Renegade (9 page)

A tear slid down my cheek. “I’m scared, William.”

His eyes shined, perplexed. “I have never hurt you. I have never been untrue.”

“What if you tire of me?” I asked. “What if you become distracted? I have never felt this way about anyone.
Anyone
.”

“Abbie, I am not my father.” He saw my troubled expression. “Yes”—he ran his fingers nervously through his hair—“I followed him in that one regard. But please, Abbie, no one is perfect. Trust rather in the person I am now. I do not want to be Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I am more constant than that.”

He pulled me back to him and kissed me.

Blood rushed to my head, and I, incapacitated, kissed him back.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard Simon’s office door shut and his steely steps going toward the staircase.

Be guarded, Abbie.

“But there is no guarantee of your constancy,” I said firmly, finally pushing him away from me.

William sighed. “No, there is not.”

He pulled away and I saw a realization wash over his expression like a wave rushing over sand.

We stared at each other, unable to proceed. A cord had been severed that could not be repaired.

Unbelievably, I saw his dark eyes fill with tears before he turned his head to walk to the window, to stare at the dirty, busy street far below. He squinted and shielded his face with his hands as if he had a headache.

“Goodbye, William,” I said.

“Goodbye.”

He did not even turn around.

Seven

A
fter the bath, she went outside in her monstrous form to rest upon one of her favorite tall craggy peaks on the island. She couldn’t stop thinking of that last kill. Immediately after she’d killed the French boy, so many years ago, her keeper had disposed of the body and returned to her in the menagerie. She was feeding one of the dodo birds; Robert Buck had been trying to breed the two birds with no success for some time. All the animals in the large underground room—indeed, it was larger than the entire house itself—were dear pets to her. They were the only living beings she saw most of her days. She made toys for the monkeys and allowed the numerous parrots and other birds to fly free from their cages on many days. She even allowed her particular favorite, the Bengal tiger Petey, to wander in her own quarters. The tiger had been a man-eater in India when the Conclave had captured him thirty years before. They had made him—like the other birds and animals of the menagerie, and like she herself—immortal with the elixir. Still, in spite of the tiger’s violent past, with her he was tame as a kitten.

Though she tried to tend to the animals only when in her human form, the few times she had transformed inside the menagerie the animals never cowered from her. They knew that she would never harm them.

This was probably the reason her keeper was always safe around the tiger, and around her. She smiled to herself. Even though her keeper was human in form, his heart seemed half-beast itself.

“Effie,” Max had said when he’d entered the menagerie after burying the boy. Her keeper was the only person who ever made a nickname from her full name, Seraphina. “My dear, dear Effie.” He hauled several bags of birdseed down the steps from outside and into the menagerie. That time, as now, he had been gone for too many months, but when he returned he brought her an abundance of new supplies, more food for herself and the animals. “You had such a lovely record—you had become almost tame since your early days here.”

“It was reckless of me.” Seraphina bit her lip. “I didn’t want to kill this one. But I was … ” She struggled for the right words. “Overcome.”

“That happens to me quite often,” Max had said as he fed Petey.

She swept the floor. With pride she thought of how Max had told her that most menageries reeked of animal wastes and smells. Hers had no odors other than the incense
she burned twice a day. Her menagerie was a place of beauty, the floors the same marble as the rest of the house. She took care to hang her unfinished portraits on these walls also. Animals needed beauty in their environment as much as humans. This she believed as she would a religious creed.

“I have much to tell you of our affairs in the world,” Max had said later, as they took their dinner in the house. They ate on the floor in front of the fire in the library, reclined on pillows.

Seraphina took a sip of wine. “Affairs.” She smiled. “I have no interest in your affairs.”

“Effie, you know I am always yours.” She could still remember how his eyes had glinted green, that evening in the firelight.

She did know. She always knew this. Whatever he did in the rest of the world, he always returned to her. Her lover. Her companion. He knew her—he had seen her transformation many times and it made no difference to him. Still, she was well aware that there was only so much he could offer her. Max was a libertine, free from the laws of love and constancy. He was loyal to no one—except to the Conclave. And she secretly believed that he did their bidding only because of the power it bestowed on him, the immortality they gave him every year in that ceremony.

As she had sat there with him on the floor, their empty dinner dishes now set aside, she’d thought of how Max made certain that she had enough activity to entertain herself. He brought her painting supplies, and books on nearly every subject to fill her library. He worked with her extensively to try to control her transformations. But mastering the monstrous part of herself was still impossible. Until she could keep the transformation from happening, or until Robert found a cure, she would always be confined to this island and the surrounding waters. And yet she still had no knowledge of the world, about how it had changed since she had been banished to this place near the turn of the century … 1810. That year seemed engraved upon her mind.

As if to compensate for her isolation, Max had kept her updated on the Conclave’s activities and accomplishments. He showed her sketches of the hospital that Julian Bartlett planned to establish in East End London. He once showed her pictures of their large and sprawling house on Montgomery Street, as well as their other homes in the Alps, in Scotland, and in the wilderness of the American West. Then, after the astronomer John Herschel described his discovery of photography to the Royal Society in London, the Conclave directed Max to take up the art, to document their life and work: their houses, Robert Buck’s specimens, places around the world that they visited. Max would often practice his photography at the island, taking pictures of the sea, the rocky paths. He often photographed her body, both in its nude human form and its monstrous one. He arranged all the photographs neatly in books, and Seraphina looked through them obsessively in his absences. For her, the photographs of the Conclave’s activities were nothing less than rows and rows of glimpses into the outside world.

