Chapter 36
“I’ve been looking for you,” Abraham Van Helsing says. He takes a step toward me. His slate-gray eyes are illuminated by the sparks around us, his ruddy hair and matching complexion nearly the same color in the shifting light. He wears a wild pink rose pinned to his lapel. “My little girl.”
“You’re dead.” I take a step back.
“He’s dead,” Diavola whispers, like she did so often in my dreams.
“I’m not,” my father says, that low rumble of warning in his voice that I remember so well.
That tone meant I was playing too loudly, or Mama’s cooking wasn’t up to his standards, or one of his colleagues had disrespected him and he brought his anger home to us.
I’m instantly thrown back to that feeling, once more a little girl desperate not to do anything wrong, desperate to think of all the ways I might accidentally say or do or feel something that will incur his wrath.
“Step away from that monster,” Papa says. “She’s trying to keep me from you, the same way your mother did. I’ve been waiting so long for you to find me.”
“He’s a liar,” someone says, tugging on my sleeve. “Please, Anneke.” But the voice feels like a dream. I’ve heard it in so many dreams. It’s not real. My father is, though.
“You don’t believe me?” Papa shakes his head, and his face falls. He’s disappointed in me. He’s always been disappointed in me, and I’ve proved him right. I’m not worth his time or attention or love. I failed him. I was supposed to avenge him, and I haven’t done it. I haven’t done anything.
Tears claw their way up my throat to my eyes. “I saw you die.”
He smiles. It’s the same smile I used to see him give colleagues and imagined receiving myself.
Now it’s mine, at last. “You read my journals, didn’t you?
Death isn’t always final. Not for those of us who still have something to hold on to.
I tried to visit you, so you wouldn’t be sad or worried.
Your mother wouldn’t let me in. But nothing, not even death, could keep me from my little girl.
I would never have left you. Not on purpose, not if I had any other choice.
” His face softens. He leans closer, really, truly seeing me.
All those hours I spent sitting across from his desk, waiting for him to look up.
He has, at last. “I’m sorry you believed I would leave you.
But I’m here, now, and I’m going to make it up to you.
Take my hand. Let me fix this all for you.
Let me be the father I’ve always wanted to be, the one you deserve. I love you.”
I look down at his outstretched palm. This is exactly what I’d always hoped to hear. I have him, at last. He really was guiding me to him with his journals. And Mama wouldn’t have let him back in, not with her constant vigilance against vampires. This is all her fault.
But…there’s something wrong with his hand. What is it?
He never loved you, Diavola whispers in my dreams and in my memories and in my heart. It was never said out of cruelty. It was meant to comfort me, to release me from the burden of seeking my father’s approval even after he was gone.
But he does love me now, doesn’t he? I stare at his hand, lifting my own, but then I pause.
There are no stains on his fingers from his pipe. No callus on his middle finger from so many years of scribbling in his journals. No black smear of ink along the edge of his hand. And, most important, no truth in his words that he would never have left me.
He left me all the time, as easy as breathing.
Without thought and without care. Maybe that’s the source of my intuition, after all.
Mama was right. I spent so long studying my father to try to win his love.
I devoted myself to looking for all the tiny indications of how he felt, what he’d do, how I could avoid his temper and perhaps earn his affection.
I studied every scene and event and meeting, looking for clues as to what I’d done wrong and what I could do better.
But I know now, thanks to the people who do love and value and trust me—Joren, Maher, Dávid, Inge, and Mama, my precious, fierce Mama—that I was never, ever going to find that approval I constantly searched for from him.
Maybe the Watcher’s methods work on those who still hold on to hope. But I don’t hope to live up to my father anymore. I’m better than him. And I believe in myself in a way he never could have believed in me.
I reach out and find Diavola’s fingers. Just like that, she’s real again. The world comes into focus with a pop and a sizzle as one of the poles behind us drops into the waiting cradle, connecting the flow of electricity. I pray it wasn’t the fourth pole, but I don’t dare turn around and look.
Also, I’m holding a knife I don’t remember pulling from my pocket. What was I about to do with it under his influence?
“My father didn’t love me.” I stab the knife into the Watcher’s waiting hand.
