Our Violent Ends, page 19
Their front door opened easily under his palm. With a breath of relief, Marshall stumbled in, taking a moment to sniff at the apartment. It seemed different. Losing an occupant would do that to it, he supposed. The air was dusty, as was the kitchen counter, like it had not been wiped in weeks. The blinds were crooked, pulled up once some time ago and then abandoned, allowing half-light to enter in the day and only blocking out the half-dark of the night.
Marshall finally entered Benedikt’s room and carefully set him onto his bed. Now that they were safe, the exertion of his kidnapping task caught up at once, and Marshall rested his hands on his knees, breathing hard. He did not move until his heart stopped thudding, tense in fear that the sound was so loud it would stir Benedikt awake, but the other boy remained still, his chest rising and falling in the barest of motions.
Marshall dropped to a crouch. He watched him—resolute just to watch him—like he had done these past few months, a pair of eyes following Benedikt’s every move in fear that Benedikt would do something foolish. It was strange to be so close again when he had gotten used to being a shadow. Strange to be near enough that Marshall could reach out with his fingers—and suddenly his hand was hovering forward, brushing a blond curl out of Benedikt’s face. He shouldn’t. Benedikt could wake upon disturbance, and the last thing Marshall needed was to break his most important promise to Juliette.
“How mighty you are,” he whispered quietly. “I am grateful that our roles are not switched, for I would have dove headfirst into the Huangpu should I be left in this world without you.”
Before the White Flowers, Marshall’s childhood had been dreary hallways and snatches of fresh air when he managed to wander out. If his mother grew too occupied with her dressmaking, Marshall was trekking into the fields behind the house, skipping stones on the shallow creeks and scraping moss from the rocks. There was no one else for miles—no neighbors, no kids his age to play with. Only his mother hunched over her sewing machine day after day, her gaze caught out the window, waiting for his father to return.
She was dead now. Marshall had found her body, cold and still one morning, tucked in bed as if she were merely frozen in sleep.
A soft sigh. Marshall’s hand stilled, but Benedikt continued breathing evenly, his eyes closed. Abruptly, Marshall stood, tightening his fists in reminder to himself. He was not supposed to be here. A promise was a promise, and Marshall was a man of his word.
“I miss you,” he whispered, “but I haven’t left you. Don’t give up on me, Ben.”
His eyes were burning. Staying here a second longer would undo him. Like a curtain being drawn across the stage, Marshall stood up and trailed out from his former apartment, fading back into the darkness of the night.
Twenty
Benedikt awoke in the morning with his head pounding something awful. It was the glare of light in his eyes that had roused him out of sleep, and it was the glare of light now worsening the ache at the base of his skull, the feeling reverberating outward and down his spine like some skeletal menace was pinching at his nerves.
“Christ,” he muttered, lifting a hand to block out the sun. Why hadn’t he pulled his bedroom blinds before going to sleep?
Benedikt bolted upright. When had he even gone to sleep?
The moment he started to move, his shoulder pulled with a sharp discomfort, and he glanced down to find a small pool of blood on his sheets—entirely dried by now, having seeped from the shallow wound. Benedikt rolled his arms around gingerly, testing the extent of his injuries. He was stiff but otherwise fully functioning, at his usual level, anyway. The wound had closed on its own, and he had no clue how long he had even been lying here, letting his body knit itself back together.
Flabbergasted, Benedikt pulled his legs to his chest, resting an arm on his knees and pressing the flat of his hand into his forehead, trying to push the headache back. He tried to visualize the last thing he could remember, and all he saw were bullets in the night, the raging inferno of the safe house in the background. He had been charging toward a Scarlet, pistol in his hand, and then…
Nothing. He had no idea what happened next. He didn’t even know where his gun had gotten to.
“How is that possible?” he asked aloud. The house did not answer him. The house only stirred with his voice, shifting and exhaling in the way that all small spaces did every once in a while.
Suddenly, so viciously that Benedikt was almost bowled over, he caught the faintest whiff of a scent—of gunpowder and pepper and deep, musky smoke.
Benedikt shot to his feet. Marshall. The pain came to him all over again, like the first morning he had awoken and remembered, remembered that this apartment was empty, that Marshall’s room was empty, that his body had been left to cool on the floor of an abandoned hospital. Benedikt was losing it. He could smell him. As if he had been here. As if he were not gone.
With a ragged inhale, Benedikt yanked a new jacket out of his wardrobe and tugged it on, hardly bothering to go easy on his throbbing shoulder. What was the point? What was one more point of pain against the whole smorgasbord? He was a damn walking collection point for grievances and grief.
He closed all the doors in his apartment—three times—then walked the short distance to the main Montagov residence, letting himself in. Before any of the White Flowers in the living room could take notice of him, Benedikt was slinking up the stairs, climbing to the fourth floor. Unprompted, he walked into Roma’s bedroom, shutting the door after himself.
Roma jumped, immediately whirling around on his desk chair. He had a cotton pad in his hand and a mirror in the other. There was a wound on his lip, running scarlet red.
“I was looking for you all night,” Roma snapped, throwing the mirror down. “Where the hell did you go? I thought you were dead in a ditch!”
