The Shape Stealer (15 page)

“Wait,” Will piped up, looking at the screen. “This interests me.”

“Even with all your—shall I say, years—of financial experience by now, ey?” Octavia said. “So much of what is said about money on these sorts of shows strikes me as drivel. People who really know how to profit from things don’t share their knowledge for free.” Clearly, she didn’t realize she was talking to a younger version of the Will she knew.

Will got up and came close to the set, better to hear the lowered volume. “Have you never seen a TV before?” Octavia asked him.

I suddenly observed another familiar face, that of Adele Weiss, in the sitting room doorway. Octavia had gone to find the Summer Country with me in order to have herself made mortal, so she would not live on in eternal pain without the mortal Adele. (I hoped to soon learn what the fate of that quest had been.) Adele, an elegant woman in her early eighties, was looking urgently at Octavia now. But Octavia’s gaze was fixed on Will, and how he was staring at the TV set. Adele looked at Will, and from him to me.

“Oh my goodness! Look who’s here!”

She rushed over to me and embraced me warmly.

Adele had been a friend and confidante of my mother, whom she knew in Paris. I don’t know if she’d have greeted me so warmly otherwise, given my involvement with Will, of whom she disapproved. Right now she gave him a fleeting glance and said a cold hello. Will stood and extended his hand formally. “Have we met?” he asked, confused.

I stepped into the breach, introducing the two of them before Adele had a chance to elaborate. Better to have her confused than Will, who was my responsibility. I started to introduce her to Kepler but before I could proceed she said, “My dear man, you bear a striking resemblance to the famed astronomer.” Adele had been educated at the Sorbonne.

Kepler looked pleased. “My dear woman, there’s an explanation for that.”

Adele peered more closely at him, then at Will and me, and sighed. “I have strange news for Octavia, but I suspect I’m about to hear stranger news than I bring.” She sat in the last empty chair, a shaft of sunlight catching her profile and illumining her elegant wrinkles. Briefly, they made her look her age. I wondered again which option they had chosen: joint mortality, or going their separate ways. She took a few deep breaths, chin in upraised palm, and suddenly looked on the brink of tears.

“What’s wrong, dear?” I asked her. Octavia was staring at her.

“I have been visited by two … by two … Malefactors,” she blurted, her eyes wet. “Barely alive, they looked. Almost stick figures, dressed in black from head to toe, so emaciated it was like if you glanced at them from the wrong angle you couldn’t see them.

“They came in last night about ten p.m., sat down at the bar where I’d been having a nightcap with Tony, the night manager. They asked Tony to go in the room behind the bar and then spoke to me. They said there’d been a cataclysm in ‘mega-time’; I think that was their term for eternity. One of them called it ‘deep time.’ An earthquake. As a result, all of the time portals worldwide—which they depend on for survival much as whales rely on coming to the surface for air—were shut. They asked if I knew the location of any secret portals in Paris. They said they’d been told that there was one still open, known only to the fey. When I denied knowing of such a portal, which was the truth, they mentioned your name, Octavia, and said they knew I was the lover of a fey. They said they’d be keeping an eye on the hotel, and one out for you, though they didn’t seem to know where you live. I apologize for my incompetence in not letting you know sooner, but now that you and the others are here I have to warn you. From here on out, avoid the hotel and me. At least for the time being. Please! They had a brutal attitude about getting the information they wanted. And it seemed to me that if you don’t have it, they might not believe you, and could take extreme measures with you. As it was, only my sobs seemed to stop them from hitting me. An old woman like me!” She shuddered.

I thought to distract her. “What could an ‘earthquake in eternity’ be?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm, looking first to Kepler for an answer. I did not see anyone suspicious in the lobby outside the sitting room, at least that I could observe from my vantage point, but that didn’t mean that no one lurked about.

Neither Kepler nor anyone else answered me right away, and I thought of the sense of transmigration I’d experienced in the alley a few hours earlier. Could that have been the outer wave, the ripple, of some seismic time event? Or the equivalent of an aftershock? No one else had seemed to feel it, but no one else had been as close as I to the vanished portal at the time, either. Another reflection was on the physical resemblance between the entities Adele described and the thieves who had robbed my father’s gallery back in New York City in the fall of 2008. Was there a connection?

