Down Among the Sticks and Bones Read online

  The floor was a narrow lip, no more than two feet at its widest point, circling the outside of the room. The rest was given over to a basin filled with sweetly scented water, dotted with frothing mounds of bubbles. Everything smelled of roses and vanilla. Jill stopped and stared. This was … this was amazing, this was incredible, and it was all for her.

  A small dart of smug delight wedged itself in her heart. Jack wasn’t here. Jack wasn’t standing in this room, looking at a bath fit for a fairy tale princess. This was hers, and hers alone. She was the princess in this story.

  (Would she have felt bad about her smugness if she had known that, at that very moment, Jack was puzzling her way through the process of getting water from well to kettle to tin tub without scalding or freezing herself? Or would it have delighted her to think of her poised and pampered sister sitting in lukewarm water to her hips, marinating in her own dirt, scrubbing the worst of it away with brittle yellow sponges that had once been living things, and were now remembered only by their bones? How quickly they grow apart, when there is something to be superior about.)

  Jill removed her stained and filthy clothing and stepped into the bath. The temperature was perfect, and the water was silky-smooth with perfumes and oils. She sank down to her chin and closed her eyes, enjoying the heat, enjoying the feeling that soon, she would be clean.

  Some untold time later, there was a knock at the door, and Mary’s voice said, briskly, “Time to come out, miss. Your clothes are ready, and it’s nearly time for lunch.”

  Jill snapped out of her daze, opening her mouth to protest—it couldn’t be time for lunch, they’d just eaten breakfast—before her stomach gave a loud growl. The water was still warm, but maybe that didn’t matter in a magic room inside a magic castle.

  “Coming!” she called, and waded through the water toward the place where she’d left her clothes. They were gone, a towel and robe in their place. Understanding what was expected of her, Jill dried her body with the towel and covered it with the robe, which was soft and white and felt almost like the bubbles from her bath. There was no towel rack or hamper. She folded the used towel as carefully as she could and put it down against the base of the wall, hoping that would be tidy enough, good enough, for her host. Then she let herself out of the room, to where Mary waited.

  The maid gave her a thoughtful once-over before saying, in a faintly surprised tone, “I suppose you’ll do. Here.” She picked up a bundle of pale fabric—purple and blue and white, like a bruise in the process of healing—and thrust it at the girl. “Get dressed. If you need help with the buttons, I’ll be here. The Master is waiting.”

  Jill nodded silently as she took the clothes, and was unsurprised to see that a screen had appeared on the far side of the room. She slipped behind it, setting the clothes down on the waiting stool before untying her robe and beginning to dress herself.

  She was relieved to find that the undergarments were ones she recognized, panties and a slip-chemise that was halfway to being a thin tank top. The dress, though … oh, the dress.

  It was an ocean of cascading silk, a sea of draped fabric. It was not an adult dress, meant to grace an adult figure; it was a fantasy gown intended for a child, one that made her look as much like an inverted orchid as she did a girl. It took her three tries to figure out which hole was for her head and which were for her arms, and when she was done, the whole thing seemed to slouch around her, unwilling to fit properly.

  “Mary?” she said, hopefully.

  The maid appeared around the corner of the screen, clucking her tongue when she saw the state Jill was in. “You have to fasten it if you want it to fit you,” she said, and began doing up buttons and ties and snaps, so many that Jill’s head spun just watching Mary’s fingers move.

  But when Mary was done, the dress fit Jill like it had been tailored for her. Looking down, Jill could see her bare toes peeping out from beneath the cascading skirts, and she was grateful, because without that one small flaw, it would have all been too perfect to be real. She looked up. Mary was holding a purple choker with a small pearl-and-amethyst pendant dangling from its center. Her expression was grave.

  “You are a member of the Master’s household now,” she said. “You must always, always wear your choker when you’re in the company of anyone other than the servants. That includes the Master. Do you understand me?”

  “Why?” asked Jill.

  Mary shook her head. “You’ll understand soon enough,” she said. Leaning forward, she tied the choker around Jill’s neck. It was tight, but not so tight as to be uncomfortable; Jill thought she would be able to get used to it. And it was beautiful. She didn’t get to wear beautiful things very often.

