Page 32 of Her Creation

An uneasy prickle coiled in the pit of Victoria’s stomach. She knew her father had curious means of gathering various bodies and their parts for his experiments and her training, yet his patients rarely didn’t survive their time with him and when they left, they were whole…or at least she thought. Where was he getting all these body parts? Previously she had turned a blind eye to their origins, assuming that a perfect circumstance had occurred to supply them, but with the need of so many and the ease with which Alphonse bought them, it caused a queasy feeling to sit inside of her. She had always thought of her father as a hero, a saintlike man who saved everyone and everything—well, almost everyone—but the closer she worked with him in the lab, the more she wondered if he was as saintly as she had always believed.

“Where will you find them all?” she pressed, needing to know. She hated all the secrets that now sat between them.

He glanced over his spectacles pointedly. “You forgot brain. It needs a new brain.”

Victoria’s fingers stilled before returning to their task, repairing a section of bone in the cadaver’s leg. “His brain is intact. It’s the only part of him that needs nothing.”

“Step away from the body,” her father commanded.

She lifted her arms, tools still in hand and took three large steps away from the cadaver, mirroring her father on the other side.

“Watch the flame of the man’s awareness,” he said as he stepped forward and lay his hands over the cadaver’s chest and stomach. The flame remained small and steady. A modest candle flame with no wind. “Step forward,” he urged her, his face serious and displeased.

Victoria’s head shook as she stepped forward, unsure what the meaning of this demonstration was, but as she approached, the closer she came, the brighter the flame burned until her hips hit the edge of the table and the light flickered excitedly. She swallowed as her father nodded for her to place her hand on the cadaver as he had. With a deep inhale, Victoria splayed her hands and moved to lay them on the man’s chest and stomach. Before she even touched the cadaver, the flame stretched and danced, fighting as if to free itself from the confines of the glass. When she made contact with the cadaver, the flame doubled its size with a flash, continuing to lick the sides of the glass as it stretched toward Victoria erratically.

“I told you, it’s broken. I must have disconnected a wire,” she muttered under her breath as she watched the flame reach for her. “You said you would look at it.”

“I’ve been looking at it. It only does this for you. I don’t like it. Its wires are all as they should be.”

Something warm bloomed in her body. “What…what does it mean?” She forced her mouth not to smile.

“It means despite a lack of connection to anything else, the Russian’s brain is responding to you. And only you. I don’t like it.”

Victoria stepped away again and the flame steadied. Her father caught her smile before she dropped it.

“This isn’t a good thing, child,” he snapped.

“I’ve been working on him more than anyone. Maybe he’s just familiar with me,” she tried.

It was her father’s turn to laugh. “You assume its awareness is friendly. Foolish and juvenile. This is the brain of a murderer. A trained, hired killer. You assume its signaling suggests it enjoys your presence. What if it’s the opposite? What if it detests you? Wants to harm you when you’re near it?”

“Oh.” She’d never thought about the possibility that his awareness could possibly be flickering because it didn’t want her to touch him or be near.

Her father shook his head. “No, if we are to bring it back to life, the last thing we should want is for the brain of this man to remain. We don’t know what will happen when it is reanimated. An entire country was hunting him—they had to bait him just to capture him. We replace the beast’s brain. The Wraith of Serbia will die alongside all its memories when the brain is replaced.”

Victoria’s spine stiffened. How easily he spoke of destroying someone’s life as they remembered it. She couldn’t explain why, but she hated the thought of removing his brain, though maybe there was peace in losing all those hard memories. But surely he had good ones stored as well. Even monstrous, beastly killers had wonderful memories at some point, didn’t they? Or perhaps they didn’t; perhaps that’s why they became what they did.

“After we reinforce its bones fully, then we will implant the internal organs, heart last.” His hands trembled, as they always did now. It didn’t matter; the cadaver didn’t mind the messy repairs, and soon her father would take his last dose of laudanum for the day and head to bed, and then Victoria would spend the next hour or so cleaning up the messy stitchwork and repairs her father had done. When he returned to his work in the morning, it would be steady and flawless, just as he remembered.

“Are you still going to Helena’s tomorrow? I imagine you should like to escape the confines of the castle now that the weather has calmed. I enjoy your friend immensely. Tell her to return so that we may discuss her taste in poetry once again.” He chuckled softly.

Helena had shown up at the castle a few times to check on Victoria, and they had spent the latter part of the evenings in the castle’s expansive library, where her father had joined them. Even though Victoria knew her friend’s wild curiosity no doubt made her inquisitive about the lab, Helena never once asked about it. Victoria wondered if Helena hadn’t already figured out what Victoria was doing. Helena wouldn’t care. In fact, she would likely encourage Victoria. They’d had many conversations on the senseless restrictions of women in such fields. Had Helena already put together the reason Wilhelm had secrets about Victoria? There had been several moments she had been tempted to open her mouth and let the flow of all her hidden secrets roll from her tongue and free her heavy mind, knowing that Helena would be supportive. But she couldn’t. No matter how much she wished to, she could only imagine the temporary relief it might give her to be free from the shadows of lies and secrets, at least to one person.

Alphonse’s gritty voice startled her from her daydream. “Set the fragment flush—there, against the tibial crest. It should marry cleanly if you angle it forward.”

Victoria looked at her father. “If I angle it forward, it will shorten the limb. The crest isn’t the reference point here.”

Alphonse stopped. A beat passed before he responded. “What do you mean, it isn’t?”

“The alignment takes the medial malleolus as primary.” She cleared her throat. “If we follow your line, the distal end will rotate inward and it won’t bear weight. It needs to be drawn back, not forward.” Her eyes slowly rose to meet her fathers.

Realization weighed down Alphonse’s tired eyes. “Yes…of course. Back.”

A wave of mortification prickled her chest, not for her, but for her father, imagining how it must feel to be corrected by your daughter. He was starting to slip, and they both knew it. Silently, she continued to work with steady precision.

“You are good, Vic. Better than I was at your age, with twice your education. You are already capable of passing me in skill.” He let out a sigh and moved to the bottle of laudanum on his desk.

“It was a simple mistake. I was simply thinking about it differently, that’s all.” She continued to work, bent over the leg of the cadaver, expertly moving the bone into place as though she’d done it every day of her life.