“I’m … so sorry, Jillian,” said Jack, in a careful, measured voice. “I was hungry. You know how cranky I get when I’m hungry.”
Jill giggled. “You’re the worst when you haven’t eaten. So did you come to visit me, really?”
“Yes. Absolutely.” Jack didn’t need to turn to know that Alexis was trembling, or that her parents were fighting not to rush to her. They hadn’t been expecting her to bring danger to their door. They should have been. They should have known. She should have known. She’d been a fool, and now they were paying the price. “Dr. Bleak expects me back by midnight, but I have shopping to do in the square before then. Would you like to come with me? I think I have enough coin that I could buy you something nice. Candied ginger, or a ribbon for your hair.”
Jill’s gaze sharpened. “If you’d really come to see me, you’d know whether you had enough coin to get me a present.”
“Dr. Bleak controls the money. I’m just his apprentice.” Jack spread her hands, trying to look contrite without seeming overly eager. Jill seemed to believe her—or maybe Jill just didn’t care, as long as she got her own way in the end. We’re strangers now, she thought, and mourned. “I’m learning a lot, but that doesn’t mean he trusts me with more than he has to.”
“The Master trusts me with everything,” said Jill, and skipped—skipped!—across the room to slide her arm through Jack’s. “I suppose we can shop before you buy me a present. If Dr. Bleak cast you out, you’d have to live in the barn with the pigs, and you’d be filthy all the time. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?”
Jack, who already felt like she needed a bath from just that short contact with her sister, suppressed a shudder. “Awful,” she agreed, and grabbed her basket, and let Jill lead her out into the night.
The door slammed shut behind them. Ms. Chopper dropped the tray of potatoes in her hurry to fling her arms around her daughter, and the three of them huddled together, shaking and crying, and suddenly all too aware of the dark outside.
*
JILL STEPPED LIGHTLY, like she was dancing her way across the muddy cobblestones in the village square. She never stopped talking, words spilling over each other like eager puppies as she recounted everything that had happened to her in the months since she’d last seen her sister. Jack realized, with a dull, distant sort of guilt, that Jill was lonely: she might have servants in that great pile of a castle, and she might have the love, or at least the fondness, of her Master, but she didn’t have friends.
(That was probably a good thing. Jack could remember Dr. Bleak returning from trips to the village shortly after she’d gone to live with him, a dire expression on his face and his big black medical bag in his hands. There had been deaths among the village children. That was all he’d been willing to tell her, when she pressed. It hadn’t been until years later, when Alexis started coming around, that she’d learned that all the children who’d died had been seen playing with Jill around the fountain. The Master was a jealous man. He didn’t want her to have anything in her life except for him, and he was happy to do whatever he deemed necessary to make sure that he remained the center of her world. Friends were a nuisance to be dealt with. Friends were expendable.)
Jack was accustomed to doing her shopping alone, or in the company of Dr. Bleak. It was surprising how often people forgot that Jill was her sister, or felt no need to guard their tongues in her presence. She was used to jokes and gossip, and even the occasional sly barb about the Master’s policies.
As she walked through the shops on Jill’s arm, the real surprise was the silence. People who knew her as Dr. Bleak’s apprentice went quiet when she approached side by side with the Master’s daughter, and some of them looked at her face like she was a riddle that had just been unexpectedly solved. Jack had to fight not to grimace. It would take her months, maybe years, to rebuild the ground she was losing with every person who saw her in Jill’s company. Suddenly, she was the enemy again. It was not a comfortable prospect.
Several of the merchants tried to give her deeper discounts than they usually did, or could afford. When possible, she paid the normal amount anyway, shaking her head to silence them. Unfortunately, if Jill caught her, she would snatch the coins from the merchant’s hand, rolling her eyes.
“We only pay as a courtesy,” she would say. “We pay as a symbol, to show that we’re part of this village, not just the beating heart that sustains it in a world of wolves. If they want to make the symbol even more symbolic, you’re to let them. You promised me a present.”
“Yes, sister,” Jack would reply, and on they would go to the next merchant, while the hole in the pit of her stomach got bigger and bigger, until it felt like it was going to swallow the entire world.
She’d have to tell Dr. Bleak about this. If she didn’t, the villagers would, the next time he came for supplies or to check on someone’s ailing mother. They would talk about his apprentice and the Master’s daughter walking arm in arm, and he would wonder why she’d hid it from him, and everything would be ruined. Even more ruined than it already was.
The basket over her arm was heavy with the things she’d been sent to buy, and with an occasional extra that Jill had picked up and simply placed among everything else. A jug of heavy cream; a jar of honey. Luxuries that were nice, in their way, but which had never been considered necessary in the windmill up on the hill. Finally, it was time for Jill to choose her gift.
The stallholder, a slender village maiden who shook and shivered like a reed dancing in the wind, stood with her hands clasped tight against her apron, like by refusing to let them flutter, she could somehow conceal the rest of her anxiety. And maybe she could: Jill didn’t appear to notice. She was busy running her fingers through the ribbons, cooing and twittering about the feel of the fabric against her skin.
Jack tried to make eye contact with the stallholder. She looked away, refusing to let Jack look into her eyes. Jack felt the hole in her stomach grow greater still. Most of the villagers were superstitious, if it could be called that when the vampire was right there, when there were werewolves in the mountains and terrible things with tentacles in the sea. They knew that the Master could influence their minds by meeting their eyes. None of them had looked directly at Jill without being ordered to in years, even though she wouldn’t have her own power over the human heart until she was transformed. Now, it seemed, some of that superstition was transferring to Jack.
“Do you like this one?” asked Jill, holding up a length of shimmering gray silk that looked like it had been sliced out of the mist on the moor. “I have a dress it would look perfect with.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Jack. “You should get that one.”