Never a Hero, page 40
“Why would a monster create a monster slayer?” Eleanor’s tone was almost mocking.
It was the question Joan had kept asking herself. It had never made sense to her. Nick hadn’t killed monsters in targeted assassinations. He’d massacred monsters indiscriminately. How could that be part of any plan?
“After the King erased our family,” Eleanor said, “I went looking for him.” She nodded at Nick. “He didn’t remember me, of course.” To Nick, she said, “I had someone beat you up. They broke your nose. It was more satisfying than you’d believe.”
Nick’s expression didn’t change. “Brave of you.”
Eleanor shrugged. “I used my Grave power to undo the beating. At the end of it, you were unbruised and your nose was unbroken. That was less satisfying, but it was proof.”
“Proof of what?” Joan said.
“That the timeline would allow her to make a change.” It was Tom who’d spoken. He’d figured it out first.
“A very small change,” Eleanor agreed. “An insignificant change. I had to do it slowly to make sure that the timeline didn’t figure out what I was really up to. I broke Nick’s bones over and over. Fixed them over and over. I killed his family and brought them back.” A flinch from Nick at that. “And then I did it all over again.”
Joan had a flash of Nick again with a broken nose. Nick crying. Nick screaming. Nick begging for his family’s lives. Again, Eleanor had said. Again. Again. And Nick had been tortured in a whole new way. Again. Eleanor had hurt him and reset him and hurt him again.
“Why?” Joan ground out.
“I had a theory,” Eleanor said, “that if I could change someone’s personal history over and over, the timeline would eventually lose its grip on them. I remember the first time that he killed a monster without the timeline trying to fix it.” She laughed. The note of triumph made Joan shiver. “That was when I knew I’d done it. I’d made a weak point on the timeline.”
Ying had said that events could be changed at weak points on the timeline. Nick was a weak point?
“I’d made someone who could change the timeline at will,” Eleanor said. “And I made him perfect.” She turned to Nick again. “You were perfect. I had a monster kill your family so that you would hate us. Hate Joan. And then I had you trained into the perfect monster slayer. The perfect human hero. My work of art.” She wasn’t even mocking this time; it was sincere. Some part of her saw him as her masterpiece.
Nick stared Eleanor down, as cold as Joan had ever seen him.
“You went after monsters with a righteous fury,” Eleanor said to Nick as if she hadn’t noticed his expression. “Every time you killed a monster, you became even more detached from the timeline. Even more capable of change.”
“It didn’t matter who he killed,” Joan said slowly. “It was the killing that mattered. You only wanted him more and more free of the constrictions of the timeline.”
Joan thought of how Aaron had thrown a stone into the canal and told them to watch the ripples fading. She imagined Nick now as a ripple that couldn’t be smoothed over. The changes he’d caused stayed changed. She shivered.
It hit her then that she’d changed the timeline by unmaking Nick. Was that why she’d been able to do it? Because Nick was special? Because he was a weak point on the timeline?
“What did you make me for?” Nick said, jolting Joan from her thoughts. “What change did you want me to make? You need me to bring back the Graves? How? What am I supposed to do?”
Eleanor’s smile was small and private like she was laughing at an inside joke.
“Why did you bring us here?” Joan said suddenly. She’d been expecting Eleanor to try to change a significant event. To change something. But she’d just been standing here, talking to them.
“Honestly?” Eleanor said. “I could have done this anywhere. But I thought it would be poetic to change the timeline where the King did it. To bring our family back here—on our own territory—in the very place where he killed the first of us. And when I create the new timeline, no one will touch our family again. Not the King. Not humans. Not anyone.”
Joan’s next breath shook. She saw Eleanor’s full vision now.
The timeline they’d seen through the window wasn’t a mistake. Its horrors weren’t a terrible by-product of Eleanor’s plan to bring back the Graves. That world would be exactly as Eleanor wished it to be.
Eleanor wanted to create a world where the Graves would never again question what she’d called their birthright: a world where monsters would steal life with impunity; where humans and monsters would never imagine coming together in peace; where nothing like the past would ever happen again.
