Chapter Nineteen #3
What had she been thinking, letting the monster in? Even if it had worked the first two times, that had only been to lure her into a false sense of security, the way her mother’s first visions had been true only to give way to the false. This was always going to end badly.
“The bee—it wasn’t sent by your father,” Sam confessed, working the needle in and out of Hel’s skin. “I sent it.”
“I know,” Hel said.
“Last night—the teacup and the blood . . .” Sam stumbled to a stop. “Wait, you know?”
“Keep sewing,” Hel gasped, and Sam quickly resumed. “Shakespeare, remember?”
“If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?” Sam asked.
Hel looked away. “I wanted you to tell me.” And Sam felt a stab of guilt.
We need to trust each other, or there’s no point to any of this.
Hel trusted Sam, but Sam hadn’t trusted Hel.
She’d told herself that trust didn’t mean telling your partner everything, but that was just an excuse.
Sam hadn’t told Hel because she’d known what she was doing was wrong, because she’d been afraid Hel would stop her, and Sam couldn’t let that happen, not when it was the only way she’d see her grandfather again.
What exactly do you think will happen, Van Helsing hissed in her memory, when the monsters are more than ink on old paper? When you are stuck on some enigma, and can’t resist the pull of their voices?
Van Helsing had been right to be afraid.
“Why did you do it?” Hel asked.
“I just—I’m so tired of being helpless,” Sam said as she tied off the stitches and cut the thread.
Tired of being struck by visions when she least expected them and abandoned by them when she needed them most. Tired of Professor Moriarty winning.
She’d wanted to stop caring. To stop hiding.
To be the monster, if that’s what it meant to be herself.
“I don’t know how to fight. All I have is my channeling. So this—I thought, maybe I could . . .”
“It’s true I only invited you along because of your channeling,” Hel said. “But I was a fool. You are more than a channel. You’re clever, empathetic, and fearless.”
“I’m afraid all the time!” Sam protested.
“But you do what needs doing anyway,” Hel said. “And you do fight. You just do it differently.”
“I don’t, though,” Sam said, frustrated. “I just give people what they want.” Playing her part in their stories, as if that would keep her safe.
Hel raised an eyebrow. “So Mr. Wright wanted to be coerced into sending you into the field?”
“Well, no, but—”
“And Mr. Ashdown, he wanted you to snoop around his office?” Hel pressed.
“Now that’s not fair—”
Hel shook her head. “Not all fighting need look the same.”
Hel’s breath caught as Sam’s fingers slid down the taut muscles of her back, wrapping a bandage around her ribs.
When at last she was done, Sam closed her eyes against a sudden stinging.
She had done this to Hel. This was her fault.
She had done the unthinkable, given in to temptation, and the person she loved most had suffered for it. Just as everyone said she would.
Sam was a monster.
“You know, it’s not what my father did,” Hel said quietly, “that keeps me up at night. It’s what I did.”
Sam stilled. She remembered the knowing way in which Hel had asked Officer Berchard if he knew how long it took to dismember a corpse. The uncanny ease with which she broke into buildings. The offhanded mention of gas lamps and poison.
Hel had never spoken of the things she’d done before she signed on to the Society. But Sam could guess enough.
This, she understood at last, was why Hel hadn’t wanted Sam to follow her to Ireland. Not because Sam was in danger, though she was, but because she was ashamed of the things she’d done. The person she’d been in that place that had been and could never be home.
“Whatever you did, it wasn’t your fault,” Sam said. “You were a child. You were just trying to survive.”
“Tell that to the victims,” Hel said, but her attention wasn’t internal, but on Sam. Sam leaned back as she realized what Hel was doing. The equation she was trying to draw.
“That is not the same,” Sam said flatly. “You’re not a monster.”
“Neither are you,” Hel said. “You’re human.”
An odd thing to call the woman who had just . . . what? Abandoned the husk of her body to possess a monster? That couldn’t be right. The feeling wasn’t one of mastery, but of being out of control—of losing herself.
Who was she kidding? She’d been losing herself for days.
“At least give yourself the same grace you give the monsters we fight,” Hel said quietly.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to face my grandfather,” Sam whispered. “If what you said is true . . .”
