“Three times a week for the villagers. Once a day for Balthazar and the more advanced ones. Ajax used to need it twice daily.” He finished with Cymbeline, who squeezed his eyes shut during the entire injection.
“There now. That’s very good,” Montgomery said.
Cymbeline gave him a smile and took off like a wildcat. Montgomery cleaned the needle and repacked his medical bag, then reached for the vial in my hand, but I held it back.
He shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking. And it’s nonsense.”
“What am I thinking?” I asked, clutching the vial. It was a pale yellow color, like the pancreatic extracts I took, but thicker. He snatched it out of my hand.
“You’re wondering if your treatment is similar.”
“Is it?”
My bluntness caught him off guard. He clicked his bag shut. “No. It’s nothing at all the same.”
“No one’s ever heard of my treatment. The chemists look at me like I’m mad.”
“Your father designed it specifically for you. He tried to produce it for the public, but the medical board shut him down.” He picked up the bag and leaned closer. A strand of hair worked its way loose and fell into his eyes. Nothing about him could be tamed for long.
“Your mind is racing,” he said softly, his voice caressing my worries. “You’re looking for problems where there are none. I’ve known you from the time you could barely walk. I’d know if there was something … unnatural.” His gaze shifted to something behind me in the courtyard. His jaw tensed.
Father strode toward us from the main building. I knew that anger on his face. But it was Montgomery he was after, not me. Still furious that Montgomery had lied about Ajax being alive.
My hand twisted into a fist. I leaned in to Montgomery and whispered before Father could hear. “Come to my room tonight. I need you to see something.” I slipped around the worktable just as my father stormed up with all the cold rage of a coiled snake.
NIGHT HAD SETTLED WHEN Montgomery finally came to my room. The air hung with the promise of rain. He’d spent all afternoon beyond the compound walls, digging graves for the deceased. Shadows stretched over his face, handsome still after such grim work.
He stopped in the doorway. His blue eyes glowed in the soft light, lashing my heart like a string. But warning was written in them, too.
“Why am I here, Juliet?” he asked. We both knew there would be trouble if he was caught alone in my room, especially while Father was in a rage.
“Just come in for a moment,” I said. My nervous hands drifted to my blouse’s mother-of-pearl buttons.
His lips were sunburned. He glanced around to make sure no one watched from the courtyard. But there were always eyes, somewhere.
He shook his head, reluctant to cross Father. I grabbed a fistful of his shirt, hard buttons and crisp linen, and pulled him gently inside. His eyes still held warning, but there was something else there now. Desire. Seeing it stilled the breath in my lungs. I closed the door behind him.
The oil lamp cast a warm glow over the whitewashed walls. In the semidarkness, his presence blazed even more.
“You’ve been digging graves,” I said.
A spot of sandy dirt clung to his right ear, missed in his bath. “Eight dead so far. That we know of.”
“Did Jaguar really kill them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. A year ago I’d have said you were crazy. But things are different now.” He stepped closer. His hair was still damp from the bath. Lye soap mixed with the smell of coming rain. “Don’t worry. You’re safe here.”
He thought I wanted reassurance that whatever killed them wouldn’t kill me. But no one could make that promise. “That’s not why I asked you here. I need you to look at something.”
He brushed his hair behind one ear, just missing the patch of sand. An urge overcame me to wipe it off with my thumb. But my hand would have shaken, knowing what I was about to ask him to do. I tangled my hands in the folds of my skirt instead.
“What is it?” he asked.
I took his hand and led him into the corner, where we couldn’t be seen from the window. His tired feet dragged, but his eyes were alert.
“I want to know why my medication is so similar to theirs.”
He let out a pent-up breath. “Is that what has you worried? I told you, it isn’t the same.”
“Close enough to make me need more proof.”
He touched my shoulder tenderly, like he’d done to Alice. “It’s impossible. You look too much like your mother to have been created in a laboratory.”
I tried to read the unspoken words in the lines of his face. His concern was deep and genuine and honest. He didn’t believe I was anything like the creatures. But he could be wrong.
“It’s more than that,” I said. “I feel odd sometimes. Like there’s something not entirely right about me, as if I’ve inherited some of Father’s madness. Only now I wonder if it’s something more.…”