The Book of Blood and Shadow (22 page)

“You want company?” Adriane asked.

I did not.

I liked the airport; I liked being alone in the airport, anonymous in an anonymous crowd. I liked that it was, at its core,
nothing more than a holding area, a No-Place that wasn’t a place at all so much as it was a gateway to Not-Here. If you stripped away all the superfluous regional talismans, the Red Sox banners and chowder shacks, it could have been any airport, with the same cell-phone and bank ads lining the walls, the same overpriced convenience stores and salmonella-infested sandwich stands, the same signs detailing what should be done with your explosives, your firearms, and your shampoo bottles, the same plastic chairs, the same blinking monitors, the same desks where, with the right plastic card, you could buy yourself escape. Standing before the ticket desk, I felt like I had when I’d first gotten my driver’s license: suddenly, ridiculously free. Untethered. I could forget Paris, forget Max and our shared insanity, even forget Chris; I could, with my emergency credit card, buy a ticket to Peoria or Topeka, somewhere no one would ever find me. I wondered if it would help—if being as alone on the outside as I was on the inside would somehow equalize the pressure, keep me from exploding.

I got an extra water for Adriane—sparkling, the way she liked it—along with two bags of peanut butter cups and a canister of Pringles that would get us through the flight.

I wasn’t going to Topeka.

But it was nice to pretend.

2

When I got back to the gate, the flight was about to board, and Adriane was gone.

I suppressed my panic reflex. This was an airport: If she’d gone catatonic again, if the men with knives had come for her, if she’d been carried away by a boy with yellow roses in one hand and a psychogenic toxin in the other, someone would have
noticed. So before alerting Homeland Security, I checked the bathroom.

I’d never heard her cry before, but it couldn’t have been anyone else. The sobs coming from the stall were as ugly as her laughter, the only ungainly thing about her. The woman washing her hands, the woman changing her baby, the woman dragging her toddler into the opposite stall, they all pretended not to hear.

So did I.

Adriane wouldn’t want me to see. That’s what I told myself. Adriane would be desperate to avoid the messy, public cliché of ladies’ room regret and recrimination, so I backed out and waited for her at the gate, and when she appeared, red-eyed and full of unconvincing complaints about sordid conditions and empty soap dispensers, I went along with it and asked no questions and told myself I was doing her a favor.

3

“You sure you want to leave all this?” Adriane asked, elbows propped on a gargoyle, gaze sweeping across the panorama spread out beneath us. Paris was a postcard, the Seine sluicing through the jumble of pillars and spires that stretched to the horizon, its water the same slate gray as the sky. The Eiffel Tower poked the clouds, dwarfing the dull rectangular office buildings lined up like dominos in the distance. Two hundred feet below us swarmed a mass of photo-snapping tourists, French schoolchildren, and grungy backpackers, all too intent on texting, posing, gelato licking, and avoiding the panhandling troupe of mandolin strummers to bother with the monster that loomed overhead, at least until the bells chimed, reminding the crowd—and the city—that they stood in the shadow of Notre Dame.

“I told you, you don’t have to come. I can do this myself.”

She snorted. “That I’d like to see.”

“Right, because you’re the capable, intrepid adventurer. Remind me again, which one of us was hyperventilating on the plane?”

“It’s natural to be agitated when you’re about to plummet forty thousand feet to the ground. It’s inhuman to be sitting there totally calm while pieces are falling off the plane.”

“Nothing fell off the plane.”

“I know what I saw,” she insisted. “And how do you explain all the bumping and shaking? The so-called turbulence?”

“Um, how about turbulence?”

Adriane, who’d perked up as soon as she heard my Prague plan, had spent the bulk of the flight reciting pertinent statistics on meteorites, errant planes, birds with a death wish, anything that might tear through the thin membrane separating us from a wide array—falling, freezing, oxygen deprivation, drowning, crashing, burning—of deaths. Not the first time I’d resented her nearly photographic memory, but fortunately I’d grown expert at tuning her out. I’d been on a plane only twice before, and both times I’d made full use of the barf bags helpfully tucked into the seat back, but this flight was different. We were sealed into a metal can, hurtling forty thousand feet over the ocean, which meant no one could climb through my window, no one could ease open the front door with a stolen key, no one could hover over my sleeping figure with a pillow or a gun or a knife. Yet when I closed my eyes, I still saw Chris; I still saw his blood. So I didn’t sleep.

