Chapter Twelve #2
“I’m saying he could have written it,” Hel said.
“Did you not think it strange when Arsène Courbet confessed to working not for my father, but for me? You heard him speak of my father in the catacombs. You heard what he said about me.” That Hel was Professor Moriarty’s wayward daughter, that she was squandering the gifts of her criminal father. “I am not your adversary, Van Helsing.”
“He might have been putting on a show,” Van Helsing said stoutly. “You were never at risk, were you? Just me and Miss Harker.”
“And when he died,” Hel continued, “his clothes crawling with a variety of ant not found on this continent, right after he’d made his so-called confession, that, too, was part of my plan?”
“That might have been revenge,” Van Helsing said. “For turning on you.”
“It’s pointless, arguing with him like this,” Hel told the ceiling. “I can’t prove I’m innocent if he’s convinced that every flaw in his logic is not because he’s wrong but because it’s some misdirection, some part of my greater plan.”
“You don’t find it convenient that your innocence is impossible to prove?” Van Helsing said.
“That’s not convenient at all,” Sam said. “For anyone.”
Abruptly, Van Helsing appeared to tire. “Fine. Help me catch him, then. Give me something I can work with.”
“What a brilliant idea,” Hel said dryly, as if she hadn’t just said they ought to talk about her father five minutes ago, hadn’t been working toward her father’s end her whole career.
“There are three things you have to understand about my father. The first is that he doesn’t act directly.
He’s temptation. Manipulation. More merchant than master thief, enabling the designs of others when it suits his plans, using their sins like puppet strings. ”
Sam couldn’t help but think of her grandfather and the skills he must possess for Professor Moriarty to pursue him an ocean away; the sins that Professor Moriarty might have used against him.
“But you said he sells monsters,” Van Helsing accused.
“That would be the merchant part,” Hel said flatly.
“And Sherlock Holmes?” Sam asked.
“That’s the second thing,” Hel acknowledged. “The Baker Street detective managed to bait him into acting directly, playing on his professional pride. A weakness. The only one I’ve found.”
“And you think he’s the one who loosed the hellhounds?” Van Helsing asked. “What, do you think he was angry at the Vespertine for infringing on his territory?”
Hel snorted. “Haven’t you been listening?
My father wouldn’t bloody his fists. Besides, he’d be more likely to try to take the Vespertine over than force them out.
He has always had a talent for acquisitions.
He acquired that phosphorous preparation, for example, and now he sells it—in this case, to someone who seems to want the English gone. ”
“The separatists.” Van Helsing swore. It seemed he was willing to believe Hel when it aligned with another of his prejudices. “I knew I recognized the construction of the smoke bombs.”
Sam shook her head. “But if the separatists had to resort to phosphorous to conjure hellhounds, then they couldn’t possibly be behind the disappearances. Why would they resort to fabrications when they might summon the real thing?”
The Wild Hunt had been no clever bit of chicanery. Sam had seen it with her own eyes—felt it when she’d touched Mr. Enfield. And then there was the matter of the ghosts.
“I concede it’s . . . unlikely,” Van Helsing said reluctantly. Which meant that the hellhounds and the Wild Hunt were unrelated incidents. The separatists taking advantage of the Wild Hunt’s attacks to mask their own. “What is your father’s part in all this? Is it just business?”
“That’s the third thing you have to understand,” Hel said.
“It’s never just one thing. Every mystery my father puts in front of us, we think that’s it, that’s the game, and because lives are at stake, we have to play it.
It makes us predictable. But to him, each mystery is but a single move in a chess match we don’t even know we’re playing—a gambit he may or may not even mean to win, so long as it ensures we’re in position for his next move. ”
Like sacrificing a pawn to take the queen, Sam thought, with a shudder.
“But what else can we do?” Sam said. She brushed aside the curtain, glancing out the carriage window at the tumbledown stone walls that dotted the green countryside and the sheep that trundled by, their wool marked with splashes of blue, and sometimes red.
“It’s not like we can just let the Wild Hunt keep disappearing people. ”
“Let me know if you figure it out,” Hel said.
