“I’m ready to learn.” Taking off his shirt gave Balthazar the cover he needed for the swift movement toward the bedside table. In a flash he opened the drawer to find—nothing.
He looked up to see Constantia sitting still on the other side of the bed. Where the drawer of the bedside table on the left was open. And where she’d no doubt found the stake now in her hand.
Her eyes were almost sad. “Do you know, I’d hoped Charity was lying?”
She betrayed me, Balthazar thought in the split second before the stake slammed into his chest.
The rest was a kind of darkness that couldn’t be seen, a silence that couldn’t be heard. Balthazar knew he was not dead, but he knew nothing else. At times his stunned senses delivered a signal—the sight of Charity standing above him, triumphant and proud, or the smell of burning wood—but his mind could not process the information. It slipped in and slipped out, unheeded and barely remembered.
Until the moment a great weight fell upon him and dislodged the stake.
Balthazar screamed. The stake now jabbed through his chest, if not his heart, with the full pain of a deep stab wound. He sucked in a breath and found his lungs filled with smoke; when his eyes would see again, he realized that Charity had fulfilled his plan to the letter—she’d simply turned it against him instead of against Constantia. He was the one now trapped in a burning house, half a smoldering timber across his gut searing his skin, only seconds from oblivion.
Charity, why?
But he knew why. He had killed his sister. She was returning the favor.
Despair settled over him, heavier than the beam that pinned him down. It would be easy to just lie back and let it happen. And yet he couldn’t. Maybe that made him a coward. Maybe the instinct to survive outlasted death itself.
Using all his remaining strength, Balthazar shoved the fallen timber off his body. His remaining clothes were singed, his skin blackened and blistering. The tips of his fingers stuck to the stake he yanked from his own chest, peeling away from his flesh. He staggered toward the nearest window and threw himself through it; glass stabbed into him, just one more layer of pain to mingle with all the rest.
The fall hurt, too; the bones in one forearm snapped as he hit the ground, but somehow he managed to stifle a shout of pain. Balthazar crawled away from the burning house, expecting Constantia and Charity to arrive at any moment to finish him at any cost.
But no one was there. In Philadelphia during the influenza epidemic, even firefighters weren’t risking their lives for anyone else. And apparently Charity and Constantia had already written him off.
Balthazar found his way to the edge of town, to an abandoned building where rats dwelled and made for easy eating. He remained there long after his burns and broken bones healed. Long after the flu epidemic ended. He spoke to no one. He let his beard grow. He spent long days watching a rectangle of light from his room’s one window crawl from one side of the room to the other as the sun rose and set.
Dozens of days.Hundreds of days.
Without human blood, he felt himself changing: his flesh hung more loosely on him, and his fingers increasingly curved into claws. The monster was taking over, but the monster could feel no pain, so Balthazar accepted it. Filth matted his hair and beard, and his torn clothing turned into mere rags. When vermin scurried close enough to be caught, he devoured them. He was as low as he deserved to be; that was as much as he thought about the matter, when he bothered to think of anything at all.
One evening, though, as he lay on the floor halfway between stupor and slumber, he heard a low, guttural laugh. “Lookit this. Some damn hobo.”
“Trash, if you ask me.”
“Might have something in here, though.”
“Not this guy. Lookit him. He don’t need a squat. He needs a grave.”
“We can take care of that, can’t we?”
Balthazar breathed in, smelled human blood, and the monster had killed and devoured them both long before his mind told him he’d even been in danger.
He stood over the corpses of his victims for nearly an hour as he tried to process his return to human consciousness. Already Balthazar could feel his body restoring itself, taking on the muscular form he’d had in life. His tangled beard disgusted him now, as did the grime coating his body, but he’d have to clean himself later.
First he had to figure out just how long he’d been in this place.
One of the dead men was at least close to his size, so Balthazar put on his shirt, coat, and shoes before venturing outside. It was late at night—but that was all he recognized. The entire neighborhood had been rebuilt around him. The roads were repaved, and no horses and carriages were to be seen; instead, automobiles rolled past, faster and more contained than they’d been before.
Buying stock in General Motors was a good idea, Balthazar thought. But his portfolio wasn’t his main concern at the moment.
Moving more naturally and decisively now, Balthazar went to a nearby trash bin and pulled out a crumpled newspaper. The headlines blared unfamiliar information—Depression, Dust Bowl—and one unexpectedly familiar phrase—President Roosevelt? Again?—but he’d read this and absorb the contents later. Right now he cared about only one thing: the date.
April 26, 1933.
Almost fifteen years gone, and he hadn’t even noticed them going.
He would have to return to Evernight Academy and enroll again. There he could find out what the world was like these days and start to adapt. Balthazar hated the process of starting over, but he could do it when he had to.