“We are,” I agreed. The squat was littered with cans of spray paint, and I started to pick them up. She joined me.“We cannot have our beautiful piece surrounded by trash,” she said. We put the cans back into the cabinet. I wondered how long we’d have to wait to see if the cures had worked. I wondered what we’d do if they hadn’t. When everything was tidy, I took another look at our mural, so alive and vibrant. I squinted at my sun, which had glowed when I’d painted it, but now looked dull and faded. “Is it getting dark in here?”
She looked around the room and then at me, her eyes widening. “I think it worked,” she said.
“What worked?” Then I realized. My vision was starting to fade back to human. Those awful cures we’d taken had worked. I sniffed the air, which minutes before had been layered with the overwhelming smell of spray paint, the still-strong tang of blood, and the persistent sour odor of limestone. They were all still there, but muted. “Oh,” I said. Then I realized what losing v mode meant down here in the dark. “We need to find a way out of here before our senses revert.” She caught up her pack immediately, and we left the squat. No one would know now that it was once Le Bec’s. He was gone: dead, buried, and never to rise. Paris belonged to us again, just like Noor had written on her mural.
We hurried while we could still see in the dark and follow a scent trail. We were lucky, in an awful way, that the blood smell Le Bec carried with him was still so strong, because that’s what we followed until the trail went cold at a fork, and we found ourselves fully in the dark and merely human once again. I wondered if, after all we’d done, we’d end our lives down here. We had shut our phones off to save battery, but we turned them on and used the flashlights to see where we were. I scanned the two corridors that made a Y there,wondering if it really mattered which one we chose. We could have been working our way farther and farther from an exit and never have known it until we collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration. We were running on fumes as it was.
“Stay with us,” Nick had cautioned me when he took me into the catacombs. Was it only a month ago? “People who don’t know the catas can get definitively lost down here. Even people who do know them can lose their sense of direction.” He’d told me about Philibert Aspairt, who went exploring on his own down here in 1793 and got lost. Cataphiles had found his skeleton eleven years later, and they’d buried him right where he’d died. They put up a monument commemorating his lonely death, which is more than we would get.
Noor interrupted my grim musings. “Look; there is the trail.” She pointed up at the black line painted down the center of the ceiling. It was like the one we’d followed my first time in the catas. I’d forgotten all about it. Thank goodness Noor hadn’t. We checked our phone batteries, which were so low we could use them only sparingly. We had my matches, though. After an hour or so of groping our way along in complete blackness, we came to another crossroads and lit a match. Noor found a street marker she recognized. “Merde,” she said. “We are going the wrong way.” I was hungry and thirsty and cold and tired. I didn’t want to retrace our steps. All I wanted to do was sit down and cry. “I am so sorry,” she said, sounding miserable.
If we stopped, I wasn’t sure we’d start again. So I pretended I wasn’t exhausted and hopeless. I forced some cheer into my voice. “It’s not a crisis. We just have to go back. It’s better than having to stake a vampire.”
“I just want to go home.” Her voice shook.
“Me too.” I hugged her. “And we will. I mean, we wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”
“In the wrong direction.”
“Okay, yes, but now we know what the right direction is. And all we have to do is walk. We don’t have to kill a vampire or eat his heart. We just have to walk. It’ll be easy.” I took her hand and tugged it. We needed to keep moving. She fell into step beside me, and we marched into the dark, feeling our way toward freedom. Time didn’t feel the same in the catas, so I’m not sure how long we’d been walking when Noor asked to stop for a rest. We sat down right where we were standing, and I scooted as close to her as I could.
“I’m cold,” I said. She jostled against me as she rummaged in her pack. I could hear zippers sing as she opened pockets. Then I heard a crinkle. “Voilà,” she said.
“Voilà what?”
“Chocolate. I always have some for emergencies.” She felt for my hand and put a chunk in it. I remembered our last excursion in the catas, when she’d also saved me with emergency chocolate.
“Oh my God,” I moaned, forcing myself to take small bites and chew each one thoroughly. “It tastes like a miracle.” I felt a little warmer. After a few minutes of rest, I forced myself to get up. Noor protested but got to her feet, taking point. I followed, my hand on her pack. “Is there water along this route?” We’d need some fairly soon. Once again I regretted not thinking to snatch up my backpack, with its water bottles, as I fled after attacking that man. Dad always said you could go longer without food than you could without water. I usedto tease him because he obsessively checked trail maps before we hiked to identify water sources. You can’t carry enough water with you on a long hike—it weighs too much—so he’d mark all the sources we could expect to find along the trail. We always hiked with a backup water purification kit, too. He’d had giardia, and his goal was never, ever to have it again. I wished he were here with us now.
“Yes,” Noor said. “We will be okay.” We walked on, feeling our way through the blackness. After a while, she asked what we were going to do when we got out of the catas. I’d been thinking about that, too.
“Madame Dupuy said she’d help us.”
“Do you trust her?”
I hesitated. “She told us about the cures.”
“Yes. But her family kills vampires.”
“We’re not vampires anymore.”
“How do we prove that to her?”
“The silver test,” I said.
“But we do not have anything silver. And if we ask her to meet us with silver, will she think that we are still vampires and that we are trying to trap her?”
“Good point.” I was so tired it was hard to think.
“Nick?” Noor suggested.
I groaned. “Nick saw me rip someone’s throat open. Maybe Martine or Youssef?”
“Perhaps.” We considered this. “So we call Martine—perhaps Youssef—and they meet us. They will run away when they see we are covered with blood,” she pointed out.
“Right. We need somebody we don’t have to explain this to. Somebody who won’t be shocked when they see what welook like. Madame Dupuy knows about vampires. She said she’d help us.” Noor sighed. “What if we call her? Just call her and tell her the cures worked? See what she says?”
Noor was silent for a couple of minutes. “Very well. I cannot think of a better alternative. But if she does not respond well, we cut the call.”
