“You see, it’s hard to explain…” the hotel clerk stammered down the phone.

“I don’t care how hard it is to explain!” Val snapped. “I don’t want it explained; I want it gone! It’s your hotel – aren’t you bothered about the carpet? Or the ceiling?” He turned his head to glare once more at the steady red leak that tapped at the already-saturated carpet in the corner. There was a rusty stain on the ceiling already, promising untold volumes of liquid just waiting to befoul Val’s hotel room.

The door handle jiggled uselessly, startling him, and stopped, only to be followed by a staccato knock.

Val clenched his jaw, tuning out the clerk’s weak excuses. Of course. Roland had said he wouldn’t be out for long. As if to confirm that it was really him, he shouted, “Tin-tin!” No one other than Roland had called him Tin-tin since he was about twelve.

“Look,” he said viciously down the phone. “I’ll be here waiting for you to send someone up to deal with this.” And he slammed the phone down in its cradle, launching himself across the room to open the door for Roland.

“God, Tin-tin, could you keep it down? I could feel you from across the road!” Without so much as a word of thanks for Val having opened the door for him so graciously, Roland pushed it closed with his foot and tossed a small plastic bag onto the double bed where Val was now sitting. “There’s your bastard fags.” He looked around. “What’s that noise?”

“The pure blood of saints, dripping from our ceiling,” said Val without the slightest trace of irony.

Roland followed Val’s gaze, startling when he saw it. “Shit! That really does look like blood.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

Roland was already busy investigating the leak, his anger – or rather, Val’s anger – forgotten. Overpowering someone else’s emotion with his own was generally hard for an empath to do, which spoke volumes about his curiosity. He looked almost like a dog, hunched down in the corner of the room, completely absorbed in the growing dampness on the floor. Discoloured lines, moist and mouldy and the same reddish brown as the stain on the ceiling, crept up the wall, and the paint was flaking. “How d’you know it’s a saint’s blood?” he asked.

Val shrugged. “Reeks of martyrdom.”

Roland got down closer to the floor and sniffed warily. “Oh,” he said. “So it does. Did you phone someone about it?”

“Yeah.” The memory of the infuriating response he had received loomed up again.

“What did they say?” Roland laughed suddenly. “Wait, that’s what pissed you off so much, isn’t it? What did they say?”

“It’s ‘complicated’. It’s ‘hard to explain’,” said Val in disgust. “They can’t be arsed to do anything.”

Roland made a face that mirrored Val’s tone exactly.

The most irritating thing about Roland by far was that he tended to brood over the stronger emotions he absorbed, so that tomorrow, when Val himself was over this mess, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to face the day, Roland would still be angry and frustrated and all of the other things Val was right now. He should try to calm down in order to minimise Roland’s bad mood tomorrow, but then the train station jingle floated through the small, but significant, gap between the balcony doors and all thoughts of calming down went out the window.

“What’s wrong with this place?” he yelled, kicking the side of the double bed.

“You booked it,” muttered Roland.

Val rounded on him. “No! No I didn’t! I booked the New Hotel Gare Du Nord, not this piece of shit, so don’t try to lay this on my shoulders! They put us here!”

“Tin-tin…” Roland closed his eyes as though he had a headache. “You promised you wouldn’t do this.”

“Do what?” Val demanded.

“Get angry.”

“Look, I just wanted a nice, peaceful, slightly generic holiday in Paris, where everything works and we can do all the tourist things without having to worry about anything. And look what I get!” He gave up and flopped back on the bed, eyes locked on the ceiling and stubbornly ignoring the grisly leak from upstairs. “Bleeding saints!”

“You’ve got me,” Roland offered.

Val snorted. “No offence, Roland, but I’ve known you since school. It’s usually a given that I’ll have you.” When had he become Roland’s keeper? he wondered, but dismissed that treacherous thought immediately. Roland was only acting childish now because that was how Val himself was feeling. This was enough to curb his temper. He bit the inside of his cheek, willing the feelings down.

“Is this about the saint upstairs?” Roland asked. “Because it’s worse for him than it is for you.”

