Chapter 21
I should have already known Diavola was here. Laced through the wild roses is her icy perfume. How long has it been caressing my senses while I was too focused on my task to notice?
I wipe the sweat from my brow and turn. Diavola stands on the edge of the cemetery, her head tilted in that way that haunts me asleep and waking. Her eyes, blacker than a burial pit, are fixed on me. Not with malice or rage or fear, but with something worse. Amusement.
“I’m ruining your cemetery so there’s nowhere for you to rest.” It’s not lost on me that she waited to speak until she saw me dump out the remaining contents of my canteen. She doesn’t know I have another, along with stakes and silver blades, in the bag at my feet.
“Oh, Little Fox.” She sighs like the wind passing through the ageless hills around us. “I’m touched you think anyone deemed me worthy of this cemetery. No grave dirt for me, only a naked, battered body tossed onto the rocks. I wasn’t buried. I was disposed of.”
I grit my teeth against the wave of…what, compassion? Mournful horror? She deserves no sympathy, and I refuse to give it. “And yet here you are.”
“Here I am.” She holds her arms wide as though asking for an embrace.
I ready myself for attack. In a fit of paranoia, I even drank some of the holy water earlier, hoping it would protect me from whatever influence she exerts on her victims.
Instead of lunging for my neck or liver or whatever it is she lives on, Diavola points to the side and says, “I planted the roses.”
“What?” If she’s trying to throw me off-balance, she’s succeeding.
“The flowers. I wanted something lovely. Besides,” she says, a note of sly teasing creeping into her voice, “they say wild roses keep away vampires.”
“And you didn’t want any others coming here? Like your friend Dracula?”
I figured it out as soon as I realized she had an accomplice.
My father scribbled that note theorizing that Dracula wasn’t really dead, and then Diavola showed up.
Dracula is the “him” my father never should have trusted.
As soon as I’m done destroying her, I’ll travel to Transylvania and finish what Papa started.
I’ll make Dracula pay for what he did to Dávid.
“Who?” Diavola sits on a stone marker so weathered it no longer marks anything except the inevitable destruction of time.
“Dracula. The other vampire in your duo.”
Diavola’s nose wrinkles with distaste. It’s such a startlingly human expression, it throws into stark relief just how inhuman she looks most of the time. How does anyone see her and think her anything other than a monster? How did I think her a woman for so long?
“I am not a vampire.” She has the audacity to sound offended.
I tick off the reasons I know she is. “You’re unnaturally strong. You’ve lived for more than a century and yet you appear to be a young woman. You prey on humans. No one can agree on what you look like. You’ve infiltrated my dreams and tormented me nightly for—”
“Wait.” A smile tugs on the corners of her pale lips. “I’m in your dreams?”
“You know what you’re doing,” I snap.
“Whatever dreams torment you, those are entirely of your own making. I’m not a vampire.
” She stands and closes the distance between us faster than I would have thought possible.
I take two hurried steps back, leaving my bag unattended at my feet.
She crouches down, white skirts trailing on the ground, and begins looking through it.
“Silver knives,” she says. “Stakes. Garlic cloves. Communion wafers. Trinkets.” She holds up a wooden cross, then drops it back into the bag. “I see you finally read your father’s work. Ah, here.”
She grabs the last canteen of holy water, unscrews the cap, and pours it up and down her bare arm while holding eye contact with me.
She drops it, empty, on the ground. “By all means, try. Try every method you brought to kill me. If any of them worked, neither of us would be here.” To prove her point, she picks up one of the silver daggers and runs the blade over her palm.
It slices—I can see that it slices—but as soon as the edge moves, it’s as though it never touched her. There’s no blood, no wound, nothing.
Diavola isn’t a vampire. She’s something else.
Nothing I’ve done here matters. She’s at her leisure to kill me.
I’ve failed everyone. I drift away from the useless bag I should have abandoned after all and sit on a chunk of the crumbling graveyard wall.
Then I take off my hat. If I’m about to die, I don’t want to do it in this ridiculous thing.
“Please.” I hate how soft and desperate I sound, but I can’t help it. “Please, don’t hurt my mother or my friends after this. I didn’t tell any of them where I was going. They don’t know where you’re from, and it was always me hunting you, anyway.”
Diavola picks her way through the debris and sits next to me.