But for the duration of the flight, for the first time, I felt safe.

“You’ll believe anything,” Adriane said. “That’s why you need me along. Someone’s got to bring a healthy sense of paranoia to the situation.”

“Adriane, this is no joke. I swear, you don’t owe me—”

“I’m not laughing.” She lowered her voice and leaned over
the edge of the railing. Doing my best to ignore the vertiginous drop, I bent toward her. “And I’m not doing this for you,” she said quietly. “Or for Max.”

She stopped there.

We’d spent a bleary-eyed morning traipsing after our chaperones from one touristic hot spot to the next, and after Notre Dame would have to endure the Pantheon, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Sorbonne before we would be set free for three hours of exploring the Louvre. That was a wide enough window to make it to the train station and hop the 17:40 train to Prague before anyone noticed we were gone. The suitcases had been sent on ahead of us to the hotel, awaiting our check-in, but we had enough clothes and cash in our carry-ons to get us through the next couple days. I’d say it was almost too easy, but I knew better. There was no such thing.

4

The Louvre was practically a city unto itself. Thirty-five thousand works of art, according to the soporific tour guide, the best and brightest of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman civilizations, not to mention seven centuries of European oil painting, all crammed into fourteen acres of gilded hallway. The café served wine—even to overeager, underage Americans—so, unsurprisingly, the horde went one way. We went the other. In search of something called
Fragments of an Equestrian Statue of Nero
, I told Kyle Chen, the youngest and most apathetic of the chaperones, and because he’d been a Chapman Prep senior recently enough to know me by my Latin-nerd reputation, he waved us off, barely looking at me but sparing poor, soon-to-be-bored-to-death Adriane a glance that shifted from sympathy to appreciation as it descended her body. In fact, it was Adriane who, back
before our Paris sojourn had morphed from
Amélie
into
Mission Impossible
, had committed the Louvre’s index of unmissable works to memory, mapping out the geometrically optimal route between them—the better to force-feed me the wonders of the civilized world and still finish up in time for chardonnay o’clock.

Now she was in charge of our escape route. It was only a matter of heading into the Denon Wing and waiting out the minutes beneath the impassive gaze of crumbling marble gods before we could risk returning to the central atrium and ascending the escalator that would return us to ground level.

“Someone’s watching us,” Adriane whispered as we emerged from the giant glass pyramid that marked the entrance to the museum.

“Where?”

“He’s just getting off the escalator—our age, gray sweatshirt, black hair. Look.”

But when I turned around, ever so casually, there was no one who fit the description, and no one in the horde of tourists who seemed to care about our existence one way or another. They were too busy snapping photos of the glass pyramid and the majesty that surrounded us—to one side, manicured gardens with sculpted hedges watching over drizzling fountains, and to the other, the Louvre itself, once home to centuries of French kings, its baroque pediments now topped by statues of all the dead white men who had tamed civilization on behalf of the French. The austere glass triangle looked like it had been dropped in from outer space, though it was no less out of place than all the digital cameras and miniskirts. I imagined Louis XIV would be less than pleased.

“He’s gone,” Adriane said.

“Someone from school?”

She shook her head. “Just a guy. But he was definitely staring at us.”

“Staring at you, probably,” I said. That, as it turned out, was as Parisian as the Eiffel Tower. Even I’d been hit on twice since we arrived, which would have been noteworthy even if it hadn’t been nearly two days since I’d showered or changed my clothes. “Either way, let’s get out of here.”

Adriane successfully navigated the metro and got us to the Gare du Nord without incident, where I broke out my newly memorized sentence, “
Je voudrais acheter deux billets à Prague, s’il vous plaît
.” It got me two tickets and a sour
your accent sucks
look from the narrow, mustachioed man behind the counter.

