Author: Megan Shepherd

“Are you ready?”

I nodded. The cold metal tip pressed against the thin skin inside my elbow. I held my breath. He slid the needle under the skin and my breath caught. My eyes closed. The light was dim, but he found a vein immediately. And then a painful pressure filled my arm as he injected the liquid. I’d done it every day. The routine was familiar. But this was not—this feeling of slow, throbbing pain mixed with the thrilling pleasure of his proximity.

My lips parted. The new compound shot through me, making me light-headed. I gripped the edge of the table so hard the surgical instruments rattled. My eyes settled on a strand of hair falling over his jawline.

“Do you feel unusual at all?”

My throat tightened. I felt something, but it didn’t have to do with the new compound. It had to do with the light reflecting off his face. With his hand that held my wrist, checking my pulse.

“You have dirt on your collar,” I said. My voice was hoarse.

One side of his mouth tugged back in a handsome grin. “That’s normal.”

I brushed the dirt off with my thumb and forefinger. His head turned to my hand, instinctively, his lips grazing the inside of my wrist. I gasped with the sensation. How could such a simple touch electrify every inch of my body?

He pressed his lips into my palm, my knuckles, each of my fingertips, drowning me with a thousand waves of pleasure. He murmured my name. The sound of it on his lips, so aching, choked me with passion.

I grabbed his collar, pulling our lips together. Not knowing if it was wrong or right or today or tomorrow. He hardly needed persuading. He kissed me back so hard the operating table shook beneath us. The surgical tray fell and tools crashed to the floor. I hardly noticed. He picked me up around the waist and sat me further back on the table, leaning in, his chest rising and falling like a stormy tide. My trembling fingers brushed against a manacle, accidentally knocking it off. It tumbled down with a rattle of chains.

“Juliet,” he muttered. His hand tangled in my hair, and his lips were inches away but he wouldn’t kiss me, torturing me with the space between us. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with me. I’m guilty of so many crimes.”

My fingernails dug into his shoulders. I rested my forehead in the crook of his neck. Breathed in the scent of him. There was so much I wanted to say. He thought he was guilty, when he didn’t even know what guilt was. He had made mistakes, but he could never be cruel. Not like my father.

Not like me.

“I don’t deserve you,” he whispered.

“Leave that for me to decide.” My lips brushed his jawline, tasting him, drowning in him.

The laboratory door rattled. I jerked at the unexpected sound. The hinges groaned, and mottled sunlight poured in as the door swung open.

Montgomery’s hold tightened on my waist. I could have gotten off the table, could have acted like we there for the injection, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Father had already seen enough.

He came in and closed the door behind him.

Thirty-seven

FATHER APPROACHED SLOWLY, HIS footsteps echoing in the silent room. Suddenly the laboratory looked menacing again. It was all sharpened metal and glass and ink diagrams of horrible things. Montgomery’s fingers twisted in the folds of my skirt.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Father said. His black eyes gleamed like the glass specimen jars. “Just like a dog. You tell it not to do something, and that’s just what it does.”

I curled my fingers around the edge of the table, angry enough to rip it in two.

“I warned you, Montgomery,” Father said coldly.

Montgomery didn’t answer. His fist tightened in my skirt.

“He’s not yours to command,” I snapped. Montgomery shot me a wary glance, but I ignored him. “You’ve treated him no better than a slave.”

“I treated him like a son.”

“You used him. He was just a boy when you dragged him here.”

Father’s eyes were burning coals. He paced along the wall of cabinets, peering at me like one of the specimens. “Stay out of this, Juliet. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“I started the kiss.”

“You’re a female. You can’t control yourself.”

“The hell I can’t.” I pushed off the table, swinging my fist. He dodged it easily and boxed his elbow against my ear. Montgomery moved like a flash, throwing my father against the wall of cabinets. A pane shattered and glass rained to the floor. I screamed and covered my head. Somewhere in the chaos, Father pulled a pistol from his jacket. He aimed the barrel at Montgomery’s chest. Montgomery started forward anyway.

He was going to take a bullet for me.

“Stop!” I yelled.

He froze. His breath came as quickly as my own. Father dabbed his mouth with the back of his shirt cuff. It came away spotted with blood. He waved the pistol at Montgomery. “Over there,” he said, his voice creepily calm. “Against the wall.”

Slowly, Montgomery stepped back. Once he was far enough away not to lunge, Father grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the operating table. “You’ve proven my point,” he said. “Do you know how they control a hysterical woman in the sanatoriums?”

“Let me go!” I yelled. I slammed my shoulder against him, but he was solid for such a thin man, and I was still weak from my fever.

He dug the pistol’s barrel into the back of my head. “They lock her down before she can harm herself.” His free hand worked the buckle of the closest manacle. He threaded my wrist through and tightened the buckle, so hard the metal bit into my skin. Something clicked into place. A lock.

“I’ll be back to deal with you,” he told me. I lunged for him, but the manacle kept me chained to the table.

“Don’t leave her here alone,” Montgomery entreated. “The beasts got in once. If they come again, she won’t be able to escape.”

