“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.
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.”