“Maybe they can help us.”
“Good friends?”
“Well, not really. But Isabelle’s known Alan for ages.”
“And hasn’t spoken to him for years,” John said.
“But—”
“Do you think they’re such good friends that they’d help us kill a well-respected artist like Rushkin?”
John asked. “Just on our say-so?”
“Maybe if we explained things ...” Cosette’s voice trailed off at the withering look John gave her.
“Okay. So maybe it’s not such a good idea.”
“They have their concerns and we have ours,” John said. “By what each of us are, they are mutually exclusive. We have too little common ground, Cosette.”
“That’s not really true.”
John didn’t want to argue anymore. “We should go.”
“But that would be so rude.”
“Fine,” he said, exasperated. “Wait for them. You know where to find me when you’re done.”
Cosette nodded. “I wonder,” she said, before he left. “Should I contact the others—you know, Rosalind and the rest of them still on the island?”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” John told her. “They should have a little forewarning in case we fail.”
“But we’re not going to fail, are we?”
She looked up at him, afraid and hopeful all at once. John wanted to set her mind at ease, but he couldn’t lie to her.
“If we do,” he said, “it won’t be from lack of trying.”
He left her then, heading east and north, aiming for a tenement in the Tombs where Isabelle spoke with Rushkin and prepared to sell her soul. He arrived in the middle of their conversation, finding a perch outside the second-story room where they spoke, sharing the narrow ledge with a grotesque gargoyle that reminded him of Rothwindle, one of Isabelle’s earlier creations who had died in the fire at Wren Island.
“My darling ‘goyle,” he said softly.
It was the name Isabelle had given the painting of Rothwindle. The gargoyle had come across from the before with her own name, just as John had. Come across and lived her life in the shadows of this world until John had let her die. He’d let them all die. Since the night he’d rescued Paddyjack from Rushkin he’d vowed to protect each and every one of Isabelle’s numena, but he’d failed. He hadn’t been there when the fire swept through the farmhouse.
John frowned when he heard Rushkin accuse Isabelle of starting the fire. Isabelle knew what she was about when she called her old mentor the father of lies. But then John found himself thinking of how Isabelle could confuse the truth, even in her own mind—claiming she was mugged when it had actually been Rushkin who’d beaten her. Insisting her friend Kathy had died of an illness in a hospital when she’d committed suicide. What if the mystery of the fire was another of her stories? What if it hadn’t been Rushkin who had set the farm-house ablaze, but Isabelle herself?
Simply considering the possibility made him feel as though he was betraying her, but now that the question had lodged in his mind, he couldn’t shake it. All things considered, hadn’t she betrayed him in how she’d cast him out of her life? Hadn’t she betrayed them all by allowing so many of them to die?
Couldn’t she have saved some of them?
He listened with growing disquiet as Rushkin explained how numena could be given the gift of true life. Another betrayal, he thought, but then shook his head. No, Isabelle hadn’t known ... had she?
He wished now that he’d never come. He didn’t want to consider Isabelle to blame for all the deaths.
Didn’t want to think that she could have given all of them what Cosette called the red crow at so little cost to herself. If they’d been freed from their paintings, none of them would have had to die. How could she not have known? And yet ...
Rushkin was a master of lies, but like all such men, he had to use a certain amount of truth to lend his lies the echo of veracity they required to be believed. So what was lie, what was truth?
No, he told himself. This is exactly what Rushkin wants. To raise so many doubts that you could no longer be sure what was true and what was not. Undoubtedly, he was the cause of Isabelle’s own confusion with the truth. Rushkin’s presence, his voice and the half-truths he wove in among his lies—they were like a virus. How could you do anything but doubt everything you believed in once you’d been infected by him?
That was when he realized what it was that Rushkin was demanding of Isabelle. Doubts were put aside, to be dealt with later if not forgotten. Right now all he wanted to do was burst into the room and kill Rushkin where he lay on his pallet. Squeeze the life out of him the way Rushkin had taken the lives of so many of Isabelle’s creations. But he still wasn’t certain that a maker could die at his hands and there were Rushkin’s own creations to consider—his double and the strange monochrome girl that Cosette had described to him earlier, the one’s gaze more feral than the other.
So he waited. He hugged the wall and willed, with all the potency he could muster, that Isabelle would stand up to her old mentor, rather than fall under his sway once again.
“Tell him no, Isabelle,” he whispered, his voice pitched so low that not even the stone gargoyle squatting a half-dozen feet away could have heard him. “Deny him, once and for all.”
XIII
Isabelle didn’t honestly believe that Rushkin could bring Kathy back. She was a naïf when it came to his magics, to what could and could not be done, but not so innocent as to believe that the dead could be raised, unchanged and whole. The creation of numena almost made sense. If you accepted that there was an otherworld, then it stood to reason that there could be pathways leading from it to this world. Didn’t Jilly always say that a hundred centuries of myths and fairy tales had to be based upon something?
But the dead didn’t return, unchanged and forgiving. Not even folktales pretended differently. She knew that. She knew it, but still her heart broke when she finally looked up to meet Rushkin’s gaze and shook her head.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I won’t do it.”
He gave her a look that she knew so well—he was the teacher again, disappointed in his pupil—only this time she didn’t buy into that role.
“Not now,” he said finally. “But you will.”
“You can’t make me.”
Rushkin only smiled. “A handful of your numena still wander loose. Bitterweed and Scara will find the paintings that brought them across. And then you will have to make a choice: sacrifice them, or paint others for me.”
Isabelle shook her head.
“It makes no difference to me,” Rushkin told her. “But I will survive. Make no mistake about that, ma belle Izzy.”
There was honey dripping from his voice as he used Kathy’s endearment, but all Isabelle could do was shudder. From where she lounged against the wall, Scara tittered.
“Take her away,” Rushkin said.
Isabelle cringed and pulled out of Bitterweed’s grip on her shoulder. “Don’t touch me,” she told him.
After giving Rushkin a questioning glance, Bitterweed stood back from her. Isabelle rose under her own steam and let him guide her back out into the foul-smelling hallway. She stared down at her feet as he led her a half-dozen paces to another door.
“In here,” Bitterweed said.
She hesitated at the doorway, gaze taking in the easel and art supplies laid out upon a long wooden table. Brushes and palette knives. Tubes of paint and rags for cleaning up. Linseed oil and turpentine. A palette and beside it, a stack of primed canvases. A white cotton smock hung over the back of the room’s one wooden chair. The only windows were set high in the wall, casting a northern light down into that part of the room where the easel stood. There was already a canvas standing in the easel.