In the morning we stumbled down from the mountain, hungry and giddy with lack of sleep, laughing over our misadventure. It had been a day without fear, a day without study. A day without pretending. I would carry that day in my heart, locked up tightly where nothing else could touch it.

—

As the afternoon slowly faded, I despaired of catching up to Victor on the mountain. I hated to come up here alone on such a bleak and terrifying mission. All my happy memories of the day we had spent hiking were being replaced by cold dread and seething anger.

Hours passed and I found not so much as a footprint. I was about to turn back, when far ahead, on the glacier, I saw a figure moving faster than should have been possible across that deadly terrain. I ducked behind a massive boulder lodged in the ice. My heart raced. I was torn between screaming and laughing. I struggled to contain my delirious emotions.

It was the monster.

There was no other explanation. And though my soul curdled at the thought of such a creature existing, it also meant I had not been hallucinating, and that Justine was beyond a doubt innocent. Because there was no question in me that that thing, that unholy creation, was what had killed William.

I clutched my knife—and then all my exultant triumph at being right crashed around me like ice falling from the eaves of a house. If the monster could move like that here—and was as tall and powerful as I had seen it to be—what did I hope to accomplish with my kitchen knife?

My zeal to protect Victor had not been accompanied by a similar portion of sense. I should have told his father. Should have raised the alarm in the city, gathered a militia with swords and torches. Even a pitchfork would have been a better weapon than my sad little knife.

I peered around and watched as the monster drew closer and then stopped. In spite of the speed of its movement, there was something awkward and ungainly about it. Its feet did not bend as they should. It ran on the pads of its feet, like an animal. The knee joints were too high, the femurs too short. The arms, too, did not move naturally with the body, remaining still at its sides as the legs did all the work.

I shuddered to think what the monster would look like up close in the daylight—what seeing it in full truth would reveal. How could Victor have created such a thing? How deep must he have been in his own tortured mind to ever conceive of it?