Benedikt slumped onto Roma’s bed. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t”—Roma stood, then rested his hands on his knees, his voice pitching up ten octaves—“remember?”
“I guess I hit my head and got myself home.”
“You were there one second and nowhere the next! The fight hadn’t even dispersed before you were gone. I almost got flayed because I kept looking around and searching—”
Benedikt got to his feet too, cutting his cousin off. “I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
Roma threw his hands into the air. He was exerting so much energy in that one motion that his cheeks flushed with color. “I am hardly arguing with you.”
Silence. Roma’s expression shifted from annoyed to thoughtful to grim within the span of seconds as the two Montagovs stared at each other, having a silent conversation with nothing but facial expressions. They had grown up together. No matter how far they were pulled apart, the language of childhood was not one easily forgotten.
“You can’t keep working with Juliette,” Benedikt finally said, tearing right into the wound of the matter. “Not after this. Not after what they did to us.”
Roma turned away, placing his hands behind his back now. He was buying time. He only paced when he couldn’t puzzle through his answers.
“This whole thing was orchestrated,” Roma said in lieu of an answer. “The blackmailer struck again, had us think the Scarlets were responsible, had the Scarlets think we were—”
“I know it was orchestrated. I’m the one who figured it out,” Benedikt cut in, seconds away from giving his cousin a hefty shake. What part of this was hard to understand? What part of this was hard to see? “But her people chose to set those fires. Her people burned children to death.”
Roma swiveled around. “Juliette is not her people.”
And Benedikt snapped. “Juliette let your mother die! Juliette killed Marshall!”
His voice crashed across the room with the same intensity of a cannon, landing with complete devastation. Roma rocked like he had been physically hit, and Benedikt, too, clutched his stomach, bearing the kickback of his words.
That—that was the central point which they could not forgive. Even mothers could be forgiven, in a city soaked in blood. But Marshall Seo could not be.
“I know,” Roma spat. The volume came unwillingly, like he hadn’t wanted to shout, but that was the only way this conversation could be tolerated. “I know, Benedikt. God, don’t you think I know?”
Benedikt laughed. It was the most humorless sound, somehow blunt and bladed at once. “You tell me. Because you sure act like everything can be forgotten, gallivanting off with her like this.”
“He was my friend too. I know you two were a hell of a lot closer, but don’t act like I didn’t care.”
“You don’t get it.” Benedikt couldn’t think past the roar in his head. Could hardly breathe past the twist in his throat. “You just don’t get it.”
“What, Benedikt? What could I possibly not get—”
“I loved him!”
Across the room, Roma exhaled out once, letting the rest of his anger go in that short breath. Quick as his surprise came, it was gone in the next beat, like he was kicking himself for being surprised at all. Benedikt, meanwhile, put his hand to his throat, like he could swallow his words, could return them inside his lungs where they once lived undisturbed. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have said anything at all… but he had said it. And he didn’t want to take it back. He meant it.
“I loved him,” Benedikt said again, softly this time, only to feel what those words tasted like on his tongue a second time.
He had known all along, hadn’t he? It was only that he could not say it.
When Roma looked over, his eyes were glistening. “This city would have destroyed you for that.”
“It has destroyed me anyway,” Benedikt replied.
It had always taken, and taken, and taken. And this time, it took too much.
Roma strode toward him. For half a second, Benedikt considered that Roma was coming to attack him, but instead, his cousin drew him into a fierce hug, arms as steady as steel.
Slowly, Benedikt returned the embrace. Doing so felt like seizing a gasp of his childhood, plainer days when his biggest worry was the sparring mat and whether he was going to get the wind kicked out of him. It never mattered even if he did. Roma always helped him back up again.
“I’ll kill her,” Roma whispered into the quiet of the room. “On my life, I swear it.”
Twenty-One
MARCH 1927
Juliette slammed down the telephone receiver, letting out the faintest scream. She sounded so much like a whistling teakettle that one of the maids at the end of the hallway peered over her shoulder, checking if the sound had come from the kitchen.
With a sigh, Juliette retreated from the telephone, her fingers red from the excessive cord twirling. At this point the switchboard operators probably recognized her by voice alone, given she was calling so many times a day. She had no choice. What else was she to do? Suffice it to say, after Tyler’s arson, their cooperation with the White Flowers had ended, and when Juliette asked her father if it would not be beneficial to meet at least once more, her father had thinned his lips and waved her off. She couldn’t comprehend why Lord Cai would be eager to work with the White Flowers one moment, and when Juliette was finally onto something—when she needed their resources to find the identity of the Frenchman who had transformed into a monster—suddenly it was no good working with the enemy.
Who was the one whispering into her father’s ear? There were too many people coming and going from his office to ever begin making a list. Had they been infiltrated by White Flowers? Was it the Nationalists?
“Hey.”
Juliette jumped, her elbow banging against the jamb of her bedroom door. “Jesus.”
“It’s Kathleen, actually, but I appreciate the holiness,” Kathleen said from upon Juliette’s bed. She flipped her magazine. “You look stressed.”
