Author: Megan Shepherd

Silence pervaded. The creatures stared with dull, watery eyes. No, I wanted to shout. They aren’t the word of any god. They’re the words of a madman.

“Yes!” A husky voice broke the silence. “Yes, the word of our god!” Low murmurs ran through the crowd. We all strained to find the voice. A hulking creature pushed his way toward us. His gait was lilting. It was the bearlike creature I’d seen in the jungle with Jaguar. His hands were crippled into twisted claws he kept tucked against his chest.

He stopped in front of Father. The islanders huddled closer like cattle. “The word of our god!” the bear-man shouted.

I glanced at Edward. His arms were folded, muscles tight as wire.

“We shall not drink spirits!” The bear-man cried again, dancing on his monstrous legs. “We shall not eat flesh! The words of our god!”

The beast-people began to stir again, as uncertain as I. Python-woman slunk up to me, her slanted eyes blinking. She licked her mouth with an unnaturally large tongue. I sucked in a breath.

“Very good, Antigonus” Father said to the bear-man. His lips twisted in a self-satisfied smirk. “Now, my fellow, tell me who did this horrible thing to Caesar.”

Antigonus took a few stilted steps toward Father, beckoning with a clawed hand. His other hand still clutched at his waist. Just as he leaned his bear snout close enough to whisper, a knife blade glinted in his hand. It jerked toward Father’s throat.

A shot rang out.

Montgomery had scrambled for his rifle, but Edward had fired first. The creatures panicked, climbing over each other to get away. Antigonus’s body fell at my father’s feet, spilling blood on his leather shoes. Father’s eyes were wide. One of his precious creatures had turned on him.

Montgomery rushed to the body. Dust clouded around them. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Edward. He had killed. Defending my father, no less. The pistol fell from his hands. He looked as stunned as I felt.

“Edward—” I said, but I couldn’t finish. He was a killer now, too.

His face was blank, wide-eyed. He ran a hand over his head, shaken, staring at the fallen body as though it was going to stand up and haunt him. His eyes held the same look as when we found him in the dinghy, torn between life and death and sea madness.

He turned and disappeared into the jungle, as though he could run from what he’d done.

WE RODE BACK IN miserable silence. There was no sign of Edward, no matter how much I’d yelled for him. Montgomery assured me that a man who could survive twenty days in a battered dinghy could make it back to the compound. But at sea the only thing hunting Edward had been the inescapable sun and his own haunted memories, and here there was a monster loose.

Someone shouted ahead. Through the leaves, the compound’s walls appeared. Balthasar came running, big chest huffing, eyes rimmed in red. I recalled the first time I’d seen him, when I thought he was hideous. Now, after the horrible faces of the python-woman and Antigonus and the others, he looked as human as any of us. I hoped Montgomery would never stop giving him the treatments. I couldn’t stand to see Balthasar regress.

“What is it?” Montgomery asked. His hand tightened on the rifle.

“Come quickly,” Balthasar said, out of breath. His lower lip trembled. “Hurry.”

Montgomery handed the reins to Father and jumped from the wagon. He took off at a jog with Balthasar. Ahead, I saw the wooden gate was broken. The boards had been splintered by a terrible force.

Father brought up the wagon quickly. No one waited to take it. Puck, Alice, the other servants—they weren’t there. Something clenched in my stomach. A primal need to get inside. To find out what had happened.

Father thrust the reins at me. “Stay here. Hold Duke.”

“But what happened?” I asked. He ignored me. I twisted my fingers in Duke’s mane, watching the men disappear through the broken gate. Why was no one saying anything? Why didn’t someone come for the horse?

There were tracks in the mud outside the gate. Slipping, gliding tracks like the monster had made before. But the gate was reinforced with iron bars. The monster couldn’t bend iron, could it?

A man yelled. I recognized Montgomery’s voice.

“Stay here and be damned,” I muttered, and led Duke and the wagon to a tree. I looped the reins around a branch and hoped he wouldn’t try to bolt.

I bunched my skirt in one hand as I climbed through the broken gate. My breath caught. The courtyard was a wreck. The tomato plants had been trampled, the lanterns broken, the chicken house shattered.

Voices came from the kitchen. I stepped toward them slowly.

“The devil take you!” Montgomery yelled from around the corner. “The devil take you all!” The anguish in his voice made me stop in my tracks. He was usually so controlled, even when he was seething with fury.

I pressed my cheek against the stone wall. They were right around the corner. I only had to look. But somehow, I was afraid that looking would change everything.

“The devil take you!” Montgomery yelled again.

Curiosity took control, compelling me to look at whatever had Montgomery so enraged.

Montgomery and Father were outside the kitchen door with Balthasar and Puck. Montgomery paced back and forth wildly, hulking shoulders straining like a beast’s. A trembling hand covered his mouth.

“Calm down,” Father said. His hand was shaking, too. “You’ll drive yourself mad.”

A flash of white on the kitchen floor caught my eye. I blinked, not sure I was seeing correctly. Alice’s white skirt peeked out from the doorway, flat on the ground, with two pale bare feet streaked in mud. A line of dark blood dripped from her big toe into a puddle. The feet didn’t move. As certain as I’d ever been of anything, I knew those feet would never move again.

