“Hitler thought the same thing.”
There was another silence, long and cavernous, broken only by the beeping of Gregor’s heart monitor, now wildly erratic.
“Lay down with dogs and you get up with fleas, MacGregor,” Doe said softly, one hand wrapped in a death grip around his cane. He stood slowly, in obvious pain, favoring one leg and leaning heavily on the cane. “This is not over. This is only the beginning. Do you think these creatures will be content to live forever in the shadows? Our information indicates there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands. Maybe more; there’s no way to be sure. But consider what will happen if they one day decide humans have been at the top of the food chain too long. You’ve seen what they can do.” He patted the pocket of his suit jacket where he’d stashed the phone. “And that is only the tip of the iceberg, as they say. They’re killers, MacGregor. They’re monsters. Their potential to cause harm to the human race is unlimited. Consider that carefully when you think of the reasons you are protecting your lady friend.”
He moved slowly to the door. One of the gendarmes saw his approach through the glass and swung the door open for him, holding it as he drew near. He paused in the doorway and looked back at Gregor over his shoulder. His gaze was ghostly pale and eerie as it rested on him.
“You will have plenty of time to ponder all that in prison, I’m sure.”
The hospital door was the kind that had a magnet on it, so when pushed against a wall with another magnet, it stuck and held. Agent Doe passed through the door, but because the gendarme had pushed it all the way open it stayed that way, and Gregor was able to overhear a few words as he made a phone call from his cell phone, walking slowly away from his room and down the hall.
“Thirteen here. Section Thirty. Put me through to the chairman. Yes, I’ll hold.”
He rounded a corner and limped out of sight.
Crouched in the same spot she’d been hunkered down in for the past six hours, Eliana’s legs were numb.
The tall, turreted red brick structure long ago used as a furnace and chimney to burn waste during construction of the Eiffel Tower was dwarfed by the tower itself, but on its little grassy hill directly beside it, provided a perfect, unobstructed view of the surrounding area. She’d be able to see D’s approach from any direction.
She’d be able to see if he brought anyone else with him.
Twilight conspired to paint Paris in a romantic glow perfectly unsuited to her mood. It was cold but lovely; light snowfall tinted the sky all silver and haze and muffled the roar of the cars and buses on the Avenue Gustave Eiffel to the south. The lights from the port on the river Seine snaking by to her north sparkled in long, winking waves off the dark water. The tower itself was awash in gold light from the thousands of lamps that illumed it, a spear of brilliance that rose straight up to the heavens from the heart of the greatest city in the world. Everything was beautiful.
Everything was awful.
She hadn’t been able to string together a single coherent thought all day. After the catacomb police—a separate division of the force tasked with clearing out the cataphiles on a regular basis—had finally left and the dark corridors were once again silent, Eliana had gone aboveground and wandered the streets for nearly a full day, blank-eyed and hollow. She didn’t see the pedestrians Christmas shopping who thronged the quaint, cobblestone lanes and chic boulevards; she didn’t care when she bumped into them and they skittered away, frightened by whatever look must have been on her face.
She could guess it wasn’t friendly. Or particularly sane.
Curiously, she couldn’t feel it. She wasn’t feeling much of anything at all, except a tightness in her chest that wouldn’t go away and a growing tension in her muscles that felt like a winch, constricting. There was a black cloud over her head, descending, engulfing her in darkness.
A tingle of recognition snapped her head around and pulled her out of the morass she’d been lingering in with an abrupt jolt, as if she’d been plucked from quicksand. Her heart began to pound. Her hands began to shake.
Because there he was. Walking slowly toward the ticket booth at the south foot of the tower marked
He stood out like a lion in a flock of dozing lambs.
A lion that carried, in one large hand, a small parcel wrapped in butcher paper.
Instead of the elevators with most of the tourists who preferred to avoid exposure to the cold, Demetrius took the narrow stairs in the south leg of the tower to the second floor. She watched him as he ascended through the open latticed network of iron until he reached the wide platform. Moving with slow deliberation, shouldering through the thinning crowd who darted aside to let him pass like a school of minnows fleeing from a shark, he went to the railing and looked out. He closed his eyes and stayed that way for several moments, unmoving, his coat flapping and billowing around his spread legs, while Eliana watched from her hidden perch, feeling as if her heart would claw itself out of her chest.
Then he turned his head, and across the distance his eyes found hers, as if he knew where she’d been hiding all along. As if he’d felt her watching.
She stood. She stared back at him. Even with the distance, everything was between them, palpable as rain, bright as summer sunlight. His gaze was heat across her face, his dark eyes burned, just staring at her, not a muscle moving, searing intensity and the crackle of invisible flame. She felt pinned by that look, the stark longing in it, the hunger, raw and real. She felt powerless against it, and suddenly a wave of anguish rose up in her, a longing to match his own, and she had to look away.
She turned to the stairs of the old chimney and began the winding descent down.
When she finally stood beside him on the second-floor observation deck and looked out over the vast, sparkling majesty of Paris on a winter evening, she had herself a little bit more under control.
D didn’t turn to look at her. He acknowledged her presence with a slight bow of his head, but that was all. They stood silently for a while, shoulder width apart, listening to people chatter in a dozen different languages, feeling the wind on their faces. Up here it was colder, the flakes of snow more biting than below.
“I have this memory of you,” he said in a low, solemn voice, still looking out over the city. She kept her own eyes on the view as well as he continued to speak. “You were sixteen, maybe seventeen. It was the winter solstice, and everyone had gathered in the great room after the ceremony in the temple for the feast of Horus.”
Eliana closed her eyes, remembering the cavernous great room they used on festival days, the smell of hot beeswax and incense, the glow of a thousand candles in iron braziers and chandeliers, the shouting and laughter, the heat of so many bodies pressed close together at long wooden tables as they feasted on suckling pig and roasted beef and delicacies from all over the world, brought in to celebrate the birthday of their patron god.
“You were sitting with your father and brother at the main table. I was standing behind you, against the wall, on duty as always. The
“But you kept glancing back at me, with this worried look on your face. I didn’t dare look at you, but I couldn’t figure out why the king’s daughter, the precious
Hope for the future: that’s what the elders had called her, though she never knew exactly why. He went on and his voice grew softer, tinged with something close to awe.
“Then when your father was distracted by someone who’d come to speak with him, you called one of the servants to you and passed her something. You whispered something to her, and I could tell she was trying to talk you out of whatever you’d said. She looked very angry, but you insisted, and eventually she made some pretense to walk by me and hand me what you had given her.”
D glanced down at her. “An apple. You gave her an apple to give to me.”
“You looked hungry,” Eliana whispered. “You looked miserable, standing there alone. I thought you might like something to eat.”
