Chapter 22
The smell in the cave is overpowering. Diavola is an icy breeze, sharp but bracing, like my favorite time of year. This is slipping beneath the surface of a frozen lake, trapped so deep not even the sun can find you.
On the floor of the cave are five long metal spikes and an enormous sledgehammer.
Diavola drifts around them. “I asked the devil to wait here for me, promised him he’d like the surprise.
Pretended I was in awe and grateful for what he’d done.
I went back into the church that I swore I’d never enter again and picked up my supplies.
When I came to the cave, his back was turned.
I flew into him with all the rage I’d carried with me past death.
I drove the first spike through his hand.
He didn’t struggle. I pierced his other hand and his feet and his heart, not that the placement mattered.
All that mattered was staking him to the rock so he couldn’t leave.
He smiled up at me when I was finished and asked what I planned to do next.
I had no plans. Just desperate determination that he wouldn’t continue down the mountain to where my sister lived. ”
“Why didn’t you kill him?” My teeth chatter, which I know is irrational because the temperature in here isn’t cold. But my body and my senses don’t agree with each other.
“I stabbed him through the heart with a giant stake.” She nudges one with her foot.
It rolls away with a metal clanging. “I lit him on fire. I poisoned him. I crushed him under rocks. I tried cutting his head off, slicing his wrists open, disemboweling him. Everything looked like it was working, until it just…didn’t.
And all the while he smiled at me, patiently waiting.
Asking me how I felt. Asking me how I liked the gift he had given me.
Asking me what I would exist for, now that I had to exist forever.
” A shudder passes over her, like wind rippling across the surface of a wheat field.
She lifts the sledgehammer as easily as I might lift a pencil.
“I told him I would exist to make certain he never walked the earth again. Every night, I moved through the town with a candle to let my sister know I was okay. To give her hope. After a few years, I dared venture farther. I went down to her new village, sometimes.”
Diavola glances at me through her lashes.
It’s an almost shy expression, which makes no sense.
“She never recognized me, though. Not really. She was kind and welcoming, but puzzled. I was like a word on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t quite land on.
It broke my heart, but I told myself it was for the best that she would never truly comprehend what I’d become.
I made up a story about being a cousin of a cousin.
I could sit at her table and sample her life for a few hours at a time.
I got to watch as she bore babies to a man who loved her.
Watch as those babies grew up, beloved and nurtured the way we hadn’t been. Watch as she grew old.”
“They never realized it was you?” It makes no sense.
She shakes her head. “No one recognized me from one visit to the next. It wasn’t that they forgot me. It’s just that I have no real impact on the world. The world has no impact on me, either.” She crouches, puts a hand on the floor of the cave, and brings the sledgehammer down on it.
“No!” But before I can cross the distance to her, she holds out her perfect white hand. Uninjured. Unblemished.
“I don’t age. I don’t hunger, or thirst. I don’t sleep.
I can’t feel heat or cold. I can’t taste or smell.
But I can see and hear. And he knew that.
He talked to me, a constant stream of sweetness, of promises.
He pushed against me with all his will. I could feel it, tugging on me.
His mistake was changing me to be like him, though.
It’s hard to corrupt the incorruptible. The strangest part, the one that worried me most, was that he didn’t seem to mind.
He was content to wait it out. To wait forever, it felt like.
Whenever I raged at him for his patience and ease, he laughed and said I’d fed him well enough for generations. ”
“You fed him?” I ask, aghast.
She tosses the sledgehammer bitterly back into the darkness. “When he changed me. He feeds on pain. Surely, you’ve noticed.”
I shake my head. I could accept creatures feeding on blood or internal organs, but something intangible? “Is he a sadist, then?”
Diavola sits, her white skirt pooling around her. She looks like a moon in the center of the night sky. “I think he’s just curious, which is far, far worse.”
“Do you feed on pain, too?”
Diavola shakes her head.
“What do you feed on?”
“I don’t know.”
