A Drop of Night (26 page)

We're steps away when I notice the fourth figure. Standing
behind Hayden, blending with the shadows. A small shape, like a little kid. He's wearing an old-fashioned frock coat with pronged tails, flickering like a dark red flame in the blackness.

I lunge forward and bury the dagger in Hayden's shoulder. There's almost nothing left of the guy in the private school blazer, swaggering up to us in JFK. His hair is falling out of his head in patches. His cheeks are shadowy hollows. His lips have started to draw inward, shriveling.

He doesn't even flinch as the blade goes through his shoulder. Doesn't move. He's looking past me, into space, his palms still outstretched like he's been frozen in place. The figure in the shadows remains motionless.

“Hayden?” I stare at him, horrified.

I jerk the dagger out. It releases with a metallic grating sound.

No blood. No reaction. Hayden's not breathing.

“Get them,” Lilly says, in a tiny panicked whisper. “Hurry!”

I spin and start sawing frantically at Will's ropes. Lilly begins hacking at the binds tying Jules to his chair. One rope cut through. Two. I sling Will's arm over my shoulder and start dragging him away over the rocky floor.

He weighs a ton. I hear his breathing next to my ear, shallow and raspy.

“Lilly?” I whip around. She's following, Jules leaning into her, almost toppling her over. Hayden still hasn't moved.

But the small figure has.

His face is turned toward us. He's watching us drag the boys desperately away.

And suddenly Hayden starts after us.

“I can't let you do that!” he calls out, and he sounds like Hayden again, his East Coast accent, golden boy attitude, silver spoon confidence. But the voice came from the small figure in the shadows.

“Lilly,
RUN
!” I raise the dagger, hoping I can somehow
fend Hayden off. He's hulking toward us, head lowered, eyes flat and wet, reflecting the fluorescent lighting. His shirt's torn, and under it I glimpse metal, curling tubes, maybe glass, embedded in his chest. Deep, glimmering wounds. Too many wounds. You can't survive that many wounds.

I hear a new sound: the ring of dozens of feet clattering down the stairs.

Lilly reaches me. “Dorf,” she whispers. “They're here.”

I spin. The tanks stand silently, the bodies floating inside, calm and ghostly. The steps are still ringing with descending feet. And now I see figures emerging out of the dark, dozens of them, thrown into stark relief against the green glow: Havriel. Miss Sei. Row after row of trackers, red lights piercing the gloom.

“Found you!” Havriel yells, his voice booming up to the ceiling. I look over my shoulder. Hayden's approaching fast. We let Will and Jules down as gently as we can onto the ground.

Havriel breaks into a run. Miss Sei is gesturing sharply to the trackers. A black case is being passed forward through the ranks.

Havriel reaches us seconds before Hayden does. He
ducks under my dagger, whirling. Knocks me sideways. Pain lances through my shoulder. Lilly lets loose a banshee shriek and swings her sabre toward Havriel.

Now Hayden's smashing into me. It's like he doesn't even see me. My dagger catches on his arm. Hayden swings it toward me, dagger and all, and I drop, scrabbling over the stones. I'm surrounded by legs, screams. Lilly's swinging her sabre in desperate arcs, trying to keep Havriel at bay. The trackers are forming a ring, Miss Sei pressing to the front. I hear that buzz again, inching into my brain, and my chest is aching, my lungs pressing against my damaged ribs like they're trying to jump ship—

I stand just in time to see Hayden's head jerk and smash into Havriel's skull. Havriel retreats a step. But he's only caught off guard for a second.

“Have you become so pathetic and desperate”—Havriel wheezes, grinning—“that you must hide behind the corpses of your more comely family members? I was wondering where this one had gotten off to. Did you enjoy your little afterlife, Hayden?”

Havriel's eyes narrow. He steps forward again, and I see he's got a gun. He presses it to Hayden's stomach.
Shots fill my ears, ringing in the cavern, again and again, a deafening string of noise. Hayden lurches backward. Falls to the ground. Havriel keeps shooting, until the gun clicks. Smoke rises gently from Hayden's ruined chest.

Havriel tosses the gun aside and turns on us.

“Stay away,” Lilly hisses. She places herself in front of Will and Jules. I stand next to her, dagger out. “Stay back!”

