The Sweetest Dark (28 page)

Something zinged by me. With the gas in my face, I thought at first it was a gull or a gannet, but it wasn't. It was a bullet.

It was followed by a volley of about a million more.

...

“Why—the beach?”

Armand was out of breath. They were outside, nearly to the motorcar. By now he was carrying practically all of Jesse's weight, and even though he was strong—much stronger than he should have been, than a human boy his age would have been—Jesse weighed almost fourteen stone. He was heavy, and he wasn't helping. His legs at this point were just meat.

“Grotto's closer,” Armand noted, still gasping.

“The water,” Jesse said. His mouth felt so dry. He knew it was the blood loss parching him. That thinking about water or ale or tea or anything wasn't going to help, but it did seem to sharpen his mind some. “Water,” he said again thickly, trying to clarify. “Distance. Must see it.”

“Care to let”—they stumbled over a groove in the path; Armand heaved them both back up—”let me in on—whatever the hell it is you're—planning, Holms?”

“No,” said Jesse.

Armand only grunted, pulling them on.

...

The other airship had machine guns. They had veered in close and were firing them at me. Perhaps I'd panicked them enough that they weren't even thinking about the fact that they were helping to annihilate their comrades.

The zeppelin I had wounded—like an animal, like a vicious keening animal—kept listing. That's all that saved me. I was too slow to duck a bullet; they pocked into the skin of the balloon and left fresh new holes for the hydrogen to escape, and I was rolled out of range. By now I could hear the shouting of the crew in the gondola far below, trying to understand what was happening. For all they knew, their allies had turned on them. Perhaps even some of the gunfire was striking them, although, as far as I could tell, none of the men in this ship were firing back.

The night sky was diminishing. The writhing sea rushed to meet us. I withdrew my claws and opened my wings and let the channel winds have me, jerking me away from both ships, and the wounded one sank and sank.

I wanted to watch it go all the way down. But the men in the other ship had spotted me, had trained their weapons back on me. I had to dive fast away from them and then up, up, because I thought—I hoped—they wouldn't have the means to fire at me once I crested the side of their balloon.

I heard the first zeppelin smashing into the water behind us and couldn't help but glance back. Their bombs began to explode, one after another after another, deafening, and then everything was blue fire, white fire, and I was blinded.

I flapped around like a bat amid a stream of bullets, graceless, falling.

My front right leg was struck. My left wing.

smoke!
shrilled the stars.

Of course. That worked.

As smoke, I was able to get my bearings again. I had ended up somewhere between the sinking wreckage of the first ship and the slipstream of the second. I narrowed into a dart and raced back to the untouched ship, something livid and pitiless waking within me.

I don't think I'd felt much of anything beyond desperation up until then. There had been no time. But as I sped toward that second dirigible, I realized I was more than desperate.

I was enraged. I'd been shot three times tonight, and I was going to make these men pay for that. For what they planned to do to the castle and to my country. For St. Giles and London and the orphanage. Everything.

They imagined themselves the dragon-slayers, but the dragon was going to slay them instead.

The zeppelin in the water had nearly finished its burn. By its dying light I could see the airmen in the second's gondola with their guns poking out, more shouting, everyone searching the skies around them for the mythical beast that was no longer visible. I smoked up to them, right up to one of the windows, and examined the face of the man staring straight through the mist of me.

Youngish, square-jawed. Attractive. Navy-blue uniform with loops of brassy braid. White hat. Brows knit with worry.

Yes, do worry,
I thought, and boiled up to the top of the balloon.

Same plan, same results—at least at first. I Turned to dragon in the exact center of the fabric field and jabbed my talons deep. The hydrogen surged out; the ship began to descend. I shifted over, ready to do it again, when the zeppelin made an abrupt left turn, throwing me free.

No doubt they'd seen everything I'd done to the first ship. They'd figured out how to counter.

I used my wings, but it hurt where the bullet had pierced me. Hurt like someone was twisting a dagger into my flesh. So I Turned to smoke to find a new place to dig in …

Only I didn't. I Turned to girl again instead.