Kepler finally spoke. “Such an earthquake sounds reasonable or at least possible, when one considers that time is a physical dimension, like the other three we experience without any instrumentation. Not to mention the dozens more dimensions, or even the infinite number in parallel universes, that are speculated about nowadays.”

“Annick and Jules might know something on this topic,” Will observed.

They were still sleeping in one of the new rooms we’d taken upon returning to the hotel. “Can we summon them?”

“Who are they?” Octavia asked.

“
Chronologistes
from the institute,” I told her. “Yes, we should do that,” I agreed with Will.

“Perhaps you should all come to my apartment instead of staying at the hotel,” Octavia said. “By ones or pairs, so as not to attract too much attention. That includes you, Adele. After all, security has been compromised here in some way. But my apartment can be safely sealed off. We can await further developments there. From the little I’ve heard of them over the … years, Malefactors are not to be trifled with. Running around without their portals now, they must be crazed.”

20

Hieroglyphs of Shadows

I left Will and Kepler to the task of rousing Annick and Jules. I needed to take a stroll by myself, to think things through more. We decided to meet back in the lobby in forty-five minutes to carry out the move to Octavia’s. When I left the hotel, I had an urge also to spend a little time in the Jardin des Plantes. The day had turned hot, and all the cement and stone around me seemed like it could burst into flames at any moment. A thin haze of vehicle exhaust smeared the air. I walked briskly and reached the Jardin entrance at the corner of Rue Cuvier and Rue Linné in a little under a quarter hour.

I walked into the park, taking the tree-shadowed cement path on the right, seeking a favorite bench I had sat on during my visits to the Jardin during the weeks while I had waited for Will to show up in Paris. In fact, I had come here to meet a certain Monsieur Lutin, who lived under the labyrinth. I passed the entrance to the labyrinth now and looked up the hill to the cast-iron gazebo that crowned the top. I wondered if Monsieur Lutin was somewhere in the hedge maze that lined the paths up to the gazebo, but I kept walking, not feeling in the mood to talk to the gnomish little man. Fifty feet past that bench the path ended at a gardener’s shed, and this deterred pedestrian traffic that could disrupt my reveries and diminish my ability to feel sorry for myself in the beautiful shade. The bench was empty and I sat down, losing my gaze in a grove of young oak trees beyond the stone wall across from the bench. Their leaves were especially luxuriant in the afternoon sun, branches gleaming as if they stored warmth for the desolate winter ahead. The life these trees appeared to lead seemed simple—growing, greening, and shedding—while the gnarled shadows they spilled onto the path seemed complex by comparison, like hieroglyphs. I longed for the pristine life of a tree, no Malefactors, or demented alchemists, or vampires to contend with. It might be dull, but right now it seemed a lavish pleasure to sprawl in the sun all day.

I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a man striding down the path toward me. Purposefully, as if he was coming to meet me. I recognized Will and wondered how he had known where to find me. I had told no one where I was going. But as I puzzled over this, a new mystery opened up. The expression on the man’s face was not the look of puppylike devotion I had seen in young Will’s eyes. These eyes had seen centuries worth of pain. This was not young Will, but the four-hundred-year-old man I loved.

“Garet, is it truly you?” he whispered, holding out his arms to me.

I longed to embrace him, but I held myself back.

“I could ask you the same question. After all, there’s only one of me and at least two more of you roaming around Paris. And the last time I saw you, you weren’t able to walk in the sunlight. How are you doing it now?”

“Perhaps you can tell me. My daylight freedom started only a couple of days ago, and I don’t know why. I do stand as comfortably in sunlight right now as I once did only in utter darkness.” He stepped from the shadows where he stood into a particularly bright patch of sunlight, without flinching. Seeing him in the full sunlight filled my heart with love, but I still held back from going to him.

“Interesting,” I said a little coldly. “Your younger counterpart has been losing his tolerance for the sunlight since he was attacked by Marduk. Perhaps you are connected with him in some way.”

He laughed. “We are the same person. That was why I sent him to you…”

“Not the same person,” I snapped angrily. “How could you have thought I’d be satisfied with a facsimile? And how could you have left me if you really loved me?”

