Jack stepped before him before his hand settled on the knob, though. Under warmer circumstances, Sebastien suspected Jack might have justified the gesture by handing him an umbrella. Instead, the young man stared him in the eye and then grabbed his shoulders and kissed him before allowing him to pass.
Sebastien said nothing, but his lips burned with Jack's transferred warmth as he shut the door behind himself and turned to face the stair.
Neither Phoebe nor Abby Irene came out to bid him farewell. He hoped they were dressing for dinner: the short days of winter gave him more latitude, and meant as well that his warm and breathing friends carried out far more of their own lives after dark. He understood that Jack was taking the women someplace fabulously well-regarded for supper, a trip predicated upon an equally extravagant expenditure and the opportunity to see and be seen. Sebastien might have felt a moment's jealousy, but he schooled himself with a reminder: if he were the sort of person who could still enjoy an elaborate supper, he would have been dust a millennium since, long before he had any chance to see Paris lit up like an electrical jewel. . .or, in all honesty, to travel far beyond his childhood village.
He might be a dead man. He might sometimes find himself grown very tired. Every year, there was more to mourn. But he could not find it in himself to regret the circumstances of his death, no matter how unusual.
No one paid him untoward attention as he crossed the lobby or stepped into the street. He looked respectable, and though cabbies hailed him from the curb as he passed he dismissed them with a flat, hip-high gesture of his hand. He would walk.
A cab ride meant someone who knew his destination. And it wasn't a very great distance.
The dead, for all their frailties, did not suffer bodily fatigue.
The night, if anything, was colder than the night before. A mortal man might have been quite grateful for the scarf wrapped across his face and tucked into the vee of his heavy wool caped coat. A mortal man might have shivered despite it.
Like London, like Mayrit, Paris was older than Sebastien. He found its permanence comforting, the winding streets unchanged since medieval days. The city plan was almost entirely unmodernized, which made the occasional entrances to its new Metro and the regular metal posts of the electrical lights seem as if they had been transplanted from another time and place.
In truth, la Ville-lumière had earned her name by being the first in Europe to install gaslamps, and now less than a hundred years later, she was the first in the world with the new broadcast power, the invention of a scientist and theurgist who had come to her as a refugee from Russia's ambitions of empire.
So it was untrue what some said, that Paris was eternal. She had changed in a few hundred years, changed a great deal—trains under the streets and glowing lights upon them—but her plan, that remained as it had always been, the old buildings leaning shoulder to shoulder, nearly closing over the narrow streets. And so Sebastien knew where he was going, and knew as well that although they were peculiarly deserted, the ancient city's byways would take him there.
He did not feel competent to risk the Metro.
It was not long at all before he felt, again, the same sense of being observed. There were no street-level shop windows along his route tonight, no convenient reflective surfaces in which to survey the pursuit. He lost discipline enough to turn once, suddenly, in the hopes of catching a glimpse of whatever trailed him, but managed not even so much as a flash of movement—although he could cozen himself all night with the possibility that he had seen something.
There were too few people on the streets to conceal a pursuer, though he did notice that everyone who walked walked warily—heads up and arms swinging with purpose.
Disturbed air stroked the fine hairs of his nape, above the scarf. But there was no sound, no scent, no sense of movement. And certainly, there was nothing to see. Still, one of the blood knew when he was followed.
He had allowed extra time, and with it he forged a random path that crossed and recrossed itself. He finally found a neighborhood that was better-populated, the streets filled with streams of tradesmen and secretaries and office workers returning home at day's end. He