A Drop of Night

by Stefan Bachmann

  I think of Lilly on her own, fighting her way through the palace while the rest of us were busy getting captured and falling out of chandeliers.

  “Lilly?”

  “Yeah?” She’s not listening, just running, dragging me up some steps and along the rippling midnight-blue curtain.

  “Thanks for coming back.”

  “Duh,” she says, and we stop, right at the center of the stage. We turn and face the theater. At the back of the theater, the silhouette of a huge figure is growing against the frosted panes of the doors. A hand is placed flat to the glass. Behind it, I see more shapes, tall, dark shadows.

  “Point your toes,” Lilly says urgently. “Hold your breath and keep your arms in.”

  “What?”

  “You know how to swim, right?”

  “What?”

  The doors at the end of the salle d’opèra burst open.

  Lilly stamps a tiny wire prong sticking up through the boards. And the floor drops out from under us.

  I scream so loud it’s like my throat is ripping. We’re falling like bullets into the dark, wind whizzing in my ears—

  “Point your toes!” Lilly shrieks, and a second later I’m burbling, plunging into black water. It’s shockingly, painfully cold. I’m gulping it, sinking. But Lilly’s got hold of my arm and she’s kicking upward, pulling me with her. We break the surface.

  I drag myself up onto a stone ledge, gasping.

  “Are you insane?” I sputter. I’m shivering violently, wiping my face, trying to catch my breath. It’s so dark I can’t even see my hand in front of my eyes. “What was that? What—”

  “Anouk,” Lilly says softly, and I hear her digging around in her sopping wet clothes. “They’re going to come after us. We have to hurry.”

  She’s shaking something. By the metallic rattle coming from it, I’m assuming it’s a flashlight. A broken one.

  “Oops,” Lilly says. Giggles nervously. “There’s light farther down. Come on.”

  She charges off into the dark and I follow, stumbling blindly. My nightgown is soaked, sticking to my skin. My feet are bare. The ground is weirdly sharp, full of welts and holes, like volcanic rock. As my eyes adjust, I see the barest outline of where we are: a low stone tunnel, hacked into the bedrock.

  The ground becomes metal grating. We’re on a walkway now, suspended high up in the air. Dull-white lightbulbs inside cages blink on as we pass them. The walkway is sloping downward.

  “How far did you go?” My teeth are chattering. I can barely talk. The grating of the floor is cutting into my skin.

  “Far enough to find them.” She glances at me, and she looks scared suddenly. Exhausted. “Far enough to find a lot of things.”

  We’re at the end of the walkway, turning onto a circular stairway. We stagger down, farther and farther underground. The sound of our descent seems to echo forever. Beyond the lights all I can see is thick, uniform darkness. And now we’re at the bottom, in a huge vaulted space. A clammy, stone-cold copy of the salle d’opéra high above. The floor is covered in shale and huge triangular shards of rock, like this place was blasted out and never properly cleared.

  The light is surreal—a dark, chilly green. Fluorescent tubes are bolted at random intervals across the ceiling, like glowing staples closing up a wound.

  Lilly leads me along the wall. We’re trying to be quiet, but if someone’s within a hundred feet of us they heard us clambering down those stairs. I look up at the wall. It’s scrawled with dripping words. Names. Numbers. Some of them are huge. Others form tiny, shaky sentences.

  L’enfer, I read under my breath as we hurry past the uneven letters. I am Jacques Renaud.

  1775—1795—1885?—1912—2004—2016

  Aurélie. Aurélie du Bessancourt.

  Forgive me. I cannot find you.

  I brush my hand along the wall as I run. Some of the words are gouged into the rock, deep.

  How long is eternity?

  She cannot return to me.

  I am lost.

  Mon nom est perdu.

  The words terminate in an angry mass of blots and splatters.

  We reach a pocket of light. A huge, shattered chandelier is lying between the rocks, cables snaking away into the dark. It’s been laid at the feet of a crudely hacked sculpture. At first it looks barely human. On second glance, I think it’s supposed to be a girl. Piles of trinkets and ancient paper are heaped around it and tangled through the prongs of the chandelier.

  “It’s like a shrine,” I breathe. Lilly looks up at the disfigured stone face. “Come on,” she says, and pulls me onward. “Come on.”

