Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  “Juliet?” Montgomery asked. “I could use your assistance.”

  “Of course,” I said, brushing my hands off. He handed me a beaker while he read through Father’s notes. My attention kept trailing to the cellar door, wondering if Edward also felt conflicted feelings over the prospect of the cure. Would he feel incomplete without the Beast? Would some deep part of him miss it?

  Montgomery and I worked through the afternoon and into the evening, not stopping even for tea. In the next room Elizabeth and Lucy exchanging frustrated words as they decoded page after page of useless observations. The first two serum batches failed, but Montgomery adjusted the ingredients, and as darkness fell outside on Christmas Eve, he held up a vial.

  “This one has held steady for three minutes. I think it might work.” His blue eyes met mine. “Are you ready to try it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But let’s not tell the others yet. If it doesn’t work, I don’t want them to lose hope for Edward.”

  A corner of his mouth pulled into a bittersweet smile. He went to the table and readied the syringe. I rolled up my sleeve, touching the soft skin on the inside of my elbow where I’d injected myself daily for my entire life. Soon, if this worked, I would never need to hold a syringe again.

  “Are you ready?” came Montgomery’s gentle words.

  I nodded, and he pressed the tip of the needle against my skin, sliding it expertly beneath the surface until he found the vein. I winced as the hot liquid spread. First came warmth. Then pain. My arm jerked suddenly as a white-hot light seared me and I knocked the syringe from Montgomery’s arm, heard the glass crunch under my bare foot, and felt a sting of pain as I stumbled toward the window.

  “Juliet?” I was vaguely aware of his arms around me, keeping me from falling, but it felt like my body belonged to someone else.

  “The window,” I rasped. “Air.”

  He threw open the pane behind the herb garden, and I gasped cold evening air that still smelled of rosemary and thyme. The lights of the city beyond were too bright. I squeezed my eyes closed, covering them with my hand, but they still burned behind my eyelids. All the sounds of the city—coal plants churning, rumbling carriages, people snoring—were magnified a thousand times.

  The pain diffused through me, steady and throbbing. The sensation of my bones separating themselves from flesh had never been so great. My fingers curled against the open window, reaching for something that wasn’t there. Wanting to hold myself together but finding nothing more than air. My body started to shake uncontrollably, though of its own accord or by Montgomery shaking me out of some kind of fit, I wasn’t certain.

  “Juliet,” he called. “Juliet!”

  And then my vision telescoped back into focus, my hearing sharpened, my bones crunched together as the various parts of my body pulled back together. Bones along bones, muscles quiet beneath skin, like all the disparate notes of an orchestra tuning up in a concert hall, coming together with a single jerk of the conductor’s baton.

  I blinked, returning to my senses. Montgomery’s hands on mine no longer felt rough as sandpaper. I re­discovered my own legs.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. I blinked again, taking in the room with eyes that no longer burned. A fire roared in the stove. Sharkey wagged his tail at my feet. I stretched my fingers out, studying them, waiting for the telltale pops and clicks.

  They were beautifully silent.

  “Well.” My voice was rusty, but I wet my dry lips. “I feel well.”

  Montgomery smoothed the sweat-soaked hair off my face. “It near enough killed you.”

  I couldn’t stop looking at my hands. Moving them, flexing the fingers. Something was missing, and when I realized what it was, I nearly laughed. The stiff, lingering pain I’d lived with forever was gone.

  This is what life was meant to feel like.

  “Have some water,” Montgomery said. I clutched the glass, drinking it greedily, then thrust the empty glass back at him. I wanted to cry with relief. I had been so worried and conflicted over nothing; the Beast was wrong when he said that I would miss that twisted, ill part of me. I didn’t miss it at all. Even better, if Father’s journals held the secret to my cure, surely they would hold the secret to Edward’s, too.

  I steadied myself against the door, no longer dizzy, but head reeling with our success. From the dining room came sounds of Lucy and Elizabeth arguing, but I couldn’t focus on anything except this feeling.

