by Lee Carroll
A flash of lightning lit up the courtyard, bringing the white bits of broken marble statuary and underbellies of the crocodiles to ghoulish life, as ugly as the jealous thoughts that preyed on me. They would devour me, I suddenly saw, and devour whatever chance Will and I had of loving each other. I had to put them aside. I didn’t know what the future would bring for Will and me—didn’t even know if we’d be able to get back to our own time—but the only chance we had was to trust ourselves to that future and not dwell in the past. Whatever Will had done in the four hundred years that stretched from this time to ours, those things had helped make him the man—or vampire—I’d fallen in love with.
At the next flash I saw him. He was coming through the same broken window I’d come through. He tilted his face up toward the tower, no doubt looking for me. I called his name, but my voice was drowned out by the rumble of thunder, which was followed by the sharp crackle of fresh lightning, this time directly above the courtyard. This flash lit Will midstride, just past one of the leering crocodiles, and at the window, another figure.
“Will!” I screamed, trying to warn him that he was being followed, but of course he couldn’t hear me. The lightning was coming every few seconds now, each flash giving me the briefest, most frustrating glimpse of Will and the cloaked figure following him across the long courtyard. It was like watching the action through strobe lighting. I was so intent on the scene that I didn’t notice at first that the metal rings behind me had begun to revolve faster, but when the groan of metal drew my attention and I glanced back, I found that not only were the gears of Ruggieri’s contraption spinning, they were also glowing. The metal rings were collecting the light and energy of the storm and throwing them off in a great geyser of sparks that shot fifty feet into the air and then drifted down into the courtyard. Looking back down, I saw that the broken furniture and scraps of cloth had caught fire. Will had vanished. He must have reached the door. The other figure was still threading his way through the debris and smoke. Good, I thought, by the time he gets here, Will and I will be gone.
I stepped tentatively into the metal cage, into the center of the glowing, revolving circles, and opened the timepiece. The watch gears were revolving and glowing just like the rings on the tower. The watch hands were spinning just as they had when I got lost in the Val sans Retour. The timepiece was working—but how did it work? How did I get it to take me and Will back to 2009?
The door in the floor opened. I held my breath until I saw it was Will coming up the steps, then threw myself into his arms so hard he stumbled and nearly backed into the revolving wheels.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it!” I cried.
He looked down at me, his eyes flashing as green in the glow of the sparks as the Chareuse I’d drunk at Madame La Pieuvre’s. “I was followed,” he said, his voice hoarse. “We have to move quickly. Do you have the timepiece?”
I held it up for him. Another flash of lightning hit the top of the cage, and a thin filament traveled down and struck the timepiece. I felt a charge go through me that nearly made me drop the watch, but I held on to it with one hand while drawing the vial of Marduk’s blood out of my pocket with the other. “I have this, too. Do you want to drink it now?”
He shook his head. “We’ll wait until we get to the future. We may need my strength right now.”
I was surprised he wanted to wait, but I put the vial away and held up the spinning watch. “I’m not sure how to make it work.”
“You’re the Watchtower. You only have to say where you want to go.”
“Like Dorothy clicking her heels and saying there’s no place like home?”
His fine, marble brow creased in confusion. “Doroth—,” he began, but then the trapdoor slammed open and another figure rose up. His face was covered by the hood of his cloak, shielding himself from the showering sparks, but then he flung the cloak aside when he saw us. It was Will—or at least someone with Will’s face.
“It’s Marduk,” the man at my side whispered. “Changed to look like me!”
I looked from face to face; they were identical. But then why hadn’t Will gotten my Wizard of Oz reference a moment ago when he himself had said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” back in Paimpont? I looked down at the hand that grasped my arm—at the ring on his finger. A black swan on silver—my ring—not the one that Will should be wearing.
When I looked back up, I saw that his eyes were truly green—and malevolent. He snarled and, pushing me back, threw himself on my Will, who drew a sword and ran it straight through Marduk’s heart.
Marduk screamed and clutched at the wound as Will withdrew the blade, the blood splashing Will’s shirt. Then, before he could attack again, Will planted his boot on Marduk’s chest and shoved him through the metal cage and over the edge of the tower.
I ran to Will, who stood trembling at the edge of the metal cage, looking down at the body of Marduk lying between two crocodiles. “He’d better be dead this time,” Will said, spitting.
“I think he is,” I said, looking down at the motionless body. “But we don’t have time to check. The storm is passing. We have to go now!”
I pulled Will into the center of the cage and held up the timepiece. It was so hot now it was hard to hold. I closed my eyes and pictured twenty-first-century Paris—the round Bourse du Commerce instead of Catherine de Médicis’s palace, the metro stop, the Eiffel Tower. I pictured the people I knew in twenty-first-century Paris—Adele Weiss, Sarah, Becca, and Carrie, even the homeless people who sat in the Square Viviani and the accordion player at the Cluny metro stop. Then I threw in everybody I knew and loved in the twenty-first-century—my father, Zack Reese, Becky and Jay, Joe Kiernan, Maia, the receptionist at the gallery … and Will. I pictured my Will in the present and mortal, his face in the sunlight …
A blinding flash enveloped us as if the sun I’d conjured in my mind had exploded. I felt Will’s arms around me, pulling me down to the tower floor as burning sparks showered down upon us. At some point he must have put his cloak over our heads because when I came to, I was muffled below damp, singed wool.
I pushed the cloak aside. Will stirred and moaned. One of the wheels had fallen across him and seared his cheek. I moved the wheel away and the flesh began to heal in the gray light—
Gray light?