...

The Atalanta couldn't make it all the way to the water. The slope accessing the shore was too steep, and Jesse found himself remotely grateful that Armand had sense enough to pull the brake before they rolled. It left them to slide down the scrub and rocks themselves, which actually meant Jesse sliding and Armand attempting to keep them both upright.

The beach was wet pebbles and seaweed. The pebbles clicked and clacked as Armand dragged him to the breaking surf.

There were things he wanted to say, Jesse realized. Important things. Things that seemed to matter. But it was too difficult to keep them in his head; the black dots in his eyes from before had engorged into tunnels, and all he could see now was a small wavering window directly before him. He might have been in pain. He should have been. But mostly what he felt were the pebbles beneath his body, cool and smooth.

“Leave me,” he was able to say.

Armand's face filled the narrow window of his vision.

“Not bloody likely.”

He felt it now, Jesse knew. Whether Lord Armand wanted to or not, he felt their bond. Dragon protects star. Nothing to be done about it.

Almost nothing.

“Get back,” Jesse said, making it a command. He had life enough for that. “Get back into the auto, Armand.”

“No—I …”

But it worked, as Jesse had known it would. The other boy's face left his view. His footsteps ground into the pebbles, halting, retreating.

It filled Jesse with an unexpected warmth. And hope. Things might … things might work out, after all… .

He focused upon the lip of seawater in front of him. He focused on moving his arm. His hand.

...

The ship careened drunkenly from side to side. I bounced off its unbroken skin, into the air, then the skin again. The curve of the balloon was so immense that I slid down its side, trying to Turn to smoke or dragon or anything but a girl who could not hold on to a dirigible.

I managed smoke, but only long enough to find myself back down at the gondola. Then I was me again, a girl again, pressed naked and bloody against the glass, dropping. My right hand hooked the rim of an open window. Pain knifed through my arm, and I screamed.

My fingers released—and then a hand smacked around my wrist. I dangled in place, my legs kicking out to the infinite distance below, and when I looked wildly up I saw the German officer of before, the attractive one, leaning out the gondola window to hold on to me. Staring dumbfounded back at me.

His eyes were brown.

He shouted something, lost to the wind.

I snarled at him and Turned to smoke, flinging myself just high enough to Turn back to dragon and slice a long, vertical slit down the side of the balloon.

I met a girder beneath the fabric. I assumed it was a girder; as my claws raked its length, it squealed like steel and sparks leapt from our union, dazzling my eyes.

Sparks. Hydrogen.

I pushed off with all my might just as the balloon combusted, but the fire still got me.

I curled away from the airship—singed, falling—Turning and Turning. Within seconds I couldn't tell what I was. There was only the wind rushing past me and the fireball descending next to me, fabric in flames and red-hot steel.

And the brown-eyed man, tumbled from the gondola. Three others like him, all of them shrieking as they hurtled to their deaths in the waiting sea.

I swooped toward him. I reached out for him.

Shiny talons curved around his wrist; I was pulled sideways from his sudden weight.

It seemed I was a dragon, after all.

...

Below us, all the sea flashed bright. Brief as a comet, glittering light spreading out miles in a fantastical, brilliant bloom. Night turned by Jesse into golden day.

Then it was over. The channel plunged to purple-black again.

Chapter Thirty

He lifted his face from the crook of his arm. He wiped the sand from his lids and allowed himself to breathe again, taking in the charred air, salt spray and diesel smoke blowing over him in gusts. The smoke was especially foul, caustic stinking grease that seared his eyes and made him wipe at them again.

Armand climbed out of the Atalanta. Whatever had compelled him to fall back here in the first place—that infuriating, unbreakable command from Holms—no longer held him. He leapt down the slope, skidding through an avalanche of dirt and rocks, and bounded across the beach to the other boy.

Holms had collapsed on his side, one arm still stretched out to the channel. Mandy took him by the shoulders and rolled him to his back. It was dark out here, ruddy dark. Or maybe it was just that his eyes hadn't adjusted yet from staring at Holms when he'd detonated without warning into solid light.

