The Madman's Daughter (Madman's Daughter - Trilogy)

by Megan Shepherd

  I pressed myself into the tack room wall, lost among the hanging bridles and dangling saddle leathers. Edward approached slowly, his hands out, palms down, as if to steady a frightened animal.

  “It’s all right, Juliet. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Maybe he should have looked different—sinister, or monstrous. But he didn’t. He looked just like the bruised and broken castaway clutching a tattered photograph on the Curitiba. His gold-flecked eyes were intelligent and deep—eyes that still haunted my dreams.

  I shook my head, biting back the tender sting of betrayal. “How could you, Edward?”

  “I tried to tell you.” His dark eyes consumed me. “Before you left, I tried … but what would I have said? You’d have loathed the sight of me.”

  “Because you’re a monster!” I hissed. “You killed all those creatures. You killed Alice!” My foot grazed something on the ground that rang with the sound of metal. The pitchfork. I darted for it, but he was on me in a second, moving faster than humanly possible. He wrenched the pitchfork out of my hands and threw it into one of the stalls. I hurled myself at him, but he picked me up as easily as a rag doll and shoved me against the wall.

  His eyes burned. “Don’t,” he whispered. Begged. “Don’t fight me. It’ll only bring on the change.”

  “What change?” I asked. His fingers felt like they could snap my wrist as easily as a reed. “What change?”

  But he didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. I’d seen the three-toed prints, the six-inch-long claws. He was so close I could see his nostrils flare. His pupils were wide and black, slightly elongated like an animal’s. My breath caught. “It’s impossible. In the woods, it was chasing us.…”

  “That was only a bobcat that had escaped the laboratory cages. You were already so scared. It wasn’t hard to convince you it was the monster. I just wanted to get you back to the compound, where I could watch out for you. I never wanted to hurt you. Or any of them. I don’t even remember killing them—that’s how it is. I become another creature.”

  His jaw twitched. “Your father made me like this. He tried a new technique, something revolutionary that didn’t involve surgery. He said he used a chemical composition taken from human blood. It changes the cellular constitution of animal flesh. He thought he had transformed me from animal to human, but he was wrong.” Edward’s dark eyes could have swallowed the world. “You can’t ever destroy the animal.”

  His knuckles were red and swollen, and I could feel the bones grinding unnaturally beneath his skin as he held me against the wall. I remembered what Father had said about the monkey.

  A new technique. Changing the constitution on a cellular level without ever having to use a scalpel.

  Edward had been his first. Now he was trying to do it again.

  “I’m not a monster, Juliet. I’m everything your father intended. Intelligent. Compassionate. Loyal. But I’ve a darker side. I look human, but the animal flesh still lives inside me. Its bones alongside my bones. Its blood in my veins.” His eyes were glowing, hungry. “I can barely control it.”

  “From whom did it come?” I asked with a hoarse voice.

  He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “You said he used human blood to extract the cellular traits to make you human. Whose blood did he use?”

  Edward shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never known.”

  “What about the animal?” I asked. “He must have started with some kind of creature.”

  Edward cast a glance at the door, as though remembering the feel of the wild. “It wasn’t just one. He began with a jackal but added cellular traits of others. Heron. Fox. Those are just the ones I know about, but there are more—I can feel them.”

  He flexed his hands, studying the bones as though he barely believed it himself. “The doctor explained the process, but he kept my files secret. As far as what I was … I don’t remember anything. I only remember waking up in the laboratory shackled to a table, to a gray-haired man taking notes. He was delighted. He thought me a great success. I knew things—words, objects. The rest I figured out through books. I read about men’s clothing and the London flower markets and primate biology. I borrowed my own history from the pages of novels and plays. My name from Edward III. The story of Viola from Twelfth Night. My family’s estate, Chesney Wold—that’s from Dickens.”

  He continued in a rush. “The servants—Alice and the rest—they were kind, though I think I unsettled them. I stayed in the compound, never interacted with the villagers. But then after a few weeks, something happened. I was near the beach at night. A beast had cut its leg. The smell of blood … I don’t remember the details precisely. They didn’t find the body for days.”