I stood up. In the east the sun was just beginning to rise over the rooftops of Paris—old, slate, mansard roofs.
I spun west and saw, etched in black against the gray sky, the Eiffel Tower.
“Thank God, we’re back!” I cried. Will stirred. As he started to sit up, a ray of sunlight reached his hand. His flesh sizzled. He cried out and snatched his hand back under his cloak. I rooted in my pocket and found the vial of Marduk’s blood, miraculously unbroken.
“Here,” I said, kneeling beside Will. “Drink this.”
He looked up at me, his silver eyes wary. I didn’t blame him. “Or we could find you shelter until we’re sure it will work.”
He snatched the bottle from me. “I don’t want to hide in the shadows away from you. If I can’t be with you, I’d rather die.”
He drained the bottle before I could remind him it wasn’t an either/or proposition. I’d have stayed with him even if he remained a vampire. But it was too late. Marduk’s blood was moving through him. I could see it spidering through his veins, bulging through his skin. It looked as if it were cracking him open, and it must have felt like that because he screamed as if he were being burned alive. I held him, not caring if I burned up with him, until the fire in his veins subsided. I felt his skin cool—but not all the way to the chill temperature of a vampire. The face he lifted to the sun was flushed with human blood. The tears he shed, clear as glass.
“It worked,” I said. “You’re mortal again.”
He looked at me, holding his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun for the first time in over four hundred years. “All because of you. I’ll never take my mortality for granted again.” He pulled me t
o him and pressed his lips against mine. Human lips, warm and tasting like salt from his tears—and from mine, which I now let fall. “I can never apologize enough for everything I’ve done.”
I shook my head and smiled. “We have to stop that. Both of us. The past is over.” I held up the timepiece. Its gloss had cracked in the transit;Or201C;See? We can’t go back again.”
He returned my smile and kissed me again. I could have stayed like that for a long time, but I could already hear the morning traffic. “Come on,” I said, getting up and pulling him to his feet. “We’d better get back to the hotel before the streets fill with people and we have to answer for these clothes.”
Will looked down at his tattered, bloodstained shirt. “I suppose you’re right. I would like to wash this foul creature’s blood off me. It smells like rotten fish.”
“Ugh! You’re right,” I said as we entered the stairwell. The smell was more powerful in the enclosed space. “Even after he took on your features, he must have retained some of the qualities of the sea creatures he’d fed on over the centuries. What a freakish monster!”
“I shudder to think of that creature wearing my face. I’m afraid it will taint my enjoyment of my reflection forevermore.”
I glanced behind me to see if Will was joking, but he wasn’t smiling.
“That sounds like the old you,” I said, gentle in my rebuke. “I thought you’d outgrown that vanity…” I stopped when I saw the stricken look on Will’s face. At first I thought it was due to my criticism, but then I followed his gaze past me and down a few steps where the light from the still-open trapdoor fell on a dark stain.
“What’s that?” Will asked. “It looks like…”
I knelt and touched my finger to the dark spot. It came away bloody and smelling like spoiled sardines. “Marduk’s blood,” I said. “Given its newness and the time that’s passed, he must have survived the fall and then climbed up here.” I looked farther down and saw footsteps on the steps below me. “He almost reached us.”
“But look—there are footsteps coming up, but then he turned around and went down! He might still be below us in the tower!” Will drew his sword and pushed past me. “I’m going to end this once and for all.”
I heard Will’s footsteps racing down the stairs. I followed, terrified at every turning of the spiral stairs that I’d find the two of them locked in combat, but hoping that Will’s assumption was wrong. Just because Marduk was back in the tower when I used the timepiece didn’t mean he traveled forward in time with us. Did it?
I was relieved when I reached the bottom of the tower without encountering Marduk. Will was standing just outside, blinking in the early-morning sun. He was staring down at the ground. As I came up beside him, he pointed at something. Among the cigarette butts was a bloody footprint … and another … and another. I followed the trail of them to the entrance of the metro.
“Shit,” I swore, meeting Will’s stricken eyes. “We brought him home with us!”
Will nodded and then turned in a wide circle, taking in the park, the erly-morning commuters (who only gave our clothes and Will’s sword passing glances, assuming, I realized, that we were gamers), the entrance to the metro, and the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
“Home?” Will asked, shaking his head in confusion when his circle brought him back to me. “This doesn’t look like home to me. Is this the land of the fey you’ve brought me to, Marguerite?”
I opened my mouth to object to his calling me Marguerite—I hadn’t evolved that far past my jealousy—but then saw the bigger problem.
“Will,” I asked, “how long were you a vampire?”
He looked baffled at the question, but answered, “It felt like an eternity, but I suppose it was only two days.” He took a step toward me. “I hope you won’t hold that short time against me now that you’ve saved me.” He looked concerned. Probably because I was crying.
“You’re not my Will,” I said, not caring how the words might wound him. “I saved the wrong one.”
Tor Books by Lee Carroll
Black Swan Rising
The Watc
htower
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitio
usly.
THE WATCHTOWER
Copyright © 2011 by Carol Goodman and Lee Slonimsky
All rights reserved.
Edited by Paul Stevens
A Tor® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carroll, Lee, 1951–
The watchtower / Lee Carroll.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2598-3
1. Women jewelers—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Good and evil—Fiction. 4. Vampires—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.A774578W37 2011
813'.6—dc22
2011013450
First Edition: August 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-7764-7
First Tor eBook Edition: August 2011
