“I’m that monster’s child, aren’t I?” I said with a horrible sinking in my chest.
Raven flinched as though I’d struck him. He clenched his jaw as if against some terrible pain. “What monster?”
“Van Drood. He loved my mother. She refused to marry him, but she must have loved him once and . . . been with him. That’s why she ran away. She saw what he was becoming and didn’t want to raise me with him. But that’s why he was looking for me.” I felt my chin wobbling, but I bit the inside of my cheek and forced myself to look Raven in the eyes. “That’s why you’ve stayed away, isn’t it?”
Raven gave me a long, level look.
“Do you think I would forsake you because of something like that?”
I felt a quiver of relief, but also a sinking in my heart. “So it’s true.”
“Where did you get this idea?” Raven asked.
“I saw it in the candelabellum.”
“Tell me exactly what you saw,” he commanded in an oddly stern voice.
I told him about the scene of van Drood and my mother in the garden and her running toward the woods, the crows chasing her, the wings dissolving into larger wings, and then vanishing. “Because she was swallowed up by the shadows,” I said at last. “I’m afraid they were always inside her from then on.”
“And this is what she told you when you saw her in Faerie?”
“No,” I replied. “There wasn’t time.”
“Ava,” Raven said, gripping both my shoulders in his hands. “What you saw in the candelabellum wasn’t complete. When your mother disappeared in the woods she wasn’t swallowed by the shadows. She was fleeing to her lover.”
“Van Drood said she loved someone else, but I thought it was just his jealousy.”
“No, she did love someone very much, someone she couldn’t stay with.”
“So van Drood’s not my father!” I cried, so relieved I felt tears pour down my face. “The young van Drood looked so familiar to me.”
“Yes, he would look familiar to you, because you know his son.”
“His son? Who . . . ?”
But then I saw it—the way Dame Beckwith had looked at van Drood in the vision I had seen in the candelabellum and the way her face had changed when she heard his voice coming out of Sarah’s mouth. She hadn’t wanted to believe that the shadow creature was speaking with his voice because she had once been in love with him.
“Nathan is van Drood’s son?”
“Yes. That’s why I was afraid of you getting too close to him. He’s half submersed in the shadows already.”
“No!” I cried. “Just because Nathan is a monster’s son doesn’t make him a monster.” I remembered what my mother had said, that I was the only one who could save Nathan from the shadows. I looked into Raven’s eyes. He still gripped my shoulders, still stared at me.
“I’m glad you see it that way,” he said. “It will make it easier for you. . . . You see, the man your mother loved . . . well, he wasn’t a man.”
“What . . . ?” But I was seeing the shadow play again, watching the swirl of wings. I could hear them in my head, almost drowning out Raven’s words, but not quite.
“Those pains you feel in your shoulder blades are fledgling pains. We all feel them when our wings are emerging . . . You see, Ava, your father was a Darkling . . .” His voice faltered at the look on my face.
“No!” I cried, unable to disguise the horror in my voice.
“Is that so horrible?” he asked, his voice hoarse with emotion. “That you are becoming like me? Do you think I’m a monster?”
“Of course not . . . it’s just I—I . . .” I stammered to a halt, searching for the right words, but before I could find them I heard Helen’s and Daisy’s voices calling my name. I turned and shouted to them that I would be there in a moment and when I turned back Raven was gone. I hadn’t even heard his wings. For a moment I wondered if I’d imagined his appearance. Perhaps it had all been a dream and I wasn’t turning into a Darkling after all. But when I turned back toward Helen and Daisy I felt the ache in my shoulder blades again and I knew it was true.
I walked out of the woods and found Helen and Daisy on the lawn standing a few feet from the edge of the woods.
“Daisy was worried, so we came looking for you,” Helen said. Daisy opened her mouth to object but one look at Helen’s drawn and anxious face made her close it again. “Yes, I was worried,” Daisy said. “And Helen agreed to come look for you.” She reached out her hand and took mine. “Come along or you’ll be late for the farewell dinner.”
Helen hooked her arm in mine and we all turned to walk back to Blythewood as the bells began to ring the dinner hour. They rang us all the way home and then, when they were done, the seventh bell rang from beneath the river, its tone clear and sweet in the spring air, only instead of saying Remember me, remember me, it tolled a different tune now. You’re not alone, you’re not alone.
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Acknowledgments
I HAVE AN entire Order of farbrente maydlakh to thank for the creation of this book. First, my daughter Maggie’s webcomic Penny Dreadful (PennyDreadfulComics.com) inspired the 1911 setting. My step-daughter Nora was an invaluable source of historical detail, calling in her cohorts Barry Goldberg and Ben Hellwege to suggest sources for the period. Maggie’s friend Sarah Alpert listened to many hours of world-building, gave invaluable suggestions on the manuscript, and invented Featherbell. My intrepid editor, Kendra Levin, saw me through many revisions and tirelessly pinned down the taxonomic hierarchies of Darkling and fairy.
Thanks, too, to Danielle Delaney, Nancy Brennan, and Janet Pascal at Viking. My agent, Robin Rue, and her assistant Beth Miller, at Writers House, were fiery in their advocacy for this book.
Thanks to Wendy Gold, Gary Feinberg, and Scott Silverman for reading early drafts.
And, as always, I couldn’t do any of this without the faith and love of my husband Lee.
Blythewood Page 41