Out across the fields, on the low slope down toward the loch, just as he’d presumed, he saw a faint blue flickering in the darkness. The baby. The shining boy.
“There you are,” he whispered.
* * *
Jacob knew they must have seen him, he knew there was no time. He gave no thought to the blind woman he had struck down, back at the institute. She was nothing to him. He ran, feeling his frock coat snap out behind him, the night air slapping cold on his face, his boots sliding crazily in the slick grass of the slope. Somewhere ahead lay the dark loch, beyond that the cliffs. If he could only reach them he could slip across the stone perimeter of Cairndale, out of the glyphic’s grasp.
The baby was crying and would not stop. Walter was wheezing, falling behind, calling to him weakly to slow. But he didn’t slow, he couldn’t. His arms were fairly crackling with the blue shine from the baby now. The child was wrapped in a blanket and burrowed inside Jacob’s coat and yet the shine still poured forth. There would be no hiding him.
He risked a glance back. Cairndale’s windows were alight.
Then: something happened. He didn’t understand it at first. It was a kind of prickling, a pain, all across his skin and his face and his scalp, so that he stumbled. The baby felt hot, impossibly so. He fumbled for the child in his coat and pulled him clear and held him and stared down into his shining face.
And the shine intensified.
He was no longer thinking, acting purely on instinct. Perhaps he would have acted differently, otherwise. But he kneeled down in the muck of the slope under a black night sky and he tried to summon the dust; he tried to enclose the baby in a sphere of darkness. He was thinking he might still conceal the shine. He might yet hold it in.
But the pain intensified. Soon his skin was stinging and then his eyes started to cloud over and an agony erupted in his flesh. Through the cloud of dust the baby’s blue light grew.
Too late, he understood. There was no containing it.
And then came a blinding flash, followed by a wind that roared in Jacob’s ears, and he was thrown spinning into the air, like a rag doll. And the ground came up to meet him in a rush.
* * *
Scorched earth, still smoldering.
That was all Margaret Harrogate could see in the eerie glow of the lanterns. Scorched and torn earth, and the raked-up marks of some manner of struggle. She, too, had seen the blue flash of light from the institute windows and come running.
“My God, what—？” she murmured, her breath standing out in the cold.
Dr. Berghast turned in place, staring around at the darkness. “The child,” he whispered. “The baby did this. Where is he? Where is Jacob?”
“The baby did this?” Margaret doubted very much that it was the baby’s doing. But who was she to say? She shook her head. “Your Jacob has eluded us, Dr. Berghast. The baby—”
“Is not with him.”
She raised her lantern so that she could see his face clearly. There were nearly two dozen others coming down from the manor, lanterns and torches burning against the darkness. She watched them fan out and begin to search.
“Here,” said Berghast, pushing at the mud with his boot. “You can see where Jacob fell. And how he left, this way, at a run. He’s injured. Look at the way his boot prints stagger. But here”—and he walked some feet away, to a patch of scorched earth—“here you see a new set of prints. Smaller. A woman’s. Or a girl’s. This is who found the baby. She goes off in that direction.”
Margaret listened to all this with incredulity. “A girl?” she murmured. “You cannot imagine one of the students here has taken the baby? One of the students has been in league with Jacob Marber? I do not believe it.”
Dr. Berghast scowled. “Of course not, Mrs. Harrogate. Though Jacob did have his confederate here, among us.”
“Mr. Laster will regret this.”
“Mr. Laster is already dead,” snapped Berghast. “He just does not realize it.”
“His sickness—”
“Is most advanced. Yes.”
Margaret paced between the two sets of prints, swinging her lantern side to side. “They do not go in the same direction. Marber’s prints, and this other’s.”
“Because they are not together. I expect the young woman has stolen our ward and made off with him. She will be heading for Edinburgh, no doubt. And from there, south into England. Jacob will be … disappointed.”
Margaret sensed there was much she did not understand. She could see the searchers moving across the grounds of the institute, combing through the undergrowth. “Who was it?” she asked. “Who took the child?”