In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children, #7.5)

by Seanan McGuire

He wasn’t sure, as the days turned into weeks and Jack’s arms, weak in the beginning, grew strong and dense with muscle, whether they were all going to survive the arrangement they had landed on. But the choice was the choice, and even if he’d been inclined to unmake it in favor of the experiment left unconducted, he would never have been able to get the others to agree. Jill was happy in the castle with her master, the Master was happy with his dutiful new daughter—and was, by all accounts, a doting father, perhaps having learned from his mistakes with earlier “children.” And as to Jack … Sweet Jack, who was so brutally sour in self-defense, who would one day meet the wind that whispered through the cracks in her walls and learn what it meant to soften, he could no more imagine handing her over to a monster than he could fathom slicing off his own arm for a werewolf’s supper. That he was also a monster in his own way was irrelevant. He knew he wouldn’t swallow her whole while she was sleeping. He couldn’t say the same for his counterpart. So Jack Wolcott, twelve years old and innocent of how much danger she had wandered into, grew into her proper place as a mad scientist’s apprentice. She rarely ventured anywhere without him, not out onto the cool wide spaces of the Moors themselves, not down to the waterlogged and slowly sinking town where the Drowned Gods reigned supreme, and not into the village that spread, septic and foul, at the base of the Master’s haunted, hauntin...