Chapter 22 #2
“I told him I had trapped a monster unlike any he’d seen and that I needed his help to kill the devil himself.
He held my hand in his and said he wouldn’t rest until it was done.
He packed a bag, didn’t so much as bid his family farewell, and joined me that very night.
I brought him here. I lingered near him, afraid of what my devil would say, what he might do.
His eyes were closed and he remained unmoving, seemingly insensible.
I dared to hope that my absence had deprived him of food long enough to render him inert.
Maybe that was the secret, I said. Starve him.
Leave him here alone forever. Had my presence been the thing sustaining him all this time?
“But your father said it was too early to come to that conclusion. He wanted to examine him and run some tests. I, fool that I am, was desperate to check in on my sister’s descendants.
I had been starving in a way, too, cut off from that connection.
Your father bid me go without worry. When I returned, my devil was still in the same state.
Your father, however, had a frenzied gleam in his eyes.
He told me he’d figured it out. All I had to do was find the whitest, purest sheep on the entire island. ”
“What?” I ask, genuinely confused.
She lifts her hands as if to echo my confusion.
“Who was I to question your father, after hearing what an unparalleled mind he had? After spending our entire journey here being regaled with story after story of his studies, his findings, the way he had defeated the most powerful vampire to ever live? I have questions about that, by the way,” she says, frowning.
I shrug. “So did he.”
“Well, a sheep seemed to make as much sense as anything else. After all, I’d been sacrificed to protect the town from my evil.
Maybe a sacrifice was what it would take to end my devil.
I went out searching. It took me two weeks, but I found it.
A perfect, unblemished sheep. I carried it the whole way here, terrified of its somehow getting injured and ruined.
When I got back to the cave, this is what I found. ”
She lifts one of the stakes, then slams it into the ground with a ringing crash, the sound echoing around us.
“Nothing,” she says, biting off the word.
“I told your father exactly what my devil was. I showed him the town. And still he pulled up these stakes and escorted that monster back to Europe.”
I sit heavily on the cave floor, all arguments dying before they can fully form.
It’s not hard to imagine exactly what happened.
It wouldn’t even have taken supernatural persuasion.
Just a promise that my father could get Pieter back.
Doubtless the great Abraham Van Helsing thought himself up to the task of controlling the devil himself.
Or maybe that never even occurred to him.
Maybe he thought this monster another angel in disguise.
The answer, at last, to all his searching. A miracle held here just for him.
“So, yes, I killed your father.” Diavola picks up another stake and holds it out to me. An offering or an excuse, I don’t know which. “But every death since he freed my devil is blood on his hands.”
“Why didn’t—” My voice cracks. I should never have come in here.
I should never have listened. My father’s scribbled apology feels as though it’s carved onto my heart.
It wasn’t an apology, not really. It was an admission of guilt.
Diavola was both jury and executioner for his unconscionable crime.
“Why didn’t your devil kill him? Or you, once he was free? ”
“He feeds on pain. Death wouldn’t have brought your father any more pain than knowing he’d failed to get his son back, once and for all. And my devil would never do me the kindness of giving me an ending. He savors the knowledge that I’m still out here, hunting him.”
I stand. I need to move, get out of here, make her hurt the same way I am. I’m desperate to feel anything other than this devastating certainty that she was justified in doing what she did. That I’ve devoted the last few years to hunting the wrong monster, in memory of yet another monster.
“He savors it like you’ve savored the knowledge that I was hunting you?” I snap.
Diavola freezes. She freezes so long I wonder if something inside her has broken.
Then, as suddenly as she stopped moving, she rises to standing in a single smooth motion.
“I thought myself divorced of his influence, but you’re right.
He wants to feel, and he can’t, so he creates a nightmare crescendo of pain in others.
I want to feel, and I can’t, so I let you chase me while I luxuriated in the idea that you felt more for me than anyone else ever could. ”
As fast as a snake striking, Diavola is right in front of me, inches from my face. It’s such a familiar position, I half-expect her to whisper a truth I don’t want to hear and then kiss me.
She places her fingers on my wrist as though taking my pulse. It’s pounding, wild and unsteady at the nearness of her. But she’s not mocking my traitorous, confused heart. She slides her fingers up along my skin and pulls out the silver knife I hid in my sleeve.
“So you have no questions about whether you could have ever killed me,” she whispers, driving the blade into her heart and leaving it there.
The only evidence of damage is a cut in her white dress.
“And now you know why your father died. He deserves no vengeance. Go. Be free. I hope someday you don’t think of me at all.
” She tilts her head once more, but this time her eyes linger on my lips.
For a breathless eternity I wonder if she is going to kiss me.
Instead, she unsheathes the knife from her heart and puts it back into my shaking hand.
“It should be easy to forget me,” she says with the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “Everyone does.”
Without so much as a whisper of bare feet on stone, she’s gone.
And with her goes the last decade of my life.
Wasted on a man who never deserved justice, chasing the wrong monster, and flinging myself toward a phantom I could never catch, much less destroy.
A phantom who might never have deserved destruction anyway.
I sink to my knees and linger in that unearthly cold, still marking the presence of the demon my father set free.
“What do I do now?” I whisper, but no one is left to answer.