Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  “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, 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 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, 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 the law of the jungle: 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 the 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. 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,” Montgomery continued, “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 that 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 held my arm roughly 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 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 shrank 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; 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.

  “So many damn masks in there, it’s hard to keep straight,” another man said.

  “The masquerade is necessary for our purposes,” Radcliffe answered. “Moreau’s creation wouldn’t have come unless he could disguise himself. You’re certain no men tried to talk to her? I’d stake my life they’ve been in contact. That fool who brought Moreau’s last le
tter—Captain Claggan, isn’t it?—said the boy was quite taken with her.”

  My breath halted as I realized the girl they spoke of was me.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I JERKED MY HEAD toward Montgomery. Worse, they also spoke of “Moreau’s creation,” which meant they knew about Edward, too. Montgomery kept a finger to his lips and silently reached for a revolver holstered at his side.

  “She got lost in the crowd,” another man answered.

  “Well, find her,” Radcliffe said. “She’s the best chance we have of hunting him down. If only Claggan could have given us a better description before he drank himself to death. Dark hair, not yet twenty—that could describe half the young men in there.”

  One of the men spat over the side of the balustrade and added, “That old blatherskite von Stein won’t say a word. The moment he hears the name Moreau, he slams the door in my face. He practically threw Lessing out by the collar.”

  “Leave von Stein to me,” Radcliffe said, and then added, “What of the preparations?”

  “The specimens will be ready within two weeks, providing we can capture Moreau’s creation. Then it’ll be a simple matter of extracting what we need from him and finishing the preparations for New Year’s Day.”

  “Rochefort is speaking to his contacts in Paris about the exact delivery date. They’re threatening to change their minds, but once they see what we have planned, they’ll double their current order.”

  “Excellent.” Radcliffe snuffed out his cigar, and it fell to the garden at my feet. I drew in a gasp as it singed my slipper, but Montgomery pressed his hand to my mouth. It felt like an eternity while we waited until their footsteps receded and the balcony door swung closed, leaving us alone in the garden once more.

  Montgomery let go of my mouth, and I gulped in air.

  “They know about Edward!” I gasped. “Claggan must have learned on the ship about his two sides and somehow gotten in touch with the King’s Club. This whole party is a trap. They knew I’d be here and thought it would lure him. That ‘guest of honor’ nonsense—I thought they were just trying to win favor with the professor, and all the while Radcliffe wanted me here as bait.”

  Montgomery ran a hand over his forehead. “They don’t know what Edward looks like—that’s good at least, so we can get to him first. Damn it all, how do they even know he exists?”

  “Radcliffe is the one Father was writing to on the island—his secret colleague who went by the code name ‘A King’s Man.’ Don’t you know about the letters? You must have delivered them.”

  Montgomery shook his head. “I did, but all Radcliffe ever did was pay the bills for my travel and the exotic animals and other supplies—chartering a ship to the island was exorbitantly expensive. There was never any science exchanged, or else I would have put an end to it.”

  “Did you ever actually read the letters?”

  “Of course not—they were sealed. But your father swore… .” His voice trailed off as he realized Father had lied to him, as he’d lied to all of us. As much as Father had loved Montgomery, he wasn’t above lying even to him.

  I put a hand to my head as everything started to come together. “They did exchange science. They must have, because Lucy’s read some of the letters that reference it, and you heard them talking about specimens. They said all they needed was to extract something from Edward. His blood, perhaps, or bone marrow, I can’t imagine what else. They have to be attempting to replicate Father’s creatures.”

  Montgomery’s face hardened. He didn’t disagree, and this worried me even more. I continued, “They said everything would be ready in two weeks, in time for New Year’s Day. What are they planning?”

  “I don’t know,” he said gruffly. “But we need to find out.”

  I paced in the snow. “Earlier tonight I found a human brain.”

  “A brain?”

  “Yes, in Radcliffe’s study, in a hatbox. He doesn’t practice science himself—he must have been holding it for one of the others. Whatever they’re doing, it involves humans, not just animals.”

  Montgomery jerked his chin toward the balcony. “I think there were four of them,” he said. “Five maybe—one might have been small. It means…” He rubbed his face, letting it all settle in.

  I finished his thought. “It means this isn’t limited to Radcliffe. It’s much larger than we ever imagined. That makes sense now—Radcliffe’s a businessman, not a scientist. He’s providing the funding while the others are handling the research, the specimens, the politics. There are several members of Parliament in the King’s Club. They even mentioned Rochefort, the French ambassador. That means this goes beyond one man or even a group in London. They have connections in France, Germany… who knows how far this reaches?” I leaned against the wall, body numb but thoughts churning like a steam engine.

