Duke stopped at the edge of the clearing. I studied the quiet cabin, wondering what I’d find inside. Maybe a feral jaguar, ready to slash at whatever warm, breathing thing came through the door. I climbed off Duke and tied him to a post with a quick knot. I scrambled onto the wooden porch, feeling the same fear in my throat as I’d felt the first time. The three-toed tracks had long ago disappeared, but they lingered in my memory.
I peered in the glass window, but it was dark inside. I unlatched the door before I lost my nerve. The door gave an inch but stopped, either locked or stuck. I pushed my weight against the door, then harder, and harder again, until it suddenly gave. I fell into Jaguar’s cabin.
Shaken, I stumbled to my feet. It seemed as vacant and abandoned as before—even the flower was gone from the mantel. I brushed aside dead leaves with my boot and found shattered pieces of the glass vase. I ran back to the window to make sure Duke was still there, needing the reassurance.
He grazed calmly in the fading light in the front yard. I let out a deep breath and rested my forehead against the cool windowpane. I wasn’t sure if I felt an urge to laugh or to cry.
Duke suddenly jerked his head up. Loose grass fell from his mouth. He seemed to stare straight at me, ears twitching, though I knew it was too dark to see into the cabin. An uneasy feeling stirred in my belly. I felt trapped. An overwhelming urge to get out of the cabin pulled at my gut. Maybe it was the pieces of deer inside me, the animal instinct, sensing a predator was near.
I flung open the door.
Montgomery stood in the doorway, his shirt torn, his hair loose.
“Juliet?” he started, but I grabbed his shirt in my fists. I touched his face, his chest, his hair, to make sure he was real.
“You’re here,” I said. “You’re alive.”
“What are you doing here?”
I buried my face in his chest. My breath came ragged. He was alive. We were going to get off the island, all of us, in one piece. I started shaking. He wrapped an arm around my back.
“Try to calm down,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right. Here, sit down.” He led me to the dingy bed. “What are you doing here?” he asked again. “It’s dangerous. I told you never to return to the jungle.”
“I had to find you. Where’s Jaguar? Are you all right? What happened on the beach?”
He pushed his hair back. There was a fresh cut on his arm, but it no longer bled. He started to answer, but I jumped up.
A figure filled the doorway.
“Jaguar,” I said. I slid my hand into my pocket. Found the shape of the shears.
He paused in the doorway, his slitted cat eyes shifting between us. He walked upright, but only barely. His clothes were gone. Fine golden hair covered his body like a thick mane. He’d regressed, but not as much as the others. I pulled the shears out of my pocket, but Montgomery pushed them back in.
“We can trust him.”
Trust him? Jaguar slipped in but hovered around the outer edges of the room. He moved more gracefully than ever, as though he might drop to four legs at any moment and slink closer. His long claws clicked on the wooden floorboards. He could slice our throats in a single swipe, and I was supposed to trust him?
His golden eyes met mine. I felt a twist inside me, fear and incredulity mixed in one.
“He’s lost the ability to talk, but not his reason. He’s not like the others.” Montgomery sat down in the desk chair. “He conspired with the water beasts to flip our boat. He dragged me here.”
My head whipped to Jaguar. “You? We nearly drowned!”
“It was me they wanted. They weren’t trying to kill me. They wanted to warn me. They didn’t know if you and Edward could be trusted.”
I watched Jaguar from the corner of my eye. He squatted in the corner, half hidden in shadow, so still not even his whiskers moved.
“Warn you of what?” I asked, breathless.
Montgomery ran a hand through his hair, his eyes shifting to Jaguar. “The beasts are going to attack the compound. They’re after the doctor, but they’ll kill anyone they find.”
The hair on my arms rose, making my skin tingle. “When?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight? Edward’s there!” I jumped up, pacing. “We’ve got to leave the island. Now.” But Montgomery stayed seated. He rubbed his jaw. There was something he wasn’t telling me.
“What is it?” I asked.
