Chapter 31

Cordelia felt as if the question had turned solid and blown a hole through her chest. “What do you mean?”

“The monsters, Cordelia. The only private collection of monsters in the world. The world’s only private collection of monsters, representing more than a dozen species. So many different kinds of living horror, here, right in Boston. Proof of evolution gone horribly awry. Proof of life gone terribly wrong.” He withdrew his finger slowly, letting her feel the sharpness of his fingernail. “Where are they?”

It was Elizabeth who spoke. She’d given in to the surge of goblin and was almost completely green. Warts ran down the length of her nose, dividing it exactly in the middle. “Very funny,” she said. “You’ve obviously had lots of practice playing dumb.”

Plancke kept one eye on Cordelia and spun the other one in Elizabeth’s direction to glare. “I will ask you again nicely.” His voice was very quiet, but Cordelia wasn’t fooled. She could hear the anger pulled tight underneath it. “Then the question will be very painful—for you. Where. Are. The. Monsters?”

Panic was building inside Cordelia, pressing at her stomach and throat. “You tell me,” she fired back. “You’re the one who stole them. You’re the one who’s got my dad locked up somewhere. You’re the one playing games.”

Plancke jerked backward, as though touched by an electric shock. For a moment, he said nothing. His eyes roved every inch of her face, and she imagined that they left her covered with a film of slime.

Then he gave a short sigh and turned away from her. “I see,” he murmured, frowning. “How foolish I’ve been. You were unaware . . . that is, he never told you . . .” Producing a pair of glasses from one coat pocket and a handkerchief from another, he began to polish the lenses. “Well. It’s no matter now. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. We will draw him out, from wherever he’s been lurking.”

Cordelia swallowed. Her mouth was as dry as dust. “Are you saying . . . are you truly saying . . . you have no idea where my father is? Where the monsters are?”

Newton-Plancke brought the glasses to his mouth and gave a little huff to mist them. “How could I?” he said unconcernedly. “I had been keeping an eye on them—literally—for quite some time. I even wrote him a letter, hoping he might see reason once he realized all of the benefits that his cooperation might buy. Unfortunately, it seems he decided on a most unreasonable course of action.” Having polished his glasses carefully with a silk handkerchief, he repositioned them on his nose. “By the time I arrived—under the legal authority of the governor’s office, and with the full support of the Boston Police—your father had made off with them.”

Cordelia felt as if the ground was spinning beneath her. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. Her father had taken the monsters? But why? And where?

And why hadn’t he brought Cordelia with him?

“Surely you see, child. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It had been many years, of course, since our last . . . run-in. I wish I could say it was a pleasant one.” Newton-Plancke’s lips curled back over gums the gray-pink of a dead salmon. Even his teeth were long. “Your father and I exchanged some very nasty words. He even, I’m ashamed to say, managed to throw in a punch.”

“He should’ve thrown in a few more, for good measure,” Gregory muttered.

Newton-Plancke ignored him. His eyes were fixed on Cordelia. “He might have killed me then,” he said. “He wanted to. I could tell. All because I’d said to be careful proof of his wife’s love for monsters wasn’t growing in her belly . . . after all, she was seven months pregnant then. . . .”

“You’re a monster,” Cordelia spat.

Suddenly, he drew closer again. “Say it again,” he said.

“You’re a monster,” she said, a little louder. Then louder again: “You’re a monster! You’re a monster!”

“Go on,” Newton-Plancke said. “Let it out. You’ll feel better.”

“You’re a monster!” She was screaming now. Now the fire was inside of her, scorching her insides, clawing up her throat and burning through her mouth. “My father should have killed you when he had a chance!”

Unexpectedly, a wide grin split his face. He reminded her in that moment of a jack-o’-lantern, behind which some maniacal fire was burning. “You see?” he said. “You see how good it feels—to scream, to point your finger, to say die?”

Cordelia realized, in that second, that he’d tricked her.

He bent down, so they were eye to eye. “Your mother intervened that night to save me,” he said softly. “She told your father to leave me. She even, I believe, made him apologize for getting blood on my shirt. Vince malum bono, she said. Good overcomes evil. . . .”

