The Madman's Daughter (The Madman's Daughter 1)

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 Balthasar 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 face, 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 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.

I found a grassy place against the outside wall where we could see the sparkling ocean. I sat down, but it took him some time to calm. I tore a strip of cloth from the hem of my skirt.

“Let me bandage your hand. You’re getting blood everywhere.”

His blue eyes met mine. The wild animal was still there, still restless. But there was pain, too. He sat down next to me and tied his hair back. I gently wiped away the blood from his busted knuckles. His jaw had a hard edge. He was so handsome it made my pulse race.

“I’m sorry,” I said, winding the strip of linen around his hand.

He didn’t answer.

I pictured Alice’s white feet in the mud, glad I hadn’t seen her cold, dead face. “I know she loved you,” I said before I could stop myself. “And I know I came between you. If I’d never come, maybe she’d still be alive.”

His deep eyes could carry every burden in the world. I tied off the bandage, tucking in the frayed edge. It was already damp with sweat and blood. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

“Did you love her?” She was dead, not even buried, but I couldn’t keep my frantic thoughts to myself. My voice rose in a hysterical pitch. “If I hadn’t come, would you have married her?”

His eyebrows were a line of worry. “What are you talking about?”

“You always wanted to save people. She was an orphan. The only missionary left. How could you not have fallen in love with her?”

“Blast and damn.” His head fell back against the wall. “I wasn’t in love with Alice. God, Juliet, I thought you knew. She wasn’t one of the missionaries.” He paused, not meeting my eyes. “She was a creation.”

My breath caught. I pushed my hair back with shaking hands. Alice? The sweet girl who carried the comb of my silver brush set, one of them? I felt my head shaking forcefully. “That’s impossible. She was human.”

“She looked human,” Montgomery said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His wounded hand tensed. “But she was created two years ago from a sheep and three rabbits.”

“Rabbits?” I put my fingers to my lips, as if I could feel the word. As if that might make it more believable.

Her harelip. They are all flawed, Father had said. I tried to piece it together, to make sense of the puzzle. Alice had dodged my questions about her past. God, I’d been such a fool. When I called Balthasar and the others animals, I’d been calling her the same.

“I thought you said it couldn’t be done.” I swallowed back my rising fear. “You said he couldn’t make them look completely human.”