A Stranger in the Garden Read online




  To Saint Darwin: Your story still remains to be told

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my editor, Navah Wolfe,

  and agent, Jennifer Laughran

  Some day, but not at this time,

  I shall make an announcement of something

  that I never once dreamed of.

  —Nikola Tesla

  The first sound Charles heard was rain. It was such a familiar sound that he thought for a moment he was back in the gutter of New London, huddling in rubbish for warmth. Then he realized that he was curled around something knobby and hard—a tree root.

  He worried for a moment that he was in the Forest, that the dryads had somehow enspelled him and brought him here. He searched his memory and remembered Lucy Virulen’s hand slipping from his as he fell through howling darkness toward a door of light.

  We are where I said we’d be.

  The Grue.

  There was a tiny part of him, like a black box shut deep in his mind, that the Grue couldn’t always control. That little part was disappointed. He had hoped if they achieved their aim and opened the door he would be free of the Grue, the magic, everything. He had hoped that he could start anew.

  He shut away those feelings before the Grue could mock him for them, and breathed deeply. Old London. The smells were different than home—loam rather than sewage, wet leaves rather than the burning bone of the Refineries. This place reminded him of the Virulen countryside with its orchards and gardens.

  Kent, to be precise, the Grue said. London proper is now much the same as your home. Though without the magic, of course.

  Charles looked up. He was lying under the spreading branches of an apple tree. Speckled, blushing apples dripped water on him, and he found himself thinking briefly of Saint Newton. The curtain of rain obscured all but the most basic details. He was in an orchard with a gravel path beyond. The chill in the air felt like September.

  He sat up slowly, every bone in his body settling back into place with great pain. He gasped at the sharpness of it. It was as if his skeleton had been unstrung and now was being reassembled.

  It practically was. The Grue snickered. Travel between the worlds isn’t easy on flesh like yours.

  Then why did we do it? Charles asked silently.

  Always so many questions.

  Charles waited. He knew the punishment if he asked more than the Grue was willing to tell. It was always a careful and calculated agony that made Charles wish he’d never had a single thought of his own. It had taken him a long time to learn to hide his thoughts, and he couldn’t always do it well enough.

  The worst thing he could do was demonstrate that he had any will of his own.

  We are here because this is the Gathering Place where long ago I was cast from this paradise. There was the hint of a sneer in the Grue’s voice.

  Charles looked up at the nearest apple, and a strangely passionate longing to pluck it grew within him. But the Grue hungered for other food. It sometimes felt like Charles had eaten the entire world for his master, but it was never enough. He had devoured the Sphinx, the Wyvern hatchlings . . . anything made of myth to satisfy him. But nothing ever did.

  There was only one thing the Grue wanted now. Her.

  Charles had long known that the woman for whom the Grue yearned was someone of such importance that the creature had nearly destroyed an entire world to get to her. He also knew that she had betrayed the Grue and that he longed for revenge perhaps even more than he longed for the sight of her. Everything the Grue had made him do—hoarding power by eating raw myth, killing anyone who got in his way, capturing the Manticore to take her Heart—all had been done for this nameless woman. For the chance to be in her presence again and take revenge.

  But Charles still didn’t know who she was. Her face was imprinted on his memory—a face like starlight, eyes deeper than oceans. He knew that in a time long past, she and the Grue had been lovers. He knew that she had betrayed him during a war and allowed him to be exiled with some of his kin. That was when the Grue had become what he was now—a shriveled homunculus, all his beauty and power stripped down to this horrid, vengeful core.

  “Is there a reason you’re sitting under my apple tree, young man?” a voice said from behind him.

  The rain had obscured the sound of the man’s approach. Charles turned.

  Charles Darwin, the Saint for whom he was named, peered in at him under the laden apple branches. He was ancient. His white beard flowed over his collar. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat and matching coat that glistened with rain. He clutched the head of a cane with a hand as gnarled as the roots of his apple tree. None of his mythical Apes could be seen dancing around him.

  Charles stared at him, openmouthed.

  Don’t be such a git, the Grue said. He’s a man, nothing more.

  The Grue’s hunger beat at him. After all the magical energy expended to get here, they were both completely drained. The Grue needed food, and the most obvious source was right in front of them. Charles pushed himself to his feet. He clenched his fists and then shoved them in his pockets. He didn’t want to do this—not so soon anyway—but the Grue didn’t care what he wanted.

  Darwin watched him with a knowing look, far too knowing.

  There was no reason to speak. The old man would be easy to overpower. The Grue wished for the soul jar, so that he could trap the Saint’s soul, but they would have to do without it. Charles felt the Grue summoning the magic through him, the magic that would subdue Darwin and bring him under their control. The Saint wouldn’t feel anything.

  And afterward? Charles couldn’t think about that. The Grue wouldn’t allow it.

  He summoned the magic, but nothing came. When he reached for it, in fact, there was a stunning jolt, as if an arc of mythfire had swept through his body. The Grue growled. Charles stumbled back against the tree, and it was only the splinters of bark under his nails that kept him from fainting.

  “Are you quite all right?” Darwin said.