“I don’t care about him,” said Val, still looking at the ceiling and the badly-plastered hole where a much nicer light fitting had obviously once been. “I don’t want you whining all night about how much it hurts.”

“Thanks,” said Roland, clearly touched by Val’s noble intentions. At least, that’s what Val told himself the sideways glare meant.

“What time is it, anyway?” Val asked. “We could still go out and do something.”

Roland checked his watch. “Half eight. So I doubt it.”

“Bull. Eiffel Tower’s open till eleven. Come on.”

The unnecessarily complicated metro journey to the Champs-Elysées was crowded and hot, as usual, because Paris, like most capital cities, did not sleep. Roland stopped sulking and started to get excited as they grew closer to their destination, the concentration of tourists to indifferent Parisians becoming more acute. Val had started to think of his surroundings in these terms when, annoyed and bewildered by Roland’s behaviour and erratic mood swings when they first met, he had bullied the fact that he was an empath out of him. It made him easier to deal with if Val was aware of the variables affecting him.

The Tower itself was already lit up when they arrived, destroying the once-a-day chance of imitating the famous movie scenes where the dashing hero lights up the Eiffel Tower with a click of his fingers, but Val clicked his anyway. It was a habit, almost superstitious in its compulsion, that he had picked up from Kassovitz’s La Haine, and he probably would have been disappointed if the tower had lit up or darkened in accordance with his finger-click.

“Oh, I like this,” said Roland, stretching luxuriously to the rolling pulse of djimbe and tam-tams that echoed through the park in front of the Eiffel Tower. Even Val felt mellower just for entering. “Screw the Tower. Let’s stay here.”

Val didn’t let himself slow down, knowing that if he did then doubtless the hypnotising spells of the drums would snare him and he’d end up attracting more weirdoes than ever. Don’t be a bastard, he scolded himself as soon as the thought was released into the ether. Roland’s not a weirdo. He’s your friend. “Come on,” he said, eyeing up the scattered idlers on the grass like they might leap on him and tell him their weird stories at any moment. “It doesn’t take that long to go up and down, and the view’s better at night.”

“As long as no one’s afraid of heights,” said Roland, making a face. “I hate it when that happens.”

“Roland, I doubt someone with a deathly fear of heights would force themselves to go up the bloody Eiffel Tower. And if they do, tell me and I’ll push them off.”

Roland’s eyes widened. “I wonder what that feels like.”

“Falling off the Eiffel Tower? Mostly like flying, I should think.” Actually yes, Roland was a bit weird.

They didn’t say much else until they had passed through the little guardhouse where their belongings were checked. Roland unzipped his shoulder bag and handed it over to be searched while Val emptied his pockets in stages of all the things that he had forgotten about that set the alarm off over and over. As if anyone would try to hold up the Eiffel Tower at gunpoint. When they finally got through, a murmur of foreign languages surrounded them, most of them exotic drawls and rolled ‘r’s that Val couldn’t identify.

“It’s like we’re the only French people in the world who haven’t done this before, isn’t it?” remarked Roland, and Val shot him a half-enraged look because he had been thinking the exact same thing at that moment.

A girl caught his eye meaningfully. Val ignored her. There was definitely something weird about her, and Val wanted none of it. “My shoes are still covered in dust from the catacombs,” he said to Roland, something banal and loud enough to overhear (if the girl spoke French at all) just to show her that he had far more important things to do than humour her.

“It’s probably bits of old bones,” said Roland, standing on tiptoes to see over the crowd. “Oh, we’re moving!”

“Well, yeah, or quarry dust,” said Val, put-out with this answer. He liked those shoes.

“Nah, it’s bones.”

They shuffled forwards with the crowd, and thankfully Val lost sight of the strange girl.

“I’m surprised you even agreed to go to the catacombs, to be honest,” continued Roland cheerfully. “What with all the dead people down there.”

“Dead people don’t bother me and all the real freaks hang out in the illegal catacombs,” replied Val. Annoyance was beginning to needle at him again; the saint upstairs, the strange girl, the bone-dust on his shoes and the fact that everyone kept trying to speak English to him.

