Chapter 53
Chapter
If only I’d come awake slowly, I could have taken in my surroundings. Maybe prepared some kind of plan, or tactic.
But instead, I woke with a gasp, swallowing air so loudly that Edgar noticed at once. I took stock of my surroundings as Edgar came closer. Lucy was beside me, propped against the same cool stone wall. Her chin slumped to her chest, but she was breathing steadily, and her lashes fluttered.
“Lucy,” I said, and bumped her shoulder with mine. “Luce, wake up, wake up, wake up.”
We were somewhere…large. A cavernous space with smooth gray walls.
I heard a familiar squawk and strained my neck; Ajax’s aviary was set on the floor, close to where Edgar had been standing.
And there was—oh—there was a Loom in the center.
Only this one didn’t have a glass bell jar at its heart.
The seven arms of the Loom fed into a vat of the black-tar serum, and lying in the vat were bones.
Enormous bones. Humongous bones. The fossilized skeleton of a creature so large, my brain struggled to make sense of the scale.
The thigh bone alone had to be nearly three feet long.
“Megalosaurus,” I breathed, a shiver down my spine. The great lizard-creature Buckland hypothesized in 1824 based only upon the sawlike teeth. But Buckland never found a complete skeleton. Not like this one.
Edgar crouched before me. “Incredible, isn’t it?” he said, as if we were having a nice chat in the library, and he hadn’t drugged and kidnapped me. “Henry built the mill around the monster.”
At least I knew where we were now.
Edgar offered me a hand. I didn’t take it, though I wobbled a bit as I stood.
“I know you’re scared, Mary, and confused,” he said. “But please, just give me a chance to explain.”
But I wasn’t listening. Because I’d noticed that the pods around this Loom weren’t empty.
Seven people were propped in the pods, bobbing naked in the serum. Some of their eyes were closed, but others displayed wide and vacant gazes.
I recognized one: the old woman from my last visit to the Glasswater Mill.
There was also a young man with pale-yellow hair, and a middle-aged woman with a port-wine stain across her shoulder.
A dark-skinned man with black curls; a skinny girl, hardly twenty.
A man with deep lines on his brow, and two old men.
Brothers, I thought. They shared the same nose.
“Are they—” I couldn’t finish.
“Not dead. Only drugged. They all consented, I swear,” Edgar said quickly, as if that would change things.
There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask. I started with the one that seemed most pressing.
“And what of us? Are you planning to kill us?” I tried to sound brave. Defiant, even. But the words came out thin and wavering.
“What? Of course not!” Edgar scoffed. “But I knew you would never come willingly, and I needed everyone together so I could explain everything, and—”
“WHERE IS SHE?”
The door burst open.
“Henry,” I choked, as he swept across the room, his gray eyes a wild storm as he crushed me against his chest.
“Mary,” he exhaled, breathing shakily, his face buried in my hair. Then he pulled back, holding my elbows. “Are you all right?”
I nodded, and he cupped my cheek, searching my face.
Then Henry turned to Edgar, his brow knotted in fury. “And you. What were you thinking? This was not what we agreed.”
I caught my breath, and my wits, and wrenched free of Henry’s arms. I remembered, suddenly, what Edgar said about Henry before the tea took effect. You weren’t ready to accept your powers, Henry said. The two were partners in this, whatever it was.
I thought I’d been prepared for Henry’s inevitable betrayal. But apparently not, because I felt now as if I’d been shot once again in the heart, the pain was so deep and fierce.
“Don’t touch me,” I snarled, and Henry stepped back in shock. “What do you mean, ‘this was not what we agreed’? To what exactly did you agree?”
“Mary, please,” Henry said, his face anguished. “Let us explain.”
I was tempted to declare that no explanation would help their cause or dull my fury. But in truth, I did want an explanation.
“Fine,” I said, glaring at them both. “Then explain.”
Edgar and Henry exchanged a glance.
“I suppose we ought to start at the beginning,” Edgar said. “Because it begins with you, Mary. You, and my mother.”