Chapter Two
Austin
I broke her. It was the only thing on his mind as he loomed at the end of the hall.
Lord Sebastian brought her out of the laboratory yesterday to rest in bed.
Unlike other projects, it was imperative that this one have time to rest. Other projects didn’t need sentience.
Unlike Austin, Carl, or Moonpie, most of their projects needed regulations.
Rules and strict routines, things that made those creations more like machines than people.
Austin was made to be people. Carl and Moonpie were made to be free-roaming, free-thinking pets.
Which is just people but with less responsibilities, oh to be an undead cat that spends half the day in the arms of my Lady Rosemont.
The pretty dead lady would need to be a people.
Person?
Sapient.
Which was harder to do than the creations he was used to up until that point.
Thus, the worry that he broke her…because why did she scream like that?
He looked down into her face, watching her eyes clear up and her veins fill with color, and she screamed.
A high-pitched sound that echoed in his ears even hours after it stopped.
Sebastian said it was normal, but Austin wasn’t so sure.
Not even their creations made for vicious purposes screamed like that.
So…I have broken her. It’s hard to be gentle when one is seven feet and four inches tall with narwhal horns for tusks and the might of a rock giant. Maybe if Sebastian made him out of weaker stuff, he’d be less inclined to break things. But that’s not what I was made for…
The door to the bedroom, where Sebastian laid her down to rest, cracked open and Austin lurched forward.
His hands warmed nervously. Forced to wipe them on his trousers, he studied the doorway for a long moment, expecting Sebastian to return with another shake of his head. She’ll wake when she’s ready.
But when she emerged, Austin panicked. Scrambling hand over ass as a mountain giant sized person is not easy, but he managed to fly out of the hallway and down the stairs into the Lab.
Before I break her again. His heart thundered in his chest, pumping the thick ichor used for his blood through his veins.
Adrenaline kicked in and made his limbs weak as he rounded one of the many worktables.
Idle hands, Austin! He needed something to do.
Something to focus on. Panic made his eyeballs itch and his stomach filled with fluttering beasts.
Austin dove, elbows deep, into the junk trunk, pulling out arms and legs like they might hold his attention.
It was only when a shadow passed behind the trunk, blocking out one of the overhead lights, did he glance up.
“Austin?” Smith asked, head cocked ninety degrees to the side with his hands tucked behind him.
The slender lawyer was dressed in a simple pair of slacks and a red button up that was left open at the top three buttons.
A faceless being with sharklike teeth filling a broad smile, pale as moonlight with divots in his not-face like there would be eye sockets if Smith were made of flesh and not nightmares.
Despite all of that, Smith was never scary to Austin.
Smith leaned in closer. “What’s the matter? ”
“Nothing,” he laughed with a pitiful excuse for a lie. “I am searching for inspiration, like Lord Rosemont says.”
“Hmm, and so that herd of elephants I heard earlier wasn’t you?” Smith chuckled, crouching down behind the trunk. Austin sighed, closing the lid with an elbow. Pulling one of the many cleaning rags off the work bench to the left of him, he brushed off the clumps of sinew covering his fingers.
“I broke her, Smith.”
“Broke who?”
“The dead woman.” Austin hung his head.
“Really? I thought Lord Rosemont said you found her? Murdered? That’s what I wrote in her contract.” Smith folded his long, noodly arms over the junk trunk.
“No, that’s true. I meant when she woke back up.
I’ve broken her. She saw my face and screamed, Smith.
Doesn’t that mean I broke her? Or at least scared her?
” Austin folded the towel into a neat little triangle and tucked it away on one of the many shelves hiding the pair from the rest of the laboratory.
Lord Rosemont’s lab was a long, rectangular room with a massive crystal pane window at the front.
It was full of marble tiles and stainless steel.
Long tubes for revitalizing corpses gurgled with a rainbow array of colored liquids inside them.
Pipes ran up the walls around them into the rest of the house.
Despite how much it was used, the laboratory was always spotless.
We’re necromancers…not necromessers.
“Ah,” Smith hummed as he nodded thoughtfully. “Or, and this could very much be me playing the Lich’s advocate here, Austin…this dead woman is simply a new spirit who has suddenly become sentient, and screaming is exactly what every creature does upon realizing they can function autonomously.”
