And yet try as I might, I couldn’t pull that trigger. In some terrible way, I agreed with part of what he said. Having the Beast meant I wasn’t the most violent person in the room, nor the darkest. Besides, it was Edward’s face looking at me, and a little bit of Montgomery’s as well, and even a bit of my own.
“You can’t do it, can you?” There was a ring of sympathy to his voice that had never been there before.
Suddenly, one of the cabinets flew open, and Lucy sprang down, the surgical knife gripped tightly in her hand. At last I understood why the pots and pans were on the floor—she’d emptied the cabinet as a place to hide.
She hurled herself at the Beast. “Maybe she can’t, but I can.”
TWENTY-ONE
LUCY DUG THE BLADE into the side of the Beast’s neck before he could react. I froze. This was Lucy, who was afraid of practically everything, who had never so much as smashed a spider under her shoe.
“I should have done that the first time!” she yelled.
She drove the blade deeper into his neck, letting his blood spill out onto the floor, but he overpowered her. I screamed as he pulled away, wrenching the knife from her, letting it clatter to the floor.
At the same time, Montgomery and Balthazar appeared in the kitchen doorway with rifles. Shock flickered over Montgomery’s face but died quickly: he was a trained hunter, and it didn’t take him but a second to raise the rifle.
The Beast clamped a hand over the bleeding wound on his neck, stumbling out of the kitchen’s rear exit toward the winter garden. Balthazar lumbered after him, while Montgomery knelt by my side.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Hurry. If he goes back outside, he might find the girls.”
A bellow sounded from the direction of the winter garden, interrupting me, and we all jerked our heads around.
“That was Balthazar!” Lucy gasped.
The three of us raced toward the winter garden. Visions flashed in my head of terrible things: the Beast with a knife through Balthazar’s gut, carving him up like his victims in London.
Montgomery made it to the winter garden first and stopped short. I caught up to him and my hand shot to my mouth.
“Dear God.”
Balthazar stood by the side of the glass-enclosed garden between the white statuary of a deer and a fox. He was perfectly unharmed, though I’d never seen such a look of shock on his face. He let out another bellow—not one of pain, but of fear.
In the center of the room, within a growing pool of blood, lay the Beast. I didn’t need to see his face to know he was dead. I’d seen enough dead bodies in my day to recognize a chest that didn’t rise for breath, limbs that sagged lifelessly.
Behind him, standing perfectly still, was Hensley. His hands were covered in blood up to the elbow, bits of blood and flesh splattered across his face and high-collared shirt. In his hands he clutched the Beast’s heart, red and dripping.
He looked at us calmly, then wiped the back of one hand over his blood-splattered cheek. “I was tired of him,” Hensley said. “He wasn’t much fun.”
He dropped the heart to the floor, where it splashed in the puddle of blood.
A shiver of terror ran up my spine, vertebra by vertebra. I had thought there couldn’t be a creature more dangerous than the Beast, and yet now he lay dead at my feet, defeated so easily by a little boy who had died three times over. When I glanced at Montgomery and Lucy, they were both as white faced as I was.
Hensley turned to me.
“Now can I have a story?”
I WATCHED THE SUN fall on Ballentyne from the windows of the library, where I sat on the green velvet couch, still dressed in my bloodstained clothes, reading to Hensley from a book of Scottish folktales. My hands were unsteady as I turned the pages, and my voice shook. Montgomery sat across from me with the silver pistol hidden under his coat, aimed at Hensley should his mood suddenly shift.
I finished the story, and Hensley burrowed closer to me with sleepy eyes. “Another one, please.”
I glanced at Montgomery, who nodded solemnly. I kept reading. After his startling display of violence, we had decided to do whatever Hensley asked while the others ran outside to fetch Elizabeth. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the little boy nestled at my side. It was hard to imagine him capable of such violence while he was listening to bedtime stories.
Footsteps sounded at the door and Elizabeth rushed in, panic on her face—Lucy must have told her what happened. Moira was right behind her. Elizabeth swept into the room and pulled Hensley into her arms.
“Enough stories, darling,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “Look at you—dirty through and through. Moira will give you a bath and then read all the stories you like.”
She passed the sleepy boy, even now nodding off and rubbing his eyes with little fists, into Moira’s arms. Only once they were gone, and the library door was closed and locked, did I let out a ragged breath.
“Blast it all, Elizabeth, you didn’t tell us he was that dangerous.”
She gave me a hard stare. “He saved your lives, didn’t he?”