On the evening of that day that she killed the boy, long after dinner while Max was out securing his boat from the impending storm, Seraphina stayed in the library and flipped through his latest photographs: the beaches, jungles, one of Julian Bartlett with midwives in Africa. Then she stopped at a photograph of a red-headed woman.

The photograph was out of place—this was not a picture documenting the Conclave’s travels. Rather, it was of a woman with long hair, loose down her back, painting in a garden. The woman appeared to have no idea that she was being photographed; she was biting her lip in intense concentration, and the image was fuzzied from her movement.

Seraphina knew that Max had other lovers, but he was thoughtless, ruthless, and had never cared at all for them. Why had this picture been taken with such apparent care, and been made part of the Conclave’s documented history?

At that moment, Max had entered the library. His black curls were wet, tousled from the wind and rain, and he brought with him the smell of salt, of wood.

“Who is she?” she had asked sharply, pointing to the photograph.

Max lit a cigar and considered Seraphina through a cloud of smoke.

“Caroline Westfield.”

“Is she one of your … conquests?”

Max smiled brilliantly. “Not yet.” He sat on the sofa near Seraphina and gazed distractedly at the ceiling. “She means more than that to us. To Julian.”

Seraphina cocked her head. Perplexed.

“Does she know?” She held her breath. “About the Conclave … ”

“We are planning to tell her.”

Seraphina’s heart stopped. “You are offering her the elixir, then?”

“Yes,” Max said, peering carefully at Seraphina. He looked at her steadily: “We need another physician this time, a female one. And she has many talents … ” His voice dwindled a bit.

Seraphina laughed, bitterly.

“After four hundred years, a woman in your ranks.”

“You are in our ranks,” Max said.

“As a pet.”

“You are invaluable,” he said, with a strange mixture of affection and irritation.

“Take me with you,” she begged suddenly. She felt desperate this time, as she had been so many times in the past.

His green eyes flashed at her. They could go from blue to the exact color of the seagreen ocean that she swam in, and then back to blue. Wearily he answered her plea: “We have talked of this already. You know that is impossible. You could expose us all. You nearly did at one point, remember.”

She always tried not to remember that time. “But I am better at controlling it,” she said weakly.

“Seriously, love?” Max smiled widely in the candlelight. A mere few hours earlier he had been cleaning up the blood and gore from the French boy.

She chuckled in spite of herself.

“Robert is working on a cure, Effie.”

He has been for over half a century
, she thought bitterly. With every passing decade, she despaired that she would always be like this. And though she never said anything to Max, she questioned how hard, truly, Robert Buck was working on a cure. After all, the Conclave needed her; they needed her to care for their many animals, to guard their wealth.

She feared she would always be as she was now.

Wearily, she had changed the subject, but her mind kept returning to that redheaded woman—Caroline.

Max reclined a bit, leaning back upon her. He stared up at the ceiling as he smoked, deep in concentration. Seraphina felt her jealously flare up. A woman in the Conclave … but a woman who could travel and study with them, who would see more of the world than she had. Seraphina always felt like a child, pushing against the glass walls of a fabulous world that she could not venture into.

Petey roared in his cage, only seconds before lightning cracked in the sky outside. The tiger always roared before the fiercest storms, and that night there was a terrible one.

She leaned over, curling into Max. She wondered where his thoughts were. She knew that he had mental powers and physical powers that others did not—psychic abilities, the ability to climb down walls, defy gravity. The elixir had had this odd effect upon him, and he was almost as mythical as she was. She wished now that she had his mental powers, that she could see his visions, that his thoughts would slip out toward her mind like water. He had shared so much with her. Now he seemed distracted, and she was interested in his sealed-away thoughts. She wondered if he thought of Caroline; she wanted him to be hers alone. Only hers.

“How long are you staying?” she had asked, letting her gown slip away a bit from her shoulders.

She had his attention in that instant.

He ran his hand along her back, along her tattoo, which was only slightly raised in scar tissue and ink. She had requested that her tattoo be drawn larger than those on the other Conclave members, that it cover her entire back. She had embraced her position within the Conclave with sorrow and relish. At first, she had thought the immortality would be a gift, giving her power she had not had in her mortal life, but eventually realized that she had not only become their pet, but their slave. She had not seen the other Conclave members since they had made her immortal, after … she rarely allowed herself to think about that time.

Also, she couldn’t think of how Robert Buck, and especially Julian Bartlett, had abandoned her. For years now, Max had been the one to supply her, to bring her a yearly dose of the elixir. She took her elixir with him, without ceremony, when he came to inject a concentrated formula into all of the animals.

“Only two nights,” Max had said finally. “I must leave the following morning.”

She had stood, the fire and storm sounds roaring. She pulled the ribbon that held her gown together, letting it fall to the floor.

His stays were too short. Always too short.

It stormed. For two nights and an entire day. On the morning he left, the storm finally moved eastward—away from her world.

Often over the years, from the tall craggy peak where she now rested, she would watch him row away from her island. Now, sunlight broke through a crack in the black storm clouds and she stretched her back in the beam. Shiny. Indestructible. Dense. As she coiled her tail, Seraphina’s thoughts turned to her old life—to the days before the transformations, before her life had fallen into this beautiful placid ruin.