The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(2)

He drew me to his side. I flinched and tried to pull away as the needle came close.

“Really? Afraid of needles? You shall have to overcome that fear—as well as nearly every other one—if you are to serve me. There are much greater things to fear in the divine creation than this little needle, Will Henry.”

The name of my contagion scrawled in his nearly illegible hand upon the file beside his elbow. My blood smeared upon the glass slide. And a soft, self-satisfied grunt as he squinted at the sample through the magnifying lens.

“Is it there? Do I have it too?”

Worms spilling from my father’s bleeding eyes, boiling from his bleeding boils.

“No. And yes. Would you like to see?”

No.

And yes.

THREE

When he spoke of it, and that was not often, he called it my “peculiar blessing.” His chief piece of advice was this:

Never fall in love, Will Henry. Never. Love, marriage, family, all would be disastrous. The organism that lives within you, if the population remains stable and you do not suffer the fate of your father, will grant you unnaturally long life, long enough to see your children’s children pass into oblivion. Everyone you come to love is doomed to die before you. They will go, and you will go on.

I took his advice to heart—for a little while, at least—until my heart betrayed me, as the heart will do.

I still carry her picture, the one she gave me when I left her to follow the monstrumologist to the Isle of Blood. For luck, she had said. And for when you are lonely. It’s cracked and faded now, but over the years I have stared at it so many times that her face is indelibly stamped into my memory. I do not need to look at her to see her.

Three years passed between the day she gave it to me and the evening when I saw her again. Three years: an eternity in the life of a sixteen-year-old. A blink of an eye for a resident of Judecca, trapped in the infernal ice.

“I have determined that this will be my last pre-congress soiree,” Warthrop remarked on that night, raising his voice to be heard over the music. The band was not very good—it never was—but the food was abundant, and, to add to its irresistibility (for the doctor, at least), entirely free. He displayed a truly monstrous appetite when not on a case; like a wild animal Warthrop tended to gorge in preparation for leaner times. At the moment he was polishing off a platter of oysters, melted butter dripping from his freshly shaven (by me) chin.

He waited for me to ask why and, when I declined, went on: “A roomful of dancing scientists! It would be humorous if it weren’t so painful to watch.”

“I rather enjoy it,” I said. “It’s the one evening of the year when monstrumologists actually bathe.”

“Ha! Well, you don’t act as if you are enjoying it, glowering in this corner as if you’ve lost your best friend.” Crinoline skirts trailed across the gleaming boards, hiding the delicate toes stepping quickly to avoid being squashed by the clumsy feet of dancing scientists. “Though I beg you to hold your temper in check until ten forty.” He checked his pocket watch. Warthrop had not won the pool in more than sixteen years—longer than I’d been alive—and clearly hoped his time had come. So desperate was he to win, I think, that cheating was not out of the question. Starting the fight himself would disqualify him from the pool, but there was nothing in the rules to prevent his faithful assistant from throwing the first punch.

The lights sparking in the chandelier. The clinking of silver against porcelain. The red curtains and florid necks above stiff white collars and bare shoulders gleaming golden-skinned and bouquets in crystal vases and everywhere the scent of possibility, of unfulfilled promises and the way a woman’s hair falls against her back.

“I have no temper to check,” I protested.

Warthrop would have none of it. “You may be indecipherable to most, but not to me, Mr. Henry! You noticed her from the moment you walked through the door and haven’t taken your eyes off her since.”

I looked him squarely in the eye and said, “That isn’t true.”

He shrugged. “As you wish.”

“I was a bit taken aback, that’s all. I thought she was in Europe.”

“I was mistaken. Forgive me.”

“She is a very annoying person and I don’t like her.”

“More trouble than she’s worth, I agree.” He tipped back his head to down another oyster, his sixth. “Writing you long letters while she’s been away, each one requiring your response, taking up time better spent on your duties to me. I have nothing against women in general, but they can be quite . . .” Searching for the word. “Time-consuming.”

She wore a purple gown with a matching ribbon in her hair, which she had let grow while she was away; it cascaded down her back in a waterfall of corkscrew curls. She was taller, thinner, a chubby little girl no longer. The sun has risen, I thought, rather incoherently.

“It is the ancient call,” he murmured beside me. “The overarching imperative. And we alone have the ability to recognize it. And, by recognizing it, we can control it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I am speaking as a student of biology.”

“Do you ever speak as anything else?” I asked crossly. I grabbed a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter: my fourth. Warthrop shook his head. He never partook of spirits and considered those who did mentally, if not morally, weak.