“What the fuck?” she spat at Gavin. “What have you done to him?”
Gavin looked away, and Katie realized, disgusted, that he didn’t even know. The Yusuf Katie knew had been a sweet boy, bright with numbers and eager to please. The creature before her now had Yusuf’s face, but that was where the resemblance ended. He was pale, so pale that his skin almost appeared white, and his eyes were dark, fathomless hollows. He did not smile or show any other sign of recognition, only stared at the group, and as they moved toward the door, Katie saw with alarm that Yusuf’s eyes were fixed on Jonathan.
The last thing she remembered was walking through the doorway.
Rowland Finn had pictured this moment in his head so many times that when it came, he almost expected it to be disappointing. Here was Jonathan Tear, the favored son—oh, and his heart still burned at the unfairness of that; Tear had given the Town nothing—and here was Katie, her head bowed, and that was right too, because Katie of all people should have been penitent—
Katie looked up, and Row felt his equilibrium vanish. The lightest touch of fear seemed to breathe on the back of his neck.
Katie was supposed to be sorry. For years, whenever he had imagined this moment, he had known that first: Katie would be sorry that she hadn’t come with him. Her posture was right, cringing and defeated, but her face was all wrong. She stared at him with no expression, her face almost blank, as if with shock. She didn’t seem to know where she was.
Row turned to Gavin, who stood nearby with a pathetically eager look on his face. Unlike Katie, Gavin performed perfectly, like a puppet; only shake a string, and he would do as he was told.
“What’s the matter with her? Is she drugged? Beaten?”
“No,” Gavin replied. “We didn’t touch her.”
Row dismissed that, turning to Jonathan. “You! Where’s William Tear’s sapphire?”
Tear raised his eyes, and Row recoiled at the pity on his face. Jonathan Tear did not get to feel sorry for him, not now, not when Row had won.
“You will give it to me,” he told Jonathan. “No one is beyond the reach of pain, not even a Tear.”
At that, Katie stirred slightly, and Row saw something, a ripple beneath that drugged expression on her face. Then she was still. A distant alarm seemed to go off inside him. It was almost as though she were in a trance . . . but Katie didn’t have trances. She had never had any gifts. Row turned back to Tear.
“Give it to me.”
“No,” Tear replied, almost wearily. “If you’re going to kill me, may as well do it now. You won’t have it.”
Row frowned. He didn’t dare actually take the jewel; that was the hell of it. His own sapphire worked, but only sporadically, inconsistently, nothing like the power he had felt when he held Tear’s jewel. And yet it had never occurred to him to simply kill Jonathan and take the thing. He knew it could not be that easy—nothing ever was—but beneath the knowledge was a deeper certainty: any magic that could be seized by force was hardly worth having. Row had earned his power, had been honing it for years. No one could simply walk in and take it away.
He snapped his fingers at Yusuf, who darted forward, his face twisting in a bestial grin. That grin chilled Row, yet he couldn’t help but feel an almost paternal pride. This child, who was no longer a child at all, was his own creation. He had two more under construction, deep in the catacombs he had dug beneath the church, but even these three were nothing compared to what he could make. There would be so many more.
He had hoped that the sight of Yusuf would wipe the pity from Tear’s face, but here again, he was disappointed. Jonathan merely stared at the child for a long moment, then said, “So this is what you’ve been doing in the dark. Even my father didn’t think you would stoop this low.”
Row clenched his fists. Even now, after all these years, he hated this idea, that William Tear would have talked about him, behind his back, talked about him in the very bosom of that family from which Row had always been excluded. Tear, Lily, Jonathan, Katie, the Rice bitch, all of them had been on the inside, and he had been out.
He turned back to Katie, who continued to appear almost catatonic. She had stolen his crown; she knew where it was, but Row knew he would not get that information without a fight. Jonathan’s pain would be doubly useful here, but now, staring into Katie’s muddled eyes, he wondered if she was even capable of understanding that Jonathan was being tortured. Would she even notice?