“Yes, I am stressed, biǎojiě. How perceptive of you.” Juliette pulled her pearl earrings out, setting them onto her vanity and massaging her lobes. It turned out that wearing earrings and pressing a receiver to her ear for hours at a time did not go well together. “Had I known you were home, I would have roped you into helping me.”
At this, Kathleen closed her magazine, sitting up quickly. “Do you need my help?”
Juliette shook her head. “I jest. I have it handled.”
For the past week, since the White Flower safe house burned to the ground and Roma hadn’t responded to any of her delivered messages, Juliette had been calling every French hotel in their directory, asking a series of the same questions. Was any guest acting peculiar? Was anyone making a mess in their rooms? Leaving behind what might look like animal tracks? Making too many noises at random hours of the night? Anything—anything—that might signal someone keeping control of monsters or turning into a monster themselves, but Juliette had gotten nothing but false leads and drunks.
She heaved a long exhale. At present, gravel was crunching from somewhere outside, beyond Juliette’s balcony doors. When Kathleen walked over, peering through the glass, she reported, “That looks like your father coming home.”
Seconds later, Juliette identified the sound of tires rolling down the driveway.
“You know what strikes me as strange?” she asked suddenly. The front door opened and closed. A burst of voices downstairs signaled the arrival of visitors accompanying her father’s return, interrupting an otherwise leisurely late morning. “There has only been one attack thus far, two if we count the train. And it is awful of me, but I cannot help but feel as though there should be more.”
“But there have been sightings,” Kathleen said. She leaned up against the balcony glass. “Numerous sightings.”
“Largely at the workers’ strikes,” Juliette countered.
The first time, she had brushed it off. Roma thought it to be a rumor; she had thought the same. Only now the rumors were coming from police officers and gangsters, more and more of them arguing that they were unable to defend their post—defend against the striking workers as they tore down their factories and stormed the streets—because they had spotted a monster in the crowd.
“I don’t know,” she went on. “I imagine releasing insects would spread fear much faster than mere sightings.”
Kathleen shrugged. “We have labeled this person a blackmailer for a reason,” she said. “It is not Paul Dexter. The purpose isn’t chaos. The purpose is money and resources.”
But still, Juliette bit down on the inside of her cheeks. Something did not sit right with her. It was like she was looking directly at a picture and seeing something else because someone had already told her what to look for. Just as she had charged into a wonton shop without thinking about how it didn’t make any sense for it to be a vaccine center. She had merely assumed from the beginning—from the moment she laid eyes on that flyer—because that had been the case once before.
So what wasn’t she seeing now?
“Miss Cai?”
Juliette tucked a curl behind her ear, turning her attention to the messenger when he stuck his head into her room. “Yes?”
“Lord Cai summons you. His office.”
The ruckus of voices drifting down the hallway was growing louder. It sounded like her father had a whole assembly in his office.
Tired as she was, Juliette moved immediately, exchanging a meaningful glance with Kathleen and then hurrying out into the hall. Though she didn’t know exactly what she had been summoned for, she could take a guess as soon as she slipped into her father’s office and found it filled to the brim with Nationalists.
“Oh boy,” Juliette muttered beneath her breath. She had entered late, it appeared, because they were mid-debate, one Kuomintang man already speaking with his arms clasped behind his back. She recognized him—or rather, recognized the fact that his lapels were decorated to every square inch.
General Shu. She had looked into him since her father’s warning. Among the Kuomintang, he was powerful enough to be second to Chiang Kai-shek, their commander in chief. He wasn’t in Shanghai often—he had an army to lead, after all—but if the expedition finally reached the city, it would be his men who marched in first.
Juliette’s dress started to itch at her skin, too long and bright among so many dark suits. Her mother was nowhere in sight. Only her father, behind his desk.
“—it is best to protect those who matter first. What good is there aiding those we want gone?”
Suddenly, Juliette caught sight of another very familiar figure in the corner of the room. Tyler was seated with the slightest of smiles, legs propped wide and something that looked like a chunk of blue dough hanging from his fingers. She squinted closer. It was a familiar blue. Lapis lazuli blue.
Juliette understood now. Her dear cousin had been spending all his time at the Scarlet facility in Chenghuangmiao overseeing their efforts for this reason precisely. The vaccine was ready. And Tyler had brought in the news ahead of anyone else, giving him first access to a room full of Nationalists, letting him set the stage before Juliette even had a chance to say a word.
“We do as Cai Tailei proposed,” General Shu said.
“No,” Juliette snapped. Heads turned fast in her direction, but she was ready, discomfort fading from her skin. “What kind of government are you going to be if you let your own people die?”
“Even once we are in power,” General Shu said, offering her the sort of placating smile that one would give a child, “there are certain people who will never be our own.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
The Nationalists in the room bristled, as did Tyler.
“Juliette,” Lord Cai said plainly. There was no reproach in his tone. That was more of Lady Cai’s trademark, and she wasn’t here to be offended at Juliette’s social decorum. Her father was merely reminding her to think carefully about every word coming out of her mouth.
General Shu turned to face Juliette, his eyes narrowing. As a powerful war general, he could surely read a room; Juliette was getting away with saying such things to his face, so Juliette was not a mere girl he could flick away.
