A Drop of Night (23 page)

I wake up in an enormous bed. Cupids stare down at me from the
corners of the canopy, blank eyed and creepy, like they want to eat my face. Red velvet curtains are drawn around the bed, dimming the light on the other side. A thick, embroidered comforter lies heavily across my chest. And I'm clean. So clean my skin feels like a peeled egg. All that sweat, blood, and grime—all gone.

I lie for a second, reveling. My bones feel weird, like they've started to gel, like they haven't moved in ages.

I blink a few times. Wrinkle my nose.

I fell out of a chandelier.

The thought comes to me slowly. Now the next one: the bed smells awful. Like dust, and locked-up sheets, and the time I had to render my own soap out of cow fat during summer camp in Wyoming. It wasn't fun. I
didn't stay long. I don't want to stay here long, either. I hear the hiss of gas lamps. The flat, no-sound air.

I'm still underground. They caught me. But why haven't they killed me yet?

My eyes flick from side to side. I hear the tick of a clock somewhere beyond the drawn curtains. I imagine someone sitting in a chair right next to the bed, waiting. Waiting for me.

I sit up slowly, soundlessly, pushing back the comforter. I'm wearing an old-fashioned nightgown. Frills and white cotton and persimmon-seed buttons. My hair's been washed. The cut on my ankle is still exposed, an ugly scab. That's disturbing. Someone washed my hair and dressed me up like a pilgrim, but they didn't bandage my ankle?

I glance around quickly. The curtains are open slightly on either side, letting in a sliver of light and air. I see the corner of a carpet. The leg of a chair.

In one smooth motion I slide out through the curtains. My bare feet hit the floor. I spin, staring around the room. I need to find 1) Something to use as a weapon. 2) Someone to use it on. There's plenty of the first. None of the second. I like that arrangement.

I grab a candlestick from the mantel and pull the gnarled stump of wax off it. There's a long, mean spike where the candle was skewered. I heft the candlestick and pad across the carpet to the other side of the bed. I see a big old armoire, a double door in the far wall, a mirror.

I move toward the mirror, staring at myself. My hair's been pushed up under a white cap. My eyes are huge and ghostly in my face. I feel like I can see every vein in my irises, every strand of dark blue and light blue and gray—

“Aurélie?”

Something behind me moves.

I whirl, raise the candlestick. A man is standing in the corner of the room. He's been there all along. He's huge, face painted chalk white, wearing a red brocade coat and poppy-red shoes.

“Aurélie?” he says softly. “Aurélie,
retourné de l'autre coté de la mer
?”

I run at him like a freaking psycho. Slash out with the candlestick. The spike snips at his waistcoat. He jerks back, fast for someone so large.

“Who are you?” It hurts to talk. My lungs heave, and
a sharp pain like nothing I've ever felt before spreads across my chest. I might have cracked a rib.

The man stares at me. His eyes are weird. Quivering, watery, but under it is a sharpness. A watchfulness.

I slash out again, and this time the spike catches him and rips a ragged gash down his waistcoat. He shrinks, cowering against the wall. He's crazy. Everyone here is crazy.

“Stay back,” I say in French, moving. I keep the spike pointed at his chest. “There's another girl down here. Lilly Watts. And three boys. One of them's crazy. Have you caught them?”

The man's eyes are tiny in his powdered face. It's like they don't even belong to him, like there's a small animal looking out from behind the folds of human flesh. He's breathing hard.

“Answer me!”
I yell. “Why are you doing this? Is this some kind of sick game? Throw a bunch of kids in with some bionic men and deformed monsters and enjoy the spectacle?”

His breathing slows. His eyes fix on mine. And now the quivering is gone, replaced by the tiniest slither of derision. “Game?” he says. “My dear, this is not a game.”

His hand comes up. There's a bottle in it, a tiny vial. It snaps between his fingers, and a rich, sharp tang hits my nose. Hits my brain. I'm tipping, falling. The candlestick is ripped from my grasp.

The man is leaning over me, screaming: “Havriel? Havriel, quickly!”

This can't be happening.
I'm on the floor. My hand finds a chair leg and I pull myself up.

I hear running footsteps. I heave myself onto the chair, my head lolling, my muscles suddenly useless. The doors to the bedroom fly open.

The man who enters is dressed in black. Black velvet knee breeches, black stockings, a long black frock coat. I recognize his calm gray eyes. The way he drifts along, great as a giant, but elegant. Like a dancer.

“Anouk,” Dorf says. He bows slightly. “Lovely to see you again.”

The accent I couldn't place before comes into sharp focus. French. Oddly curled and old-fashioned, but definitely French.

