Her grandfather gasped, his back arching, his eyes rolling back in his head. As they watched, his body shifted, as if every bone and muscle in his body were animated by a much younger man. The face that had once belonged to her grandfather took in the corpse before him, a smile spreading like an oil slick. The look in his eyes was something Sam would recall in her nightmares.
“Get out of that man,” Jakob said, his voice dark with the promise of violence.
“Oh, but we’re just getting acquainted,” her grandfather said in a syrupy Kentucky drawl that was not his.
“Fine, we’ll do this the hard way,” Jakob snarled, flipping open the book, a litany of Latin pouring out of his mouth to lap against the walls. Sam scrambled back over the iron chain to safety, bracing herself for an assault, but it never came.
Instead, her grandfather picked up a pair of pliers, considered them for a moment before opening his mouth and reaching them inside. There was a horrible snap, and he withdrew a molar, its roots tangled with gore.
Even Jakob stumbled on his Latin, his face white.
“Oh, now ain’t that funny. You know, I didn’t feel a thing?” Her grandfather looked up at them with a bloody, gap-toothed smile. “He does, though. I can feel his body quake with it. Let me try something else.”
“Please, stop,” Sam cried, uncertain as to whether she was talking to Jakob, or whoever was in her grandfather, or both.
“Oh, you care about this body, don’t you?” her grandfather said. He dropped the pliers to clatter on the floor and picked up the long surgical knife, running the lantern light down its length. “How many pieces do you figure I might carve off before your boy finishes that there exorcism?”
“Jakob, this isn’t working. We have to find another way,” Sam begged. Those long knives used for amputation were so sharp that once, a surgeon had taken off his surgical assistant’s fingers along with the patient’s leg before he even realized what had happened. She didn’t even want to know how much damage he could do before they could stop him.
“Ten fingers,” her grandfather said, shaking his head. “That’s just excessive, don’t you think? So many a man hardly knows what to do with them all.” He raised the knife.
“Come on,” Hel said, turning away. “We’re done here.”
“We need to arrest him,” Jakob said, visibly struggling with his duty. “This is Professor Moriarty’s spymaster, for God’s sake.”
“We want him alive, Van Helsing,” Hel said quietly, and if he couldn’t feel pain, well. They’d have to do a lot of damage to take him out, and that wasn’t even counting the damage he’d do to himself. “Report him to the Special Branch. I’m sure they’ll want to know where their prize detective has gone.” They had ways to incapacitate a man that the three of them did not.
Jakob cursed, but he closed the exorcism book, turning his back on Sam’s grandfather. What Sam felt wasn’t relief. Not exactly.
“That’s a good boy.” Her grandfather chuckled, stabbing the knife into the meat of Detective Lynch’s thigh. “You run along now.”
Sam and Jakob followed Hel out, listening to the sounds of skin being flensed from flesh behind them, and a new song being hummed under his breath.
This, Sam understood with terrible clarity, was what her grandfather preferred over living with what he’d done?—what hewas doing. He would be anyone else, so long as it wasn’t himself, do anything so long as he survived. Even if it meant doing unspeakable things. Even if it meant losing Sam and her family. Did he even truly love her? Love any of them?
Sam squeezed her eyes shut, wondering how she was ever going to tell her mother. It wasn’t until she’d climbed the last rung of the ladder, the sunlight stinging her eyes, that it occurred to Sam her mother probably already knew?—at least of his problem. It would explain why she hadn’t wanted Sam to search for him. She helped Jakob and Hel heave a heavy stone over the trapdoor, sealing her grandfather in with a sound like the closing of a tomb.
Before the dust had settled, Hel was off, striding down Montpelier Hill, her long tan coat snapping behind her in the wind.
“Hel, wait!” Sam called, picking her way down the hill. Insects called in the tall grass, and a lone raven circled overhead. Even in her sensible shoes, she couldn’t keep up with Hel. “I can’t?—” Her ankle caught in a furrow in the uneven hillside, and she cried out as it twisted, catching herself with her hands.
Sam heard footsteps and looked up. But unlike last time, Hel wasn’t there to help her to her feet. Hel wasn’t, in fact, there at all. It was only Jakob, pushing past her without a word. Her gut twisted. It seemed they hadn’t forgotten what her grandfather had said. Hadn’t forgiven her either.
Sam’s gloved hands balled in the cold dirt and grass, and she pushed herself up, forcing herself to keep stumbling down the hill despite the spike of pain in her ankle, in what was feeling increasingly like a metaphor. She caught up with Hel at the train station, just as Jakob was leaving to buy train tickets.
“Hel, I’m sorry?—” Sam started to reach out, only to think better of it when Hel glanced her way. She’d seen that look on Hel’s face before. But never aimed at her.
“I’ve never shownanyonewhat I showed you,” Hel said, her voice low. The feathers. Her brother catching Sam in his machinations again... It was the thing Hel feared more than anything, the reason she’d tried to stop her coming, and Sam had hidden it from her.
“I know,” she said inadequately.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” Hel demanded, and for a moment, Sam thought she caught a hint of the familiar spark between them, that yearning for connection.
“Yes, of course I was.” But she knew it for a lie the moment it left her lips, and so did Hel. Her expression flattened, and whatever had been between them evaporated, as if it had never been.
“Never mind,” Hel said, and Sam’s heart cracked.We need to trust each other...“There’s no point to any of this.”
In searching for something Sam had lost ten years ago, something she was beginning to suspect might never have existed to begin with, she had lost everything that mattered. Her career at the Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena. Her friendship with Jakob, which she had never expected to earn again. And Hel... Had it been only last night they’d lain tangled together in the moonlight on a bed of broken glass, wondering if they might go on like that forever?
