Chapter 25 #2
Inge’s observation that Diavola’s letters could be love notes or threats has plagued my thoughts since Lesvos. Because now I know they were never threats.
What does that mean? What do I want it to mean? Does it mean nothing at all, and I’m projecting what I want onto Diavola, like everyone else who sees her without truly seeing her? I needed her to be a murderer, so she was. And now I need her to be…what?
“I’ll take over from here,” she says. “You should all leave. It isn’t your responsibility.”
Now I know how to feel: angry. “You made it my responsibility when you dragged my father into your fight.”
“You didn’t have to—”
“In Budapest, you could have left. You could have followed the clues on your own without alerting me. You wrote me a letter. You gave me your name. You teased me. You practically begged me to stay on the hunt.”
She nods, dark eyes mournful. “I was tired of being alone, and so surprised that you’d looked for me. I didn’t want you to stop looking for me after that. It was selfish, and I’m sorry. I’ll go.” She turns as if to leave.
“Do you want to know your name?” I ask, the words coming out in a rush.
I have to keep her here. I have to…I don’t know.
Talk to her. Look at her. If I can just look at her long enough, be around her for more than a few painful conversations, then surely I’ll understand at last what she is to me.
“I found it in the records left in the church.”
The book was so old and brittle most of the pages disintegrated beneath my fingers, but the entries toward the end were still intact.
Given the dates and how small the town was, I’m almost positive I know who she is.
Who she was, at least. And some of the more terrible answers about why the town treated her the way it did were answered, too.
No father listed. A baby born in “sin,” as if such a thing were possible.
Ostracized, demonized, and it must have only gotten worse as she grew older, lovely and fierce and defiant, with eyes for other girls more than the men who desired her.
I might have assumed that last part. I’ve definitely thought about all this much, much more than I should have during the last year of silence from her.
Diavola tilts her head. I’m thrown back to that first night we met, how odd the gesture seemed. How compelling I find it now.
“What makes you think I don’t remember my name?” she asks.
It’s not the response I expected. According to my father’s notes, most undead things lose their identity between dying and waking again. “Because you call yourself Diavola,” I say, rather than insulting her by comparing her to a vampire again.
She moves closer. Too close. Hers is a cold, depthless gaze, startling in its strangeness, and as always I’m lost in it. “Because that’s what I am. A devil, like him. He called himself Diavolo, and he made me in his image.”
I know she means to intimidate or scare me. But I’m not alarmed; rather, I’m angrier than ever.
“You’re not the same as him, Leda,” I whisper.
She backs away as though tugged by marionette strings. Her voice is edged with pain. “That’s not my name. Not anymore. Not while he still walks the earth.”
I want to argue with her that she shouldn’t define herself by him, but I understand. I, too, am bound forever until he’s gone. And haven’t I spent so much of my life flinging myself against the Van Helsing name, trying to please the father who didn’t care that I existed?
“You should go,” Diavola says, turning away once more.
“No, you should stay.” I say it before I know what I’m saying, but it’s the right choice.
I’ve been looking for the best way to neutralize the Watcher once we have him, and at last I’ve found it.
Inge and Maher aren’t going to like it. Hopefully they’ll understand.
Hopefully I’ll understand, too, because there’s still part of me screaming that I need to kill her.
Destroy her. Avenge my father. Rid myself of the fever of her, burning hotter and hotter the last few months.
I stand and move next to Diavola. Not touching her, but shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the cemetery together. “We need your help.”
She doesn’t leave. That’s something. I keep talking, trying to wrap my words like silk strands around her, binding her to me.
“We have the lure for him, we have the trap, we have the cage, we even have new methods to kill him. But we don’t have a guarantee that none of us will fall prey to his compulsions.
You have a hundred years of experience ignoring him.
Help us. Or at the very least, let us help you. Willingly and knowingly this time.”
Diavola doesn’t turn toward me, but there’s an imperceptible shift.
I always expect to feel colder when I’m close to her, but instead there’s an electric anticipation, like the moment before a lightning strike.
The temptation to reach out and brush her arm with my fingers is so strong my hand lifts almost of its own accord.
“So, you’ve forgiven me then?”
My fingers clench into a fist. I move my hand back to my own side. Abraham Van Helsing wasn’t a kind or noble man. He wasn’t a good father. But I’ve had to learn these things too late. I’ll always be angry that I lost the opportunity to reject him on my own terms, on my own timeline.
How much of my life was shaped by watching him and anticipating his every mood, his every thought, so that I could somehow find a way into his affections?
How much of my intuition isn’t instinct so much as training to notice every single detail in an effort to at last find approval?
Who would I have been had our relationship not been cut violently off?
It’s a severed limb, which can’t be healed, versus a broken bone, which I would have grown around.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
“Good,” Diavola says. “You shouldn’t. If I help you, you have to promise me something.”
“If I break my promise, will I die like my father?” I try to keep my tone light, but that’s the question, isn’t it? I know what she’s capable of. No matter what I project onto her or what my dreams whisper seductively to me, Diavola is capable of driving someone to self-murder.
She faces me, and I’m pinned in place by her gaze. “I would never do that to you. But if you break your promise, I’ll haunt you forever. You’ll never be free of me.”
I nearly laugh. I’ve been haunted by Diavola for ten years now. I don’t even know who I’d be without her, and I find myself desperate not to find out.
“One step at a time,” I say, more to myself than to her. “First, we end him. Then…” I wait for her to fill in what she wants.
“You destroy me, too.”
At last I understand. They weren’t love letters, after all.
They were written to make me obsess over her.
To keep me trailing her, fixating on her, hating her, so that when she finally managed to kill her devil, she’d still be my devil and I’d do it to her, too.
“That’s what you were really training me for. ”
Somehow, it hurts more than knowing she killed my father. She’s been using me this whole time.
“Well, come on then.” I stride through the cemetery toward a house where we can destroy two devils. One who wants to live so he can kill forever, and the other who wants to kill so she can die forever.
Diavola, assuming the invitation is my response, follows.
But I didn’t make the promise.