by Carrie Ryan
It’s time.
That’s all I know for certain.
II. Luc, 14h02, le 17ème Octobre
I watch her move and it’s all I can do not to touch her. No man is immune to the pull of la Sirène, but of all men I am the least. Hair. Curves. Bare neck. Bits of wrist and ankle, above and below her wrinkled dress.
I would do literally anything on heaven or earth to have her.
Heaven. I snort.
Mon Dieu, you’re pathetic. You act like a loup-garou—a werewolf. Like you want to eat her, not kiss her.
And so it has been for as long as we have worked together, as long as I can remember. I close my eyes, swallowing. It sounds like a wave crashing in my ears, but I know she can’t hear it any more than she can hear my heart pound.
I follow Adrienne down the narrow hallway. Gas lamps flicker dimly from the stone walls, but I can see what I want. What I need.
The light illuminates the curve of Adi’s legs through the thin cotton of her dress. I can see plenty.
At a time like this, I shouldn’t be thinking about her perfect derrière, but I do. It’s how she walks. Elle marche toute en beauté comme la nuit. In beauty, like the night. You’d write a sonnet to that pair of curves, too.
It makes me want to punch the wall. Instead, I finger the pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket.
Two years, that’s the age difference between us. In Mortal years she’s just nineteen. But those gypsy eyes, those black curls—they’ve been tormenting guys like me for two hundred, more.
Elle est trop belle et trop jeune pour mourir. That’s all I can think now. Unlike me, she is too pretty and too young to die.
She stops at the dark wooden doors. Her hand on the iron handle, she draws a deep breath. Courage, I think.
“Don’t.” The word slips out before I can stop myself.
“What?” She doesn’t turn around.
“Don’t tell them, Adi,” I say, catching her hand. She twists to me, a strange expression playing across her lips.
“I have to.”
“Of course you don’t. Yes, you’re the Voix de Prophétie. But just because you’re the voice of the future doesn’t mean you have to tell the others.” I think of the society, the room ahead of us teeming with immortal life. “They’ll go crazy. They can’t imagine facing death, let alone the end of the earth.”
“Luc.”
“Let’s get out of here. I have my moto.” I sound as desperate as I am. “You don’t know what they’ll do. It’s not safe.”
What happens now? How do you tell Immortals that they’re about to die?
How can they hear it?
How can we?
She laughs. “Of course it’s not safe. Nothing is. But not because of them.” She looks at me, her smile fading into softness. “Not because of us, Luc. We’re just the first to know.”
When she says my name, I want to cry.
I don’t. I know she’s barely holding it together as it is. I also know she’s bluffing.
And terrified.
Adrienne doesn’t want to say it out loud, not this news. Still, she knows it’s coming. She knows it will be bad. We both do. Adi, and me, and the few we’ve told at the Council. The few we needed, to call the meeting. Everyone we’ve brought it to.
Any one of us who says otherwise is lying.
It’s been brewing for years now. Since the sixteenth century, in fact—the first day I got the first message in a spilt puddle of black ink on yellow paper. The day we met.
Les Prophéties de Nostradame is the public record of everything we’ve learned over the centuries, as our oracles became seers became prophets became tea leaves became scryers became machines.
Now there’s only the Enigma.
The Enigma, and me.
Et Adrienne.
Nostradamus, he’s just a name, a personality we invented—the group of us—so we could disseminate information throughout the mortal world. Nostradamus’s real name is the Société de Notre Dame Immortelle. He’s us, the whole lot of us, our joke—named for the church where we hold our meetings. Adi and I carry the truth to the others, and they decide what to do with it. What to tell the Mortals.
But the source of the words, the other end of the line, the sender-recipient of the messages I type out so carefully on the Enigma, that’s no joke.
That’s a different thing entirely.
I’ve stopped knowing what to make of it. More and more, all I get are glimpses of disaster. At some point, news stops being news. What else is there to say, when every message is like this—
At forty-five degrees the sky will burn, Fire to approach the great new city: In an instant a great scattered flame will leap up.
Or this?
Earthshaking fire from the center of the earth will cause tremors around the New City. Two great rocks will war for a long time, then Arethusa will redden a new river.
Who writes them? Who sends them? Who is it that cares enough to say? Who knows what is coming our way?
Another person—more philosophical, more religious, at least more curious—would obsess about the source of the message. Me, I’m more concerned with the message itself. What it means. What time I have left.
Besides, I have a god already, and she’s standing here in a rumpled dress, beside me.
Adrienne takes a step closer to me. She takes my hands in hers, crumpling the piece of paper she carries between us.
She’s standing so close to me I can smell her. Lavender and Earl Grey tea. Chocolates and new bread and rain on the pavement. Wind. Life. Eternity.
That’s what I want her to smell like. That’s how I’ll remember her, for as long as I can.
“Luc. Do you know what your name means?”
I nod. “Light,” I say, thinking of my mother and her warm lap.
“Do you know what mine means?” she asks.
Beautiful, I think. Perfect. The thing that defies explanation. “Non,” I say. “Pas du tout. Not at all.”