I narrow my eyes. That doesn’t seem likely. But before I can press the issue, she moves on in her story.
“I thought we would continue here until the sun ceased to burn in the sky and everything fell into darkness forever. It wasn’t such a bad existence.
I watched my sister grow old, happy and satisfied with her life.
I watched her daughter become a mother, and then her daughter become one, too.
I couldn’t feel happiness or love, but I could observe it.
I ranged outward, too, visiting other villages.
Helping where I could. Getting rid of a handful of restless, simple vrykolakas.
Making certain no harm ever befell my sister or her family.
Then the earthquake struck. By the time I made it back to the cave, he was nearly free.
I managed to stake him once more, but it was close.
I realized I couldn’t keep him here forever.
Eventually something else would happen, and he would escape.
That was why he was content to wait. Time was nothing to him.
I had to kill him, but I needed help. After making certain he was fastened tightly once more, I left. ”
“But how?”
She tilts her head. “What do you mean?”
“You said the sailors stranded him here. And Dracula—vampires—other things like you can’t cross water.”
“It wasn’t the salt water keeping him here. He was in a new place. Happy to wander until his wanderings took him elsewhere. I can’t speak for vampires, but the only difficulty I have in crossing water is navigating the ways the world changes. Eleni helped me.”
I must scowl, because Diavola smiles affectionately.
“She doesn’t know who I am, but she recognizes me more than most. She senses kinship, I think.
” Diavola pauses, and the intensity of her attention shifts to me.
“No one sees me the same way between one visit and the next. No one recognizes me, instead turning me into what they expect me to be. A beautiful woman. An old woman. A barely remembered relative. Someone who will be forgotten as soon as she’s gone.
Except you. You’ve always known me. Why is that? ”
I clench my jaw. “Maybe because I hate you.”
She nods, thoughtful. “Maybe.” But a single blink of her eyes makes the answer clear. She could have a thousand different faces, and I would still know those eyes. They’re seared into my soul, along with the winter perfume of her. I can’t tell her that, though.
“Eleni got me passage to Europe. You’re probably wondering how I speak your language, if I grew up isolated in this small town.”
I wasn’t, but now I am.
Diavola holds out her hand again. “I’m not like he is.
I don’t burrow deep into minds the same way.
But I sometimes send tendrils in. And when I do that, the information flows both ways.
” She flips her hand and cups her palm, like she’s cradling something small in it.
“I take only what I need. Including languages. I’ve collected ever so many of them, just like you.
My way of learning is easier, though.” She pauses, as though expecting me to laugh, but I’m horrified.
I can’t stop imagining her sending tendrils into my brain and taking whatever she wanted.
Including all the dreams I’ve had, all the thoughts, all the feelings.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she says, misinterpreting my expression.
“They don’t forget what I pull from them.
It’s the same as when he feeds, actually.
He doesn’t take away the pain. It’s like—it’s like if you walked into a kitchen filled with the scent of bread and breathed in as deeply as you could.
The bread is still there, whole and untouched. ”
I shake my head, eyes wide, unsure why she thought that would be reassuring.
She moves on. “Once I was in Europe, I met with everyone I could find who saw the hidden things of the world. They all spoke highly of one man, claimed he knew more about the supernatural than any priest. That suited me. I have a dislike of priests, on account of being stoned for my sins.”
Something fierce wells up in me. I can’t tell if it’s anger toward her, or on her behalf.
The warning that I shouldn’t listen to her flares again. She told me the devil who created her could push his words in and tug on your will. Is she doing the same to me? Has she already begun? Or did she start years ago at our first meeting?
Every contact leaves a trace. It’s the same principle. She touches someone and they touch her back. Surely, I’d be able to tell if she was inside, wouldn’t I? I’m so concerned with taking stock of whether she’s supernaturally manipulating me that I fail to make the connection before she says it.
“I found Abraham Van Helsing.”
“Oh,” I say, the wind knocked out of me. We’ve reached that part of the story.