not a supernatural creature.
Caring for her—just being in the same room with the weight of her despair and exhaustion—was a crushing thing. When Mary, dressed now for skulking, slipped out of the dingy cellar room at sunset, leaving Ruth dozing fitfully in a salvaged infirmary cot, she felt relief. And guilt—but it was guilt at the relief, not at leaving. She’d become accustomed to being her own creature, to bearing no responsibilities except the ones she picked up willingly. To be responsible for the care of another galled a little.
But she had the necessary skills, and the superhuman abilities to keep safe a superhuman refugee.
We are ugly creatures, she thought, ascending the stairs in near-darkness, for Paris. There were other tenants in the flats she passed, but very few would poke their heads out of doors in such times. Some were her brothers and sisters in the Resistance, quietly keeping watch over her while she expedited Ruth on her way.
Others had merely learned under the occupation not to invite notice. Like mice when the hawk swings over, people were going to ground.
She paused in the small lavatory—it had no bath—to attend her makeup and her hair, which she kept in an Eton crop modeled on that made famous by another black American who had made Paris her home and the Resistance her calling. The mirror was of no use to her, but the bathroom had a small kerosene burner in the corner, and she used that to heat her comb. Over the years, she’d gotten adroit at attending her toilette by feel.
At the top of the attic stair, Mary picked the lock—a skill her old employer might be surprised to learn she had acquired. She had always been a slender—a skinny—woman, and it was but the work of a moment more to let herself out the window onto the steeply canted roof.
She lifted herself into the cold wind of the rising night, staying low so as not to silhouette herself against the clouds streaked with blood and amber in the west, the twilight sky that glowed a radiant periwinkle elsewhere. L’heure bleu, the French called it: when there was light, but no sun. Slates gritty and chill against her fingertips, Mary tasted the coming night on the air. In the street below, there were few pedestrians: only the eternal Prussian patrols, and even those seemed somehow tentative.
Paris was Mary’s city, as no other had ever truly been. She had lived in Philadelphia and New Amsterdam, but the City of Lights had been her home for nearly forty years—and those other places had belonged to someone else. Mary had only inhabited them. In Paris she had been able to submerge herself in the community she’d always craved—a curious culture of expatriates and wanderers who found in each other what they could not find at home.
Paris was hers, and she would fight for it.
As much as anything in her city, Mary loved its Mansard rooftops. The greatest gift of her nascent immortality was the strength and agility that let her treat those roofs as a highway, that let her go skimming across their slates and shingles alongside the city’s axiomatic clowders of cats.
She watched the light fade out of the sky. When it was safely dark—or a little before—she rose to her feet and ran. The night smelled of frying onions, of wood smoke, of the exhaust of cars, of the wind that swept over everything, that bound it together and pulled it apart.
Mary smiled as she leaped fearlessly among the chimneys.
This was freedom.
This was worth anything.
It was over too soon. She could have run all night, and sometimes she did. But someone was waiting for her, and so she flitted south along the Rue Saint-Denis. The trees were hazed with tiny leaves and blossoms as if in defiance of the cold, though it was too early for the heavy scent of the famous chestnuts.
Here, there was foot traffic. The street below had been famed since medieval times as a haven for the sex trade, and no mere crumbling Prussian occupation could keep the force of nature that was a Parisian whore indoors. Their catcalls and solicitations floated up to Mary, who paused a moment to wish them well. She had nothing but respect for them, the demimondaines making their way in the world in defiance of its expectations. Many, like Mary, were women from other places who had come to Paris for a better life; some were Parisiennes born and bred,