He laughs, twisting his palm so the knife is yanked from my grip. He removes it and tosses it away. In a blurry motion not unlike the horrible moving pictures, he has a different face. Or the same face, but less distinct. He could be anyone, if I squinted and thought about it too hard.
“You’re cleverer than your father was,” the Watcher says.
“All I had to do was look just a little like his precious lost son and he was mine for the taking. Oh, the pain he felt whenever he glanced at me! What fun he was. I had plans for Abraham Van Helsing. Diavola ruined them, the way she ruins everything.” He glares at Diavola.
When he looks at me, I can’t quite see him.
But when he looks at her, all his cruelty and malice and hunger come into sharp focus, rendering him truly monstrous.
“You’ll make it up to me,” he says in a discordant singsong voice. “You already are.”
“Leave her alone,” I snarl.
He snaps back to me. “So protective. Fascinating. Have you figured it out yet?”
“Don’t listen to him.” Diavola takes a step back, tugging on me.
“What she feeds on. How she sustains herself. Haven’t you wondered?
I’ll bet she hasn’t told you.” He smiles, the expression peeling apart his lips like a rotting fruit splitting.
“It took me a while to understand, but I had a lot of time in that cave. She’d leave me, depleted, ragged at the edges, barely solid at all.
And then she’d come back from visiting the villages in those dreadful scrubby hills, flush with life and fully refreshed.
Any ideas? No?” He shakes his head as though disappointed in us, then lunges forward two steps.
We trip back in unison. I try to count the poles, but I don’t want to look away from him.
I don’t trust him not to transform into something I won’t be able to resist.
“You can’t know what I feed on, because I don’t even know,” Diavola says. Something in her tone is off, though. She’s talking too quickly, like she’s trying to convince both of them.
“Ah, but you do, my diavola. My perfect fount of wretched need. You devour desperation. You used to skip down to the villages, places where life was difficult, where survival demanded constant efforts. Babies died young, crops failed, a bad fishing season doomed an entire family to starvation. You’d breathe it in and be filled with it.
Everyone in your town knew that about you.
They all saw how you thrived on suffering.
That was why they hated you. That was why they wanted you gone.
You craved suffering, and where you couldn’t find it, you caused it.
You’ve always been this way. I just made it literal. ”
“No,” Diavola says, but it sounds like she’s pleading with him, not arguing with him.
“You’d come back to the cave, sated but still in pain because you were alone and always would be.
Then I’d feed on your pain. It was beautiful.
A perfect circle. That’s why I never tried to escape.
There was something pure about our existence there, something meditative and holy.
” His smile splits open even more as he strokes the wild rose on his lapel.
It’s the same as the ones Diavola planted in her ruined town, worn now as either homage to or mockery of Diavola.
Probably both. “But even I get bored of the same flavor forever, and I took the opportunity of exit when it presented itself. And what things I’ve tasted. Nothing is purer than pain.”
His eyes flicker to me. “Surely you wondered why my diavola was drawn to you. Why, when you look in her eyes, you’re certain she sees only you. It’s not love. It’s need. You’re filled with the desperation she planted in you, and she’s feeding off it. She has been this whole time.”
I want to deny it, but his words have already found their way into my head, tugging on memories and answering questions.
The way Diavola watched and waited for me in cities.
The way she wrote me, spurring me to keep going or telling me to quit, whichever she thought would provoke the strongest reaction.
The way tonight, when I was overwhelmed with desperation to find Inge, she flew toward us like she was being reeled in by a fishing line.
But I have it backward. Diavola wasn’t the one being drawn in. I was. Hooked by the lure of this untouchable, unknowable woman, reeled in time and time again whenever she needed to feed.
I feel like I’ve been scoured on the inside with a wire brush.
“Tonight, in the mirror room. You were so powerful that you were glowing. I was desperate to save Maher and Inge, as desperate as I’ve ever been in my life.
And in München. When I couldn’t save Berend, and I was about to die. You appeared like I’d called for you.”
I turn toward Diavola. I need her to deny it. But her face is warped with anguish, her mouth open like she’s screaming with no sound. She shakes her head.
“I didn’t know,” she whispers. “I promise you, I didn’t know.”