Thorns, he’d claimed. More like Alice’s fingernails.
I tore through the pile of clothes, ripping at the hems, digging through the pockets, trying to find some further evidence. I yanked the sheets off his straw pallet. My heart refused to believe my head. Edward wasn’t a monster. He’d protected me. He’d protected my father! I’d seen his face when he shot Antigonus. He’d gone white as a cadaver, horrified by what he’d done. He could never claw a person to death. He didn’t have claws! And I’d seen the monster. I’d smelled its musty scent. I knew the weight of its presence.
I fumbled for the shears and thrust the sharp end into his mattress, ripping a gash into the burlap. I tore it open and pulled out handfuls of straw, feeling for anything that might tell me the truth.
Nothing.
I crunched handfuls of straw in my fists. Jaguar’s mark flashed at me, mocking. Jaguar had known. He’d tried to warn us. Father must have known, too, but led us to believe Edward was a total stranger. Had he meant to kill him, that first day, when he pushed him into the water? Punishment for leaving, maybe. A lesson to show his creation who was in command. He’d made Edward from what—another panther? A hound? He must have done it while Montgomery was away. How proud he must have felt, to create a creature even more perfectly human than Alice, smarter even than Jaguar. Until his perfect creation had abandoned him.
Furious, I threw the half-empty mattress against the back wall. Straw rained over the damp ground that had been hidden under the mattress. My breath caught. Claw marks sliced across the stone floor. Long. Deep. Furious. And between them, dark-brown streaks of blood dried. Tracks ran through them. Three-toed.
My blood went cold. Something shiny glinted among the claw marks, and I picked it up. A silver button just like the ones on Edward’s shirt when we found him in the dinghy.
My heart twisted, wanting to deny it. But the truth was evident. His scarred face was just a mask for a fiend bent on spilling blood. I didn’t know how Father had done it or how Edward made those bloody footprints. Only that the truth of it chilled me to the bone.
I felt a warm breath on the back of my neck. Then a voice spoke in my ear, both familiar and terrifying.
“Don’t run, Juliet,” Edward said, before his hand closed around my mouth.
Forty-three
I FOUGHT HIM, BUT he was impossibly strong.
“Promise not to scream, and I’ll let you go,” he said. His hand held my jaw closed, sealing in my screams. I still smelled traces of lamp oil and sulfur on his skin.
I gave a jerk of a nod. The pressure was gone, and I leapt away from him, scrambling to the back wall and filling my lungs with air. Montgomery was right outside. If I screamed, he’d come running. But would he be fast enough?
“Don’t,” Edward said, reading my thoughts. “He can’t help you.”
Something primal and defensive—the animal part of me—took control of my muscles. For once my head was silent as it surrendered to that deep animal strength. With a growl I hurled the decanter at him. He blocked it with his elbow, but it shattered into hundreds of shards of glass. They rained to the floor like a spring shower on stone steps, and for a moment I was back in the house on Belgrave Square, watching afternoon rain fall on the street outside. I blinked, wondering if I’d made a huge mistake. We weren’t animals, after all—at least not entirely. This was Edward, who had saved my life. Who had come to the island to protect me.
Who loved me.
Love was a human trait. Despite whatever material Father had started with, Edward was human now. Did he deserve to die because of it?
But the primal part of me was only interested in survival, and it was stronger. I pushed past him, clawing at the door until I got it open. Outside, the courtyard pulsed with shadows. I could hear the beasts’ soft footsteps and barely still breaths. They were everywhere and nowhere. I clenched my jaw and darted across the courtyard to the barn. I heard Edward scrambling just a few steps behind me. I only had one chance.
I threw open the barn door.
“Montgomery!” I yelled.
But the wagon was gone. Duke wasn’t in his stall. I ran to the tack room. Empty. But it no longer mattered. Edward was already at the barn door.
I pressed myself into the tack room wall, lost among the hanging bridles and dangling saddle leathers. Edward approached slowly, his hands out, palms down, as if to steady a frightened animal.
“It’s all right, Juliet. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Maybe he should have looked different—sinister, or monstrous. But he didn’t. He looked just like the bruised and broken castaway clutching a tattered photograph on the Curitiba. His gold-flecked eyes were intelligent and deep—eyes that still haunted my dreams.
I shook my head, biting back the tender sting of betrayal. “How could you, Edward?”
“I tried to tell you.” His dark eyes consumed me. “Before you left, I tried . . . but what would I have said? You’d have loathed the sight of me.”
“Because you’re a monster!” I hissed. “You killed all those creatures. You killed Alice!” My foot grazed something on the ground that rang with the sound of metal. The pitchfork. I darted for it, but he was on me in a second, moving faster than humanly possible. He wrenched the pitchfork out of my hands and threw it into one of the stalls. I hurled myself at him, but he picked me up as easily as a rag doll and shoved me against the wall.
His eyes burned. “Don’t,” he whispered. Begged. “Don’t fight me. It’ll only bring on the change.”
“What change?” I asked. His fingers felt like they could snap my wrist as easily as a reed. “What change?”
But he didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. I’d seen the three-toed prints, the six-inch-long claws. He was so close I could see his nostrils flare. His pupils were wide and black, slightly elongated like an animal’s. My breath caught. “It’s impossible. In the woods, it was chasing us. . . .”
“That was only a bobcat that had escaped the laboratory cages. You were already so scared. It wasn’t hard to convince you it was the monster. I just wanted to get you back to the compound, where I could watch out for you. I never wanted to hurt you. Or any of them. I don’t even remember killing them—that’s how it is. I become another creature.”
His jaw twitched. “Your father made me like this. He tried a new technique, something revolutionary that didn’t involve surgery. He said he used a chemical composition taken from human blood. It changes the cellular constitution of animal flesh. He thought he had transformed me from animal to human, but he was wrong.” Edward’s dark eyes could have swallowed the world. “You can’t ever destroy the animal.”