are gone. Now it is my official duty, as Watchtower between the worlds, to order you begone! To cast you from my presence! To bid, indeed command, that you return to the nether regions to which you belong! I suggest you seek the catacombs—that is where creatures of your sort generally go.”
    Will had an unbidden thought of the cliff cave at Pointe du Raz where he had spent the day. Compared to this Parisian locale of horror, it was home.
    “May I protest against this bitter exile you order? Exile from you and thus from life itself? I know of no Watchtower, no such authority, no such guardianship. I reject the Watchtower. But not you my love. Never you.” He took a step toward her.
    “You know the Watchtower now,” Marguerite told him in an authoritarian tone, snapping her fingers. Flames burst from her fingertips. Will felt the heat lick at his skin and knew she had the power to destroy him. “You know what you need to know.”
    She fled from him along the river with an alacrity, an evanescence, that suggested she might still have one foot in another world. Will blinked, and she was gone.
    Immortality, like memory, was not so easy to shrug off, he thought. For Marguerite, it would never really be in the past.
    Yet Will knew this couldn’t be entirely true, for that antagonistic look in her eyes, a totally human look, had been all too real. He also knew better than to follow her, for there lay the worst heartbreak of all, trying to rule fate when fate ruled him. Numb with grief, and trembling with a nightstalker’s fear of being uncovered, Will ignored the latter to sit for a while. He stared into the blood moon of the Seine, an implacable face of this new world to which he’d been admitted, and waited for a breeze to break up its otherworldly shimmer and release him from its grip.
    One came along. It shattered the moon into a thousand fragments of rosy ice. Will retreated up the bank, intending to mount his horse and ride back to Pointe du Raz to search for Dee and demand he return him to his mortal state. Despite his hunger and thirst. But halfway to his horse, he caught sight of a distraught young woman just emerged from a tavern, weeping while meandering drunkenly near an alley. A quick survey of the street told him no one else was about. The pale skin of her neck was as alluring as Marguerite’s had been. And why shouldn’t it be? For his nocturnal needs, one young woman compelled him as another did: theirs seemed the sweetest blood of all to salve his thirst and fill his hunger, an intuition that would prove valid