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CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

JOE CUTS A SWATH

T he distance from Joe to Percy was only a few city blocks. But Montmartre is a strange and terrifying place at night when it’s deserted and you’re being hunted by pale crawlers. Every lane and byway is a hiding place. Dumpsters and cafe tables leer out of the darkness with equal menace, and it doesn’t matter how many gorgeous twinkling lights sparkle overhead or how romantic such a quiet stroll would ordinarily be; every touch of Joe’s shoes to the cobblestones echoed back a thousand noises that weren’t really there and augmented those that were terribly.

The growling had never stopped. Not really. There was a pause here and there, the direction it came from changed frequently, but it was always somewhere close by. It was as if the creatures were watching him all the while, and Joe felt the constant prickle of hunters’ eyes trained on his back.

He wondered why they hadn’t attacked again. Maybe they’d learned something about the gun Giordano had. But though they gathered around, more and more, until the soundtrack of his walk was a low and ravenous hum, they seemed to be following.

Joe worried over what Molly had done to the people that still lined the streets outside Percy’s apartment. He’d taken several pulses as he went by. They slept. Or seemed to be asleep. They lay there warm and unconscious, all except the woman whose body was still crumpled in a heap on the ground, her throat gashed, her blood drunk. He wanted to return to her corpse. What if one of the sleeping children was hers? What if they awoke to find her like that?

He slowed, looking back down the long street. An echoing snarl curled around the buildings, as if in warning. Keep moving .

If he turned back now, would they follow him still? Would they start picking over the bodies he led them to? Eating people while they were unconscious, unable to even try to defend themselves?

That consideration, coupled with his restless desperation to find Percy, propelled him onward.

The timing of the murder hadn’t escaped Joe—that Molly had performed the horrifying act seconds before the attack, which, he imagined, must have taken enormous power to perform. That thought, coupled with what he knew about Althea’s abduction—that she too had been drained of blood regularly—ticked over in the back of his mind as he walked.

It looked exactly like blood magic. Like she needed that blood to access her powers to their full extent.

He hadn’t seen another animated soul all the unnerving walk to the cemetery. Nothing human at least; just the occasional flash of that insipid skin. He wondered how far the sleeping sickness spread. Was all of Paris asleep like this? Could Molly do that?

And how were Leo and Althea to get to the sheath without a train to catch? How were they to drive through the city streets when they were packed with stopped cars and bodies?

They would just have to find a way.

He had qualms about giving Molly the sheath, of course he did. But it wasn’t something he had to think twice about. She didn’t have the Spear of Destiny—the lance that would make the sheath magical once they were reunited—if the rumours were even true. That was still at Percy’s place, overseas, back where their journey together began. Without the spear, the sheath was all but useless. She didn’t have anything but Percy. And if Joe could only get him back, he would give her whatever she asked for, just as obligingly as he could.

Until he could get a clean shot.

And that was entirely too bad for Cleo. And for Percy. Because if he got that one shot, he was going to take it.

Joe thought over how close Percy had come to throwing his dagger earlier, though he didn’t think for a second it would have been a head shot. Or a heart shot. Not by Percy’s hand.

How he wished it had been. That this whole nightmare was over before it ever began. Another bullet for each of her zombie off-siders, and then some celebratory champagne.

But no. It was cruel to think that way. Percy had grieved his friendship with Cleo for so long now. Joe saw it in the hotel room the night she tried to seduce him—the shock and hidden worry at the change in her. He saw it in her house, the tense regret as Percy walked around, taking in the remnants of their long history together. The way Percy had been so sure, when they did the séance, that Cleo couldn’t have been at fault for any of it. And he’d been right.

He’d played it off in front of Joe as though he had the lot under control. As though it wasn’t eating away at him. But every night since they found her skull, Percy had sat her down to dinner with them. He was always talking to her, took her everywhere decent he could. He cared for her in the quiet way he always did with those close to him. All the unspoken kindnesses that had made Joe fall so deeply in love with him.

