Chapter 23
“Mama?” I call meekly as I open the front door.
“In here!”
My relief at hearing her voice from the sitting room is so immense I nearly collapse.
I had a lot of time to think on the return journey, lightened of the burden of my useless supply bag, but weighed down by yet another twist in reality.
How many times could the world and my own personal history rewrite itself around me before my mind simply broke?
But Mama at home is an inviolable constant in my life. I could never earn my father’s attention, but I’ve never had to ask for my mother’s. It’s always been freely given and readily available. What I saw as weakness was, in fact, a gift she offered me.
I walk in and sit on the rug at her feet, resting my head on her lap. She unpins my hat and strokes my hair.
“How is Maher?” she asks.
“I wasn’t visiting Maher.”
“Oh, really?” Her tone is sharp and knowing.
I glance guiltily up at her and she pinches my cheek softly.
“It was as poor a lie as when you were ‘attending operas’ but actually going to that club. You don’t come home from the opera with small bruises on your neck, smelling of other women’s perfume, or missing a stocking.
Unless the opera has changed since I was a young woman. ”
I flinch, but she just laughs and resumes stroking my hair.
“I love you, my little Anneke, and you deserve to be loved in whatever ways you choose. I wish I’d had that freedom.”
After everything I’ve been through, it’s her acceptance that breaks me.
I cry into her skirts, thinking of who I would be if I hadn’t had her.
Thinking of who I might have been if I hadn’t also had my father.
How much did she have to compensate all these years to make me feel secure and wanted?
And how often did I reject her in favor of chasing after my father’s attention and memory?
“You were right. About Papa.”
“Of course I was. But you needed to learn it for yourself. That’s part of growing up.”
“I’m nearly thirty.”
She tugs on a curl. “And yet you’ll always be my little girl.”
For some reason her gentle possessiveness makes me think of Diavola, left to die alone. I think of all the people I’ve seen, broken and destroyed in body or spirit. By their families, by society, but especially those tormented by Diavola’s devil.
He killed Dávid for no reason. Given what I know now, he had no cause to fear us. He didn’t need Dávid dead. I doubt he even realized Dávid was looking for him, specifically. Dávid just had the misfortune to cross paths with a monster who feeds on pain.
The thing Diavola said about his curiosity tugs at the back of my mind, though. Maybe that’s why he makes a record. So he can rewatch the moment that life leaves. The idea that he might have a reel of Dávid’s last breaths makes me so physically ill I feel sweat break out along my hairline.
“I know Papa doesn’t deserve vengeance,” I say, looking up at Mama once more. “But he did something selfish and horrendous. Something that has cost countless lives. Including Dávid’s.”
“It’s not your responsibility to atone for his sins.” Mama sounds worried, but also sad. She already knows what I’m going to do next.
The devil had no reason to fear Dávid; I’ll make him regret it. My father may have studied monsters and dabbled in hunting them, but he was an academic. I’m a goddamn detective, and I’m the best there is. It’s time to do what my father and Diavola couldn’t. But I’ll need help.
I get up, smoothing back my hair. “I’m going to find this monster, and I’m going to end him. Because it’s the right thing to do.”
Mama wipes under her eyes, then nods firmly. “I’ll start baking, then.”
“It would be more helpful if you’d read Papa’s journals and take notes on everything he theorized could kill or harm supernatural creatures. I have notes, but I could use another set of eyes in case I missed anything. And once you’re done with that, you could—”
“Honestly, Anneke.” Mama stands and puts her hands on her hips.
“Do you think you got your brilliant mind from your father? I’ll collate the notes, and I’ll contact all his idiot friends to see what information they might have without realizing they have it.
And I’ll bake in the meantime, because you and I are still human.
” She jabs me in the belly and then pulls me in for one fierce hug before bustling down to the kitchen.
“And tell Inge I want the headquarters moved back here!” she yells up the spiral stairway.
That request puzzles me as I walk to the Van Engelenhoven house, until the front door opens and I find myself face-to-face with Inge—and Maher. They never stopped working together. No wonder Mama knew my visit to Budapest was a lie.
“Oh,” Inge says, her expression impassive.