  “And Father didn’t care that he’d created a monster?”

  “Your father didn’t know. None of them knew. I hid it. Alice saw me once rinsing blood off my hands and mouth. She suspected—but it was simple to keep her quiet. She frightened so easily. But then it happened a second time. And a third—they still haven’t found all the bodies. The lack of infection here slows decomposition.” His throat constricted. “I took the dinghy and left before any of them knew. Before I killed again.”

  Suddenly he looked as vulnerable and lost as the first time I’d seen him, curled in the bottom of the boat. “I thought I’d die in that dinghy. When your ship found me, when the doctor’s own assistant brought me back to life and was headed for the very place I’d left, it seemed like escaping the island was impossible. As if my fate was tied to this place. And then there was you. His daughter. You had no idea who he was, or what he was capable of. What other monsters he might create.”

  He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a crumpled and torn piece of paper. I took it with shaking hands. The edges were so worn they were soft as fabric. The photograph.

  “You asked me what it was. It’s a woman holding a little girl by the hand in a garden. It used to be on the shelf in the salon with the rest of the photographs. I took it when I left because I wanted to remember why I was leaving. To remember there is good in the world, flowers and happiness and families. It wasn’t a world I belonged in, no matter how much I wished I did.” He paused. “The photograph was of you and your mother.”

  I thought of him leaving the island, blood still on his hands, ready to die of exposure. But he hadn’t died. Above all else, we were both survivors.

  He slumped against the door. “I thought I could make up for everything. Do something right, for once. Protect you from him.”

  The tiles rattled overhead. A growl, too close.

  “The beasts are on the roof,” I said, my voice just a whisper. “They’ll kill us. Let me go, Edward. Please.”

  “They can’t get through me. They know what I am now.” A slow line of sweat ran down his face. A beast snarled again outside, but he didn’t flinch.

  I spied an old bucket, empty except for a hoof pick. I eased closer to it with each breath, while I tried to buy myself time. “Father recognized you when we first arrived. That’s why he tried to drown you.”

  “He was furious I’d left. That first night, he told me I’d be forgiven as long as I obeyed him and kept my identity secret.”

  I inched my hand toward the bucket. “Why bother? What did it matter if Montgomery and I knew?”

  He hesitated. “He thought it would serve his purposes for you not to know. It’s all one big experiment to him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He tried to match us, Juliet. He was trying to push us together, to keep you away from Montgomery. He found a use for us after all—to see what would happen if a human bred with one of his creations. We were both only experiments to him.”

  My legs went weak. I grabbed a bridle to keep myself steady. No, he wouldn’t. And yet I knew he would. Outside, glass shattered. I heard a few shouts. From Puck, maybe, but the voice was carried off by the wind. I glanced at the back wall. The big rifle was missing from the gun rack. Montgomery had it somew
here. God, where was he?

  “But I’d never have gone through with it,” Edward said in a rush, oblivious to the chaos outside. “I’d never have tricked you. It’s different with you, Juliet. I can control myself better when you’re near. You drown out all other noise in the room. Back in London, maybe I won’t need to kill. If you help me.”

  I inched my hand toward the hoof pick, but he stepped closer, his gaze dropping into the bucket. I curled my fingers into my palm, but we both knew what I’d been trying to do.

  “Please. He made me this way. You can make it right.”

  A gunshot rang out from the courtyard. Edward whirled, growling. I darted for the door, but he grabbed my waist and hauled me back.

  “Montgomery!” I yelled. “In here!” I struggled to get free of Edward’s arms.

  “He can’t help you, don’t you see?” Edward grunted. “He made Alice. He’s as bad as the doctor.”

  I heard my name called outside—Montgomery was shouting for me. Another gunshot rang out. Something flashed by the door, leaving only dust in its wake.

  Edward heard my gasp and turned.

  “They’re inside the walls,” I said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  SNARLS TORE THE AIR. A shelf of tiles crashed right outside the barn. Two more gunshots.

