Page 53 of Adam, Mine

Would they wake screaming in the night at dreams of whatever he looked like on their doorstep?

Would he remind them too much of the sight and be unable to dry their tears?

Elias was still Margarite’s child, cast to drift in the sea. Charged with a holy mission, hands soaked in the blood of man. The butcher she raised on milk and meat, the cub she cuddled on cold nights.

But now, he was no one’s son. Victor had slaughtered the connection between him and the only home he’d ever known. All he had now was a doll that did not even truly belong to who it reminded him of.

Elias wasn’t sure what sort of man he would be when Victor’s house was finally hollow as a gourd. When the wind whistled through his windows as the stench of rot sank into the linens and carpets.

How he passed through its gate. How he would walk the earth, after.

Brut

There was only one hospital in Geneva.* It was old and large and easy to find.

Elias stopped to refill his water canister, then walked straight there. He still felt pangs of hunger and exhaustion when appropriate, but he’d never felt so strong before. He knew now that it was a part of the curse of whatever Victor had done, but he wasn’t sure how it worked.

He had never been able to go so long without eating and never been able to walk these far distances. Though he still had not yet looked in a mirror, he could see his hands and arms filling out with muscle. Flesh he did not have even before Victor walked into his tavern.

He was by no means a hale man. But he looked . . . perhaps like a hale man who had experienced suffering more than a waif who had never before known health.

It did not excite him. There was a wrongness to the feeling. Though it gave him strength for his terrible purpose.

The nursemaids at this hospital were very busy. The cold here had lodged itself in the chests of children and the elderly. Elias could hear their coughing and wheezing from the entrance where he stood.

They did not have time for Elias standing before them without a bleeding wound or illness, and they did not have time to be careful.

They divulged Alphonse Frankenstein’s address immediately—glad to have pushed a patient elsewhere in the midst of their crisis. Warning him that the doctor required payment considerably higher than most could afford.

This was fine.

Elias, remembering the address, ducked into a tavern to eat his share of meat and inquire about walking directions.

The people of Geneva did not stare at him as much as they did in Munich. There were many old soldiers here, and for that Elias was grateful. Anxiety tried its best to push itself to his heart, but he quelled it with anger. He reminded himself that, though he was far from home and surrounded by strangers, he was grown and expected to carve his own way.

Victor, he reminded himself, was a shade between man and boy. Old enough, perhaps, to court Elias—as their differing stature would even out after a single year of handfasting. But young enough for other men to see he was not yet fully blooded, and create struggles for him if they desired to.

He still had the fat on his cheeks that Elias had lost three years past and shoulders slender. He did not look like he could grow a mustache, much less a beard, though he dressed like a man leagues above Elias’s station.

He was also very beautiful, if one looked away from his dead eyes.

Elias pettily hoped Victor was having many inconveniences on his travels. Imagined with glee him falling into a ditch and breaking his leg or drowning in the sea.

But that thought didn’t last for long. It wasn’t in Elias’s nature to find joy in others’ pain.

Reeds

The house where Victor grew up looked hauntingly similar to Elias’s own. It was just bigger and had more animals. The land was fenced around to keep them in and also to mark their territory.

Elias had only ever been able to associate Victor with the plaster and steel of the city. The severity of a sea of black clothes pressed sharp. Cologne that burned the nose. Clinical and orderly, cramped and dull.

It suited him.

This place, however, spoke of a childhood in the sunshine. Chores while the wind blew your cheeks pink. Grass and mud beneath soft boots instead of cobblestones.

Elias frowned. He shifted in his tree perch and pulled his scarf tighter around himself.

The Frankensteins must own a good deal of land. The other houses in this area were close together, but this one was apart. They had only one neighbor, and even still, they lived far away enough that it might be hard to hear a commotion.