No wonder Victor had been so certain of Justine’s innocence! I hated and pitied him in equal measure. I had hidden my own suspicions to avoid revealing secrets. And my suspicions were of an actual man. Who could stand before a judge and jury and claim a monster murdered the child? Of course he could not speak the truth. Even knowing his genius as I did, I, too, had thought Victor mad upon seeing his notes. I had burned down a building to keep the world from judging him.

And if I felt guilt, I could not imagine how he must have felt. Because if I was right, if there was a monster, I knew its origin. Why it had found us here. Why it had hurt us, of all the people in the world.

Had it been following me this whole time? I remembered the thing in the chute as I burned the building. The open door. I had nearly killed it then; I was certain of it. Would to God I had been successful!

How it had found me at the boardinghouse, I could not—

The card! I had made cards of my address at the boardinghouse. One had fallen out on the doorway of Victor’s laboratory, and in my haste I had not picked it up. Could a beast read, when so many men could not? If it could, I had led the monster right to me.

And then it had followed me back here.

Victor might have created it, but I had brought it to our home. And now Victor had gone away, alone, into the mountains. With a pistol. He was trying to end this, to protect us all. But I had seen the monster. Victor was no match for it.

I would lose my Victor, too. It was more than I could bear. I grabbed a cloak—Mary’s, another reminder of Ingolstadt and all the tragedy it had rained down upon our heads—took the sharpest knife from the kitchen, and rushed to the path that led from our home to the mountain trails.

I did not pause to question myself. I knew I could still be wrong. Prayed for it, even. Prayed I would find Victor alone in the mountains. That my head injury was leading me to absurd and even laughable conclusions. That, in my desire for revenge, I was making a monster where only an unknown man had acted.

I did not care. I would not risk it.

The monster—if it existed—would never take a loved one from me again.

—

It was bitingly cold in spite of the summer sun. The farther into the mountains we went, the closer we grew to the glacial plains. Huge sheets of ice covered miles, ancient and so compacted that the cracks shone deepest blue. The terrain was treacherous and slick, capable of claiming unwary hikers. Victor and I had been forbidden to venture this far when we were children.