  Edward dragged me into the tack room and slammed the door, sealing us in. In the second his back was turned, I grabbed the hoof pick and hid it in the folds of my skirt.

  “I can protect you, Juliet,” he said. “We’re similar, you and I. Both children of the same monster. Both capable of his same atrocities.”

  I pressed the pad of my thumb into the pick’s sharp end. “That’s not true. I haven’t killed,” I said.

  “Not yet. But you would. To defend Montgomery. To defend yourself.” He lunged at me. I gasped and struggled, but he only wrestled the pick from my hand.

  He studied the sharp end, as if to prove his point. “There’s a darkness inside you. Don’t deny it—you know it’s true. You feel it. It’s the animal in you, stirring, hungry for unnatural things. Just like me.”

  He turned and hurled the pick against the back wall, where it dented the wood with a thud. I threw my hands over my ears, pressing my eyes shut. But I felt his presence in front of me, coldness and scars. His hands covered mine, drifting into my hair, his fingers running along my scalp. “I loved you the first moment I saw you. Helplessly. Passionately. I love you more than he does.” His breath was just inches from my own.

  “Stop. Please.” I squeezed my eyes harder. I should have twisted away, but my body didn’t obey. “You know it’s impossible. You’re a murderer.…”

  His hands tightened in my hair. “And what do you think Montgomery’s doing out there? Don’t you hear the gunshots? We’re all animals! We all fight to survive.”

  His skin was on fire. His lips grazed my neck, and my larynx tensed, ready to scream. My eyelids shot open, my vision glassy and unfocused.

  “We belong together. Not to serve your father’s mad experiment. But because we’re the same.” His open palm covered my heart, just grazing the exposed skin above my neckline. I gasped at his touch. Fear and thrill were divided by such a fine line that I couldn’t tell which plucked at the tight strings in my chest. And was he really so wrong? I did know about the darkness he spoke of. As much as I loved Montgomery, he couldn’t understand it like Edward.

  Something thudded at the door, and the wooden latch splintered. The door burst open. Edward spun around, nearly knocking over the lantern. Montgomery stood three paces away, a gash running down his face, with the rifle aimed at Edward.

  “Get away from her,” Montgomery said. Mud streaked his clothes. “I’ll blast a hole in your goddamned chest.”

  “Montgomery, don’t!” I yelled. I shouldn’t have cared about Edward’s safety. He was a monster and a murderer and the last person I should defend. But it was too late.

  Montgomery paused just long enough for Edward to attack. A low growl rumbled in Edward’s chest before he leapt across the room, knocking Montgomery’s gun to the floor.

  I screamed—it was as if Edward was suddenly a different creature, wild and violent. Gone were the gold-flecked eyes, now black as night except for an electric ring of yellow iris around slitted pupils. His clothes strained over muscles that seemed to grow larger by the second. The way he moved was calculated, threatening, like he was stalking prey.

  He knocked Montgomery down with the force of three men.

  I wanted to scream for him to stop, but my voice was gone. Edward was changing. Its bones alongside my bones, he had said. Its blood in my veins. The animal part of him—the jackal, the fox, along with whatever other bits and pieces of various species Father had added—really did live inside him, lurking, waiting for its chance to transform Edward into the monster Father had made him.

  His knuckles were red and knobby, so swollen I thought they might split and seep blood. As I watched, his fingers seemed to grow. Tendons snapped. The metacarpal bones grated against each other. The hair on his arms darkened, until he looked nearly as beastly as the wild dogs that haunted the outskirts of farms.

  I dug the heels of my palms into my eye sockets, convinced his transformation must be a trick of my eyes. But when I looked again, it was the same. The palmar ligaments in his hand twisted and popped, bending the fingers. He grabbed the door to slam it shut. The way his gnarled fingers knotted, the sweaty handprint on the door looked as though he had only three fingers. Just like the three-toed prints on the cabin porch. But what animal could he have been made from that had only three toes?

  A heron. One of the animals Edward had listed. The realization nearly knocked me flat.

