But that was the least of my worries. Bremerton was upon me and fast, knocking his bags out of the way and grabbing me by the throat before I could defend myself. He threw me back against the wall next to the window, following up with a heavy fist squeezing around my neck.
“You did it,” I cried. “You killed his mother! Murderer!”
“His mother?” Bremerton snorted and pressed his thumb into the fleshy hollow of my throat. “I have no earthly idea who spawned my nephew and I don’t care. That wench was one of ours until she decided to turn her back on the cause. She was to be made an example of, nothing more.”
“Then why . . . Why are you here?” If I was going to die, I at least wanted to know what had been the cause of all this suffering. All this confusion.
He rolled his eyes and pushed his thumb into my neck until I coughed. “Why, to kill the Devil, girl, what else? I didn’t kill my brother, John, for my health. And now you will answer my question and be quick about it. How?” He shook me, hard, clamping down on my throat until only the lightest trickle of air got through. His eyes and nostrils bulged, spit flying from his lips as he shouted in my face. “Devious little bitch, how did you get in here? You’re one of them. I know you are. So how did you do it?”
I scratched desperately at his hands, trying to pry his fingers loose from my neck.
“Uncle!”
Lee’s voice rang out from the hall, and for a beautiful, shining instant I thought I was saved. But Bremerton blind fired over his shoulder, shooting the door frame. I heard Lee’s cry faintly over the ringing in my ears. A thread of a whining sound persisted. Had I gone deaf? The pistol had sounded, and felt like raw fire exploding in my face.
He cocked the pistol again and turned it on me, shoving the hot barrel against my temple.
“I don’t know,” I wheezed, tears squeezing out of the corners of my eyes. “Please! I don’t know anything.”
“Lies!” he thundered, shaking me again. Through bleary eyes I could see the welts I had made on his hand, blood running under my fingernails. Nothing dislodged him. “You work for the Devil, girl, and no servant of evil is ever so innocent or naive. Tell me how you got in here!”
How . . . How . . . I scrambled for an answer that would mollify him, if such a thing existed.
“I’m not one of them!” I cried.
“Wrong again.” He screwed up his mouth into a hideous pucker and nudged my head with the pistol. “One more try, and then you die.”
“The p-pin,” I whispered. It was the only thing I could think to say. My eyes flicked downward to show him. “Gold . . . pin.”
Bremerton searched the front of my frock and with his gun hand ripped the cravat pin from my dress. His grip on my neck tightened in warning as he fumbled to tuck the pin into his pocket. There was a commotion at the door. I could see the whole of the house gathered there, trying to get in. I watched Lee shove aside first a stricken Mary and then Mr. Morningside himself.
I tried to shake my head at him. No. No. But he could make it through the warding on the door. A boring human boy. A boring human boy trying to save a dying monster like me.
But Bremerton was not taking any chances, and he was no fool. He blind fired again, and this time I felt the bullet hit. I felt it as if it had struck me in my chest, only it had struck Lee’s. The bullet’s discharge left me confounded and deaf for a moment, and I watched in trapped silence as Lee stopped, touched his fingers to his chest just over his heart, and pulled them away shining with blood.
Then he crumpled to the floor, a red flower blossoming across his crisp white shirt.
“You did that!” Bremerton screamed at me. “You made me do that!”
His voice was muted, and so was my own voice as I thrashed against him and shrieked incoherently, landing one blow at last, my knee slamming into his groin. He recoiled and dropped me, bending in half with a throaty cough. But the gun was still firmly in his grasp, and he blocked me completely from the door.
I looked at Lee, at his lifeless body on the floor, and groped blindly for the spoon in my pocket. There was nothing else in reach, and for now it would have to be my one and only weapon. Bremerton recovered, as I knew he would, and lunged at me again, pinning me against the wall. This time I had the desperate wherewithal to throw my arm up and grab his wrist, fighting the trajectory of the pistol before he could aim it at my head. He snapped his thumb against a latch on the pistol’s handle and a short bayonet shot out toward me, missing my throat by a hair. We struggled, both of us growing damp with sweat, and just as I hoped, he paid no mind to the dull spoon in my left hand.
But it was not just a spoon. Not in that moment. It could be anything I wanted.
I closed my eyes and jabbed the spoon against his side and then his neck and he laughed me off, twisting the gun away from me. There was no more time. The pistol would need to be reloaded, and unless I could hit the latch on the handle and retract the bayonet, my moment had come. Vaguely, I heard the others screaming at one another in the hallway, disjointed voices tumbling as they struggled to find some way through the ward. I heard an ax slamming into the wall, but they would never break through in time.
It was not a spoon. It was not a spoon. Sweat ran hot and itchy over my forehead. Time slowed. It was not a spoon but a knife. Jab jab. It was a knife. Yes, a bayonet like the one slashing toward my neck. I wanted it to be a knife. Jab. Never in all of my years had I wanted anything more than I wanted this spoon to be a knife.
I felt the spoon sink in, far, and I snapped my eyes open to watch the cruel-bladed knife disappear into his throat. A gurgle of surprise bubbled out of his mouth, and his eyes now were wilder, more dangerous. It wasn’t enough. He could still aim the pistol, and aim it he did, lifting it with weakening and shaky fingers and pointing it at my face.
“Mary! Quick, quick, shield them!” I heard Poppy’s tiny scream pierce through the veil of dread.
It happened too quickly to feel the full meaning of it. I saw the bayonet flash toward my face and flinched, watching the blade ricochet off my cheek, the touch of it like the brush of a feather. Then there was only Bremerton’s flummoxed expression and the blood pouring out of his mouth as my stab wounds disabled him at last, and then I felt the air around us deaden and flatten and I braced, knowing I was shielded by Mary but terrified all the same.