And maybe the Graves would live again, but it would be a nightmare for humans. Joan pictured that terrible street: the blond man’s terror and his resignation. He’d known that the monster would drain his life; he’d known that his body would be tossed into the back of the van like rubbish.
“We won’t let you create a world where monsters reign,” Nick said to Eleanor, anger thickening his voice.
He was right. “We can’t let you do it,” Joan said.
Eleanor’s mouth twisted. “You really do always choose the wrong side, Joan.”
Before Joan could even think of the next step, there was a blur of movement to her right. Nick rushed at Eleanor, and Tom was just a moment behind. They’d been in quiet communication while Eleanor had been talking.
Almost as fast, they were both thrown violently back into the alley by an invisible force.
“Tom!” Jamie said, reaching for him.
Joan scrambled to Nick unthinkingly. He was already getting to his feet. Tom had fallen on his side to prevent Frankie from being crushed. She jumped out of Tom’s knapsack, her stubby tail wagging as if Tom had been playing a game.
Tom glared at a dark-haired woman standing behind Eleanor with her hands raised.
“Quite the master of the Ali power,” Tom growled at the woman.
“I don’t want to kill you, Tom Hathaway,” the woman said to him. “I know your sister is an Ali.”
“That’s your one warning,” Eleanor said to them matter-of-factly. “Try that again, and someone gets shot.” She looked meaningfully at Jamie and then Joan, and Tom made a rumbling sound at the back of his throat. Nick glared at Eleanor like he was going to kill her.
“There’s no point in fighting me anyway,” Eleanor said. “The change is already in motion. It started when you brought him here.”
“What?” Joan said.
In answer, Eleanor took a step back from them and lifted her eyes. The sky had lightened to dull white. Shouldn’t it have been brighter by now, though? It hit Joan that she hadn’t heard any background sounds for some minutes: the river and the docks had gone silent. Near St. Magnus, a steamship had been pulling from the wharf. Now it was unmoving. Gray smoke stood above its chimney in a frozen swirl.
Eleanor saw Joan staring. “You are so far out of your league in this timeline,” she said almost gently. “Have you even figured out your own powers yet? What you can do?” She swiped at the air, the gesture almost dismissive. And as she did, the familiar, unbearable buzz of dissonance hit.
Joan gasped as she realized what Eleanor had just done. There’d been an Ali seal above them this whole time. Eleanor had opened it as easily as wiping steam from glass. She was so much stronger than Joan had understood. And, by opening the seal, she’d revealed a vast tear in the timeline above them.
Aaron groaned with nausea. Jamie and Ruth bent double next. Even Nick paled.
The tears at the café and at Holland House had been tiny in comparison. This one rent the sky—a scar of blue among white clouds.
Eleanor’s hands were up, and Joan could almost see the power streaming from her, ripping open the seal to reveal more and more of that torn sky.
“Close that seal back up!” Tom said. “Close it now, before that tear gets bigger!”
Could Joan do something? She focused on the flame of power inside herself, and she hurled it at Eleanor’s hands, trying to undo her stream of power at its source.
“Stop that!” Eleanor snapped at her. “Stop it!” Her tone reminded Joan weirdly of Ruth’s when they’d argued as kids. The irritated tone you’d use on family.
She was so annoyed that Joan realized with a jolt that her own blast of power must have done something. She concentrated. Eleanor’s power was almost visible, like heat distortion in the air.
Joan hurled her power again at Eleanor, and this time she tried to keep up a steady flow of it.
“Stop it!” Eleanor said again. Maybe it was working.
But then Eleanor’s power roared to life—a wall of fire to Joan’s flame. Joan gasped—she could almost feel it as real heat, and her own power couldn’t compete.
“You’d really fight me on this?” Eleanor said to her thickly. “After you sacrificed everything to save the Hunts? If you remembered your real family, you’d be doing anything to bring them back!” Her expression crumpled again for just a moment. “God, look at what the King did! Our whole family is gone. And you don’t remember them at all! You don’t miss them at all! You don’t feel anything!”
