Obedience had been the first thing Dr. Bleak drilled into her: failure to obey could result in nasty consequences, many of which would be fatal to a child like she had been. Jack rushed to Jill’s side, gathering her unconscious sister in her arms. They were the same height, but Jill felt like she weighed nothing at all, like she was nothing but dust and down.

“We have to hide her,” Jack said.

“Hiding her isn’t good enough,” Dr. Bleak replied. He grabbed a small machine from his workbench and moved toward the windmill’s back door. “You’ve been an excellent apprentice, Jack. Quick-fingered, sharp-witted—you were everything I could have asked for. I’m sorry this has happened.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Jack’s stomach clenched in on itself. She was holding her sleeping sister, covered in the blood of her dead girlfriend, and the village was marching on the windmill with torches and pitchforks. She would have said this night couldn’t get any worse. Suddenly, she was terribly sure that it could.

I’ve seen this movie before, she thought, almost nonsensically. But we’re not the ones who made the monster. The Master did that. We’re just the ones who loved her.

Only they weren’t even that, were they? Dr. Bleak would have saved Jill instead of Jack, at the beginning, because he’d seen Jack as a more logical choice for a vampire lord. That didn’t mean he’d known her or cared about her. Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love, and Jill and Dr. Bleak had never had any time. If anyone in this room loved Jill, it was Jack, and the worst of it was, she wouldn’t even have had that much if it hadn’t been for Alexis. Their parents had never taught them how to love each other. Any connection they’d had had been despite the adults in their lives, not because of them.

Jill had run to the Master, and while she may have been the one who’d felt deserted, she was also the one who had never looked back. She had wanted to be a vampire’s child, and vampires did not love what they were compelled to share. Jack had gone with Dr. Bleak, and he had cared for her, had taken care of her and taught her, but he had never encouraged her to love.