I feel sick. I feel like I need to crawl back into the bed and pull the covers over my head and sleep until it's all over and done. “Dorf,” I whisper. “Dorf, why are you
doing this? Why are we here?” I stand, wobbly.
Why do you want to kill us? Why did Hayden come back from the dead? Why-why-why . . .

He's watching me, his gaze hooded, like I'm some exotic display behind glass. Now he turns to the other man and murmurs something. I catch the words “
fille”
and “
parcourt
.”

He wheels around again. “Anouk. Where are your friends?”

Well, that answers my first question. They don't know where the others are. They think I do. That's why I'm still alive.

“Dorf—” I start.

“I am not Dorf,” he snaps. “Dorf does not exist. I am Havriel du Bessancourt.”

“Who?”

“And this . . .” he says, motioning to the other man, “is the Marquis Frédéric du Bessancourt. My brother.”

I stare at them. At their centuries-old clothing, their weird hair and stockings.

“There are no Bessancourts anymore,” I mumble. “It's an obsolete title, and Frédéric du Bessancourt is
dead
. He's been dead for centuries.”

“Has he? Did you hear that, brother? You are dead. Anouk has spoken, and she knows all.”

What is going on?
I see the shattered displays in Rabbit Gallery again, the white chunks of glass covering the floor. The brass plaques, gleaming.

H. B.

Death by H. B.

Bombs by H. B.

Poison by H. B.

And the lists of names in the cracked, leather-bound volume in the study. That's what was bugging me: the handwriting was the same. From 1760 up until now. More than two hundred fifty years, and the handwriting never changed.

This is impossible.

Dorf, Havriel, whoever he is, breathes in deeply. “Now, my dear . . .”

He goes to a panel in the wall and folds out a glossy metal case, dark sharp corners incongruous with the décor of the room. He snaps it open. A barbed nozzle slides into view, the sharp tip glinting silver. “Won't you sit down? I think it's time we had a little chat.”

The figure stands in the doorway, motionless. He is small as a child, but his skin is pale and hard, as if he wears a mask of marble veneer. He is dressed in a frock coat, sharply cleaved at the back into two crimson prongs, a velvet swallow's tale. His hands are at his sides, tiny like a doll's hands, and in one of them he carries a little case, dark wood with many locks.

“Jacques?” The word escapes me in a strangled whisper.

Jacques remains stock-still. “All will be well,” he says, but I hear the tremble in his voice, the coursing fear. “He is our ally. He knows of our predicament. He has promised to help you escape.”

The whine in the air becomes deafening, wave after wave crashing over me. It seems to be peeling apart the strands of my brain, sifting through my thoughts and fears like they are berries in a basket. It comes from the figure in the doorway. Slowly, long red slits open down his cheeks and across his
neck. They are not wounds. They are surgically precise, as if he was made this way, as if the human head was too foolish and this is better.

“It was the only way,” Jacques says. “The only way I knew—”

The figure is still in the doorway, watching us, and I seem to detect amusement in those bottomless black eyes, a spark of malice.

“Who are you?” I say to him, and I turn Delphine's head away, shielding her with my arms. “What are you?”

“I'm not telling.” The smell from the tiny bottle is still in my
nose, rich and oily, like blood oranges and musk. We're sitting across from each other, me in a wing chair, him perched on a hard wooden stool, languid but somehow tense at the same time, like a cat waiting to pounce. “I'm not telling you where the others are. You can kill me if you want to, but I'm not snitching.”

Havriel turns the nozzle over in his hands. His rain-cloud eyes are fixed on me, measuring me up, tallying every twitch and sign of weakness in my face. “You may not know where they are.”

“Oh, I know.” I don't know. I don't have a clue.

“Have they been captured?”

“Nope. Still running free.”

Havriel turns on the stool, pressing a finger to his ear and gesturing to the marquis, who is still
standing, hovering nervously. “
Trois,”
he whispers.

Three
.
So they don't have Lilly yet. They don't have anyone, except that one genius who climbed into a chandelier. But this doesn't at all guarantee that the others are still alive.

“Let's make a deal,” he says. “You tell me
exactly
where the others are, and I will tell you everything you wish to know.”

“I won't,” I say. “What's the point of knowing everything and then dying two seconds later?”

Havriel turns again to his brother. Says something I don't catch. They titter. They're laughing at me, heads together, like a couple of freakish, waistcoated clowns.

“You still hope to escape,” Havriel says, and his eyes dance. He taps the nozzle thoughtfully against his knee.

I stare at its needlelike tip and try to swallow. “Yes?” I say.

“Very well,” he says. “I will answer all your questions
and
I will let you go, and you can run away back to New York City and live happily ever after.”

He flips a small switch on the nozzle's handle. A red light blinks on. He's going to kill me. He knows it, and I know it, and he's grinning at me like:
You're not this
stupid, Anouk. We don't need to play this game.

