Chapter 34
“Where is Inge?” Diavola demands as we rush out of the nearest gate and into the streets of Paris.
“Why? So you can muddle our minds and go there alone?” Maher nearly gets clipped by a carriage. Diavola grabs his hand and pulls him out of the way just in time. We continue running, ignoring angry shouts as we barrel through groups heading toward the fair.
“I wouldn’t muddle your minds,” Diavola says. “I’d leave you behind and get there much faster. Don’t you want me to do that? For Inge?”
“We can’t trust you,” Maher says, tears streaming down his face. Because he does want her to do that, despite everything. I do, too, but we can’t leave this to Diavola. Inge is ours. Our friend, our sister, our responsibility.
“You can’t,” Diavola agrees. She has the audacity to sound brokenhearted about it. “But you can trust me to do whatever it takes to protect Inge.”
I yank Maher to a stop and pull the flyer out of his pocket. “It has to be all of us. Truly working together for once. Maher and I will focus on getting Inge out, and you…Well, here,” I say. “Look.”
Diavola stares down at the artist’s rendition of her. Her expression goes far away and sad as she traces the contours of her face. Then, like a clap of thunder, her eyes go dark with rage. “Let’s give him what he wants.”
Instead of leaving us behind, she takes our hands.
With Diavola rushing ahead of us like a vengeful figurehead on the bow of a warship, the crowds unconsciously part.
Paris itself opens up to allow us speedy passage.
Maher and I sprint to keep up. She could go faster without us, but I’m relieved she isn’t leaving us behind.
“Left!” Maher shouts. Diavola follows his directions and in another couple of turns, we stop. Above a door in fashionable lettering not unlike that above the new metro stations is a sign that says “The House of Curiosity.”
We stare upward in unison. Five years of hunting this monster, much of that spent not even knowing who we were actually tracking. And now, at last, we’re here. My own desperation and fear and rage are reflected in Maher’s expression.
Diavola has no expression. She looks blank. Five years of his evil infected our lives. It was more than a hundred for her.
“Do we have a plan?” Maher reaches for the door handle, because it doesn’t matter if we do. We’re going in no matter what.
“I’ll attack him,” Diavola says. “You get Inge and run.”
None of us question what state we might find Inge in. We can’t let ourselves think about it, lest we succumb to despair. And Inge wouldn’t tolerate that.
“Try to lure him back to our house, if you can,” I say. “We have the cage ready.”
Diavola nods, which is generous of her. We all know this is the end of our grand plans.
All we can hope for is to save Inge. The best-case scenario is that we get Inge away and then the Watcher escapes and we start on this moving walkway of terror and futility once more, traveling in circles around Europe, always a few steps too late.
The worst-case scenario? Too many to think about.
“Do we block our ears?” Maher asks me.
I hesitate, then shake my head. “We need to be able to communicate with each other. If he starts talking to us—”
Diavola cuts me off. “I won’t let him.”
With that decided, Maher opens the door and we enter. Of all the things I imagined the Watcher’s den of murder and torture might look like, a photo gallery isn’t one of them.
“Budapest,” Maher whispers, staring at a portrait of a family hung prominently on the gallery wall. “That’s how we met.”
I scan the room. It’s empty, save the ghosts framed and staring at us.
The family in Budapest. The clerk in Amsterdam.
The newlyweds. The teacher. Up and down the walls, captured in a single perfect moment when they were still alive, still breathing, still human.
Before the Watcher got to them and stripped it all away in pursuit of pain.
It’s a history of how Maher, Inge, and Dávid became my family.
My heart seizes and I rush from photo to photo. There are so many I recognize, like the woman Elisa whose mother reported her missing. So many more I don’t. So many we missed. “Dávid’s not here,” I say, simultaneously relieved and devastated.
“Look, they change,” Maher says, but he doesn’t need to.
I see the exact moment the portraits start to shift.
The expressions become less posed and formal, more visceral.
I wonder how many people have walked through this door, unaware of what they’re looking at.
And then I see him. My friend. My lover.
The person who I knew would always be there for me, no matter what, and whom I wasn’t there for in the end.
Dávid stares out at me, and I don’t need the Watcher to fill me with pain and despair. It comes all on its own.
Maher puts his hand on my shoulder. “Inge needs us. Come on.”
Diavola isn’t distracted like we are. She glides straight through the room to a door on the other side. It’s locked, but Diavola pulls until it snaps. When injury isn’t a risk and pain isn’t felt, what can’t she do?
She eyes the darkness beyond. “Let me go first.” Maher and I wait until she’s through the door, then join her. The only light is coming from behind us, but it’s still illuminating the room more than it ought to, refracting and bouncing off of…
“Mirrors?” I touch the nearest one. There’s a sliding sound.
The door disappears as a light blazes on overhead.
The bulb is bare, the mirrors diffusing its glare so the entire space is brilliantly illuminated.
Everywhere I turn, my own terrified face looks back at me.
I whirl, but there are no doors. Only panels of mirrors, fitted perfectly together.
Even the floor and ceiling are mirrors. Maher shouts in alarm as the room begins spinning around us.
The walls and ceiling whirl, picking up speed.
Only the floor stays in place, but with the optics of the infinitely repeating mirrors, it feels unsteady.
Maher cries out in pain. I rush to him. His fingers are bleeding.
“I tried to stop it,” he says. I can’t tell how much damage he did trying to grab a panel and hold on. But the blood is coming fast. I take my knife and cut off a length of my underskirt, then wrap it around and around his fingers, trying to stem the flow.