And Joe had developed some kind of fondness for Cleo, whoever or whatever she now was, though he wasn’t anywhere close to seeing the soul in that skull as the woman who owned her body. That woman he could have killed easily, despite the state it would leave Percy in. Because Joe had seen first hand, more than once, that Percy’s one and only weakness was the people he loved. And what would he let the possessor of the vessel of such an old friend as Cleo get away with in the hopes of reuniting her with her body? Freeing her from the madness of being trapped inside that skull?

He would put himself on the line like he always did. Joe knew it. And it was a risk Joe couldn’t bring himself to take anymore.

Perhaps Joe would destroy the skull. Kill Cleo’s body first, then smash Molly’s skull to pieces. That would send her off to Heaven or Hell or wherever she was destined to be, wouldn’t it? She’d be out. And Percy would be free. Free and safe and back in his arms. And then they would retire from all this. Whatever this life was that they were suddenly leading. Because for all the talk of being in the eye of the storm, that only held when he was by Percy’s side. When it was the two of them to face it together. He’d have died so happily that way. But not like this. Not torn from Percy.

And where the fuck was Percy? Was he even alive anymore? Was Joe simply marching to his own death, perfectly, horrifyingly ignorant of the fact that he was already half in the grave? Because there was no life without Percy. There was nothing to return to, or to go on for.

A bridge, supported by a thick, blue, and ornate iron frame, stretched out ahead. On either side of it, a near-opaque darkness spread and spread wider again, nothing but void beneath. Off to his right, stairs dropped down to the entrance of the burial ground. Joe stood at the top, surveying the scene. The gate below was high and flanked by green metal spikes, adjoining a long and unceasing stone wall that circled the area. Keeping the living out, and thankfully, hopefully, keeping the undead in. At least until someone came to open those gates tomorrow morning. Assuming the people of the city ever woke again. But for now, how was he to get in?

A small “Mew” broke the taut silence. Moxie tilted forward, pressed her paws to Joe’s chest, and before he could catch her, she sprang to the ground. She bolted a few feet ahead, and from the street, jumped onto the iron fence of the bridge.

“Moxie! Wait!” Joe hissed just as loud as he dared. He ran the few paces to her, but she was gone, over the edge of the bridge into the black below. Joe approached, taking in the sight. One stone grave after another, row upon row upon row, all pillars and sharp angles, and piled up all around, like the aftermath of a game of Jenga. But only the tips of that mishmash of stone memorials were visible. A fog rolled through the valley of the cemetery, set low beneath the streets. It was edged with trees that were black and formless patches of obscurity in that gothic and forbidding resting place.

He knew the only way in was to follow Percy’s kitten. To take the same leap straight over the edge of the bridge into the dark, and hope nothing reached out for him when his feet hit the ground.

He readied his knife, climbed over the guardrail, and without even the thought of saying a final prayer, he slipped into black.

Joe’s feet hit solid concrete, which, despite the pain it occasioned in his legs and back, was a welcome surprise. The rolling fog, a sickly yellow, was so dense, he could only see a few feet ahead. Of that, there was little more than the suggestion of leaves, the silvery arms of grasping trees, and looming high above him, shadowy, sharply lined monuments of the long deceased.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the sinister darkness beneath the bridge. More graves, skulls and faces chipped into their dimly glinting granite surfaces, seemed to study him, this creature of the living, stepping uninvited into a metropolis of the dead.

Joe knelt down, and with a soft click of his fingers, whispered, “Moxie.”

Not a peep of sound met his call.

He tried once more, and with a new, curling sickness in his stomach at the thought of losing Percy’s kitten, had to remind himself that it was not really a cat, but a thing of evil that had decided to befriend them.

The path forked forward and left, and Joe, with little guidance but his faith that he would somehow find Percy, walked straight ahead into the blanketing fog.