Page 54 of The Uninvited
“Agreed.”
She stopped. “Crossroads.” I lit a match and watched without really seeing as she inspected the street names. A smile spread over her face. “The access hatch is just a few meters down that tunnel.”
The hatch opened into an underground parking garage, still and dark except for the pale glow of exit signs. I was so grateful to see any light at all after days in the dark that I started to cry. Tears glistened on Noor’s face, too. I turned on my phone and texted Madame Dupuy: “The cures worked.” She called me immediately, the ringtone sounding like a calamity after all the time we’d spent in the silent dark.
I put her on speaker. “Where are you?” she said.
“Can I trust you?” I countered. She didn’t say anything. “Not to kill me?” I clarified.
“They really worked—the cures?”
“Yes.”
She inhaled shakily. “Yes, Mademoiselle Tosh, you can trust me.”
I looked at Noor, splotched with dried blood and limestone dust. She hesitated, then nodded. Madame Dupuy arrived half an hour later with clothes for us, wipes to clean up with, and cheese, bread, and bottled water. We tore into the food immediately and slurped the water greedily. Afterwe’d eaten every last crumb and finished off a bottle of Vittel each, we cleaned up and changed. When Noor took off her blood-caked headscarf, Madame Dupuy unlooped the scarf from around her neck—because of course she accessorized to come pick up a couple of runaway vampire killers—and gave it to Noor to cover her head. Then she made sure we looked normal, bundled our filthy clothes into a shopping bag, and took us to her apartment, where she put the clothes into her washer. Just like this was a normal housekeeper task: clean up runaway vampire killers, destroy evidence.
“Bon,” she said. “Would you like some tea?”
Noor and I looked at each other. “Yes?” I said. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove. “What are we going to do?” I asked.
“You are going to sit down in the living room.” She measured tea into an infuser. “We will have tea, and we will talk.” Noor gave me anIs this for real?look. I shrugged, baffled by Madame Dupuy’s matter-of-fact calm. She made a shooing motion at us, and we dutifully went and sat down. I should have been thinking about what we would say, but my brain just wouldn’t engage. And then, she was setting a silver tray down in front of us with an old-school silver teapot and sugar bowl with little silver tongs. I remembered how she’d put my shoes in the fridge the night I’d gone dancing with Nick so she’d know that I had kept my curfew, and I tipped an imaginary hat at her cleverness. Silver burns vampires. When she poured the tea for us, I held her eyes as I used the tongs to add a lump of sugar to my cup. Noor put two lumps in hers, stirred, took a polite sip, and then attacked the plate of Petit Écolier cookies. I didn’t even bother with the polite sip. I wasfamished, and the cookies were delicious. Madame Dupuy nodded to herself and started asking questions. Technical questions. Where had we found stakes? She thought using the candleholders had been clever and resourceful. What did we do with the body? She was pleased when Noor told her I’d pinned it to the bottom of the grave with a stake. “That is what a true vampire killer would do,” she said, and I felt a tiny spark of pride. Then she asked about the cures. She was impressed that we’d figured out how to burn his heart. “I always imagined that it would be so difficult,” she said. We assured her it had been. She wanted to know how we’d known we were cured. We explained how our senses had faded from predator back to normal.
“It was like when you go to see a film,” Noor explained, “and the lights in the theater fade to darkness.”
“And you were not afraid when this happened?”
“Terrified,” I said. “I thought we’d die down there like Philibert Aspairt. But Noor navigated us through the darkness with no maps. She was amazing.”
When we’d answered all Madame Dupuy’s questions, I had one. “Do you think we’re still vampires?”
She shook her head. “That is why I brought food when I came to get you. If you had not wanted to eat it, then I would have suspected.” I thought about asking if she’d also taken stakes with her, just in case, but of course she had. I would’ve. “And of course when you touched the silver tongs and were not burned, I knew. So what do you want to happen now?”
I put my head in my hands. “I want all this to go away.”
“I want to go home,” Noor added. I nodded. I’d run away because I was angry and scared and literally not myself, butcuring my vampirism had scrubbed that away. The anger atDad about moving back to Portland had been replaced by—well, I was still angry. But the overwhelming rage was gone. I’d thought a lot about him while we were in the catacombs. For one thing, he’d taught me the skills I used down there. Like how to make a fire. How not to panic when you’re lost. He’d taught me self-reliance. And I could see why he’d want to protect me. He’d been scared, too. When you’re scared, you don’t think.
Madame Dupuy pursed her lips, considering. “I think that is possible.”
I shook my head. “Maybe for Noor, but I attacked someone when I was with Nick, and I think maybe I…killed him.”
She shook her head. “He is alive.” I wanted to weep with relief. “After you ran, Monsieur Nick stayed. He called an ambulance and did first aid until it arrived, even though he himself was in shock. When the police questioned him, he did not tell them about you. They think it was another Paris vampire attack that he fortunately stopped. You made him responsible for the terrible thing you did, Mademoiselle Tosh. You owe him much.”
I texted Nick immediately, apologizing for what I’d done, for leaving him to deal with it, and for not responding to his earlier texts. “I want you to know that I’m not like Le Bec anymore.” I didn’t want to say “vampire” over text. “Noor and I cured ourselves.” He returned a one-word reply that tore a hole in my heart. “Ok.” As I wondered if I could ever explain to him what it had been like to be in my body, battling my worst urges, and losing in such a terrible way, another textfrom him pinged: “Where are you?” I texted back that I was safe and waited for his reply, but none came.
We told Madame Dupuy how we’d gradually realized that we were vampires. “The mirror test is useless,” Noor said.
“Just like the invitation thing,” I chimed in. “I never invited Le Bec in anywhere. In fact, I kept trying to push him away because he made me uncomfortable. I don’t want to be negative, but—does your family really know all that much about vampires?”
“I assure you, they know how to kill them,” she said grimly. “But for the other things…there is no real science of the vampire. There is only what people say. ‘Do not invite them in.’ ‘They do not have reflections.’ ‘A victim can cure himself by eating the ashes of the vampire’s heart.’ ” She smiled sadly. “My grandmother told me that anything involving millet seed is useless, even though everyone says to scatter it around. Then she showed me the scar on her neck.”
Noor inhaled sharply. “Is that how you know about the cures?” Madame Dupuy nodded.There should be studies, I thought. Science-based research. Properly designed experiments. Reality-tested solutions. No one should ever have to face that malevolence like Noor and I had: alone, with just a stake and a handful of folklore to protect us from a deadly predator.
Madame Dupuy was thinking along the same lines. “Tell me everything: what you did, how you felt. We need facts to fight this.” She interrogated us about our symptoms, our feelings, how we tried to manage our cravings. She thought the menthol salve and smoking solutions were very good.
“Not good enough, though.” I told her how I’d almost attacked Dad, and Noor described how she’d wanted to bite the guy who was harassing her while she painted.
“What did you do then?”
