WE RODE BACK IN miserable silence. There was no sign of Edward, no matter how much I’d yelled for him. Montgomery assured me that a man who could survive twenty days in a battered dinghy could make it back to the compound. But at sea the only thing hunting Edward had been the inescapable sun and his own haunted memories, and here there was a monster loose.
Someone shouted ahead. Through the leaves, the compound’s walls appeared. Balthazar came running, big chest huffing, eyes rimmed in red. I recalled the first time I’d seen him, when I thought he was hideous. Now, after the horrible faces of the python-woman and Antigonus and the others, he looked as human as any of us. I hoped Montgomery would never stop giving him the treatments. I couldn’t stand to see Balthazar regress.
“What is it?” Montgomery asked. His hand tightened on the rifle.
“Come quickly,” Balthazar said, out of breath. His lower lip trembled. “Hurry.”
Montgomery handed the reins to Father and jumped from the wagon. He took off at a jog with Balthazar. Ahead, I saw the wooden gate was broken. The boards had been splintered by a terrible force.
Father brought up the wagon quickly. No one waited to take it. Puck, Alice, the other servants—they weren’t there. Something clenched in my stomach. A primal need to get inside. To find out what had happened.
Father thrust the reins at me. “Stay here. Hold Duke.”
“But what happened?” I asked. He ignored me. I twisted my fingers in Duke’s mane, watching the men disappear through the broken gate. Why was no one saying anything? Why didn’t someone come for the horse?
There were tracks in the mud outside the gate. Slipping, gliding tracks like the monster had made before. But the gate was reinforced with iron bars. The monster couldn’t bend iron, could it?
A man yelled. I recognized Montgomery’s voice.
“Stay here and be damned,” I muttered, and led Duke and the wagon to a tree. I looped the reins around a branch and hoped he wouldn’t try to bolt.
I bunched my skirt in one hand as I climbed through the broken gate. My breath caught. The courtyard was a wreck. The tomato plants had been trampled, the lanterns broken, the chicken house shattered.
Voices came from the kitchen. I stepped toward them slowly.
“The devil take you!” Montgomery yelled from around the corner. “The devil take you all!” The anguish in his voice made me stop in my tracks. He was usually so controlled, even when he was seething with fury.
I pressed my cheek against the stone wall. They were right around the corner. I only had to look. But somehow, I was afraid that looking would change everything.
“The devil take you!” Montgomery yelled again. Curiosity took control, compelling me to look at whatever had Montgomery so enraged.
Montgomery and Father were outside the kitchen door with Balthazar and Puck. Montgomery paced back and forth wildly, hulking shoulders straining like a beast’s. A trembling hand covered his mouth.
“Calm down,” Father said. His hand was shaking, too. “You’ll drive yourself mad.”
A flash of white on the kitchen floor caught my eye. I blinked, not sure I was seeing correctly. Alice’s white skirt peeked out from the doorway, flat on the ground, with two pale bare feet streaked in mud. A line of dark blood dripped from her big toe into a puddle. The feet didn’t move. As certain as I’d ever been of anything, I knew those feet would never move again.
Alice was dead.
THIRTY-FOUR
MONTGOMERY SLAMMED HIS FIST into the kitchen door. The wood splintered too easily, and he growled, unsatisfied. He swung his other fist at the solid stone wall.
I rushed forward. “Stop it!”
But it connected with a sickening crack. Blood flowed from his shredded knuckles. I locked my hands around his wrist.
“Stop it!” I said. “It won’t change anything.”
“Let go!” His loose hair was caked in sweat and grit. The muscles in his arm flexed like steel clockwork below his skin. It took all my strength to hold his fist back from pounding into the wall again.
“He’s going to hurt himself,” Father said. “I’ll prepare a shot of morphine.”
Montgomery reeled toward him. “I don’t want your drugs. I don’t want anything from you!”
Father ran a shaking hand over his chin’s thin white hairs. For a moment I thought he might apologize or, at the least, offer some condolence. But then his black eyes iced over. “That suits me. You were worthless anyway.”
Montgomery’s arm jerked back. In another second his fist would have slammed into my father’s face, but I threw my arms around him.
“Come on,” I whispered. I touched his hot cheek, his tense shoulders, trying to calm him. Alice’s cold flesh lay by our feet on the kitchen floor. Her blood soaked into the mortar. It could have been me. It could have been any of us. The thought nauseated me. “You need air. You need to clear your head.”
He strained against my arm, pacing like a wild animal, but I was able to gradually pull him away from her body, through the broken gate, and away from the compound.