  Montgomery struggled to his feet. Blood dripped from Edward’s knuckles, though he hadn’t cut them. He balled his hands in pain and growled deep in his throat. Three black claws slid out from the knuckles on each hand. They were retractable, so in his human form there had been no sign of them lingering beneath the surface. One claw was missing on his right hand, I realized—cut off by my own shears.

  I stumbled and my hip connected hard with the corner of the saddle stand, but I felt nothing. Shock had rendered me blank inside. I’d wanted not to believe it. The change in Edward was hard to define. He was larger. Darker. And yet as my eyes slid over his face and body, I couldn’t name one clear thing that was different. I’d have said his fingernails were black, and yet when I really looked, they were unchanged. It was like looking at stars—one could see them clearly only from the corner of one’s eye.

  But the claws, at least, were no trick of my eye. He raised them like deadly knives in Montgomery’s direction. “Edward, stop!” I screamed. But he didn’t seem to hear me.

  Edward slammed Montgomery against the wall of bridles with enough force to crack the boards. The seam of his shirt split around his shoulders. He had gotten larger. I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of it.

  Montgomery managed to twist out of his grasp. Leather straps fell, tangling around them. If I could get closer, I could pull one down and try to get it around Edward’s neck like a noose.

  Edward curled his gnarled fist. The black claws dripped with blood. Suddenly they retracted, and he punched Montgomery so hard that the wall cracked under his weight.

  “Stop!” I said.

  But Montgomery got back up. Blood trickled from his mouth. Edward threw another punch that Montgomery evaded. Something silver gleamed in his hand—a broken metal bit from one of the bridles, sharp and ragged at the end, dangerous as a dagger. Or claws. He slammed it into the side of Edward’s neck.

  Edward howled. He wrenched the broken bit out of his flesh. For an instant he looked like himself again, and my heart twisted. I almost ran to help him.

  Montgomery grabbed my arm. “Run,” he said.

  But running was useless. Edward was already blocking the door. His claws were out. His face was the dark before a storm. He lunged for Montgomery, ducking just as Montgomery brought down
the broken edge of the bit. They fell to the ground, wrestling in the straw. Dirt choked my throat, blinded my eyes. Edward’s claws too were like daggers. He swiped at Montgomery, grazing his arm. I pressed my back into the wall, the hanging bridles dangling over me like a curtain. I ripped one down and wrapped the leather strap around my hand, waiting for a clear shot at Edward’s throat.

  Just as I was ready to lunge, they rolled, bumping into the table that held the lantern. It fell to the ground. Flames leapt to life in the straw.

  “The straw’s on fire!” I yelled.

  Montgomery thrust his fist at Edward’s jaw, causing him to fall back long enough for Montgomery to stand. Edward scrambled to his feet, ducking away from Montgomery’s fist. Montgomery swept out his leg, hooking it around Edward’s ankle. Edward slammed to the ground, his head smacking against the corner of the table with a sickening crack.

  Montgomery held his fists up, ready to strike, but Edward didn’t get up. His eyes were closed. Blood pooled beneath his head. Suddenly he looked like an innocent young man again, and my heart cried out that we were making a terrible mistake. Had it all been a trick of my eyes? Or my mind? Montgomery felt for his pulse, but I grabbed his arm.

  “Leave him,” I said.

  “I have to finish it.” He reached for the old iron spade in the corner. An image flashed in my head of the sharp edge coming down across Edward’s neck. My stomach clenched. I stared at the blood trickling through Edward’s black hair, blood that was warm and flowing. A groan so low I could barely hear it slipped out of Edward’s mouth.

  Still alive.

  I glanced at Montgomery. The spade’s rusted blade was caught on a tangle of leather straps that he tugged on angrily.

  A snarl sounded outside. Heat from the fire bathed me in an uncomfortable warmth and then, with a spray of sparks, a roof beam split and fell. I shrieked and covered my head. Montgomery rushed toward me, still holding the spade’s handle. I pulled it out of his grasp and threw it on the floor. “He’s no threat to us now,” I said. “The fire will kill him. Come on, before we burn with him.”