“Really?” Austin scrunched his face, glancing up at Smith before returning his gaze to his dirty fingernails.
“Well, think of babies. The second they’re born, they scream.” Smith dropped down to sit beside Austin, his back to one of the many worktables in the lab.
“How do you know what babies do?” Austin teased, swiveling his head to stare at the man plopped beside him.
“I know many things, that’s my job,” Smith retorted with a giant, shark toothed grin up at Austin. “Why would you assume you broke anything?”
“Well, mostly because my face was the first face she saw,” he grimaced. Returning to the dirt smudged under his trimmed nails, he picked at it with one of the many sewing needles he kept on the shelves under the worktables. “Smith, can someone die from fright?”
“Yes,” Smith snorted before straightening at the horrified shift on Austin’s face. “Oh! No, big guy, you can’t think like that.”
“I scared her,” Austin croaked.
“You’re not even all that scary looking, Austin. Please. You’re the most handsome guy in the house.” Smith swatted at his arm with a flop of his hand. “Remember, you’re a hunk.”
Austin wanted to enjoy the compliment. He did.
But all he could remember was the poor coffee cart kid who saw him years ago, walking Lady Rosemont to the bank.
How the teen trembled in fear, eyebrows up into their hairline.
How, the last time they went to the city, Austin pretended not to notice people scurrying away from him as he walked down the sidewalk.
It's the skin; I’m off-putting. No, it’s the stitches, I’m visibly undead. Or maybe it’s the size—yeah, it’s gotta be the size. What’s a guy to do when he’s a lean, mean, hulking machine?
“I’m a monster,” Austin whispered his confession like it took the last drop of air in his lungs to say it.
I am a monster and I am falling apart at the seams. Austin scrunched away from Smith in attempt to make himself smaller but all it did was cause his shoulders to clip the worktable and it groaned as the metal dented slightly.
Smith climbed to his feet, fixing the metal with a zap of his hand to the top.
When he crouched down beside the sulking man, he did so with his hands knotted up in front of him.
“Hey, big guy, look at me.” Smith’s voice was soft, barely audible but in the empty laboratory, it echoed off all the walls.
Austin glanced up from his fingers, a deep frown still embedded on his face.
When he did, Smith put a hand on his shoulder.
“You’re not a monster, and anyone whose made you feel that way is not to be trusted.
You’re my best friend, alright? Could a monster stay up with me for days to study for law exams?
Or help convince squirrels to eat out of the palm of their hands during a brutal winter?
Or hold Aggy when she’s frightened during storms, huh? You think a monster could do all that?”
Austin chuckled, shaking his head. “I guess not.”
“You guess right, my friend! And I would know.”
“Cause you’re a lawyer?”
“No, because I’m always right…don’t tell Melody I said that.”
Austin snorted. “Did you pinkie promise to be more humble?”
Smith scoffed, twisting away from Austin. “No! I simply insinuated that I was humble enough and she laughed in my face. So, therefore, I am trying to prove it to my beloved werewolf. But, there is being humble and then there are the facts.”
Austin rolled his eyes, nodding along as Smith rambled more.
The lawyer spoke with his elongated fingers as he strode away from the worktable.
Austin followed him, but his eyes kept roaming back to the slab.
The one at the far end where she’d been stitched back together, where she’d blinked for the first time, and where she’d screamed in his face.
If I am not a monster, why does this weight in my chest persist? If I am not broken, why do I feel as though I am coming apart at the seams?
Austin wanted to ask Smith or even Sebastian, but there would be no actual talk with them.
Smith would immediately try to cheer Austin up instead of letting him speak to the pain that radiated through his chest. Lord Rosemont would tell him it was okay, that he wasn’t to blame, but Austin wasn’t just a monster because he scared the dead woman from the woods.
Austin failed at his key objective. My purpose.
He was Lord Rosemont’s right hand. Muscle when needed, protection and insurance that things never went awry.
If The Hungry One turning him to a pile of pieces in the front yard wasn’t bad enough…
two years ago, when the vampiress Elyth Rosemont descended upon the house, he did nothing to defend his home.
It wasn’t one but two prolonged examples that Austin was a mistake.
A failure who couldn’t even follow a simple rule:
Protect this house, Austin, from all whom would harm it.