Sam tangled in her sheets, listening to the rain drumming against her window.
It wasn’t even the black feathers she’d found covering her bed when she’d returned.
Numbly, she’d stuffed them in the drawer with the others.
Strange how things that had once horrified her were now routine.
This was another of Professor Moriarty’s manipulations.
He violated your sense of safety so repeatedly, you forgot it wasn’t normal. It just was.
No, it wasn’t the feathers.
It was that every time Sam found herself pulled beneath the tide of sleep, she startled awake, her breath quick in her throat, unable to shake the feeling of being helpless, arm stretched above her head, as M.
Voland debated how deep to cut. The feeling of ice crystalizing on her lashes, the ghost’s hands burning her flesh.
The feeling of that song rooting in her bones, pulling her under, until she wasn’t.
And then there was the death omen of the washer at the ford that haunted her dreams.
But even so, Sam must have fallen asleep sometime, for she woke to a cold rat nose on her cheek, the remnants of her dreams clinging to her like cobwebs.
The night painted the room in pitch, the only light that which leaked from beneath her door, occluded by what was either Van Helsing or Hel keeping watch.
She shivered, rubbing the chilblains on her arms, glad the ghost hadn’t returned, but knowing it was only a matter of time.
There was a muffled squeak.
“Heathcliff,” Sam murmured in relief. She had never been so happy to see a rat. Her head ached as if it had been stuffed with cold mud. She sat up and immediately regretted her decision. Sleep might be optional for the Moriartys, but it was decidedly less so for a Harker. “What do you have for me?”
Sam turned the key on the gas lamp, flinching at the flare of light, to see her shadow stuck starkly against the wall.
Only there was something . . . wrong with it.
At first, she couldn’t quite parse it—she was still half drunk with sleep, and it was hard to make anything out against the weedy florals of the wallpaper—until she went to brush her curls out of her face and noticed the shadow of her left hand.
It had too many fingers.
Sam swallowed a scream, the blood draining from her face. She checked and checked again. Squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for it to go away, like every other vision. Tried not to think about what it might mean. But when she opened her eyes, it was still there, and when Sam froze, the finger moved.
You’ll get visions from monsters, Van Helsing had said. They’ll lead you astray and everyone you care for will suffer for it.
Which was to say she’d go monstrous, like Lucy Westerna.
Sam’s breath came quick in her throat. What would Hel do if she found out Sam was sprouting shadow fingers? What would Van Helsing do? Except Sam already knew. He’d been telling her since she was eleven years old.
At least Sam thought she knew the cause: that song. It had taken her over, like a puppet. Led her through Ashdown Manor, past locks she couldn’t possibly have picked, and through secret passages she couldn’t have discovered.
It had, in a word, helped. A thought that left Sam nearly as uneasy as not knowing what it intended, or what was happening to her, other than that she was breaking.
She had to stop channeling. She should, she knew, go home, where the song couldn’t reach her, leave solving the mystery of the disappearances to Hel and Van Helsing.
But that would mean leaving Ireland before finding her grandfather.
Sam drew in a steadying breath. She didn’t have time for this—Heathcliff was looking at her with as much concern as a rat might muster while holding a rolled-up bit of paper in his mouth.
She took it and translated the message, from one of the raciest scenes in the novel.
It was as if Hel got some perverse pleasure out of watching Sam squirm!
Ask her . . .
Sam stopped after two words, the book slipping from her nerveless hands.
This message, she realized, her heart racing, was not from Hel.
She half expected to see a black feather fall out from between the pages of the book, but there was none.
Only that message, sent with the same code, the same book, and the same rat.
Still, there was no doubt who it was from. Ruari.
Sam should wait, should tell Hel—except who knew what Hel might do.
She certainly shouldn’t read any further; she knew how manipulative a Moriarty could be.
If he sent her this message, it wasn’t for her health, and yet .
. . Sam eyed the book splayed on the floor.
It was still a clue, and knowing he meant to manipulate her must mitigate the risk.
In the end, Sam couldn’t help herself. She scooped up the book, paging through it, translating the message:
Ask her how she knew your grandfather.