But I can play stupid as well as anyone if it buys me time. I don't know where the others are. I have nothing to lose by agreeing, except for maybe some metaphorical points in selfless nobility, but I'm not super attached to those anyway. If he talks long enough, maybe I can think up a way to get out of this room.

“Okay,” I say. “You first.”

He blinks at me. Studies the instrument in his hand as if he's considering using it right this very instant. When he looks back at me, his expression is infinitely less sympathetic. “You say you wish to know the truth. The reasons behind everything. But you will not understand. You will find it difficult.”

“You think?” Fury, blistering hot, scalds my throat. “Yes, I find it hard to understand why you think you can drag us down here and kill us, yes, that's HARD TO UNDERSTAND.”

Dorf clicks his tongue. “So angry,” he says. “Whenever people fail to understand things they always become so
livid
. You must realize that just because you are too foolish to understand something does not mean it makes no sense. You are not here for nothing. And you are not
dying for nothing. You are dying so we can live.”

“What are you, the Countess of B
á
thory, bathing in the blood of virgins for eternal youth? I hate to break it to you, but that's not—”

“Anouk, be quiet,” Havriel snaps, and there's a razor edge to his voice. “Listen for once, and keep your clever bits of skepticism to yourself. All five of you carry in your veins a priceless genetic code. It has no outward effects on you. If not extracted and activated, it will pass into dormancy between the eighteenth and twentieth years of your life. These genes have the ability to regenerate human cells. In essence, biological immortality.”

Okay, that was a lot.
I don't have any clever bits of skepticism. At all.

Havriel isn't finished. “The genes were stolen from us. Injected into the bloodstreams of your ancestors and allowed to escape. The one who invented it refuses to cooperate. Entire labs of scientists cannot replicate the genes. So we find the carriers still in existence, just a few at a time, and we harvest them. Every fifty to seventy years, we require more. Fresh blood. We, the brothers du Bessancourt, have lived nearly five hundred years combined, and I'm afraid the only way we can keep living is
by carving up your pretty young bodies and extracting every drop of the precious cargo inside you.”

I stand perfectly still. I feel like the room is tipping around me, or maybe I'm tipping, falling. “Who?” I say. “Who allowed the carriers to escape?”

“
Don't act like you don't know.” Dorf's eyes pin me to the chair. “The same one who cut the camera feed, helped you escape the trap rooms, holed you up somewhere we couldn't find, massacred our teams. He has been helping you from the moment he realized you had breached the palace.”

The butterfly man. He's talking about the butterfly man. “We haven't seen him,” I say. “I swear, we never met him once.”

“No?” Havriel seems to calm down again. His gaze softens. “He was always a shy creature. Self-conscious. He hates us, you know. He is our crowning achievement, and yet he is a great danger. A liability and a blessing, in one. My brother became obsessed with immortality long ago. He was terrified of disease and revolted by death and dying. And when he realized it was beyond his grasp to find a cure for this most human ailment, that eighteenth-century science could never hope to unlock life's secrets,
he created something that could. An artificial human. Perfect and logical, unfettered by the physical and mental limitations of man.”

Perfect? The thing that clawed the walls outside the library, killed the trackers in complete silence, burned Perdu's arm open? That was perfection?

Havriel keeps talking: “Our butterfly man, we called him. We grew him in a glass cocoon,
killed
to make him. His skin is as delicate as an insect's wing, fragile as paper, but he is more powerful than any man. He can calculate possibilities and variables into infinity, invent technological wonders. He made us rich beyond measure.

“When the Lady Célestine was killed, he began to develop this serum for eternal life. But the serum was not ready, and even if it had been, its effects on those already dead was incalculable. Lady Célestine became something else, neither living nor dead. And now the butterfly man keeps her—to taunt Frédéric, and he keeps his other pet alive, too, but he shares not a drop of his serum with us. So you see, he is the reason for this great ruse and the cause of this bloodshed. If you are angry at your fate, blame him.”

“None of this works.” I feel pathetic, but I say it
anyway. “Artificial people, fine, whatever, but you can't live that long, okay? The body breaks down; it's called cellular senescence. The second law of thermodynamics. It doesn't
work
, and even if it did, you can't just kill other people so you can live. You can't go around kidnapping and murdering just because you feel like it—” I'm rubbing frantically at the side of my nightgown, my skin burning. “None of this is possible, okay? Scientifically it's not
possible
.”

“Everything you dream of is possible, Anouk. Sometimes you have simply dreamed too soon.”

I watch him lift the nozzle and step toward me.

“What are the greatest mysteries, do you think?” he asks. “Life, of course. And death. We have solved them.” He smiles, quick and pointed, his lips curling back from his teeth with a wet sound. “But for everything there is a price. You.”