Page 42 of Her Creation

They stepped into the glittering side yard, snow crunching softly beneath their boots. The fading sun washed the grounds in tangerine light.

“Oh, it feels lovely,” Sophia said, lifting her chin. “All I needed was fresh air. I’m very resilient.”

As the others decorated the pines, Sophia seated herself near the dry fountain. Johanna, Ida, and Helena scattered the remaining birdseed, laughing as a murder of crows descended in a cacophony of wings.

“Shoo!” Sophia said with a curl of her lip. “Let real birds eat, not these plague-ridden scavengers.”

Victoria kept her eyes on Johanna and Helena, though she felt the icy-blue stare burn against her profile.

“Oh, they’re lovely!” called Ida. She and Helena moved to sit next to Sophia, where they continued to throw seeds and try to get Sophia to join the fun.

“They are not lovely,” Sophia snapped. “They are weird and odd. Notice how no other birds will be near them? How we are now missing out on the beautiful cardinals and jays because these sky rats are here.”

“Are they really so bad just because they’re different? Darker?” Victoria broke her silence. The rest of the group went quiet as the tension pressed into the crisp winter air.

“Yes!” Sophia shouted, as if the last bit of her barely restrained patience had snapped. She picked up a palm-sized rock from the pile that surrounded the fountain and hurled it with unexpected precision, hitting one of the crows with a thud.

Gasps rang out through the group, muffled only by the sound of the fifteen or so crows cawing loudly as they took off from their place on the snow and hid in the trees. All except one. The one who had been hit with the rock.

“Sophia! You’ve killed it!” Helena and Johanna screamed in horror.

Instead of showing even the smallest hint of remorse, Sophia merely turned her head and fixed Victoria with a cold, unflinching glare. “Save it, Frankenstein,” she taunted.

But Victoria was already on her feet. Her knees drove into the cold, wet snow as if pulled there by force, the shock of it barely registering as she bent and lifted the limp crow into her arms. She did not know what she was doing—only that she was doing it. The bird’s body hung heavy and wrong in her palms, its weight unfamiliar now that all tension had fled from it. She ran her hand over its back, hearing the rustle of its feathers as she moved its wings.

Shouts erupted from the group behind her. Johanna’s hands flew into the air as she screamed for Victoria to put the dead bird down. One of the men laughed and called out something about what a good shot Sophia had been. The sound reached Victoria as if from a great distance, warped and slow, as though she were submerged beneath water.

Everything in her mind moved sluggishly, stretched thin by the thunder of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.

Maybe she could save it.

She stared down at the crow, unable to comprehend how easily—how carelessly—Sophia had done it, how quickly life had been extinguished. It took so long to keep something alive, so much effort, so much vigilance, and yet one reckless motion could undo it all in an instant.

Victoria waited, breath held, hoping desperately that the bird had only been stunned.

But then she saw the blood.

She saw the damage to its head, the dark smear where the stone had struck. Hope collapsed inside her chest, folding in on itself.

In a flurry of bloodstained snow and black fabric, Victoria turned and ran.

She fled from the group, her boots slipping as she trotted through the snow, cradling the crow against her chest as if love alone might undo what had happened. Above her, crows cried out, circling and shouting, their calls sharp and frantic as they followed her path. Unsure if they cheered Victoria or chastised her, it became a terrible symphony of her pounding pulse and grieving caws echoing across the frozen land.

She reached the manor’s stable and with a loud whinny, found Mischief waiting, mounted her horse without pause, and urged the animal forward as fast as it would go. Tears burned behind her eyes, threatening to spill as the wind lashed against her face.

Today had been a mess. There now were two other people who knew of her secret, and one hated her. She tightened her arm around the bird, not understanding why she cared so much about this stupid creature, other than that she knew it hadn’t deserved to die by Sophia’s hand and that, to her, it felt as though a strange, invisible thread bound her to its death.

Had she not fixed Sophia—had she not intervened—Sophia would have been unconscious, lying quietly in a carriage somewhere. She would not have been able to lift the rock. She would not have thrown the very stone that had ended this small, fragile life.

Victoria’s thoughts churned violently as the bird’s fellow Corvidae cawed loudly as they flew overhead.

How many times had her father saved someone like that? A murderer. A brute. Someone who had harmed another person. At what point did the responsibility end? If you saved someone who killed, were you then complicit in every death that followed?

Her tears streamed freely now, splashing onto the crow’s glossy, purple-black feathers. They darkened beneath the moisture, clinging together beneath her trembling fingers.

Was this God’s warning? Was he granting her a taste of the same moral weight he himself bore?

If it had not been for her hands, her skill, her intervention, would the harm have happened at all?