The Watchtower

their contact with humans.
    “But others abused their power over their human consorts,” Madame La Pieuvre continued darkly. “The worst offender was the Duc du Mar. He surrounded himself with human slaves whom he ravished and then disposed of when they no longer pleased him. His appetite was insatiable. Soon he was no longer content with mere physical abuse. He wanted to literally devour them. In his attempt to possess his humans wholly, he began to drink their blood. Some say he even ate their flesh.”
    “Ugh. How could the rest of you—the other sea fairies—allow that?”
    “We weren’t sure at first what he was doing. We realized it only when his victims began rising from the dead as vampires. He made hundreds of them. They swept over Paris terrorizing the populace. The fées de la mer met and decreed that Marduk—as he then began calling himself—must be stopped, but by then it was too late. Marduk had gained the power to take on the appearance of his victims. Thus he slipped from our grasp and escaped Paris. He went on a rampage across the countryside, leaving a path of drained bodies and vampires in his wake. Eventually we hounded him into the Pyrénées. There, without enough human victims to sustain him, he began feasting on beasts of the wild—boars, wolves, and bears. He took on traits of all the animals he had devoured and became a monstrous beast with an insatiable appetite for human flesh.”
    “Like the Beast of Gévaudan,” I said, recalling what Will had told me. I described the legend of Gévaudan to Madame La Pieuvre.
    “Yes, that sounds like Marduk—or perhaps one of the creatures he spawned. I’m afraid that the forests of Europe have never entirely been free of such creatures since Marduk went on his rampage. At last we hunted him down to his lair high in the Pyrénées. I was among the hunting party. We captured him, but only after he had taken many lives … including that of someone very dear to me.”
    Her eyes filled with tears. “We brought him back to the Île de Sein—to the last vestige of the city of Ys—and imprisoned him in a cave deep beneath the sea. Watchers were set guard in the tower on the Île de Sein—and in the towers on the mainland—to make sure he never escaped, but over the centuries the watchers have grown lax and susceptible to corruption and bribery. Many of the towers fell into ruins—or into evil hands. The tower on the Pointe du Raz, for instance, became the property of Cosimo Ruggieri, a gift from his late patroness Catherine de Médicis. We feared then that Ruggieri was up to no good, but we never suspected that he had the power to call forth Marduk from the sea. But then we didn’t know that the English sorcerer John Dee was working with him, or that he’d found, through Will Hughes, a way to gain the silver box and the Watchtower ring from Marguerite.”
    “It’s not Will’s fault. He had no idea what Dee was planning, and he tried to kill Marduk. He did kill him, I think, but when my —I mean Will from the future—tried to drink his blood, Marduk revived and attacked him.”
    “And you say Morgane told you Marduk’s blood would make Will human again?”
    “Yes. Do you think she was telling the truth?”
    Madame La Pieuvre shrugged with typical Gallic resignation. “Maybe yes, maybe no. One never knows with Morgane. But one thing is clear. We must hunt down Marduk and destroy him. Your Will is free to do what he likes with him when we find him.”
    “But how will we find him? We don’t know where he is.”
    “I think we do. Look again at Ruggieri’s column.”
    I looked through the telescope. For a moment I thought I was back in twenty-first-century Paris where the Eiffel Tower lit up the skyline with pyrotechnic displays, but the flashing lights came from the Medici Column, which looked now like a Roman candle setting off sparks. At the center of the blaze, the metal cage was glowing and revolving, shooting fireworks into the Paris sky.
    “I believe Ruggieri has been preparing the column for Marduk’s arrival, and therefore Marduk, Dee, and Ruggieri will be in the Hôtel de la Reine. I only hope they haven’t gone ahead with their experiment tonight.”
    “They haven’t.”
    The voice came from the doorway. Will stood beside a flustered maid, his face less pale than when I’d seen him last, but no less grim.
    “I tracked Marduk down to the Hôtel de la Reine and spied Dee and Ruggieri feeding him the blood of