Father grabbed Montgomery’s collar and dug the gun against his temple. “I told you,” he said, only a tremor of anger in his voice as he dragged Montgomery across the cold floor. “They’re harmless.”

Mad. He was mad.

“Let him go!” I yelled. I tore at the manacle, but it held strong.

They vanished into the rectangle of morning sunlight.

If he was mad enough to think the beasts harmless, he was mad enough to take Montgomery outside and shoot him. I twisted my wrist. Clawed at the manacle. It didn’t give. I studied the manacle and found a small black opening on the side for a key.

I might be able to pick the lock. If I just had . . . yes, the surgical tools. I fell to the floor and reached as far as my shackled wrist would let me. Scalpels, forceps, needles—they littered the floor out of reach. I slid out my toe as far as I could, but I was still inches away.

“Blast!” I yelled. I jerked on the manacle. The chain clattered—the sound of my imprisonment.

I crawled to the desk. My fingertips just grazed the brass drawer handle. I cursed and tugged on the chain. It was twisted. I scrambled to my feet and spun around, twisting the chain the other direction. A straightened chain might only give me an extra half an inch, but that was all I needed.

I reached again for the drawer, and my middle finger barely wrapped around the handle. I pulled it open, hoping for a letter opener or a pen. My stomach sank. Files—dozens of them, meticulously labeled, packed tightly. The laboratory was filled with countless sharp objects, but all I could reach was a cabinet filled with useless paper.

I slammed my fist on the files. Montgomery might already have a bullet in his skull. Maybe Father would kill me, too. Then again, maybe not. There were worse things on the island than dying.

The sweat on my hand smeared the ink on one of the files. I wiped my hand on my skirt and looked at the word.

Balthasar.

I slid out the file. Inside were pages of notes in tight, controlled handwriting. Sketches. Medical diagrams. Notes on behavior, appetite, origin of the bear and dog he’d been made from. Careful recordings of the exact procedure Father had done five years ago.

I read it quickly. Five-fingered, it said. Passable appearance. Still unable to replicate Ajax’s procedure. Suitable for household service.

I threw the file on the floor and dug through the rest.

Cymbeline.

Othello.

Iago.

Ophelia.

All names from Shakespeare’s plays, I realized. That’s how he’d named his creations. There must have been a hundred files, each with careful notes and measurements, as though the islanders were only experiments on paper and not breathing, thinking, killing creatures.

My finger paused on a familiar name.

Juliet.

For a moment time slipped away into some dark void. My lips formed that one word, my name—Juliet, Juliet, Juliet—over and over, repeating until it all made sense. But it never did. How could it? My hand pulled out the file, but it was like someone else’s hand laying the file on the cold ground, opening it, rifling through the few meager pages annotated with my father’s distinctive handwriting.

And then time seemed to fracture again and I was back in my own body, all too aware of how my sweaty fingertips caught on the paper, the grit on the ground digging into my legs, as my eyes focused and refocused on the handwriting.

The pages had a date—July 1879, one month after I was born. The notes were briefer and more disjointed than Balthasar’s and the others’. The paper wasn’t even the same—these pages looked ripped from an old journal. They must have come from a time before Father had developed a system for cataloging his creations. There were only a few scribbled lines describing the surgery he performed when I was an infant. The file told me painfully little, didn’t prove anything—until I reached a handful of words in Latin I didn’t recognize. Except for one.

Cervidae.

Deer.

That was all I needed to see. Feeling melted out of my fingers and I let the pages flutter to the ground. I touched my face, my hair, but sensation was gone—it was like touching flesh that wasn’t mine. And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it belonged to some animal, a deer. This body—my eyelashes, my toes, the curve of my waist—was a lie. Such a convincing lie that I’d even fooled myself.

I slumped against the operating table, eyes closed, hugging my arms in tight. Trying to see within me, to feel if it was true. At some point the lantern must have gone out, because when I opened my eyes I was alone in darkness. Hours or minutes might have passed—it didn’t matter.

The laboratory’s metal door creaked open, and I shielded my eyes from the bright sunlight. The pages of my file lay scattered at my feet. My eyes adjusted slowly to the light. Father came in, his arms folded behind his back like a gentleman. His face was as calm as the afternoon sea. Feeling flooded back into my numb body. My fists balled, slowly. Anger bubbled in my blood, almost giving me the strength to rip the manacle from the table.

“Where is he?” I said.

“Montgomery should never have been a concern of yours. His kind are beneath you. His mother was a whore whom Evelyn let scour our pots in her Christian charity.”

“He’s smarter than you,” I said, seething. “He bested you at your own work.”

He lifted a hand to strike me, but his eyes caught on the paper littering the floor. He slid the file closer with his boot. “And what’s this?”

“I found the files,” I said. My words sounded so far away. “I know.”

“Know what exactly?”

I jerked my chin at the open file drawer. “Know that I’m one of them. An animal you’ve twisted and taught to speak like some sideshow attraction.” The chain rattled as I inched toward him, as close as I could, wishing I could strike. “And thank God for it. I’d rather be an animal than have your cursed blood flowing in my veins.”

His eyebrows rose. He picked up the folder and straightened the papers carefully on the desk. “You have quite an imagination.”