A low growl came from the corner. Jaguar came out of the shadow, slinking toward the fireplace. I took a step back, but Montgomery didn’t seem concerned by his presence.
The heel of his boot tapped nervously against the rotten floorboards. Then he stood abruptly. “It’s nothing. You’re right, we need to leave.”
He left the cabin and jumped down from the porch to untie Duke’s lead. I hurried after him, but suddenly Jaguar’s rough paw was on my arm, holding me back. A scream rose to my lips but died just as quickly. It took one look into his eyes to know he wasn’t going to hurt me.
“What do you want?” I whispered, feeling the weight of being alone with him.
He nosed my hand palm up. I swallowed, remembering the rough feel of his tongue on my skin.
He slid out a long, black claw. He traced the tip over my forearm, lightly at first, and then slightly harder. Just enough to scratch but not draw blood. My breath caught. The pain was tolerable. What he was doing was not.
Writing.
He etched three careful scratches into my flesh. Three straight lines in a row. A crude circle around them.
“Three?” I said. Three toes? Three claw marks across the victims?
But he just growled deep in his throat and slunk back into the shadows.
FORTY-TWO
NIGHT HAD FALLEN, AND we rode home in the moonlight. Montgomery dug his heels into Duke, pushing the horse to tear at the soft ground as I wrapped my arms around Montgomery’s waist and buried my face in his shoulders. Leaves whistled by, no more than an afterthought. But not fast enough. My worries hovered before us, just out of reach. I wanted to claw at the air to make us go faster. Every passing moment was a moment the beasts might attack. And Edward waited for us at the compound, unaware of the coming storm.
Moonlight glinted off mica flecks in the compound’s rock walls as we arrived. Montgomery slid off Duke and helped me down from the steaming horse. We hurried to the compound and pounded on the gate.
Balthazar let us in. I stumbled through, still reeling from the breakneck ride. His face broke into a grin when he saw Montgomery. The smile faded at the hollow looks on our faces.
“Is everyone safe?” Montgomery said, breathless.
Balthazar nodded. His eyes were darting nervously. He might not be clever, but he could sense when something was wrong.
“Where’s Edward?” I said.
Balthazar pointed a thick finger at the storage building. “In his room.”
Relief showered me like moonlight. I started through the mud, but my feet stopped when I heard Montgomery speak.
“And the doctor? We should warn him at least.”
“Hasn’t returned,” Balthazar said.
Montgomery threw me a questioning glance. “He left? Why?”
I took a deep breath. We’d planned every aspect of our escape, but we’d never talked about what would happen to Father. I never intended to say good-bye, let alone bring him with us. I’d assumed Montgomery felt the same. But looking at his face now, I realized he was still caught up in their bond. Montgomery still thought of him like a father, even after everything.
“He went to the village to try to find you.”
Silence fell for a beat. I knew what he was thinking. The beasts had found my father somewhere in the jungle and sliced his heart out like those of the others. We might never see him again. For the first time, it felt real. We might leave with no good-byes, just a boat drifting out to sea, never to return.
I started to speak, but Montgomery dug his fingers into my arm and dragged me out
of Balthazar’s earshot. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll hitch the wagon. Get Edward and collect the water and supplies. As fast as you can.”
A scream came from the jungle, sharp and piercing.
They were coming.
The gate hung open. Balthazar stumbled toward it, reaching for the wooden beam. Montgomery raced to help. They shoved their weight against the door, scrambling to seal it.
“Hurry,” Montgomery called over his shoulder.
Panic beat in time with my heart. My feet felt suspended in molasses. I couldn’t move fast enough. The beasts would move like lightning, though. They’d come over the roof tiles or break down the gate.
I stumbled to my room and threw my things into the old carpetbag. A bedsheet would give us shade from the relentless sun. Mother’s jewelry and the silver comb and hairbrush would fetch a price. The wooden box that held my treatment. My thoughts clutched at all the scattered things I couldn’t take. Wilted lavender Alice had left on my dresser. The copy of Longman’s Anatomical Reference I’d saved from our library on Belgrave Square. Now I never wanted to see it again.
