Renegade (37 page)
Authors: Amy Carol Reeves
Tags: #teen, #Young Adult, #YA fiction, #Young Adult Fiction, #Paranormal, #Historical Fiction, #jack the ripper, #Murder, #Mystery, #monster
And indeed, the man wasn’t Max—he was our sunburned follower. Even in the moonless night, I saw the ash-blond hair clearly.
I felt jumpy and my patience was papery thin. I kept his arm twisted behind him and, without a word, moved the knife from his throat to his back. I was a bit surprised that he didn’t try to defend himself, but I seemed to have broken his rib—he was doubled over, not even trying to struggle with me.
“You! Who are you?” I demanded, pressing the knife harder into his back.
“Someone who means you no harm.” He was still bent over.
“We’ll see about that.”
“Put your dagger down. Please,” he demanded, still clutching his chest.
“No,” I said firmly, pushing him in front of me as I headed down the stairs and into the great hall.
Simon was already there, alarm on his face. I didn’t want to disturb William, so I led the man into the library.
Hugo, who lay before the fire unable to move due to all the bandages Simon had wrapped around his torso, lifted his head weakly as we entered and growled at the intruder.
I pushed the man into a kneeling position on the floor and placed the knife blade against his throat again. Vaguely, I felt a twinge of guilt knowing that his ribs must hurt terribly, but I couldn’t trust him for a second. I couldn’t imagine that he meant well, given that he’d been following us these past few weeks.
“You have five seconds to tell me who you are, where you come from, and what you are doing here, or I’ll cut your throat. Simon, tie him up, please.”
Simon left and re-entered the room with the useless, water-damaged revolver and an old rope. The man still hadn’t said a world.
“Three seconds!” I yelled, pressing the knife more tightly against his throat.
“Abbie,” Simon said calmly, but his mouth twitched in amusement. The man’s jacket flipped open as Simon tied him up, and I saw Simon’s eyes focus on something on the inside flap.
“Edmund Wyatt,” the man said, heaving, his chest still in pain. “I come from London. I work for Her Majesty the Queen, and I need to speak to both of you.”
I hesitated and glanced at Simon. His eyes were still on the man. He cleared his throat. “I would believe him, Abbie.” He reached out, tearing something from the inside of Wyatt’s jacket.
I gasped—the emblem on the jacket lining was the same as the emblem on Richard’s tattoo.
Simon and I looked hard at one another, over Wyatt’s head.
“If you will loosen these ropes and attend to my chest, I would greatly appreciate it,” Wyatt said calmly. “I know that you are a physician, young man, and I believe that she has broken my rib. I promise you, I have no ill will toward you—my concern is with the remaining Conclave member.” Wyatt looked up at me, and I saw that he was perhaps older than I’d first imagined, perhaps in his early fifties. “He is doing dark deeds, dark and terrible deeds.”
Epilogue
I
stared out the window at the morning fog as the carriage sped through the Highlands of Caithness. William lay sleeping in the carriage seat across from me. He was wrapped in multiple blankets. He needed rest, and privacy, which we would not have on a train, so we’d decided to take the carriage all the way to London. Although his fever continued, it remained low; still, he had a long recovery ahead of him. While Simon remained on the island to care for the animals, I would take William back to Christina so that she could begin nursing him back to health.
This very morning, Simon was to go into Bromwell to speak to Neil’s wife about his death. I thought of Margaret MacDiarmand and that traumatized little girl, Laura … I shuddered, relieved that Simon had decided to deliver the news himself. With his sensitivity, he would be nothing but compassionate.
The carriage took a sharp turn and we sped past an enormous loch, an expanse of dull shine under the dark morning clouds. An eagle cut gracefully through the waning fog, a silver fish in its claws.
