Only a Monster (32 page)

“I wish . . .” Joan swallowed. “I wish we could be different.”

“What if we were?” Nick said.

“What do you mean?”

“We can't change what we've done,” Nick said, “but . . . we don't have to be the people we were made into.” He sounded shaky. “You told me once that you wanted peace between monsters and humans.”

Joan stared at him. The woman in the recording had said that she'd chosen Nick because his virtuousness could be twisted into righteous fury. The woman had thought she'd made Nick perfectly. But she'd been wrong. Joan understood that now. There was something incorruptible at the core of him. Something good that not even two thousand attempts at torturing and breaking him could erase.

“Do you really think it's possible?” Joan said. She wanted peace more than anything. She was half-human, half-monster. She didn't just want peace. She felt broken without it.

“I can't bring your family back,” he said. “But if we can make this timeline better, I want to try.”

Joan knew then. She wasn't in love with that other Nick—the Nick who'd never been the hero. She wasn't that other
Joan. She was in love with
this
Nick—the Nick who'd suffered unimaginably, and turned that suffering into wanting to protect people. And who still, even now, could imagine a future that was different.

She took the last step and reached up to touch his face. He let her, unflinchingly. “Can I kiss you?” she whispered.

He made a soft sound and reached for her with a kind of desperate relief that made Joan's heart jump. He was bare-necked, she realized as he pulled her into his arms. All she'd have to do to was slide her hand to his neck, and he'd be dead. His trust almost undid her.

“I've loved you since the moment I saw you,” she said. Since then and before that. Now and forever.

“I love you,” he whispered back. “I always have.”

Joan closed her eyes. She could feel tears starting as his mouth touched hers. And the timeline responded. The monster part of her sensed it as her mouth opened under his: a shift in the world, as though vast jagged pieces were knitting together. The timeline was repairing itself.

Just for a second, she let herself
feel
it. She imagined that she and Nick could really have this. That they could be happy.

And then she opened her eyes and unleashed her strange power on him.

He huffed a shocked breath into her mouth. “Joan?” He tried to pull back, but Joan tightened her arms around him. She knew what she had to do.

Joan drew power from the depths of herself, and her power
responded as if it had been waiting for her call.
Something forbidden
, one of the guards had called it.

In a way, Joan had always known what her power could do. She hadn't transmuted the metal into stone; she'd turned it
back
to ore. She'd unmade it.

And now she unmade Nick.

There was nothing gentle about it. Power poured out of her. His body jerked and shook with it. His face became a mask of pain.
Joan
, he mouthed.
Joan, please.
Joan forced herself to keep going, even as he started to scream.

She was properly crying now. Around them, the house started to shake.

Joan unmade him. The force of it shook the walls. Plaster cracked and dust rained down around them. She unmade everything Nick had done, and everything that had been done to him.

She unmade the lives Nick had taken. She brought her family back.

She unmade Nick until he wasn't the hero anymore. Until the Nick she loved was gone.

And, at the end of it, everything had changed.

The last weeks of summer were long and warm, even as the leaves started to turn. Everyone agreed that it had been the loveliest London summer in years.

In the city's parks, wildflowers bloomed later and longer than anyone could remember: sweet peas, daisies, violets, and honeysuckle.

Joan missed the end of it. She'd come down with what Gran worried was the flu and Uncle Gus thought might be heatstroke.

But Joan knew it wasn't a human illness. Unmaking Nick had pushed her power beyond its limit. She'd burned through every last spark of it to change the timeline. Now, whatever ability she'd had to unmake things was gone. She could feel the absence inside herself even after her body started to heal.

And her power wasn't the only absence inside her.

She dreamed of him. Sometimes he was in the Holland House library, sometimes tied to a chair in his childhood home. Always, he was screaming, begging her to stop. Joan woke shaking and reaching for him, words still thick in her mouth.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I love you.

If the dreams were bad, though, being awake was worse. The last moments at the house came back to her over and over. She remembered how Nick's eyes had widened. How his chest had shuddered as he'd started to scream. She remembered the look on his face as he'd realized that
she
was doing this to him. That she wasn't going to stop. She'd told him she loved him. She'd kissed him. And then she'd torn him apart.

Too weak to get out of bed, all Joan could do was lie there and remember and remember and remember.

No one else did.

“Holland House?” Gran felt Joan's forehead with the back of her hand. “You mean the old ruins in Holland Park? Why would you want to go down there?”

“I mean Holland House! The house in the park!” Joan tried to sit up, but Gran coaxed her back down.

“There's nothing there, love.” Gran sounded worried. “You still have a fever. I'm going to call Dr. de Witt again.”

Joan had never been a good patient. As soon as she was strong enough to stand, she pronounced herself well and headed straight for Kensington High Street.

