A long time went by, or perhaps it only seemed like a long time. I was cold and wet and the water was full of blood. Flies buzzed through the air, settled, buzzed again. The soft, obscene sounds went on and on, until at last they stopped.
Eventually, Saul released his prey, and Phelps slid off the table and fell facedown into the water. I winced a little at the wet thudding noise the body made when it hit the boards, though I knew he was long past caring.
“I think,” said Saul, stretching as luxuriously as a man who was pinned to a table could, “that it is probably safe to release me now.”
He looked better. Alotbetter. The hollows in his ribs had filled out completely and there was muscle along his arms now. No one seeing him now would assume that he was dead or dying, and certainly not that he had been down here for an unspeakable length of time.
“Why aren’t you mad?” I asked, thinking about how long that year must have been.
“Who says I’m not?”
The gun was still in my lap. I picked it up. Saul sighed. “Madness, for most people, is something that happens inside your brain. Something being damaged. But those parts heal like everything else. I would go a little mad for a time, I think, and then they’d toss me some food and the madness would heal.”
I tried to picture what that must have been like and couldn’t.
Red fanned lazily through the water at my feet, a brilliantcolor that you only get with cadmium and other heavy metals. And blood, of course. Most of Phelps’s blood had gone into Saul, but there was still enough to dye the water crimson. “This is why you didn’t want me to set you free, isn’t it? You thought you might do… that. To me.”
“Yes.”
I nodded. “You could have explained that to me.”
Saul gave me an ironic look. “Strangely enough, when you feed primarily on blood and entrails, you don’t go around telling everyone.”
Well, that was fair enough. “You told Louisa though.”
The cords of his neck stood out briefly as he lifted his head, then let it drop. “We could never have children, you see, and she deserved to know why. But I would have told her anyway.”
“Good.” I pushed myself to my feet.
“I would have dealt with those children too, if I’d been here. Poor doomed souls. I heard rumors about them and came as quickly as I could, but of course it was much too late by then. I might have been able to save them, if I’d heard about them sooner.”
“Savethem?”
“It wasn’t their fault. They were like ducklings raised by hens, with no one to teach them how to swim. It is not easy to be what we are, but there are… ways… to mitigate it. To do as little harm as possible. Not the sort of things a child could work out for themselves. They would have only known that they were not like others, and prey to a monstrous hunger they could not possibly explain.”
I thought of Jackson’s grandmother, telling him tales of blood and hunger, and wondered how many of those tales came from Saul’s people, or from their abandoned children. I would have liked to feel sorry for those doomed three-month babies. Perhaps someday I would.
“Ma Kersey said they were born with sharp teeth,” I said.
“Yes.”
His teeth looked perfectly normal at the moment. I wondered whether the sharper teeth folded back against the roof of his mouth, like a snake’s fangs? No, surely that would affect his speech, give him some kind of lisp, wouldn’t it? Unless the upper palate was significantly deeper or perhaps had a slot for the teeth to fit into…
“They’re in my throat,” said Saul, rolling his eyes. “I’d offer to show you, but I don’t want you to run away screaming before you unlock these things. After that, you can run away screaming whenever you like. I may too, actually.”
I rubbed my forehead. “Are you a vampire, then?”
He made a scoffing sound. “Is a manatee a mermaid?”
“Only if you’re desperate to see mermaids, I suppose.”
“There you go, then.” He pursed his lips. “Incidentally, while this is a fascinating conversation, I suspect I’d enjoy it even more if I wasn’t chained to a table.”
“Right,” I said, setting the gun down on the table and examining the manacles. They were still as unyielding as ever. “I could go out and get a file. No, what am I thinking? I’ll go get Jackson—”
“No!”
I blinked at him. “But the door is open now.”
