Chapter 13 #2
A softness passed over Alphonse’s face as the firelight shifted, painting him in varying shades of gold and amber.
“That,” he said gently, “is where you misunderstand the burden you carry. A snake will always be a snake. You do not help it across the road expecting that your assistance will change its species. When it is safe on the other side, not only is it still a snake but now a snake with someone to strike.” He folded his hands loosely.
“I am tolerated among the nobles and the community not because I helped them cross the road once, but because I stay by the road, helping direct all the others that come. The day they no longer need to cross, they will strike me just as quickly as they would anything else.”
His gaze sharpened, thoughtful and intent. “You were never built to help snakes cross the road,” Alphonse said softly. “You were always meant to be the hawk, watching as your feast of snake is delivered at your feet from across the road.” Alphonse stood then, a broad grin breaking across his face.
“I am hardly a ferocious raptor,” she replied, a soft, incredulous chuckle slipping free.
Her father studied her for a long moment.
“I wonder how many hawks and kestrels consider themselves ferocious,” Alphonse said thoughtfully.
“I’m sure they believe themselves to be as ordinary as all the other birds.
” His brow lifted in challenge as he reached for one of the stacked books beside the sofa.
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“This will not work,” Alphonse shouted across the chamber.
Victoria sat hunched in the small corner near her desk, a large bucket positioned beneath her. She barely looked up. “We don’t know what’s in your blood that caused your disease,” she replied steadily. “What if it affects the outcome of the experiment? We can’t risk that.”
She fixed her gaze on a single, perfectly cut square of stone in the wall opposite her, concentrating with everything she had to keep the nausea at bay.
A cool tingling had crept across her face, spreading outward as the slow drip of blood from her arm fell into the bucket below, pitter-pattering softly in the silence.
“What should it matter?” Alphonse argued sharply.
“We’re killing it again immediately afterward.
Even diseased blood will not disrupt organ function temporarily.
” He moved closer, his voice lowering but no less firm.
“Despite what you say, you are weak—and ill with nerves yourself. You have grown thin and gaunt these last months. Until now, I have allowed you your comfort in quiet so as not to worsen it, but you are hardly in any condition to produce enough blood for this experiment.”
“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. “And I understand your apprehension, but I still think you will change your mind and allow him to stay once you meet him.”
“Victoria,” her father warned. “I have told you not to get attached. He will die within twelve hours of resurrection. Even with adaptation and a new brain, the man’s body is still a weapon.
He enjoyed hurting and killing, and he was good at it.
So good at it, countries fought over him.
He did not spare women and children. The man had no morals, apparently, only violence and greed.
Dangerous cannot describe the things I’ve heard about this man since he’s been in our possession.
He is infamous among the elite. Never married.
The only women he was seen with were killed—in fact nearly everyone who saw him died.
They say you only saw him when it was your time to die, and even then, no one ever saw him when he killed. A wraith.”
When the dark gray grout around the stone began to blur and double, Victoria stopped the flow of blood from her vein and quickly tied the small tourniquet around her arm.
“He could awaken and be the most soft-spoken, kind man I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and I will still not allow him to live.
I will not allow him near you once he awakens.
That kind of evil stays in the soul. No matter what we replace, it will reside within him.
He must die. No exceptions, Victoria. That’s enough blood. ”
For the experiment to work, the cadaver required blood and a lot of it.
Victoria believed from her studies that the blood that filled the body needed to be pure and free from any pollutants, or the resurrection would not work.
They could procure organs and other body parts, but finding massive amounts of untainted blood was difficult, so Victoria had taken on the task of collecting her own blood.
Bloodletting was quite common in their practice, and her father initially had not protested until it began taking a toll on her state.
Today, Innominatus was on the table in front of her.
She would lean against his table, clutching his forearm if she thought she might pass out.
She was sure her father thought it odd how she treated the cadaver, but until today, he had thankfully kept his opinions to himself.
Victoria knew it was foolish and odd—grotesque even—to feel such a connection to a body, but she could not help it.
She had grown more invested each day in the prospect of bringing him back to life.
Her father’s words rattled her, though, and a new fear pressed into her thoughts of Innominatus.
What if he didn’t wake up to be the man she had formed in her lonely imagination?
What if the flames and pulses that went off when she touched him or was near him really were fueled by hate and violence?
The careful hours of attention repairing and replacing parts of the man—making him whole once more—had created a bond the likes of which she’d never felt.
A sculptor loved their statue; no one would ever love it more than the one who created it.
The difference for Victoria was that, unlike the sculptor, she might have the opportunity to awaken her creation and feel his love in return.
If he didn’t hate her or try to kill her for what she’d done to him, which now she wasn’t so sure wasn’t a possibility.
“It’s beginning to rumble outside; I believe there will be another storm tonight. We should secure the Leyden jars in the apparatus.” Victorian nodded. His words sounded fuzzy in her ears. She focused on the curve of the cadaver’s jaw and the soft shadow underneath it as it flowed onto his neck.
“You are so stubborn,” her father grumbled as he sat on the stool next to the cadaver and continued to clean the area where the kidneys next to him would go.
“Did you get the heart in? That’s all that’s left,” she said as she leaned back and felt the wooden ridge of her seat press sharply into the bones of her back.
She shifted, feeling the pain all over her body from the hardness of sitting in the chair, and admired one of the cobwebs in the tall corner of the lab, to the left of where her father worked.
She’d been watching this particular web for months, wondering if it might be the home of the spider she had spared that day at the beginning of winter.
Sweeping one day, she had come across the web.
The broom in her hands had been raised, ready to knock down the web that at that point had only been a few long strings hanging in the corner.
It wasn’t hurting anyone, so she left it.
Victoria’s eyes had caught sight of the pebble-sized black spider with a brown star on its back, and her hand stilled, broom frozen inches from the spider as it skittered off the glistening lines of fragile silk and onto the stone wall.
Empathy pulled at Victoria’s gut once again, and she found herself resting the straw of the broom back on the floor and walking away from the small arachnid, pondering the morality of killing things that didn’t directly serve humans.
The feeling in her stomach twisted, coiling in on itself like something alive.
She had killed hundreds of spiders in the cold, dark depths of the castle without ever sparing them more than a passing thought—hundreds of small lives erased with a shoe, a cloth, a careless swipe of the hand.
She had never questioned it. Never paused.
Except for that one day, the memory of which now rose in her chest with an unexpected, almost unbearable weight.
Why did human lives surpass everything else in importance?
What kind of God-level perspective must one assume to decide that their existence mattered more than another’s, simply because they could contextualize it, narrate it, name it?
Just because humans were larger, armed with a greater array of tools, sharper intellects, and language to justify themselves, hardly made them superior.
It certainly did not grant them permission to destroy and kill indiscriminately, cloaking violence in the thin excuse of scale.
How would they be any better than Innominatus and all his killings, if they killed him?
Or was it precautionary? What if it was all true and he killed others?
Would the kills be their fault because they brought him back?
Victoria’s mind spun. What if the people he killed were bad? Did it excuse it?
Perhaps the only truly godlike thought, Victoria mused, was restraint. Sparing the spider.