“Holms. Holms! Jesse, wake up!”

Water shifted and sighed over the pebbles. Jesse was getting wet. Armand's knees were getting wet.

“Holms, did you see it?” he persisted. He tore out of his coat and lifted Jesse enough to spread it beneath him; the wool went damp right away. “She did it! She brought them both down– bloody, bloody amazing. Holms! Did you get the sub?”

There—the smallest thing: Jesse swallowing, his eyes still closed. Mandy felt hope ignite inside him, hard and glittering as the cast of golden fire.

“You did, didn't you? Come on, old chap. Tell me you did.”

“Did.”

“Excellent! Excellent! So let's get up, then, eh, and go find her. Go tell her, together.”

Jesse smiled. His eyes never opened. The sea sifted nearer, pulled back. The pebbles all around them shone glassy with water.

“Jesse,” Mandy said.

The wind fell calm. The diesel smoke wafted gently away.

“Jesse.”

The sea drew back. Nothing else moved.

Mandy bent double, lowering his forehead to Jesse Holms's shoulder. His fingers felt like rusted iron against the coat. He could not get his fingers to unlock.

“I'll tell her,” he whispered. “I'll tell her all that you did.”

Chapter Thirty-One

The funeral for a hired hand is not the same as one for a marquess.

Mrs. Westcliffe was there for both. I guess that was the same.

Armand was there for both.

I attended only Jesse's. It probably would have been politic of me to also go to the marquess's; I had been summoned, but I didn't care. I didn't want to go anywhere, really. I wanted only to stay in my tower, in my bed, and spend the rest of my life doing nothing more than staring up at the ceiling, watching the spiders wending around on spindly legs, weaving their opal webs.

I roused myself for Jesse. That was all.

I stood between Mrs. Westcliffe and someone else. I think it was Professor Tilbury. Most of the teachers had shown up, which vaguely surprised me. Quite a few of the villagers, as well, along with all the other Iverson employees.

I was the only student. Even Malinda hadn't come.

Lord Armand—now the new Marquess of Sherborne—was the highest-ranking person in attendance, so he'd been given a place of honor right by the pit dug for the grave. He stood a solemn figure in stylish black, almost directly across from me. Whenever I glanced his way, he was staring at me. Lots of people were staring at me, frankly, but his was the only gaze that stung. So I tried not to look at him.

I also could not look at Hastings. If I looked at Hastings, stooped over his cane, I began drowning in a shame so deep and profound it made me tremble, and Tilbury would eye me uneasily and pat me on the arm.

It was my injured arm, too. It was bandaged up, but you couldn't see the bandages beneath the peacoat, so he didn't know.

Mrs. Westcliffe wouldn't glance at me at all. I think she no longer knew quite what to make of me. Was I an accidental heroine, as Armand had publically insisted, or was I something much different: a conniving slum girl who had taken advantage of her beloved Reginald's weakness and largesse?

There had been no disguising what the duke had done that night, or what he'd meant to do. Despite our initial intent to spirit him away and cover the whole thing over with darkness and lies, two burning dirigibles—visible for miles along the coast, I'd heard—were impossible to disguise. They'd woken everyone in the castle, everyone in the village, likely every single person all the way to Bournemouth. Woken them right up to the war.

And then we had been found, Armand and Jesse and me, there on that beach of broken stones.

And the duke had been found, because two minor children suffering bullet wounds, one of them dead, could not be explained away with any of the dubious, unsteady excuses that had come to me at the time.

Eventually, even the German I'd saved had been found. I'd left him in a cove of brutal surf and steep cliffs on every side. I suppose he could have tried to swim for it–I would have–but he didn't. By the next afternoon, a shepherd boy had heard his shouts and he'd been hauled up the cliffs and confined to an empty pigeon house, the sole survivor of his doomed mission.

Gone cracked, though, from the ordeal. Ranting in perfect English about dragons and a young woman who could fly.

