The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(121)

“So there is no monster,” I said. “There never was.”

“Really, Will Henry? What do you want in a monster, anyway?” he asked. “Size? The magnificum was the size of Socotra with the potential to grow as large as the world. An insatiable appetite for human flesh? You have experienced firsthand how ravenous it is. A grotesque appearance? Name something—anything!—more grotesque than what we have seen on this island. No, the magnificum is worthy of the name—a dragon by functionh, not—as we’d supposed—by design.” He patted his instrument case, where he had carefully packed the remaining samples of the baby’s blood. “And I have it in my power to slay it.”

He rose and walked the few steps to the water’s edge, and the man in the glassy surface gazed upward into the monstrumologist’s eyes.

“It nearly undid me,” he said pensively. It struck me as an exceedingly odd thing to say to the one recuperating from its terrible bite. I did not realize he was referring to an entirely different monster.

“My ambition bore me up like the wings of Icarus,” he said. “And when the truth of the magnificum burned those wings away, I fell. I fell very far. And I did not fall alone.”

He turned to me. “When you were attacked and I lost you in the melee, it… broke something in me. As if I’d been rudely shaken from a deep sleep. In short…” He noisily cleared his throat and looked away. “It reminded me of why I became a monstrumologist in the first place.”

“Why did you?” I asked.

“Why do you think?” he returned testily. “To save the world, of course. And then, at some point, as with most self-appointed saviors, it became about saving myself. Neither goal is entirely realistic. I cannot save the world, and I don’t care much anymore about saving me… but I do care very much about…”

He returned to sit beside me. I saw something in his hand. It was Lilly’s photograph.

“And now I must ask you about this,” he said. His tone was grave.

“It’s nothing,” I said, reaching for it. He held it just beyond my grasp.

“Nullité?” he asked. “Nothing?”

“Yes. It’s… She gave it to me…”

“Who gave it to you? When?”

“Lilly. Lilly Bates, Dr. von Helrung’s great-niece. Before I left for London.”

“And why did she give it to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“She said it would bring me luck.”

“Ah. Luck. Then, you did know why she gave it to you.”

“I don’t like her very much.”

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Can I have it back now?” I asked.

“You mean ‘May I have it back now.’”

“May I?”

“Have you fallen in love, Will Henry?”

̶That’s stupid.”

“What is? Love or my question?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’ve tried that trick once. Why do you suppose it will work better the second time?”

“I don’t love her. She bothers me.”

“You have just defined the very thing you denied.”

He stared at her face in the photograph with a curious expression, the naturalist stumbling upon a strange new species.

“Well, she is pretty, I suppose,” he said. “And you are getting older, and there are some contagions for which we will never find a cure.”

He handed the photograph back to me. “I told you once never to fall in love. Do you think that was wise advice or self-serving manipulation?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “I don’t either.”

Kearns returned at dusk with a fresh catch of camel spiders and a chip on his shoulder. For Kearns, he was downright sullen.

“Bagged only three today,” he said. “This isn’t a hunt; it’s a turkey shoot.”

“Except they are not turkeys and we are not hunting them,” replied the doctor. “We are ending their agony and preventing the spread of a deadly disease.”

“Oh, you’re always desperate to be so bloody noble.” Kearns glanced at me. “Are you cured?”

“It appears so,” Warthrop answered for me. He preferred to limit Kearns’s interaction with me, as if he feared an altogether different sort of contagion.

“Then, shouldn’t we be using what you have to cure them and not be slaughtering them like cows?”

“Human beings are not cows,” retorted the doctor, echoing his old master. “I’ve only two vials of sera. These vials must be preserved in order to replicate the antidote.”

“You realize you are talking out of both sides of your mouth, Pellinore. You didn’t worry about preserving the antidote when it came to your assistant here.”

“And you really should avoid mimicking the voice of conscience, Kearns. It rings hollow, like someone attempting to speak in a language he does not understand.”

Smiling mischievously, Kearns stuffed a whole spider into his mouth. The monstrumologist turned his head away in disgust.

The doctor had designed a brutally efficient protocol to finish the grisly work of eradicating the magnificum from the island. We set up camp at a spot that provided good cover and some shelter from the elements, a few hundred feet below the clouds that enveloped the nesting grounds. We kept our quarry’s hours, sleeping by day and luring them into the killing zone by night.