This Monstrous Thing(57)

We took the stairs up from the kitchen into the deserted entry hall. I’d rarely come to see Oliver at night, and I was surprised by how shadowy and silent the whole place was. The vaulted ceilings disappeared into the darkness and every footstep cracked loud as a splitting avalanche. I was jumpy, but if Clémence was afraid, she didn’t show it. The only time she started was when her foot went through a rotted beam on the stairway and I had to grab her hand and pull her back up.

“Sorry, the stairs are a bit treacherous,” I murmured. “I should have warned you about that.”

“Would have been nice.”

I started climbing again. Then from behind me I heard her say, “You can let go of my hand.”

“Oh.” I was surprised to realize I was still holding it, and even more surprised by how badly I didn’t want to let go. “Do you think maybe . . . ?”

I trailed off, but she worked out the rest. Her fingers flexed against mine. “Keep going, then,” she said, and we started again, still linked. As we reached the second landing, Clémence said, “It smells like gunpowder.”

“It’s from the basement,” I said. “The city keeps explosives here.”

“It reminds me of Paris.”

“I don’t remember Paris smelling of gunpowder.

“My father was a bomb maker there, remember? Gunpowder smells like home.”

At the top of the stairs, I spotted an open doorway down the hall with golden firelight dancing from beyond it. The wallpaper peeling away in long strips looked like thorny spikes in its shadow.

The room was a large, open antechamber connected to what was once a bedroom. The barred windows overlooked the moonlit rooftops of Geneva far below, with the illuminated face of the clock tower hanging above them like a halo in an Annunciation painting. A fire was blazing in the grate, flames leaping up into the chimney, with a figure silhouetted against it. Not Oliver, I realized. A woman. She turned when we entered, her dark profile framed by the firelight so I didn’t know who it was until she spoke.

“Alasdair,” she said, and her voice made my whole being go still.

“Mary Godwin,” I replied.




Mary took a step toward me—out of silhouette and into the firelight so I saw her in full like an apparition raised from smoke. She was . . . different. That was the only word that came to my mind. The Mary I had known from two years ago was round faced, with rosy cheeks and full lips, and a body even a shapeless gown couldn’t conceal.

But this woman, this specter of a woman, looked so much older than I thought anyone could become in two years. Her cheeks were hollow, the skin beneath her eyes shadowed, and she looked frightened, something I had never known Mary to be.

“Alasdair,” she said again, and she took another step toward me. Her eyes flitted to Clémence’s and my linked hands, and a stab of vindictive satisfaction tore through my surprise.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came to find you. I told you I was coming to Geneva. It was in the letter.”

“I never read it.”

“I know that now,” she said, and my stomach dropped.

“Where’s Oliver?”

“I’m here.” There was a creak from the darkness and Oliver stepped into the firelight. His pipe, lit and smoking between his teeth, cast a bloody glow across his face and turned his eyes black. “You came back,” he said.

“You thought I left you?”

“It seemed the only logical conclusion.” He looked around at Clémence, Mary, and me in turn. “Well, this is the most visitors I’ve had in two years. We should call it a party.”

“Why’s Mary here?” I demanded. I wasn’t in the mood for games. I wanted to know what was going on, and how long I had before he erupted.

Oliver took a long pull on his pipe, then tipped his head back and released the smoke into the air. The mechanic in me—the Shadow Boy that would always be Oliver’s maker—flinched when I thought of the damage he was doing to his oiled-paper lungs. “When you didn’t come for days,” he said, “I assumed you’d finally grown tired of playing mother to your creation and had left me locked in here to die.”

“I’m back now.”

“To dispose of my corpse before someone found your resurrected man?”

My hand turned to a fist inside my pocket. I hadn’t expected him to be pleased to see me, but I had hoped he’d be a bit less openly hostile. “I came back to get you out of here.”

Oliver crossed his arms and stared me down. His pipe bounced as he clenched his jaw. “So where’d you go?”

I glanced at Clémence, wondering whether it was worth lying, and suddenly wishing I hadn’t brought her. “I went to Ingolstadt,” I said. “Our parents were arrested and Geisler offered me protection.”

“Oh good, so you’ve been chumming it up with my murderer as well.”

“I needed somewhere safe,” I said over him. “I didn’t abandon you, Oliver, I was always going to come back. I have come back.”

“To fetch me for the mad doctor’s experiments?” Before I could deny it, he clapped his hands together in mock delight. The gears in the metal one whined. “Oh, and look who came to visit while you were gone! Mary Godwin, the long-lost poetess of the year I died. Her sweet little letter saying she was coming for a visit was tucked in one of the books you gave me, and that helped me find her in my own memory. She”—he pointed a silver finger at Mary—“didn’t think I had memories at all, but there they were, just waiting. I remembered that you two had a bit of a flirt, and you’d been sick over her ever since she left.” He glanced at Clémence. “Seems you’re moving forward, though.”