The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(15)

“To the contrary,” I answered. “I am the sanest person alive.”

I gestured toward the door with the gun. “I suggest you hurry, Maeterlinck. Every second is precious now.”

He eyed me for a moment, his wet lips twisting into a grimace of fear and rage. He scooted to the edge of the bed, swung his legs over the side, pushed himself off, and then crumpled into a heap with a startled cry. It was the remnant of the sleeping draft that dropped him, of course, not the tinted saline I had shot into his veins. He reached for me without thinking, the natural instinct, the human affliction. I stared down at him from the upper atmosphere, Maeterlinck a miniscule speck writhing at my feet, so far beneath me that no feature was distinct, so close I could see down to the marrow of his bones.

I could have killed him. It was within my power. But I stayed my hand, and so am I not merciful?

SIX

I found the monstrumologist in the library where I had left him, slouched in a chair, a volume of Blake open upon his lap, but he was not reading it; he was staring off into space with a melancholy expression. He did not react when I entered the room, did not rise to greet me or demand to know where I had been or why I had been gone so long. He closed his eyes and laced his fingers together over the book, leaned back his head, and said, “I have been thinking I acted rashly in dismissing this Maeterlinck fellow without demanding proof of his claim. It would be an extraordinary find and would seal my place as the foremost practitioner of my craft in the world.”

“You’ve already secured that place, many times over,” I assured him.

“Ah.” Rolling his head back and forth. “Fame is fleeting, Will. It is not fame I crave; it is immortality.”

“Perhaps you should seek out a priest.”

He chuckled. His right eye came open to consider me, closed again.

“Too easy,” he murmured.

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “I’ve always thought, if heaven is such a wonderful place, why is entering it so absurdly easy? Confess your sins, ask forgiveness—and that is all? No matter what your crimes?”

“I haven’t been to church since my parents died,” I answered. “But if memory serves, there are one or two crimes for which there is no forgiveness.”

“Again, then what sort of god is this? His love is either infinite or it is not. If it is, there can be no crime beyond forgiveness. If not, we should pick a more honest god!”

He placed the book on the table beside him and stood up. He stretched his long arms over his head.

“But I have little patience for mysteries of the unsolvable variety. Tell me, where have you put it?”

I did not play dumb. What would be the point? “In the basement.”

He nodded. “I must have a look at it.”

“It’s alive,” I said.

“Well, of course it is. You wouldn’t have come looking for me if it weren’t.”

He stopped before me, placing his hands upon my shoulders and drilling into my bones with his dark, backlit eyes. “I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.”

“Maeterlinck received what was coming to him,” I said.

“You are now resisting the urge to brag.”

“No.” An honest answer.

“Or chide me for losing my temper.”

“You? You are the most even-tempered man I have ever met. It’s as you’ve always told me, sir: A man must control his passions lest they control him.”

Or, in the alternative, he might choose to have none at all and thereby escape the struggle entirely.

He laughed out loud and clapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s snap to it, then! It might be alive, as you say, but still could be a case of mistaken identity.”

He did not ask me for any particulars of the transaction, that night or ever. Did not ask the price or how it was arrived at or why I decided to seek out Maeterlinck myself without telling him. For all his flaws, Warthrop was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. The path to immortality did not lie in that direction. He was proud of me, in his way, for taking initiative in the battle, as a good foot soldier in service to the cause.

And as for Maeterlinck: I never heard from him again. I can only assume he fled to London seeking a dead man who’d been left for carrion on an island six thousand miles away. Finding neither the man nor the antidote, since neither existed, he must have thought himself doomed, until the dire moment he thought must be coming never materialized. From time to time, I wonder if his heart was filled with rage or joy—rage for having been tricked in so cruel a manner, joy for having survived when death was all but certain. Perhaps neither, perhaps both; what did it matter? It certainly didn’t matter to me. He received the priceless gift, and I the prize beyond price.

Canto 4

ONE

“T. cerrejonensis!” Lilly whispered after hearing some—but not all—of the tale. “It can’t be, Will!”

“It is,” I said.

“They’ve been extinct for nearly a hundred years. . . .”

In a lavender gown, holding my wrist, looking into my face with depthless blue eyes.

“Or so everyone assumed,” I said.

In my morning suit, with carefully gelled hair fashionably long, smiling down into those eyes.

“Are you satisfied?” I whispered. “Shall we go on? Or do you wish to turn back? The dance is over, but I know this little club on the East Side . . .”