“If you’re going to eat, I’ll stay,” said North. His voice was steady, but he looked eager in the mirror of the water.

Dawes handed Alex a towel and helped her climb awkwardly from the tub.

“Can I be alone for a minute?”

Dawes’s eyes narrowed. “What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. Just eat. But if you … If you hear anything, don’t worry about knocking. Just come on in.”

“I’ll be downstairs,” Dawes said warily. She closed the door behind her.

Alex leaned over the crucible. North was waiting in the reflection.

“Want in?” she asked.

“Submerge your hand,” he muttered, as if asking her to disrobe. But, of course, she’d already disrobed.

She dunked her hand beneath the surface.

“I’m not a murderer,” said North, reaching for her.

She smiled and let her fingers clasp his. “Of course not,” she said. “Neither am I.”

She was looking through a window. She felt excited, a sense of pride and comfort she’d never known. The world was hers. This factory, more modern than Brewster’s or Hooker’s. The city before her. The woman beside her.

Daisy. She was exquisite, her face precise and lovely, her hair in curls that brushed the collar of her high-necked dress, her soft white hands buried in a fox-fur muff. She was the most beautiful woman in New Haven, maybe Connecticut, and she was his. Hers. Mine.

Daisy turned to him, her dark eyes mischievous. Her intelligence sometimes unnerved him. It was not quite feminine, and yet he knew it was what elevated her over all of the belles of the Elm City. Perhaps she was not really the most beautiful. Her nose was too sharp, her lips too thin—but oh the words that spilled from them, laughing and quick and occasionally naughty. And there was absolutely nothing to fault in her figure or her clever smile. She was simply more alive than anyone he’d ever met.

These calculations were made in a moment. He could not stop making them, because always they tallied to a sense of triumph and contentment.

“What is it you’re thinking, Bertie?” she asked in her playful voice, sidling closer. Only she used that name with him. Her maid had come with them, as was proper, but Gladys had hung back in the hallway and now he saw her through the window drifting toward the green, the strings of her bonnet trailing from her hand as she plucked a sprig of dogwood from the trees. He hadn’t had much cause to speak to Gladys, but he would make more of an effort. Servants heard everything, and it would pay to have the ear of the woman closest to the woman who would be his wife.

He turned away from the window to Daisy glowing like a piece of milky glass against the polished wood of his new office. His desk, along with the new safe, had been built especially for the space. He’d already spent several late nights here working in comfort. “I was thinking of you, of course.”

She tapped him on the arm, drawing closer still. Her body had a sway to it that might have been unseemly in another woman, but not in Daisy.

“You needn’t flirt with me anymore.” She held up her hand, fluttered her fingers, the emerald glinting on them. “I’ve already said yes.”

He snatched her hand from the air and pulled her near. Something in her eyes kindled, but with what? Desire? Fear? She was sometimes impossible to read. In the mirror above the mantel, he saw the two of them, and the image thrilled him.

“Let’s go to Boston after the wedding. We can drive up to Maine for our honeymoon. I don’t want a long sea voyage.”

She only lifted a brow and smiled. “Bertie, Paris was part of the bargain.”

“But why? We have time to see the whole world.”

“You have time. I will be a mother to your children and a hostess to your business partners. But for a moment …” She stood on tiptoe, her lips a bare breath from his, the heat of her body palpable as her fingers pressed against his arm. “I might simply be a girl seeing Paris for the first time, and we might simply be lovers.”

The word hit him like a hammer swing.

“Paris it is,” he said on a laugh, and kissed her. It was not their first kiss, but like every kiss with Daisy it felt new.

A creak sounded on the stairs, then a rolling sound, like someone stumbling.

Daisy pulled away. “Gladys has the very worst timing.”

But over Daisy’s shoulder, Bertie could see Gladys still drifting dreamily along the green, her white cap bright against the dogwoods.

He turned and saw—nothing, no one, an empty doorway. Daisy sucked in a startled breath.

The edge of his vision blurred, a dark blot spreading like flame catching at the corner of a page, eating along its edge. He cried out as he felt something like pain, something like fire, pierce his skull. A voice said, They cut me open. They wanted to see my soul.

“Daisy?” he gasped. The word came out garbled. He was lying on his back in an operating theater. Men stood above him—boys, really.

Something’s wrong, one said.

Just finish! shouted another.

He looked down. His stomach had been cut open. He could see, oh God, he could see himself, his gut, the meat of his organs, displayed like winding snakes of offal in a butcher’s case. One of the boys was pawing at him. They cut me open.

He screamed, doubled over. He clutched his stomach. He was whole.

He was in a room he didn’t recognize, some kind of office, polished wood everywhere. It smelled new. The sunlight was so bright it hurt his eyes. But he wasn’t safe from those boys. They’d followed him here. They wanted to kill him. They’d taken him from his good spot at the train yard. They’d offered him money. He knew they wanted to have their fun, but he hadn’t known, he didn’t know. They’d cut him open. They were trying to take his soul.

He couldn’t let them drag him back to that cold room. There was protection here. If he could only find it. He reached for the desk, pulling open drawers. They seemed too far away, as if his arms were shorter than he remembered.

“Bertie?”

That wasn’t his name. They were trying to confuse him. He looked down and saw a black shape in his hand. It looked like a shadow, but it felt heavy in his palm. He knew the name for it, tried to form the word for it in his mind.

There was a gun in his hand and a woman was screaming. She was pleading. But she wasn’t a woman; she was something terrible. He could see night gathered around her. The boys had sent her to bring him back so they could cut him open again.

Lightning flashed but the sky was still blue. Daisy. He was supposed to protect her. She was crawling across the floor. She was weeping. She was trying to get away.

There, a monster, staring back at him from above the mantel, his white face filled with horror and rage. They’d come for him and he had to stop them. There was only one way to do it. He had to ruin their fun. He turned the shadow in his hand, pressed it to his gut.

Another flash of lightning. When had the storm come on?

He looked down and saw that his chest had come apart. He’d done the work. Now they couldn’t cut him open. They couldn’t take his soul. He was on the floor. He saw sunlight crisscrossing the slats, a beetle crawling over the dusty floorboards. Daisy—he knew her—lay still beside him, the roses fading from her cheeks, her wicked, lively eyes gone cold.

22

Winter

Alex staggered backward, nearly knocking the tray from the table where Dawes had placed it. She clutched her chest, expecting to find an open wound there. Her mouth was full of food and she realized that she’d been standing in front of the tray, shoveling macaroni into her mouth, as she relived North’s death. She could still sense him inside her, oblivious, lost to the sensations of eating for the first time in more than a hundred years. With all of her will, she shoved him from her, resealing the breach that had allowed him inside.

She spat out the macaroni, gasped for air, lurched to the edge of the crucible. The only face looking back at her from the surface of the water was her own. She slapped her hand against it, watching the ripples spread.

“You killed her,” she whispered. “I saw you kill her. I felt it.”

But even as she said it, she knew she hadn’t been North in that moment. There had been someone else inside him.

Alex stumbled down the hall to the Dante bedroom and pulled on a pair of Lethe House sweats. It felt like days had passed but it had only been hours. There was a lingering soreness where her ribs had been broken, the only sign of the beating she’d endured. And yet she was so tired. Each day had started to feel like a year, and she wasn’t sure if it was the physical trauma or the heavy exposure to the uncanny that was wearing her down.