I did a conspiratorial half shrug, my left shoulder rising halfway to my ear. “I mean, I wouldn’t call the cops if you did.” She smiled and stuck her head back into the cabinet. I turned my attention to a tall wing-back chair on a heavily patterned Persian rug in the center of the room.
“Tosh,” she said. I turned back to see her holding up a hunting knife.
I grimaced. “Why would a vampire need a hunting knife?”
“I do not want even to think about the possibilities.” She shivered, replaced it, and continued rummaging.
I sat down on the chair. Oversized and regal-looking, it had eggplant-colored velvet upholstery, gold-embellished tufting, and a back so tall it almost met the low ceiling. The gilded arms were gouged, though, and buttons were missing from the tufting. The stained upholstery was ripped and bald in spots. I wondered how he’d gotten the chair down here. It would have taken a lot of work. But then, the whole room was a lot of work. Aside from the improbable furniture, its walls and ceiling were covered in drawings of pigeons. They blanketed the limestone so densely that initially I’d thought they were some kind of enormous abstract doodle. It was only after I was sitting in Le Bec’s chair, staring idly at the wall near the doorway, that I started to pick individual images out of the snarl of wings, beaks, and feathers. I had the same sensation I had the first week I was in Paris: a barrage of people doing things both mundane and spectacular, butso quickly and so constantly that all I could process was a face here, a gesture there. The room was a microcosm of Paris, a Paris of pigeons. They rode the Métro, played on their phones, staged a screaming sidewalk argument, kissed on a park bench, filled a canvas tote in an open-air market, hurried down the street clutching a briefcase. It looked like Le Bec just kept drawing on top of older drawings, so that in some sections I could pick out only a wing or a beak. He tucked tiny illustrations wherever there was a centimeter of free space, creating a restless, itchy-scratchy avian mass. The walls seethed so hard I had to stare at the carpet to avoid feeling seasick. “Noor, did you notice the walls?” I said. She tucked a box of supplies into her pack and looked up, running her gaze slowly over the drawings. I could see her shoulders hunch up. “You feel it, too, right?” I asked. “I’m not just making it up that it’s super amazing and super creepy at the same time?”
She shook her head. “You are not making it up.”
I got up from the chair and joined her. “It’s like he thinks he’s a king,” I mused. “Look at that chair; it’s a throne.”
“King of the vampires,” she said sarcastically.
“This is why the police haven’t found him. He disappears down here.”
“Wefound him, though.” She smiled a grim little smile.
“We did, didn’t we?”
“We tracked him through the dark without any resources but ourselves.”
“We’re kind of badass.”
She nodded briskly. “Of course we are.” She undid the stakes from her pack and handed me one. I made a coupleof test thrusts into the air, feeling silly. “Is there a method we follow for this?” she asked, trying to find the best grip on hers. “We will need to conserve his blood, yes? So how do we do it?”
“Madame Dupuy said be sure to stab him in the heart.” I showed her where to find the heart, running my fingers over the left side of my rib cage until I felt its steady thump.
Noor frowned. “It is not a large target, and it is well protected.”
“Yeah. Maybe one of us can distract him while the other one stakes him?”
“Or we knock him out first. That will make the staking easier.”
We looked for something that we could use as a club, but there was nothing. She reached into the cabinet, pulled out a can of spray paint, and tossed it to me. “Spray it in his eyes. It is not as good as knocking him out, but it will put him at a disadvantage.”
I pointed to the sleeping bag. “Then toss this over his head. If one of us holds him, the other can stake him.”
Chapter 23
Five Weeks Ago
A slaughterhouse smell invaded the squat. Noor and I looked at each other. “That’s him,” I said, tightening my grip on my stake.
She nodded, holding my gaze. “We can do this.” The door opened, flooding the room with the smell of blood and terror, and I knew there was another body on the streets of Paris for the police to find.
“Bonjour, les filles,” Le Bec said as he entered. “I see you have finally come to join me.” We just stared at him. “Of course, you have done it the wrong way around. You cannot enter my home without my permission. But here you are, so I will invite you in retroactively.”
I snorted. “We are not here to join you,” Noor told him.
“But of course you are.” He sat down in the purple throne chair and surveyed us like a king would a couple ofparticularly useful peasants—pleased and not a little surprised that we showed any ability at all. “How do you like my home?”
“You live in a squat underground,” I said. “It’s hardlyAmazing Interiors.”
He laughed dismissively. “I own the catacombs. All of it is my home—my kingdom.”
I did a slow nod. “Your kingdom is a bunch of rocks and dirt in a hole in the ground. I can see why you’d be proud.” That explained why the police couldn’t find him, though, if he lived down here full-time. I wondered if he’d taken any victims from the cataphiles who played down here, in his “kingdom.”
