The Watchtower

between us and pressed myself against the heat of him. I lay my head on his chest, tilting my head so my throat was bared to his lips. I felt him hesitate.
    “Perhaps there is a way to start over,” he murmured as if to himself. Then he lowered his head to my neck. As his lips grazed my skin he whispered in my ear, “But tonight I want to be with you one last time … like this .”
    As his teeth sank into my neck, every muscle in my body turned to liquid. I would have fallen straight to the floor if he hadn’t caught me. I might, I found myself thinking, fall straight into hell in his arms, but it no longer mattered to me. I’d go to hell to be with him. But I didn’t fall. Once he had hold of me, I felt the blood in my veins catch fire as if they were filled with that green liqueur Madame La Pieuvre had fed me earlier. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pressed my mouth against his, tasting my blood on his lips. I could taste, too, the venom his fangs released. It made my mouth tingle and sent a ripple of electricity through my veins. I undid his pants as he carried me to the bed. He was inside me before we hit the bed. I felt his urgency and matched it.

34
    The Hotel of Crocodiles
    I watched death come upon Will at dawn. It wasn’t just sleep, I realized, it was as if he died at every dawn. I couldn’t bear the thought of his dying one more day. I had to find Marduk.
    I closed my eyes, meaning to rest a few moments beside him, but when Madame La Pieuvre woke me, she told me that it was past six in the evening. “I let you sleep, ma chère, so you could be rested for what we have to do, but we must find Marduk before the sun sets.”
    When we walked outside the château, the late-afternoon sky was so overcast I was afraid the sun had already set. Black storm clouds hung in the western sky. Madame La Pieuvre looked at them worriedly.
    “Another storm. More lightning to feed Ruggieri’s machinery. We must hurry.”
    “I’m sorry if doing this puts you in any danger,” I told her when we were settled in her carriage.
    She shrugged. “You, being from the future as you are, are a descendant of the Watchtower. It is my duty to help you. Besides, it sounds as if you did me a favor in your time by taking me to the Summer Country.”
    “I’m not sure how much of a favor that was. I’m afraid you might have gotten lost in the Val sans Retour.”
    “And yet I was willing to risk the journey. I must have loved— will love—this woman Adele very much.”
    “Yes, I think you did—I mean, will.” I described Adele Weiss to her and told her what I knew about how they had met during a war. Then, taking my notebook from my pocket, I drew a picture of her.
    “She is lovely,” Madame La Pieuvre said, smiling at the drawing. “I’m glad that I will love someone enough to want to give up my immortality. It gives me something to look forward to.” She gazed out the coach window, her gray eyes as serene as the overcast sky. Four hundred years seemed a long time to wait, but perhaps to a creature who had already lived for millennia it wasn’t.
    “We’re here,” she said as the coach came to a stop. We were in a narrow side street bordered by a high, windowless stone wall.
    “This is Catherine de Médicis’s palace?” I asked skeptically as we stepped out into a lightly falling rain.
    “The southwest corner of it. You didn’t think we were going in the front door, did you?”
    “No, but…” I couldn’t see any door at all, just a shallow niche decorated with a large bronze bas-relief panel depicting Venus rising from the sea. Above the wall I could see the Medici Column, and beyond that I saw the spires of Saint-Eustache. I turned around in a circle, recalling the visit I’d made with Roger Elden.
    “We’re standing right at the entrance to the metro,” I said. “Or where the metro will be in four hundred years.”
    “And what is the metro?” Madame La Pieuvre asked.
    “An underground”—I was about to say train, but remembered that she wouldn’t know what a train was—“passage,” I said instead, “that people use for transportation.”
    “That’s just what’s here now,” she said, bending down before the carved plaque of Venus. She looked as though she were paying homage to the goddess—I supposed that Venus might be one of her gods—but then her fingers found some hidden catch in the grooves of the shell Venus rose from, and the bronze sculpture swung wide-open. A cool,