They had bought tickets to the top floor of the Eiffel Tower of course, because Val wanted to do the tourist thing properly. The first lift up was so full of people that Val and Roland were squashed up against each other, more hot bodies all that kept them steady on the swaying way up. Despite the tinned-fish claustrophobia of the journey, Val felt the oddly steady, unnaturally patient eyes of the girl prickling the hairs on the back of his neck, boring through the other tourists.

They managed to avoid her during the change in lifts, and all the way to the top floor. “I didn’t know it was so high!” said Roland, craning his head to see directly below them. There was a quiet wave of foreign languages that were presumably expressing the same thing. But Roland, more open and receptive than usual, had given voice to it first.

Roland had gone to make a tour of the top of the Tower, and Val was leaning against the chain-link fence preventing people from dropping things from the top when the girl reappeared. Val saw her as she approached, and watched her as impassively as a lizard sunning itself on a rock. He had begun to understand what exactly about her was so odd. Her clothes were mismatched and eccentric, as though she had thrown them on that morning without bothering to look in a mirror (though if this was true then her wardrobe must have housed a fabulous collection), and for some reason her face gave him the same impression. And there appeared to be some kind of heat haze hanging around her, despite the wind that blew her clothes and hair around.

She stood beside him as if she was admiring the view, and Val noticed that despite the definite weirdness that surrounded her, she had a very nice profile. “There is a dark presence that hangs over you,” she said conversationally. Her voice whispered like sand.

“It’s rude to talk about Roland like that,” said Val, bored already.

“I didn’t mean him and you know it, Valentin Guillaume!” said the girl.

“Oh, we’re on first-name terms now, are we?” asked Val. “Go on, then. What’s yours?”

“Victoire.”

Val actually turned to face her then, incredulous, a half-crazy smile on his face and on the edge of a laugh. “Oh my God, no it’s not!”

Victoire glanced at him uncomfortably.

“Look, you freaks can come and find me all you want, and far be it from me to tell you if you exist or not, but the least you can do it not lie to me about it!”

“Tin-tin!” snapped Roland, appearing from nowhere. “If you can’t keep your temper then I’ll push you off this sodding Tower!” He turned to not-Victoire. “Sorry if he was bothering you, miss.”

“Oh, don’t be nice to it,” said Val, lip curled in disgust.

“I’m not an ‘it’,” interjected the girl imperiously. She had a very proud bearing, and used it to its full extent now. It had no effect on Val.

Roland looked from one to the other. “Who is… this?” he ventured.

“Don’t you recognise it? It’s the Winged Victory of Samothrace. We saw it in the Louvre yesterday.”

“I may be a statue, but you should still refer to me as a ‘she’,” said the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were the Winged Victory, not the Winged Obnoxious.”

“I think you mean ‘obnoxiousness’,” Roland supplied helpfully. “And would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

“Apparently I’ve got a dark presence hanging over me,” said Val. “As if I didn’t already know, with it bleeding all over the floor!”

“I thought it was a saint,” said Roland.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace looked happier now that someone less angry than Val was paying attention to her. She was used to admiration after having been displayed in the Louvre, in pride of place on the Daru staircase. “He is a saint,” she said, pointedly ignoring Val as he was doing to her. “Saint Sebastian.”

Val glowered at the lit-up city of Paris spread out below him, the strong, cold wind whipping at his face. Saint Sebastian indeed. That wasn’t so hard to explain, he thought sulkily.

“Which one’s he?” Roland asked, with a forced brightness that Val recognised as that which he used when he was trying hard to ignore someone.

“His martyrdom came about when he was tied to a tree and shot with arrows,” explained the Winged Victory of Samothrace, in the kind of voice that indicated she didn’t particularly think this was a bad thing.

Roland squirmed. “You know that… that Tin-tin doesn’t care about any of that, don’t you?”

“I’m on holiday, all right?” said Val by way of a little clarification, not wanting to appear completely insensitive.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, with her strange face and arms that had not been seen in millennia, and the presumably invisible wings that made her look small and narrow by their absence, looked as though she cared for Val no more than she cared for Saint Sebastian. “So am I,” she replied in a voice like fine stone.