“Welcome,” someone says from above. His voice is like the mirrors around us. Spinning and disorienting, ready to cut us open.
Diavola looks at me. At last I notice that she doesn’t appear in the images around us. She’s just another flash of white light. I stare at her as a way of grounding myself. Like the stationary poles on the moving walkway—something to hold on to when the entire world feels unsteady.
I reach for her fingers and weave mine through them.
How can she ever know what she means to me when she can’t experience the aching shock of contact between us?
I’m going to die today. But I don’t want to go without Diavola knowing that she is sunk so deeply into me I couldn’t disentangle her from my heart even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. Not ever.
“I’m here,” Diavola says, staring only at me.
“At last,” the Watcher answers. “I’ve missed you.”
She tips her head back, eyes like a shark as she stares upward at her hidden prey. “Let us out and I’ll show you how much I’ve missed you.”
“Oh, but this is delicious,” he croons. Everything about his voice should sound normal, but there’s something missing. Like the recordings played with the moving pictures. A subtle disconnect that jars my senses and tells me something is wrong. “So much pain.”
Maher stares down at his fingers, horrified.
“Leave him alone,” I shout.
“Not his pain,” the Watcher says, laughing. “That’s nothing.”
Diavola punches a fist into the nearest panel.
It tears through, the glass cracking, the gears whining.
The mirror cuts through Diavola and she cuts through it, too, panel after panel, refusing to let go of whatever she’s grabbed onto.
There’s a smell of smoke and a terrible grinding noise as the room judders to a halt.
“Let Inge leave with them and I’ll stay,” Diavola says. “I’ll do whatever you want. You can have your fill of me forever.”
“No,” I whisper. “No, you can’t.”
“She’s right, my diavola. You can’t fill me.
Not on your own. It’s the pain of the two of you, together.
Look at the way she holds on to you. Look at the way she stares at you, as though she could make you real by sheer force of will.
You were fading all those decades we spent together.
Your pain had settled into a single note, boring and flat.
But now, with her? It’s a symphony. A banquet. It’s exquisite.”
“No.” Maher puts his good hand on my shoulder, trying to tug me away from Diavola. “No, that’s not the deal. Just Diavola. No one else.”
The laughter rains down on us, magnified and multiplied as if the mirrors are reflecting it, too. “It never stops fascinating me, how humans think they can bargain, right up until the end. Creatures built on an irrational belief that they can defy the inevitable.”
I let go of Diavola’s hand and take Maher’s in both of mine. “Maher,” I say, pleading with him to understand. “If you could have taken Dávid’s place, would you have?”
“That’s not—”
“I would have. I know you would have, too. Let me save Inge. Let me save both of you. Please. I’ve never forgiven myself for Dávid’s death. It was my fault.”
“No.” Tears leak out of the corners of his eyes, catching in his thick black lashes. “This is all that demon’s fault. Not yours.”
“My father made a deal with him because I wasn’t enough. I’m going to make a deal with him because you and Inge are. You’re worth everything.” I kiss his cheek. As I press my lips against him, I whisper, “Lightning is how we kill him. Don’t give up.”
I have to give Maher a reason to hope so he’ll leave. I don’t think they’ll actually find the Watcher again, much less kill him. But I’ll say whatever gets Maher and Inge out of here safely.
He shudders, then nods. “I’ll take Inge. I promise she’ll be safe.”
With a last embrace, I release him. “I accept the deal,” I shout.
“No!” Diavola shakes with fury, bare feet no longer touching the floor.
Her hair and dress whip around her with violent lashes, and she glows from within.
Not the sickly glow of the nachzehrer in München so long ago, but a glow like dawn on the horizon.
“You don’t get to take this, too. You don’t get to take anything, ever again. ”
“Sweet girl,” the Watcher says, “You—”
There’s a thud as something falls on top of the room, and then a much sharper thud that shakes the entire structure. One of the ceiling panels crashes down, shattering.
Diavola doesn’t hesitate. She rips off one mirror, then another until she finds the door back to the gallery.
She glances at me, begging silently. I shake my head.
Not without Inge. With a defeated nod, Diavola keeps tearing away mirrors until a second door is revealed.
She shoves it open and the three of us burst out into a new room.
A projection on the wall flickers with eerie silver light.
I tear my eyes away, knowing that just that glimpse of the last moments of a poor young man’s life will haunt me forever.
In a circle in the center of the room are lights, a cinematograph camera, and one of the magnetic recorders, all ready to go. Or at least, they were. Two of the lights have been knocked down, their bulbs in pieces on the floor. The recorder has been torn open. And there’s no sign of Inge.
“Inge!” I shout. “Inge, where are you?”
“Inge!” Maher rushes into the dim corners of the room, kicking over the camera in a fury. “There’s another door, it’s—” He flings it open. It leads outside to an alley. He groans in despair. “She has to be here, she has to—”
There’s another thud as the mirror room shudders from an impact. I look in the shadows and find a ladder rising into darkness. “Maybe she’s up there,” I say. Then I freeze as a full-throated growl echoes above us.
“Maher,” I whisper, backing away from the ladder. “Look for another door. Inge has to be in here somewhere.”
Diavola’s staring straight up into the inky space I can’t pierce. “Inge’s here.”
“Where?”
Before she can answer, a lithe gray body is flung from above, crashing down to the floor with a pained yelp. It’s a wolf, sleek and beautiful and enormous. I get one look at its intelligent, luminous green eyes before they roll back as the animal loses consciousness.