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“Is he supposed to bleed like that?”
Reason snapped back into me as Lucy nodded toward blood dripping down the back of Edward’s neck.
“I injected him with an anticoagulant,” I explained. “It will make him bleed profusely, but it will also help bind the reattachments. You can help. Take that rag and mop it up.”
She hurried to dab the blood away with a clean cloth, exposing the smooth white of the bone beneath. His skull. I made an incision just below the occiput, four inches in diameter, and exposed the pink flesh of his brain. So simple, and yet so complex.
I pressed the scalpel to the base of the brain and cut.
My stomach lurched in response. Before, when I had watched Elizabeth work on Moira’s eye, I had wanted to be the one holding that blade. I had wanted to cut apart the essence of a human and stitch one back up again—and now I was.
“Keep holding his body steady,” I said. “And hand me that larger scalpel.”
I knew every fold of skin, every joint and artery. I’d memorized it on pages in a book, and I felt it beneath my own fingers. Lucy handed me the scalpel and took a small step back. My fingers were shaking but I took a deep breath and thought of my father’s steady hands, and mine stilled.
“My God,” Lucy said, watching with rapt attention. “You really were born for this.”
Pride, mixed with shock, laced her breathless words. I wondered what it must feel like to have a parent who supported one’s desires and talents. If only Father had taught me alongside Montgomery. I could have made him proud.
“Yes, now the carotid artery . . . I need to sever the connective tissue. . . .” I already knew the procedure by heart. In another few cuts, the posterior lobe was exposed. A sharp, rotten smell emanated from it, and I nearly dropped my scalpel in revulsion. Edward’s reptile brain was swollen to the size of a rotten and bloated tomato. Deep lines of black marred the purple surface. The tissue looked thin and waxy, and thick yellow puss seeped out of a tear.
Lucy gagged at the rotten-egg smell. “How foul!”
“Indeed. There’s the problem,” I pressed a hand over my own nose as I pointed the sharp end of a scalpel toward the ganglia. “See the connective tissue? It’s diseased. The jackal organs my father used were diseased from rabies, and it combined with the malaria from Montgomery’s blood.”
My eyes followed the pus dripping down the side. I was looking at the Beast in his most animalistic, physical sense. I knew disease and cancers could result in modified brain activity. This swollen, diseased organ had gone one step further: created an entire second self within Edward, toyed with not only his personality, his temperament, but it had also changed him on even a physical level.
The sterile cloth lay on the table; I wrapped it around my nose and mouth to staunch the smell before pressing the scalpel into the base of the medulla. The sharp point sunk into it like butter. White-yellow puss foamed out. Lucy gagged and turned away, but I kept cutting. In another few incisions, I had freed the diseased organ. With hands slick with puss and blood, I unscrewed the lid of a glass jar and dumped the organ inside, sealing away the terrible stench.
In the jar, the organ looked so benign. Could an entire personality truly be reduced to puss and flesh in a glass jar? In a way, loss and longing pulled at my gut. The Beast had been a monster. He’d been a murderer. And yet on some terrible, deep level, he had been the only one to understand me.
“Juliet,” Lucy said, pulling me from my past. “The rain is letting up. The storm won’t last forever.”
I flicked a glance at her: dark hair twisted back tight, streaks of blood on her cheek and staining her hands. Such an innocent face, but she wasn’t innocent any longer. What happened in this room would change her forever.
I jerked her chin toward the metal table. “The manacles. Help me secure him in place.”
She picked up one heavy leather cuff, dusty with disuse. “Is that really necessary?”
“You’ve seen Hensley’s strength. We aren’t taking any chances until we’re certain he’s not dangerous.”
The sight of a gaping hole in the back of Edward’s head made her uneasy, but she strapped him to the table while I sutured the vagrant’s healthy posterior lobe to Edward’s brain stem, wired the vertebra and bone back together, and bandaged his head.
“That’s the worst of it over now,” I said as I reached for the complicated system of wires. “This part is far less bloody. It’s just like we did with the rat.” Her eyes watched in wonder as I attached the electrical nodes to the key neurological points on his body: the sciatic nerve, the base of the spinal cord, the nerves in his wrists. We soaked two sponges in a brine solution and pressed them to the sides of his head. Outside, thunder clapped. It seemed the heavens were as anxious to witness the impossible as we were.
I finished with the wires and then went to the cabinet and opened the drawer. I took out the silver pistol.
“We can’t take any chances,” I said. “On my signal, pull the lever, just like before.” Her hand rested on the lever, her eyes on the storm outside. Rain pelted in through the open window, stinging both of our faces.
Time seemed to slow. I took in the room in flashes: Edward, cold and dead on the table, Lucy with wild eyes awaiting the storm, the pistol in my own numb hand. The hair slowly raised on the back of my neck. Tingles began along the nerves running up the backs of my legs.
“Now!” A bolt of lightning struck the rod, and Lucy threw down the lever. Sparks flashed from equipment that hadn’t felt such direct voltage in forty years. Lucy remained steady, but her eyes were on fire. My breath came fast as pulses of sheer electricity ran down the lightning rod, into the wires, into Edward’s flesh. I could imagine them finding the web of nerves, connecting synapses, traveling from the extremities to the core to the heart to the head, waking everything with a jolt.
More lightning crashed outside, with the sound of a tree falling somewhere. I became aware of a pounding at the door downstairs; no—the door to the laboratory. Balthazar was knocking. He had heard me screaming, but I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t make it to the door. Couldn’t even keep a hold of the pistol in my hand.
“Turn it off!” I shouted at last, and Lucy complied.
The equipment powered down with snapping wires, the smell of burned flesh and ozone in the air. Lucy slumped against the table, spent and drained. I forced my fingers to wake up and curl around the pistol. I raised it on instinct toward the body on the table.