  Montgomery held my chin to study my eyes, checking for illness, but I could feel it, deep inside.

  I was cured.

  I had the urge to laugh. I was whole now, just like I’d always wanted.

  Montgomery had told me once that my unnatural curiosity about my father’s work was a symptom of my illness, just the same as the popping knuckles and pain behind my left eye. At the time I’d doubted him, wondering if it was truly possible to cure a dark heart, but now…

  “You were right,” I said, kneading the fabric of his shirt, wanting to never let go. We’d be married now, live the type of normal life that normal people did, church on Sundays and dancing on Saturdays and maybe, years from now, even pushing a baby pram through the park.

  He smiled, and I matched it, and I had never felt such sweet relief in my life.

  If only Edward could feel this way too…

  Sharp voices came from the dining room, rupturing the perfect stillness between Montgomery and me. Lucy and Elizabeth were arguing in heated voices, and Montgomery frowned and headed for the doorway. I started to hold him back, to savor a few more precious seconds of this calm I’d never known. But just because the world had turned right side up for me didn’t mean it had for everyone else.

  “No!” came Lucy’s voice.

  I stood in the doorway with Montgomery, watching as she balled her fists in the papers as Elizabeth tried to calm her. “It’s not true! It can’t be… .”

  “There’s no other way,” Elizabeth said.

  Lucy looked up suddenly and, through the layer of tears, her eyes met mine. Blinded by her own panic, she didn’t see how changed I was since the cure. She rushed over and grabbed me by the shoulders. “It’s all there, in the journal. The unknown ingredient. And it’s impossible to replicate. Juliet, there’s no hope for him!”

  Her hands dug into me like claws. I pried them from my shoulders and rubbed them gently. “Don’t say that, Lucy. We won’t give up. We found a cure for me—we’ll find it for him, too.”

  But Lucy couldn’t stop sobbing. She shook her head and then stumbled off to the kitchen for a rag to wipe her face. Balthazar pushed up from the table clumsily and went after her, offering her his handkerchief.

  Outside, the church on the corner chimed six o’clock mass. I glanced at the window, where the family across the street appeared at their door with rosy faces as they made their way to the Christmas Eve service at St. Paul’s.

  Elizabeth squeezed my hand. “I’m so relieved to hear your cure worked, Juliet, truly. But I’m afraid Lucy was right. We can’t do the same for Edward.”

  “Why not?” I asked, baffled. My hands were still now. My heart cured of darkness.

  “It came down to the unknown ingredient,” Elizabeth explained, clutching the letters.

  I bit my lip. “What is it?”

  To my surprise, her eyes shifted from me to Mont­gomery. She took a deep breath. “Montgomery, did Dr. Moreau ever draw your blood?”

  FORTY

  THE SOUND OF LUCY’S sobbing in the kitchen faded as the beating of my own heart grew. Beside me, Montgomery was tense as wrought iron.

  “What are you suggesting?” he said.

  “Did he, or didn’t he?” Elizabeth asked.

  Montgomery glanced at me as he dragged a hand through his hair. “Yes—all the time. There were few illnesses on the island, but malaria was a threat. Only to us, not to the islanders. I caught it a few times, and he drew my blood to study the disease before giving me a treatment to cure it, the same as his o
wn.”

  I recalled the conversation I’d had with Edward when he first told me what he truly was.

  Whose blood did my father use to make you? I had asked.

  I don’t know. I’ve never known, Edward had said.

  My god, it was all so clear now.

  Elizabeth continued, “When we decoded the journal, we discovered that the unknown ingredient was human blood. Moreau hadn’t wanted to use his own because of his advanced age. He wanted strong, young blood, and there was only one source to get it from.” She paused. “Edward was made from your blood, Montgomery.”

  “Mine?” His head shook in denial, even in anger, but I knew him better than that. There was an uncertainty to the way his hand hovered anxiously over his mouth, the same move he’d made a year ago when I’d found him again. That move betrayed tender emotions that he was afraid to admit. All his life he’d wanted a family. It was why he’d been so loyal to my father. It was why he’d kept Balthazar alive. When I was young, he had told me once, I used to watch the other boys play in the street and wish I had a brother.

