Her eyes burned feverishly bright. “You killed Inspector Newcastle lightly enough. You killed your father easily enough.”
I gasped at her accusation. This wasn’t a stranger. It was Lucy, my best friend, who had a good heart but wasn’t seeing reason right now.
“Go to bed,” I said. “In the morning you’ll see how insane this plan is of yours, and you’ll thank me for putting an end to it right here.”
I opened the door, but she didn’t make a move toward it. The light in her eyes burned colder now.
“I never thought I’d see the day when Juliet Moreau was too weak willed to do whatever it took to save a friend’s life,” she said. “Even if it meant ending it first.”
She slammed the door behind her.
I forced myself not to go after her. It was better this way. She was mad with grief and didn’t realize how insane it sounded to kill Edward so that we could cure him and bring him back.
Could we even do it? Could I?
I CRAWLED INTO BED, exhausted. It was dark outside, those witching hours between midnight and dawn when anything seemed possible and the idea of bringing a dead friend back to life was no more strange than rigging a remote manor with electric lights. If one was possible, why not the other?
Montgomery would tell me that I should stay far away from anything resembling Father’s dark science. He would remind me that I had another path open for me: my mother’s.
I closed my eyes, trying hard to picture her face, and a memory came from when I was seven years old and my parents took me to a carnival at Vauxhall Gardens. There were performing horses. Chinese jugglers. Ventriloquists. Mother had fanned herself with playbills and teased Father that he was going to run away with the bearded lady. Father swore that he’d never love a woman with more facial hair than himself, and she had laughed.
“Come with me to the music hall, Juliet,” Mother had said. “They’re playing Vivaldi on dueling pianos.”
Father scoffed. “Vivaldi, that repetitive hack? I’m off to see the monstrosities, myself. The Dog-faced Boy. Hairy Mary from Borneo.” He paused, as if for the first time noticing how I hung on his every word. “Would you like to come?”
My heart had soared. It was the first time he’d invited me to do something, just him and me.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember which one I had chosen: my mother and her piano music, or my father and his freakish science. In my head there was only a blank. Why couldn’t I recall?
I buried my head in my pillow. Now the past was hidden from me, just like my future. And the future seemed so terribly important in light of Lucy’s plan. Which was worse—letting Edward succumb to the Beast, or going against God—and Montgomery—to tear his body apart and stitch it back together again?
I tossed and turned in bed for hours, trying to foresee the future, before I remembered that I knew someone who specialized in precisely that.
I THREW OFF THE covers, the smell of caramel apples from my childhood memory lingering in the back of my head. It was still dark outside, with only a faint glow on the horizon to tell me that dawn was coming. I dressed quickly and hurried through the sleeping house. I ran through the fields. The carnival troupe had camped out in the fields since the Twelfth Night bonfire the night before last, and I half feared they would be gone, but their tents loomed beneath the dying stars. As I approached, darkness hid the stains and tears in the tents’ fabric, and it looked like a fairy village, magical and forgotten by time.
A voice came from behind me.
“It isn’t good to ramble at night. It betrays a wandering spirit.”
I turned to find Jack Serra silhouetted in the moonlight, skin so dark I couldn’t read the expression on his face. I stood straighter. “That’s ironic, coming from a member of a wandering troupe.”
“There’s method to our wandering,” he said. “I wonder if there is to yours, Miss Moreau.”
I wrapped my arms tightly across my chest, against both the cold and his probing question. He came closer and lifted the flap of the tent. Inside, a lantern glowed softly, showing a tidy bed and a neatly stacked pile of clothes. I hesitated to enter a strange man’s tent, but he seemed to read my mind and only laughed. “You’ve nothing to fear from me, pretty girl. You can trust me. Isn’t that why you came tonight?”
I gave him a hard look. “Can you read minds now, too, fortune-teller?”
“I can read your face. That’s enough. Now, come in.”
I followed him inside, where he motioned to a stool. The tent was warmer than I’d expected, but I didn’t unclench my arms from across my chest.
“You never finished telling me what my fortune means.” I paused to take out the water charm I still wore around my neck. “About a child being like a river headed for the ocean. Finish it, please. I’ll pay you however much you want.”
I held out my palm flat, insistently, but he didn’t take it.