“Should I?” Havriel says, and he sounds jolly somehow, desperate and crazy and happy. “Do you know what you did? You, in your desperation to live out your tiny, meaningless lives, killed a great man. A man who had lived two hundred and seventy years, longer than any other. A man who influenced nations, built empires and watched them fall, constructed a creature impossible to this day. And he died like a dog at your hands. Do you think I appreciate that?”

Lilly's sabre whips out, slashing Havriel's palm. “Shouldn't have come after us, then.”

His face turns hideous, a crinkled, vicious mask, teeth bared. He looks down at the cut in his palm, and for a second I think he's crying, his eyes squeezed shut. But it's
a chuckle, a thin laugh, high in the back of his throat. He steps toward us, his bleeding palm raised. Lilly swings her sabre with all her strength. Havriel's eyes open wide. He catches the blade on his arm, loops it down. The tip hits the floor. Lilly loses her grip, and Havriel kicks the sabre away. It goes spinning and dancing across the stones, like a tiny wind spout.

“Oh, children,” he says, and he's right there, right in front of us. His hand—bloody from his wounds, bloody from his brother's—clenches around my neck. “You should not have made me angry.”

He lifts me up like I'm weightless. I claw at his fingers. He doesn't let go. Multicolored explosions bloom across my vision. The buzz is rising, painful, filling every crack and fissure in my head, and I don't know if it's just me dying, or if everyone hears it. I see the trackers pinning Lilly's arms while she screams and kicks. I see Miss Sei, pulling on a medical glove with a snap, kneeling next to Jules and Will—

Havriel's eyes flick away from my face. He's looking over my shoulder. I don't know what he sees, don't even care anymore, but his mouth goes slack. And something hits me, hits us all. A massive shock wave, soft and cold
and crushing all at once. I'm flying, rolling across the floor. I see Havriel hurtling into the dark, picked up like a rag doll.

I lie for a second, gasping, choking. Push myself up onto hands and knees. “Lilly?” I cough. “Will?”

The trackers are on the floor, spread around me in a circle, like I'm the epicenter of a bomb. Miss Sei lies crumpled against a boulder about ten feet away, glassy-eyed. Not far away from her, Havriel is sitting up in the faint blue-yellow light of one of the tanks, brushing his hand delicately across a cut in his cheek. He looks almost disbelieving.

“That was unnecessary,” he croaks into the darkness, and he must be talking to the pale thing, because it's walking slowly toward us, drifting over the rocks and the bodies. Its eyes are black, birdlike.

The butterfly man. It's got to be. It was controlling Hayden, but this is its true form.

“You brought us our runaways,” Havriel says, pushing himself to his feet. His voice is becoming a strange mixture of contempt and groveling fear. “I am forever indebted, my dear boy.”

Will and Jules are about six feet away from me, tangled
with the bodies of some trackers. Farther back, Lilly's trying to push herself out from under the mass of arms and legs. Her hair is sticking to her face in wet strands. I start crawling toward the boys.

The butterfly man passes me, black eyes pinned on Havriel. The whine rises the closer he comes, until it's all there is, the only sound I can hear. The butterfly man stops in front of Havriel. The buzzing cuts off abruptly.

“I have not brought you your runaways,” he says. His voice is weirdly soft and uncertain. Almost sweet. Havriel is looking up at him, his expression horrified.

“I have returned them for myself,” the butterfly man says. “I have been waiting for you to arrive, Havriel du Bessancourt. I was waiting for Father as well, but it seems he has been given his just rewards already. I cannot say I will mourn him. I wish to tell you that our long-standing alliance is terminated.”

Lilly's up, stumbling over bodies to get to us. I try to stand, feel the black polymer suits against the soles of my feet, sticky and disgusting, the give of flesh-encased machines.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Havriel moving, backing away from the butterfly man. “Alliance?” he
says. “But we are not allies. We are brothers! Equals!”

“Equals?” The butterfly man lets out a high, chittering laugh. I notice a disturbance in the air around him, a dark, fuming mass, barely visible.

I've reached Will. I heave him upright.

“Equals,” the butterfly man says again, softer, yearning. “You rule the world in secret. I wander a dungeon, alone. You keep me fettered in a gilded wasteland, at every turn a mirror to remind me of who I am and what you made me. No,” the butterfly man says. “If we were equal, you would not fear me so.”

