A Cold Legacy

by Megan Shepherd

  DEDICATION

  For Lena,

  and our Scottish Highlands adventures

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Megan Shepherd

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  THE LAST TRAVELERS’ INN on the road from Inverness was no place to die.

  Freezing rain lashed the windowpanes as I huddled over a warm bowl of soup in a corner of the inn’s ground-floor tavern. Across the table, Montgomery rubbed a scar on his arm and stared out the window, scanning the muddy road for signs that we were being pursued. In the upstairs room just over our heads, locked away from the other patrons, Edward lay dying.

  I rested my hands on Montgomery’s anxious ones. “We’re safe here. No one would come after us this far north.”

  Beneath the worn canvas shirt and the pistol strapped to his side was the young man I’d agreed to marry. His silver ring circled my finger, scuffed and dented after our escape from London. For the past three days, Lucy, Edward, and I had huddled in the back of the carriage while Montgomery and Balthazar had driven us through snow and rain without complaint, north to Elizabeth von Stein’s estate, Ballentyne Manor, where we hoped to hide.

  I threaded my fingers through Montgomery’s. My hands were cold, as always. His were warm and solid. They belonged to a surgeon, not a servant, but I suppose it didn’t matter anymore. Now, like me, he was simply a fugitive.

  He turned back to the window. “I keep thinking the police will find us.”

  “We didn’t leave any evidence for them to trace. Besides, Elizabeth stayed behind to make certain they don’t suspect us. They’ve no reason to tie us to the . . . the deaths.”

  Deaths. Murders is what I should have said. Just days ago, in the King’s College’s basement laboratories, we had brought to life five of Father’s water-tank creatures that had then slaughtered the most dangerous members of the King’s Club. I could still picture the blood seeping from a gash on Dr. Hastings’s neck.

  Montgomery and I hadn’t yet spoken of what had happened at King’s College, though I knew the violence of it bothered him deeply. It had been terrible, but necessary—a fact we didn’t quite seem to agree on.

  “We were very thorough,” I added in a dry voice.

  A dark look crossed his face. He started to answer, but the sound of laughter drowned out his voice.

  Annoyed, I turned to the inn’s fireplace, where a dozen red-faced men and women in gaudy satin clothes swapped stories and pints of beer. They were part of a traveling carnival troupe following the winter fair circuit, and were the only patrons sharing the inn with us. A scraggly-haired woman finished telling a ghost story with a loud belch, and the others roared with laughter.

  I didn’t realize how tensely I was holding my muscles until Montgomery leaned in. “Ignore them,” he said.

  “It’s nonsense,” I muttered. “Telling ghost stories. There’s enough in this world that’s frightening. Only the ignorant would scare themselves on purpose.”

  Overhead, a floorboard creaked and I sat straighter, watching the ceiling, wondering how Edward was doing. Days had passed, and yet I hadn’t come to terms with the fact that he’d poisoned himself. He had tried to end his life before—misguided attempts to kill the monster inside him—but the Beast had always been too strong. It hadn’t been until the very end, when Edward and the Beast had nearly melded into one, that he’d been able to force arsenic down his own throat. He’d have been dead in hours if Montgomery hadn’t stolen drugs from a chemist’s shop outside of Liverpool to counterbalance the worst of the poison’s effects. It wasn’t a cure, but it was a chance.

  Now, overcome by delirium and fever, he was caught somewhere between life and death, between being Edward and being the Beast. Lucy was up there now, tending to him at his bedside, while Balthazar stood guard outside the door.

  The floorboards stopped shifting, and I relaxed. I leaned forward, letting my hair screen my face, and toyed with the ring on my finger.

  “Ignorant, are we, lass?”

  I tossed back my hair to see the speaker—a thin man with a potbelly gut that stretched his cheap green satin tunic. The leader of the troupe, I assumed. The room had gone silent, save the sounds of the fire popping and the barmaid cleaning glasses. None of his troupe was laughing now.

  “It was a private conversation,” I explained. “You shouldn’t have listened in if you didn’t want to hear what we had to say.”

  The thin man’s eyebrows shot up in surprise that a young woman would speak to him so boldly. He dragged his wooden stool next to mine, leaning in so close that I could smell the sour beer on his breath. “You’ve a fine accent. City folk, are you? If you’re smart, you’ll turn back.” He dropped his voice to a theatrical hush. “Strange things happen this far north. Flashes of colored light. Pools of black water. They say half the women smell of witchcraft.”

  He was trying to frighten me, and it wasn’t working. “It’s probably the smell of soap,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d recognize that particular odor.”

  The barmaid snickered.

  Montgomery’s hand tightened over mine. “The last thing we need is to draw attention to ourselves,” he whispered in my ear.

  He was right. I started to turn away, but the thin man grabbed my stool with surprising strength and dragged me over until my face was only inches from his. “If you’ve a better ghost story, then by all means, lass, tell us.”

  Montgomery let out a sigh.

  I narrowed my eyes. I should go upstairs. I should leave it be. But my nerves were agitated, and my patience was a prickly monster. If this man thought I didn’t have my own horrors to tell, he was wrong.