  “There,” said Mary, stepping back and looking at her frankly. “You’re as good as you’re going to get without more time, and time’s a thing we don’t have right now. You’re to sit quietly. Speak when spoken to. Think before you agree to anything. Do you understand?”

  No, Jill thought, and “Yes,” Jill said, and that was that: there was no saving her.

  Mary, who had not spoken the word “vampire” aloud in over twenty years, who knew all too well the limitations that they labored under, only sighed and offered her hand to the girl. “All right,” she said. “It’s time.”

  * * *

  WHEN DR. BLEAK RETURNED from his errands with an armful of firewood and a bundle of herbs, it was to find Jack in the front yard, carefully wiping the last of the grime from the sides of the tin tub. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps. He stopped where he was and looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time.

  It had taken her six trips to the well and three turns with the kettle, but she had washed the grime from her body and hair, using a thick, caustic soap that she’d found next to the sponges. Her hair was braided sensibly back, and the only things that remained of her old attire were her shoes, patent leather and wiped as clean as the rest of her. She still looked too delicate to be a proper lab assistant, but appearances can be deceiving, and she had not balked from what he’d asked of her.

  “What’s for dinner?” asked Dr. Bleak.

  “I have no idea, and you wouldn’t want to eat it if I did,” said Jack. “I don’t know how to cook. But I’m willing to learn.”

  “Willing to learn, but not to lie?”

  Jack shrugged. “You would have caught me.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Dr. Bleak. “Are you truly willing to learn?”

  Jack nodded.

  “All right, then,” said Dr. Bleak. “Come inside.” He walked across the yard with great, ground-eating steps, and when he stepped through the open door, Jack followed without hesitation.

  She closed the door behind herself.

  PART III

  JACK AND JILL WITH TIME TO KILL

  8

  THE SKIES TO SHAKE, THE STONES TO BLEED

  IT WOULD BECOME QUICKLY dull, recounting every moment, every hour the two girls spent, one in the castle and one in the windmill, one in riches and one in artfully mended rags: it would become quickly dull, and so it shall not be our focus, for we are not here for dullness, are we? No. We are here for a story, whether it be wild adventure or cautionary tale, and we do not have the time to waste on mundane things. And yet.

  And yet.

  And yet look to the castle on the bluffs, the castle near to the sea, which sits atop a crumbling cliff in the belly of the lowlands. Look to the castle where the golden-haired girl walks the battlements at dusk and dawn in her dresses like dreams, with her throat concealed from prying eyes, with the wind tying beautiful knots in the long curtain of her hair. She waxes and wanes like the moon, now pale as milk, now healthy and pink as any village girl. There are those in the village below who whisper that she is the Master’s daughter, sired on a princess from a far-away land and finally returned to her father when he howled her name to the western winds.

  (There are those in the village who whisper darker things, who speak of disappea
ring children and lips stained red as roses. She is not a vampire yet, they say, and “yet” is such a powerful, unforgiving word that there is no questioning its truth, and no hiding from its promises.)

  And yet look to the windmill in the hills, the windmill on the Moors, which stands higher than anything around it, inviting lightning, tempting disaster. Look to the windmill where the golden-haired girl works in the soil at all hours of the day and night, with her hands protected from the soil by heavy leather gloves and from everything else by gloves of the finest suede. She toils without cease, burns her sleeves on smoking machinery, strains her eyes peering into the finest workings of the universe. There are those in the village near the cliffs who smile to see her coming, dogging at the doctor’s heels, her shoes becoming sturdier and more sensible with every passing season. She is learning, they say; she is finding her way.

  (There are those in the village who whisper darker things, who point out the similarities between her and the Master’s daughter, who recognize that a single body can only contain so much blood, can only take so much damage. She is not called to service yet, but when the Master and Dr. Bleak clash, there is never any question of the winner.)

  Look at them, growing up, growing into the new shapes that have been offered to them, growing into girls their parents would not recognize, would turn their noses up at. Look at them finding themselves in this wind-racked place, where even the moon is not always safe to look upon.

  Look at them in their solitary beds, in their solitary lives, growing further and further apart from one another, unable to entirely let go. Look at the girl in the gossamer gowns standing on the battlements, yearning for a glimpse of her sister; look at the girl in the dirty apron sitting atop the windmill, looking toward the distant walls of the town. They have so much, and so little, in common.

