Chapter 30

“Well, well, well. Cordelia Clay, what a pleasure. I must admit, I’ve been wanting to meet you for quite a long time.”

Cordelia’s brain felt as if it had been swirled around in a stewpot and then sloshed haphazardly back into her head. She was in one of the exhibit hall’s steel cages. Gregory and Elizabeth had been enclosed in cages of their own; so had Cabal, Icky, and the dragon. The dragon, additionally, had been muzzled, and his wings clipped to the floor by means of small iron rings.

Cordelia struggled to sit up, moaning at the throbbing pressure in her forehead.

Up close, Byron Newton-Plancke gave even more the impression of a man made up of old elastic, stretched one too many times. And Cordelia saw, at once, that their cabdriver had been right—there was something wrong with his eyes.

First of all, he had none.

Or rather—he had no eyes in his face, just gaping red sockets.

The eyes in question were on the floor, separated by at least four feet. One of them rolled closer to her cage bars, and she drew back instinctively.

“Don’t be afraid . . . yet,” Newton-Plancke said. “They can look, but they can never touch.” He laughed at his own joke. The second eye rolled slightly, as if it didn’t find its limitations very funny.

Then both eyes swiveled in her direction. “Pretty girl,” he said. “Though I don’t see much resemblance to your mother.”

Cordelia’s heart seemed to freeze in her chest. A terrible feeling slid from her neck to the base of her spine.

“My mother?” she whispered.

Newton-Plancke twitched his long, thin lips into a smile. “A smart woman,” he said casually. “Had a promising career ahead of her—at least, until she met your father and became consumed by her ridiculous idea of a single evolutionary tree. I tried many times to point out the error of her thinking. But she was too stubborn. . . .”

Now Cordelia’s heartbeat punched back on, and she fought against a sudden breathlessness. “You—you knew my mother?”

“We ran, for a time, in similar circles,” he said. “Her early work showed promise, I admit.” Cordelia remembered, in a flash, what Professor Natter had told her: the group of monster experts and hobbyists was small, and tightly knit. But Cordelia didn’t believe for a second that any group, big or small, would have welcomed Byron Newton-Plancke as a member.

Probably he had slimed his way in. He clearly had practice.

“But after she made herself a laughingstock . . .” Newton-Plancke shrugged. “Well, like I said. I tried to warn her. Her ideas were more than absurd. They were dangerous. Just imagine the idea of monsters being normal, of monsters being necessary. It’s a threat to civilized society as we know it! Luckily, there was no danger that she would be believed . . . not after the failure of her first book. It was a sad thing, really, for a woman of such promise. Overnight, no one would touch her, much less her nonsensical theories. . . .”

In a moment, Cordelia’s fear tightened into hatred. “It was you,” she said. “You were the one who got all her books yanked from the libraries and bookstores. You were the one who got her banned from speaking, from publishing.”

“Of course,” he said simply, without regret. As Cordelia watched, disgusted, both eyes rolled quickly back to his feet, leaving small, slick trails of green slime behind them. He bent down to retrieve them, then worked them back into his face with a sickening squeaking sound, like a wet finger around the rim of a glass. “What else could I do?”

Cordelia noticed that he had mispositioned his eyes. His left eye was rolling ever so slightly toward the bridge of his nose. He had monster blood, obviously, and was likely descended from a long-ago line of . . . what? Not goblins, certainly. Trolls, perhaps? But no troll species she could think of came with detachable eyes; many hardly used their eyes at all, and navigated mostly by smell. And she understood, all at once, why Newton-Plancke was on a mission to purge monsters and their descendants from the world.

It was like her father had always said: Fear is the real monster. It breeds by making monsters, and the monsters make more fear.

“You’re afraid,” she said, and was pleased to see the words wipe the smirk from Plancke’s face. “You’re terrified you’ll be found out for what you are. For whatever you are.”

“Quiet,” he snapped, and Cordelia felt sure she was right. Who would possibly suspect him of being a monster, when he had dedicated his life to rooting them out? “Or I’ll have your tongue cut out for dog feed.”