Cordelia recognized the words from the frontispiece of her mother’s unfinished book. Now the fire had turned to a kind of sickness. She didn’t feel well. She felt as if she needed to throw up.

“She even offered me her hand. . . .”

“Stop.” She couldn’t listen anymore. “Stop it.”

For the first time ever, she was gripped by hatred for her mother. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have loved monsters—any monsters, all monsters—more than she loved the people who really needed her protection? How could she have loved evil, more than she did its victims?

“That’s exactly what I told her,” Newton-Plancke said. “But it was just another one of her misguided ideas, and she was as stubborn about it as all the others. My philosophy has always been Vincere est vivere—to conquer is to live. In fact, I was just having a lively debate with my publisher about whether or not it should subtitle my next book. You see, Cordelia . . .” A strange ripple pulled his face, for a moment, into a hundred other faces—dimly familiar, people she had seen at the pharmacist, in the park, on the street. “I know better than anyone that monsters can be very, very dangerous. That is why, for years, I let your father go on collecting proof. I waited until he had all the evidence I needed.”

The room was spinning into dark. Or it had disappeared, and Cordelia was spinning, down into the darkness of Newton-Plancke’s eyes, where she could see the past distorted. The only known domestic collection of monsters in the world. More than two dozen species. Here, in Boston.

They’d been so stupid. All along, they’d been doing Newton-Plancke’s work.

“I waited until I would be able to use it for good. For the country. For the world. There must be rules, you see. There must be right . . .”

Now, he slotted all ten fingers into the cage, between the bars. As she watched, his fingers grew, flowed like narrow rivulets of skin toward her face.

“. . . or else how would you know that you aren’t wrong?”

Cordelia skittered backward, choking on a scream. But there was nowhere to go. Soon the fingers were at her jaw and pinning her gaze to his.

“You do have her eyes, you know,” he said. He passed a long, slick finger over her cheek, and Cordelia fell into the hole of fear in her stomach. Then, in a different voice: “I want you to know I regret what I had to do,” he said. “I tried to avoid it. It was her fault. She gave me no choice. It had become a matter of survival. She was trying to expose me, you understand, even if she didn’t know it. . . .”

“What—what are you talking about?” Cordelia’s voice sounded as if it came from far away.

“It gave me no pleasure to kill your mother,” Newton-Plancke said simply. And in a second, with a terrible, wet, suctioning sound, he retracted his fingers—and Cordelia, at last, knew what he was.

“A morpheus,” she whispered. “You’re . . . you’re a morpheus.”

“Your father taught you well.” He stood up. He neatened his shirt and coat, readjusted his sleeves. “Now you see, I think, why I had to do it. Your mother had already written several prominent universities to claim she’d even tracked down fossil evidence. . . .”

“In Brazil,” Cordelia said. “That’s why she went.”

“An absurd gambit,” Newton-Plancke said sharply. “She knew better than to believe the morpheus would possibly leave evidence in Brazil. I should have seen right through her trap.”

A question tickled the very back of Cordelia’s mind. A doubt. But she couldn’t make it take shape. “Her . . . trap?”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was too focused on making sure her evidence—if she had any—would never become public. It might have ruined everything.” He turned away with a shrug. “Stupid woman. Perhaps she’d thought to weaken me. But I was still strong enough to kill her.”

He made hardly a sound as he oozed across the exhibit hall toward a door marked Private—No Trespassing. Cordelia assumed the museum abutted his living quarters directly. “I look forward to seeing your father again. Soon, I should imagine, now that my whisperers have begun their work. Your father is a wanted man, you know. It is quite criminal to leave a twelve-year-old child unattended. And Boston is a civilized city.”

Cordelia finally understood. He would lure her father out—using Cordelia as bait.

At the door, he paused to look back at her. “I hope we can put all that unpleasantness behind us. After all, I am quite grateful to him. I will be president because of him.”

He smiled. “And you, of course.” Then, casually, as he slipped through the door: “I hope you don’t mind the dark.”

And with that, he slammed the door shut.