Her Dark Curiosity (19 page)

“Are you feeling all right?” Elizabeth asked, the teasing gone from her voice.

“I might have had too much champagne.” I fanned my face, wanting her away from me, since close by was the most dangerous place for her to be. “I’m just going to rest here a moment, then I’ll dance. Go on, really.”

Her face relaxed. “You’d better,” she said. “Or I’ll make you dance with old Mr. Willowby, and he’s all left feet.”

The moment she left my side, the masked man started toward me. A dagger of fear twisted my insides. I had only the window behind me, no place to run. He moved so gracefully through the dancers, as if they parted to make way for him. In a few moments he’d be here, and what would he say? Would he threaten me? Attack me?

Or would he tell me, once more, that he loved me?

The mask choked me with the smell of newsprint. I tore it off and hurried toward the balcony door. Nothing mattered but luring him away from these warm, tempting bodies.

He’d come for me, not them.

The man in the wolf mask cocked his head, dark eyes watching as I hurried across the dance floor. He paused for just a beat before changing his direction and following me. The doors to the balcony were still cracked from before, making the white drapes flutter. Men and women stood near the door talking, red glows to their cheeks, wineglasses in hand. I pushed my way into their midst and through the door.

The cold wrapped around my arms. I glanced back through the glass door at the candlelit ballroom, where a girl in a swan mask glided and laughed. Overhead, the stars and the moon shone as brightly as before, and I cursed them. Darkness was what I needed now. A place to hide.

The door opened again. The man in the wolf mask stepped onto the balcony. We might as well have been the only two at the party, alone outside under the stars, only a few feet of flagstone separating us.

I wouldn’t let it end like this.

I ran down the staircase into the garden, knowing that the dark boughs of the hedges were the perfect place for a murder, but also my only chance of drawing him away from the crowd and escaping. At the end of the garden was a gate that led into the back alley, and from there I could lose him in the streets.

The man in the mask started down the stairs after me.

The garden hedges behind Lucy’s house were as familiar to me as the basement hallways of King’s College. So many memories here: Lucy and I exploring every inch of this garden, chasing fairies, playing Catch the Huntsman. That was my one advantage—I knew the maze of hedges, and the Beast did not.

I darted behind the closest hedge wall. It had thinned with age, and I could peek between the branches to see the man approaching. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back to make sure no one had followed us outside, then moved toward the hedges. I darted to the next row as snow soaked into my satin slippers. They’d be ruined. It hardly mattered. I just had to reach the back gate and pray I could climb over.

I froze and listened. The hedges were fuller here and blocked my view. He could be anywhere.

I took a deep breath and darted around the hedge wall, past another row until I reached the brick wall. The black gate loomed ahead. Just a few more paces . . .

A hand came out of the shadows and grabbed my wrist. I started to scream, but the man’s other hand was over my mouth in a flash. I felt his chest against my back, all rigid muscle. I looked up at the lights shining onto the balcony, only a few dozen paces away from us, but it might as well have been another world.

“Shh,” the man in the wolf mask whispered. “They’ll hear you. They’ll think this is a secret tryst and come to investigate.”

I nearly choked with shock. That voice, so tender and yet so deep. It wasn’t the Beast’s.

It wasn’t Edward’s, either.

My wrist went slack in his hand.

“Montgomery,” I breathed.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-ONE

T
HE MAN REACHED UP
and pulled off his mask, blond hair falling over his broad shoulders, but I already knew what face I’d find. There was no mistaking the voice that belonged to a young man I’d known forever, a voice that brought back memories of our hands intertwined, his lips on mine, my fingers tangled in his blond hair.

My head wouldn’t let me believe it. Reason told me that he was just another hallucination, and yet my heart knew Montgomery was real.

The mask slipped from my hand into the snow.