  Someone with sharp enough eyes might see the instant where one wounded heart begins to rot while the other starts to heal. Time marches on.

  There are moments in the years that we are skipping over, moments that are stories in and of themselves. Jack and Jill begin their menses on the same day (a word that comes from the village women and from Mary, who came from a different time, and Jack finds it charming in its antiquity, and Jill finds it terrifying in its strangeness). Jack packs her underpants with rags and begins trying to find a better way. It is unsafe, on the Moors, to smell of blood. Dr. Bleak calls the village women to help her. They bring their old clothes and their sewing needles; she rampages through his herbs and simples, testing chemical combinations until she strikes upon the right one. Together, she and the village women make something stronger and safer, which holds the smell of blood from prying noses. It keeps them safe when they have cause to venture out of their homes. It keeps monsters and the Master from noticing them.

  They learn to love her, at least a little, on that day.

  While all this is happening, Jill sinks deeper and deeper into her perfumed baths, bleeding into the water, emerging only to eat plates of chopped beef and spinach, her head spinning with the strangeness of it all. And when her period passes, the Master comes to her, and finally shows her his teeth, which she has been dreaming of for so long. He talks to her all night, almost until the sunrise, making sure that she’s comfortable, making sure she understands.

  He is not so different from the boys she had been dreading meeting when she started her high school career. Like them, he wants her for her body. Like them, he is bigger than her, stronger than her, more powerful than her in a thousand ways. But unlike them, he tells her no lies, puts no veils before his intentions; he is hungry, and she is meat for his table, she is wine for his cup. He promises to love her until the stars burn out. He promises to make her like him, when she is old enough, so that she will never need to leave the Moors. And when he asks her for her answer, she unties the choker that has circled her neck for the last two years, lets it fall away, and exposes the soft white curve of her neck.

  There are moments that change everything.

  A year after Jill becomes the Master’s child in everything but name, Jack stands next to Dr. Bleak on the top floor of their shared windmill. The roof has been opened, and the storm that stains the sky is black as ink, writhing and lit from within by flashes of lightning. A village girl lies stretched on the stone slab between them, her body covered by a sheet, her hands strapped tight around two metal rods. She is only a year older than Jack, found dead when the sun rose, with a streak of white in her hair that spoke to a heart stopped when some phantom lover kissed her too deeply. Hearts that have been stopped without being damaged can sometimes start again, under the right circumstances. When the right circumstances cannot be arranged, lightning can make a surprisingly good substitute.

  Dr. Bleak howls orders and Jack hurries to fulfill them, until lightning snakes down from the sky and strikes their array of clever machines. Jack is thrown across the room by the impact; she will taste pennies in the back of her throat for three days. Everything is silence.

  The girl on the slab opens her eyes.

  There are moments that change everything, mired in the mass of more ordinary time like insects caught in amber. Without them, life would be a tame, predictable thing. But with them, ah. With them, life does as it will, like lightning, like the wind that blows across the castle battlements, and none may stop it, and none may tell it “no.” Jack helps the girl off the slab, and everything is different, and nothing will ever be the same.

  The girl has eyes as blue as the heather that grows on the hill, and her hair, where it is not white, is the golden color of drying bracken, and she is beautiful in ways Jack fumbles to find the words for, ways that seem to defy the laws of nature and the laws of science in the same breath. Her name is Alexis, and it is a crime that she was ever dead, even for a second, because the world is darker when she’s gone.

  (Jack hadn’t noticed the darkness, but that doesn’t matter. A man who has lived his entire life in a cave does not mourn the sun until he sees it, and once he has, he can never go back underground.)

  When Alexis kisses her for the first time, out behind the windmill, Jack realizes that she and Jill have one thing in common: she never, never wants to go back to the world she came from. Not when she could have this world, with its lightning and its blue-eyed, beautiful girls, instead.

  There are moments that change everything, and once things have been changed, they do not change back. The butterfly may never again become a caterpillar. The vampire’s daughter, the mad scientist’s apprentice, they will never again be the innocent, untouched children who wandered down a stairway, who went through a door.

  They have been changed.

  The story changes with them.

  * * *

  “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 scienc
e 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.