I would return here as soon as I had delivered William safely. A tightening started in my chest—I wanted to stay with William in London to care for him. But Simon and I had too much to do with figuring out where to send the animals. Thinking through this was an enormous task. Max had often transported the animals to and from the island in small groups, but we now had, we believed,
all
of the Conclave’s animals to deal with—including two dodo birds, which would cause too much of a sensation and raise too many questions if they were made public. Fortunately, money was no issue. Wyatt had told us that all of the wealth in the treasury was ours—our payment for killing the Conclave and Seraphina.
Edmund Wyatt.
“Do you trust him?” Simon had asked me, the first mo-ment we spoke alone after meeting Wyatt.
“I’m not certain.”
“Neither am I.”
Simon’s response had come quickly. He told me that the emblem on Wyatt’s jacket—the same emblem that was tattooed upon Richard—was indeed an emblem associated with the Queen’s secret service.
“How do you know this, Simon?” I asked.
He smiled coolly. “That is a whole other story. I’ll tell you about Richard when we have more time. I have a bit of a history with Richard.”
Although we’d said very little about it, I knew we had many of the same questions about this Edmund Wyatt.
If, as Wyatt told us, he did work for Queen Victoria, and it had been his responsibility to monitor the Conclave’s actions, why hadn’t he stopped them when they began killing those women last year? Why had he let Simon, William, and me deal with the Conclave both then and now? Of course, Max was a ruthless killer, evasive, with strange physical powers endowed upon him by the elixir; still, certainly the monarchy could track and control him. When Simon and I had asked Wyatt these questions, he’d given us only vague answers, telling us that he would give us more answers at a later time.
My mind spun with all that Wyatt had told us before returning to London. Once Simon and I were both back in town, we were to meet Wyatt for even more specific information.
“I am the only individual in the Queen’s service who knows of the Conclave,” he’d said. “This surviving Conclave member must be stopped or the very monarchy will be threatened. I assure you, he is not alone now.”
Wyatt’s words burned into me now. I remembered my nightmare about the charnel house, body pieces in the background. Max’s cruel laugh.
I shuddered.
What was Max planning? Who else could be in league with him?
Wyatt had said “dark and terrible deeds.”
After that hideous autumn last year, with the Ripper murders, I couldn’t imagine what else Max could plan.
William turned a bit on the seat. Carefully, I stood and adjusted his pillows. He was in a deep sleep. As I pushed his curls away from his face and ran my finger lightly down his jaw, feeling the scratch of his dark stubble, I thought of how handsome he was even with his face flushed with fever, his cheeks hallowed, and his frame thinner.
Although I sat back down in my seat, I couldn’t peel my eyes away from him. He had been raised by an unconventional adoptive father, but where he originally came from, no one, not even Christina, knew.
“William, who are you?” I asked softly.
I remembered the water-damaged letter to Max in the photo album, with the cryptic message telling him to keep someone alive. Simon had seemed to suggest that William might be the person the letter writer referred to. Why? And Simon had also made a remark about how those terrible beings had stopped pursuing me upon William’s arrival at Highgate Cemetery. I’d always thought that was mere coincidence, but now I wondered.
Nothing made sense—the cannibalism, the Conclave’s symbol near the bodies in the graveyard, why Max wanted me to kill Seraphina when he could have easily done it himself. I sighed and settled back into the carriage again.
There was so much ahead. So many unanswered questions, and I feared that whatever Simon, William, and I faced in the future would be far worse than what we had already seen.
I bit my lip hard and stared out the window.
A shard of sunlight broke through the sky in the distance, casting an enormous golden-brown haze upon the sides of a nearby mountain … the color startlingly similar to the hue of Seraphina’s long locks.
Photography by Roger Hutchison
About the Author
Amy Carol Reeves has a PhD in nineteenth-century British literature. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where she teaches at Columbia College and writes young adult books. When not teaching, writing, or spending time with her family, she likes jogging with her Labrador retriever Annie, reading Jane Austen novels, and seriously hoping that bloomers come back in style at some point.
Renegade
is her second novel.
Watch for
Resurrection
,
the thrilling conclusion to the Ripper trilogy!
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