That wasn’t quite true. Joan did feel something—pressure thrummed deep in her chest again. Maybe Eleanor was right. Maybe if Joan could remember the Graves, she’d have been fighting for them too.
But she could only act on what she knew. “You need to stop!” she said to Eleanor. “That world is wrong. I saw it! You’ll make people suffer!”
“It’s going to engulf us!” Tom said. Joan looked up dizzily and saw that uncanny blue sky bearing down on them.
A rumble rippled through them all suddenly—more earthquake than thunder. It reverberated through Joan’s bones in a long, long bass note.
Eleanor’s head snapped up.
“What was that?” Ruth whispered.
“What was what?” Nick said, and Joan realized that it hadn’t actually been a sound. Only the monsters had sensed it.
“No,” Eleanor breathed.
The air in front of Joan blazed. She flinched away, shielding her eyes, and then realized that the brightness wasn’t something she could actually see. It was an interpretation by her monster sense.
A man was stepping out of the air. He exuded so much power that looking at him felt like looking into the face of the sun.
Joan’s eyes watered with the effort of trying to see him. He was handsome, but she couldn’t make out much more than that. Her perceptions seemed to be oscillating. He seemed old and young at the same time; terrible and benign; cheerful and grave.
The man spoke. Joan had expected his voice to match his presence—to be a rumble of thunder—but he sounded surprisingly human. He addressed Eleanor. “Did you really believe that I’d allow this? Did you believe I wouldn’t know? I am aware of every moment, every ripple, in the timeline.”
Beside Joan, Aaron drew in a sharp, shocked breath as if he’d realized who the man was. He collapsed to his knees and dropped his head into a bow. He wasn’t the only one. Eleanor’s allies were lowering their guns and falling to the ground, prone, their arms outstretched.
“Joan,” the man said. “You sent a message to the Court. You sent for Conrad to save you.” He lifted his hand, swatting lazily at the sky. And the timeline responded like an obedient pet; the blue gash above vanished as if it had never been there, zipping itself back into white sky. Joan gasped at the immense power of it.
“You sent for Conrad,” the man said again. “But I rather think you need a king.”
Thirty-Seven
The King stood outside the alley, his back to the river. He was a bear-like figure, taller and broader even than Tom. Or was he? Joan’s perceptions of him kept changing: he was old and young, his face lined and smooth; he wore prehistoric furs or maybe a futuristic suit. And Joan had thought that Eleanor and her allies were strong, but the King’s power spilled from him like sunshine. It was difficult to look at him directly; Joan’s eyes kept sliding away.
“What have you done?” Eleanor whispered to Joan.
Joan couldn’t answer. She’d asked Ying to get a message to Conrad, saying that Eleanor had turned against the King. She hadn’t imagined that the King himself would arrive. This man hadn’t just murdered the Graves—he’d erased them from memory. His presence here was even more frightening than Eleanor’s.
“Those on their knees may rise,” the King said in his oddly human voice. “And then you will all stay where you are.” It was conversational, but Joan felt it as a press of power, an order impossible to disobey.
She started to shift her weight, and then realized with a wave of horror that she couldn’t lift her feet from the ground. It didn’t feel like mind control; it felt like her shoes had melded with the wooden walkway. She tried to slip her shoes off and couldn’t make them slide at all. Trying not to panic, she lifted her arms just to see if she could. A rush of relief ran through her. Only her feet were trapped.
Was this what the Argent power felt like to humans? Was this what it had felt like to Nick? She turned to him, but he just looked grim as he tested his own feet and found himself stuck too.
Between them, Aaron stood shakily. As he settled, Joan saw his feet freeze too. He shuddered. The bare skin of his neck was a pale line above his shirt collar. He turned that collar up now.
Joan was halfway through flipping up her own collar before she recognized the unconscious need to protect her neck too. Looking down the line, all the others were doing the same thing. Did they all feel it? The spine prickle of primal danger from the King? Joan’s body thought she was too close to a predatory animal. She could almost smell a musk scent. And she couldn’t run.