She made it halfway up the street before she stumbled back to Gran's, half-dead on her feet.

“Serves you right,” Gran said, but her voice was gentle. She guided Joan back to bed.

But maybe willing it to be true made it true, because Joan
got stronger and stronger every day after that. As soon as her legs would hold her, she headed to Holland Park. She went back the next day, and the next.

The morning that Dad was due home, she felt almost her normal self again.

When she came into the kitchen that morning, she found most of the family already up.

Joan paused in the doorway, feeling the same shock of relief and disbelief that she felt every time she saw them now.

Uncle Gus was at the stove, stewing pears. As she watched, he plucked fresh pears from an empty fruit basket and tossed the peelings over his shoulder, where they vanished into thin air.

He spiced the pears with a heavy hand—Gran's side of the family liked strong flavors. No matter where Gran was living, her house always smelled the same: of cinnamon and saffron and cardamom and cloves.

“I bet I could steal the
Mona Lisa
,” Ruth was saying to the others. She was using Gran's broken radiator as a window seat. Her curls were a stiff black cloud around her face. “You're not seriously going to eat that,” she added as Gran took a bite of toast. She groaned. “Oh, that is
wrong
.”

“Dorothy, throw it out,” Aunt Ada said. “Please.”

“I like it like this,” Gran said.

“It's burnt!” Bertie said.

“I like it burnt.”

When they'd been dead, Joan had dreamed about them. She'd never been able to conjure all the little details, though. Gran's hair was a gray cloud, frizzier at the ends. Her dressing gown was frayed at the hem. And she may or may not have liked burnt toast, but there was a sly, amused quirk at her mouth as she ate it. She always enjoyed horrifying people.

Beside her, Aunt Ada was spreading Marmite onto a slice of pale toast. She was in a white suit, and there wasn't a spot of Marmite on the suit or her plate. Joan had asked Ada once how she always stayed so immaculate. Ada had grinned and kissed the top of Joan's head.
It's just confidence, love.

“Anyone could steal the
Mona Lisa
,” Gus said to Ruth now.

“I'm not talking about snatching it from the old man's hand,” Ruth said.

“I wouldn't do that,” Gus said. “What do you take me for? I'd properly steal it too.”

“It's only a copy, anyway,” Bertie said.

This drew everyone's attention.

“One of the Venetian families bought the original,” Bertie said, as though he was surprised that they didn't know. “Paint was still wet.”

“You sure?” Ada said. “I heard the Nightingales bought it—same deal. Paint wet.”

“How many of them did Leo sell?” Bertie said.

“Yes, but the point,” Ruth said, “is that I could steal a painting from the Louvre.” She saw Joan in the doorway then. “But I would never do that,” she added, singsong, “because theft is wrong.”

Teacher's here
, Ruth would sometimes say when Joan came into a room. She'd always said it fondly, almost with pride, as if she were saying
Joan's an astronaut, actually
.

She jumped off the radiator and slung an arm around Joan's shoulder. “Right,” she said. “Last day in London. What do you want to do?”

Joan felt a familiar flash of fondness, along with a pang of something sharper. How many times had she come into a room and felt the conversation halt and change like this?
Joan doesn't like shop talk
.
Not in front of Joan.

“I—” she started.

“I know, I know. You have to go somewhere first, and you'll meet me after.” Ruth bumped Joan's shoulder gently. “Where do you keep going?”

“Nowhere fun,” Joan promised. She took a piece of toast from Ruth's plate. “You finished with this?”

“No,” Ruth grumbled, but she didn't really sound grumpy. She'd been more worried than she'd let on by Joan's illness.

“Take some fruit if you're planning to walk,” Uncle Gus said. He plucked a blood orange from Gran's fruit basket and gave it to Joan. “You need to keep up your vitamin C.”

Joan had forgotten that detail too. Uncle Gus thought that vitamin C could heal everything from the common cold to a broken leg. Her smile wobbled, and she swallowed hard. She'd missed them all so much.

The blood orange was sweet-scented and heavy, red as a sunrise. Perfectly ripe. And out of season, she realized slowly. Oranges were winter fruit. Maybe it was imported. Or maybe
someone had traveled to winter. She looked back up at Gus.

“I'm fusspotting, aren't I?” he said.

Joan shook her head. “Nah.” She managed a proper smile. But she put the orange back in the bowl. “I'd better get dressed.”

Gran was sitting on the front doorstep when Joan left the house. She shuffled over to let Joan pass her.

“Geraldine from two doors down just walked past with a cat on a leash,” Gran said. “Big ginger tom with white paws. Woman must be having a midlife crisis.” She drank her tea. “Will you be home for dinner? I'm making treacle pudding.”

