I found myself wholly, profoundly speechless. Not out of shyness or uncertainty, but because all the words had apparently been shaken out of my skull and left nothing behind them but a dull, staticky buzzing sound. Maybe if we’d had longer I would’ve recovered, said something like My father, closing Doors? or maybe How do you know? or, perhaps most honest and necessary of all: I’m sorry.
But I didn’t say any of that, because there was a sudden pounding at the cabin door. A chill, drawling voice called: “Miss Scaller, my dear creature, are you in there? We never finished our conversation.”
There was a single, crystalline moment of stillness.
Then the latch lifted and the cabin door swung toward us. Jane’s chair clattered backward as she stood, hands plunging into her skirts. Bad clawed to his feet, hackles high and lips peeled back. My own body felt as if I’d been submerged in cold honey.
Havemeyer stood on the threshold. But he was hardly the same man who’d attended Society meetings and snubbed us at Christmas parties: his linen suit was wrinkled and faintly gray with too many days’ wear; his skin was flushed; something about his smile had gone sickeningly wrong. His left hand was a wad of wrapped gauze, soggy brown with blood. His right hand was bare.
But it wasn’t Havemeyer who brought me stumbling to my feet, my hands reaching uselessly toward the door. It was the young man he half dragged beside him, battered and dazed.
Samuel Zappia.
Samuel’s hands were bound behind his back and his mouth had been jammed with cotton gauze. His skin, normally the color of browned butter, had gone a sick yellow, and his eyes reeled in his skull. The prey-animal panic in them was familiar to me; if I’d looked into a mirror after Havemeyer touched me, I’d have seen the identical expression on my own face.
Samuel blinked into the gloom of the cabin. His eyes focused on me and he made a hoarse sound through the gauze, as if the sight of me had been an invisible blow.
Jane was in motion. Everything about her promised violence—the angle of her shoulders, the length of her stride, her hand emerging from her skirt with something dully gleaming—but Havemeyer raised his bare right hand and placed it around Samuel’s neck, hovering just above the warmth of his skin.
“Now, now, ladies, settle down. I shouldn’t like to do anything regrettable.”
Jane wavered, hearing the threat but not understanding it, and I found my voice. “Jane, no!” I stood shakily, bandaged arms outstretched as if I could restrain either Jane or Bad if they lunged for Havemeyer. “He’s some kind of, of vampire. Don’t let him touch you.” Jane went still, radiating red tension.
Havemeyer gave a short laugh, and the laugh was just as wrong-seeming as his smile. “You know, I feel similarly about that appalling animal beside you. How did he survive? I know Evans isn’t bright, but I thought he could at least drown a dog properly.”
Rage curled my nails into my palms and hardened my jaw. Havemeyer’s not-smile widened. “Anyway. I’ve come to continue our conversation, Miss Scaller, as you missed our previous appointment. Although I confess my original purposes have been somewhat amended since your little magic trick.” He waved his bandaged, bloody left hand at me, eyes flashing with malice. I watched the muscles of Samuel’s neck move as he swallowed.
“It appears you’re quite a remarkable creature—we’re all unusually talented people, each in our separate ways, but none of us can open a hole in the world where there was none. Does Cornelius know? It would be just like him, collecting all the best things and locking them away in that mausoleum he calls a house.” Havemeyer shook his head fondly. “But we’ve agreed he can’t keep you to himself any longer. We’d very much like to speak with you further.” My eyes flicked around the room—from Jane to Bad to Havemeyer’s white fingers held like a knife blade to Samuel’s throat—as if I were solving a math equation again and again, hoping for a different answer.
“Come with me—immediately and without fuss—and I won’t suck the life out of your poor little grocery boy.”
And Havemeyer let his fingertips rest, with obscene tenderness, against Samuel’s skin. It was like watching a flame flicker in the wind: Samuel’s entire body seized and shuddered, his breath drawing harshly against the cotton gauze. His legs sagged.
“No!” I was moving forward, reaching for Samuel and half catching him as he pitched forward. Then both of us were on the floor, Samuel’s shivering weight slumped over my knees, my left arm burning as the barely scabbed wounds split and bled. I tugged the sodden cotton from his mouth and he breathed easier, but his eyes remained vague and distant.
I think I must have been whispering words (no, no, Samuel, please) because Havemeyer tsked. “There’s no need for hysterics. He’s perfectly fine. Well, not perfectly—he was quite uncooperative with me when I tracked him down last night. But I was insistent.” The not-smile returned. “All I had to go on when you vanished—taking some of me with you, of course—was his little love note. Which you so heartlessly left behind at Brattleboro, and which he so foolishly composed on the back of a Zappia Family Groceries receipt.”
Hold On January. Such a small, brave act of kindness, repaid with suffering. I’d thought only sins were punished.
“He’ll recover, if nothing else unfortunate befalls him. I’ll even leave the dog alone, and your maid.” Havemeyer’s voice was confident, almost casual; I pictured a butcher calling a reluctant cow onto the slaughterhouse floor. “Simply come with me now.”
I looked at Samuel’s pale face below me, at Bad with his splinted leg, at Jane, jobless and homeless on my behalf, and it occurred to me that, for a supposedly lonely orphan girl, there were a surprising number of people willing to suffer on my behalf.
Enough.
I slid Samuel off my lap as gently as I could. I hesitated, then let myself brush a dark curl of hair away from his clammy forehead, because I was probably never going to get another chance and a girl should live a little.
I stood. “All right.” My voice was a near-whisper. I swallowed. “All right. I’ll go with you. Just don’t hurt them.”
Havemeyer was watching me. There was a kind of cruel confidence in his expression, the swagger of a cat stalking something weak and small. He reached his bare hand toward me, white and somehow hungry-looking, and I stepped toward him.
There was a scrabbling behind me, a snarl, and Bad leapt past me in a streak of bronze muscle.
I had a sudden movie-reel memory of Mr. Locke’s Society party the year I was fifteen, when it had required the intervention of several party guests and a butler to dislodge Bad’s teeth from Havemeyer’s leg.
There was no one to intervene this time.
Havemeyer made a shrill not-very-human sound and staggered backward. Bad growled through his mouthful of flesh and planted his feet as if they were playing tug-of-war for possession of Havemeyer’s right hand. If Bad hadn’t been already injured, if his splinted back leg hadn’t folded beneath him, maybe he would’ve won.
But Bad stumbled, whimpering, and Havemeyer ripped his hand away in a spatter of blackish blood. He clutched both hands to his chest—the left one bound in gauze, missing three waxen fingertips, the right one now punctured and torn—and looked at Bad with an expression of such wrath that I knew, with perfect clarity, that he would kill him. He would bury his ruined hands in Bad’s fur and hold on until there was no warmth left in him, until the amber light of his eyes went cold and dull—