That earned her a wounded glare from Terence as he continued dressing her leg. The bowl of water at his knee turned pink with clouds of blood.
“I shouldn’t have ever let myself grow so fond of you,” he said, which was enough to make something within Jane sting,even more than the alcohol he swabbed along her wound. His hold on her ankle suddenly tightened. “Now that that… thatthinghas tasted your blood, it will crave more. It is greedy in that way: more and more, a never-ending hunger for blood—violence—that which is not its own. It can never be sated.”
“Well, whatisthat… thing…”
Terence sighed heavily, rubbing his face before running his hand viciously through his hairline. “It’s a scourge upon my bloodline. It infects us men before lunging for the throats of those around us we love. It has infected me, my brothers, and our father. All we’ve ever known is this infection, and my father and brothers have all fallen victim to it. And now you’ve become a victim, too,” he said, with a lowered stare, dark, haunted. “I know not where or why this curse was birthed, all I know is how it isolated my family, and that bringing you here has been a mistake.
“All my life I… I thought…” his voice wavered, and he licked his lips in an attempt to tame his tears. “I thought I could be different fromthem. My father, my brothers—other men. I thought I could be agoodman—a goodperson, Jane—and not some… somemonstermy blood, the title of manhood, demanded me to be—”
“Surely there’s something you can do about it—to get rid of it.” Jane only found herself speaking as a way to stop the keens of his anguish. Because it made something within her acheforhim, and after falling victim to the teeth of his dark secret, she didn’t care to do any sort of additional aching.
He shook his head. “Our father had once tried, in our youth. But our curse has kept us bound to this infernal marsh, and our resources limited. But, dammit, as brief as it was, we tried. Cheap spiritualists and self-proclaimed witches that sold useless tinctures and whispers of hope. After a time I felt more like ananimal to be prodded at, even when I wore my human disguise, even when the sun was high—no longer could I tell when I was meant to be a boy or some hellish…thingto be examined and feared. Eventually, we were instructed to keep our heads down and to bear the pain as strong boys should, until I had grown too afraid to look up.”
The hand that cradled her ankle shivered as Terence’s resolve at last appeared to shatter. He slumped before her, shoulders shuddering as he started to cry. He bowed forward until his forehead pressed against her knees and he clutched fistfuls of her skirts.
“God—I beg for your forgiveness, Jane… This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he mewled into fabric stained with rot and blood. “I—I tried to keep you as safe as I could, but I just… I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t keep you away. This heart—this imprudent,wretchedmuscle—has damned you… and I will never forgive myself. My greed, my sin…”
The scene struck Jane as she let the heat from his tears warm her knee, the marrow of her bones, for what beast would weep at the feet of a lady wounded by his own teeth to plead her forgiveness?
A hushed whispering from behind her caught her attention and when she glanced over her shoulder, she caught both Mrs. Foster and Mr. Hudson huddled in the doorway. They watched them with a sort of relieved indifference that Jane was unsure how to feel about. Had they been witnesses to similar incidents? How many other girls have they seen damned to a similar fate? Jane, suddenly, hated them both. They knew about this beast, of blood that flowed beneath their feet. They knew and neglected to tell her the truth. She hoped that seeing her maimed was enough to tarnish their souls with guilt—that was if their souls weren’talready immune to guilt. Her eyes pinched in a glare before she looked back down at Terence.
Unsure of whether he’d startle like a dog, quick to bite, she hesitantly reached out a hand and ran her fingers through his hair. He went still beneath her touch, not once moving to bite. His hair was soft, so unlike the mange of the beast. She couldn’t help but stroke him as though petting a dog between his ears.
Bad boy,she thought with a forced scowl of indifference.
Perhaps she could’ve been more compassionate in her understanding of the apparent horrors he’d suffered since his youth, but she found herself lacking such compassion and in its place held a bitterness for the fact he’d nearly eaten her as a result of his negligence.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” She finally rasped out. “If I were trapped here, who could I tell? If you killed me, then your secret would die with me, and if I return to America, the secret shall be mine to keep out of gratitude and kindness.”
He just looked at her warily, and she could feel the misery oozing off of him, completely and utterly palpable, with a taste like bad ocean air. Tears dampened his face, eyes red, and the sound he made to stifle his crying wasn’t too unlike a mongrel’s whimpering.
“I rather like thinking of you as a friend, but you test my trust, Terence,” she said. He visibly flinched at that, a wounded crease between his brows, but he otherwise remained still as she swiped away a tear with her thumb. “If I’m going to have to spend another night here—and Christ knows how many more after—then I want to know how to survive.”
Her hand then shifted down from where it stroked his hair to grip his chin.
Her newborn hatred stammered upon seeing his pink, tear-stained eyes. A broken man caging a broken beast justbeneath the surface of his skin. But a beast was still a beast, and she refortified her resolve by digging her thumb into his jaw and tightening her face into something severe as she brought it close to his, so that they may share the same air. His cologne overpowered her with the scent of bergamot and lemon oil, but beneath it, she could smell the whispers of a mutt’s fur and the cellar’s gore-soaked damp.
“And you’re going to help me. You understand this… thisthinginside you better than me, than anyone in this house,” her hold on him loosened—Only because I pity the poor beast, she had to remind herself, “You’re the one that brought me into this mess, and I expect you to help me out of it.”
CHAPTER
Fourteen
As a child, more than anything else, Jane wished to be Mary Anning. She wished she lived amongst those Dorset cliffsides, wandering the shores of the English Channel where she’d acquire fossils to sell; pieces of past animals, the imprints of their flesh, the remains of their scat, until she’d find her own new beast, just as Anning uncovered herIchthyosaur—an utter accident.
Despite the purgatory of living in a day where such a desire from a woman was frowned upon while also not wholly discouraged, Jane sought to be a woman like Mary Anning. Jane wanted to discover monsters, and she wanted to be remembered for it.
So, Jane had become Mary. She referred to herself as such and often introduced herself as Mary, even to family who very wellknew that she was born Janet Elizabeth Sterling; they would just smile and play along as such were the whims of imaginative little girls.
Mary was the girl who walked with her father in the woods and Great Lakes shores, collecting bones and discarded antlers and shells, and who was taught about the trilobites and mastodons that had once roamed in prehistoric Wisconsin. Mary wanted to be like her father and write books on her fossil findings. Mary wanted to be the one who presented lectures at the Smithsonian as she announced her own fossil discovery—a whole new prehistoric beast that would be as equally awesome and beloved as the newly discoveredTriceratops.
However, after a while, once she observed how others would sooner flock to the musically-inclined endeavors of her sisters and mother—with their shared auburn-haired, red-lipped beauty that’d make the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood flush—than spare a moment to offer polite grimaces at her procurements of palm-fulls ofBrachiopodsor owl pellets with half of a mouse skull peeking out from digested fur, she concluded that Mary must leave. Envy was but a smoldering ember, then.
Putting away her father’s textbooks to instead readScribner’s MagazineandThe Delineator, Mary the Girl needed to be subdued and replaced by Jane the Lady if she were to vie for the attention her sisters received.
Mary had lay dormant since then, stifled and suffocated beneath layers upon layers of silk and lace and brand-new petticoats and decorated hats.
Jane never anticipated needing to revive that child within her to better understand a live monster that seemed intent on hunting her, and, somehow, resided within Terence like some parasite.