  What a terrible twist of fate: Edward shared his blood—a brother of sorts. It meant if there was still some way to cure Edward, that Montgomery would have the family he’d so desperately wanted. Edward would, too.

  Montgomery paced by the windows, and it struck me that this information might be far more welcomed by Edward than by Montgomery. Over the past year Montgomery’s sense of mercy had given way to a harsh desire for justice. Would this information soften him at all? Give me back the boy I’d fallen in love with? Or would it only make him more determined to kill Edward?

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Elizabeth. “If we only need Montgomery’s blood to cure Edward, it should be a relatively simple procedure.”

  “That’s the problem, I’m afraid,” Elizabeth said. “Montgomery’s blood was tainted with malaria at the time. The malaria played some role in the composition of Edward’s genetic material, but when Moreau treated it, the malaria was cleaned from his body. Without that strain, we won’t be able to replicate it. It’s winter in London. The closest mosquito is halfway around the world.”

  “It’s true, then,” I muttered. “There really is no hope for him.” Even spoken aloud, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I had always thought Edward’s and my fate were intertwined, and yet here I was cured, meant to live a long, healthy, wholesome life—yet for Edward there was no future but melding with the Beast.

  “How much time do you think he has left before the Beast takes over completely?” Elizabeth asked.

  “A few days. A week, at most,” Montgomery said shakily.

  “As it is, he can barely keep himself in one form or the other,” Elizabeth said. “I know you don’t wish to hear this, Juliet, but if we can’t cure him, the kindest course of action might be to put him out of his misery.”

  Put him out of his misery.

  I remembered a rabbit, long ago, laid out on an operating table being dissected alive by medical students. I’d taken an ax to the rabbit to put it out of its misery. But Edward wasn’t a rabbit. However he was created, he was a person now. How could I do the same to him?

  I looked at Montgomery. He had wanted Edward dead all along, but could he truly learn he had a blood relation, only to kill him?

  “You can’t kill him,” a voice said. Lucy stood in the kitchen doorway, tears dried and a hard resolve on her face. “I’ve just been downstairs talking to him—” She silenced me when I tried to object. “Balthazar went with me. I was safe. Edward had a right to know all of this, since it’s his life we’re talking about. He’s woken and is back to himself, for now, though the Beast is just beneath the surface.” A look of tenderness crossed her face. “You can’t kill him for crimes that monster inside him committed. It isn’t fair.”

  Lucy was right—here we stood discussing Edward’s fate, when he should have some say. Montgomery called after me, but I ran into the kitchen that still smelled of rosemary, and descended the stairs.

  The basement was quiet. Put him out of his misery, Elizabeth’s voice echoed. No, no, no. I knew I could find a way to cure him, too. I wasn’t my father’s daughter for nothing. We could replicate the malaria somehow, send Montgomery south to the tropics… .

  At the bottom of the stairs, I wrapped my hands around the cellar door bars. “I know Lucy told you it’s hopeless,” I said. “But I’m better now, Edward, and soon you will be too… .”

  My voice trailed off when I caught sight of the body crouched in the corner. Signs of the Beast were all over him—the way his fingers twitched, the powerful curve of his muscles. Lucy had been down here only moment before, but it didn’t take long for the Beast to transform.

  He looked at me with gold-colored eyes. I should have been afraid. I should have been terrified. Such beastly eyes, such a cruel-looking face didn’t belong in this world. Yet as he stood and sauntered toward the door, never taking his eyes off mine, it wasn’t fear I felt. It was a strange thrill, those old tinges of curiosity that had always drawn me to him despite my horror. I had thought all that banished when I’d been cured.

  And yet I still felt it. That shouldn’t have been possible, should it? Not now. Not cured. An uneasiness grew in my stomach, tasting of bile and mistakes.

  “Cured, are you, love?” he said. There was almost a flicker of humanity in those yellow eyes, before it burned away. “No, I don’t think so.”