  We’re coming up on something. At first it looks like Stonehenge, looming out of the dark, and now like a circle of ancient telephone booths, and now I see that it’s a series of tanks, glass and heavy, bolted frames, standing end up in the center of this enormous space.

  They aren’t empty.

  Lilly tries to pull me past them. I shrug her off.

  “Wait.” The water behind the thick glass is cloudy, yellow-blue. A figure is floating inside. My throat closes.

  It’s indistinct, drifting. Closer. Now farther. A finger. A hand—

  A face slides forward through the murky fluid.

  For a second I think it’s Jules. It’s got his black hair, the same narrow face and pointed chin. But it’s not Jules. It’s someone his age, a kid with a fuller mouth and muscled arms, and he’s wearing a button-down shirt, wide ’60s pants. He’s suspended in the water, eyes closed. Definitely, inarguably dead.

  “I don’t know what those are,” Lilly mumbles. She’s watching me, not the tanks. She won’t look at the tanks. “We need to go, Anouk.”

  I wrap my soaking arms around me. Start walking again, moving past the circle of tanks. I catch glimpses of a boy in knee breeches. A thin, dark-haired girl in a nineteenth-century gown. Her petticoats are floating around her. There’s a black cavity in the back of her neck.

  “It’s everyone they’ve killed,” I whisper. “All the people they got rid of to stay alive. It’s their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

  Lilly stares at me. One of the bodies floats against the glass with a thunk, wispy hair drifting around its head like spun gold. Eyes closed. Blue lips. It could be Lilly’s twin.

  These are our ancestors. Bessancourts. I wonder if they were dragged down like we were, if they ever got the chance to fight, how long they lasted. Or if they just never woke up.

  Lilly grabs my arm. We stumble on.

  “Look,” Lilly says, and up ahead I see something. To the left, close to another bubble of light: two slumped shapes solidifying out of the dark.

  It’s them. Will and Jules. They’re tied to chairs, backs toward us, heads to their chests.

  And Hayden’s with them. He’s leaning over Jules, cupping something in his hands. A rococo table stands next to him, medical instruments laid out in two neat, glittering rows across the top.

  Lilly doesn’t hesitate. Neither do I. Lilly tosses me a jeweled dagger. Pulls a long, thin saber from her belt loop. We approach out of the darkness.

  Hayden sees us. Grins.

  “My friends have all returned to me,” he growls, and it’s not Hayden’s voice. It’s like a dozen voices at once, strand after strand of grating, whining sound. “My lost brothers and sisters, fellow children of darkness.”

  54

  We’re steps away when I notice the fourth figure. Standing behind Hayden, blending with the shadows. A small shape, like a little kid. He’s wearing an old-fashioned frock coat with pronged tails, flickering like a dark red flame in the blackness.

  I lunge forward and bury the dagger in Hayden’s shoulder. There’s almost nothing left of the guy in the private school blazer, swaggering up to us in JFK. His hair is falling out of his head in patches. His cheeks are shadowy hollows. His lips have started to draw inward, shriveling.

  He doesn’t even flinch as the blade goes through his shoulder. Doesn’t move. He’s looki
ng past me, into space, his palms still outstretched like he’s been frozen in place. The figure in the shadows remains motionless.

  “Hayden?” I stare at him, horrified.

  I jerk the dagger out. It releases with a metallic grating sound.

  No blood. No reaction. Hayden’s not breathing.

  “Get them,” Lilly says, in a tiny panicked whisper. “Hurry!”

  I spin and start sawing frantically at Will’s ropes. Lilly begins hacking at the binds tying Jules to his chair. One rope cut through. Two. I sling Will’s arm over my shoulder and start dragging him away over the rocky floor.

  He weighs a ton. I hear his breathing next to my ear, shallow and raspy.

  “Lilly?” I whip around. She’s following, Jules leaning into her, almost toppling her over. Hayden still hasn’t moved.

  But the small figure has.

  His face is turned toward us. He’s watching us drag the boys desperately away.

  And suddenly Hayden starts after us.

  “I can’t let you do that!” he calls out, and he sounds like Hayden again, his East Coast accent, golden boy attitude, silver spoon confidence. But the voice came from the small figure in the shadows.