The Gare du Nord, like pretty much everything in Paris, looked like a palace. At least from the outside. Inside, it felt more like a cavernous shipping warehouse—by way of a Gothic cathedral. Three of the walls climbed up and up forever, while the fourth was missing, leaving in its stead a gaping maw through which the trains could come and go, along with the sun.

“We’re actually doing this,” Adriane said, watching the trains chug away for parts unknown.

“We’re actually doing it.”

Her eyes popped. She grabbed my arm, and spoke without moving her lips. “He’s here.”

“Who?”

“The guy from the museum. He followed us.”

“Where?”

She dragged me toward a bathroom alcove. Safely hidden, we peeked around the corner. “He was standing by the café,” she said. “Watching us.”

“I don’t see him.”

“I don’t see him now, either,” she said. “But he was there.”

“Are you sure—”

“I’m not imagining this,” she said fiercely. “I’m not crazy.”

“If you say someone’s following us, I believe you,” I said. Much as I preferred not to. “Let’s just go to the gate. Fast.”

The station was teeming with people: sturdy men gripping chic briefcases, businesswomen in impossibly high heels, tourists of every creed, color, and camera model, and a few ragged clumps of children in oversized, mismatched clothing, who Adriane informed me were the gypsy pickpockets our chaperones had warned us about. (They’d made sure to add that
gypsy
was an out-of-date, politically incorrect term referring to a group of people most of whom were perfectly upstanding, law-abiding, oppressed citizens … but that nonetheless, we should guard our wallets and beware of children.) We were both rather proud of ourselves for picking our way through the noisy chaos and finding our way to the right platform with a minimum of confusion or disaster … until the right platform revealed itself to be deserted and the departure board suddenly informed us that it was awaiting a train to Nice three hours hence. The train to Prague was no longer listed at all. Despite the fact that it was due to leave in the next fifteen minutes.

“There will be an announcement,” Adriane said, with a level of confidence she only mustered when she suspected we were screwed.

There was an announcement. In French. At least I assumed it was in French—given the static that garbled every syllable, it could have been in Nepali for all I knew. It could have been in English. It could not have been less helpful.

“Pardon, Monsieur,”
I said to the first official-looking person we could find.

“Nous avons un question,”
Adriane said, in the slow, laborious French that had gotten her kicked out of her AP class the third
week of school. Just our luck that foreign languages were her Achilles’ heel—while mine, on the other hand, was the obscure desire to learn a foreign language that would come in handy only if we built ourselves a time machine.

“Pardon?”
the man said.

She enunciated.
“Un question.”

He shook his head.

“Parlez-vous anglais?”
I asked, the other French phrase I’d made sure to memorize.

He shook his head again.
“Pardon?”
And then he said something else really fast that I gathered meant we were out of luck.

“Prague,” Adriane said, too loud.

The man started speaking again, even faster this time, gesticulating wildly, jabbing his finger first at his SNCF uniform, then at the ceiling, then at us, and all the while, the seconds ticked away, and if we missed this train we’d be trapped in Paris till morning. “What the hell is he saying?” Adriane murmured.

“He’s saying that he hates it when rude American girls act like he has any interest whatsoever in their transportation issues, and that the SNCF doesn’t pay him to deal with backpacking Eurail trash,” said a voice from behind us.

Adriane turned, and the color leached out of her face. “It’s him.”

The guy standing behind us, smug smile on his smug face, did indeed have a gray sweatshirt and black hair. I wished I hadn’t been so quick to dismiss my mother’s contribution to the packing list. She’d been right: You never knew when travel-sized Mace could come in handy. “You.”

“Me,” Eli said. “And I see, as per usual, the fact that it’s me and not a crazed serial killer does nothing but disappoint.”

5

“You
know
this guy?” Adriane said.

“Remember Chris’s cousin I told you about?”

She made a face like I’d asked her to taste-test some sour milk. “You said he was cute.”

Eli preened.

“No, you asked if he was cute,” I reminded her. “I said that wasn’t the point.”

“Not a no,” Eli pointed out.