He coughed, and pain wracked his chest. No, she had run from the building. He remembered that much. She’d left him there to die. Did he really mean so little to her? When she’d danced with him at the Purgator ball, her body had hummed with desire. If she hadn’t been lying to herself, she’d have run off with him then and there.
He’d have taken her home to New England. They’d have slept in a field under a giant beech by the old North Bridge, waking to mist rising from the tall grass. She’d have stood by his side when he rewrote the world, and he would have fashioned her a towering palace in the center of the city.
Or maybe a butter-yellow house in the woods. Tea, wool sweaters, hot hands under blankets, her head on his chest while he read books.
That was his other life. The phantom life that should have been, but wasn’t.
He was delirious. Why did Fiona so preoccupy his thoughts? That March day, in the cemetery, they’d lingered by a linden tree. Standing over John Winthrop’s dusty bones, she’d promised to sweep the monsters away. Then there was their first kiss—outside the school, the remnants from his army’s attack still smeared on the pavement. She hadn’t yet known he was a monster, and their future together had bloomed before him like pear blossoms.
But when she’d found him in the woods with blood running down his chin—that was when the rot had set in.
Did she really think Tobias would be any different? Once the Tatter boy learned his fate, he’d go to any lengths to escape a sentence of eternal torment. At least, he would if he had any sense.
Jack swallowed, his throat raw. He could dream of a gleaming future all he wanted, but the sad reality was that she wasn’t here. Wherever “here” was.
Even worse, his plans to snatch the relic were shattered. He lay alone in a quiet and musty room that might as well be a coffin.
He’d failed at everything. Fiona hated him, and he’d lost the trail of the relic. He couldn’t save a single person from death, which meant all the murders he’d committed had served no purpose. He was a broken monster, lingering on this corrupt earth long after he should have expired. Loneliness pressed his chest like a ton of rocks, threatening to shatter his ribs.
What was wrong with him? He didn’t normally wallow in guilt. Maybe that Fury had infected him with a conscience. Or maybe this is my own personal hell. He tried to sit up, but pain screamed through his bones.
Grunting, he settled back into the pillow. He hadn’t felt this brutalized since the 1650s. That one day had changed everything. That one day had created this polluted carcass.
11
Fiona
She just wanted silence.
For two days she’d sat in a dark corner, listening to the dogs bark and yap and the wind rustling the honeysuckle outside the door. Byron had returned, apologizing for failing, but Fiona didn’t want to hear from him.
Whenever Tobias stopped by, asking if she’d slept, she told him she had. He could probably tell by the bags under her eyes that she was lying. She hadn’t slept for longer than twenty minutes, hunched against the wall.
Celia, Alan and Thomas had brought dire drinks, trying to coax her into the sun, but she wouldn’t budge. If they’d known what was warring in her mind, they would have stayed away. Her thoughts were corrupted with shattered skulls and blood.
She still wore the chicory-blue dress she’d had on when she heard the news. Since that night, she’d left the kennel only once, quietly slipping into Tobias’s room to fill a backpack with gold bits. She was still mulling over an escape, but it was nearly impossible to think clearly enough to figure out where to go.
As soon as she was able to get a full night’s sleep, she’d wander out of here on her own. Maybe take a bus to Canada. She’d figure out how to trade gold pieces for real money, and she’d rent a small apartment. She’d change her name—something sassy and intimidating, like Roxy. In a few weeks, she’d have a new life.
But you needed a passport for Canada. Shit. Mom had always kept track of those things, in a little filing cabinet in her bedroom.
She clutched her backpack to her chest, all of her possessions now stuffed into this canvas sack. She tugged at a loose thread, staring at the dimming light on the hay-strewn ground. Her Canada plan was ridiculous anyway. For one thing, she wanted vengeance, and she wouldn’t learn about bloodlust from Canadians.
When she closed her eyes, images flickered in the recesses of her mind. There was the man dredged from the sea—the man whose brains her father had blasted onto the sand. There was the jack-in-the-box Danny had drawn on the wall when they didn’t have enough money for toys—lopsided and red-lipped. When she was five, she had shoved a chair in front of it to avoid catching sight of its empty eyes in the middle of the night.
She wrapped the thread around her finger, so tight that her fingertip blanched. What was it with psychopaths and clowns? If serial killers had familiars, they’d each get their own grinning jester.