Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children #5)(40)
“If you bring him back…”
“If I bring him back, I’ll be vulnerable. I’m aware. Only one monster at a time, and all that. But you see, I love him, and children will do anything for their fathers. His head, please, and we’ll be on our way.”
The Master curled his lip in disgust. “You’ll have your head. I knew you should have belonged to me,” he said, and spun on his heel, and swept away.
“I wish there’d been time to get my gloves,” said Jack, still in that impossibly level, impossibly calm voice. “I can take them once we recover the body, I suppose, but there’s always the chance she’s leaking on the leather. I’ll have to scrub my hands with lye when I get back to the windmill. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Jack?” Kade took a cautious step forward. “Are you…?”
“There are only a certain number of possible ways to end that question, and the answer to all of them is ‘no,’” said Jack. “No, I’m not okay. No, I’m not going to be okay. No, no, no. Everything is terrible. I’ve killed my sister. Again. I was always the monster at the end of her story, and she died knowing everything she thought about me was true.” She shook her head. “I want to leave this place. Can we go?”
“Yeah,” said Kade gently. “We can go.”
They descended the stairs into the castle in the order that had brought them there: Jack, then Sumi, then Kade and Cora, and last of all Christopher, whose hands were finally still.
When they reached the hall outside Jill’s room, Jack kept walking, bringing them to a wide interior stairway. Jill’s nightgown flared out around Jack’s feet with every step, and her hair was loose and wild, and she looked every inch the vampire’s daughter, an illusion that was reinforced when every servant they passed shied away from her, terror in their eyes.
The sounds of fighting had long since stopped. When they reached the ballroom, they stepped into an abattoir. Bodies were strewn in all directions. Some wore the robes of the Drowned Abbey; some wore the Master’s household livery. Others wore village clothing, and when they fell face-down, it was impossible to tell whose village they had come from. Gideon sat in his chair at the center of the room, his surviving people arrayed behind him. The Master’s surviving servants were backed into the corner.
Jack strode toward him, barefoot in the gore, blood and other terrible, viscous fluids soaking into the lacy hem of her gown. She didn’t seem to notice. Kade flinched. If Jack didn’t notice she was getting dirty …
Oh, this was bad. This was very, very bad.
“Well?” asked Gideon, as Jack drew closer. “Which Wolcott are you? The fun one, or the scientist? Who won?”
“I will slice you open and spread you as evenly as a coat of jam across the shore,” said Jack levelly. “I’m sure the Drowned Gods will forgive me, since I’ve agreed to stay and maintain the balance for their sake.”
“Ah,” said Gideon. “The scientist. We won, too.”
“Bully for you.” Jack turned to face the stairs as the Master came sweeping down, a burlap sack in his hand. “Excellent. We’ll be leaving now.”
The Master snarled, showing her his teeth, but didn’t argue; merely flung the sack containing Dr. Bleak’s head into the blood and fluids on the floor. Jack gathered it without a word of complaint, holding it, dripping, to her chest. She turned back to Gideon.
“I won’t forget you helped me,” she said. “Give me from this full moon to the next to get my house in order, and then send me anyone you have who requires medical care. I’ll rob a few graves if I have to, but I’ll fix them for you, free of charge. Just this once.”
“Just this once,” agreed Gideon, with the ghost of a smile.
Jack inclined her head and walked away without another word.
“Should we follow her?” asked Cora.
“She is the only one who knows how to make us a door home, and I don’t want to live here,” said Christopher. “My girlfriend is a literal skeleton, and this is too creepy for me.”
They followed as Jack left the ballroom, pulled down a sconce, and walked through the hidden door that opened in the opposing wall. They followed her down the stairs, back to the place where they had entered the castle.
Pony and Bones waited outside. Pony was chewing on something that looked like a chunk of raw meat. None of them looked any closer. Instead, Jack dropped the bag containing Dr. Bleak’s head on the seat before she turned and walked further around the base of the castle, Sumi and Christopher behind her, while Kade and Cora remained with the wagon.
When they found Jill, she wasn’t moving. She had landed in a graceless sprawl, and it was clear, when Jack and Christopher gathered her up and lifted her, that several things inside her body had broken so profoundly that they could never be repaired, not even here, where science could do virtually anything. Sumi folded Jill’s hands across her chest, and the three of them carried her back to the wagon like pallbearers at the world’s least-attended funeral. They lay her down in the hay, and Jack climbed silently into the driver’s seat, leaving the others to arrange themselves.
This time, Kade rode up front, while the others—who were less squeamish, or maybe just more accustomed to this world and its horrors—rode in the back. He glanced at Jack as she drove. She didn’t glance back. Her eyes were fixed on the fields ahead, and the bag containing Dr. Bleak’s head rested in her lap like a swaddled child, something to be cared for and protected.