Renegade (24 page)

I saw confusion cross Grandmother’s face. She paled, undoubtedly wondering why I was acting so rudely toward our guest. I willed myself to be calm. Grandmother had had such great respect for Julian Bartlett, and in her mind a visit from his handsome young nephew from the Continent was an honor. This cordial, dapper Max Bartlett was the illusion that she had; it was all that she knew.

But I can play his game, too.

Straightening up, I flashed my most brilliant smile. “Of course. Forgive me—I had difficulty placing you, since I have only met you once, one evening at Dr. Bartlett’s house.”

He bowed again, as if my worry was a mere trifle.

Bloody bastard.

I saw Grandmother relax a bit; Jupe, finished with his exploration of Max’s hat and gloves, leapt up onto Grandmother’s lap. She began scratching his back with her thin, heavily veined fingers.

“I understand that you worked closely alongside my uncle during his last few months in the hospital? Is that correct?” Max asked.

“Of course. He had such care, such affection for our patients.” I leveled my gaze at him and felt my face flush even darker.

Max smiled, his perfectly white teeth gleaming.

“I know it is early, but”—he turned to Grandmother—“I was wondering if I could take Miss Sharp on a brief walk, just around the neighborhood, of course. I was unable to attend the memorial service for my uncle at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and it would give me great pleasure to hear of Miss Sharp’s memories of my uncle. He was like a father to me.”

“Of course,” Grandmother said warmly, gazing up at him in admiration. I felt nauseated.

Stepping forward, I said quickly, “I would be delighted to share some of my memories. If it would comfort you.”

He bowed gratefully.

Twenty

O
nce Max and I had walked several blocks away from Grandmother’s house, he took my arm in his in an intimate gesture, as if I were his wife. But I knew it was a way to control me, to keep me from turning upon him or from running away. The streets were rather busy this morning, so I couldn’t possibly attack him without making a scene. Carriages sped loudly along the street beside us, but their noise seemed like nothing compared to the thuds of my own heart. Although I wanted to kill him, I couldn’t possibly in this setting, among these people. Furthermore, I needed to figure out how he was behind William’s disappearance.

But my urge to hurt him, to kill him, was too strong, now that I knew he had murdered my mother; now that I knew he had been the one to take her from me.

“Keep your bloody self away from my Grandmother,” I growled softly as we neared Kensington Gardens.

“Ah, Abbie,” he said, patting my arm lightly. “But we have so many other important matters to discuss.”

“Where is William? And who is this creature I keep seeing in my visions?”

Max smiled widely, brilliantly. I saw, in the shadows under his hat brim, the small crescent-shaped scar on his chin from where I had bitten him that night he attacked me in Christina’s house. I felt much satisfaction upon seeing the scar, and I wanted to hurt him again. The rage rose within me to the point of being unbearable. But there were too many people—I couldn’t do it. I needed to deal my cards out carefully if I wanted to save William.

Still, I couldn’t hold my tongue from one matter: “You killed my mother, you smarmy cock.”

“I saved you, remember. I saved you from drowning.” His stare was enigmatic in that moment. “I couldn’t let you, my best project, drown. Frankly, I would have expected a bit more gratitude, love.”

“How did you kill her?” I snapped, a bit louder. “What poison did you use? How did you do it?” I felt myself trembling a bit.

Max looked down at me through his eyelids, clearly bored. We were passing a Catholic Church on Kensington High Street. Max stopped, keeping my arm locked in his own. He stared above us at a small crowd of pigeons perched upon the blackened stone carvings. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve lapsed a bit in my church attendance, and I’m feeling the need to make confession.”

He grabbed my wrist painfully hard and, almost before I could breathe, pulled me swiftly into the cathedral. Although the morning was bright and busy, we were enshrouded in darkness, silence, and solitude the moment the doors closed behind us. I had never been inside a Catholic church, and in these shadows, statues of saints with rose-painted lips and pale faces glowed eerily in the candlelight. The sanctuary seemed empty, and just as I wondered why no one attended a morning mass, I saw blankets and enormous canvasses covering the pews and half-empty paint buckets set upon the floors. The smell of fresh paint and splintered wood pierced the air sharply. It seemed as if the interior was being renovated, which explained the sanctuary’s emptiness.

Max pushed me behind a curtained doorway, into the interior of a tiny confessional.

In the dark, stifled air, before I could move or speak a word, he had his gloved hand at the base of my throat, and I felt his fingers tighten a bit through the lace of my high collar. “Your mother is a forbidden subject. Her death is a matter that I would advise you not to bring up with me. Ever again.”

I saw something dark flicker in his eyes, the lingering of something that I didn’t understand. I trembled in fear and confusion, but anger also pulsed within me. Max had no feeling toward his victims; he was sadistic. Part of me thought he would almost relish describing how he had poisoned my mother. I had not expected this reaction.

William. You must save William.

Only after I stilled myself, stopped struggling, did he loosen his grip upon my throat.

Then I stated quietly, trying to blink back tears, “You know where William is.”

“I do.” Max smiled. He stepped back from me a bit in the shadows as he lit a cigar. The confessional was terribly closed off, and I fought the urge to cough as the sweet smoke merged with the already persistent odor of wine and old wafers. “William is, actually, what we need to talk about—why I arranged this little rendezvous with you. You did a fine job last autumn.”

A fine job.

I felt shocked. Baffled.

“When I initially discovered what you had done, killing off Bartlett, Buck, Perkins, and Brown, I was, of course, enraged,” Max continued. “It had seemed impossible. I therefore planned to kill you, your friends, Lady Westfield and her nasty pug for that matter. You see, I will not surrender my immortality. Fortunately for you, I located something of interest in the interim, and I think matters will work out for the best. In fact, matters are working out quite well. I have a bit of a project going on, an experiment of my own … ”

The cannibal murders? Simon’s follower? What is Max doing? Who else is involved?