His face had lost its sun-bronzed color, replaced by a few fading cuts. The angles of his features were sharper. He’d always been strong, but now he held himself differently: tenser, hardened. Seeing him again stirred those painful memories of that last night on the island, waiting in the dinghy as the compound burned in the distance. I still remember seeing the rope fall from his hands, the jolt from his boot as he shoved the dinghy away with no warning.

But I need you,
I had yelled across the waves.

The island needs me more,
he’d called back.

With those words, Montgomery had shipwrecked my heart.

The memory made my knees buckle, but he came forward and caught me in his arms before I felt into the snow. Still so quick. Still so strong.

Our eyes met.

Still so handsome.

He was so close that I could feel the beating of his heart through our clothing. “Christ, I missed you,” he said, his voice just a whisper as it grazed my lips. His tender words shook me from the sense that this was all a dream. All the pain of his betrayal rushed back like a reopened wound. I shoved hard against his shirt, stumbling away from him before he could kiss me.

If he thought I would forgive him so easily, he was wrong.

I sensed the snow seeping into my slippers. The laughter from the ballroom, the dancers, the music . . . none of it mattered as much as this young man with me amid the hedges.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “You said you weren’t ever coming back. You left me.”

“I am sorry for that,” he said, warm breath clouding the air between us. He stepped forward slowly as if I was a horse spooked by only a falling leaf. “I didn’t want to leave you. I had no choice.”

“You might have told me, instead of shoving me away in a dinghy with your boot!”

“I know,” he said, glancing at the balcony overhead to make certain we were alone. “It was cowardly, but I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t think you’d understand, and I feared you would insist on staying behind with me. I needed to know I’d done everything I could to keep you safe.”

“Safe? I nearly died in that dinghy.”

He ran a hand over his face, searching for words. “If you’d stayed on the island, you would have died for certain.”

The note of regret hanging in his voice gave me pause. He never would have abandoned the island, not unless something terrible had forced him to. What had happened on that burning piece of land after I’d left? I had tried not to think about it, though ever since that time I’d been plagued by waking nightmares of reverted beast-men turning on one another, flesh ripping apart, and Montgomery like an ungodly prince amid the madness.

“If you’re here,” I said carefully, “does it mean all the islanders are dead?”

“Dead, or close enough to it.” His words were flat, but his broken voice betrayed him.

“What happened?”

He glanced again at the balcony, and then frowned at me shivering in the snow. “You’re freezing out here. Let’s go inside, and I shall explain everything.”

“I’m not a fragile child who can’t handle a little cold. Tell me.”

He watched me through the darkness as though weighing whether or not to believe me. At last he removed his suit jacket and wrapped it around my bare shoulders, rubbing them through the fabric. The friction wasn’t nearly as warming as his proximity. I’d forgotten his smell, fresh hay and sunlight even in the midst of the city.

“I had no choice but to leave,” he began. “The compound had burned. The islanders had reverted to feral creatures and taken to the jungle. They didn’t know how to hunt for themselves or feed. I made my home in Jaguar’s old cabin, thinking I could at least help them adjust by breeding the rabbits and feeding the beast-men myself. But their instincts took over, and it wasn’t rabbits they wanted. They hungered for larger prey, and turned on each other instead. After a few months, they forgot I had ever been a friend to them. I was forced to hunt them down one by one, and kill them before they killed me.”

His voice held steady, but the way he ran an anxious hand through his loose blond hair betrayed him. He had loved the creatures, even helped give life to many of them. When I’d first arrived on the island, the beast-men had been civilized creatures, living in villages and eating only vegetables, even praying in a church of their own making. Yet once Father had taken away their treatments, they quickly regressed into the animals they were, and in the end all Montgomery’s scientific genius and high morals were reduced to nothing more than kill or be killed.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

He looked away, into the hedges. “You were right when you said they should never have been created. It was mad of him to do it, and folly for me to help him. Killing them mercifully was my penance.” His voice dropped as he glanced at the balcony again and stepped closer. “But one escaped, Juliet. I went back to bury the bodies of those who died in the compound fire, and Edward wasn’t there.”

