Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children #2)(26)
There are moments that change everything.
A year after Jill becomes the Master’s child in everything but name, Jack stands next to Dr. Bleak on the top floor of their shared windmill. The roof has been opened, and the storm that stains the sky is black as ink, writhing and lit from within by flashes of lightning. A village girl lies stretched on the stone slab between them, her body covered by a sheet, her hands strapped tight around two metal rods. She is only a year older than Jack, found dead when the sun rose, with a streak of white in her hair that spoke to a heart stopped when some phantom lover kissed her too deeply. Hearts that have been stopped without being damaged can sometimes start again, under the right circumstances. When the right circumstances cannot be arranged, lightning can make a surprisingly good substitute.
Dr. Bleak howls orders and Jack hurries to fulfill them, until lightning snakes down from the sky and strikes their array of clever machines. Jack is thrown across the room by the impact; she will taste pennies in the back of her throat for three days. Everything is silence.
The girl on the slab opens her eyes.
There are moments that change everything, mired in the mass of more ordinary time like insects caught in amber. Without them, life would be a tame, predictable thing. But with them, ah. With them, life does as it will, like lightning, like the wind that blows across the castle battlements, and none may stop it, and none may tell it “no.” Jack helps the girl off the slab, and everything is different, and nothing will ever be the same.
The girl has eyes as blue as the heather that grows on the hill, and her hair, where it is not white, is the golden color of drying bracken, and she is beautiful in ways Jack fumbles to find the words for, ways that seem to defy the laws of nature and the laws of science in the same breath. Her name is Alexis, and it is a crime that she was ever dead, even for a second, because the world is darker when she’s gone.
(Jack hadn’t noticed the darkness, but that doesn’t matter. A man who has lived his entire life in a cave does not mourn the sun until he sees it, and once he has, he can never go back underground.)
When Alexis kisses her for the first time, out behind the windmill, Jack realizes that she and Jill have one thing in common: she never, never wants to go back to the world she came from. Not when she could have this world, with its lightning and its blue-eyed, beautiful girls, instead.
There are moments that change everything, and once things have been changed, they do not change back. The butterfly may never again become a caterpillar. The vampire’s daughter, the mad scientist’s apprentice, they will never again be the innocent, untouched children who wandered down a stairway, who went through a door.
They have been changed.
The story changes with them.
*
“JACK!” DR. BLEAK’S VOICE was sharp, commanding, and impossible to ignore. Not that Jack was in the habit of ignoring it. Her first season with the doctor had been more than sufficient to teach her that when he said “jump,” her correct response wasn’t to ask “how high?” It was to run for the nearest cliff and trust that gravity would sort things out.
Still, sometimes he had the worst timing. She untangled herself from Alexis’s arms, grabbing her gloves from the shelf where they had been discarded, and yanked them on while shouting, “Coming!”
Alexis sighed as she sat up and pulled her shift back into position. “What does he want now?” she asked. “Papa expects me back before nightfall.” Days on the Moors were short, precious things. Sometimes the sun didn’t come entirely out from behind the clouds for weeks at a time, allowing careful vampires and careless werewolves to run free even when it shouldn’t have been their time. Alexis’s family ran an inn. They didn’t have to worry about farming or hunting during the scarce hours of daylight. That didn’t mean they were in any hurry to offer their child a second funeral.
(Those who had died once and been resurrected couldn’t become vampires: whatever strange mechanism the undead used to reproduce themselves was magic, and it shied away from the science of lightning and the wheel. Alexis was safe from the Master’s whims, no matter how pretty she became as she aged. But the Master wasn’t the only monster on the Moors, and most wouldn’t care about Alexis’s medical history. They would simply devour her.)
“I’ll find out,” said Jack, hastily buttoning her own vest. She stopped to look at Alexis, taking in the soft white curves of her body, the rounded flesh of her shoulder and breast. “Just … just stay right where you are, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you don’t move, we won’t have to take another bath.”
“I won’t move,” said Alexis, with a lazy smile, before lying back on the bed and staring at the taxidermy-studded ceiling.
After four years with Dr. Bleak, Jack had grown stronger than she ever could have expected, capable of hoisting dead bodies and bushels of potatoes over her shoulders with equal ease. She had grown like a weed, shooting up more than a foot, necessitating multiple trips to the village to buy new cloth to mend her trousers. The contents of Dr. Bleak’s wardrobe trunk had stopped fitting her properly by the time she was fourteen, all long limbs and budding breasts and unpredictable temper. (Much of that year had been spent shouting at Dr. Bleak for reasons she could neither understand nor explain. To his credit, the doctor had borne up admirably under her unpredictable tempers. He was, after all, somewhat unpredictably tempered himself.)