When they resumed, she said lightly, teasing, “You can touch every filthy plant in the world, but you can’t touch me without a bucket of boiling water on hand?”
“I don’t touch them,” said Jack. “My scissors touch them, and my gloves touch them, but I don’t touch them. I don’t touch much of anything.”
“I wish you could.”
“So do I,” said Jack, and smiled, a wry twist of a thing. “Sometimes I think about what my mother would say if she could see me now. She was the one who first told me that I should be afraid of getting dirty.”
“My mother told me the same thing,” said Alexis.
“Your mother is a reasonable terror of a woman who frightens me more than all the vampires in all the castles in the world, but she has nothing on my mother when there was a chance one of the neighbors might see me with dirt on my dress,” said Jack darkly. “I learned to be afraid of dirt before I learned how to spell my own name.”
“I can’t imagine you in a dress,” said Alexis. “You’d look…” She stopped herself, but it was too late: the damage was done.
“Like my sister, yes,” said Jack. “We would be two peas in a terrible pod. I don’t think I’d make a good vampire, though. They never seem to have a napkin on hand when the spurting starts.” She shuddered theatrically. “Can you imagine me covered in all that mess? And they haven’t reflections. I’d be unable to tell whether I’d wiped my face clean. The only solution would be dipping myself nightly in bleach.”
“Hard on the hair,” said Alexis.
“Hard on the heart,” said Jack. She gave Alexis’s fingers a squeeze. “I am what I am, and there’s much about me that won’t be changed with any amount of wishing or wanting. I’m sorry for that. I’d trade a great deal to share an afternoon in the hay with you, dust in the air and sweat on our skins and neither of us caring. But I’m afraid the experience would drive me mad. I am a creature of sterile environments. It’s too late for me to change.”
“You say that, and yet I’ve seen you leap into an open grave like it was nothing.”
“Only with the proper footwear, I assure you.”
Alexis laughed and stepped a little closer to Jack, hugging her arm as they walked toward the looming wall of the village. She rested her head against Jack’s shoulder. Jack inhaled, breathing in the salty smell of her lover’s hair, and thought that there was something to be said for worlds of blood and moonlight, where the only threat more terrible than the things that dwelt in the sea were the things that lived on the shore. Beauty was all the brighter against a background of briars.
The walk was too short, or maybe their legs had just become too long: both of them were still so haunted by the ghosts of childhood that they had yet to learn the fine art of dawdling, of stretching things out until they lasted as long as they would ask them to. In what seemed like no time at all, they were standing in front of the great wall.
Alexis let go of Jack’s hand. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called, “Alexis Chopper, returning home,” to the sentry.
“Jacqueline Wolcott, apprentice to Dr. Bleak, escorting Miss Chopper and purchasing supplies,” called Jack. Residents always spoke first—to give them the opportunity to scream for help if they felt that it was needed, she supposed. The “help” would probably take the form of scalding oil, or possibly a rain of arrows, but at least the residents would die knowing that they’d protected the rest of the village.
It was fascinating, how frightened people who lived in a vampire’s backyard could be of the rest of the world. Just because something was unfamiliar, that didn’t mean it had sharper teeth or crueler claws than the monster they already knew. But Dr. Bleak said that conducting psychological experiments on the neighbors never ended well, and he was in charge, so Jack kept her thoughts to herself.
“Watch the gate!” called the sentry. There was a lot of shouting and creaking of wood, and then the gate swung open, heavy and slow and supposedly secure.
Alexis, who had been born behind that gate, knowing that the Master watched her every step, walked through serenely. The fact that she was willingly strolling into a vampire’s hunting ground didn’t seem to trouble her—and maybe it didn’t. On the few occasions when Jack had tried to speak to her about it, she had spoken darkly of the werewolves in the mountains, of the Drowned Gods under the sea, of all the terrible dangers that the Moors had to offer. Apparently, being a prey animal living under the auspices of a predator was better.
Maybe it was. Jack had only spent a single night under the Master’s roof, and while she was sometimes sad that she hadn’t been able to save her sister, she was never sorry that she’d gotten out. Jill had made her own choice.
Jack chuckled to herself. Alexis glanced at her.
“Something funny?”
“Everything,” said Jack, as the doors swung shut behind them. She offered Alexis her hand. “Let’s go see your parents.”
*
THE SUN, ALTHOUGH FADING, was still in the sky; the Master was deep inside his castle, resting up for the night that was to come. Jill was not allowed in his presence for another two days. It was always like that after a feeding. He said she needed to reach a certain age before he could stop her heart in her chest, preserving it forever. He said she would be happier facing the unending night as an adult, with an adult’s position and privilege.
Jill thought it was really because he was afraid. No one had ever heard of a foundling going back to their own world after their eighteenth birthday: if you came of age in the Moors, you stayed there until you died. Or undied, as the case might be. She was only sixteen. She still had two years to wait, two years of him leaving her alone for three days every two weeks, two years of walking the battlements alone, feeling the cruel kiss of the sun on her skin. The Master insisted. He wanted the people to grow used to her, and he wanted her to fully accept what she was giving up.
Nonsense. It was all nonsense. As if anyone could be offered an eternity of privilege and power and refuse it on a whim. Anyone who walked away from the Master would have to be a fool, or worse—
There was a flicker of motion down in the square. Two people had entered via the mountainside gate. The fat girl from the inn, and a skinny figure in a black vest. Light glinted off Jack’s glasses when she turned her head. Jill felt her hated, hated heart clench in her chest. Her sister, here.
This could not be allowed to stand.
9
SOMEONE’S COMING TO DINNER