Just before nightfall—saving us from the enthusiastic locks of Frau Gottschalk, who watched us leave with suspicious eyes after demanding extra coin for more ink usage—Justine and I settled in our carriage.

“Home!” I cried, pointing forward. The carriage bumped over the roads and out of Ingolstadt, back to the house on the lake that no longer threatened to spit me back out. We would ride all night for Justine’s sake.

In the early hours of the morning, when the sun had yet to make any claim on the sky, I startled awake to a bright flash of lightning. Silhouetted against a hill parallel to our path, I thought I saw the figure from the street. The figure from my nightmares. It ran with inhuman speed, its gait close to a man’s but horrifyingly off in some unnamable way. I closed my eyes in terror. Another flash of lightning forced them open.

Nothing was following us.

I sank back against the seat, closing my eyes and thinking only of home. The home that was, once again, mine.

Part Two: What Is Dark Within Me, Illumine

Chapter Twelve: At Once Indebted and Discharged

AS JUSTINE AND I were rowed with patient and even strokes across the lake, I remembered my first time here. How frightened I had been. How the house had felt like a predator, waiting to devour me. Now, as I looked at it, it seemed infinitely lessened. Did the spires not stand up so much like teeth as grave monuments? Did the gates swing not so much to catch us as to wave us wearily inside?

I had pictured my return as triumphant. But I sat passively watching the house grow closer as someone else took me there. I realized then: for all my striving, all my hoping and fearing and traveling, I had worked this hard to stay in the same place.

The sun was almost setting, the day nearly done. I did not anticipate home and my bed the way I had expected. Justine sighed happily, taking my hand and squeezing it. “Look! William is on the dock, waiting for us!” She waved so vigorously at her little charge that the boat rocked.

I smiled, too, with a wave. Mine did not so much as add a ripple to the lake.

Everything was not the same, though. Judge Frankenstein, thankfully, had not yet returned from the mysterious trip that had allowed ours, making it less likely that he would speak with Justine and discover my illicit travels. Not that he ever spoke with Justine—in her more than two years at the house, I could not recall a single conversation between them—but it was still a relief. Being caught in my lie about Henry was more than enough. I did not want Justine knowing I had tricked her into chaperoning me without express permission.