Chapter 25
The mystery at the heart of the Full Moon was not a smuggling ring or an opium den. It was not a religious cult, nor a murderous cabal.
It was, as Sergeant Corbet had said, a disease.
“We’re not unlike a colony of lepers,” Alfie said cheerfully, as Mrs. Easton slipped the manacle cuffs around Caroline’s ankles in the locked room on the second floor.
The pain of her injuries had faded under the pleasant hum of Rab’s liquor, but the strange strength that had possessed her in Sergeant Corbet’s kitchen was straining at her seams again, and she nearly knocked the iron key from the landlady’s hand as she clicked the cuffs on Caroline’s wrists.
She did not want to be fettered. If only they’d leave her be, if only she could get past them all into the quiet hallway, into the moonlit garden—
“Only we keep our looks,” called out Mr. O’Riley with a wink from halfway down the room.
Caroline was closest to the boarded windows, Rab beside her. The moonlight pressed through the cracks, perfect and pearly, and if it weren’t for the restraints, she would have reached out and pried the slats from the glass.
“You’re the first, er, female, we’ve encountered,” said Mr. Tythe from the manacles opposite hers.
He slid his fogged glasses higher and winced as the iron cuff clanked his nose.
“The, um, pathogen, you see. Very similar to rabies, in etiology. Carried by the water in the blood. When the moon is fullest, the pathogen is excited, drawn to the surface, as it were, in the same way the full moon raises the tides. The males of the species survive it, but the females die in utero or shortly thereafter—”
“Gents,” said Rab. “Kindly shut up and leave Miss Foster be. Can’t you see she’s edgier than a stallion on a boat?”
Caroline glared at him. He smiled back, and if her hands hadn’t been secured by chains to the ceiling, she would have clawed the grin off his face.
“Easy,” he said, as though she were indeed a startled horse. “It’s your first one. You’re going to feel like a cut nerve, Miss Foster. But come sunup, it’ll all be over. And the next will be easier.”
“What will be easier?” she snapped. She didn’t recognize her voice; didn’t recognize any of the sensations of her body. She felt hot and cold, like a thousand ants were trapped between her skin and the fabric of her dress. She had to move, to get away from here, to run somewhere open and green—
“The change,” Rab said simply. And then, when Caroline only blinked in response, he said, “Charlie told you nothing, did he?”
Caroline shook her head.
Rab sighed, looked down the length of the room.
Mrs. Easton—no, Rose Silvia Blevins, her mother’s sister—had finished locking them all in their stations and was saying something quiet and soothing to John, who was closest to the door with his cuffed hands held over his face, whimpering like a beaten dog.
The other guests were standing or slumping against their restraints.
Senhor Perreira was pacing half a step to the right and left, taking up all the slack in the chains.
Mr. Tythe had begun to tremble. And Alfie was breathing as though he’d just run a great distance.
A remote part of her brain noticed that the police commissioner was not among them, but she could not follow the thought to any conclusion.
Something was shifting within Caroline. It felt like her bones were realigning, clicking into place like some terrible new machine.
“Tell me.” It was her own voice, but she didn’t recognize it.
Rab turned back to her. His eyes glowed in the gloom, and Caroline remembered when she had interrupted him in the kitchen on the night of the last full moon, how her hairs had stood on end, how her body had thrummed with the knowledge that she had brushed against something very dangerous.
She saw the same changes in him now: The color was high in his cheeks, his pupils dilated to the edges of his irises, leaving only a thin border of yellow. But now, she wasn’t afraid.
“Tell me,” she said again.
Rab shook his head. “Not now. Not now, Cat.”
Cat. The word rang like a bell through the wild wind in her ears.
“It will be over soon,” Rab went on, “and you will be yourself again. And I’ll answer every question you have, but not now.”
Mr. O’Riley had slumped into a crouch with his arms suspended above him like a grim marionette. Mr. Bajwa was praying in a hoarse, ceaseless whisper. Senhor Perreira was cursing, Caroline assumed, in Portuguese. And John. John was shaking so hard that his chains rattled.
A low, hoarse sound was coming from Caroline’s throat. The vibration purred against her swollen flesh, and she thought, vaguely, that she should stop, but couldn’t.
The fog in her head was thickening.
“Hold…on to something,” Rab muttered. “A happy memory. Think of it as…as a raft…in a storm.”
His chin lolled on his chest. He was succumbing. But to what, she did not know. Fear rose then, sharp and acrid. Reasonless. “Oh, God,” she heard herself say. “Oh God oh God oh God.”
“A memory,” Rab said again. He forced his head up. His golden eyes were half-masted. “Find a memory, Cat.”
He held her eyes with his. She clung to them until she couldn’t anymore, until her head dropped, and darkness began to curl across her vision.
“I’m right here, Cat,” she heard him say, almost in a whisper. “Right beside you. Find a memory, Cat. Hold on to it.”
So as the moon rose higher, and sanity evaporated from Caroline’s mind like dew in the sun, as the men around her raised their voices in howls of pain and longing, she found her brother like a lighthouse beacon.
The memory that came to her, that rose to the churning surface of her mind, was of Charlie in the dappled sunlight of the riverbank, catching tadpoles in his cupped hands.
They’re like you, he had said, looking down at the wriggling creature with his lashes thick and black on his cheeks. Halfway between one thing and another.
She had thought he meant halfway between childhood and womanhood. Perhaps he had. Or perhaps he meant something else entirely.
Her brother had hung in this room. Maybe these very same chains had bitten his skin, as they were biting hers. He had endured this, survived this, whatever this was.
And Caroline was certain that, as this same smothering blackness drowned his consciousness, he had clung to a memory of her.