She smiles, sadly, from somewhere faraway. “Darkness. According to our birth names, you’re the light, and I’m the dark. See? This is what I was made to do. Funny, isn’t it?”
She doesn’t laugh.
Neither one of us does.
Instead, she drops my hands, sliding hers up to my shoulders. For a moment, she lets her head linger on my chest, resting.
I can feel her breathe. And I can hardly breathe myself.
Because the wooden doors are all that stand between us and the end of what has always held us together.
The Société—our people, the closest thing to family we’ve known for hundreds of years—will learn the truth.
That death comes for even the deathless.
I want to stay on this side of the brown doors forever. I want to circle my arms around these dark eyes and dark curls and turn us to stone, in the middle of this stone hallway.
I want to tell her I love her, and that I know somewhere inside that crumpled dress, above those wrists and beneath those curls, she loves me too.
All the things we have never said.
Instead, I say nothing, and she pulls away from me, turning her face like a bubble is popping between us.
III. Adrienne, 14h12, le 17ème Octobre
The door groans as I pull it open.
The faces surround me in the wide chamber of our council room. La Société de Notre Dame Immortelle. Les Enchanteurs, les Sorciers, les Magiciens, les Vampires et les Loups-Garous—even a few Fantômes with nothing better to do.
In other words, the Immortal Undead, in all our many forms.
They’ve come to Paris, but they’re not from here. Not all of them. They’re from everywhere, from cities where they live among the Mortals, from graves and caves where they remain in isolation.
The faces around me are drawn, worried; everyone is sitting too far forward in ancient hardwood chairs. We’ve called this meeting suddenly, without warning. They know that is never a good sign.
Bu
t then, there are few good signs now, not for us. Not anymore. All the cryptic messages have led to today. Now. The King of Terror, the great waiting death from the skies, is upon us.
There’s no point in drawing it out.
I step up to the podium in the center of the room, a carved stone half-pillar, in front of a lone row of crushed-velvet chairs.
I lean against the stone, looking out at the faces in the shadows of the cavernous space. I feel their eyes on me.
I take a breath.
Let the words come.
Give me the courage to say them.
I don’t know who I’m asking, not exactly. Luc? Myself? That enigmatic presence on the other end of our clumsy encryption machine?
Does it matter?
Is anyone there?
I raise my voice. “C’est fini. Le fin. The end. We need to accept the truth of our predicament. It’s getting worse. We don’t have very long now.” I look up, but I can’t meet their eyes. “I’m so sorry, but in this matter, we are beyond doubt.”
I smooth the paper out on the stone in front of me, focusing only on the typed words.
“There’s more,” I say.
I keep my eyes on the page as I speak.
It’s the only way I can bring myself to do it.
I tell them, again, about the world killer. About the unthinkable mass, and the trails of fire and stars. We ourselves have predicted this for six centuries now. Our Nostradamus. The thing we hoped would not be. The event some of us even prayed—to whom?—would not occur. I unfold the paper, repeat the final words.
“All that has been foretold will come to pass, on the last breath of this, the last day of the last month of eternity. The King of Terror, the great death that falls from the skies, is upon us. And even death will not spare the deathless.”
It couldn’t be clearer. Death will not spare us. Even our immortal lives will end today.
From what we can tell, Mortals will believe it is an asteroid. That’s what Luc says.
The word itself, which means “starlike,” seems a cruel joke, because this star isn’t bright and won’t bring hope or create life. It will utterly destroy it. Without feeling, without motive, without reason.
I tell them it’s not a mistake. The Enigma Machine has typed out only this message, every day, for the last week.
Each message names this day as the last.
No predictions have ever been so detailed, so complete.
Seven lines, repeated seven times.
I tell them it won’t be long after that.
Minutes, maybe seconds.
Today.
Luc stands with me. He doesn’t say a word, but he doesn’t have to. As usual, as always, his presence is the one fixed thing.
His presence, and his prophéties.
His eyes do not look away.
My voice sounds strange and steady in the darkness. I do not feel anything beyond the words I speak.
I am dark, I think.
This is how it should be.
The moment I finish speaking, my words die in the air above me. I understand the truth of the prophecy.
There is no reason to keep our powers in check, not anymore. No reason to do or not do anything at all.
I have lost control of the room.
The most powerful creatures in the world, who sit within it, have lost control of themselves. I can see it in the look of their eyes, the twitch of their impatient fingers, the crazed flush of their faces, the glow of their auras, their staffs and talismans.
We don’t have to wait for the terror to come from the skies. It begins now, as soon as the words are spoken.
Shock turns to rage turns to chaos. Despair. Rage. Disbelief. They will do this now, themselves, on their own terms. I step back as the haphazard violence of power surrounds us, engulfs us.
Ancient rivalries and unnatural behaviors held too long in check explode from every corner of the room. There is no holding back now.
No point or reason. No higher power or accountability. Only the madness of powerlessness, perhaps the only thing we’ve never felt, not in this room.
There is nothing left to say, only to do—and they all begin to do it, in their own way.
All we can do is watch ourselves in horror.