“Sweet Eleanor,” the King said, and Eleanor stared back at him defiantly. She seemed more able than Joan to look the King in the face, but her feet were glued to the ground just like everyone else’s. And that sent another pulse of fear down Joan’s spine. Eleanor was the most feared member of the Curia Monstrorum. She’d brought allies here with the power to freeze the world around them, to wield the rare Ali power like a weapon, and who knew what else. And yet just a few words from the King had subdued her.
“Did you truly think that your sister needed to send for me?” the King said. “I see every event on the timeline, every fluctuation. I knew the moment you sought to betray me.”
Sister?
For a long, long moment, the word didn’t make any kind of sense. Joan had sent for help. Why had the King referenced Eleanor’s sister?
Eleanor saw Joan’s confused expression, and her lips pressed until they whitened.
And then Joan could only stare at Eleanor’s pretty face, her waves of golden hair, her cornflower-blue eyes. Why wasn’t Eleanor contradicting this? They couldn’t be sisters. They looked nothing alike. And . . . some part of Joan would have remembered her. Surely.
“I rewarded you for your loyalty once,” the King said to Eleanor. “I granted you life. I granted you membership in my Court.”
“You call that a reward?” Eleanor said. “Keeping me alive after you erased my family from existence? Bestowing me with this sigil? The Graves were the most powerful family in London, and now no one even remembers our name.” She turned to Joan, and her expression was so full of emotion that Joan couldn’t look away. “My own sister doesn’t remember me,” Eleanor said hoarsely.
“I’m not your sister,” Joan blurted, and Eleanor took a visibly shaky breath, as if Joan’s words had actually hurt her.
They really couldn’t be sisters. Eleanor had done things Joan would never understand. She’d tortured Nick and Jamie. She’d hurt the people Joan loved most. She’d trained Nick and set him loose on the world. He’d massacred hundreds and hundreds—maybe thousands—of monsters. Joan’s own family included.
Eleanor had taunted Joan about it. She’d locked her up in a cell.
“We grew up together,” Eleanor said to Joan. Was there a shake in her voice? “You’re only here because I am.”
Joan was aware of the others listening—even the King. But she could only look at Eleanor. Stuck fast in place like the rest of them and dwarfed by the King’s bulk, Eleanor seemed smaller than she had before. The world was still frozen around them, and without any breeze, her straight-cut medieval dress hung limply.
“I don’t believe you,” Joan said honestly, and again Eleanor looked as if Joan had hurt her feelings.
“The King rewarded me with life,” Eleanor said. “To grant me that, he had to preserve my entire line—every ancestor down to my mother. Our mother.”
“My mum was Maureen Hunt.”
“Our mother was Maureen Grave! She was marked for assassination as soon as I was born. But . . .” Eleanor’s voice faltered for a moment. “Mum was always clever. There were rumors that she’d escaped—that a Nightingale had saved her. That she’d gotten out through a series of safe houses.”
Joan found herself turning, shaken, to Aaron. His mouth parted slightly, and his eyes widened. His mother had been a Nightingale, and she’d been executed for helping someone like Joan. A member of the Grave family, Joan knew now.
Aaron’s mother had had a safe house in Southwark. . . . Had she saved Joan’s mother? Joan pictured the two of them cowering there in the dark, knowing the King was hunting them down. . . .
“Mum must have found your dad again after she escaped,” Eleanor said to Joan. “They’d belonged together in the zhēnshí de lìshĭ, and so the timeline would have brought them back together. And then . . . I suppose she sought refuge with the Hunts. I should have guessed. Or maybe I shouldn’t have—she and Gran never really did get on.”
“Gran?”
“Dorothy Hunt,” Eleanor said. “She’s my grandmother too. To be honest, though, I never got on with her either. Mum used to say we were too alike. Spiky peas in a pod.”
She didn’t sound like she was lying, but Joan couldn’t process it. Nothing about Eleanor was familiar. Not her precise, mannered way of speaking; not her doll-like features; not her casual cruelty. And at the same time, Joan had a flash of Nick introducing himself as if they’d never met. Of herself standing in that little airless room with Aaron, begging him to believe that he’d once known her.
