The blood drained from Montgomery’s face. He took a deep breath. “He can’t.”
It came to me then. A whisper of an idea.
“You made her,” I said. Not a question. An accusation.
He rubbed a hand over tired eyes. The wound had reopened, and blood seeped through the bandage.
“How could you?” I whispered, lips trembling. “Just like Father . . .” Blood rushed in my ears. I tried to stand, but he grabbed my h*ps and pulled me back to the grass.
“What’s done is done! If I’m to go to hell, so be it. But I’m not like him.” The force of his anger was a slap in the face. It wasn’t me he was angry at, but himself. He let me go and stood up, grabbing the iron bars outside my window. Like he deserved a prison.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “I knew that from the beginning. Your father and I had an argument. One of his creatures died on the operating table. I tried to warn him. I saw the errors in his work. But he’ll never admit to mistakes. He told me he was the doctor and I was a servant, and it would always be that way.” His knuckles tightened on the bars. “I wanted to prove him wrong.”
The breeze off the ocean blew a strand of hair into his face. He hadn’t put it in so many words, but I understood. By creating Alice, he had bested my father at his own work. With no formal training, as only a teenage boy.
And they called my father a genius.
I looked at him askance. I had underestimated him. We all had. As much as I cared about him, I always thought of him as the handsome, brooding assistant. Edward was the clever, educated one. Montgomery was a workhorse, strong and faithful.
But if he could make Alice, what else was he capable of?
“It was wrong.” He turned away from the window. “And now she’s dead, and so we are all if we don’t find Ajax.”
“Ajax?” I asked. “Don’t you think it was the monster who killed her?”
He frowned. “What monster?”
I paused. Didn’t he know? Alice had been terrified of something very real, and it wasn’t Ajax. Montgomery had been gone for months. Long enough, I supposed, for Father to create some terrible new creature without his knowledge.
The trees rustled in front of us. The sound of footsteps came from the jungle.
I slowly stood. Montgomery stepped in front of me protectively.
The footsteps grew louder.
Something was coming.
Thirty-five
MONTGOMERY PULLED A BLADE out of his boot. The footsteps were running now. Whatever it was, it tore through the jungle. I clawed at his arm. We had to get back inside the compound.
But Montgomery wouldn’t come. His eyes were the steely color of ice. He wanted to be there when the monster returned. He wanted to ram the knife into its murderous flesh.
The leaves trembled just beyond the tree line. The muscles in his arm tensed, ready to strike.
A figure came out of the woods, tearing at the leaves. I grabbed the blade from Montgomery. I had recognized Edward a second before Montgomery did, and that might have saved his life.
“Devil in hell,” Montgomery cursed. “You gave us a fright, Prince.”
Patches of blood streaked Edward’s shirt. Scratches formed lines over his face. He braced himself on his knees to catch his breath.
“Are you all right?” I asked, just as breathless. “Is something chasing you?” The jungle was silent, but silence could hide danger.
“I don’t know.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I heard noises. I ran. It might have been only my imagination.” His sleeve was torn. A gash ran down one arm. Blood seeped through his shirt where his shoulder met his neck. He touched the blood, wincing. “Damn thorns are big as my thumb.” He looked between me and Montgomery. “What are you doing outside the walls?”
He hadn’t been here. He didn’t know about Alice.
Montgomery slid the knife back into his boot. “I have work to do.” His voice was dead again. He wanted it to have been the monster, I realized, to exact his revenge. “I have a casket to make,” he muttered over his shoulder.
Edward’s face went slack. A question formed on his lips.
“For Alice,” I said hesitantly.
Edward collapsed against the wall, wiping a hand over his white face. “How? When?”
“While we were in the village. Something broke into the compound. It tore down the gate.”
“There are iron reinforcements.”
“Even so.” I took a deep breath. “Come inside. I’ll dress those cuts.” Between him and Montgomery, at least I was getting some use out of my medical knowledge.
We climbed through the splintered gate and passed the area outside the kitchen. They had moved Alice’s body, but the tiles were stained red. Edward was silent.
Most of the medical supplies were in the laboratory, but I knew there was a small kit in the servants’ bunkhouse. The quarters were spartan, simple, just as I’d imagined. Two beds for Balthasar and Puck and a floor pallet for Cymbeline, though he’d disappeared back to the village when the treatments stopped. The sheets were crisp and white. A woven ring hung above one of the beds, rich in red-and-gold threads, as if it was meant to capture nightmares before they could enter the sleeper’s mind.
I pulled open the desk drawers until I found a length of cloth and a pair of scissors.
“Sit down,” I said. “Take off your shirt.”
He pulled out the stool and obliged. His skin was pale except for his tanned arms and a sunburned ring around his neck. In addition to the cuts on his arm and his neck a dark-blue bruise covered his ribs.
“Thorns did this?” I said.
“Everything here’s dangerous. Even the damn plants.”
I poured iodine onto a clean rag. I should disinfect Montgomery’s knuckles, too, I thought briefly. But he’d never sit still long enough. I dabbed the iodine on Edward’s cuts. The sting didn’t seem to affect him, but when my fingertips grazed his skin, his stomach muscles contracted sharply.
“You’re too good for him,” he said.
I dabbed the rag carefully around his cuts. I didn’t need to ask who he meant. “He’s a good man,” I said. “He’s smarter than he looks.” I tried to keep my fingers from shaking. So smart he made Alice, I thought, but I kept that to myself.
“A good man wouldn’t have brought you here.”
I turned away to measure lengths of cloth. It wasn’t a discussion I was willing to have. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could win.