Sam was embarrassed to admit she’d thought the latter a requirement for the former. It was what made her own weakness so disheartening. She didn’t have the strength to protect others?—she couldn’t even protect herself.
“Did I ever tell you about my first hunt?” Van Helsing asked, pulling her back.
“You know you didn’t,” Sam said. It had been five years ago, back when he’d been at his cruelest. Sam had kept her distance.
“A manticore was terrorizing a small village in Greece. My father and I tracked it to its den and slayed it, only to find it had whelped. I thought I was seeing things?—I’d taken seven spines in my back and was half dizzy with venom. But my father gathered up the mewling creatures and tied them in a sack with a bundle of rocks before throwing them in the ocean. ‘Better to kill them now than when they’ve done their damage,’ he said.” Van Helsing paused, and Sam could hear his breath catch. “Do you know what baby manticores look like? The fat-cheeked faces of human babies on the bodies of kittens.”
Sam could imagine it. Her heart twisted. “That’s awful.”
“I dove into the water when he left to deal with the manticore’s body,” Van Helsing went on. “Rescued them. I don’t know how I survived?—I could hardly tell up from down. But somehow, I did. I didn’t think of it again for three years, until there was a massacre at that same village. Five people, all from the same family. I was called back in to clean it up. My father knew by then what I must have done, and he insisted upon it. He knew it would teach me the price of my hesitation.” He paused. “Those people’s deaths are on my head.”
“Surely the manticores are the ones who did the murdering,” Sam objected.
“And I’m the one who failed to stop them,” Van Helsing said. “Worse, I saved them from their fate. They could not have murdered that town without my assistance.”
It was the same argument Sam had made for her responsibility for Cyprien and Lord Lusk’s deaths, that it was the carcolh, the Wild Hunt, the monster you failed to save them from, and not you, you didn’t hold the knife yourself. And yet, despite her words to Van Helsing, her heart answered much as he had: No. It was because you were weak.
That, however, wasn’t what caught her attention.
“Am I meant to be the baby manticore in this metaphor?” she asked. How Sam had fallen from Hel’s queen to pigs and manticores. “Are you worried I’m going to grow up to eat a village?”
“That’s not?—” Van Helsing blew out a breath, frustrated. “Anything you do, anything Miss Moriarty does, is on my head. You have no idea how hard it is, to be judged for something beyond your control.” Because he couldn’t controlthem, he meant.
“Oh, no, you’re right,” Sam said, breathless with anger. “How could we possibly know what it’s like to be judged for things beyond our control? It’s not as if that literally defines our existence. And it’sDr.Moriarty?—if you can remember the names of all forty-seven wing dapple patterns of northern wyverns, you can remember that.”
Van Helsing shifted outside. “You know what I meant.”
“Do I?” Sam said. “Because it sounds like you’re comparing beingin chargeto growing up being told that you are susceptible to the influence of evil, that one day you’ll turn monstrous and everyone you love will suffer for it. Until they put you down, which everyone insists you should thank them for?—all because you get visions that you did not ask for and cannot control.”
Van Helsing had been more of a leader at five than twenty-five, standing up to his father for Sam at a time when no one else would.
“That’s not what I meant?—” Van Helsing protested.
“Isn’t it?” Sam said sharply. “You know, the vengeful spirits and the rusalka you destroy didn’t have a choice about becoming monsters?—that was taken from them when they were murdered. But the man who murdered them? He had a choice, and in destroying them instead of laying them to rest, you steal their chance at peace as well. Punishing the victims because killing them is easier, because you’re terrified of what they’ve become, and because the men who made them look likeyou.”
“Samantha, that’s Society policy?—”
“You know, I never put it together before,” Sam continued, certain she would regret it in the morning but unable to swallow down the fury inside her. What was more, she found she didn’t want to. She wanted him tolisten. To see her for who she was, rather than the stories he told himself about her. To seehimselfreflected in her eyes.
“You always wanted to hear my father’s stories about Quincey Morris,” Sam said. “You even dress like him, with those cowboy boots and spurs?—playing the hero. But Quincey wasn’t a hero because he drove his bowie knife through Dracula’s heart. He was a hero because he listened and did what he believed was right even if it was strange, because he was generous without expectation, and because he laid down his life to protect his”?—her breath plumed in the air?—“his...” Ice crystalized up the glass of the lantern, her fingertips going sticky red with cold.
Friends.
Sam could hear the frown in Van Helsing’s voice as he asked, “Samantha?” But Sam’s voice caught in her throat as the ghost materialized before her, her hair winding in the air like weeds, her ephemeral nightgown clinging as if it were wet.Ophelia drowning beautifully.
Sam found she couldn’t move, her heart in her throat, paralyzed like the rabbit before the hawk. The ghost eased toward her, and at last her limbs unlatched. She fumbled for her knife, drawing breath to scream?—
But the ghost held up her hands in surrender, her bloodred lips forming words Sam could not understand.
Despite her racing pulse, Sam hesitated. The ghost haunting Mr. Enfield hadn’t made itself visible, nor had the ghost haunting Lord Lusk. And though it had been frightening, Sam never would have seen Mr. Enfield’s death if not for her ghost, for all the good it had done her?—or Mr. Enfield for that matter.
“Is everything all right in there?” Van Helsing called, his voice growing concerned.
Sam squeezed her eyes shut. You weren’t supposed to listen to monsters. You weren’t supposed to invite them in. But if the ghost might tell her who had marked her for death... was that not worth the risk?
No,Van Helsing would have said.It’s not.
Even Hel might have balked. This wasn’t just channeling?—this was inviting the monster in. It might also be the only way she was going to get answers.
