Page 50 of Her Creation

Her vision blurred, hot tears spilling free. She pressed her palm against him, desperately searching for movement, warmth—anything. Nothing.

There was nothing. He was gone.

Only the fading ghost of heat lingering in the worn cotton of his shirt remained.

A sound tore from her throat—raw, animal, unrecognizable—as thunder cracked directly overhead. Her chest heaved violently, pressure crushing inward until she felt certain her ribs would splinter and spill her heart onto the stone beside him in a matching pool of gore. She squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her hands over her ears, but still she heard them—the horrible taps of his feet just before he fell, the throaty noise he’d made when he realized he was falling.

She dragged in a cold, metallic breath—and then the thought came.

Resurrect him.

The idea slid into her mind with unnatural smoothness, and with it came an eerie, terrifying calm. The chaos inside her stilled, replaced by a sharp, focused clarity that made her feel almost hollow.

Her head snapped up.

Across the laboratory, the cadaver convulsed as thick arcs of electricity crawled over his body, snapping and hissing like living things. The smell of iron burned her nostrils. Blue-white light strobed across the walls, painting everything in violent flashes.

Her father’s voice echoed perfectly in her mind, clear and absolute: “Respect my wishes and leave your mother and me to the peace of death. Do not, under any circumstances, bring me or either of us back to life. Promise me.”

A sudden stillness came over her as her eyes fell on the discarded parchment-wrapped heart lying on one step. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed down her hysteria and let it fill her stomach with glass shards of calm.

“You will not leave me.” Her head shook slowly as she spoke softly as if to a small child. Her left eyelid twitched, moving her eyelashes as she looked down at her father. Half lidded with a forced calm, her eyes located the brown parcel again on the edge of the fourth step down. “The heart of a saint.”

Her eyes roamed over the enormous, sparking man with stoicism before she pressed her fingers into his body and inspected the opening in his chest. She had to move quickly or the blood being pumped into him would be wasted. With eerie calm, Victoria swallowed down the feelings that threatened to climb up her throat and gripped several tools. The sharp knives clanged together in her grip as she walked slowly back to her father.

She bent and kissed his cheek—the one he had left—before she cut into his chest, through the fabric of his shirt and everything. Something flipped and fluttered in her stomach, like an acid butterfly. She continued until she completed the task and carefully stood—holding her father’s heart in her blood-covered hands.

The sound of her boots hitting the floor echoed around the corners of the laboratory as she reached the open cadaver.

Innominatus.

“Better than any saint,” she whispered as she kissed the wet organ and lowered it into the cadaver’s chest, quickly working to attach it. After she finished, Victoria stepped back and admired the freshly stitched chest with a cloudy numbness. She glanced at the heavy iron staples and made certain that she had shackled his wrists and ankles.

Just as her father had wanted. No matter what happened next, she would carry out this experiment exactly as her father had wanted.

With a deep inhale, she flipped the last switch and watched as her stored blood coursed into the creature’s veins. Sparks flew to the ceiling, illuminating the entire laboratory and causing the body to vibrate and jerk wildly. A tranquil smile curled at the corner of Victoria’s lips despite her eyes remaining vacant as she turned her back to the sparking man and returned calmly to her father with her stitching kit in hand.

Great crackles and snaps sounded behind her. The taste of the electricity landed on her tongue as she closed up her father’s open wounds. She couldn’t heal him, but she would put him back together as best she could. She owed him that.

With a grunt, she managed to roll her father’s body onto a nearby linen and dragged him into the cold chamber that had previously been Inno’s home. With the table gone from the space, she laid her father on the floor of the ice-cold chamber. She gave his good cheek, now stiff and cold, a kiss and left the chamber.

She cleaned up the streaks and smears and pools of blood as best and as quickly as she could. The sooner it wasn’t there to remind her of the horrible incident, the better.

After removing her gloves and every article of bloodstained clothing until she was completely naked, she threw the tainted clothing in a pile by the stairs to burn. She glanced back at the seizing Innominatus and realized it was almost time. He would wake any moment.

She would have to fire the staff tomorrow; she couldn’t afford to keep them. Without her father, she would be forced to leave the castle. Without money, how could she ensure a proper burial for her father?

“Aggh.”

Victoria’s head snapped up at the unfamiliar voice grunting. She rose slowly, mesmerized by Innominatus…moving. Her lungs filled with musty, metallic air as she walked to the table and pulled back the levers, stopping the electricity.

As she bent over the large man as she had a thousand times…his amber-gold eyes blinked back at her brighter than the color she remembered.

She reached out and touched his chest to feel the erratic beat of his heart beneath his too-warm skin.

His eyes danced over her features erratically before his face tightened and he cried out in pain. She pulled her hand back and stepped away, looking at her hands. She may have known his body inside and out, but his living mind and soul were a complete stranger to her—and Innominatus had no idea who she was.

Without the crackling of the apparatus, the sound of rain hitting the walls of the castle filtered all the way down to the basement as the storm continued to rage. The stranger cried out again in pain, and she stepped back in fear as the man she’d known as Innominatus came to life. He suddenly seemed so much larger, so much more powerful and dangerous with life sparking through his body. His presence alone was suddenly terrifying, completely different from the still cadaver she had fallen in love with.