We looked at each other. “We did it,” she said. There was no triumph in her voice, just a weary acknowledgment that we’d completed an unpleasant task.
“We did,” I replied flatly. We should have been celebrating. We’d taken down a vampire. We’d won. But I just sat there, empty and exhausted. Wordlessly, Noor dragged her hand through the blood pooling on the ground next to his body and smeared it on her arms, her face, her clothes.Right, I remembered,this was part of the cure. This was why we staked him. I dipped my hand into the puddle. It was warm. When she asked me if I could rub blood on her back where she couldn’t reach, I laughed. She looked at me, wondering what I could possibly find funny right now. “It’s like helping a friend put on sunscreen.” I giggled. “But vampire version.” She started laughing, too. We rubbed each other with blood, laughing until we gasped. Finally, we caught our breath andstared at the body. Noor said, “We have to do this, yes?” I wanted to say no, but we didn’t know which cure, if any, would work. We needed to do all three.
I nodded. “Good thing he thoughtfully provided a knife for us.” We started giggling again but stopped when I got the knife out of the cabinet. His heart seemed absurdly small for the amount of work it took to get it out. It was slow, squishy going, and when we were done, it sat on the floor, ugly and malevolent and leaking blood. I glanced at the body and looked away quickly. We hadn’t exactly done a precision extraction, and I wanted to burn the memory out of my brain with acid and fire. Noor pulled the sleeping bag over him. “Thanks,” I said. “Now we just have to ash this thing.” I poked it with the toe of my boot, then started to cry.
“Oh, Tosh.” She hugged me.
“How do we even do it?” I sobbed. “We don’t have any wood. I mean, I have matches.” I wasn’t completely useless. “But what do we do, singe it into submission, one match at a time? It’ll take forever.” I slumped down and curled into a ball, weeping so hard I could barely breathe. We’d come all this way, done hard, horrible things, and now we were going to fail.
“It is okay.” She rubbed my back, which made me cry harder. I wanted all this to stop: the pain and anger and despair and disgust. I wanted to be a normal girl living her best life in Paris instead of a blood-caked abomination.
“I think—Wait a minute.” She walked over to Le Bec’s bookcase and took out one of the sketchbooks. She opened it and tore out a page, crumpling it and tossing it onto the ground close to the heart. “We can use these. His ‘throne’will burn, too, if we break it up.” I dragged a hand across my eyes, got a sketchbook, and started tearing out pages. We built a pyramid of wadded-up drawings and surrounded it with sketchbooks stood on end and fanned open to catch the flame. We laid the broken bones of the chair on top, then lit the loose paper and fed the flames with Le Bec’s art until everything had been burned up and the charred lump of his heart sat in their ashes. The squat stank of burnt meat. Noor eyed it grimly. “Why are these cures so disgusting?”
“Right?” I agreed. “There should be a pill or a vaccine, instead of this DIY horror kitchen.” When the heart was cool, we used a spray can to bash it into powder. Then we stared at the disgusting pile of gray ashes.
“Maybe if we put them in water, they’ll go down easier?” I suggested. Noor got her water bottle, and we mixed the ashes in until we had a toxic-looking slurry. We took turns drinking, one of us gagging while the other one forced down another swallow.
“I think I feel worse,” she said when we were done.
I nodded. “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d definitely kill him for this.”
She held up the empty water bottle. “So what disgusting thing must we do next?”
I made a face. “Eat his grave dirt. Except to do that, he needs a grave.” He was dead, and he was still making our lives miserable. “So I guess we’ll have to dig him one. With our hands.”
“In the cabinet, there is a shovel that folds up.” She gave me an ironic half smile. “For one time, he did something useful.” The shovel was an aluminum one you use to dig a firepitor trench around a tent. The handle was so short we had to kneel to dig in the packed rubble floor. We worked together, Noor on the shovel and me pulling out the bigger chunks of rock as she loosened them. After a couple of hours we switched, and almost immediately I hit solid rock. I directed a baleful look at the sleeping-bag-covered lump.
