She nodded. “It cannot hurt to look. I know that there is at a minimum one church in Paris with an access.”
“Give me just a minute,” I said, pulling my phone out. It had been vibrating nonstop with calls and texts from Nick and Madame Dupuy. I shot a quick “I am so sorry” off to Nick. I had no idea how to even begin to apologize to him. Then I called Madame Dupuy. “Noor’s okay,” I said when she picked up, “and she thinks she knows where to find a vampire.”
“Very well. But whatever happens, call me. I will help you if I can.” I thanked her. “Mademoiselle Tosh,” she said as I was about to hang up, “be sure to put the stake into his heart. Otherwise he will return.” She told me how to find his heart, and we ended the call. I led Noor down the stairs to a room hacked out of the limestone. It looked catacomb-ish because of the bare rock, but it wasn’t far enough belowground, and it was self-contained: No tunnels or passages branched off from it. I looked at her, defeated. “Well, it was worth a try.”
“Look for a grating or a plate in the floor,” she instructed. We separated to scan the room. After a minute, she called me over and pointed to a rusty grille set into the floor. I shone my phone on it, and we saw a shaft with iron rungs descending into the darkness. Our way in. Together we managed to drag the grille off the opening, and Noor sat down on the edge, dangling her feet into the dark. “Are we ready?” she asked.
“I think so—No, wait.” I trotted back upstairs to the room of broken things and returned with two stakes—one for her and one for me. “For Le Bec,” I said. She nodded. I tied themto her pack, and then she lowered herself into the hole. When I could no longer see her, I followed. Like my first descent, it was achingly long, but unaccompanied this time by the fizzy euphoria of being with Nick on a forbidden adventure. This time it was just work.
We arrived in a small chamber that led to a larger tunnel, which we followed until Noor got her bearings. “I am sorry,” she said as we retraced our steps for the second time. “I do not have maps. I know where things are in general, but this will take time. I am very sure we will have to turn around several times.” She frowned at a street marker over our heads. It didn’t seem to be the one she expected.
I shrugged. “I don’t have anyplace else to be.” She huffed out something like a laugh, and we continued until we came to a branching tunnel, which we took. We walked through a grayscale world that reminded me of being out at night when the moon is new. It was as though the darkness had levels of darkness I’d never been able to discern before, and everything—every pebble, every wall, every chisel mark—was high-def. I’d expected to grope my way through the catacombs, but instead I saw more, and more clearly, than I’d seen with Nick when we were all wearing headlamps. V mode had some advantages.
“What was it like?” Noor said. We’d been walking for a while, and I’d fallen into an ambulatory trance. It took me a minute to understand what she meant. “If you would rather not say,” she continued, “I will understand.”
“No, it’s okay.” Nothing I said would shock her. That was comforting. “It kind of felt great, actually. Which is awful buttrue. Right before I bit him, this amazing power just surged through me. I felt like I was in control for the first time in ever. I felt—” I paused, struggling to convey the enormity of the feeling. “I could feel myself taking up all the space, instead of being small and fitting in, like I usually do. I felt consequential.”
She stopped. “I envy that. I always feel small. Well, when I finish a piece, I feel big for a few minutes. When I step back and look at the whole thing and see what I saw in my head has come out through my hands. It never lasts long enough, though. I want it to go on forever, but it fades so fast. And then I am just me again. Le Bec took that feeling of bigness from me. He made me to be always small now.”
“To be honest, if I could get that feeling all the time without, you know, killing people, I’d totally sign up for v mode. It was so amazing. But it came from me ripping someone’s neck open. And liking it.” I shivered at the memory. “And then later, I tried to talk to my mom, and she didn’t answer. She always answers.” I told her about Mom and lighting candles and her voice in my head when I needed her. “She was gone, Noor. I did something she can’t forgive.”
She didn’t tell me it was okay. Instead, she said, “I chased that guy. I thought,You are not getting away; I am hungry. I would have sucked him dry if I had caught him. I do not think that I can be forgiven, either.” We walked on. The catas were full of scents: the rock, of course, but also water. I was sure we were close to a spring or an underground stream; the air smelled wet. There were other smells. The scent of chocolate, which hovered everywhere, along with beer, wine,tobacco, and weed, told me what fueled the explorations of most cataphiles. I also smelled laundry soap and shampoo and, fainter still, clothing: the bland vegetal scent of cotton, the chemical sharpness of polyester and nylon, and the earthy, animal whiff of leather and wool. It was disorienting and wonderful. And horrifying. I realized, as I sniffed the air, that I was tracking. Like a predator. Noor pointed to the tunnel on the left, and we started down it. “This section has at least one cat-hole, probably more.” She sighed. “I do not like cat-holes.”
There were two, and each one took maybe twenty minutes of wriggling on our bellies through a tunnel only inches larger in diameter than we were. About halfway through the second one, as I dug the toes of my shoes into the floor and wriggled a couple of centimeters forward, I had a sudden, sick understanding that there were tons of rock above me. Tons of rock, and then buildings on top of that, with their own terrifying weight. Parts of the catas had collapsed before, and I was seized by the fear that this tunnel would give way, burying us. My breath came out in staccato huffs. I started counting to calm myself:Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.By the time I’d counted to cinquante, my breathing had evened out. By the time I’d counted to mille trois cent quarante-deux, I could feel the cat-hole widening. I alligator-crawled out and stood up, panting and sweaty, and stretched, my fingers brushing the ceiling overhead. Then I noticed Noor sitting on the floor, huddled into herself, her head down on her knees. I sat next to her. “Are you okay?”