  “Lilly, RUN!” I raise the dagger, hoping I can somehow fend Hayden off. He’s hulking toward us, head lowered, eyes flat and wet, reflecting the fluorescent lighting. His shirt’s torn, and under it I glimpse metal, curling tubes, maybe glass, embedded in his chest. Deep, glimmering wounds. Too many wounds. You can’t survive that many wounds.

  I hear a new sound: the ring of dozens of feet clattering down the stairs.

  Lilly reaches me. “Dorf,” she whispers. “They’re here.”

  I spin. The tanks stand silently, the bodies floating inside, calm and ghostly. The steps are still ringing with descending feet. And now I see figures emerging out of the dark, dozens of them, thrown into stark relief against the green glow: Havriel. Miss Sei. Row after row of trackers, red lights piercing the gloom.

  “Found you!” Havriel yells, his voice booming up to the ceiling. I look over my shoulder. Hayden’s approaching fast. We let Will and Jules down as gently as we can onto the ground.

  Havriel breaks into a run. Miss Sei is gesturing sharply to the trackers. A black case is being passed forward through the ranks.

  Havriel reaches us seconds before Hayden does. He ducks under my dagger, whirling. Knocks me sideways. Pain lances through my shoulder. Lilly lets loose a banshee shriek and swings her sabre toward Havriel.

  Now Hayden’s smashing into me. It’s like he doesn’t even see me. My dagger catches on his arm. Hayden swings it toward me, dagger and all, and I drop, scrabbling over the stones. I’m surrounded by legs, screams. Lilly’s swinging her sabre in desperate arcs, trying to keep Havriel at bay. The trackers are forming a ring, Miss Sei pressing to the front. I hear that buzz again, inching into my brain, and my chest is aching, my lungs pressing against my damaged ribs like they’re trying to jump ship—

  I stand just in time to see Hayden’s head jerk and smash into Havriel’s skull. Havriel retreats a step. But he’s only caught off guard for a second.

  “Have you become so pathetic and desperate”—Havriel wheezes, grinning—“that you must hide behind the corpses of your more comely family members? I was wondering where this one had gotten off to. Did you enjoy your little afterlife, Hayden?”

  Havriel’s eyes narrow. He steps forward again, and I see he’s got a gun. He presses it to Hayden’s stomach. Shots fill my ears, ringing in the cavern, again and again, a deafening string of noise. Hayden lurches backward. Falls to the ground. Havriel keeps shooting, until the gun clicks. Smoke rises gently from Hayden’s ruined chest.

  Havriel tosses the gun aside and turns on us.

  “Stay away,” Lilly hisses. She places herself in front of Will and Jules. I stand next to her, dagger out. “Stay back!”

  “Should I?” Havriel says, and he sounds jolly somehow, desperate and crazy and happy. “Do you know what you did? You, in your desperation to live out your tiny, meaningless lives, killed a great man. A man who had lived two hundred and seventy years, longer than any other. A man who influenced nations, built empires and watched them fall, constructed a creature impossible to this day. And he died like a dog at your hands. Do you think I appreciate that?”

  Lilly’s sabre whips out, slashing Havriel’s palm. “Shouldn’t have come after us, then.”

  His face turns hideous, a crinkled, vicious mask, teeth bared. He looks down at the cut in his palm, and for a second I think he’s crying, his eyes squeezed shut. But it’s a chuckle, a thin laugh, high in the back of his throat. He steps toward us, his bleeding palm raised. Lilly swings her sabre with all her strength. Havriel’s eyes open wide. He catches the blade on his arm, loops it down. The tip hits the floor. Lilly loses her grip, and Havriel kicks the sabre away. It goes spinning and dancing across the stones, like a tiny wind spout.

  “Oh, children,” he says, and he’s right there, right in front of us. His hand—bloody from his wounds, bloody from his brother’s—clenches around my neck. “You should not have made me angry.”

