“It’s true, then,” I muttered. “There really is no hope for him.” Even spoken aloud, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I had always thought Edward’s and my fate were intertwined, and yet here I was cured, meant to live a long, healthy, wholesome life—and for Edward there was no future but melding into the Beast.
“How much time do you think he has left before the Beast takes over completely?” Elizabeth asked.
“A few days. A week, at most,” Montgomery said shakily.
“As it is, he can barely keep himself in one form or the other,” Elizabeth said. “I know you don’t wish to hear this, Juliet, but if we can’t cure him, the kindest course of action might be to put him out of his misery.”
Put him out of his misery.
I remembered a rabbit, long ago, laid out on an operating table being dissected alive by medical students. I’d taken an ax to the rabbit to put it out of its misery. But Edward wasn’t a rabbit. However he was created, he was a person now.
I looked to Montgomery. He had wanted Edward dead all along, but could he truly learn he had a blood relation, only to kill him?
“You can’t kill him,” a voice said. Lucy stood in the kitchen doorway, tears dried and a hard resolve on her face. “I’ve just been downstairs talking to him—” She silenced me when I tried to object. “Balthazar went with me. I was safe. Edward had a right to know all of this, since it’s his life we’re talking about. He’s back to himself, for now, though the Beast is just beneath the surface.” A look of tenderness crossed her face. “You can’t kill him for crimes that monster inside him committed. It isn’t fair.”
Lucy was right—here we stood discussing Edward’s fate, when he should have some say. Montgomery called after me, but I ran through the dining room covered with scrawled pages and ciphers, into the kitchen that still smelled of rosemary, and descended the stairs.
The basement was quiet. Put him out of his misery, Elizabeth’s voice echoed. We’d made a successful cure for me, and I knew I could find a way to cure him, too. I wasn’t my father’s daughter for nothing. We could replicate the malaria somehow, send Montgomery south to the tropics. . . .
At the bottom of the stairs, I wrapped my hands around the cellar door bars. “I know Lucy told you it’s hopeless,” I said. “But I’m better now, Edward, and soon you will be too. . . .”
My voice trailed off when I caught sight of the body crouched in the corner. Signs of the Beast were all over him—the way his fingers twitched, the powerful curve of his muscles. Lucy had been down here only moment before, but it didn’t take long for the Beast to transform.
He looked at me with gold-colored eyes. I should have been afraid. I should have been terrified. Such beastly eyes, such a cruel-looking face didn’t belong in this world. Yet as he stood and sauntered toward the door, never taking his eyes off of mine, it wasn’t fear I felt. It was a strange thrill, those old tinges of curiosity that had always drawn me to him despite my horror. I had thought all that banished when I’d been cured.
And yet I still felt it. That shouldn’t have been possible.
“Cured, are you, love?” he said. There was almost a flicker of humanity in those yellow eyes, before it burned away. “No, I don’t think so.”
I KNITTED MY FINGERS together, rubbing the smooth joints, reminding myself that they no longer cracked and ached. They were cured. The Beast was merely toying with me, working doubt into my head as he loved to do.
“Yes, I am,” I said, trying to sound brave. “Montgomery and I made the serum, and it held. I can feel the difference in my body.”
“I’m not talking about your lovely little fingers and toes,” he said. “Flesh, blood, bone—only a container for who we truly are inside. Maybe the serum cured your physical afflictions, but it didn’t cure the illness of your soul.” The tenderness in his voice, the truth in his gaze . . . he could capture me, a wolf stalking a deer, if I wasn’t careful. I stepped back, shaking my head.
My heart started to thump harder, in time with his fingers tap-tap-tapping on the cellar bars. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m a different person now, body and soul.”
But a coldness crept from the old stone foundation, weaving among my skirts to my bare legs. It was quiet down here, a million miles from London, from the island, even from the others arguing upstairs. In a way, it felt right to be down here.
The Beast’s eyes fell to the chained handle of the cellar door. “There was a different door once,” he said quietly. “A red door on a jungle island.”
I took another step back, frightened by the memory. A red laboratory, paint bubbling beneath my fingertips as a fire raged in the compound, my father trapped inside. And most memorable of all, Jaguar waiting for me to open the door—just a crack—so he could slip inside and kill my father.
I had done it. I’d helped him kill my father. And yet that had been the old me, sick of body and soul.
“Would you change what you did?” the Beast asked quietly.
One would have to be sick to be capable of killing her own father. The new, cured me could never have done something so ruthless. And yet. My eyes sank closed, as my heart beat harder, painfully, wrenchingly.
“No.”
His voice was softer now. “Would you still have opened that door?”
And this is what it came down to: surely a normal girl, that girl I’d imagined pushing a baby pram through a garden and dancing on Saturdays, couldn’t be the same girl who helped kill her father. But I was still that girl, still my father’s daughter, still the one who, even now, would open that door if faced with it again.