No one believed him. A few people swore the airships had suffered lightning strikes, although the night had seemed so clear. A few more vowed they'd spotted them off the bluffs and fired at them, and that had brought them down.

Whatever it had been, everyone seemed certain of two things. It had not been a dragon, and it had not been the poor, tormented Duke of Idylling.

We'd had to give him up. To his credit, Armand had led the authorities straight to him, and apparently in the nick of time, too, as he'd been coming 'round. So no one else got shot.

I was in the hands of the local physician by then, who turned out to be the bespectacled man from the birthday party, the one chatting up Miss Swanston. He didn't seem to mind that I'd fallen mute, just like I'd been as a child. Other people talked and talked at me, but I had nothing to say.

Let silver-tongued Mandy come up with his crafty mesh of facts and fabrications. I couldn't speak. I couldn't react, not even when the bullet was fished from my arm.

I was still back on that beach, you see. I couldn't leave it. I couldn't leave Jesse.

Over the next few days, Sophia had visited enough times that I knew all the school gossip, which included a variety of tales: That Jesse and I had been lovers, and the duke had discovered us on the roof. That Armand and Jesse had been lovers, and I had been jealous enough to inform the duke. That Jesse and Armand and I had been lovers, and the duke had tried to murder us all… .

Armand's official story was this:

He had discovered what his father intended that night and had raced to the castle to stop him. By pure chance he'd come across Jesse walking the grounds and had enlisted his help. He'd thought, Armand had explained bleakly to Mrs. Westcliffe when they were alone, that he could trust Holms. That perhaps there'd be a chance to hush it all up still, allow the family to deal with the situation privately. And that—although he was deeply mortified to admit it now—even if Holms had wanted to tell, he would be unable. Mute, you know. Simple.

But Holms had proven stalwart and valiant. When Miss Jones had shown up to discover them in the castle hallway, because she'd heard a suspicious noise and had feared for her schoolchums' safety, they'd had to bring her along. She'd wanted to run straight to the headmistress, of course, but Armand had persuaded her not to. How he regretted that decision now!

The duke had fired his guns at them all. They'd retreated, thought to go to the automobile to fetch a doctor and the sheriff, but they'd stumbled the wrong way and fallen down the slope to the beach instead. All three of them. And there, noble Jesse had died.

Fact. Fiction. Likely because so much of it
had
happened, and because Armand's red-eyed, stoic distress seemed so genuine, the adults around us had accepted it as truth.

Mostly.

I think if I hadn't been discovered wearing only Armand's coat as I knelt next to Jesse's body, Mrs. Westcliffe might have found the whole thing easier to swallow.

Yet the official version ruled the day. And here we all were basking in it, breathing fresh sea air, warmed by the generous spring sun. Burying a hero. A far, far greater hero than anyone standing around me at his funeral would ever suspect.

Somewhere in deep-blue briny waters, a U-boat rested, filled with live torpedoes and solid-gold men.

I thought I better understood Rue's letters now. I understood her warnings about the pain that would come with my Gifts.

I understood my sacrifice.

I listened to the vicar speak. I listened to the breeze. The birds. The sea. I watched the first handful of dirt land on Jesse's coffin and thought with absolute sincerity,
Wish it were me.

...

I waited until Aubrey's funeral to steal away. It wasn't long to wait, only a week, so I made myself tolerate it.

I paid attention to my spiders. Their remarkable webs.

Due to a loss of blood, I'd been excused from attending classes, although the professors had made an effort to extend their best wishes for my recovery, mostly by assigning me homework. It'd been piling up on the bureau. I knew I should at least inspect it, but it bored me. Everything bored me.

Let them kick me out of Iverson if they wanted. Perhaps I'd fly to the moon to live.

Lora-of-the-moon. That would be me.

I itched where I was healing. The wound to my wing was a phantom itch somewhere in the vicinity of my shoulder blade; unlike with my arm, no bullet hole showed there in my human form. But that particular itch was especially maddening, because I could not scratch at it. It was always present.