  I started to open my mouth. I could tell him about a madman banished to an island who twisted animals until they spoke and walked on two legs. Or a murderer stalking the streets of London who left behind white flowers tinged with blood. Or I could go upstairs and unlock Edward’s door and let the Beast’s six-inch claws show these carnival performers what real terror was.

  “We’ve had a long journey,” Montgomery answered for me. “Our nerves are frayed. We didn’t mean to offend.” His words had a finality to them that sent the man grumbling back to the fireplace, where the old woman let out another belch.

  “I could have handled it on my own,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “By dumping your soup in his lap, most likely, and starting a brawl. I told you, we need to remain unnoticed. Now I should check on the horses while there’s still a bit of daylight. Eat that soup before it goes cold. You need it.�
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  He pulled his oilskin jacket over his shirt and disappeared into the freezing rain. Alone at the table, ignoring the din from the carnival troupe, I watched the steam rise from my soup while I calculated the distance to Ballentyne Manor. We’d been riding for three days, but the rain and snow and a broken strut had slowed us, so it might be another full day before we arrived. Not much time to keep Edward’s fever stabilized until we could find a cure.

  Footsteps approached, and a man sank into the seat that Montgomery had vacated. I jerked out of my calculations, frowning. He wore the same gaudy green tunic as the rest of the carnival troupe, but I hadn’t seen him earlier. I certainly would have remembered if I had. His skin and hair were brown, marking him as a foreigner from Africa or the Americas. I narrowed my eyes.

  “I already told your leader that you won’t get any stories out of me,” I said.

  “It isn’t a story I want.” His voice was deep and raspy, with traces of a faraway accent. “It’s you, pretty girl.”

  I raised my eyebrow, ready to fulfill Montgomery’s fears and dump the soup in the man’s lap, but he only set a deck of fortune-telling cards on the table.

  “Or rather, it’s your fortune.”

  I rolled my eyes. I suppose to him I must look the perfect gullible victim: a young girl dressed in wealthy clothes far from home. “I think you meant it’s my coins you want, but I’m sorry to say I don’t believe in fortune-telling. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” I started to stand.

  His mouth quirked in a smile. He flipped over the top card. I tried not to look at the symbol it displayed, but my curiosity won.

  The Fool. It depicted a man on a journey, bag slung over one shoulder with a dog following at his heels.

  I paused. The dog looked a bit like my little black mutt, Sharkey, and I was on a journey, though logic told me it wouldn’t be difficult to infer that a girl at a travelers’ inn was on a voyage. “Why did you choose that card?”

  “I didn’t choose it. It chose you.”

  I rolled my eyes again. “Does anyone actually fall for such dramatics? They certainly don’t work on me.” I turned to go. I should check on Edward and relieve Lucy and Balthazar of their watch. It would be a long day of travel tomorrow, and we’d all need our sleep.

  “You claim not to believe in fortunes,” the man said, hand hovering over the next card. “Yet you are intrigued, are you not? Come, pretty girl. One more card.” Though I knew it was a trick, my feet didn’t move. I jerked my head toward the deck begrudgingly.

  “Go ahead, then. One more.”

  He flipped the card. The Emperor, an arrogant-looking man with white hair and a foppish crown. “Your thoughts are consumed with a man,” the fortune-teller said. “A lover? A brother?” He studied me. “No, a father.”

  I sank back into the chair, every sense alert. The fire crackled while the carnival folk whispered among themselves. I could feel my own heart beating. I knew it was nonsense, but suddenly I was very curious to know what else the fortune-teller might say.

  Amusement flickered over his features. “Ask me the question that is on your mind. Then you can judge for yourself if fortunes are real.”

  I swallowed, glancing around the room almost guiltily. I didn’t believe any of it, of course. Science had long ago disproved fortune-telling. And yet I slid a coin across the table, dropped my voice, and tried to pretend I wasn’t desperate to know what he would say. “Yes, it’s about my father. I want to know . . .”

  But I couldn’t continue. Memories of Father were a hand around my throat, silencing me. The fortune-teller’s gold-flecked eyes met mine, and the rest of the room dimmed. “He has some hold over you, does he not? A hold you wish broken, but it isn’t that easy. A child can never escape her father.”

  His words struck too close to my heart, and I swallowed and looked away. “I can. He’s dead.”

  The fortune-teller didn’t blink. “Death, in these cases, doesn’t matter.”

  For a moment, his words held me in a rapt silence. I thought of my father: his affection for science, his ability to focus so completely on the task at hand, his ambiguous morality, his madness. All traits I’d seen glimmers of in myself. I pictured myself at his age: a gray-haired scientist, brilliant and terrible, just like him.

  One of the carnival folk let out a shrill laugh by the fireplace, and I blinked. The room came back into focus, along with my logic.