“I was wrong.”
Ever the stubborn girl, Inge’s face doesn’t budge. Nor does her body, blocking my way inside. “About what?”
“About so many things. But most important, about who—what—we were chasing. May I come in? Please? I need your help. One last time and then I’ll never bother you again.”
Inge sighs. “Should I let her in?” she asks over her shoulder.
Maher was always lean, but he’s lost weight. There’s a hollowness to his cheeks that wasn’t there before. But his warm brown eyes are the same as they ever were, looking on me without judgment or hatred. Only relief and love.
“Yes,” he says.
I want to throw my arms around both of them.
I want to cry into their shoulders. But I don’t deserve that.
Instead I hold myself bolt-straight as I follow Inge into the sitting room.
Her work has spread. The walls in here are a rich hunter’s green, coupled with oiled wood paneling and velvet-covered furniture in mossy greens to make the room appear almost like a forest. But breaking the effect are the piles and piles of papers on the coffee table and various photos carelessly pinned to the fireplace mantel.
Inge sits primly on a high-backed chair. Maher leans against the back of it.
I sit on the sofa across from them and take a deep breath. “We were hunting the wrong thing.”
Neither of them react, so I push on. “Diavola—she—she isn’t—” I leap back up, wringing my hands and pacing, keeping my eyes alternately on the entry and the fireplace, both of which are easier to look at than the expressions I expect on my old friends’ faces.
I practiced this so many times on the journey home, but I’m already out of order.
“Diavola isn’t our killer. She’s been tracking the murderer the whole time. Using our work to do it, in fact.”
At last I turn and nod to Maher and Inge. “She thinks you’re both very impressive.”
Maher’s left eyebrow shoots up. “You’ve been talking with her?”
Technically he has, too, but now isn’t the time to break that to him.
“I traced her to the island she came from. I’d hoped to destroy her.
But it didn’t turn out how I expected. Nothing has.
She didn’t kill Dávid.” I put my hands over my stomach, trying to contain the sharp ache that even saying his name creates.
“She was in München that night, not London. She saved me.”
Maher stands and guides me to sit next to him on the sofa. “You haven’t told us anything about what happened,” he says, voice soft. He takes my hand in his.
“The truth is—This is where I will lose you forever, and that’s probably for the best, because the truth is that there are monsters in this world.
My father wasn’t mad when he wrote of vampires and other creatures from stories stalking the shadows around us.
I found one in München. A nachzehrer, or vampire.
A dead man who refused to stay dead. He came back and killed most of his family, and then he killed Berend and very nearly killed me.
Diavola lit him on fire and carried me to safety. ”
“That’s why you wouldn’t speak to me when you got home,” Inge says.
I shake my head, keeping my eyes on my lap. “I wouldn’t speak to you because it was my damnable quest that got Dávid killed.”
Maher’s hand twitches, tightening on mine, but he doesn’t remove it. “If I recall, it was Dávid who sent you those first photos of the dead family. He was already on this path.”
“Was he? Or would he have brushed that mystery off as one of life’s unknowable—but still believable—horrors, and moved on? And did either of you hear when I said it was a vampire in München?”
“You didn’t make any of us do this,” Inge says, ignoring my last question. “We all knew that something terrible was happening out there, and we all decided to do what we could to stop it.”
She’s right, but she’s also wrong. I inherited this blood and horror from my father. I was the one who brought it to them. I lower my head into my hands and try to breathe. Because what I have to tell them next is the worst part.
“That means we weren’t wrong about the cinematograph machine and who Dávid found in London,” Maher says to Inge. “It was a man.”
I lift my head. “Not a man.”
Inge frowns. “But you just said Diavola was in München, and—”
“And the thing that killed Dávid is not a human man. Diavola didn’t commit the crimes we’ve been studying, but she did kill my father.
He betrayed her—and the entire world. He set a monster loose on Europe because he hoped to regain my dead brother Pieter.
So, when a devil promised a reunion, my father set him free.
Every death since has been because of it. ”
“When you say set him free…” Maher lets the end hang between us, waiting for me to fill it in.
“Diavola had him trapped in a cave on the island of Lesvos.”