“I hope there’s a hell,” I told it, “and I hope you’re frying.” The hole we’d made wasn’t yet deep enough to hold him, so we started scraping at the rock. We worked mechanically, one of us raking the shovel over the stone and the other scooping the dust out. Noor found some dust masks in the cabinet, so at least we weren’t breathing it, but it got into our eyes and coated our clothes and skin until we looked like the ghosts of gravediggers.
Finally, she stopped me. “I think it is deep enough,” she said. We were both kneeling waist-deep in the hole, and at the edge there was a pile of rubble and another of fine, pale rock dust that we’d excavated. The shovel blade was worn down to a quarter of its original size.
“We actually did it,” I said, only half believing what I saw.
“We did,” she agreed, her voice flat.
We dragged Le Bec to the hole and rolled him in. Then we just stood there, too exhausted to start filling the grave. He wasn’t a pretty corpse, but my eyes kept darting to him, pulled by a nagging idea that something was missing. Besides his heart, obviously. Noor picked up the sleeping bag that had covered him while we were digging, and I saw her stake on the ground. She was about to toss the bag in on top of him when I stopped her. I picked up the stake and stepped down into the grave. I positioned it over his chest, then drove it inwith my remaining strength. I felt it bury itself in the rock beneath him.
Noor nodded. “So he can never get up again. Good.”
We filled the grave in, except for one handful of fine dirt, smoothed it even, and then dragged the carpet over it. We examined it from all angles, but unless someone knew what lay under it, they’d never suspect it covered anything but stone and gravel. Noor looked at me. “I guess we eat dirt now,” I said.
We’d drunk the last of the water, so we had to swallow the dirt dry. It felt soft at first on my tongue, like powdered sugar. It tasted like dirt, though, and it went down in a choking, clayey lump. I hated Le Bec a little bit more. Noor gulped hers down stone-faced, her eyes watering. “What next?”
I shrugged. “We wait?” We sat down on the sleeping bench.I was beyond exhausted, and I was sure I’d fall asleep the moment I stopped moving. But images from the past hours played a blood-spattered PowerPoint in my head every time I shut my eyes. Finally I just stared at the tangle of pigeons on the wall.
“You know,” she said after a while, “I really hate how he has done the walls.”
“It’s a bit extra,” I agreed. “All those staring pigeon eyes.” I shivered.
“We should redo it.” She got up with a groan and started collecting the spray cans that had spilled out of the cabinet when I pushed it over onto Le Bec. When I realized what she had in mind, I helped her sort the colors. She picked out a small stretch of wall by the door and showed me some basics: what caps are best for what job, how to make fat and thinlines, how to make flat shapes look dimensional. She left me to practice and got to work.
I noodled around with stylized human shapes, drawing with the paint, changing the positions of arms and legs until the figures looked right. I could hear the soft hiss of paint as Noor worked on the other walls. It felt healing to be making art with her. The squat felt different with our marks on the walls—like a sanctuary rather than a graveyard. I lost myself in colors and shapes. Noor had finished the rest of the room by the time I’d gotten my little mural the way I wanted it. I turn to look at what she’d done and gasped.
She’d painted Paris—the monuments and shops, the people and parks. There was Le Shopping, with a swirling crowd of dancers. There was a boulangerie with a line out the door. Chimeras from Notre-Dame promenaded down the Champs-Élysées. Mysterious figures in blue EDF coveralls painted a mural on the side of a building. One of them wore a scarf, and one had a thick red braid hanging down her back. A Métro train on an elevated track careened through a neighborhood with an accordion player riding on top, a trail of notes following him. A cartoony Eiffel Tower leaned inquisitively into my panel, where I’d painted two figures dancing under a fat yellow sun. “They are beautiful, Tosh,” she said, looking at my dancers. At the bottom of the mural, she’d written, in friendly block letters,Paris est à nous.
“You got your art back,” I said, hugging her. “It’s amazing.”
She grinned. “I am so happy. And so relieved.” Then she pointed at my mini-mural. “We are an excellent team.”
