*
“JACK!” DR. BLEAK’S VOICE was sharp, commanding, and impossible to ignore. Not that Jack was in the habit of ignoring it. Her first season with the doctor had been more than sufficient to teach her that when he said “jump,” her correct response wasn’t to ask “how high?” It was to run for the nearest cliff and trust that gravity would sort things out.
Still, sometimes he had the worst timing. She untangled herself from Alexis’s arms, grabbing her gloves from the shelf where they had been discarded, and yanked them on while shouting, “Coming!”
Alexis sighed as she sat up and pulled her shift back into position. “What does he want now?” she asked. “Papa expects me back before nightfall.” Days on the Moors were short, precious things. Sometimes the sun didn’t come entirely out from behind the clouds for weeks at a time, allowing careful vampires and careless werewolves to run free even when it shouldn’t have been their time. Alexis’s family ran an inn. They didn’t have to worry about farming or hunting during the scarce hours of daylight. That didn’t mean they were in any hurry to offer their child a second funeral.
(Those who had died once and been resurrected couldn’t become vampires: whatever strange mechanism the undead used to reproduce themselves was magic, and it shied away from the science of lightning and the wheel. Alexis was safe from the Master’s whims, no matter how pretty she became as she aged. But the Master wasn’t the only monster on the Moors, and most wouldn’t care about Alexis’s medical history. They would simply devour her.)
“I’ll find out,” said Jack, hastily buttoning her own vest. She stopped to look at Alexis, taking in the soft white curves of her body, the rounded flesh of her shoulder and breast. “Just … just stay right where you are, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you don’t move, we won’t have to take another bath.”
“I won’t move,” said Alexis, with a lazy smile, before lying back on the bed and staring at the taxidermy-studded ceiling.
After four years with Dr. Bleak, Jack had grown stronger than she ever could have expected, capable of hoisting dead bodies and bushels of potatoes over her shoulders with equal ease. She had grown like a weed, shooting up more than a foot, necessitating multiple trips to the village to buy new cloth to mend her trousers. The contents of Dr. Bleak’s wardrobe trunk had stopped fitting her properly by the time she was fourteen, all long limbs and budding breasts and unpredictable temper. (Much of that year had been spent shouting at Dr. Bleak for reasons she could neither understand nor explain. To his credit, the doctor had borne up admirably under her unpredictable tempers. He was, after all, somewhat unpredictably tempered himself.)
After the third pair of badly patched trousers had split down the middle, Jack had learnt to tailor her own clothes, and had started buying fabric by the bolt, cutting and shaping it into the forms she desired. Her work was never going to make her the toast of some fashionable vampire’s court, but it covered her limbs and provided her with the necessary protection from the elements. Dr. Bleak had nodded in quiet understanding as her attire became more and more like his, with cuffs that went to her wrists and buttoned tight, and cravats tied at her throat, seemingly for fashion but really to prevent anything getting past the fine weave of her armor. She was not denying her femininity by wearing men’s clothing; rather, she was protecting it from caustic chemicals and other, less mundane compounds.
She was still thin, for while her belly was generally full, she did not have the luxury of second helpings or sweet puddings with her tea; she was still fair, for daylight was rare on the Moors. Her hair was still long, a tight blonde braid hanging down the center of her back, picked free and retied every morning. Alexis said that it was like butter, and sometimes cajoled Jack into letting her unbraid it so that she could run her fingers through the kinked strands, smoothing and soothing them. But it was never loose for long. Like everything else about Jack, it had grown into something precise and organized, always bent to its place in the world.
The newest things about her were her glasses, the lenses milled and shaped in Dr. Bleak’s lab, set into bent-wire frames. Without them, the world was slightly fuzzy around the edges—not a terrible thing, given how brutal this world could sometimes be, but not the best of attributes in a scientist. So she wore her glasses, and she saw things as they were, sharp and bright and unforgiving.
She found Dr. Bleak inside the windmill, a large brown bat spread out on the autopsy table with nails driven through the soft webbing of its wings. Its mouth was stuffed full of garlic and wild rose petals, just as a precaution. There was nothing about the bat to prove that it was a visiting vampire, but there was nothing to prove that it wasn’t, either.
“I need you to go to the village,” he said, not looking up. An elaborate loupe covered his left eye, bringing the internal organs of the bat into terrible magnification. “We’re running low on aconite, arsenic, and chocolate biscuits.”
“I still don’t understand how we even have chocolate here,” said Jack. “Cocoa trees grow in tropical climates. This is not a tropical climate.”
“The terrible things that dwell beneath the bay scavenge it from the ships they wreck and trade it to the villagers for vodka,” said Dr. Bleak. “That’s also where we get rum, tea, and the occasional cursed idol.”
“But where do the ships come from?”
“Far away.” Dr. Bleak finally looked up, making no effort to conceal his irritation. “As you cannot dissect, resurrect, or otherwise scientifically trouble the sea, leave it alone, apprentice.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jack. The rest of Dr. Bleak’s words finally caught up with her. Her eyes widened. “The village, sir?”
“Has your time with your buxom friend destroyed what little sense you had? I’m of no mood to take a new apprentice, not when you’re finally becoming trained enough to be useful. Yes, Jack, the village. We need things. You are the apprentice. You fetch things.”
“But sir…” Jack glanced to the window. The sun, such as it was, hung dangerously low in the sky. “Night is coming.”
“Which is why you’ll be purchasing aconite, to ward off werewolves. The gargoyles of the waste won’t trouble you. They’re still grateful for the repair job we did last month on their leader. As for vampires, well. You haven’t much to worry about in that regard.”
Jack wanted to argue. She opened her mouth to argue. Then she closed it again, recognizing a losing proposition when she saw one. “May I walk Alexis home?” she asked.