I dragged the carpetbag outside and hurried along the portico to Edward’s room. A cloud covered the moon, plunging the courtyard into shadows. My eyes played tricks on me. I thought I saw shapes climbing through the windows, over the roof. But when I shook my head, nothing was there.
Puck joined Balthazar at the front gate. They pressed their ears to the wooden boards, looking puzzled. They didn’t know the beasts were just outside, planning an attack. I wondered if they’d fight back. Puck glanced at me. His scaly mouth peeled into a grim smile.
Puck might be wild enough to join in the frenzy. But not Balthazar. Balthazar would ball himself up and let the beasts tear at him. He saw me watching, and his face brightened. Again, I felt a twist of guilt at my lie. But I hadn’t a choice. If he regressed like the others, turned violent in the crowded London streets …
A tile crashed to the ground. I jumped, scanning the roofline. I imagined the beasts there, watching, waiting, stalking, led by a black-clawed monster.
My hand found Edward’s doorknob and squeezed the odd latch. “We have to leave,” I said in a rush.
But the room was empty. The trace smell of sulfur hung in the air from a recently lit match. The lantern sat next to the pallet he used as a bed. Beside it was a pile of clothes borrowed from Montgomery, an old pair of shoes, a stack of books from the salon, and a crystal decanter.
We can sell that, I thought, and snatched it up.
The decanter left a wet ring on one of the books. The cover caught my eye. I’d seen this book on the shelves in the salon when I’d arrived, but then it had gone missing.
Edward III.
I’d read it, long ago, when it used to be in our library on Belgrave Square. It was a lesser-known play, attributed to Shakespeare by some. It was bound in dark-green cloth, standard size, nothing remarkable except for the gold foil imprint in the spine: three straight lines surrounded by a circle.
The same symbol Jaguar had carved into my skin.
My hands started shaking. I flipped through the book, nearly ripping the pages. Half the pages were dog-eared. Some had been torn out. A long gash sliced through the back cover, made by something razor-sharp. I let the book fall open to one of the marked pages. A few lines were underlined in black ink, over and over, so hard it ripped the paper.
And he is bred out of that bloody strain
That haunted us in our familiar paths.
Witness our too-much-memorable shame …
Of that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales.
Edward, the Black Prince. I tried to remember all I’d read of the Black Prince’s character in plays. To the French, Edward III was a young boy raised by a cruel father—a general—who pushed him to military victory through ambition and brutality, turning the poor boy into a fiend. Not unlike the snips of story Edward had given us. The feeling went out of my feet and I knelt on the ground, frantically pawing through to the marked pages.
It was all there. The same story. The same person.
Edward had lied to us. He wasn’t Edward Prince. He was Prince Edward—the Black Prince from Shakespeare’s plays. This was his mystery. He’d stolen his identity from a little-known play.
The book fell out of my hands. This discovery meant one of two things. Edward might just be a runaway like he claimed, giving himself a new identity to flee some crime or maybe a girl he’d gotten with child. Or it could mean …
Sweat dripped down the sides of my face. I brushed it away, taking deep breaths. I fought to think with my head instead of my heart, which wanted to shout Edward’s innocence. But my heart was weak. I had to cut it out of my chest and think logically.
Or it could mean Edward was one of my father’s creations.
Named after a Shakespearean character, just like Balthazar and Cymbeline and all the others.
Just like me.
A faint idea seeded in the back of my head. Alice had always avoided Edward, as had Cymbeline and the other servants. Had they known? Had they avoided him because they feared him—because they knew him to be the monster?
I collapsed to my knees. No, it was impossible. The monster’s murders began before we even arrived on the island. Unless … Edward had never been on the Viola. He could have left the island in the dinghy, running from something—my father—and fate had brought him back.
My mind raced, trying to remember where he’d been when the murders happened. Too many times he’d slipped away to his room or into the night. A hundred chances to kill. But he’d been with us in the village when Alice was murdered. No. That wasn’t entirely true. He’d run away after shooting Antigonus. He could have raced to the compound before us, killed her, and circled back later. He’d been covered with blood and scratches, after all.
