Van Helsing crossed his arms. “You’re saying your father took a page from the Devil’s playbook?”
“I’m saying he could have written it,” Hel said. “Did you not think it strange when Arsène Courbet confessed to working not for my father, but for me? You heard him speak of my father in the catacombs. You heard what he said about me.” That Hel was Professor Moriarty’s wayward daughter, that she was squandering the gifts of her criminal father. “I am not your adversary, Van Helsing.”
“He might have been putting on a show,” Van Helsing said stoutly. “You were never at risk, were you? Just me and Miss Harker.”
“And when he died,” Hel continued, “his clothes crawling with a variety of ant not found on this continent, right after he’d made his so-called confession, that, too, was part of my plan?”
“That might have been revenge,” Van Helsing said. “For turning on you.”
“It’s pointless, arguing with him like this,” Hel told the ceiling. “I can’t prove I’m innocent if he’s convinced that every flaw in his logic is not because he’s wrong but because it’s some misdirection, some part of my greater plan.”
“You don’t find itconvenientthat your innocence is impossible to prove?” Van Helsing said.
“That’s not convenient at all,” Sam said. “For anyone.”
Abruptly, Van Helsing appeared to tire. “Fine. Help me catch him, then. Give me something I can work with.”
“What a brilliant idea,” Hel said dryly, as if she hadn’t just said they ought to talk about her father five minutes ago, hadn’t been working toward her father’s end her whole career. “There are three things you have to understand about my father. The first is that he doesn’t act directly. He’s temptation. Manipulation. More merchant than master thief, enabling the designs of others when it suits his plans, using their sins like puppet strings.”
Sam couldn’t help but think of her grandfather and the skills he must possess for Professor Moriarty to pursue him an ocean away; the sins that Professor Moriarty might have used against him.
“But you said he sells monsters,” Van Helsing accused.
“That would be the merchant part,” Hel said flatly.
“And Sherlock Holmes?” Sam asked.
“That’s the second thing,” Hel acknowledged. “The Baker Street detective managed to bait him into acting directly, playing on his professional pride. A weakness. The only one I’ve found.”
“And you think he’s the one who loosed the hellhounds?” Van Helsing asked. “What, do you think he was angry at the Vespertine for infringing on his territory?”
Hel snorted. “Haven’t you been listening? My father wouldn’t bloody his fists. Besides, he’d be more likely to try to take the Vespertine over than force them out. He has always had a talent for acquisitions. He acquired that phosphorous preparation, for example, and now he sells it?—in this case, to someone who seems to want the English gone.”
“The separatists.” Van Helsing swore. It seemed he was willing to believe Hel when it aligned with another of his prejudices. “I knew I recognized the construction of the smoke bombs.”
Sam shook her head. “But if the separatists had to resort to phosphorous to conjure hellhounds, then they couldn’t possibly be behind the disappearances. Why would they resort to fabrications when they might summon the real thing?”
The Wild Hunt had been no clever bit of chicanery. Sam had seen it with her own eyes?—feltit when she’d touched Mr. Enfield. And then there was the matter of the ghosts.
“I concede it’s... unlikely,” Van Helsing said reluctantly. Which meant that the hellhounds and the Wild Hunt were unrelated incidents. The separatists taking advantage of the Wild Hunt’s attacks to mask their own. “What is your father’s part in all this? Is it just business?”
“That’s the third thing you have to understand,” Hel said. “It’s never just one thing. Every mystery my father puts in front of us, we think that’s it, that’s the game, and because lives are at stake, we have to play it. It makes uspredictable. But to him, each mystery is but a single move in a chess match we don’t even know we’re playing?—a gambit he may or may not even mean to win, so long as it ensures we’re in position for his next move.”
Like sacrificing a pawn to take the queen,Sam thought, with a shudder.
“But what else can we do?” Sam said. She brushed aside the curtain, glancing out the carriage window at the tumbledown stone walls that dotted the green countryside and the sheep that trundled by, their wool marked with splashes of blue, and sometimes red. “It’s not like we can just let the Wild Hunt keep disappearing people.”
“Let me know if you figure it out,” Hel said.
Sam tangled in her sheets, listening to the rain drumming against her window. It wasn’t even the black feathers she’d found covering her bed when she’d returned. Numbly, she’d stuffed them in the drawer with the others. Strange how things that had once horrified her were now routine. This was another of Professor Moriarty’s manipulations. He violated your sense of safety so repeatedly, you forgot it wasn’t normal. It just was.
No, it wasn’t the feathers.
It was that every time Sam found herself pulled beneath the tide of sleep, she startled awake, her breath quick in her throat, unable to shake the feeling of being helpless, arm stretched above her head, as M. Voland debated how deep to cut. The feeling of ice crystalizing on her lashes, the ghost’s hands burning her flesh. The feeling of that song rooting in her bones, pulling her under, until shewasn’t.
And then there was the death omen of the washer at the ford that haunted her dreams.
But even so, Sam must have fallen asleep sometime, for she woke to a cold rat nose on her cheek, the remnants of her dreams clinging to her like cobwebs. The night painted the room in pitch, the only light that which leaked from beneath her door, occluded by what was either Van Helsing or Hel keeping watch. She shivered, rubbing the chilblains on her arms, glad the ghost hadn’t returned, but knowing it was only a matter of time.