On impulse, Joan bent to give her a hug. They weren't really a hugging family, but after a surprised second Gran put her mug down and hugged Joan back.
The formidable Dorothy Hunt
, Aaron had called her once, but in Joan's arms she felt fine-boned and fragile.

“Wouldn't miss it for the world,” Joan said.

Joan remembered when she'd first returned to Holland House—a week ago now, still so ill that her legs would barely hold her. Her first glimpse of the house had been as much of a shock as seeing her family alive again.
The old ruins in Holland Park
, Gran had called it. But nothing could have prepared Joan for the reality.

The west wing was gone. The library where Joan had met Nick. Sabine's Room, where Gran had died. The east wing was still there, but gutted. All that was left was the facade, now
wrapped around a hostel. Joan had wandered inside in a daze and found a modern building, unrecognizable in layout. Where the Gilt Room had been, now there was a dormitory in cheerful kindergarten colors.

A pamphlet in the information office had said that the house had been bombed in the war—twenty-two times in one night. Joan took the pamphlet to Roger's Seat, the hidden alcove overlooking the Dahlia Garden. The house might have changed, but she still knew some of its secret places.

There, curled up and half hidden by a curtain of leaves, she read about the new history of the house. In her own timeline, a private company had bought Holland House in the 1950s and turned it into a museum. In this timeline, the house had been destroyed before that could happen. The burned husk had been sold to the Royal Borough. It was all there on the page, in black and white with citations.

Joan had sat there for a long time. Whatever the pamphlet said, she knew that she'd done this. When she'd altered Nick's history, she must have altered the history of the house too. It had just had the bad luck to be in the proximity of her power.

And she couldn't help but ask the question: If she'd done this to Holland House, what other changes had she inadvertently made to the timeline?

Now, on her last morning in London, she walked the familiar path from Kensington High Street to what was left of the house.

Where do you keep going?
Ruth had asked.

Joan didn't know why she kept going back. Penance, maybe. The heaviness in her chest made more sense when she could see what she'd done to this place she'd loved. But it wasn't just that. There were memories here that were nowhere else. She could walk through the gardens and imagine that he was here with her.

As Joan walked, she was joined by joggers and people pushing prams and walking dogs. There was a football field where the maze had once stood, and she could hear the distant smack of the ball, people shouting, the ref's whistle.

After the long summer, the weather had finally turned. It was cool and drizzly as she walked past the house's facade, past the little café, past the old icehouse. In the other timeline, food historians had churned ice cream within its thick walls, using fresh fruit from the kitchen gardens. In this timeline, it was a gallery space.

Joan lingered in the covered walkway between the icehouse and the old orangery. This bit was new—built after the rest of the house had been bombed. There were murals all the way down the wall, depicting a garden party in the Victorian era.

Joan's favorite was the one where the partygoers were in an elaborate formal garden—ankle-high hedges creating intricate green loops. Women in voluminous skirts lounged against a central fountain. Whoever had painted this couldn't have known the house, but they'd captured the mysterious atmosphere of the old gardens.

Joan stepped closer. She could almost have kept walking
into the painting, she thought dreamily.

She caught herself with a sharp breath before the tug of yearning came.

Almost automatically, she grounded herself in the details of the moment—as Aaron had taught her. The smell of wet stone. The patter of rain outside the colonnade.

Footsteps.

Déjà vu washed over her. She turned toward the sound, knowing already that it wasn't Nick. She'd have recognized the rhythm of his step. Still, her heart skipped in disappointment at the confirmation.

The newcomer was a soberly dressed man, perhaps twenty years old. He shook his umbrella carefully into the garden and then made his way down the walkway, stopping at the mural beside Joan.

His face was pale and Chinese—familiar, Joan thought. But recognition didn't come until he stepped closer to the painting with an air of intent interest. He'd been an artist, she remembered.

Jamie Liu had been gaunt as a prisoner, but in this new timeline he was solidly built and healthy. He had an expensive haircut, and he was dressed for colder weather than it was—gloves and a dark blue trench coat.

I've met you
, Joan wanted to blurt out. Except that she hadn't met him. Just like she hadn't met Nick, hadn't met Aaron. Sometimes, the weight of remembering, when no one else did, made her feel like she was going mad. She'd seen people lying dead
in these gardens—except that she hadn't. Her family had died here—except that they hadn't.

“I love these paintings,” she said a little awkwardly. She needed to hear him say something. She knew what his voice should sound like, and she needed the proof that her memories were real. “You almost feel as though you could step into the party.”

“That would be nice.” To her relief, his voice was the pleasant treble she'd expected. He turned to her, seeming curious but not uncomfortable. “It certainly looks like they were enjoying better weather.”