His words were low and thick with warning. Meant to shock me, and yet how could I be shocked when just the night before I’d been in that very man’s arms? The scratches on my shoulder burned beneath the piece of red silk so hot that I was certain Montgomery would feel them.

“He survived the fire,” Montgomery continued, mistaking my silence for distress. “For weeks I hunted him. He left me notes, begging for a chance to cure himself, wanting me to help him. But I didn’t—I couldn’t. Because that monster inside him left me letters, too. They came from a Mr. Hide, addressed to a Mr. Seek. The quarry writing to his hunter.”

The blood drained from my face. “The Beast can write?” It made me uncomfortable to speak of the Beast like this, as a thinking creature. I preferred to picture him as a mindless animal, but I knew that wasn’t true. He was sentient. He was clever.

“The handwriting was the same—written by the same hand, I mean, though with more of a slant—yet it was the ramblings of a demon. He said he was going to leave the island and come to London. That he deserved to know all the pleasure and pains in life, and he would do whatever he must to experience them.”

“You’ve been following him ever since?” I whispered into the night.

“Yes. He stowed away on the
Curitiba
when that damn Captain Claggan returned. He’s left me notes across half the world, tucked in the pockets of his victims as though this is only a game to him.” He rubbed some warmth into his face, or maybe he was trying to brush aside the memories. “He’s in London now. I arrived last week and have been searching for signs of him. I came to the party thinking with so many of your father’s colleagues gathered in one place, he might try to seek some sort of retribution. When I saw you here—”

“How did you recognize me?”

“I made some inquiries when I first arrived and discovered you were living with Professor von Stein and his niece.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “And I’d know you anywhere, mask be damned.”

His hand grazed mine. I allowed myself this brush of contact. I hadn’t forgiven him—it wouldn’t be that easy. And yet as we stood with the snow soaking into our shoes, in this city where we’d grown up together, it was impossible to pretend I felt nothing.

“I already know about Edward,” I whispered.

His hand fell away as a look of astonishment crossed his face. “You
know
? Have you seen him? Has he tried to contact you?” He grabbed my arm rough enough to shake me. In the blink of an eye the honest, hardworking boy I knew had been replaced by this single-minded hunter.

He has secrets,
Edward had warned me.
Secrets you still don’t know.

My lips were trembling. I wasn’t ready to have this conversation, inevitable as it was. Edward and I were connected in a deep way—a primal way—that Montgomery would never understand. It was the human in us fighting against the animal inside. It bound us, intertwining our fates, our desires.

“The murders,” I stuttered. “I heard about the Wolf of Whitechapel’s murders, and knew it must be Edward, back from the dead.” I was about to tell him the rest, how I investigated the bodies and found Edward at Lucy’s. And yet something held my voice. The look in Montgomery’s eyes was one of pure determination.

He would kill Edward. Or Edward would kill him. Either way, one of them would die, unless I prevented it.

My hand drifted to the scratches hidden beneath my silk dress. Amid my unquiet thoughts, something else Montgomery had said came back to me. He’d had been in London for a week already. He hadn’t come to see me. If not for our accidental encounter tonight, would he have come for me at all?

I didn’t get a chance to ask. The porch door opened above our heads, and footsteps came out onto the balcony. The fibers of my stomach shrunk at the thought that it could be the Beast. Montgomery pressed a finger to his lips to tell me to remain silent and pulled me into the shadows beneath the balcony where we couldn’t be seen. I nodded, holding my breath, dreading the telltale clicks of claws upon stone that meant the Beast had found us.

But I heard only the hiss of a match springing to life, and then smelled tobacco on the breeze. There were footsteps of a few other men, three or four in all. A man’s voice spoke, and relief rushed out of me.

“Did you see where she went?” the man said. His voice was the deep baritone of a lifelong smoker, and I recognized it as Lucy’s father, Mr. Radcliffe, and the vision of that brain came slamming back into me. Perhaps my relief had come too soon.