“I told you,” hisses Luc, grabbing my arm. “It’s not safe here. They have nothing left to lose. They’re going to riot.”
Just as he speaks, an ancient sorcier erupts into blue flame, sending from each outstretched arm an electrical pulse wave that floods up the sides of the cathedral walls, all the way to the point of the highest spire. His power surge immolates everything it touches into ash, least and most of all the sorcier himself.
It’s the supernatural equivalent of throwing yourself off a burning building.
A Ruina spell. Unimaginably destructive, and completely irreversible.
Like today, I think.
Burning timbers fall around us, and Luc pulls me closer to him, shielding my head with his arms. I see a patch of blue sky now, at the seam where the walls should be meeting the ceiling—where the world is falling apart.
“We have to go, Adi. Now!” I can hear Luc, but I can’t move. My feet feel as much like stone as the altar in front of me.
Luc picks me up, yanking me from the path of a vampire. I cannot help but watch as the creature dives out of the way of the fires, reaching instead to instinctively pincushion the nearest flesh, rooting about for anything to sink his teeth into. Our baser instincts seem to have overtaken all of us.
An elderly enchanteur does not resist, closing her eyes until it is over.
“Don’t look,” Luc says, but I can’t help it. Smoke fills the room, stinging my throat, stuffing my ears, but I cannot close my eyes.
It is not over.
A chair flies over our heads, and Luc staggers closer to the broad cathedral doors. Between us and the streets, a loup-garou kicks and hurls chairs against the wall. Blood spatters as he looses his jaws, free to bring his own destruction now.
Luc doesn’t try to stop him, slamming instead his own back into the massive wooden doors at the front of the church.
I wait for another patch of blue sky to appear, but it isn’t there.
It doesn’t come.
All that I see are more faces, curious bystanders crowding up the front steps of Our Lady of Paris, struggling to see what all the ruckus is about.
The loup-garou doesn’t wait, and as Luc pushes through the crowd in front of us, I hear the screams of the poison inside the room leaching into the streets. Luc stumbles, and I wonder if he feels the blood slick beneath his scuffed boots.
He slides me onto the back of his moto, kicking it into gear with one arm still around me. He turns his face, just so. His mouth is against my forehead as he shouts into my matted hair.
“Hold on, Adi. No matter what, don’t let go.”
I nod. I won’t. I promise.
Not now. Not yet.
It doesn’t matter what comes after this, I think. What falls from the sky. We had less time than we knew.
My words alone were a world-killer.
IV. Luc, 14h41, le 17ème Octobre
We fly, bumping, over the seam where the cobblestones give way to smooth asphalt.
I pull into the space between Dumpsters and beneath the laundry line where I keep my bike.
I turn off the moto.
The silence is surreal; the alley behind my apartment is strangely quiet.
Nothing has happened here, not yet.
No one knows what is about to happen.
Someone next door has begun to roast a chicken. Marceline, across the hall, will be home from school any minute now. An open window above mine broadcasts a football game from inside.
Paris SG versus Marseille, I think, pulling out my keys. Out of habit, I listen for the score, even as we rush up the steps and push our way through the little gate.
Only Adrienne’s eyes tell me it is real. When she looks at me, I see flame
and ash and blood. I see the brokenness and the ending, the rising panic.
Wordlessly, I swing open the door and scoop her effortlessly into my arms. Her head drops against my shoulder as I carry her inside.
My room is a bed and a window and a kettle. I let my eyes follow hers, a circle around my room. The walls are bare. The shelves empty. Dirty coffee cups piled in the sink. A lone bag of leeks sits on my counter. Leeks? What was I thinking? The end of the world and a bag of leeks.
We need only the bed.
I place her on the mattress gently, as if she were a dandelion. A dream. A wish.
But she isn’t.
Adrienne is stronger than that. Harder. She sits up and looks past me, out my good window, and I turn to see the fire burning across the city. Our Lady in flames. I listen for the sirens.
Then I close the window.
Enough.
“Don’t you want to see?” she whispers, looking at me sadly. I smile down at her, pulling a stray curl loose from the corner of her mouth. A single tear catches on her lashes. “For the last time? How it ends?”
Adi’s lips are the color of pink champagne.
“I do. I want to see everything.” I lean closer to her, until I can feel her breath on my cheek. “For the first time. How it begins.”
It’s you, I think.
You are the beginning and the end.
You always were.
Her eyes meet mine.
She pulls my leather jacket down my arms, without looking away from me. Our gestures become frantic, and I fumble with her buttons, nearly yanking her dress in two.
I give up and let the fabric rip. A button strikes my temple and she smiles.
She pulls my shirt over my head, pulling me down to her side.
Instinctively, I slide my hands down, moving her on top of me. Her skin is slippery as pearls, as petals between my fingers.
I’m still wearing my jeans, and she’s still in her dress, pooling down around her hips. Her camisole is lacy and red. A tiny tattoo of what looks like a half a heart rests just above the curve of her perfect left breast.
Then I see it isn’t a heart.
It’s a flame.
I stare, wonderingly.
