His knuckles were red and swollen, and I could feel the bones grinding unnaturally beneath his skin as he held me against the wall. I remembered what Father had said about the monkey.
A new technique. Changing the constitution on a cellular level without ever having to use a scalpel.
Edward had been his first. Now he was trying to do it again.
“I’m not a monster, Juliet. I’m everything your father intended. Intelligent. Compassionate. Loyal. But I’ve a darker side. I look human, but the animal flesh still lives inside me. Its bones along my bones. Its blood in my veins.” His eyes were glowing, hungry. “I can barely control it.”
“From whom did it come?” I asked with a hoarse voice.
He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“You said he used human blood to extract the cellular traits to make you human. Whose blood did he use?”
Edward shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never known.”
“What about the animal?” I asked. “He must have started with some kind of creature.”
Edward cast a glance at the door, as though remembering the feel of the wild. “It wasn’t just one. He began with a jackal but he added cellular traits of others. Heron. Fox. Those are just the ones I know about, but there are more—I can feel them.”
He flexed his hands, studying the bones as though he barely believed it himself. “The doctor explained the process, but he kept my files secret. As far as what I was . . . I don’t remember anything. I only remember waking up in the laboratory shackled to a table, to a gray-haired man taking notes. He was delighted. He thought me a great success. I knew things—words, objects. The rest I figured out through books. I read about men’s clothing and the London flower markets and primate biology. I borrowed my own history from the pages of novels and plays. My name from Edward III. The story of the Viola from Twelfth Night. My family’s estate, Chesney Wold—that’s from Dickens.”
He continued in a rush. “The servants—Alice and the rest—they were kind, though I think I unsettled them. I stayed in the compound, never interacted with the villagers. But then after a few weeks, something happened. I was near the beach at night. A beast had cut its leg. The smell of blood . . . I don’t remember the details precisely. They didn’t find the body for days.”
“And Father didn’t care that he’d created a monster?”
“Your father didn’t know. None of them knew. I hid it. Alice saw me once rinsing blood off my hands and mouth. She suspected—but it was simple to keep her quiet. She frightened so easily. But then it happened a second time. And a third—they still haven’t found all the bodies. The lack of infection here slows decomposition.” His throat constricted. “I took the dinghy and left before any of them knew. Before I killed again.”
Suddenly he looked as vulnerable and lost as the first time I’d seen him, curled in the bottom of the boat. “I thought I’d die in that dinghy. When your ship found me, when the doctor’s own assistant brought me back to life and was headed for the very place I’d left, it seemed like escaping the island was impossible. As if my fate was tied to this place. And then there was you. His daughter. You had no idea who he was. What he was capable of. What other monsters he might create.”
He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a crumpled and torn piece of paper. I took it with shaking hands. The edges were so worn they were soft as fabric. The photograph.
“You asked me what it was. It’s a woman holding a little girl by the hand in a garden. It used to be on the shelf in the salon with the rest of the photographs. I took it when I left because I wanted to remember why I was leaving. To remember there is good in the world, flowers and happiness and families. It wasn’t a world I belonged in, no matter how much I wished I did.” He paused. “The photograph was of you and your mother.”
I thought of him leaving the island, blood still on his hands, ready to die of exposure. But he hadn’t died. Above all else, we were both survivors.
He slumped against the door. “I thought I could make up for everything. Do something right, for once. Protect you from him.”
The tiles rattled overhead. A growl, too close.
“The beasts are on the roof,” I said, my voice just a whisper. “They’ll kill us. Let me go, Edward. Please.”
“They can’t get through me. They know what I am now.” A slow line of sweat ran down his face. A beast snarled again outside, but he didn’t flinch.
I spied an old bucket, empty except for a hoof pick. I eased closer to it with each breath, while I tried to buy myself time. “Father recognized you when we first arrived. That’s why he tried to drown you.”
“He was furious I’d left. That first night, he told me I’d be forgiven as long as I obeyed him and kept my identity secret.”
I inched my hand toward the bucket. “Why bother? What did it matter if Montgomery and I knew?”
He hesitated. “He thought it would serve his purposes for you not to know. It’s all one big experiment to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He tried to match us, Juliet. He was trying to push us together, to keep you away from Montgomery. He found a use for us after all—to see what would happen if a human bred with one of his creations. We were both only experiments to him.”
My legs went weak. I grabbed a bridle to keep myself steady. No, he wouldn’t. And yet I knew he would. Outside, glass shattered. I heard a few shouts. From Puck, maybe, but the voice was carried off by the wind. I glanced at the back wall. The big rifle was missing from the gun rack. Montgomery had it somewhere. God, where was he?
“But I’d never have gone through with it,” Edward said in a rush, oblivious to the chaos outside. “I’d never have tricked you. It’s different with you, Juliet. I can control myself better when you’re near. You drown out all other noise in the room. Back in London, I won’t need to kill. If you help me.”
I inched my hand toward the hoof pick, but he stepped closer, his gaze dropping into the bucket. I curled my fingers into my palm, but we both knew what I’d been trying to do.
“Please. He made me this way. You can make it right.”
A gunshot rang out from the courtyard. Edward whirled, growling. I darted for the door, but he grabbed my waist and hauled me back.
“Montgomery!” I yelled. “In here!” I struggled to get free of Edward’s arms.