“It appears you’re quite a remarkable creature—we’re all unusually talented people, each in our separate ways, but none of us can open a hole in the world where there was none. Does Cornelius know? It would be just like him, collecting all the best things and locking them away in that mausoleum he calls a house.” Havemeyer shook his head fondly. “But we’ve agreed he can’t keep you to himself any longer. We’d very much like to speak with you further.” My eyes flicked around the room—from Jane to Bad to Havemeyer’s white fingers held like a knife blade to Samuel’s throat—as if I were solving a math equation again and again, hoping for a different answer.
“Come with me—immediately and without fuss—and I won’t suck the life out of your poor little grocery boy.”
And Havemeyer let his fingertips rest, with obscene tenderness, against Samuel’s skin. It was like watching a flame flicker in the wind: Samuel’s entire body seized and shuddered, his breath drawing harshly against the cotton gauze. His legs sagged.
“No!” I was moving forward, reaching for Samuel and half catching him as he pitched forward. Then both of us were on the floor, Samuel’s shivering weight slumped over my knees, my left arm burning as the barely scabbed wounds split and bled. I tugged the sodden cotton from his mouth and he breathed easier, but his eyes remained vague and distant.
I think I must have been whispering words (no, no, Samuel, please) because Havemeyer tsked. “There’s no need for hysterics. He’s perfectly fine. Well, not perfectly—he was quite uncooperative with me when I tracked him down last night. But I was insistent.” The not-smile returned. “All I had to go on when you vanished—taking some of me with you, of course—was his little love note. Which you so heartlessly left behind at Brattleboro, and which he so foolishly composed on the back of a Zappia Family Groceries receipt.”
Hold On January. Such a small, brave act of kindness, repaid with suffering. I’d thought only sins were punished.
“He’ll recover, if nothing else unfortunate befalls him. I’ll even leave the dog alone, and your maid.” Havemeyer’s voice was confident, almost casual; I pictured a butcher calling a reluctant cow onto the slaughterhouse floor. “Simply come with me now.”
I looked at Samuel’s pale face below me, at Bad with his splinted leg, at Jane, jobless and homeless on my behalf, and it occurred to me that, for a supposedly lonely orphan girl, there were a surprising number of people willing to suffer on my behalf.
Enough.
I slid Samuel off my lap as gently as I could. I hesitated, then let myself brush a dark curl of hair away from his clammy forehead, because I was probably never going to get another chance and a girl should live a little.
I stood. “All right.” My voice was a near-whisper. I swallowed. “All right. I’ll go with you. Just don’t hurt them.”
Havemeyer was watching me. There was a kind of cruel confidence in his expression, the swagger of a cat stalking something weak and small. He reached his bare hand toward me, white and somehow hungry-looking, and I stepped toward him.
There was a scrabbling behind me, a snarl, and Bad leapt past me in a streak of bronze muscle.
I had a sudden movie-reel memory of Mr. Locke’s Society party the year I was fifteen, when it had required the intervention of several party guests and a butler to dislodge Bad’s teeth from Havemeyer’s leg.
There was no one to intervene this time.
Havemeyer made a shrill not-very-human sound and staggered backward. Bad growled through his mouthful of flesh and planted his feet as if they were playing tug-of-war for possession of Havemeyer’s right hand. If Bad hadn’t been already injured, if his splinted back leg hadn’t folded beneath him, maybe he would’ve won.
But Bad stumbled, whimpering, and Havemeyer ripped his hand away in a spatter of blackish blood. He clutched both hands to his chest—the left one bound in gauze, missing three waxen fingertips, the right one now punctured and torn—and looked at Bad with an expression of such wrath that I knew, with perfect clarity, that he would kill him. He would bury his ruined hands in Bad’s fur and hold on until there was no warmth left in him, until the amber light of his eyes went cold and dull—
But he was unable to do so, because there was a metallic click, like flint-stones striking—and then a sudden thunderclap.
A small hole appeared in Havemeyer’s linen suit, directly above his heart. He blinked down at it in confusion, then looked up with an expression of absolute incredulity.
Darkness bloomed around the hole in his chest and he fell. It wasn’t a theatrical or graceful collapse, but more of a sideways, melting-candle slump against the doorway.
He took a hideous, wet-sounding breath, as if he were sucking tar through a straw, and met my eyes. He smiled. “They’ll never stop looking for you, girl. And I promise”—the tar-sucking sound again, as his head slumped forward—“they’ll find you.”
I waited for the next gargled breath—but it didn’t come. His body looked somehow smaller as he lay there, like one of those desiccated spider-corpses that collect in windowsills.
I turned slowly around.
Jane stood with her legs planted wide, arms raised and perfectly steady, both hands wrapped tight around—
You know how it feels when you see a familiar object out of its usual context? As if your eyes can’t quite make sense of the shapes they’re seeing?
I’d only ever seen that Enfield revolver in its glass case on Mr. Locke’s desk.
A single coil of oily smoke rose from the barrel as Jane lowered it. She inspected the revolver with a cool, detached expression. “I’m a little surprised it fired, to be honest. It’s an antique. But then”—she smiled, a vicious, gleeful smile, and I suddenly saw her as she must have once been: a young Amazon reveling in the thrill of the hunt, a hunting cat prowling through the jungles of another world—“Mr. Locke always kept his collections in very good shape.”
Of the four of us—five of us? Did Havemeyer count?—only Jane seemed fully in possession of her own body. Bad hopped in agitated, three-legged circles around Havemeyer and made whimpering, muttering sounds, apparently complaining that he’d been cheated of a good fight. I sank back to my knees beside Samuel, who was stirring weakly, grimacing and twitching as if he were locked in some unpleasant dream battle. I felt my pulse thud-thudding through my bleeding, bandaged arm and thought, inanely: It’s not like our story papers at all, Samuel. Shouldn’t there be more blood? More fuss?
Jane didn’t seem concerned. She laid a cool hand against my face and met my eyes with a weighing expression, like a person checking a recently dropped china doll for fractures. She nodded once—a questionable diagnosis, because I felt pretty fractured—and began moving purposefully around the cabin. She unfolded a moth-chewed sheet beside Havemeyer, rolled his body neatly onto it, and hauled him out the door. There was a series of unpleasant, meaty thunks as he cleared the threshold—Thresholds are awfully dangerous places, I thought, with a semihysterical hiccup of laughter—and then nothing but the shush of something heavy dragging through pine needles.
Jane returned with two rusting buckets of lake water, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, looking for all the world like an industrious housewife rather than a murderess. She saw me and stopped, sighing a little. “See to Samuel, January,” she said softly.