The disturbance around him flares. Havriel goes slamming against one of the tanks. He slides down it, coughing.

“I have had enough of this arrangement,” the butterfly man says, and the longing's gone from his voice. It's sharp now, malicious. “Enough of Father, and enough of you. There is only one cure for pining after something you cannot possess, and that is to destroy it entirely.”

Will and I are moving now, squashing over limbs, tripping over helmets. Lilly reaches Jules. She's trying to shake him awake.

I feel something brush the back of my neck, an
awareness, like a million tiny needles prickling over my skin—

I freeze. The butterfly man: he's looking straight at me.

I stay perfectly still, trying not to breathe. Will's so heavy. My muscles are burning, aching.

“Bonjour,”
the butterfly man says, and I close my eyes, because I know he's stepping toward me. I can feel the air sharpening, becoming dense and charged. My back feels like it's being picked at, like my skin is releasing in particles and dissolving into the air.

Will stirs, his eyes flickering open. “Will,” I whisper. “Will, wake up!”

I move, start dragging us away. I'm hunched double, and my entire chest cavity hurts, and my arm is digging into Will's shoulder blades painfully. I raise my head. The butterfly man is right in front of me, stock-still, obsidian eyes boring into mine.

“You are indeed Aurélie's descendant,” he says. “Her own mother would not know the difference.”

“
We're not part of this,” I whisper. “None of us are, just leave us alone—”

He's too close. The buzzing noise is back and it's
deafening, and that shudder in the air
hurts.
My lips are cracking. I can't hold Will up anymore. He slumps out of my grasp. I'm falling, too, dropping to the cavern floor.

“You
are
a part of this,” the butterfly man says. “You are my long-lost comrades. Forsaken children of this wicked, greedy family. I have waited long for one of you to come so far. For you to slip their nets and fight with me.”

I look up at him. He is standing over me, but all I can see now is a blurry oval, two black holes where his eyes should be.

“We have much to do,”
the butterfly man says
.
“We will return to the surface, you and Lilly and Jules and William. Together we shall end this once and for all.”

What is he talking about?
I push myself up onto my knees
,
gasping.

“End what?” I whisper. “What are you saying?”

“The cycle. The Bessancourts. This empire of suffering and pain. There is no end to it. There cannot be. When we are poor we wish to be rich, when we are rich we wish to be loved, when we are loved we wish for freedom from pain and endless life and unchanging happiness. It is a great, unstoppable conundrum. There is
some sickness deep in our minds, a darkness that causes all ills. It cannot be helped. It can only be eradicated.”

Eradicate
. I remember Rabbit Gallery, the stolen artwork, the massive warheads, the weapons used in all the wars of the last two centuries.

“You did that?” I say. My voice takes forever to reach my ears. “You invented the weapons, and Havriel and the marquis got rich and took the credit, but you
wanted
it, you
wanted
them to kill people.”

“You speak as though you do not approve,” the butterfly man says. “But what reason have you to love the world when it has treated you so harshly? Do you not crave revenge? Do you not crave justice?”

Uh-oh.

The butterfly spreads his hands over my eyes. I feel the scream ripping out of me, but I can't hear it—

And everything's gone.

I see a billion people crowding a busy street, dirty faces, ragged clothing, an endless swarm under neon signs. I see troops trudging off to a war, mothers sending off their sons with flowers in their plumed helmets, boots shined, faces grim. I see smoke rising from roofs and spires. Streaks of flame raining down on low wooden houses
and walled gardens, the sky between the power lines staining hot, ugly red. I see bombs tumbling like heavy birds onto a city, and I see the little mark on their rivets, a butterfly with human eyes in its wings. Péronne—the Bessancourts' own town—blown to smithereens, bodies lying along the roadside.

“This is what I have done,” the butterfly man says. “I gave them the tools and they gladly used them. There is no hope for such a people.”

The images keep rolling, wave after wave. My skull is being filled up, synapses crackling, nerves overheating. I see things from my life, from other people's lives: a beggar being beaten on a roadside by two men in elegant clothing. Mom smiling—bright lights—a neon frosted birthday cake—bodies leaping from the sides of a huge gray aircraft carrier as it burns. I see Mom turning slowly to face me in the kitchen, a horrible look of determination on her face.