He gripped his hands together in front of him until his knuckles turned white. “It wasn’t because I didn’t love you. It was because I love you so much,” he exclaimed. “I’d realized how hopelessly inadequate I was to be your beloved. The crimes I had committed over the centuries, the … all my sordid and reckless history. My hope was that my younger, and shall I say purer, self could become a more worthy love for you. And by staying behind in 1602 I would have four centuries to relive, to be better, making up for or even preventing my worst moments. The Will I sent to you was not a facsimile, but my younger, better self.”

I snorted. “Younger, yes; better, hardly. He’s a silly, vain boy. Why, in his first day here he got himself lost, then kidnapped by Marduk. How could you have thought I’d prefer him to
you
? And how could you have cared so little about being with me that you would choose to be without me for four hundred years…”

My voice faltered as this realization hit me. The man who stood before me was not the four-hundred-year-old vampire I had fallen in love with last year in New York. He was over eight hundred years old. He had lived his long life over again and come through that second set of four hundred years—if the look on his face told me anything—apparently still in love with me.

“It is because I love you so much that I forced myself to spend the last four hundred years without you. I had to prove to myself—and to you—that I was worthy of your love. I have tried to make amends for my many crimes and to live a life that you would be proud of so that I could come to you cleansed. I set about sparing the lives that I had taken in my first life, and then I tried to save even more lives, culminating in the moral crusade I have taken my hedge fund on with its humane focus, unique in the financial world. I haven’t made things perfect, but I have improved them. The last four hundred years…”

“Have been a love letter,” I finished for him, remembering the phrase Horatio Durant had used. Then, unable to resist any longer, I stepped forward into his embrace. Instantly his arms were around me, the strong arms I remembered so well, and his lips were on mine. I remembered their curve and fullness, but now instead of being made of cold marble flesh they were warm. I gave myself to the kiss and felt transported. Transmigration of atoms was nothing next to the transmigration of love.

After a few minutes we returned to the bench and sat there together, holding hands. I was aware that time was passing, and that a deadline was approaching for the rendezvous at the hotel, but I didn’t care. There was a rightness to being with Will that transcended anything in this world, so I went with it. Still, as we sat there, even the trees seeming to grow closer together, a tricky question or two began to trouble me. “How did you know I was here?” I asked, leaning my head into his shoulder, taking his hand in mine and resting it in my lap.

“Here?”

“In the Jardin? On this bench. Just now.”

He smiled. “Lol,” he answered. “She came to me twice today, the first time to tell me that she had rescued you in the catacombs…”

“She saved us there.”

“Thank God. The second time, she told me where you were staying. I went to the hotel and watched from the café across the street. When I saw you leave I followed you. I thought I could watch you from afar … but I found that there was a limit to how long I could see you and not approach you.”

He squeezed my hand gently. The gesture was worth a thousand kisses. And after I squeezed his hand back, I kissed him. He returned the kiss so passionately he took my breath away, pressing his mouth against mine so hard I felt his teeth click against mine … He pulled away abruptly, his face white. My tongue had brushed against two sharp fangs.

“So you are still…”

“A monster,” he replied, an expression of self-loathing crossing his face. “After all I have done, I am still a vampire longing for blood. You are still not safe with me.”

“And am I safe without you? With Marduk and John Dee roaming the streets of Paris? With the Malefactors sabotaging the very fabric of time…”

“The Malefactors?” Will echoed. “What have they done?”

I explained what had happened to the Institut Chronologique. Will listened, his face turning pale. “Those bastards!” he swore.

“You know these creatures?”

“Over the centuries they have approached me a number of times to try to recruit me to their cause. At first I thought they were quite benign. They told me that what I was doing—living my lifetime over to try to rectify my past sins—was
exactly
the kind of time travel they espoused but were hampered in pursuing because of the unnecessarily strict regulations of the
chronologistes
. They tried to convince me that the
chronologistes
were my enemies because they would prohibit what I was trying to do. Over time, though, I came to realize that there was a reason for the
chronologistes’
strictures, and although I was still committed to my mission, I began to see the danger in it. For instance, now that my younger self inhabits the same time line as myself, I sense that there is a danger to the both of us…”