  He lifts me up like I’m weightless. I claw at his fingers. He doesn’t let go. Multicolored explosions bloom across my vision. The buzz is rising, painful, filling every crack and fissure in my head, and I don’t know if it’s just me dying, or if everyone hears it. I see the trackers pinning Lilly’s arms while she screams and kicks. I see Miss Sei, pulling on a medical glove with a snap, kneeling next to Jules and Will—

  Havriel’s eyes flick away from my face. He’s looking over my shoulder. I don’t know what he sees, don’t even care anymore, but his mouth goes slack. And something hits me, hits us all. A massive shock wave, soft and cold and crushing all at once. I’m flying, rolling across the floor. I see Havriel hurtling into the dark, picked up like a rag doll.

  I lie for a second, gasping, choking. Push myself up onto hands and knees. “Lilly?” I cough. “Will?”

  The trackers are on the floor, spread around me in a circle, like I’m the epicenter of a bomb. Miss Sei lies crumpled against a boulder about ten feet away, glassy-eyed. Not far away from her, Havriel is sitting up in the faint blue-yellow light of one of the tanks, brushing his hand delicately across a cut in his cheek. He looks almost disbelieving.

  “That was unnecessary,” he croaks into the darkness, and he must be talking to the pale thing, because it’s walking slowly toward us, drifting over the rocks and the bodies. Its eyes are black, birdlike.

  The butterfly man. It’s got to be. It was controlling Hayden, but this is its true form.

  “You brought us our runaways,” Havriel says, pushing himself to his feet. His voice is becoming a strange mixture of contempt and groveling fear. “I am forever indebted, my dear boy.”

  Will and Jules are about six feet away from me, tangled with the bodies of some trackers. Farther back, Lilly’s trying to push herself out from under the mass of arms and legs. Her hair is sticking to her face in wet strands. I start crawling toward the boys.

  The butterfly man passes me, black eyes pinned on Havriel. The whine rises the closer he comes, until it’s all there is, the only sound I can hear. The butterfly man stops in front of Havriel. The buzzing cuts off abruptly.

  “I have not brought you your runaways,” he says. His voice is weirdly soft and uncertain. Almost sweet. Havriel is looking up at him, his expression horrified.

  “I have returned them for myself,” the butterfly man says. “I have been waiting for you to arrive, Havriel du Bessancourt. I was waiting for Father as well, but it seems he has been given his just rewards already. I cannot say I will mourn him. I wish to tell you that our long-standing alliance is terminated.”

  Lilly’s up, stumbling over bodies to get to us. I try to stand, feel the black polymer suits against the soles of my feet, sticky and disgusting, the give of flesh-encased machines.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Havriel moving, backing away from the b
utterfly man. “Alliance?” he says. “But we are not allies. We are brothers! Equals!”

  “Equals?” The butterfly man lets out a high, chittering laugh. I notice a disturbance in the air around him, a dark, fuming mass, barely visible.

  I’ve reached Will. I heave him upright.

  “Equals,” the butterfly man says again, softer, yearning. “You rule the world in secret. I wander a dungeon, alone. You keep me fettered in a gilded wasteland, at every turn a mirror to remind me of who I am and what you made me. No,” the butterfly man says. “If we were equal, you would not fear me so.”

  The disturbance around him flares. Havriel goes slamming against one of the tanks. He slides down it, coughing.

  “I have had enough of this arrangement,” the butterfly man says, and the longing’s gone from his voice. It’s sharp now, malicious. “Enough of Father, and enough of you. There is only one cure for pining after something you cannot possess, and that is to destroy it entirely.”

  Will and I are moving now, squashing over limbs, tripping over helmets. Lilly reaches Jules. She’s trying to shake him awake.

  I feel something brush the back of my neck, an awareness, like a million tiny needles prickling over my skin—

  I freeze. The butterfly man: he’s looking straight at me.

  I stay perfectly still, trying not to breathe. Will’s so heavy. My muscles are burning, aching.

  “Bonjour,” the butterfly man says, and I close my eyes, because I know he’s stepping toward me. I can feel the air sharpening, becoming dense and charged. My back feels like it’s being picked at, like my skin is releasing in particles and dissolving into the air.

  Will stirs, his eyes flickering open. “Will,” I whisper. “Will, wake up!”

  I move, start dragging us away. I’m hunched double, and my entire chest cavity hurts, and my arm is digging into Will’s shoulder blades painfully. I raise my head. The butterfly man is right in front of me, stock-still, obsidian eyes boring into mine.