They say a sort of peace falls over you when you know that you’re going to die. I had seen enough people die to know that wasn’t true, and yet as I watched the storm grow closer, I did feel a strange calm. It was a letting go of the determination that had kept me alive this far. It was the acknowledgement to Death that he had won, and I was a fool for thinking I could defeat him. I’d cheated him enough for one lifetime.
I sank to my knees in the puddle of blood and alcohol. I’d killed so many people, including the man I thought was my father. If this was the trade I had to make to keep this science lost to time, then I was ready.
Montgomery was right. We only had one life. One chance to make the right choice. And this was mine: to burn with the rest of Ballentyne.
THIRTY-NINE
WITH MY HEAD BURIED in my arms, waiting for the moment when lightning would strike, I didn’t notice that the scurrying sounds had changed into footsteps.
“Juliet,” came a hushed whisper, “are you there?”
I jerked my head up. Montgomery’s voice sounded like a ghost.
His hands reached out from the grate.
“Montgomery!” I scrambled to the grate, threading my fingers through the bars. “I didn’t think there was a passageway to the laboratory.”
“I still have the map.” He held the crumpled old paper to the light. “Radcliffe’s men locked me in the cellar and I managed to make my way into the passages. There were markings on the map that indicated a passage once existed here, but it had been boarded up. I was able to break through. Now we just have to get you out.” He tugged on the bars, but they didn’t give.
“Listen to me!” I clutched the bars. “There’s no time for that. You have to get out of the walls. Get out of this manor, now. Tell all the servants to flee.”
Lightning crashed closer this time, and I shrieked. Montgomery at last noticed the bonfire I’d built of books of journals and soaked with alcohol. His eyes went wide. “What have you done, Juliet?”
“What needed to be done,” I said. “You were right. The science is too dangerous to exist. Once lightning strikes, the fire will burn the entire house, including Frankenstein’s journals.”
“Are you mad?” he said. “It’ll burn you, too!”
He pulled at the bars, muscles straining. I pushed on his hands, trying to pry them off the bars. “Just leave me. Go!”
A crash came from behind me. I smelled the ozone a second before I saw the spark. The entire room vibrated just as it had before, a humming coming from the metal equipment, and Montgomery grabbed my hand through the grate a second before the lightning rod pulsed.
A spark flashed. The alcohol caught. The room erupted in flames.
I screamed and covered my head with my hands. “Get out of here, Montgomery!”
I tore away from him, scrambling to the far wall as a wave of heat struck me, and threw open the window to let out the billowing black smoke. The servants and Jack Serra’s troupe would see it and know to get out of the house, but that still left Montgomery in the walls. He might not get out in time.
“I’m not leaving you here.” He pulled on the grate with all his strength, but it was useless. Only Edward might have had the strength, but for all I knew Edward was still unconscious—or worse.
I hugged myself into a ball, terrified of the painful death that would come. A scraping sound came, and incredulously, stone dust crumbled down from around the metal. Before my very eyes, the grate began to tear out of the stone. Montgomery let out a groan, pulling the bars even harder. I blinked in shock. It shouldn’t have been possible. I had heard stories of normal humans developing incredible strength in times of crisis, people able to lift huge amounts or run for miles with a broken leg. Such strength never came without a cost. Sometimes it could even kill a person.
“Montgomery, stop! You’ll hurt yourself!”
But he didn’t stop. Muscles straining to the point of giving out, he pulled on the grate until it tore out of the wall with a clatter.
“Climb through!” he yelled.
It took my brain a moment to comprehend that he had actually done it, before I scrambled toward him and crawled through the hole. I collapsed onto a grimy stone floor. It was cool to the touch, covered with dust and cobwebs. Everything was a strange kind of dark, like the world had been cast in shadows. I sat up, struggling for breath.
“You inhaled a lot of smoke,” Montgomery said. “It’s making you sick.”
I clenched my hands over his, squeezing tight. “I told you to run,” I coughed. “To save yourself. It’s impossible, what you did.”
His fingers brushed back my tangled hair, damp with sweat. “Love can sometimes do the impossible. You’re mad if you think I would have left you there to die.”
I pressed my lips against his. The sound of fire spreading through the manor roared in the distance, and the stone under our knees was warming, but I needed to feel his lips on mine. If we only had one life, then I wanted to live it right.
Something crashed in the house, jarring us out of the kiss. His arm tightened around my back. The muscles of his biceps shook strangely from the superhuman exertion; I needed to get him out of here and treat him properly before his muscles gave out completely.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re not out of danger yet.”
I grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the burning tower. Smoke was already seeping into the ceiling of the passageway. We moved faster, and I tripped over a brick and fell against the wall, flinching. The dust was disturbed here, and I looked closer at the uneven brick. I’d tripped over it before, with Hensley.
“We’re by the library!” I said. “That means this passage leads down to the tunnel that goes outside, the same one I used to escape the Beast.”
The roar of the fire was getting louder. It took me back to another time, another fire, one that roared into the island night. Father had died in that one. Maybe I’d die the same way, fated to end up like him.
No, I reminded myself. We choose our own fate.
Montgomery coughed harder. Smoke was so thick that it was hard to make out his face even from a few steps away. We kept low where the air was still breathable and descended stairs, sliding more than climbing, until the temperature lowered. The stone walls here were blessedly cool. Our feet splashed in the flooded basement.
“There it is!” I spotted a low wooden door that led to the outside. But when I turned around, my smile faded. One glance told me Montgomery’s superhuman strength was failing. There was only so long a body could do the impossible.