Well, yes. If you could consider her work to be standing and being admired in the Louvre, then she was technically on holiday. It occurred to him then that despite her strangeness and the inconsistencies of her appearance, he liked the way she looked, and wondered what she would feel like in his arms. Would she be heavy? Would she be cold? He imagined waking up beside her in the morning in the middle of the hotel double bed, Saint Sebastian’s blood tapping out its rhythm unheeded and the light creeping through the too-small curtains. Her hair would be in disarray not from the sea-wind of the Samothracian naval victory, but from a tumultuous night’s sleep.

Roland was staring at him in undisguised horror, cheeks flushed and eyes large, fighting Val’s own arousal.

“It’s rude to spy on people’s fantasies!” Val snapped, trying to shut off his thoughts though he didn't know how exactly this was done.

No, he wouldn’t bed the Winged Victory of Samothrace (though it would really be something to do so) and not just because of Roland. Val had the impression that as soon as they got home, the police would turn up looking for a missing work of art, the Winged Victory of Samothrace would be nothing more than a statue, and he and Roland would be implicated in some kind of art theft. And that was to say nothing of the saint bleeding upstairs.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace looked slightly disappointed.

“We’re not taking you home!” said Val sharply, interpreting this look. God, are my thoughts open-season to every bastard within ten feet of me, or what? “If you’re not going to go back to the Louvre, then at least get Saint whoever out of our hotel, and I forbid you from going into our room.”

“As you wish, Valentin Guillaume,” said the Winged Victory of Samothrace in a voice like sandstone, pliable but under pressure capable of becoming something as hard as marble. “Be sure to let me know when your holiday ends.”

“Whatever,” said Val half-bitterly. “You’ll still be the Winged Victory and it’ll still be art theft.”

Roland looked at him, confused.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace didn’t answer, and Val got the distinct impression that she would get exactly what she wanted one way or another. She wasn’t called Victory for nothing. But for now she turned away with a knowing smile on her strange face that promised both pleasure and trouble for Val in the future, and left them alone. She disappeared through a Chinese tour group that was listening eagerly to their leader recite the names and dates and facts and figures of the Eiffel Tower, and then he lost sight of her.

“You think too loud,” said Roland, obviously feeling the need to excuse himself for trespassing on Val’s private thoughts earlier.

“You’re too nosy.” Val turned back around to look out at Paris.

“Do you think she’s really going to sort out Saint Sebastian for us?” Roland asked, leaning on the fence. There was no question of referring to the statue as an ‘it’ anymore.

Val shrugged. “Might do. She doesn’t answer to me.” He knew that Roland would be able to sense his uncertainty, but that was how they communicated now, always in parallel lines of the spoken and unspoken.

Paris was at its most beautiful at night, when it was lit up and decorated as though it was a reflection of the sky. Car headlights moved and threaded through invisible paths like a sped up parody of the celestial dance taking place even now above the clouds. Val wasn’t really looking at it, but for some reason he was smiling. He fingered the unopened box of cigarettes in his pocket, wishing the Eiffel Tower was more smoke-friendly. As if he'd be inconveniencing anyone up here, with the constant wind washing the air clean.

“So much for peace and quiet then, eh?” remarked Roland, the same sleepy contentment tinting his voice.

“Yeah.” But if they could stay here forever…

“You know, there are people who would kill to have a life as interesting as yours,” said Roland, apparently in response to Val’s fervent desire not to go back down into Paris and deal with saints and statues and bone-dust on his favourite shoes.

“They probably would.” It felt unbearably patronising to say that the desire for adventure and weird things made the masses of the world stupid or naïve, though he often thought this. They wanted it for the experience, after all, and only by experiencing can anyone know if it was worth it in the first place. If he hadn’t been who he was, Val probably would have yearned for adventure too. “That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, though.”

Roland made a noncommittal sound.

“There are people who’d kill to be an empath, you know,” Val continued neutrally. “The ability to read people’s emotions, know what they’re thinking…”

“Hey!” Roland was about to argue vehemently with this blatant misinformation, but then he stopped himself ungracefully and laughed in tune with Val’s amusement.

“Exactly,” said Val.