Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(110)

“But now you see, things are different. Not perfectly different, but different all the same. I believed that you and I shared the same goals. I thought we understood one another. Mother implied as much.” He added that last part beneath his breath. He had doubts, and I was glad. Not everything was set in stone or water.

Not yet.

I pressed at his doubts, feeling for their edges. “I don’t know who your mother is, and neither does Emma.”

“You’re not as wrong as you think. Not so incorrect as you fear.”





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(He was right, I think. I knew more than I understood. I knew when he spoke of his Mother that he meant the howling, hungry thing out in the ocean with a voice like chains grinding together, hauling something heavy out of the tide. Hers was the voice of salvage, of dredging. Of something larger and more terrible than a mountain, drawn out of the water foot by foot, by this thing in front of me. I knew Who She was. I knew that’s Who called him. That’s Who was calling us, calling for Her children. But I was not Her child. Emma was not Her child, either. Nor the doctor, nor anyone else in Fall River, so help me God.)





? ? ?


Louder, I complained, “That doesn’t make any sense.” I wanted his attention returned to me. I needed to take his eyes off my sister, to draw his attention elsewhere. He was creeping so very close . . . hovering in the very air she breathed. Close enough to kiss her.

“Sense is relative.”

“Many things are relative,” I agreed, stepping closer—against every instinct in my body. I wanted to flee, I wanted to scream for Seabury, but he was upstairs. I heard him moving furniture, barricading the door like a fool. Would he trap us all inside? With the monster himself? He must have gone madder than I’d considered, and I had a sickening moment of worry that this was deliberate on his part, that he was working in tandem with the monster now—completely overtaken.

I could not entertain the possibility. I forced it from my mind. If it was true, there was nothing I could do about it anyway.

“Why are you here? Who is your mother? Why can’t you leave us alone?”

He fixated on Emma’s face. A snake, charmed by the flute. Or was it the reverse? “Our Mother,” he asserted.

“Our mother is dead,” I countered.

“Not that one.”

I looked down and saw the cooker’s cupboard. The door was shut. I reached with my foot and opened it . . . quietly. Whether he heard or not, I couldn’t tell. Maybe he did hear me, and didn’t care. He didn’t believe I was any threat to him, or his mysterious mother.

I tiptoed around the cooker and tried not to gaze down to the rumbling, fizzing liquid within it. He was still a dozen feet away, with a heavy wood table between us. Could I move him a dozen feet? Could Emma?

He faced me again, that chilly, sharp face that was so white it was almost blue.

“You can hear Her, can’t you? She calls us, Emma and me. Just as She spoke to your Nancy.”

I swallowed hard. I breathed, “That isn’t her name.”

“You’re very particular about such things, aren’t you?” He viewed me quizzically.

I nodded hard, and I locked my eyes to his. If I hadn’t, I might have watched Emma ratcheting herself to her feet. She used the wall to brace herself, used her knees to propel herself up, all the way. To the table’s edge, which she grasped with one hand while the other hand felt quietly for a series of vials that were scattered across the top. She was already holding one; she was showing me what it was.

A tiny glass container tinkled when she knocked it over.

Trying to cover the sound, I said quickly: “Names mean things. You changed your own name, didn’t you?”

He appeared confused, but only for a flash. He mouthed a word without speaking it. Zollicoffris, I think. “My name has always been . . .”

“Phillip Zollicoffer,” I prompted. Emma was shaky on her feet. She shot me a look that I wished to God I knew how to read—but I couldn’t watch her too closely. I didn’t want him to see that she was upright behind him.

His lips twisted, miming what I’d said. I believe it honestly confused him; he toyed with the shape of it, uncertain of whether it was familiar or foreign in his mouth. He came to a decision. “Close enough,” he said. And then he sounded more sure of himself as he looked over his shoulder and said to Emma: “You must come with me, you know. She wants to have us both. You were the one who found the specimen; you were the one who saved it from the sun.” He looked back to me and said, “You see? Look, she is standing. Already she is stronger. She is ready and willing, little sister. You must not stand in her way.”

Ready and willing?

When I looked at Emma’s face, her posture, her fierce grip on the vial in her hand . . . it was not readiness or willingness I saw there. It was anger, red-hot and raw. She looked swiftly back and forth between the madman and myself, and for one blazing, awful instant I could not tell who she hated the most.

But I couldn’t watch her, or interrogate her. I had to watch him, and while I had his attention, I said, “I won’t let you leave with her. I won’t let you take her away. She’s all I have left. She’s my whole world.”

“It’s not my fault that the feeling isn’t mutual,” he said, and I don’t think he meant to be unkind. If anything, I heard some small note of apology in the observation.