  I KNIT MY FINGERS together, rubbing the smooth joints, reminding myself that they no longer cracked and ached. They were cured. The Beast was merely toying with me, working doubt into my head as he loved to do.

  “Yes, I am,” I said, trying to sound brave. “Montgomery and I made the serum, and it held. I can feel the difference in my body.”

  “I’m not talking about your lovely little fingers and toes,” he said. “Flesh, blood, bone—the body is only a container for who we truly are inside. Maybe the serum cured your physical afflictions, but it didn’t cure the illness of your soul.” There was a tenderness in his voice, a truth in his gaze… he could capture me, a wolf stalking a deer, if I wasn’t careful. I stepped back, shaking my head.

  My heart started to thump harder, in time with his fingers tap-tap-tapping on the cellar bars. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m a different person now, body and soul.”

  But a coldness crept from the old stone foundation, weaving among my skirts to my bare legs. It was quiet down here, a million miles from London, from the island, even from the others arguing upstairs. In a way, it felt right to be down here.

  The Beast’s eyes fell to the chained handle of the cellar door. “There was a different door once,” he said quietly. “A red door on a jungle island.”

  I took another step back, frightened by the memory. A red laboratory, paint bubbling beneath my fingertips as a fire raged in the compound, my father trapped inside. And most memorable of all, Jaguar waiting for me to open the door—just a crack—so he could slip inside and kill my father.

  I had done it. I’d helped him kill my father. And yet that had been the old me, sick of body and soul.

  “You say you’re cured. You say all that darkness is behind you. But would you change what you did?” the Beast asked quietly.

  One would have to be sick to be capable of killing her own father. The new, cured me could never have done something so ruthless. And yet. My eyes sank closed, as my heart beat harder, painfully, wrenchingly.

  “No.”

  His voice was softer now. “Would you still have opened that door?”

  And this is what it came down to: surely a normal girl, that girl I’d imagined pushing a baby pram through a garden and dancing on Saturdays, couldn’t be the same girl who helped kill her father. But I was still that girl, still my father’s daughter, still the one who, even now, would open that door if faced with it again.

  “Yes.”

  He smiled grimly, though there was no glee in it, as though for once he understood
how heartbreaking this was for me. “No serum can change who you are. Nor should you change. Genius or madness—it all depends on who’s telling the story.” His hand stopped tapping, and that humanity flickered again in his eye. “You’re perfect as you are, my love.”

  I took another shaky step away from him, fearful and confused, and hurried up the stairs. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t get away from his words.

  He was right. No serum could cure who I really was—a Moreau, through and through.

  IT WAS LATE WHEN I rejoined the others. I told them I was exhausted and wanted to be alone, then picked up Sharkey and climbed to the attic nursery. I liked the quiet here, the stillness of the unused toys, Sharkey’s grainy fur beneath my fingers.

  I sat in the rocking chair and leaned my head back, watching the moon beyond the city’s skyline. It was so easy now to move my neck, my hands. Their former stiffness was nothing but a fleeting memory.

  But the Beast was right. A coldness lingered in my heart and always would, no matter how much I lied to myself.

  I shouldn’t have been so single-minded in the way I viewed Father’s research. Elizabeth had told me Father was more than just a madman, but I hadn’t listened. The Beast had seen the truth on me, plain as day, among the jungle vines of the greenhouse. Even Lucy—even Newcastle—had known that science in and of itself wasn’t good or bad.

  Sometimes, even, it was a necessary evil.

  As I petted Sharkey, I watched the tendons on the back of my hand plucking like piano strings. I had tried to deny the darkness inside me, but all this time, perhaps I should have embraced it for the potential good it could wield.

  Sharkey jumped out of my lap, stretching on the rug so that half his body was thrown into moonlight, half still cast in shadows. I sat straighter as an idea tickled the back of my head.

  Enough with the secrets.

  Enough with hidden horrors.

  There was only one way to protect Edward from the King’s Club’s machinations and also ensure that no one would replicate or condone what they were trying to do ever again.