  Charles realized Darwin must have asked him several questions that he hadn’t caught. Charles managed to shake his head before the Grue could take possession of his tongue.

  “Let’s get you inside,” Darwin said, a bit too gently.

  Charles was chilled to the bone. It was as if whatever magic he’d touched had not only shocked him but frozen him to the quick.

  The magic is different here. You must channel it and work with it differently.

  And then it felt as if the Grue fainted away from the shock himself, because Charles could no longer hear his thoughts.

  Such a thing had never happened in the year that Charles had hosted him. There was always a response to his thoughts—a sneer, a smirk, and very rarely, praise. He had gotten so used to that voice that he’d almost thought it his. Being alone was odd, and yet he longed to know the stillness of his own thoughts again.

  Darwin led him inside. Charles wasn’t sure how he managed to walk into the house; his legs were like jelly.

  A little girl ran up to them as they entered, and Darwin divested himself of coat and hat. “There you are, Granpapa!” she said. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

  She looked at Charles. “Who is that?”

  Darwin glanced at Charles. His brows were like white clouds in the gloomy house. “I found him under the apple tree. There hasn’t been time for introductions.”

  “I’m Charles Waddingly. Charles Darwin Waddingly. I was named after you.”

  A servant bustled in and unnecessarily tidied the coat and hat Darwin had already hung. “Sir, if you’d come through the other door . . . ,” he began, then stopped when he saw Charles.

  “Turnbull, that’s precisely why I didn’t. I don
’t need all your fussing,” Darwin said. “Bring tea to my study, will you?”

  Turnbull tried to tear his stare from Charles without much success. “Of course, sir.”

  The little girl tugged on Charles’s sleeve. “I’m Gwen.”

  Darwin whispered something aside to Turnbull that Charles couldn’t catch.

  Charles nodded at her. Even in the gloomy afternoon, her little cheeks were red as the apples on the tree.

  His mouth watered. The Grue was waking again.

  In the study with tea and a fire on, Darwin settled behind his desk. His hands moved restlessly across specimen jars and stacks of papers. Beneath the usual smell of fire on the little hearth, Charles caught the scents of formaldehyde and death—the comforting miasma of a museum.

  “Well,” Darwin said. “Explain yourself.”

  Charles opened his mouth, longing to tell the truth for once, but nothing came out. His upbringing hadn’t taught him what to do in the physical presence of a Saint. When he had been young and trying to understand his power, he would go to Darwin’s Cathedral and beg his namesake for help. He’d kneel and recite the Litany of Evolution before the rose window of the great Saint, begging him to bestow the wisdom and enduring adaptability of his Ape angels.

  And now Charles sat across from him, and Darwin was nothing but an old, bent man drowning in paper and dead worms, huddling in a blanket by his fire.

  He is and always was nothing more than a man, the Grue whispered. Your religion is laughable, the delusions of a man obsessed with his own might.

  Charles had known this for a while—it was one of the first things the Grue taught him after he had let the creature in. Devout as he had been, even the new knowledge couldn’t change that Charles was filled with Unnatural sin.

  Still, Charles had been born under this man’s sign. He had whispered his Litany as the Grue wormed his way into Charles’s body. He had kept whispering it as he’d healed. Until the Grue made him stop.

  Darwin leaned forward, and his dark eyes under the white thunderclouds of his brows were startling. “I think I know what you are, though I do not know why you’ve come. I had believed there was only one like you, but apparently there are more.”

  The Grue laughed, and Charles did his best to stifle it. “I am a man, sir, nothing more. And I came because I want to learn from you.”

  “I’m a bit old for that sort of thing,” Darwin said. “Go up to Oxford or Cambridge if you want to learn something. You and yours have taken enough from me in the past.”

  “What?” Charles asked.

  “You think I don’t recognize you?” Darwin rose from his seat, the blanket falling from his shoulders. The fury on his ancient face would have made Charles cower in the past. His father had been like that, filled with towering rage. Darwin’s hands shook on the edge of his desk.

  “Your people tricked me in the jungles of South America! You shan’t trick me again!”

  Charles shook his head, but inside the Grue was giggling once more. “I hardly know what you mean,” the Grue made him say.

  “You are the reason I am like this!” he nearly shouted. “You are the reason I lost . . .” He stopped and drew breath, unable to go on.

  Charles recoiled. It was as though Darwin saw straight through to where the Grue curled inside him.

  But it also made him deeply curious. As far as he knew, in his own world no one had ever united with an Unnatural in quite the way he had. Certainly, if it had happened before, no one had lived to tell the tale. Darwin seemed to be saying that something similar had happened to him in this world. If that was the case, was there more than one Grue?

  The Grue’s glee and hunger was close to insatiable. Let us feast on him now.

  Charles gritted his teeth. That tiny place inside him didn’t want to do this. Exhaustion and hunger sought to swamp him. It almost felt as though his body was being pulled back through the vortex.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone—” he heard himself say before the Grue snapped his jaw shut.

  Darwin’s thunderous gaze softened. “What did you say?”