Thorns, he’d claimed. More like Alice’s fingernails.
I tore through the pile of clothes, ripping at the hems, digging through the pockets, trying to find some further evidence. I yanked the sheets off his straw pallet. My heart refused to believe my head. Edward wasn’t a monster. He’d protected me. He’d protected my father! I’d seen his face when he shot Antigonus. He’d gone white as a cadaver, horrified by what he’d done. He could never claw a person to death. He didn’t have claws! And I’d seen the monster. I’d smelled its musky scent. I knew the weight of its presence.
I fumbled for the shears and thrust the sharp end into his mattress, ripping a gash into the burlap. I tore it open and pulled out handfuls of straw, feeling for anything that might tell me the truth.
Nothing.
I crunched handfuls of straw in my fists. Jaguar’s mark flashed at me, mocking. Jaguar had known. He’d tried to warn us. Father must have known, too, but led us to believe Edward was a total stranger. Had he meant to kill him, that first day, when he pushed him into the water? Punishment for leaving, maybe. A lesson to show his creation who was in command. He’d made Edward from what—another panther? A hound? He must have done it while Montgomery was away. How proud he must have felt, to create a creature even more perfectly human than Alice, smarter even than Jaguar. Until his perfect creation had abandoned him.
Furious, I threw the half-empty mattress against the back wall. Straw rained over the damp ground that had been hidden under the mattress. My breath caught. Claw marks sliced across the stone floor. Long. Deep. Furious. And between them, dark-brown streaks of blood dried. Tracks ran through them. Three-toed.
My blood went cold. Something shiny glinted among the claw marks, and I picked it up. A silver button just like the ones on Edward’s shirt when we found him in the dinghy.
My heart twisted, wanting to deny it. But the truth was evident. His scarred face was just a mask for a fiend bent on spilling blood. I didn’t know how Father had done it or how Edward made those bloody footprints. Only that the truth of it chilled me to the bone.
I felt a warm breath on the back of my neck. Then a voice spoke in my ear, bo
th familiar and terrifying.
“Don’t run, Juliet,” Edward said, before his hand closed around my mouth.
FORTY-THREE
I FOUGHT HIM, BUT he was impossibly strong.
“Promise not to scream, and I’ll let you go,” he said. His hand held my jaw closed, sealing in my screams. I still smelled traces of lamp oil and sulfur on his skin.
I gave a jerk of a nod. The pressure was gone, and I leapt away from him, scrambling to the back wall and filling my lungs with air. Montgomery was right outside. If I screamed, he’d come running. But would he be fast enough?
“Don’t,” Edward said, reading my thoughts. “He can’t help you.”
Something primal and defensive—the animal part of me—took control of my muscles. For once my head was silent as it surrendered to that deep animal strength. With a growl I hurled the decanter at him. He blocked it with his elbow, but it shattered into shards of glass. They rained to the floor like a spring shower on stone steps, and for a moment I was back in the house on Belgrave Square, watching afternoon rain fall on the street outside. I blinked, wondering if I’d made a huge mistake. We weren’t animals, after all—at least not entirely. This was Edward, who had saved my life. Who had come to the island to protect me.
Who loved me.
Love was a human trait. Despite whatever material Father had started with, Edward was human now. Did he deserve to die because of it?
But the primal part of me was only interested in survival, and it was stronger. I pushed past him, clawing at the door until I got it open. Outside, the courtyard pulsed with shadows. I could hear the beasts’ soft footsteps and barely still breaths. They were everywhere and nowhere. I clenched my jaw and darted across the courtyard to the barn. I heard Edward scrambling just a few steps behind me. I had only one chance.
I threw open the barn door.
“Montgomery!” I yelled.
But the wagon was gone. Duke wasn’t in his stall. I ran to the tack room. Empty. But it no longer mattered. Edward was already at the barn door.
The Madman's Daughter (Madman's Daughter - Trilogy) Page 29
