The Watchtower

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    On the train back to Paris I picked up a discarded Le Monde and read about the fourth Seine murder. They were no longer being called suicides. All the bodies had been drained of blood. The Vampire Murders, they were being called.
    It couldn’t be Will, I told myself, wiping the newsprint off my sweat-slick hands. He never killed innocents and he had left Paris in May. A year ago I would have dismissed the appellation as a media affectation, but now that I knew vampires existed, I wondered not whether there were vampires in Paris, but how many. I’d never asked Will about others of his kind. The only other vampire he’d mentioned was the one whom John Dee had summoned to make Will immortal.…
    My sweat turned icy cold. Will had the box. He’d taken it to summon a creature to make him mortal. Had something gone wrong and he’d let out the vampire who had made him instead? Was that vampire now ravaging Paris for victims?
    When we pulled into the Gare de Lyon, I experienced once again a moment of double vision—only now instead of seeing Holocaust victims being herded into freight cars by Nazi soldiers, I saw the crowds as so many beating hearts circulating blood for a centuries-old monster. I could hear the pulse of the crowd along with the hoofbeats that had lodged in my brain.
    I hurried out of the station, urged on by that incessant beat, and walked across the Seine to the Left Bank. I found myself glancing toward the roiling water flowing under the Pont d’Austerlitz. Had it been only a handful of nights ago that I had looked into that water and wondered how despairing a person would have to be to throw themselves in? Had some monster of the night preyed on lost souls—such as Amélie and Sam Smollett—as they paused on the bridge’s ramparts? Even though it was full daylight, I hurried on, barely able to keep myself from breaking into a run. Perhaps Madame Weiss would know something about the murders.
    When I arrived at the hotel, though, I found that Madame Weiss was not there.
    “She’s gone to the country,” the manager told me, tight-lipped, her eyes slanting sideways. Then she quickly busied herself tidying up some sightseeing brochures that were already perfectly tidy.
    “Madame Weiss looked upset when she left,” a man’s voice informed me as I was opening my door. I turned and found Roger Elden leaning against the hall bookcase holding a cup of coffee. In my overtired state I wasn’t sure which smelled better—the coffee or the clean tang of Roger Elden’s cologne.
    “Did she?” I asked. “Do you know what was the matter?”
    Roger shook his head, a soft brown lock falling over his eyes. I noticed lines around his eyes and some silver threaded through his hair that I hadn’t noticed before, little signs of age that only made him better looking. Why was that the case with men? I’d never worried before about growing old, but I wondered now if Will wasn’t able to become mortal again, what it would be like to grow old while he didn’t. Especially with a man who might have cared so much about his looks that he’d traded daylight for eternal youth.
    “… so if you wanted to come, tonight is perfect.”
    “I’m sorry,” I apologized, realizing I’d missed half of what Roger Elden had been saying while I worried about my vampire ex (the one who’d abandoned me) noticing gray hairs and wrinkles. Talk about shallow! “Come to what?”
    “The conference is sponsoring a series of midnight tours of famous astronomical landmarks. I know it sounds eccentric, but what can you expect from a bunch of science geeks?”
    I smiled. “Hey, some of my best friends are science geeks. My friend Jay once dragged me to Nicolas Tesla’s abandoned laboratory on Long Island.”
    “Cool. Nick was a genius, but a bit of a nut,” Roger said, as if speaking of an old colleague instead of a scientist who had been dead for over fifty years.
    “Where’s the tour tonight?”
    “The Medici Column. It’s over by the Bourse on the rue du Louvre. There’s a spiral staircase inside it that leads up to the top of the tower. It’s normally closed to tourists, but it will be opened tonight for members of the conference.”
    “And what’s on top of the tower?”
    He grinned sheepishly. “A weird metal contraption built by a sixteenth-century astrologer.”
    “Gosh, who could say no to that?”
    “Really? You’d go?” He beamed at me so hopefully that I felt myself