“You are not fine. Did somebody hurt you?”
The question stung. “It’s not my blood.” I sounded sharp, defensive. I wasn’t sure why I was so reluctant to tell her what happened. If anyone would understand, it would be her. “Anyway, what happened to you?”
She didn’t explain right away, and I looked up to see her feeling around in her backpack. “Here,” she said, pulling out a roll of paper towels and handing them to me along with a bottle of water. “Clean yourself up.”
I wetted a paper towel and scrubbed at my face. “Seriously,” I said, dropping the bloody towel into the bin and wetting another. “Your text said you needed help. What’s going on?” She just hugged her backpack and looked miserable. “Okay.” I threw away another reddened towel. “You were out working on a piece, right? I’m pretty sure I passed it.” She nodded, and I waited for her to pick up the story. After a long, silent minute, I prompted, “Then something interrupted you?”
“I was just trying to paint, you know?” Her voice shook. “I thought maybe on a wall, maybe big, I could find my line again. This guy walks up and starts to talk to me: ‘Bonsoir, what are you doing, have you done this before, did you knowit is very late and this is not a good neighborhood, maybe you should go home.’ And I am trying to paint and also to not look like someone he needs to pay attention to, so I am polite, and I say thank you, I have friends nearby, I will be careful. And then he says, ‘No, you are not listening to me, this is a dangerous place.’ And again I say thank you, but I am fine. I make sure I am holding a fresh can of paint because I know things will soon become difficult.” She paused, and I saw the shape of what was going to happen. I reached out and took hold of her hand. She swallowed, then continued. “Then he says it again: ‘You are not listening to me.’ And he grabs me and pulls me around to face him. So I spray him in the eyes with my paint. This is when I should run. This is when I always run. To stay safe. But this time I do not, because”—she took a deep breath—“because I am just finished, you know? I am finished being bothered when I am not bothering anyone. I am finished being told where I can be and when I can be there. And then I—” I squeezed her hand.
“It is as if I become a fire. I am so angry. I want to hurt him. My teeth are on his neck, and I don’t know how it has happened. He is afraid of me, and it is wonderful. I want to bite him—I am hungry, you know? But I want more to drink his fear. I have never felt so powerful like that.” I nodded. I knew exactly how she felt. “So maybe I am not holding on to him tightly enough, because he pulls out of my grip and runs away.” She sighed raggedly and scrubbed her face with her hands. “But now what do I do? I have shown that I am not a safe person. I cannot be with people. When my brother makes me angry, will I attack him? I cannot trust myself. I cannot go home.” She wasn’t crying, but there were tears inher voice. She held up her backpack, shaking it so I could hear the rattle of the spray cans. “I only have my painting things and my phone. Where will I go?”
I gave her a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. “I know a place. C’mon.” As we walked back, I told her my story. I wondered if she’d hate me when I told her how I got blood all over me, but instead she hugged me, whispering, “That must have been so horrible for you.”
“I mean, it was worse for him. But obviously I can’t go home, either.” We didn’t say anything more until we were standing in the basement of broken chairs. “We’re safe here for a while—”
“Or everyone is safe fromus.” She looked around. “But what happens next? We can’t stay here forever. We’ll get hungry”—I winced—“or someone will come to check on the church.” I lifted a brow and glanced meaningfully at the dust that coated everything. “Okay, perhaps not that. But we will get hungry, or restless, and eventually v mode will happen.”
“So I was talking to Madame Dupuy when you texted. I asked her to—to give me some pointers on how to stake myself. Because what else was I going to do?”
“Did you tell her where you are?”
I shook my head. “She told me there were cures.”
“There are?” Hope lit up Noor’s face.
“The problem is, all of them require a vampire. You need its heart and its blood or its grave dirt.”
“We know a vampire,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Do you think we could actually do it—stake him?”
“I could. He has taken my art away from me.”
“But you were working on a piece tonight.”
“Did you look at it?” she snapped. “It is terrible. When I paint, my hands see what is in my head. It is the most beautiful feeling. It is as though the image is coming alive as I lay down the lines. But what I did tonight? It was—He broke the connection between my hand and my mind. I cannot live if it stays broken. It is who I am. If I do not have it, I no longer exist.”
“But that means we have to go out looking for him. And what if Nick called the cops after I ran away? They might be looking for me. Or if he didn’t—” I couldn’t imagine Nick leaving the man, running away like I had. He’d call an ambulance at least. “Even if the cops aren’t looking for me, there’s no guarantee that I won’t hurt someone else while we’re looking for Le Bec. If we can even find him. The cops sure can’t, so how would we even start?”
“We do not go looking for him. We wait for him to come to us.”
“Here? How?”
She shook her head. “He is often in the catas. If we can find a way in, then we can simply wait for him there.”
It was an intriguing possibility. “But there are miles of passages. We could spend years looking for him.”
“So we use what we have—our eyes, our ears, our noses. He likes the catas. He is comfortable there. We will find him, and his blood will cure us. He owes us this.”
I thought about it. “You’re right. Let’s do it.”
She held up her index finger. “There is a small problem.”
“How small?” I said, thinking,Of course there’s a problem.
“I do not know any entrances to the catas. Le Bec was always the one who knew where to get in.”
I pointed to the stairs. “There’s at least one more subbasement down there. I’m thinking that a place with subbasements might also have a way into the catas.”
