SEE THEM NOW, two girls—almost women, but still not quite, not quite—running hand in hand across the vast and unforgiving moor. One wears a skirt that tangles and tears in the bracken. The other wears trousers, sturdy shoes, and gloves to protect her from the world around her. Both of them run like their lives depend on it.
Behind them, a river of anger, split into individual human bodies, running with the unstoppable fury of the crowd. More torches have been found and lit; more pitchforks have been liberated. In a place like this, under a sky like this, torches and pitchforks are the native trappings of the enraged. They appear without being asked for, and the more there are, the deeper the danger.
The crowd glitters like a starry sky with the individual flames of their ire. The danger is very real.
Jack runs and Jill follows. Both of them are weeping, the one for her lover blooming red as a rose in the empty moorland, the other for her adoptive father, who should have been so proud of her and has instead cast her aside. If our sympathy is more for the first of them, well, we are only human; we can only look on the scene with human eyes, and judge in our own ways.
They run, and the crowd pursues, and the rising moon observes, for the tale is almost ending.
* * *
DR. BLEAK COVERED ALEXIS with an oiled tarp when he heard footsteps pounding up the garden path. He turned, expecting to see Jack, and went still when he saw not only his apprentice but her bloody sister. Behind them, the furious body of the mob was gaining ground, outlined by the glow from their torches.
“Jack,” he said. “What…?”
“The Master revoked his protection when the villagers saw what she’d done to Alexis,” said Jack, still running, pulling Jill into the windmill. Her voice was clear and cold: if he hadn’t known her so well, he might not even have realized how badly it was shaking. “They’re going to kill her.”
Jill gave an almighty shriek and yanked her hand out of Jack’s, letting the still-slippery blood work for her. “That’s not true! He loves me!” she shouted, and whirled to run.
Dr. Bleak was somehow already there, a white rag in his hand. He clapped it over her nose and mouth, holding it in place. Jill made a desperate mewling sound, like a kitten protesting bedtime, and struggled for a few seconds before her knees folded and she fell, crumpling in on herself.
“Jack, quickly,” he said, slamming the door. “There isn’t much time.”
Obedience had been the first thing Dr. Bleak drilled into her: failure to obey could result in nasty consequences, many of which would be fatal to a child like she had been. Jack rushed to Jill’s side, gathering her unconscious sister in her arms. They were the same height, but Jill felt like she weighed nothing at all, like she was nothing but dust and down.
“We have to hide her,” Jack said.
“Hiding her isn’t good enough,” Dr. Bleak replied. He grabbed a small machine from his workbench and moved toward the windmill’s back door. “You’ve been an excellent apprentice, Jack. Quick-fingered, sharp-witted—you were everything I could have asked for. I’m sorry this has happened.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Jack’s stomach clenched in on itself. She was holding her sleeping sister, covered in the blood of her dead girlfriend, and the village was marching on the windmill with torches and pitchforks. She would have said this night couldn’t get any worse. Suddenly, she was terribly sure that it could.
I’ve seen this movie before, she thought, almost nonsensically. But we’re not the ones who made the monster. The Master did that. We’re just the ones who loved her.
Only they weren’t even that, were they? Dr. Bleak would have saved Jill instead of Jack, at the beginning, because he’d seen Jack as a more logical choice for a vampire lord. That didn’t mean he’d known her or cared about her. Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love, and Jill and Dr. Bleak had never had any time. If anyone in this room loved Jill, it was Jack, and the worst of it was, she wouldn’t even have had that much if it hadn’t been for Alexis. Their parents had never taught them how to love each other. Any connection they’d had had been despite the adults in their lives, not because of them.
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.