Hel twisted toward Sam, still holding her hand. “No matter who he is, he still loves you,” she said as she traced the silver scar across Sam’s palm. Sam shivered. “He’d be a fool not to.”
Sam’s cheeks heated. “I—that’s . . .” But before she could voice her objections, there was the sound of heavy footfalls behind them.
Reluctantly, Hel let Sam’s hand drop, and they turned to face Van Helsing as he ducked through one of the sunken windows. His skin was slick with sweat and grime. Claw marks tore the leather of his coat.
It took Sam a moment to recognize the thing in his arms—a puddle of darkness with enormous green eyes. Then the darkness meowed, its pink mouth a revelation.
A cat. Soaking wet with holy water, but still. He hadn’t killed it; he’d exorcised it.
“Here,” Jakob said, thrusting the cat at Sam like an unwanted dishrag, as if it were her fault, which she supposed it was.
But said dishrag yowled and clung to Jakob.
He cursed, pulling her back in to cradle wetly against his body.
She purred, a rumble that sounded as if it belonged more to her demonic form than her tiny frame. Sam couldn’t help it; she laughed.
“Congratulations on your cat,” Hel said, and Sam was grateful they’d left Heathcliff behind.
Jakob flushed and turned his back to them, realizing all of a sudden that Hel’s shirt hung open.
“She’s a fury,” Jakob muttered as Hel shrugged on her jacket and did up the buttons.
He winced as the cat kneaded his arm, her claws needling out, and petted her awkwardly, as if he feared he’d break her.
It reminded Sam of when he’d found what he thought was a stray kitten when visiting them in Boston.
He’d spent an hour picking the burs out of its fur before its mother had shrieked at him with its terrible grin of needled teeth and he’d realized it was, in fact, an opossum.
They didn’t have creatures like that in Europe, he’d complained, when Sam had nearly died laughing.
“It’s not her fault,” Hel told him, but she was looking at Sam. “She was possessed.”
“Unless she invited it in,” Sam countered. “Looking for . . . a mouse or something.”
“Are we still talking about the cat?” Jakob said. Had he just said we? No, she must be mistaken. He continued to stroke the cat’s head until drool dripped from her snaggle tooth. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” Sam said, at the same time as Hel said, “Yes.”
Jakob raised an eyebrow. Sam looked at Hel, whose gaze followed a bee that flew past her before wriggling into that hole Sam had seen earlier.
“Bees?” Jakob said.
“A hive lock,” Hel corrected. “My father’s fond of them.
If this is like his other installations, there will be a narrow, twisting channel in the wall that leads to a beehive.
To unlock it, you use the queen bee’s pheromone to pull enough bees down the passage that the weight triggers the mechanism that opens the door. ”
“That sounds overly complicated,” Jakob said.
“That’s my father,” Hel said dryly. “Fortunately, complicated things are easy to break.” Wincing as she bent over the spilled contents of the black case, Hel rummaged up a vial of mercury.
Unscrewing the top, she tipped the silvery liquid down the passage.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then Sam heard a click and the groaning of the earth as a stone panel slid out of the floor.
Candlelight flickered up from the darkness.
Gooseflesh rose on Sam’s arms, her heart hammering in her chest. “A secret door,” she breathed.
She might have guessed. The Hell-Fire Club had been built on a rath—one of the hills in which the Folk danced and drank with the ancestral dead.
A gate to the Otherworld. It oughtn’t to have been accessible to mortals, not by anything so mundane as a secret door. At least, not to the living.
But Sam’s grandfather had spun her tales of men who sailed off the west coast of Ireland and uncovered islands hidden in the mist where time moved differently.
In her grandfather’s stories, a man could claim them with the ash from his pipe—and the Folk would promise him anything to stay his hand.
It struck Sam then, how few of his stories were actually nice.
The sound of humming drifted up out of the dark. It was raw and whimsical at the same time, with a folksy edge to it that belied his academic inclinations.
“It’s him,” Sam whispered. It had been ten years, but she still remembered the sound of her grandfather’s voice.
“Who?” Jakob demanded. “Professor Moriarty?”
“Her grandfather,” Hel said grimly.