“I hate cat-holes.” She didn’t lift her head. I scooted closer, until our shoulders touched.
“Yeah.” I remembered how quickly the claustrophobia overtook me. “I thought I was okay in small spaces, but halfway through…” I shivered.
“I know that if I go into a cat-hole and it gets too small, I can back out. It is not fun, but it is possible. I have done it. But always when I am in one I begin to believe that I will be stuck. The worst thing is to panic in a cat-hole, but that is what I want to do—to shout for help and to drag myself out fast, even though I can only move a centimeter at a time. It is terrible.”
We were both silent, considering the particular hell of cat-holes. I felt ragged, and Noor was shaking. “Can we just stay here for a while?” I said. Abrasions from my chin to my knees throbbed and stung, and I wished that I’d grabbed my pack when I ran away from Nick. My trail first aid kit was init.
“What if we fail?” she whispered.
I wanted to say we wouldn’t, but I felt small and raw and scared. I leaned my head onto her shoulder. “If we fail, we fail. And then we try something else. As long as we keep trying, he doesn’t win.”
Chapter 22
Five Weeks Ago
It took us a couple of days to find the part of the catacombs where Le Bec’s scent was strongest. We would have gone faster if it hadn’t been for the cat-holes. We both wanted so badly to avoid them that we wasted time trying to find ways around them, ignoring the fact that they were there because there was no other way around. And once through, we always felt too shredded to continue immediately. We needed a couple of hours huddled silently together to recharge. But Le Bec’s scent pulled us onward. We followed its faint tendrils—the metallic whiff of blood, the chemical-sweet smell of spray paint—hoping for a freshening that would lead us to him. Finally, we entered a heavily tagged corridor, and Noor turned to me, her nose twitching. I smelled it, too. His scent was stronger there. Not fresh, but it filled the corridor, telling us he’d come here many times. It intensified near the doorway of a squat the size of my living room. It looked like asubterranean apartment rather than the usual bare, dirty shelter of necessity. Dressed stone blocks formed the walls, as professional a job as any building I’d seen aboveground. A smooth mortar joint tied the masonry into the raw stone ceiling. The opening we’d come through was framed in wood, and a door hung on it. I swung it closed, and it latched with a neat littlesnick.
A rumpled sleeping bag lay on a stone bench along one side of the room. On the opposite wall, a handsome bookcase in dark wood sat next to a matching cabinet. The bookcase held black sketchbooks numbered sequentially in red on the spines. Noor pulled one of them out—number thirty-three. She flipped through it as I looked over her shoulder. It was filled with drawings in black marker, recording everything Le Bec saw, from a street crammed with cars to the group of us crowded together at Le Shopping. I recognized Nick, Martine, and Youssef, looking animated. I was there, too, looking as overwhelmed as I remembered feeling, and Noor sat beside me, watchful and wary. I didn’t like how vulnerable he’d made me look. “I hate what a good artist he is,” Noor murmured. “Look at that. He captures everyone—their essence—in just a few lines.” She replaced the sketchbook and opened the cabinet, which was filled with spray paint, masks, and gloves.
“I think there are lots of good artists,” I said, watching her go through the cabinet, “who haven’t killed people.”
She stopped, then turned around and looked at me. “It is difficult to understand how he can be such a good artist and yet such a terrible person.”
“I think that’s a false equivalence. Great artist doesn’t equal great person.”
“But the way he captures people—their essence, their humanity—how can he be so sensitive to that, so capable of making one feel what his subjects are feeling, and nevertheless be a monster? His work is truly excellent. I admire it, and because I do, I also feel that in a certain sense I approve of the monster who makes it. I do not like feeling like this.”
Howdidyou reconcile bad people who did good things? I hated Cole because that night on the bus, as he gave me one last squeeze before he got up and went back to his seat, I realized that to him I wasn’t a person. I was a thing. Yet I used the skills he’d taught me all the time. He was good at research and argumentation, and it felt self-defeating not to take lessons where I found them, even if assault had been the price I paid for them. Still, in the back of my head there was always his voice whispering that I wouldn’t be anything without him. His casual dismissal of my humanity and my intelligence was like a fire in a coal seam. It might smolder for years before it broke into the open and exploded into flames.
“I knew this guy,” I said. “He…hurt me. It wasn’t the worst thing he could have done, but it wasn’t good. Until then, I’d liked him. Learned stuff from him. So when he did what he did, maybe I felt like—like it wasn’t okay, but on the other hand, I did owe him something for spending time and effort on me. I hate thinking about him every time I use something he taught me. I hate feeling like he made me pay for what I learned when I didn’t even know there was a cost for it. There shouldn’t have been.” I grimaced. “I’m not saying this right. I don’t really know how to live with skills I only have because a bad person taught them to me.”
She gave me an ironic half smile. “Yes. Me too. That isthe problem.” She turned back to the cabinet, which looked expensive. Not like some IKEA thing he could bring down in pieces and assemble here. It looked like something that would need movers. “Perhaps I should steal some of his equipment.”
