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When Huey looked up, the Mask Maker was standing there.
He narrowed his eyes, not comprehending. The Mask Maker remained silent, and Huey felt unease begin to seep through his body.
“Elmer…?” he asked, though he didn’t believe his own guess. (It was just that the only other option made even less sense.) “If this is supposed to be some kind of joke, I have no idea what part of it strikes you as funny—”
The Mask Maker shook their head.
Or rather, her head—because if it wasn’t Elmer, it could only be Monica. But why would she come to him like this?
Slowly, as if not trying to startle an already-frightened animal, Huey put his book aside and stood. “Monica? What’s going on…?”
He tried to approach her, but before he took a second step, she held up a hand to stop him. Obediently, he stopped, and he realized then that his heart was pounding. If he listened closely, he could hear Monica taking shaky breaths behind the safety of her mask. Every instinct in him was telling him that something was wrong.
Finally, she took a deep breath and spoke.
“H—Huey—Laforet—”
The pitch of her voice fluctuated between her own and the Mask Maker’s. Huey found that he was shaking his head steadily, to deny any need for her to wear that mask before him, or to ward off what she was going to say, whatever she was going to say. He knew that he wasn’t going to like it.
Another deep breath. Behind her mask, he could see her eyes glinting with tears.
“I’ve been—so happy, these past few months. So happy. You helped me feel like I had managed to escape, but—but—”
“No,” Huey said, finally comprehending. “Monica, no.”
The Mask Maker’s composure had vanished. Now the figure before him looked like a strange girl in a funny costume and he had to get her to stop, whatever she was trying to do, he had to stop her. He took a cautious step forward, but she stepped backwards by the same amount, shaking her head with more urgency this time.
“I can’t escape,” she said, and there were fear and desperation in her voice, “I tried, I thought I had, but they—they’re trying—Huey—” She curled in on herself, shaking.
“You don’t have to do this,” Huey said, trying to imbue his own voice with the confidence he didn’t feel.
“I do. H—Huey, I have to.” She straightened, her voice under control once more. “I came to say goodbye.”
He had half-expected the words, but his blood still ran cold to hear them. He was shaking his head again.
“Thank you. You’ve given me a happiness I never deserved.”
And then she turned as if to leave him, and he shouted her name and thank god that stopped her in her tracks.
“H-Huey…” she said, her voice trembling. She sounded like she was pleading. She didn’t turn back to face him.
Huey’s breath was coming fast and his head was full of panicked thoughts but above all of that was a single point of focus: that he had to keep her from leaving, whatever it took to do so. But if she ran, he’d have no hope of stopping her. If he tried to hold her by force she would push him away easily and she sounded desperate enough that he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t stab him.
His only hope was to speak.
“Monica,” he said once more, his voice sounding terrible to his own ears as he formulated what he would have to say. It was wrong of him, cruel of him, but it was his only option.
As if she already knew what he had in mind, Monica clutched at her own arms and shook her head back and forth. “No…”
“You told me you could never refuse me anything I asked. You’ve said that many times.”
“Huey—please—”
“Monica, don’t go.”
A frozen silence for a few seconds, neither of them breathing. Monica took a halting step away from him and Huey’s heart leapt into his throat with fear—
—And then she sank to her knees. “Huey…” she said, the words barely making it out of her throat, “that isn’t fair…”
And before she began to sob, he ran to her and kneeled next to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. If she pushed him away now, then it really was over, he understood that—but instead she clutched at his arms as she cried and in a moment she tore her mask off her face and twisted in his embrace so that she could kiss him. Her lips tasted like her tears, but like hell did he mind that. He would let nothing on earth rip her away from him.
She cried for a long time, her head buried in his shoulder and her arms wrapped tight around him. Finally, her tears faded, replaced by slow, wavering breaths. Huey stroked her back.
“Don’t go,” he said again, softly. “Don’t leave me.”
A deep breath, and then Monica nodded and clutched the back of his shirt more tightly.
“You don’t have to explain. If you did something horrible in your past, something unforgiveable, I don’t care. Just tell me what I can do to make you feel safe. I’ll do anything, Monica. I swear.” When she didn’t answer, he pressed, “It’s the Dormentaires, isn’t it?”
She caught her breath sharply at that. “Huey—”
“I’ll chase them out of the city. I’ll hound them all the way back to Spain if that’s what it takes to get them to leave you al—”
“You can’t!” Suddenly Monica pushed back, grabbing Huey’s shoulders and looking him in the eye. There was panic in her face, and her lips trembled and her eyes shone with tears again, but she made herself keep speaking. “You can’t go near them, Huey, promise me you won’t.”
He bit his lip. He’d made that promise at her urging before, implicitly, but this time he didn’t want to.
Sensing the reason for his hesitation, Monica gripped his shoulders more tightly. “You don’t know what they’re like. There’s no stopping them, Huey. Th-they take away everything…”
“Right now, they’re trying to take you away from me. Do you honestly think I’m going to let them get away with that?”
“You don’t understand!” She was blinking back tears. “They’re already trying to frame you to get to me and I couldn’t, I can’t—I can’t let them do that—”
Her eyes had gone distant with panic again, and Huey hadn’t missed the way she’d changed her sentence from past tense to present. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, trying to bring her eyes back to him. “Monica, look at me, do you think I care about that? Do you think I would sacrifice you over a petty concern like that? Do you think I’m that low?!”
But she curled in on herself, shaking her head desperately without meeting Huey’s gaze. She began to cry again. Huey felt a lump in his own throat as well, and he tried to control himself. He couldn’t be the one to hurt her more.
“Listen—” he said, forcing his voice to be calmer. “Monica, I’m not going to shout anymore, but listen to me. I don’t care about the Dormentaires. I don’t care how powerful they are, I don’t care what they want from you. The only thing I care about is that they’re hurting you, and I want them to stop.”
“You don’t understand, Huey,” Monica said again, her voice trembling and weary. She dropped her hands to her lap and stared down at them, tears coursing silently from her eyes. “They have every right to come after me. I deserve—”
“I don’t care what you deserve,” Huey interrupted, speaking forcefully and deliberately. “Do you understand that?”
Finally, Monica raised her head. He stared back at her, his eyes burning with determination.
“Who gets to decide what you deserve, anyway? If there’s a god out there enforcing right and wrong, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it. This world isn’t fair or kind. There’s no justice inherent to it, and it’s foolish to think that there is when the innocent suffer and die and the guilty walk away from it all laughing. ‘Justice’ is built by the strong. That’s all it is.”
As he expounded on the reality he saw before him, Huey was aware:
I’m talking about my mother.
On his tenth birthday, Huey had seen his mother dragged off by witch-hunters. He’d tried to stop them, tried to pull their hands off of her, but what could a child have done? He was too weak, and they’d thrown him aside easily.
He was older now, and stronger, and he knew that Monica was not so defenseless as to need his protection but he’d be damned if he was going to let her be taken away from him.
She was gazing back at him now, her tears dried at last. In the depths of her eyes, there was trust, maybe even something like hope. He lifted one hand to cup her cheek, and she leaned her head into his touch.
“Huey…”
He said, “I used to think that the whole world deserved to burn for that, or to shatter and disappear with the wind, but I don’t feel that way now. Some things are worth preserving, no matter what the world tries to do to them. —You’re worth preserving.”
His cheeks colored as he said it, but he meant every word.
“And I have no qualms about robbing what they call ‘justice’ to do so.”