Page 27 of Come Tumbling Down

“The balance must be maintained,” she said, and her voice both was and was not her own. If a storm could have been said to have a voice, if a shipwreck could have spoken, it would have been the voice that dripped like poisoned pearls from Cora’s lips. “The Moors are made of petty conflicts: they thrive on familial blood. But those conflicts can never matter more than the foundations themselves. The Drowned Abbey stands with Jacqueline Wolcott in the matter of her sister’s malfeasance, and will help her to recover that which has been stolen.”

“Thank you,” said Jack, with swift, undisguised relief. “I—”

“We are not finished,” said the things speaking through Cora’s body. At least they sounded amused, and not angry at the interruption. “There will, of course, be payment.”

“Anything,” said Jack.

“No,” said Christopher sharply. “Not anything.” He turned to Cora—the Drowned Gods—whatever she was now, and said, “We get our friends back. Both of them. They’re not yours to keep.”

“Aren’t they?” Not-Cora cocked her head. “They fell, voluntarily or no. The depths are ours. Everything within them belongs to us. The water knew this one, and she knew the water, and she breathed it willingly in.”

“She isn’t of the Moors,” said Jack.

Not-Cora returned her terrible attention to the thin, damaged girl in the black leather gloves. “So?”

“These depths are yours, but she belongs to a different sea, and that sea may have Drowned Gods of its own, and they may take umbrage at you claiming something for your own amusement that they’ve already marked as belonging to them. If the purpose of this exercise is maintaining the balance of the Moors, do you want to risk offending your alternates? I’m sure they couldn’t possibly defeat you here, in the place of your power, but…” Jack offered a delicate shrug. “The people of your protectorate are fragile when compared to you.”

“Greedy little things,” chided Not-Cora. “We never intended to keep this precious pearl; do not think you’ve won something we treasured. Still, the payment will be due.”

“No lives,” said Sumi.

“One life,” said Jack. The others turned to her. She didn’t move, but continued staring levelly at the things in Cora’s skin.

“My sister,” she said. “Jill can’t walk away from this. I would never be safe. Alexis would never be safe. I killed her once, to save people I cared about but didn’t love. To save the people I love, I’d destroy her so completely it would be as if she had never existed.”

“Without her existence, the Moon would never have seen fit to send you a door,” said Not-Cora.

Jack shrugged. “So I would have grown up innocently loveless, and never known what I was missing. I’ll pay you with my sister’s life. Is that enough?”

“Almost,” said Not-Cora. The strangeness in her voice grew stronger, like the tide rolling in. “Almost. You’ll stay, Jack of the Moors, Jack of the lightning. You’ll stay until the Moon releases you from service. Not merely on the Moors, not merely in this world, but in your windmill, chained to your lightning and your learning as Dr. Bleak was before you, and Dr. Ghast before him, and Dr. Frost before her. If your lover leaves you for another protectorate, you will not follow. You will be the cruel light to balance the killing dark, and you will know, every day, that you have no choice. You belong to us now.”

There was a moment of weighted silence before Jack laughed.

“Is that all?” she asked. “Yes. Yes, and yes, and yes again. I’ll pay for your help by doing what I was raised to do, what I want to do, and I won’t be sorry, not one minute, because this is who I am. I’m Jack Wolcott. I am the mad scientist who lurks in the fens and the fields, and I’ll be damned before I’ll let my sister take this world away from me.”

The Drowned Gods smiled with Cora’s lips, bowed Cora’s head, and said, “Gideon. Gather the acolytes. High tide is coming.” Then they opened her mouth and vomited black water across the Abbey floor in a terrible gout. Small fish thrashed there, and other, less comprehensible forms. Cora’s eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed, face-first, into the mess, dropping Kade in the process. He hit the ground and started coughing, knocking the water out of his own lungs.

“That was interesting,” said Sumi, as Christopher rushed to Cora. She bounced thoughtfully onto her toes before walking over to Gideon. She didn’t say a word, merely stared at him until he squirmed on his rotted velvet cushion.

“What do you want, candy girl?” he asked.

“You,” she said bluntly. “I have a true love, but he doesn’t know I’m coming back, and there’s no sense in staying celibate until we’re together. All that can happen later, though. You have to help us now.”

“I suppose I do,” said Gideon, as Cora coughed the last of the black water from her lungs, as she clung to Kade like she feared drowning in the open air. Her skin still glistened with oily rainbows, but her eyes were her own again.

“And after, if there’s time, before we go, I’ll show you how we plough the fields in a world made of sugar.” Sumi’s smile was guileless and wicked at the same time. “It’ll be nice.”

“I suppose it will,” said Gideon, as Jack reached for Cora’s wrist, clearly intending to take the other girl’s pulse, and had her hand swatted away. He smiled a bit, seeing that. There were always costs, always consequences, when the Drowned Gods chose to speak.

Jack, rebuffed, turned her attention back to Gideon. “When do we ride?” she asked.

“When the tide shifts,” he replied. “If we’re to ride with the blessing of the Drowned Gods, we’ll do it when their power is at its greatest. You’d best be nice to me now, Jacky-my-girl. It looks like we’re going to be neighbors for a long, long time.”

“Only if we win,” said Jack.

Gideon laughed. “Did you forget? I never lose.”

Jack’s expression, always sober, turned grim. She looked at Gideon levelly, until he squirmed in his throne and had to fight the obvious urge to turn away.