Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)(14)
“Which means her body can still become a vampire,” said Kade, dawning horror in his voice.
“Exactly.” Alexis stroked Jack’s hair with one hand. “The Master plans to make Jill his daughter in truth under the next full moon. He’s convinced her that they can be vampire lord and vampire child together for all time. Only now the windmill stands empty, with no scientist to hold back the dark and no apprentice to risk the storm. This isn’t how things are supposed to happen in the Moors. You can’t have a single unopposed force. The Master will throw everything out of balance, and the wolves in the wood and the Drowned Gods in the sea and all the other monsters will rise up to set things right. People will die. Innocent people, whose only crime was being born in the path of titans. Please. You have to help us save our home. And while she’s too damn stubborn to ask on her own behalf, you have to help me save Jack.”
Silence fell, broken only by the soft, monotonous sound of Jack’s sobs.
Kade was the first to speak.
“All right,” he said. “If you’ve got a way to get us there, I guess I better go talk to my aunt.”
5?ANOTHER AWKWARD CONVERSATION
ELEANOR STARED AT Alexis like she was the most beautiful creature in the world, grayish skin and twisting scars and all. Alexis squirmed, not quite meeting Eleanor’s eyes.
“Look at you,” said Eleanor, for the third time. Her hands fluttered in her lap as if she wanted to reach for Alexis, only to think better of it at the last second. “I’ve never seen someone who was born in the Moors before, only children like dear Jack and precious Jill, who’d traveled there long enough to pick up a bit of local flair. You’re lovely.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Alexis, voice turning hollow at the end of the sentence. She looked alarmed and glanced to Sumi, moving one hand in a quick, declarative motion.
“Alexis can’t always talk,” said Sumi. “She’s died too many times. It broke something inside her, and now everything she does uses up a little of the lightning in her lungs, and when it runs all the way out, she has to be dead again until someone puts it back. She can sign, though. So I’m going to watch what she says, and then I’m going to say it to you.”
“No embellishments, Sumi?” Eleanor managed to make the question sharp and gentle at the same time, like she already knew the answer but was willing to be kind about it.
Sumi narrowed her eyes. “I can embellish when I’m echoing somebody who doesn’t need me to communicate for them, that’s fine, that’s fun, they can catch me out and call me a liar and we’ll all laugh and laugh and laugh. Putting words in someone’s hands when there’s no one else around to tell you what they meant to say, that’s not fair. I don’t want to do that.”
“All right, all right, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Sumi’s eyes remained narrow. “People always mean something. Sometimes what they mean is ‘you can’t be trusted to remember to be kind,’ and then I want to bury them up to the necks in marshmallow fluff, so they’ll remember how I choose kindness every single day.”
Alexis looked wearily amused. Her hands moved. Sumi scowled.
“I am not like Jack, you take that back right now,” she said.
Alexis shook her head.
Kade cleared his throat. “Sumi’s promised to repeat what Alexis says fairly and accurately, and begging your pardon, ma’am, but I got the feeling we don’t have a lot of time to waste deciding what we’re going to do about the situation. Jill has Jack’s body, and she’s set on becoming a vampire while she’s still wearing it.”
“And if that happens, even if we catch her, we can’t switch them back. Jack wouldn’t like being a vampire,” said Sumi. “Living on human blood, when it’s all messy and dirty and filled with disease—no, she wouldn’t like it at all.”
Kade’s lips thinned to a hard line, and he said nothing. He knew Jack well enough to suspect she might like being a vampire a little too much, maybe even more than Jill would. As a vampire, Jack wouldn’t need to worry about getting sick, or be afraid she’d touch the wrong thing and somehow dirty herself beyond repair. She’d never been big on sunlit strolls or fancy dinners. Vampirism might suit her very, very well. An analytically minded vampire, fully trained to the inexplicable sciences of the Moors …
The people who fell in her shadow would find, quickly, that they’d have preferred the old-fashioned kind of vampire. In some ways, opera gloves and lacy peignoirs were less terrible than scalpels and tubing and spotless operating theaters. At least the first felt somewhat personal.
“All right,” said Eleanor. She focused on Alexis. “You and Jack are both welcome here, for as long as you’d care to stay. I can arrange a room, board, everything, only let me know what you need.”
Alexis’s hands flashed.
“‘It’s kind of you to offer, but we can’t stay,’” said Sumi. Her voice was calm, uncharacteristically level; in it, Kade could hear the echo of the girl she’d been before Confection, the one he’d seen in her permanent file, the one whose life had been measured and metered and entirely mapped out for her. She would have been a devastating woman, that solemn, mannered, well-educated daughter of privilege and plenty: she would have ruled a corporate empire with an unyielding fist, and her rivals would have trembled at her name.