“If you’re here,” I said carefully, “does it mean all the islanders are dead?”
“Dead, or close enough to it.” His words were flat, but his broken voice betrayed him.
“What happened?”
He glanced again at the balcony, and then frowned at me shivering in the snow. “You’re freezing out here. Let’s go inside, and I shall explain everything.”
“I’m not a fragile child who can’t handle a little cold. Tell me.”
He watched me through the darkness as though weighing whether or not to believe me. At last he removed his suit jacket and wrapped it around my bare shoulders, rubbing them through the fabric. The friction wasn’t nearly as warming as his proximity. I’d forgotten his smell, fresh hay and sunlight even in the midst of the city.
“I had no choice but to leave,” he began. “The compound had burned. The islanders had reverted to feral creatures and taken to the jungle. They didn’t know how to hunt for themselves or feed. I made my home in Jaguar’s old cabin, thinking I could at least help them adjust by breeding the rabbits and feeding the beast-men myself. But their instincts took over, and it wasn’t rabbits they wanted. They hungered for larger prey, and turned on each other instead. After a few months, they forgot I had ever been a friend to them. I was forced to hunt them down one by one, and kill them before they killed me.”
His voice held steady, but the way he ran an anxious hand through his loose blond hair betrayed him. He had loved the creatures, even helped give life to many of them. When I’d first arrived on the island, the beast-men had been civilized creatures, living in villages and eating only vegetables, even praying in a church of their own making. Yet once Father had taken away their treatments, they quickly regressed into the animals they were, and in the end all Montgomery’s scientific genius and high morals were reduced to nothing more than kill or be killed.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He looked away, into the hedges. “You were right when you said they should never have been created. It was mad of him to do it, and folly for me to help him. Killing them mercifully was my penance.” His voice dropped as he glanced at the balcony again and stepped closer. “But one escaped, Juliet. I went back to bury the bodies of those who died in the compound fire, and Edward wasn’t there.”
His words were low and thick with warning. Meant to shock me, and yet how could I be shocked when just the night before I’d been in that very man’s arms? The scratches on my shoulder burned beneath the piece of red silk so hot that I was certain Montgomery would feel them.
“He survived the fire,” Montgomery continued, mistaking my silence for distress. “For weeks I hunted him. He left me notes, begging for a chance to cure himself, wanting me to help him. But I didn’t—I couldn’t. Because that monster inside him left me letters, too. They came from a Mr. Hide, addressed to a Mr. Seek. The quarry writing to his hunter.”
The blood drained from my face. “The Beast can write?” It made me uncomfortable to speak of the Beast like this, as a thinking creature. I preferred to picture him as a mindless animal, but I knew that wasn’t true. He was sentient. He was clever.
“The handwriting was the same—written by the same hand, I mean, though with more of a slant—yet it was the ramblings of a demon. He said he was going to leave the island and come to London. That he deserved to know all the pleasure and pains in life, and he would do whatever he must to experience them.”
“You’ve been following him ever since?” I whispered into the night.
“Yes. He stowed away on the Curitiba when that damn Captain Claggan returned. He’s left me notes across half the world, tucked in the pockets of his victims as though this is only a game to him.” He rubbed some warmth into his face, or maybe he was trying to brush aside the memories. “He’s in London now. I arrived last week and have been searching for signs of him. I came to the party thinking with so many of your father’s colleagues gathered in one place, he might try to seek some sort of retribution. When I saw you here—”
“How did you recognize me?”
“I made some inquiries when I first arrived and discovered you were living with Professor von Stein and his niece.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “And I’d know you anywhere, mask be damned.”
His hand grazed mine. I allowed myself this brush of contact. I hadn’t forgiven him—it wouldn’t be that easy. And yet as we stood with the snow soaking into our shoes, in this city where we’d grown up together, it was impossible to pretend I felt nothing.
“I already know about Edward,” I whispered.
His hand fell away as a look of astonishment crossed his face. “You know? Have you seen him? Has he tried to contact you?” He grabbed my arm rough enough to shake me. In the blink of an eye the honest, hardworking boy I knew had been replaced by this single-minded hunter.
He has secrets, Edward had warned me. Secrets you still don’t know.
My lips were trembling. I wasn’t ready to have this conversation, inevitable as it was. Edward and I were connected in a deep way—a primal way—that Montgomery would never understand. It was the human in us fighting against the animal inside. It bound us, intertwining our fates, our desires.
“The murders,” I stuttered. “I heard about the Wolf of Whitechapel’s murders, and knew it must be Edward, back from the dead.” I was about to tell him the rest, how I investigated the bodies and found Edward at Lucy’s. And yet something held my voice. The look in Montgomery’s eyes was one of pure determination.