Alice was dead.

Thirty-four

MONTGOMERY SLAMMED HIS FIST into the kitchen door. The wood splintered too easily, and he growled, unsatisfied. He swung his other fist at the solid stone wall.

I rushed forward. “Stop it!”

But it connected with a sickening crack. Blood flowed from his shredded knuckles. I locked my hands around his wrist.

“Stop it!” I said. “It won’t change anything.”

“Let go!” His loose hair was caked in sweat and grit. The muscles in his arm flexed like steel clockwork below his skin. It took all my strength to hold his fist back from pounding into the wall again.

“He’s going to hurt himself,” Father said. “I’ll prepare a shot of morphine.”

Montgomery reeled toward him. “I don’t want your drugs. I don’t want anything from you!”

Father ran a shaking hand over his chin’s thin white hairs. For a moment I thought he might apologize or, at the least, offer some condolence. But then his black eyes iced over. “That suits me. You were worthless anyway.”

Montgomery’s arm jerked back. In another second his fist would have slammed into my father’s face, but I threw my arms around him.

“Come on,” I whispered. I touched his hot face, his tense shoulders, trying to calm him. Alice’s cold flesh lay by our feet on the kitchen floor. Her blood soaked into the mortar. It could have been me. It could have been any of us. The nauseated me. “You need air. You need to clear your head.”

He strained against my arm, pacing like a wild animal, but I was able to gradually pull him away from her body, through the broken gate, and away from the compound.

I found a grassy place against the outside wall where we could see the sparkling ocean. I sat down, but it took him some time to calm. I tore a strip of cloth from the hem of my skirt.

“Let me bandage your hand. You’re getting blood everywhere.”

His blue eyes met mine. The wild animal was still there, still restless. But there was pain, too. He sat down next to me and tied his hair back. I gently wiped away the blood from his busted knuckles. His jaw had a hard edge. He was so handsome it made my pulse race.

“I’m sorry,” I said, winding the strip of linen around his hand.

He didn’t answer.

I pictured Alice’s white feet in the mud, glad I hadn’t seen her cold, dead face. “I know she loved you,” I said before I could stop myself. “And I know I came between you. If I’d never come, maybe she’d still be alive.”

His deep eyes could carry every burden in the world. I tied off the bandage, tucking in the frayed edge. It was already damp with sweat and blood. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

“Did you love her?” She was dead, not even buried, but I couldn’t keep my frantic thoughts to myself. My voice rose in a hysterical pitch. “If I hadn’t come, would you have married her?”

His eyebrows were a line of worry. “What are you talking about?”

“You always wanted to save people. She was an orphan. The only missionary left. How could you not have fallen in love with her?”

“Blast and damn.” His head fell back against the wall. “I wasn’t in love with Alice. God, Juliet, I thought you knew. She wasn’t one of the missionaries.” He paused, not meeting my eyes. “She was a creation.”

My breath caught. I pushed my hair back with shaking hands. Alice? The sweet girl who carried the comb of my silver brush set, one of them? I felt my head shaking forcefully. “That’s impossible. She was human.”

“She looked human,” Montgomery said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His wounded hand tensed. “But she was created two years ago from a sheep and three rabbits.”

“Rabbits?” I put my fingers to my lips, as if I could feel the word. As if that might make it more believable.

Her harelip. They are all flawed, Father had said. I tried to piece it together, to make sense of the puzzle. Alice had dodged my questions about her past. God, I’d been such a fool. When I called Balthasar and the others animals, I’d been calling her the same.

“I thought you said it couldn’t be done.” I swallowed back my rising fear. “You said he couldn’t make them look completely human.”

The blood drained from Montgomery’s face. He took a deep breath. “He can’t.”

It came to me then. A whisper of an idea.

“You made her,” I said. Not a question. An accusation.

He rubbed a hand over tired eyes. The wound had reopened, and blood seeped through the bandage.

“How could you?” I whispered, lips trembling. “Just like Father . . .” Blood rushed in my ears. I tried to stand, but he grabbed my hips and pulled me back to the grass.

“What’s done is done! If I’m to go to hell, so be it. But I’m not like him.” The force of his anger was a slap in the face. It wasn’t me he was angry at, but himself. He let me go and stood up, grabbing the iron bars outside my window. Like he deserved a prison.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “I knew that from the beginning. Your father and I had an argument. One of his creatures died on the operating table. I tried to warn him. I saw the errors in his work. But he’ll never admit to mistakes. He told me he was the doctor and I was a servant, and it would always be that way.” His knuckles tightened on the bars. “I wanted to prove him wrong.”

The breeze off the ocean blew a strand of hair into his face. He hadn’t put it in so many words, but I understood. By creating Alice, he had bested my father at his own work. With no formal training, as only a teenage boy.

And they called my father a genius.

I looked at him askance. I had underestimated him. We all had. As much as I cared about him, I always thought of him as the handsome, brooding assistant. Edward was the clever, educated one. Montgomery was a workhorse, strong and faithful.

But if he could make Alice, what else was he capable of?

“It was wrong.” He turned away from the window. “And now she’s dead, and so we are all if we don’t find Ajax.”