Free A Stranger in the Garden by Tiffany Trent Page B

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