Fingernails scraped against the bare floorboards, and Fenris realized they were his own.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Please, don’t make me go back.”
He jumped to his feet. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“You don’t have to take care of me. Quentin—”
“Quentin is a coward and a fool.” He seized her chin in his hand, deliberately relaxed his fingers so that he would not damage her skin and bones. “He couldn’t even take care of himself.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Someone hurt him? His… his father?”
Grandfather. Please no more…
Fenris roared. He saw Quentin—himself—May—bound and helpless while one who should have loved and protected gave torment instead.
Killing rage replaced all semblance of thought. Tiberius Forster was dead, but Chester Ingram was not. The man called Bolkonsky was not.
The girl had become a wraith to him, like a half-forgotten dream. He started toward the door.
“Quentin?”
He stopped.
“Quentin, please come back.”
Quentin heard. Quentin stirred in his prison, struggling to respond. He groped in darkness for his voice and his being. A shaft of light burst from an opening door.
Fenris flung his weight against that door, but not before Quentin saw him.
“You,” Quentin said. “You’re real.”
The moment in which they faced each other was infinitesimal, but it was enough for Quentin to understand. Understanding was a new and powerful weapon, but he didn’t yet know how to use it. He was paralyzed by horror.
Fenris heard the girl’s tread behind him. “Quentin—”
“I’m here,” he whispered in Quentin’s voice.
Fenris howled. He slammed the door inside his mind and sealed it with a hundred massive locks forged by his furious will.
He couldn’t kill Quentin, no more than he could kill a man already dead, or the girl shivering within her enshrouding blanket.
But Quentin couldn’t stop him from eliminating Ingram, because it was what they both wanted. It was the work for which Fenris had been born.
He turned to the girl, seeing her face as if through a sheer veil of bloodred silk.
“Wait here,” he said with an icy smile. “I’m going to visit your father.”
Johanna arrived at the San Francisco Ferry House on the evening’s last boat and disembarked with the small group of passengers from Oakland. The others scattered to their various destinations, hailing hackney coaches or meeting friends, many chattering happily as if they looked forward to an enjoyable visit.
The sun was just setting, and already the night was damp and cold, lacking the Napa Valley’s summer warmth. San Francisco’s weather perfectly matched the chill in Johanna’s heart. The coldness had settled in with the delivery of Fenris’s letter, and hadn’t left her since.
She’d done what needed doing in spite of her fears, arranging for Mrs. Daugherty and Harper to handle the running of the Haven and the most basic care of the other patients and her father. She hoped she would not be gone long enough to put a strain on Mrs. Daugherty’s generosity, or compromise Harper’s dramatic improvement. At least she had Mrs. Daugherty’s assurance that the townspeople had lost their interest in revisiting the Haven… for the time being.
It hadn’t been easy to lie to the patients, especially to Harper. Harper guessed that Quentin had taken May, but he didn’t know that Fenris existed. She’d told him that she was going to meet Quentin in San Francisco and arrange for May’s safe disposition. Mrs. Daugherty and the patients had been given a much simpler story. None of them knew the complexity of May’s situation with her father.
But Harper wasn’t satisfied. He’d held May’s book, his brow creased in worry, and told Johanna that Quentin and May were in serious danger.
She could hardly refute him, and she respected him too much to offer comforting platitudes.
She pulled Fenris’s note from her coat pocket and read the scrawled address once more. She wasn’t familiar enough with San Francisco to recognize the location, but someone at her hotel would be sure to know. She suspected that the place was in a very bad part of town.
She had no doubt that Fenris was waiting for her.
Squaring her shoulders, she flagged down the nearest hired hack and gave the driver the address of a modest but respectable hotel on Market Street, where she’d stayed for the lecture nearly three weeks ago. Once there, she strode to the desk with her single bag and waited impatiently behind another woman who was completing her registration.