“It was just an Asylum worker,” I said, hoping I was right.
“If he comes back, I’ll kill him,” Damon decided. “We can’t take any more chances.” He shot me a glance as though he expected me to disagree, but I nodded. He was right.
“Good,” Damon said.
We started up the hallway, trying the doors on either side as we passed. The fifth door led us into Samuel’s office. Damon glanced at me, triumphant. “Let’s get to work,” he said, rifling through his bag. He pulled out a pair of gloves and tossed them to me.
I pulled them on, then set about tying hawthorn needles dipped in vervain to a length of wire and stringing it around the office. Damon stood on a chair in the corner, rigging a gun loaded with wooden bullets to be triggered by the trip wire now lining the room.
We worked silently. Damon had been right—it was him or us. The traps were crude and makeshift, but I hoped they would be enough. They had to be.
Searching for anything else we could use against Samuel, I opened a drawer stuffed with yellowed papers. I rifled through them, glanced at the dates: 1888, 1865, 1780. Samuel clearly had at least a century on us. I wondered when and how he had been turned.
Just as I was about to put the papers back in the drawer, I spotted the word Atlanta in the old-fashioned, slanting script.
“Damon!” I hissed. He carefully picked his way around the traps. When he’d reached my side, I pointed to the date on the document in my hand: 1864.
“What is this?” Damon whispered roughly, clawing the letter out of my hands.
“Give it back,” I said.
Damon shook his head, holding the letter out of my grasp. He scanned it quickly, then sighed in despair. “It’s not from her,” he said, handing it back.
Dear Sir,
This is to inform you that your letter, received in Atlanta and addressed to a Miss Katherine Pierce, is being returned as undeliverable. The address listed was destroyed under Sherman’s siege, with no survivors.
It was signed by someone I could only assume was a long-dead postal clerk.
“Do you think she was trying to escape him?” I asked.
“She must have been,” Damon said, his mouth set in a tight line.
I nodded. In truth, who knew what Katherine and Samuel’s relationship had been? They were the only two who knew for sure, and Katherine was dead—and Samuel would be, imminently. But from the way Damon’s shoulders relaxed, I knew he needed to believe that what Samuel and Katherine had wasn’t a true love.
I pulled more papers from the drawer. While Damon was focused on our upcoming battle, I was intent on finding out more about Samuel. I knew it didn’t matter; he’d be dead in hours.
And then I saw it.
The paper was yellow and crumbling, but five words at the bottom said everything we needed to know.
With eternal love,
Your Katherine.
My eyes followed Damon as he double-checked our traps. He couldn’t know. I had saved my brother’s life several times since we reunited in London, but what I did next was perhaps the most I’d ever done to protect him. I took the paper and ripped it into dozens of pieces, letting them fall to the stone floor like snow.
Damon would spend eternity thinking Katherine had loved him. He couldn’t survive otherwise.
Several hours later, as Damon and I crouched in Samuel’s office, I was still thinking about Katherine. There hadn’t been any more letters from Katherine hidden in the desk, and I wondered if Samuel had deliberately destroyed or hidden Katherine’s other letters. I wondered when Katherine and Samuel had met, and how many decades they’d spent discovering every secret of their bodies and brains. I’d only known Katherine for several weeks, and her image was branded indelibly in my mind. What could it possibly have been like to know her for generations?
Just then, I heard a loud bang, different than the sounds we’d been listening to all day, of girls hurrying to and from the laundry room, of nuns clicking their rosary beads as they walked by, of the building settling into itself. This sounded like a clap of thunder.
“I’m going to investigate,” I said, stepping delicately over our cobweb of traps. Maybe it was time for us to move into our hiding spot—the tiny coat closet in the corner of the room—and wait for Samuel to enter.
I cracked open the door, peering into the hallway. It was empty. The nuns and the girls must have been well trained not to go near Samuel’s office. Except for the odd interaction we’d had with the handyman in the morning, we’d barely heard footsteps. I stepped out, but saw nothing that could’ve produced the noise. I was about to turn back, when I thought I saw movement in one of the other rooms.
“Damon!” I hissed, before creeping to the window and peering in. I blinked in surprise. There was Cora, alone and unprotected. She was sitting in the corner with her knees hugged to her chest. “Damon, it’s Cora!”