"Sorry," I said.
"That too." She glanced at me, light dancing in her eyes. "I'm a big girl, Michael. I'm not a glass figurine." The light changed and she took her foot off the brake. "I'm going to need your strength. Not your sympathy."
"Okay." I swallowed heavily, pushing down the weight of the-call it what it is-the guilt. The Chorus took the weight in, swallowing it as easily as they swallowed the dreams and fears of other souls. "Did you know," I said, changing the subject, "David's body isn't buried in Pere Lachaise?"
"I know," she said. Glancing over her shoulder, she changed lanes. I shifted my gaze to the steering wheel, but not before she caught me looking at her throat. "He was declared a revolutionary after his death. He wasn't allowed back in France."
The car slowed and she turned a corner, slipping off the main road onto one of the tiny side streets of Paris. In the smart car, the road seemed wide enough, but with the two rows of parked cars it would have been a tight fit for any American-sized car. I was always amazed at how much denser the cities were in Europe, especially after spending a few months in Seattle. It was a constant topic of conversation in that city about the tight navigation of the hilly streets, but they were wide open compared to Parisian streets.
"There's a regulation actually," Marielle continued, "concerning the distribution of body parts in Pere Lachaise. Since David's heart is buried there, they had to remove the heart of another person."
"Seriously?"
"Chopin's. His heart is buried in a church in Poland."
"But his body is here? Because David's isn't?"
She laughed at my expression, and after a moment, I joined her. "I can't believe I fell for that." The laugh knocked something loose in me. Like ice falling off a roof in early spring. A thaw coming to the old, cold country.
"It's true," she said. "About Chopin."
"But there isn't a law."
"No," she admitted. "But some say the heart is the seat of the soul, and that the rest of the flesh is just raw meat." There was still a mischievous note in her voice, but the Chorus felt an echo beneath it, a sub-harmonic tone that reminded me of the psychic pulse she had manifested earlier.
The Chorus resurrected a memory of the painting in the narrow hall at the Chapel of Glass, the watercolor study of Christ and the flaming heart. The gift to Mary.
"Do they?" I said cautiously. "Well, they say a lot of things. In fact, they are always talking. Mostly gossip and innuendo, really."
"Is that so?"
"Absolutely. You can't trust them. Nothing but conjecture and speculation. Internet forum talk. All baseless."
"Really? What if they said you and I were sleeping together?"
"That was a long time ago, and no one knew."
She looked at me.
"Okay, Antoine knew. But he's not the gossipy type."
She turned the wheel and the tiny car slid through a gap between two parked cars. A narrow gate blocked our path, and with a mental command much like the opening spell she had used on the train, she exerted her Will on the barrier. It responded, rolling back on tiny wheels, and she eased the tiny car through the portal into the inner courtyard of the building. There were several other cars parked in the octagonal courtyard and she backed into an open space. The front pointed toward the gate. Quick escape, if we needed it.
Switching off the engine, she leaned toward me as she opened her door. Her eyes were dark pools, and the Chorus pulsated in time with her heartbeat. "It wasn't that long ago," she said quietly.
She led me up a flight of stairs to a tiny second-floor apartment. The living room looked out over the courtyard, and judging by the lack of a television and how empty the pair of bookcases were, as well as the position of the only comfortable chair in the room, watching the neighbors was the primary source of entertainment. A stub of a hallway led to a bathroom and a single bedroom. Around the corner from the door was a tiny nook and kitchen.
Marielle filled a teapot from the tap and put it on the stove. "There should be fresh clothes in the wardrobe," she said. "You can take a shower too, if you'd like."
I nodded. "Where are we?"
"Somewhere safe. A friend's." She nodded toward the picture window. "The others are across the courtyard. We'll join them when you're ready."
"The others?"
"Loyalists. People who we can trust."
I wandered over to the window and lifted the edge of the curtain. The window of the second-floor apartment across the way was lit, though the curtains were drawn. "How many?" I asked.
"Eight."
"That's all?"
"Here, yes. Things have gotten bad, and we don't know who we can trust. We can't afford to meet openly." She opened the cupboard and took down two plastic mugs with lids.
"How bad?" I asked.
"We're not sure. It has been difficult to get accurate information. Some of the rank have just gone into hiding-we hope-and they're waiting out this whole affair. The rest-" She didn't finish, and she didn't need to. The rest were ending up like Father Cristobel.
"What are they doing?" I nodded toward the other apartment
Marielle snorted. "Talking, mostly."
I let the curtain drop. "I guess I'll go get cleaned up."
She nodded distractedly, busy spooning loose tea into each of the two mugs.
I didn't think much about the war council going on in the other apartment while I showered. Instead, my mind kept wandering back to what she had said just before getting out of the car.
It hadn't been that long, nor had there been any sort of serious relationship in between. Granted, what Marielle and I had shared during my time in Paris couldn't be considered serious, as the specter of whether or not she was still dating Antoine hovered over us. She had said it was over, but I had always suspected she had neglected to tell Antoine that fact. Or, if she had, neither of them had really believed their separation was permanent. I wasn't Rebound Guy, more the Transient Mysterious Stranger. Not the healthiest of relationships, but compared to the others I'd had, it was pretty cut-and-dried. We liked each other-a lot-and knowing that circumstances were going to doom us at some point, we simply lived in the moment. The arrangement worked until the duel on New Year's Day.
The Chorus had been obsessed with Katarina, and so I had never been fully able to commit my heart to Marielle, and she had a connection to Antoine that remained steadfast throughout our relationship. We were both bound to others, but that hadn't diminished the intensity of our attraction to each other. You can love more than one person-the human heart has such capacity-but you will never be completely resolute in your attention. There will always be the distraction of that other person in your mind.
Even with Reija-and Rose, too-there had been the ghost of Katarina. But now that the Qliphotic shadow was gone, I was no longer as divided as I had been. I could give my full attention to Marielle.
There was only one annoying detaiclass="underline" the spirit of her father floating in my head. Kind of a mood killer. Unless I could figure a way to lock him out.
I gave that some thought while I stood in the shower. It kept me from thinking of other things. Like the slope of her neck, and the way a pearl kept nestling in the hollow of her throat. Like a soap bubble, a tiny moment of time caught in a sphere of magick.
On the morning of the new year, the city slept, exhausted from the midnight revelry of the new aeon. We had survived the millennial change, regardless of how you counted the first year of the next century, and the parties had been flush with the release of all the pent-up panic and apprehension that had unconsciously filled our hearts during the last years of the old world. It was a new world-this shiny twenty-first century, this third millennium-and while everyone slept off the hangover of the old, the new was still too young to be fully aware. We were outside of time for a few hours, between midnight and daybreak, where nothing mattered. Where nothing was true but the breathless promises exchanged during the ebb and flow of our rhythm. For a few hours, wrapped in the midnight cloak of cosmological renewal, we could pretend the past and the future weren't connected. We could close our eyes and forget our fears, thinking such elective blindness did, indeed, wash away the stains of our history. We could forget our petty jealousies and febrile paranoia. For a few hours.