  “I know how this works,” I said a little too fast. “You aren’t psychic at all. You’re just good at reading people’s appearances and mannerisms. You know it’s highly likely that a girl my age would have a problem with some sort of man, so you throw out the obvious possibilities and gauge my reaction. Then you let me form my own conclusions. You’ve nothing to tell me except generalities that could apply to anyone.”

  I stood, rather satisfied with myself. I couldn’t deny, however, that there was a tiny part of me that had almost wanted to believe. In a world of science, a little magic would have been welcome.

  “Keep the coin,” I said more softly, and turned to go.

  “Silver and gold are not the only coin,” he said softly. “Virtue too passes current all over the world.”

  A shiver ran through me. Instantly I was a little girl again, sitting in my father’s lap as he read heavy volumes from his library. Euripides, I remembered, in the worn leather binding. I had tried to sound out the words when I’d been just learning to read, but Father had grown impatient and finished the phrase for me.

  “Silver and gold are not the only coin,” he had read. “Virtue too passes current all over the world.”

  It had been one of Father’s favorite sayings.

  I clenched my jaw. “Why did you use that phrase, in particular?”

  My question was interrupted by frantic footsteps on the stairs. The barmaid and the carnival folk all turned as Lucy came stumbling breathlessly down the steps. Ever since we’d left London, a glassy dullness had settled over her eyes. She’d learned her father was a terrible man, financing my father’s criminal research and plotting with the King’s Club to bring his science to fruition. On top of it all, she’d found out the boy she loved was a monster. When he’d poisoned himself, she’d been inconsolable.

  Her eyes locked to mine, the dullness in them replaced by a wildness that made my heart beat faster.

  “Juliet,” she said. “Come quickly. It’s Edward—the fever is breaking.”

  TWO

  I PULLED LUCY INTO the stairwell, out of earshot.

  “He sat up,” she breathed. “He looked straight at me and said my name. I saw it.”

  Edward had been delirious for three straight days, mumbling nonsense and thrashing in his chains. The promise—and danger—of him returning to health shot through me like a jolt of electricity. “Fetch Montgomery. He’s in the stable. Hurry.”

  She dashed down the hallway. I climbed the stairs two at a time, tripping over my skirt, and threw open the door to Edward’s room. It was a small room, with a single rope bed and old wooden dresser. Inside, a hulking man inclined over where Edward lay. To anyone else the giant would have looked a monster with his misshapen shoulders and hairy face, but to me he was like family.

  “Balthazar,” I said. “Is it true? Is Edward lucid?”

  “I can’t rightly say, miss.” His big fingers knit together in hesitation. “He’s delirious now, that’s for certain. If he had a moment of clarity, I didn’t see it.”

  I sat on the bed next to Edward, reaching out to touch his sweat-soaked forehead. “Edward,” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  There had been a time when Edward cared for me deeply, and I hoped that the sound of my voice might reach through his delirium. But his only response was to jerk his head away as though my touch burned him. Thick metal chains twisted around his torso and locked his hands together—a safeguard. Edward and the Beast had been a step away from melding completely in those last moments in London, and now that we’d counterbalanced the poison, we
weren’t certain who—or rather what—we’d find when the fever broke. Would one half overpower the other completely? Or would they meld into a sort of hybrid personality? Either way, Montgomery had insisted on leaving the chains securely fastened, and I hadn’t argued. After all, I wasn’t convinced it was truly Edward who had been in love with me as much as it had been the Beast. Though perhaps obsessed was the better word. To a deadly degree.

  “Then you didn’t see him sit up and speak?” I asked.

  Balthazar’s lips folded in indecision. He’d developed a sweet protective instinct for Lucy, but he also wasn’t one to lie. “No, miss,” he admitted. “I was just outside the door. I think Miss Lucy . . . she might have wanted it badly enough to imagine it.”

  Bitter disappointment twisted my heart. Of course. We all wanted Edward back so badly that it was easy to hope for miracles. This was the boy who had come back to the island to protect me, who’d understood both my dark and light sides. The only other person who had ever stood in my leaky London attic with a mangy dog and threadbare quilt and wanted nothing more out of life.

  My hand hovered a few inches above Edward’s shoulder. His eyes were closed, his face still as death. I felt his pulse; it was raging fast. The idea of him calmly sitting up and speaking seemed impossible. I didn’t blame Lucy for imagining it, though—only moments ago I’d been nearly desperate enough to believe the words of a fortune-teller.

  Lucy stumbled through the doorway with Montgomery behind her, medical bag in hand. He sank to his knees and checked Edward’s vital signs with the well-practiced skill of a surgeon.

  “Well?” Lucy asked anxiously.

  Montgomery set down his stethoscope. He wiped a hand over his face, but not before I saw the flicker of sadness there. The two men had once been at odds, but that had changed since Edward had sacrificed himself for us. Breaking the code in Father’s journals had revealed that Edward had been made with Montgomery’s own blood. Now he was the closest thing Montgomery had to a brother, in spirit and in flesh. “He’s still deep in the fever. His temperature is high, but it hasn’t broken.”

  “He sat up,” Lucy insisted. “He looked right at me, and it was Edward, I swear. It wasn’t that monster.”