  I pressed my hand against my chest. Men like that, with limitless resources and connections, could change the entire system. They could make vivisection and animal experimentation legal, if they chose to. They could establish entire colleges dedicated to Father’s research. They could re-create his creatures. They could take everything Father had done on that isolated island and spread it throughout the globe.

  “Montgomery, we can’t let them—”

  But I didn’t get a chance to finish. A scream rang out from the ballroom.

  MONTGOMERY AND I RACED up the balcony steps and through the glass-paned door. The crowd inside the ballroom was packed tightly, everyone murmuring and pushing forward to see what had happened.

  The girl in the swan mask stood on tiptoe next to me, trying to see over everyone’s heads.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “A woman screamed,” she said. “I think it was Mrs. Radcliffe.”

  “That’s Lucy’s mother!” I gasped. I tugged Montgomery toward the grand spiral staircase, the swan girl forgotten. “Something might have happened to Lucy.”

  I tried to push through the crowd, but no one made room for me, so Montgomery took the lead instead. He had a way of moving among people as gracefully as he ducked trees and brambles in the jungle. I had to trip over my own feet to keep up with him. Soon we were at the front of the murmuring crowd.

  “Lucy!” I yelled, spotting her by the stairs. She was leaning against the grand staircase banister, mask off, face white, looking shaken but unharmed. I wrapped my hand around hers.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  Half dazed, she pointed to a clump of people on the stairs. “Mother screamed. There was a commotion on the landing, and then she tumbled down the stairs covered in blood.”

  Lucy’s eyes were fixed on the bottom of the stairs, where Inspector Newcastle, Mr. Radcliffe, and several men were leaning over Lucy’s mother. She was still screaming, though when I pushed closer I could tell with one glimpse that the wounds were only superficial. Just shallow cuts on her arm, though the three slash marks spilled a startling amount of blood onto her white gown.

  Three slash marks.

  I glanced at Montgomery and saw my fears confirmed in his face—three slash marks meant the Beast.

  Apparently we weren’t the only ones who noticed that particular detail, because once Mrs. Radcliffe’s shock wore off, she started screaming, “The Wolf! It was the Wolf!”

  “The Wolf is here!” a woman in the crowd yelled behind me. “Run!”

  My imagination started churning. I pictured blood pouring out beneath torn flesh, pooling on the floor, staining everyone’s fine dancing shoes. The blood just kept coming until the dance floor was covered, choking the quartet’s instruments, spilling out in a waterfall over the balcony into the garden where Montgomery and I had stood.

  Montgomery squeezed my hand, and the hallucination disappeared. I prayed a fit wasn’t coming on, here in public and at such a terrible time, and massaged the joints of my knuckles. Everyone was screaming, grabbing their belongings, hurrying for the front door.

  “He’s toying with us,” Montgomer
y said. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  The room churned with panic. In the turmoil someone smashed into the enormous Christmas tree at my side. Strong hands pulled me out of the way a second before it crashed to the ground, glass ornaments shattering, spurring another round of screams.

  I turned to thank the person who’d pulled me out of the way. A massive man, and young, judging by his dark hair, though a red mask hid his face from me—all except for his eyes. My lips parted as I saw their deep yellow glow.

  The Beast.

  I screamed for Montgomery, but my voice was lost in the chaos as everyone ran for the door. I looked around frantically and caught a glimpse of him thirty feet away, helping a woman who’d been trapped under the enormous Christmas tree. But he didn’t see me, and the Beast dug his knobby fingers into my arm and pulled me in the opposite direction from the one everyone else was running to.

  I twisted, but I was powerless against him without a weapon. He pulled me into the doorway leading toward the rear halls, in the shadows where we’d be overlooked.

  “I’ll kill you for what you’ve done,” I seethed.

  “I think that quite unlikely,” he said in that in­humanly deep voice. “You’ve had two chances to kill me and you haven’t.”

  “Only because Edward inhabits this body too. Now let me go. If Montgomery sees you…”

  A laugh came from deep in his throat, and I was glad for the mask that hid the face that was and wasn’t Edward at the same time.

  “You mean Moreau’s hunting dog? He’s certainly nothing I fear, and from what I saw in the garden, it seems he means nothing to you, either.” He leaned in close enough that I could feel his unnatural heat, as though a powerful fever burned from within. “You spurned his advances, my love.”

  I twisted to look back to the crowd, but it was still chaotic, still filled with screams, and Montgomery nowhere.

  “You didn’t want his kisses, did you? You wanted mine,” growled the Beast, low and seductive.

  He leaned forward as though to kiss me, and I shoved him hard, but he only laughed, a game between two lovers, and pinned me against the wall. The corset ribbing stabbed into me, and I pressed a hand to my stomach. The Beast felt the stiff corset too, and whispered, “You don’t belong like this, trussed up. Like me, you’re too wild to be caged. Why don’t you take it off?”