Chapter Five #3
“It’s not nothing.” If Sam didn’t know better, she’d have thought Van Helsing cared.
In his pajamas, he didn’t smell of leather, but of dandelions.
It was a scent that so reminded Sam of the fields behind her childhood home on the outskirts of Chicago that she felt dizzy, confusing for a moment the boy she’d known with the man she’d come to fear.
Van Helsing settled the blankets around Sam. Then he went around to the end of her bed and cracked open her travel trunk, rooting through her things like he had a right to them.
“What are you doing?” Sam objected.
“We need to dress that wound,” Van Helsing said, withdrawing her medical kit. He bent over Sam and ripped the rest of the sleeve off her nightgown, before gently wiping the blood away.
“Stop at once, that’s—” Whatever Sam had been about to say was lost in the stinging of the iodine. She was still gasping as he dressed it with witch hazel, then bound it in gauze, wrapping it around her arm gently but firmly.
“I’m afraid you might need a new nightgown,” Van Helsing said, drawing the blankets higher around her.
“Why are you helping me?” Sam whispered.
Van Helsing held out his hands. “We’re on the same team, Miss Harker, or had you forgotten?
” Reluctantly, Sam laid her frozen hands in his.
They engulfed hers, hot as living flames.
She shuddered as Van Helsing massaged her palms, sending pins and needles prickling through her frozen fingers as he worked warmth back into them.
“But you’re—” Sam didn’t know how to say it. “We’re not friends.”
Van Helsing’s brow furrowed. “You may not like me, but I made a promise to my father, and I intend to keep it.”
Sam gave a hiccupping laugh. “Your father. Of course.” And here she thought perhaps a fraction of the boy she’d known was still in there—glimpsed in the scent of dandelions and those wide blue eyes. She ought to have known better.
“He bade me keep you safe, and I mean to,” Van Helsing said. “Safe from monsters . . . and safe from yourself.” Was that what he thought he had been doing? As if threatening to murder Sam incessantly were taking care of her!
“That’s not your responsibility,” Sam said tightly.
“It is when you’re incapable of doing so yourself,” Van Helsing retorted, letting go of Sam’s hands.
Her cheeks burned. It was nothing she hadn’t said herself, but it hurt coming from someone else.
“You know you are susceptible to the influence of evil, that you are consorting with monsters, and yet you flirt with it. But there is no dabbling with evil. It is like mold. Once it taints you, it will take you over entirely, and anything good in you will slough into rot. You will not be yourself any longer—”
“And I and everyone I love will suffer for it. So you’ll put me down, like Lucy before me. I know,” Sam said. “You’ve made that much perfectly clear.”
Van Helsing shook his head. “My father has told me what became of Lucy Westerna. I do not wish the same fate for you.”
“How thoughtful,” Sam said tartly. “May we all have such good friends, who will murder us when we no longer fit the molds they have made for us.”
“Better friends who will stop you than friends who won’t tell you you’ve gone too far until you’re too far gone.” Van Helsing shook his head, exasperated. “What are you even doing in the field? If I wasn’t here . . .”
I would have died, Sam thought, rubbing the chilblains on her arms. She didn’t need Van Helsing to tell her how useless she was in the field. Sam was exquisitely aware of her deficiencies, her dependence. But . . . he did save her life. Perhaps she might try talking to him.
“It’s my grandfather,” Sam said, giving him a sideways glance. “You’ll remember he disappeared when I was ten.”
Van Helsing looked consternated. “What does your grandfather have to do with anything?”
“Would it actually kill you to listen for once?” Sam was beginning to regret the whole endeavor.
Van Helsing crossed his arms. “Fine.” But he did quiet.
“The day he left, there was this code tapping over his radiotelegraph,” Sam said. “At first, I couldn’t make sense of it. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. But then I saw it in a photograph in the newspaper.”
“The Beast murders,” Van Helsing said. “Then that was—”
“Professor Moriarty,” Sam finished for him. Van Helsing frowned. “My grandfather warned me not to try to find him.”
“But you couldn’t leave him.”
“No, I can’t,” Sam said.
The door opened on creaky hinges. Hel stood in her nightgown, her ginger curls burning in the flickering gaslight of the lamp she held in her hand.
Sam shot her a hurt look. There was no way Hel hadn’t heard Sam’s scream. No world in which the Hel Sam knew wouldn’t come running when Sam was in danger. Even when they’d been at odds, in Paris, she’d done that much. But Hel seemed not to notice. Seemed not to even care.
“I heard a scream,” Hel said, taking in the room. The shattered glass, the bloody painting, the catastrophe of Sam’s notes. The state of Sam. Sam could see other guests behind Hel, wrapped in robes, craning their necks for a look.
“Everything is under control,” Hel announced to the hall, before closing the much-abused door against the odd looks and murmurs. She crossed her arms. “What happened in here?”
“A ghost attacked Miss Harker,” Van Helsing said. “I dispersed it.”
“A ghost?” Hel frowned.
“A powerful one,” Sam said, thinking of the ghost’s mix of desolation and beauty, her killing cold.
Sam had catalogued encounters with ghosts like that before.
She was fortunate it had decided to toy with her—if it had gone right for her heart, Van Helsing might have rescued a corpse.
“I could have sworn she was a vampire at first.”
Sam of all people ought to have known she wasn’t.
There was no panic when a vampire chose you for its prey, not unless it willed it.
A vampire lulled you into a dreamlike trance before it fed.
It was, her mother had warned, horrifically sensual.
You might not even uncover what was happening to you until it was too late, for like tuberculosis, victims of vampires burned through their vitality like stars, achingly beautiful, their eyes fever bright, even as they wasted away, their shadows thinning on the floor, their reflections fading, until they were no more.
“The ghost of a vampire,” Van Helsing mused. “Does such a thing exist?”
“Apparently, it does,” Hel said dryly.
“It came with the storm,” Sam said, and the wind wailed through the broken window as if to underline her words. “I thought at first it must be the same thing that took the Viscount and the Duke, but it couldn’t have been.” For iron had worked to disperse the ghost who had come for Sam.
Then Sam thought it must be Professor Moriarty, striking at last. Which it very well might have been, except the ghost had come for Sam alone, not Van Helsing.
What’s more, the apparition hadn’t been very effective, had it?
She’d had plenty of time to murder Sam before Van Helsing had come, and yet she hadn’t.
There was one other thing, something Sam didn’t dare breathe, and hardly dared to think. The way the ghost’s mouth had moved silently. It had felt almost as if the ghost had been trying to tell her something.
Sam couldn’t help but think of the dangerous direction of her thoughts the night before, when her attempt at a vision had been thwarted. About how she might invite the monsters in.
“Well, as everything seems in order,” Hel said as she moved to leave.
“Wait.” Van Helsing scowled, moving closer. “What took you so long to get here?”
Hel shrugged. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”
“Is that so?” Van Helsing’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What if I hadn’t heard her?”
“One imagines we’d be having an entirely different conversation,” Hel said dryly.
“Stop it, both of you!” Sam snapped, as confused by Van Helsing’s sudden protective streak as she was wounded by Hel’s abandonment. “We have more important things to—”
But whatever Sam had been about to say was lost as a harrowing scream split the night.