Jill had run to the Master, and while she may have been the one who’d felt deserted, she was also the one who had never looked back. She had wanted to be a vampire’s child, and vampires did not love what they were compelled to share. Jack had gone with Dr. Bleak, and he had cared for her, had taken care of her and taught her, but he had never encouraged her to love.
That was on Alexis. Alexis, who had walked with her in the village, introducing her to people who had only been passing faces before, telling her about their lives until she could no longer fail to recognize them as people. Alexis, who had cried with her and laughed with her and felt sorry for her sister, trapped and alone in the castle. It had been Alexis who put Jill back into a human context, and it had been seeing her sister terrified and abandoned that made Jack realize she still loved her.
Without Alexis, she might have forgotten how to love. Jill would still have killed—some villager or other, someone too slow to get out of her way—but Jack would not have saved her.
The worst of it was knowing that without Alexis, whoever played her role would have been properly avenged.
“I mean they’ll kill her if they find her here, and they may kill you as well; you’d offer them a rare second chance to commit the same murder.” He slapped his device onto the door, embedding its pointed “feet” in the wood, and began twisting dials. “The Master had to repudiate her to keep them from marching on the castle—even vampires fear fire—but he won’t forgive them for killing his daughter. He’ll burn the village to the ground. It’s happened before. You did well in bringing her here. The only way to save them is to save her.”
“Sir, what does that have to do with—”
“The doors are the greatest scientific mystery our world has to offer,” said Dr. Bleak. He grabbed a jar of captive lightning and smashed it against the doorframe. Sparks filled the air. The device whirred into sudden life, dials spinning wildly. “Did you truly think I wouldn’t find a way to harness them?”
Jack’s eyes went wide. “We could have gone back anytime?” she demanded, in a voice that was barely more than a squeak.
“You could have gone back,” he agreed. “But you would not have been going home.”
Jack looked down at her silent, bloody sister, and sighed. “No,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been.”
“Stay away at least a year, Jack. You have to. A year is all it takes for a mob to dissipate here; grudges are counter to survival.” They could hear the shouting outside now. The flames would come next. “Blood will open the door, yours or hers, as long as it’s on your hands. Leave her behind, or kill her and bring back her body, but she can’t come here as she is. Do you understand? Do not bring your sister back here alive.”
Jack’s eyes widened further, until the muscles around them ached. “You’re really sending me away? But I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“You’ve denied the mob their kill. That, here, is more than enough. Go, stay gone, and come home if you still want to. This will always, always be your home.” He looked at her sadly. “I’m going to miss you, apprentice.”
“Yes, sir,” whispered Jack, her lower lip shaking with the effort of keeping herself from bursting into tears. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t fair. Jill had been the one to break the rules, and now Jack was the one on the cusp of losing everything.
Dr. Bleak opened the door. What should have been a view of the back garden was instead a wooden stairway, slowly winding upward into the dark.
Jack took a deep breath. “I’ll be back,” she promised.
“See that you are,” he said.
She stepped through the door. He closed it behind her.
13
A THOUSAND MILES OF HARDSHIP BETWEEN HERE AND HOME
DESCENDING THE STAIRS as a twelve-year-old had been tiring but achievable: the work of hours, the amusement of an afternoon.
Climbing the stairs as a seventeen-year-old, arms full of limp, slumbering sister, proved to be rather more difficult. Jack clumped up them methodically, trying to focus on all the repetitive, seemingly meaningless tasks Dr. Bleak had assigned her over the years. She had spent afternoons sorting frogspawn by minute gradations in color, or removing all the seeds from forest-grown strawberries, or sharpening all the thorns in a blackberry hedge. Every one of those chores had been infuriating when it was going on, but had left her better suited to her job. So: what did this leave her better suited to?
Betraying the girl who loved her, who was dead in the Moors, who might stay that way now that Dr. Bleak had no apprentice to assist him.
Carrying the sister who had cost her everything away from the damnation she had earned.
Giving up everything she had finally learned she wanted.
None of those were things she wanted to be suited to, but they were the answer all the same. Jack shook her head to dry her tears, and kept climbing.
The stairs were still old, still solid, still dusty; here and there, she thought she saw the ghosts of her own childish footprints, going down while she was coming up. It only made sense. There had been no foundlings in the Moors since she and Jill had arrived. Maybe there would be another now, since the position was no longer filled. Every breath had to be sucking in millions of dust particles. The thought was nauseating.
They were halfway up when Jill stirred, opening her eyes and staring upward at Jack in confusion. “Jack?” she squeaked.
“Can you walk?” Jack replied brusquely.
“I … Where are we?”
“On the stairs.” Jack stopped walking and dropped Jill, unceremoniously, on her bottom. “If you can ask questions, you can walk. I’m tired of carrying you.”
Jill blinked at her, eyes going wide and shocked. “The Master—”
“Isn’t here, Jill. We’re on the stairs. You remember the stairs?” Jack waved her arms, indicating everything around them. “The Moors kicked us out. We’re going back.”
“No! No!” Jill leapt to her feet, attempting to fling herself downward.
Jack was faster than she was. She hooked an arm around her sister’s waist, jerking her back up and flinging her forward. “Yes!” she shouted.
Jill’s head hit something hard. She stopped, rubbing it, and then turned, in slow confusion, to touch the air behind her. It lifted upward, like a trapdoor—like the lid of a trunk—and revealed a small, dusty room that still smelled, ever so faintly, of Gemma Lou’s perfume.
“The stairs below me have gone,” said Jack’s voice, dull and unsurprised. “You’d best climb out before we’re pushed out.”
Jill climbed out. Jack followed.
The two stood there for a long moment, stepping unconsciously closer together as they looked at the room that had belonged to their first caretaker, that had once been so familiar, before both of them had changed. The trunk slammed shut. Jill gave a little shriek and dove for it, clawing it open. Jack watched almost indifferently.
Inside the trunk was a welter of old clothing and costume jewelry, the sort of things a loving grandmother would set aside for her grandchildren to amuse themselves with. No stairway. No secret door.
Jill plunged her bloody hands into the clothes, pawing them aside. Jack let her.
“It has to be here!” Jill wailed. “It has to be!”