The Watchtower

twenty-first-century—my father, Zack Reese, Becky and Jay, Joe Kiernan, Maia, the receptionist at the gallery … and Will. I pictured my Will in the present and mortal, his face in the sunlight …
    A blinding flash enveloped us as if the sun I’d conjured in my mind had exploded. I felt Will’s arms around me, pulling me down to the tower floor as burning sparks showered down upon us. At some point he must have put his cloak over our heads because when I came to, I was muffled below damp, singed wool.
    I pushed the cloak aside. Will stirred and moaned. One of the wheels had fallen across him and seared his cheek. I moved the wheel away and the flesh began to heal in the gray light—
    Gray light?
    I stood up. In the east the sun was just beginning to rise over the rooftops of Paris—old, slate, mansard roofs.
    I spun west and saw, etched in black against the gray sky, the Eiffel Tower.
    “Thank God, we’re back!” I cried. Will stirred. As he started to sit up, a ray of sunlight reached his hand. His flesh sizzled. He cried out and snatched his hand back under his cloak. I rooted in my pocket and found the vial of Marduk’s blood, miraculously unbroken.
    “Here,” I said, kneeling beside Will. “Drink this.”
    He looked up at me, his silver eyes wary. I didn’t blame him. “Or we could find you shelter until we’re sure it will work.”
    He snatched the bottle from me. “I don’t want to hide in the shadows away from you. If I can’t be with you, I’d rather die.”
    He drained the bottle before I could remind him it wasn’t an either/or proposition. I’d have stayed with him even if he remained a vampire. But it was too late. Marduk’s blood was moving through him. I could see it spidering through his veins, bulging through his skin. It looked as if it were cracking him open, and it must have felt like that because he screamed as if he were being burned alive. I held him, not caring if I burned up with him, until the fire in his veins subsided. I felt his skin cool—but not all the way to the chill temperature of a vampire. The face he lifted to the sun was flushed with human blood. The tears he shed, clear as glass.
    “It worked,” I said. “You’re mortal again.”
    He looked at me, holding his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun for the first time in over four hundred years. “All because of you. I’ll never take my mortality for granted again.” He pulled me to him and pressed his lips against mine. Human lips, warm and tasting like salt from his tears—and from mine, which I now let fall. “I can never apologize enough for everything I’ve done.”
    I shook my head and smiled. “We have to stop that. Both of us. The past is over.” I held up the timepiece. Its gloss had cracked in the transit. “See? We can’t go back again.”
    He returned my smile and kissed me again. I could have stayed like that for a long time, but I could already hear the morning traffic. “Come on,” I said, getting up and pulling him to his feet. “We’d better get back to the hotel before the streets fill with people and we have to answer for these clothes.”
    Will looked down at his tattered, bloodstained shirt. “I suppose you’re right. I would like to wash this foul creature’s blood off me. It smells like rotten fish.”
    “Ugh! You’re right,” I said as we entered the stairwell. The smell was more powerful in the enclosed space. “Even after he took on your features, he must have retained some of the qualities of the sea creatures he’d fed on over the centuries. What a freakish monster!”
    “I shudder to think of that creature wearing my face. I’m afraid it will taint my enjoyment of my reflection forevermore.”
    I glanced behind me to see if Will was joking, but he wasn’t smiling.
    “That sounds like the old you,” I said, gentle in my rebuke. “I thought you’d outgrown that vanity…” I stopped when I saw the stricken look on Will’s face. At first I thought it was due to my criticism, but then I followed his gaze past me and down a few steps where the light from the still-open trapdoor fell on a dark stain.
    “What’s that?” Will asked. “It looks like…”
    I knelt and touched my finger to the dark spot. It came away bloody and smelling like spoiled sardines. “Marduk’s blood,” I said. “Given its newness and the time that’s passed, he must have survived the fall and then climbed up here.” I looked farther down and saw footsteps on the