“What do you mean?” I leveled my gaze at him.

He sighed and blew smoke through one of the creased places in the confessional’s curtain. “That is another matter, which we will deal with at a later time. I think there is some more pressing information that you want from me … ”

“William,” I whispered, coldly. “Tell me where he is.”

“You must know, Abbie, that we have had another immortal in our group for years. This one is our very own Lady of Shalott.” He smiled, pleased and languid.

“Your what?”

“Our princess in a tower. Or on an island.” He tapped ash into a nearby communion-wafer dish.

The serpent woman. The lamia.

Max’s eyes glittered. “You seem to have already seen her. I’ve sent you some images of her, and no doubt, now that she has your paramour, your psychic powers have extended a bit on their own.”

“Go on,” I hissed. “Who is she?”

Max smiled. “About eighty years ago, not too very long after I had joined the Conclave, we lived in northern Scotland, in the Orkney Islands near the small seaside town of Bromwell.”

Orkney! Of course! The rocky, windswept seacoast. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that place before.

“Long before Gregor Mendel, Robert Buck was extracting material from humans and animals to determine their structural essence. He was particularly interested in how animal essences could prove beneficial to humans, particularly in curing human diseases, or in strengthening human mental and physical abilities. There was a young woman in Bromwell, Seraphina Umphrey, daughter of the opulent merchant Joseph Umphrey. Julian Bartlett had been treating her for rashes, for painful and severe eczema, and Robert suggested injecting extractions from various serpent material—Komodo dragon genes, as well as a few other species of lizards and snakes. These breeds had particularly adaptable skin, and Robert hoped that the best part of their essences would merge with the young woman’s to heal her body, her skin. Robert had not yet tried merging these genetic structures, and he was anxious to see if it would benefit Seraphina. And of course”—Max paused—“he was insatiably curious about the outcome.”

“She was an experiment, then,” I said.

Max finished the cigar and tossed it into an old silver wine flask. He chuckled. “Of course she was. And the experiment might have helped her.”

“But it did not.” I felt a coldness creep over my skin.

Max moved closer to me in the shadows. I heard the cathedral bell chime the ten o’clock hour. But its sounds seemed dull compared to the roaring in my ears—I was anxious and furious. During my struggle with him, one of the combs in my hair had come undone. Max secured it back in its place now, his movements thoughtful.

“The possibilities inherent in animal structures are extraordinary,” he whispered. “Although the experiment had unexpected results, the results were nonetheless … interesting. We’d created a new species. Before, she had been a beautiful but dull woman. After Robert Buck’s injections, we found that we had created our own mythological beast.”

“A lamia,” I muttered. My warring emotions continued inside of me—pity for this girl, and yet fury. In the vision, William was hurt. How much humanity could be left in her after all of these years?

“Of sorts.” He smiled proudly. “Robert’s injections permanently affected her human essences. After the first round of treatment, her skin improved dramatically, but then she transformed almost immediately. What was remarkable was that the transformation could come and go—sometimes at will, sometimes as a result of extreme emotion. These transformations made her highly adaptable. Not only could she hunt on land, but she had gills and webbed feet and hands for hunting in water—it was as if the best survival mechanisms rose to the top of her own structures.”

Max was speaking of her as a specimen. As a pet.

“How did she feel about her change?” I asked bitterly, knowing where this was going—that my worst fear, that she held William, was true. My insides tightened.

“Why, she hated her new self, of course. She escaped from the cell in Robert’s home where he’d been keeping her while we decided what to do with her. Robert didn’t want to kill her—she was such an interesting study. But when she escaped, she killed a few Bromwell natives. Once I’d caught her and brought her back to them, Robert and the rest of the Conclave had already decided to destroy her. She was too much of a liability.”

Before continuing, he paused in the confessional’s darkness. “But, as I have always had too much of a fondness for lovely women, I saw how we might use her.”

I recoiled, pulling away from him and pressing my back even further into the thin wooden wall of the makeshift confessional. It was a futile effort to distance myself from him. He continued. “I thought that she might perhaps benefit us as a guard for our accumulated wealth. We have always, as you know, moved among our residences. What to do with the animals, where to keep them, what to do with our wealth, was always rather a complicated issue. So it was my idea to have an underground home constructed, on a tiny island just off the coast, where we could keep everything. I imported the architects from the Continent—they took great care in the construction of the place, and adhered to the secrecy of the project as I required them. Then, once they were finished, they were her … housewarming gifts, of sorts.”

I felt nauseated. “She eats humans.”

Max smiled. “Well, she’s not supposed to. We forbid it, requiring that she keep her existence secret and restrict herself to the island. But every so often, her appetite overwhelms her a bit.”

I glared at Max. “So you already have your female member of the group. Why did you want me?”

I knew the real reason, of course—because of my psychic powers and because of Dr. Bartlett’s romantic feelings for my mother, which he later displaced onto me. Still, I needed to know as much as I could about the lamia woman.

“Yes. Our situation with you has always posed a bit of a complication for our dear Seraphina, or Effie, as I call her.”

Effie. A pretty pet name. I didn’t want to consider the ways in which she had been used by Max throughout the years.

“The cruel irony of everything is that Effie indeed wanted to be part of the Conclave. She gladly takes the elixir I bring for her and the animals every year. She has always believed in what we do without bothering to ask questions about our means—the petty details.”

“Does she know how you gutted patients in Julian’s own charity hospital?” I asked.