  Charles shook his head. He couldn’t speak. The Grue had sealed his mouth. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes from wanting to speak and being unable to.

  He spidered his fingers across the desk to a pencil and a piece of scrap paper. With every bit of energy he could muster from the tiny black box of his will, he managed to write Help me before the room tilted away from him. White, veiny lines wormed through the walls. Charles blinked very hard. Darwin stared at him with a deep understanding that was almost more frightening than his rage.

  The last thing he heard was Darwin whispering in his ear. “You think you’ve got him now, but I promise you, I will take him away from you. I will save this boy, as I could not save my sweet Annie.”

  In the morning Turnbull brought Charles a tray. He slid it just inside the door with a fearful glance, and then Charles heard him locking him in again. The fact that he was a prisoner in Saint Darwin’s home was amusing more than anything else. The Grue would have his way with all of them when he was ready. Right now, he bided his time and gathered his strength.

  The window at least was not shuttered, so Charles looked out over the broad estate, golden in the morning light. People were working the failing fields. Grazing cattle watched them, hay hanging from their mouths.

  The old apple orchard meandered all the way to a stone wall, and the gravel walk Charles had seen moved beyond that, following a line of fences and hedges toward a distant hill. Through the trees and morning haze he could just make out a ring of mostly fallen stones that crowned the hill.

  The Grue leaped up inside him at the sight.

  We must go there.

  Charles nodded. It seemed easy enough.

  But first, we must find the proper accompaniment.

  Charles glanced back at the tray. He had not eaten human food in a long while, except for the sake of appearances. It no longer sustained him.

  The Grue required richer fare.

  Charles considered their options. Best of all was unrefined myth. That had always strengthened him when their reserves were down. But it seemed that myth did not exist here, especially in this house of Science. In fact, the startling shock Charles had received when he’d tried to gather the magic made him wonder if there was any magic here at all.

  There is magic here, the Grue said. But it is different. It cannot be summoned in the same ways.

  Then how do I summon it? Charles asked.

  With blood.

  Charles considered Turnbull. He could probably lure him in with some excuse, or pull him inside when he came to take the tray. But Turnbull would likely struggle, and Charles was unsure as to whether he would be able to overcome him quietly. Without magic easily at his disposal and in his weakened state, he doubted he could manage it.

  The sound of a piano drifted up the stairs and under the door.

  Gwen. Charles recalled the apples of her cheeks, the dark luster of her eyes, and sighed.

  When Turnbull returned for the tray, he said, “Master Darwin would like to see you in the parlor now.”

  Charles nodded.

  As Turnbull ushered him into the parlor, the servant said, “We called the constable yesterday, and he arrived after you had your fit. Master Darwin decided to spare you the indignities of jail, but if you make trouble, be sure that I won’t do you the same courtesy. You’re very fortunate Mrs. Darwin is away. She would have had you hauled off before you could set foot in the door.”

  Charles looked at Turnbull, and the Grue within snarled. “Rather outspoken for a servant, aren’t you?” Charles said.

  “Master Darwin has suffered quite enough. I will not allow anyone to harm him, no matter what that requires,” Turnbull said.

  This one is trouble, the Grue said. We will deal with him later.

  “I understand,” Charles said to Turnbull. He moved past him and into the parlor.

  Darwin was wrapped u
p by the fire again. The hearth here was bigger, and although it was relatively warm, Darwin shivered next to it. Gwen played piano nearby, the bright notes of the Archdemon Mozart tinkling on the air like little bells. Cozy chairs and books were scattered about. A tapestry hoop with half-finished embroidery on a stand by the window waited patiently for Mrs. Darwin to return.

  It was the perfect portrait of family contentment, a thing Charles had never known. He hated them for it.

  Gwen stopped in midphrase as he entered, and she tossed her head a little so that her dark locks slid to her back. She reminded Charles of someone, a distant memory he couldn’t seem to trace.

  The Grue kept the memory from him. Charles had learned that he did this when it suited his mood. On occasion, he’d kept even the memory of Charles’s own name from him, just to prove who was in control. But Charles had learned something else—sometimes the things the Grue tried to hide were important. If he could just hold on to them, if the little black box in his mind could somehow hold on to those thoughts, he hoped he’d be able to put together the pieces.

  And then, maybe someday he’d be free.

  He had to admit that when the Grue had made him the offer, he hadn’t seen how he had much choice. He still didn’t. He had just begun working undercover at the Museum for the Architects. At first that had been fine, but he’d been unsure that their desire to continue hiding magic was right. The day he’d been sent by Vespa’s father to the storage cellar for the Saints knew what, he’d been feeling his resentment of the Architects keenly. And then he’d found himself trapped by a magic darker and more powerful than any he’d ever encountered. The Grue had nearly torn him apart before he sensed the magic in Charles. And then, surely the most wicked plan ever forged by any Unnatural had been hatched in that moment when Charles had bargained for his life and the Grue had lent him his power.

  Now that plan had seemingly come to its fruition. But to what end?

  You will understand soon enough.

  “Hey, Mister Charles, do you like worms?” Gwen said to him, jarring him from his thoughts.