The following Saturday morning, the castle emptied. I got up to watch them all go, all the ebony girls, all the teachers, most of the help. Sophia had told me the formal ceremony was to be held at Tranquility, which had a completed chapel and nice, virgin grounds for its first grave. They would be burying an empty casket.

The duke, regretfully, would be unable to attend.

I wondered briefly if his madhouse was anything like mine had been, and found that I couldn't wish Moor Gate even on the man who had killed my true love.

I dressed–Blisshaven's clothes, not Iverson's. I walked like I knew what I was doing and where I was going, which was true, and I left the fortress.

It was an easy journey through the forest. The day was sublime, the kind of day reverently described in those sweeping, romantic histories of England that populated the castle library. Shafts of sunlight broke through the green canopy of trees, daubing yellow along wildflowers and butterflies and once even a rabbit, half a primrose in his mouth, staring at me with his ears high and straight.

I could smell the coming summer still, just as I had my first evening here, as I'd stepped from the train. It was warmer and lusher now, less a tinge in the air than a sultry blossoming. It traveled across the sea and laced through these woods. It slipped up my arms and neck and face and kissed me with the faintest hint of bitter salt.

Summer in the woods. Summer on the isle. I imagined it all so … full of life.

Jesse's cottage stood deserted. I'd wondered if Hastings had come by yet—surely he had—or had thought to maybe move into it now himself from his loft above the stables. Seemed like it be would nicer than living over horses.

I knocked on the door, in case. No one answered.

The latch gave at my touch. The cat's-eye knot watched me go in.

A shadowed place. A place of shadows. I had the feeling all the lamps in the world wouldn't illuminate the cottage again. Jesse had been its light, the heart of these woods.

Pine, soap, coffee. Cinnamon, vanilla, rain. Scents that wrapped around me as I walked, a last trace of him. It was awful comfort.

I drew my fingers along the tabletop, remembering the buttercup turned to gold set there on that wood, how it had sung and gleamed. But then, Jesse's home had always sounded like song to me. Even at night, in our sweetest dark as I'd lain in his arms, golden songs had drifted over me.

Like now. Right now.

I glanced around and saw nothing but the expected. The table and chairs and stove and plates. The rug and fireplace. His closed bedroom door.

Ah. The bedroom. It was coming from in there.

I rested my hand on the knob and knew that I had to go in, that he had wanted me to go in. That's why there were songs resonating from inside. It was a message just for me. A message from dead Jesse.

But … the bedroom. The bed. Quilts we'd slept under. Sheets. His drowsy smile, half tucked against a pillow. The glass vase on his windowsill, pinkish-green with the first flush of dawn.

I hadn't come out here for his bedroom. I hadn't planned on being strong enough for that.

My hand pushed open the door.

I stood fixed in place, not breathing. I had no breath left in me. All the gold in the room had stolen it, and I might not ever breathe again.

I'd dreamed once of a forest of gold, and Jesse had done what he could to give it to me. His bedroom had been transformed into a wonderland of leaves and flowers, pinecones and branches of birch and oak, all of it glimmering, all of it singing. The bed was covered, his chest of drawers, the sill.

Much of it was jumbled together, beautiful for what it was if not its presentation. Jesse had last left this room on the night of his death, right after he'd called to me, right before he'd gone to the castle. So he would have been scattering his final gift in haste, knowing he worked against the clock.

Knowing, somehow, what was to come.

Which meant he'd been making gold for weeks. When I'd seen him so tired, when he'd told me all those nights that we should rest apart … he had been doing this.

For me.

A folded note had been set upon the bed. My name had been scrawled upon it.

I love you
was all it said inside.

I sank to the floor. I looked up and all around as the sun danced through the window and turned Jesse's room into an ambered heaven of song and shimmer and sparks.

That was how Armand found me, hours later. That was what he saw, as well, what he heard, as he walked slowly into the chamber and eased down beside me to rest his back against the bed.

We sat there together, listening, marveling.

In time, his hand reached out and took firm hold of mine.