Page 12 of Come Tumbling Down

Alexis looked wearily amused. Her hands moved. Sumi scowled.

“I am not like Jack, you take that back right now,” she said.

Alexis shook her head.

Kade cleared his throat. “Sumi’s promised to repeat what Alexis says fairly and accurately, and begging your pardon, ma’am, but I got the feeling we don’t have a lot of time to waste deciding what we’re going to do about the situation. Jill has Jack’s body, and she’s set on becoming a vampire while she’s still wearing it.”

“And if that happens, even if we catch her, we can’t switch them back. Jack wouldn’t like being a vampire,” said Sumi. “Living on human blood, when it’s all messy and dirty and filled with disease—no, she wouldn’t like it at all.”

Kade’s lips thinned to a hard line, and he said nothing. He knew Jack well enough to suspect she might like being a vampire a little too much, maybe even more than Jill would. As a vampire, Jack wouldn’t need to worry about getting sick, or be afraid she’d touch the wrong thing and somehow dirty herself beyond repair. She’d never been big on sunlit strolls or fancy dinners. Vampirism might suit her very, very well. An analytically minded vampire, fully trained to the inexplicable sciences of the Moors …

The people who fell in her shadow would find, quickly, that they’d have preferred the old-fashioned kind of vampire. In some ways, opera gloves and lacy peignoirs were less terrible than scalpels and tubing and spotless operating theaters. At least the first felt somewhat personal.

“All right,” said Eleanor. She focused on Alexis. “You and Jack are both welcome here, for as long as you’d care to stay. I can arrange a room, board, everything, only let me know what you need.”

Alexis’s hands flashed.

“‘It’s kind of you to offer, but we can’t stay,’” said Sumi. Her voice was calm, uncharacteristically level; in it, Kade could hear the echo of the girl she’d been before Confection, the one he’d seen in her permanent file, the one whose life had been measured and metered and entirely mapped out for her. She would have been a devastating woman, that solemn, mannered, well-educated daughter of privilege and plenty: she would have ruled a corporate empire with an unyielding fist, and her rivals would have trembled at her name.

That future had been sidelined when young Sumi found a door that wasn’t supposed to exist; that version of her would never come to pass. Kade watched her translating for Alexis, and couldn’t help but be oddly grateful.

Alexis continued to sign: Sumi continued to speak. “‘The longer Jill has possession of Jack’s body, the harder it’ll be to take it back. More importantly, it will also be harder for Jack to adjust. Every minute is another minute when Jill could be touching anything with Jack’s unprotected hands, wading barefoot in mud just because she knows it would cause her sister emotional distress—even killing people. Jack is more delicate than anyone knows she is. Jill is the only person she’s ever killed, and she did it both to save her friends and with the full knowledge that Jill could and would be resurrected.’”

“Couldn’t Jack learn to be happy in the body she has?” asked Eleanor. “They’re identical, or they were, before their choices caused them to diverge. Jack could make those choices again. She could make herself over in her own image, without needing to put herself in danger.”

Alexis started to sign. Sumi shook her head, and she stopped, as Sumi rounded on Eleanor.

“No,” she said. The calm was gone from her voice, replaced by all her hero’s wildness, which cut through the whimsy she draped around herself like a knife through taffy. “No, and no, and no. You’re better than those words, Ely-Eleanor, you’re better than those thoughts. No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they’re not because it’s easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it. Jack isn’t Jill, and Jill isn’t Jack, and if Jack wants her own body back, we’re going to help her get it. You don’t have to give us your permission. We can just go.”

“They won’t be going alone,” said Kade. He looked at Eleanor, who he loved so dearly, and saw the echoes of his mother in her face, tucked into the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth. His mother loved him. He’d never been able to convince himself otherwise, even when it would have been so much easier to believe she didn’t. But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—understand why he needed her to accept him as her son, when she’d loved him so completely as her daughter. “I’ll be with them. So will Christopher and Cora, I reckon. Friends don’t let friends go into danger alone.”

“Oh, my sweet boy,” sighed Eleanor. “I should have reminded you of the rules when Rini fell out of the sky. No quests. It’s so easy to become addicted to them, and so hard to break the habit once it takes hold. What if you get hurt? What if the door back won’t open for you?”

“Then we learn to live in the Moors,” he said. “Christopher will fit right in. Everyone there probably thinks skeletons are charming. Alexis mentioned the Drowned Gods earlier, so I suppose Cora will have an ocean to get acquainted with, and as for me, I won’t be any further from what feels like home than I am right now. We’ll be fine.”

“As long as there’s butter, sugar, and flour, I know Confection will find me one day,” said Sumi serenely. “I have to go home and get married in order for Rini to be born, remember? So it doesn’t matter where I am. The door will find me.”

“I don’t think that’s quite how it—” Kade began.

“Hey! Don’t you go getting logical rules on my illogical life plans,” said Sumi, cutting him off. “We’re going. We’re going to help Jack, and we’re going to get the windmill back, whatever that means, so she and Alexis can do happily ever after forever and for always, not just until the vampires next door get bored.”

“If you already knew you were going to go, why did you come to me?” asked Eleanor, in a voice that had grown very small.

“Because we love you, Eleanor-Ely,” said Sumi. “We didn’t want you to just turn around and find us all gone away. That would be cruel. I can be a lot of things, and some are good and some are bad, but I try not to be cruel when I don’t have to.”

Eleanor took a deep, shuddering breath. She turned to Alexis and said, in a perfectly polite tone, “Anything you need, Kade can help you find. He’s a good boy. He’ll set you right.”

Then she stood, reaching for her walking stick.

“I’m quite tired,” she said. “I think I’m going to go and have a nap. Please be as safe as you can, children; please do your best to come home to me.”

She turned, walking out of her own office, leaning on the stick a little more heavily than she had the day before. The door shut behind her. Alexis made an interrogative motion with her hands.

“The world gets heavy sometimes,” said Sumi sadly. “That’s all. She’s carrying it as best she can, but … the world gets heavy. I hope she’ll be able to put it down soon.”

“Everyone puts it down sooner or later,” said Kade. “The others should be ready for us by now.”

Alexis signed something. Sumi nodded.