In a week of walking the city streets, I feel like I’ve seen her a hundred times. From the American accents of high school girls chatting loudly on the subway to the downtown teenagers wearing her uniform of T-shirt, slim jeans, and Converses. She is in all of them, peering out of their eyes, taunting me with a love I will never taste. Because her heart is with another—my best friend, Vincent. I love him like a brother, but right now couldn’t be gladder about the four thousand miles of ocean between us.

I wrap my coat tighter around me and lean out over my rooftop vantage point. Below me, chunks of floating ice turn the East River into one of the frozen martinis that seem to be endlessly flowing at my New York kindred’s parties. For a bitingly cold daybreak the first week of March, the Paris sky would be spread with a blanket of gray clouds. But here in Brooklyn, where the sun has just risen, the sky is a dazzling field of cornflowers. The diamonds it casts on the surface of the water blind me. Bring me to tears. Or at least, provide a good excuse for my stinging eyes.

I hear a whistle and turn to see my kindred Faust waiting for me next to a door shaft sticking up like a lone tombstone in the middle of the football-field-size roof. I make my way toward him, passing the barbecue pits and the giant swimming pool: all covered and hibernating. Waiting for the ice to melt and the city to move the party back outside again. The endless party. Life’s a party in New York.

What am I doing here? I ask myself for the hundredth time. Surviving, is the correct response. The only way I know how.

“Council’s ready for you,” Faust says, clapping me across the shoulder as he guides me down the stairs.

“So I don’t get it,” he says. “You and your kindred come to New York a week ago on a mission to re-embody your kindred Vincent. You succeed, he goes back with the others, but you decide to hang out here at Frank and Myra’s house. Then Vincent calls you to Paris, and after barely twenty-four hours in France you’re back in New York?”

“What can I say? They were up against Violette and her army,” I say, avoiding his point.

Faust nods. “Yeah, I guess you can’t turn down a request from your kindred to help out with Paris’s final battle against the numa. Man, what I would have given to be there and watch the Champion kick numa ass.”

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” I respond. “Only room for twelve on Gold’s plane. I would have brought more of you if I had understood what was going down.”