So close we’re almost touching. Together, we stare out at the horizon.
The foothills weave together like a quilt draped across the land.
Soon the sun will set, and they’ll purple gently until everything goes dark. It’s a nice final view, at least.
“I’m perfectly aware your friends are no threat,” Diavola says. “I’ve spoken with Maher on at least a dozen different occasions.”
My stomach twists with sick dread. I don’t think she’s lying.
“I’ve never spoken to Inge, but I have perused her notes. She’s quite brilliant.”
If Diavola’s seen Inge’s work, that means she’s been in the Van Engelenhoven house. No one is safe. Not even my mother, if Diavola isn’t a vampire. All that time Mama dedicated to sealing herself up in the house, and it doesn’t even matter because there’s more than one type of monster in the world.
“And Dávid—” Diavola starts.
I cut her off, a harsh low bleating of pain. “Don’t. Don’t you dare say his name.”
Diavola shifts so she’s facing me, but I refuse to look at her. “And Dávid,” she continues, her tone gentler, “was always kind whenever we met. I didn’t kill him.”
“Your partner did.” I don’t believe her that it isn’t Dracula, no matter what she says.
“He’s not my partner.” This time it comes out almost a snarl. “You think you’re the only one chasing a monster? You think I’ve been following your progress because I’m scared you’ll catch me? Honestly, Anneke.”
It’s the first time she’s used my name. Hearing it in her winter-lights voice sends a strange thrill down my core that lingers deep and low. It confuses me more than anything else about this encounter has.
“Then why are you following me?” I ask.
“Because you have resources I don’t. Because you understand the modern world in ways I don’t have time to learn. And because you’re quite good at what you do, despite your inability to see that you’ve picked the wrong target. You haven’t been hunting me at all. You’ve been hunting on my behalf.”
“No.” I stand, shaking my head. “No, that’s not true. You’re the murderer. I know you are.”
“We’re looking for the same devil. I’ve been using you to track him. In that way, Dávid’s death is my fault, and I’m sorry for it. But—”
“No!” I whirl, wanting to attack her, wanting to pound my fists against her, wanting to throw myself into her arms and beg—for what, I can’t even say. “I know you’re a murderer. You killed my father. You made him do it.”
Diavola doesn’t blink. She holds me with those terrible eyes, the black of them too big for the white to hold, the bars of her dark lashes too fragile to keep anything out or in. I could fall into those eyes and never surface again.
“I did,” she says. “Would you like to know why?”
I step back, then back again. I need to put distance between us. I need to be far enough away that I can’t smell her, that I can’t see her eyes so clearly. There’s something about being near her that affects me in strange and upsetting ways. Part of her powers, doubtless.
“It won’t change anything.” As much as I’ve wanted those answers, I’m terrified now that knowing will change things. That she’ll take my father away again. I’ve already lost so much of who I thought he was, thanks to his journals and my mother’s confessions. I can’t lose any more.
“Then there’s no harm in listening.” Diavola stands and drifts toward the edge of the cemetery, her bare feet hardly brushing the ground.
I use the opportunity of her turned back to slip a silver dagger into my sleeve. She only cut her hand. Not her heart. I also shove some communion wafers into my pocket, since she never touched those. “Where are we going?”
“You wanted to find my grave dirt. I’ll show you the closest thing there is.”
I hurry to catch up. The town, even abandoned and filled with the dead, was still easier to navigate than the rough, wild hills.
Diavola moves forward, unconcerned. I scramble and climb and tear my hair and skirts free from grasping branches.
After a few minutes, Diavola stops. We’re on the edge of a drop, a ravine sheared from the mountainside by an ancient river that now exists only in the memory of its passing.
“There.” Diavola points.
I lean, fully aware I’m on the edge of a cliff with a creature who makes people kill themselves, and look down. The wind whips at me, tugging my hair free of its bun.
“ ‘There’ what?” All I see are rocks and the ground, so far away.
“That’s where I fell, when they were done.
” She turns back in the direction we came from.
Her eyes trace figures from a memory I’m not privy to.
“After I killed a man for what everyone knew he was doing to the children in my town, they dragged me here and threw stones at me. When I stepped closer, they threw harder. When I wept and begged, they threw harder. At last, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I stood as straight as I could and cursed them all.
Then I let myself fall, hoping for an ending faster and kinder than they would have given me. ”