Cordelia didn’t doubt it. Even though she would have liked to torture and insult him, to see him squirm, she knew she would only enrage him, and put the others in even more danger. She tucked her tongue firmly behind her teeth so it wouldn’t betray her better judgment.

Byron Newton-Plancke then pivoted to face Elizabeth. As he scanned her filthy dress and ragged mess of curls, his face twisted into an ugly sneer. “Let me guess,” he said. “Poor little rich girl on a runaway adventure. What happened? Do Mommy and Daddy ignore you? Do they stick you away with the governess and refuse to give you kisses? Are they embarrassed by you?” Even his laugh was stretched thin, a hysterical giggle that soon died in his throat.

“Shut up,” Elizabeth said. Anger was darkening her cheeks to green. Cordelia wanted to shout a warning. But of course, Elizabeth couldn’t help it.

It was too late, anyway. Plancke jerked backward when the warts began to pop angrily at her hairline, as if goblins were contagious. “I see,” he said, as his lips curled back over his teeth in a sneer. “Well, no wonder they’re embarrassed. Ugly little brute. Although I suppose it was their fault, for having you in the first place.”

“Yeah, well, at least she can keep her eyes in her face,” Gregory fired back at him as Elizabeth ducked her head, blinking away tears. Cordelia longed to reach out a hand and comfort her. She knew Plancke might feed that to the dogs, too, and might have risked it anyway. But the cages were too far apart.

“True,” Plancke said icily, turning now to Gregory. “But she’s the one in the cage, isn’t she? An unfortunate position to be in,” he added, “although perhaps for you it is quite the upgrade from your usual accommodations.” He leaned a little closer and sniffed. Then he drew back with a look of disgust. “Just as I thought. You reek of orphan, you know. A boy no one will miss. Don’t bother to contradict me”—this, as Gregory opened his mouth to protest—“I can smell it on you. The desperation. The sad, cloying desire to be liked. Is that why you volunteered to come with Cordelia on her misadventure?”

Gregory’s eyes were burning. He lifted his chin. “Cordelia’s my friend,” he said. “She helped me, and so I helped her.”

“And then she ‘helped’ you into quite a pickle,” Plancke said. “So I suppose her ‘friendship’ came with a price tag.”

“I don’t know about that.” Gregory shrugged. “Buying friends is your line of work.”

The effect was immediate. Newton-Plancke’s face twisted so suddenly into a rage, his eyes popped—literally—and he barely managed to push them back in place. “I have more friends than you have breaths left in your body!” he shrieked. “I have so many friends, I’ve lost count of how many friends I’ve lost count of!”

“And how many of them would sit in a cage just to keep you company?” Gregory fired back.

“Shut up!” In his anger, Plancke seemed to bloat. His eyes bulged in his face, and his head ballooned on his neck. “Shut up! Or I’ll cut you up into so many pieces, even the dogs won’t have use for you!”

Cordelia’s fear turned to fury. It was because of people like Byron Newton-Plancke that Elizabeth had carried the burden of loneliness and worry along with her all these years. It was people like Byron Newton-Plancke who imagined monsters everywhere, insisted monsters be everywhere, just to have an answer for the gnawing fear inside them.

“All right, then. Go ahead. You can start with me.” Cordelia grabbed hold of the bars and shook; not because she thought it would do any good, but because she needed to push something, to squeeze something, to work the anger out of her palms. “If you’re so desperate to kill us, why waste time?”

“Cordelia,” Elizabeth whispered sharply.

Newton-Plancke’s fit of temper had passed. He turned to Cordelia with a look of some amusement. “I assure you that your time here will be well worth it. But since you are so eager to get down to business . . .”

He came closer, and closer. Cordelia noticed that he didn’t seem to walk so much as ooze, or glide, and she thought of those long trails of slime. What was this man?

Finally, his shadow fell across her, and all her bravery withered. His eyes were colorless, dead-looking. His skin was the marbled white of bad cheese.

“Tell me, Cordelia.” His fingers were so long, he threaded one easily through the bars to lift her chin, even after she scooted away from him. “Where are the monsters?”