Harley,

My darling boy, the light of my life, my dearest treasure. Here is not safe for you my love, creature of boundless curiosity and darkness, and fear and light.

Here in the tides you must stay, my dear, bobbing against rock and sea-spray. I know it hurts, love. It always does.

It is for your own good, you know. The separation stings harder than any flesh-flaying cliffside or the burn of saltwater in your delicate, red-ringed lungs.

You must keep treading water, Harley. Just until sunrise, my love. The stars will keep you afloat, dozen of blinking eyes, like the lights at home.

You must keep going.

You must not look back, my love. I have sewn your lungs with my own hands, I have coaxed life into the hollows of your bones, traced the curves of your mind with fire from mine own soul.

You are mine, Harley, and yet—oh, how cruel the world is that it cannot see you for what you are, only for what it fears.

Their torches would scar your skin, their pitchforks would find your heart. And so, I sent you to the tides, to the secret swell, where no eye of man may follow. I have given you air, love; I have given you stars; I have given you the cruelest mercy.

Do not let them take you, my creation, my love. You are more than bone and sinew and lunar hunger. You are the wild and the tame, the flicker of impossible things. I have seen your claws glint in the sun, your laughter ripple like silver water, and I have known that nothing in this village could bear the truth of you.

Keep moving, Harley. Let the dawn be your witness. I will not follow you, not yet, but know this: every beat of my heart calls to yours, across the fearful beat of your patchwork heart, across shadow and sun.

I sent you away to protect you, my love. But when the stars fade and the town sleeps, I will find a way to bring you back.

And then… then we will be free.

Harley Porter had not always been this way.

He was once a young, fresh thing, plucked straight from the young gentleman’s college, the sharpest of modern scientific minds. He was the beauty of London, slender and elegant, with a frame that imposed a sense of grandeur and grace upon anyone who watched him.

And Frederick did.

It was a late night at the students’ pub, and Frederick Dalloway was nursing a glass of whiskey, scanning the room for the next bright mind to succeed him. He was not old, not aged, frail or ailing by any means: he was an innovator. A man who pushed through the boundaries of right and wrong, who stuffed the walls of that essential human organ called morality until its vessels burst. That kind of thinking was dangerous here.

He needed a protégée: and along came Harley.

Frederick had approached the young thing posing as a hiring manager, seeking apprentices for the top doctors and surgeons in the country. Harley had needed some plying—a drink or two, a little money for the rest of the week, an immediate confirmation of work the next Thursday—until he held out his hand. His pale, slender fingers outstretched like a promise towards Frederick’s weathered and calloused ones.

And with that handshake: his fate was sealed.

Harley Porter had become his.