He looked at me with gold-colored eyes. I should have been afraid. I should have been terrified. Such beastly eyes, such a cruel-looking face didn’t belong in this world. Yet as he stood and sauntered toward the door, never taking his eyes off of mine, it wasn’t fear I felt. It was a strange thrill, those old tinges of curiosity that had always drawn me to him despite my horror. I had thought all that banished when I’d been cured.
And yet I still felt it. That shouldn’t have been possible.
“Cured, are you, love?” he said. There was almost a flicker of humanity in those yellow eyes, before it burned away. “No, I don’t think so.”
I KNITTED MY FINGERS together, rubbing the smooth joints, reminding myself that they no longer cracked and ached. They were cured. The Beast was merely toying with me, working doubt into my head as he loved to do.
“Yes, I am,” I said, trying to sound brave. “Montgomery and I made the serum, and it held. I can feel the difference in my body.”
“I’m not talking about your lovely little fingers and toes,” he said. “Flesh, blood, bone—only a container for who we truly are inside. Maybe the serum cured your physical afflictions, but it didn’t cure the illness of your soul.” The tenderness in his voice, the truth in his gaze . . . he could capture me, a wolf stalking a deer, if I wasn’t careful. I stepped back, shaking my head.
My heart started to thump harder, in time with his fingers tap-tap-tapping on the cellar bars. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m a different person now, body and soul.”
But a coldness crept from the old stone foundation, weaving among my skirts to my bare legs. It was quiet down here, a million miles from London, from the island, even from the others arguing upstairs. In a way, it felt right to be down here.
The Beast’s eyes fell to the chained handle of the cellar door. “There was a different door once,” he said quietly. “A red door on a jungle island.”
I took another step back, frightened by the memory. A red laboratory, paint bubbling beneath my fingertips as a fire raged in the compound, my father trapped inside. And most memorable of all, Jaguar waiting for me to open the door—just a crack—so he could slip inside and kill my father.
I had done it. I’d helped him kill my father. And yet that had been the old me, sick of body and soul.
“Would you change what you did?” the Beast asked quietly.
One would have to be sick to be capable of killing her own father. The new, cured me could never have done something so ruthless. And yet. My eyes sank closed, as my heart beat harder, painfully, wrenchingly.
“No.”
His voice was softer now. “Would you still have opened that door?”
And this is what it came down to: surely a normal girl, that girl I’d imagined pushing a baby pram through a garden and dancing on Saturdays, couldn’t be the same girl who helped kill her father. But I was still that girl, still my father’s daughter, still the one who, even now, would open that door if faced with it again.
“Yes.”
He smiled grimly, though there was no glee in it, as though for once he understood how heartbreaking this was for me. “No serum can change who you are. Nor should you change. Genius or madness—it all depends on who’s telling the story.” His hand stopped tapping, and that humanity flickered again in his eye. “You’re perfect as you are, my love.”
I took a shaky step away from him, fearful and confused, and hurried up the stairs. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t get away from his words.
He was right. No serum could cure who I really was—a Moreau, through and through.
IT WAS LATE WHEN I rejoined the others. I told them I was exhausted and wanted to be alone, then picked up Sharkey and climbed to the attic nursery. I liked the quiet here, the stillness of the unused toys, Sharkey’s grainy fur beneath my fingers.
I sat in the rocking chair and leaned my head back, watching the moon beyond the city’s skyline. It was so easy now to move my neck, my hands. Their former stiffness was nothing but a fleeting memory.
But the Beast was right. A coldness lingered in my heart, and always would, no matter how much I lied to myself.
I shouldn’t have been so single-minded in the way I viewed Father’s research. Elizabeth had told me Father was more than just a madman, but I hadn’t listened. The Beast had seen the truth on me, plain as day, among the jungle vines of the greenhouse. Even Lucy—even Newcastle—had known that science in and of itself wasn’t good or bad.
Sometimes, even, it was a necessary evil.
As I pet Sharkey, I watched the tendons on the back of my hand plucking like piano strings. I had tried to deny the darkness inside me, but all this time, perhaps I should have embraced it for the potential good it could wield.
Sharkey jumped out of my lap, stretching on the rug so that half his body was thrown in moonlight, half still cast in shadows. I sat straighter as an idea tickled the back of my head.
Enough with the secrets.
Enough with hidden horrors.
There was only one way to protect Edward from the King’s Club’s machinations, and also ensure that no one would replicate or condone what they were trying to do ever again.
Outside, church bells chimed midnight. I thought of the family across the street, tucked into warm beds, the children dreaming of waking in the morning to toys wrapped in big red bows. All over the city, families like theirs slumbered. Families that wouldn’t sleep nearly so deeply if they knew what was happening in those basement laboratories of King’s College.
I swallowed. My plan was a cruel one, dangerous, yet I couldn’t deny that the curious corners of my soul curled at the thought: Maybe the best way to prevent the King’s Club from enacting their plan was to enact it for them, and show them—and the world—exactly what would happen if my father’s science was unleashed.
FORTY-ONE
I WOKE TO THE sounds of Saint Paul’s bells ringing in Christmas Day.
I had stayed up half the night going through the details of my plan. Lucy slept over after sending a note home to her mother and was now fast asleep in the sea of pillows on my bed. I made a list of three King’s Men—Inspector John Newcastle, Dr. Hastings, and Isambard Lessing—and when she woke, told her to write an urgent message to each one in her father’s forged handwriting, calling for an emergency meeting at precisely nine o’clock in the evening and not to be a moment late. When she asked to what purpose, I refused to say. Still half asleep, with the trust of a life-long friend, she did as I asked regardless.