Chapter 32
Dawn finds Inge, Maher, and me sitting on the floor in a circle around the useless trapdoor over the useless steel cage. My legs are sprawled, my skirts wide, my head hanging. Even Inge is slumping.
“She’s really not coming back,” Maher says.
It’s been thirty-six hours since Diavola disappeared on me.
Thirty-six hours of waiting. Of shoving wax in my ears before opening the door to curious photography enthusiasts only to immediately tell them to leave.
And I’m only confident that I’ll be able to recognize the Watcher, so I won’t let Maher or Inge screen inquiries.
I tried to force them to stop looking for his location at the fair, too, but they insist on going out together.
We can all feel the futility of it, though.
We started out so hopeful, and only got more so with the addition of Diavola.
Now, the impossibility of what we set out to do is at last weighing us down.
“You really think she figured out how to kill him?” Inge asks.
I nod. It’s the only explanation I can come up with. Leave the rest to me, she said. She was willing to work with us up until that point, so something must have changed that made her confident she didn’t need us.
That’s the part that frustrates Inge the most. Diavola didn’t share her discovery.
Inge’s been down in the cellar every night, poring over Diavola’s notes, checking levels of acids and searching for any wear on the weapons, trying to find what method Diavola landed on.
She must have known for days before abandoning us.
That was why she stopped spending time in the cellar testing things out. We should have suspected it.
I’m furious with myself. Furious for trusting her.
Furious for being so idiotically besotted I set aside common sense.
Furious, most of all, for coming to depend on her.
I should have known better. What happened to my intuition?
To that sense inside guiding me to the answers before I fully understood the questions?
No. There are answers here. I can feel them, just beyond my fingertips. Fingertips. Reaching out, touching Diavola’s. The shock and spark between us. That was when everything changed, when it broke, when Diavola decided to leave, when—
When she figured out how to kill the Watcher.
The Palace of Electricity. That’s the key. I sit up straight as though jolted once more. “Frankenstein,” I say.
“Don’t we have enough monsters to worry about?” Maher asks. Then he frowns in mild alarm. “Wait, are you saying that creature is real, too?”
“No. I’m talking about Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Joren loves her. He used to talk about the history of that book all the time.”
“He also loves The Count of Monte Cristo. What do his reading habits have to do with anything?” Inge asks, but Maher holds up a hand and gestures for me to continue.
“I told you Diavola abandoned me after we visited the Palace of Electricity. But I didn’t tell you everything, because I didn’t think it was important.
” That’s a lie. I didn’t tell them everything because I’m ashamed and humiliated.
“Right before she disappeared, we were part of a demonstration on how electric currents can be conducted through people. We each held on to a pole and then joined hands. I felt the spark pass through us. From me, into her. She reacted so strangely, and I thought it was because—” I cut myself off.
I thought it was because she felt something emotionally.
But no. “She had a flush in her cheeks.”
Inge’s eyes go wide. She leans forward intently. “A physical reaction.”
I nod.
Inge snaps her fingers. “The frogs!”
“The frogs,” I agree.
“The frogs?” Maher looks between us, alarmed at our detour into insensibility.
Inge jumps to her feet and begins pacing.
I gently tug her skirt to redirect her so she doesn’t walk directly over the trapdoor.
“One of the pieces of scientific research Mary Shelley was inspired by was a concept known as Galvinism,” Inge says.
“It was an experiment done on frogs that purported to reinnervate dead tissue by running an electrical current through it. The dead frogs moved, and thus were assumed to have been restored to some form of life. Galvini’s nephew even tried to bring a hanged man back to life by jolting him.
It was both distasteful and ultimately hopeless.
They were drawing the wrong conclusions from their frog experiments.
The tissue wasn’t being brought back to life, but merely twitching because of the current. ”
She sounds so much like her father it makes me homesick. I miss Joren and Mama and herring and the smell of the canals. I miss a life that wasn’t happy, necessarily, but that made sense.
Inge stops, pointing emphatically at us.
“Galvinism was never viable. But what if the tissue isn’t entirely dead?
What if it’s in a sort of stasis, removed from the normal flow of time, insulated from injury and decay by something we don’t yet understand?
A jolt might shock the heart back into beating, if only for a few seconds. ”
“The flush,” I say, feeling my face burn. As Inge said, the supernatural is merely science we haven’t figured out yet. There was no real magic in the moment my hand touched Diavola’s. Just electricity.
“The flush!” Inge shouts, triumphant. “Diavola felt it. She could tell that her body was vulnerable while electricity was flowing through it. Which means that’s how we make the Watcher vulnerable. That’s how we kill him.”
Maher looks thoughtful, his wheels already turning.
I laugh, lying back flat on the floor. “The answer was in my father’s journals this whole time.
I could have solved it from the start.” Tears stream down my face and I’m honestly not certain if I’m laughing anymore or crying.
“There was a story about a vampire being destroyed by lightning. The same story popped up on Lesvos—a vrykolakas no one could get rid of until one day it was struck by lightning and disappeared. Because historically, only an act of God could have created that force. But now…”
The power of forty thousand horses, created by engines and steam and pipes and wires. Lightning at the flip of a switch.
“We don’t have to wait for nature to correct this abomination,” I say. “We can do it ourselves.” I sit up and turn to Maher. “We can do it ourselves, can’t we?”
He nods. I was right that he was already plotting how to make it happen. “The cage is steel. It’s conductive. I just have to find someone to wire it so that we can electrocute the whole thing with the flip of a switch. If that doesn’t kill him outright…”
“Then he’ll be mortal enough that a blade should do the trick,” I say. “Or a bullet.”
Inge sighs, exasperated. “You can’t stick a blade or a gun between the bars of an electrocuted cage. I’ll procure a crossbow. It might be nice if it takes a few tries to actually kill him, too. Cathartic.” She smiles, and I’m reminded how ruthless our brilliant, rational Inge can be.
But she’s right. Punching that monster full of holes as he rages against his long-overdue death is exactly the balm our wounded hearts deserve.
Diavola left because she didn’t need us. But it turns out we don’t need her.
I want to consume you, she said. She didn’t stay around long enough to ask whether I wanted to be consumed.
Will she feel it, when we kill him? Will she know?
At least one good thing has come of this.
Diavola didn’t keep her promise, so I’m released from my end of the bargain.
I won’t help her destroy herself. If she can’t figure out how to do it on her own, she’ll be forced to haunt me forever.
Good.
“Inge, make a supply list. Maher, find someone who can electrify our cage. I’ll walk the fair and every surrounding street day and night, as long as it takes until I find his trail. Once we have the cage set, we’ll give him a direct invitation to our demonstration. And then we kill him.”
Inge helps me up. Maher stands, too, and we link, holding hands in a circle around the trapdoor that will drop the Watcher to his doom.
“For Dávid,” Maher says.
“For Dávid,” Inge agrees.
“For Dávid,” I whisper. In my head I add the names of every victim we’ve found. I only ever refer to them by location and manner of death, but I know them. Each and every one. The last name I add is the most precious and maddening to me of all.
Leda.