Van Helsing held out his hands. “We’re on the same team, Miss Harker, or had you forgotten?” Reluctantly, Sam laid her frozen hands in his. They engulfed hers, hot as living flames. She shuddered as Van Helsing massaged her palms, sending pins and needles prickling through her frozen fingers as he worked warmth back into them.
“But you’re?—” Sam didn’t know how to say it. “We’re not friends.”
Van Helsing’s brow furrowed. “You may not like me, but I made a promise to my father, and I intend to keep it.”
Sam gave a hiccupping laugh. “Your father. Of course.” And here she thought perhaps a fraction of the boy she’d known was still in there?—glimpsed in the scent of dandelions and those wide blue eyes. She ought to have known better.
“He bade me keep you safe, and I mean to,” Van Helsing said. “Safe from monsters... and safe from yourself.” Was that what he thought he had been doing? As if threatening to murder Sam incessantly were taking care of her!
“That’s not your responsibility,” Sam said tightly.
“It is when you’re incapable of doing so yourself,” Van Helsing retorted, letting go of Sam’s hands. Her cheeks burned. It was nothing she hadn’t said herself, but it hurt coming from someone else. “You know you are susceptible to the influence of evil, that you are consorting with monsters, and yet you flirt with it. But there is no dabbling with evil. It is like mold. Once it taints you, it will take you over entirely, and anything good in you will slough into rot. You will not be yourself any longer?—”
“And I and everyone I love will suffer for it. So you’ll put me down, like Lucy before me. Iknow,” Sam said. “You’ve made that much perfectly clear.”
Van Helsing shook his head. “My father has told me what became of Lucy Westerna. I do not wish the same fate for you.”
“How thoughtful,” Sam said tartly. “May we all have such good friends, who will murder us when we no longer fit the molds they have made for us.”
“Better friends who will stop you than friends who won’t tell you you’ve gone too far until you’re too far gone.” Van Helsing shook his head, exasperated. “What are you even doing in the field? If I wasn’t here...”
I would have died,Sam thought, rubbing the chilblains on her arms. She didn’t need Van Helsing to tell her how useless she was in the field. Sam was exquisitely aware of her deficiencies, her dependence. But... hedidsave her life. Perhaps she might try talking to him.
“It’s my grandfather,” Sam said, giving him a sideways glance. “You’ll remember he disappeared when I was ten.”
Van Helsing looked consternated. “What does your grandfather have to do with anything?”
“Would it actually kill you to listen for once?” Sam was beginning to regret the whole endeavor.
Van Helsing crossed his arms. “Fine.” But he did quiet.
“The day he left, there was this code tapping over his radiotelegraph,” Sam said. “At first, I couldn’t make sense of it. I thought?—I don’t know what I thought. But then I saw it in a photograph in the newspaper.”
“The Beast murders,” Van Helsing said. “Then that was?—”
“Professor Moriarty,” Sam finished for him. Van Helsing frowned. “My grandfather warned me not to try to find him.”
“But you couldn’t leave him.”
“No, I can’t,” Sam said.
The door opened on creaky hinges. Hel stood in her nightgown, her ginger curls burning in the flickering gaslight of the lamp she held in her hand.
Sam shot her a hurt look. There was no way Hel hadn’t heard Sam’s scream. No world in which the Hel Sam knew wouldn’t come running when Sam was in danger. Even when they’d been at odds, in Paris, she’d done that much. But Hel seemed not to notice. Seemed not to even care.
“I heard a scream,” Hel said, taking in the room. The shattered glass, the bloody painting, the catastrophe of Sam’s notes. Thestateof Sam. Sam could see other guests behind Hel, wrapped in robes, craning their necks for a look.
“Everything is under control,” Hel announced to the hall, before closing the much-abused door against the odd looks and murmurs. She crossed her arms. “What happened in here?”
“A ghost attacked Miss Harker,” Van Helsing said. “I dispersed it.”
“A ghost?” Hel frowned.
“A powerful one,” Sam said, thinking of the ghost’s mix of desolation and beauty, her killing cold. Sam had catalogued encounters with ghosts like that before. She was fortunate it had decided to toy with her?—if it had gone right for her heart, Van Helsing might have rescued a corpse. “I could have sworn she was a vampire at first.”
Sam of all people ought to have known she wasn’t. There was no panic when a vampire chose you for its prey, not unless it willed it. A vampire lulled you into a dreamlike trance before it fed. It was, her mother had warned, horrifically sensual. You might not even uncover what was happening to you until it was too late, for like tuberculosis, victims of vampires burned through their vitality like stars, achingly beautiful, their eyes fever bright, even as they wasted away, their shadows thinning on the floor, their reflections fading, until they were no more.
“The ghost of a vampire,” Van Helsing mused. “Does such a thing exist?”
