A Cold Legacy (The Madman's Daughter 3)

A spark snapped, and I jerked. Sweat broke out on my forehead as though Father was peering over my shoulder.

Elizabeth adjusted the dial and electricity popped again on the wires connected to the rat. Movement caught my eye—just a flinch. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. But there was no mistaking what I had seen. There—it came again. The rat’s little paw, curling with the pulses of electricity. Suddenly I wasn’t in the tower at all. I was back in King’s College with Lucy, watching students vivisecting an unanesthetized rabbit. Its back leg had twitched just like the rat’s. Only back then my body had shaken with rage, not thrill. Those boys had been torturing that rabbit, ending its life slowly and painfully. Now, before my very eyes, Elizabeth was doing the exact opposite. Bringing a creature back to life. Righting its wrongful death. If there was pain involved—well, what was pain, in the face of new life?

Its body was warming, twitching back to life as the electrical currents jolted the heart. Elizabeth cranked the dial once more and the entire rat convulsed.

Its scream was far too human for something so small. I flinched but didn’t cover my ears. I wanted to hear that scream. I liked it. It was the scream of life fighting back into the world, the scream of the impossible finding a voice, the scream of death’s last stand before being banished back into the shadows.

Elizabeth lowered the lever, and the crackling in the air faded. She came to the table, where we watched the rat twitching back to life. Gently, she removed the wires and withdrew the needle from the creature’s heart. A tiny drop of crimson marred the rat’s perfect white fur.

Blood.

Or rather, life.

The rat suddenly scrambled to its stomach, eyes blinking, nose twitching, both panic and lethargy present in its jerky movements. I reached out to touch the soft fur. Beneath my fingers I could feel its heart fluttering out of control, the warm blood flowing through stiff capillaries. We could give Hensley back the rat and he’d never know the difference. Or maybe I’d ask Elizabeth if I could keep it as a pet. A reminder of the awe-inspiring possibilities of science and a promise to myself that I would be bringing such creatures back to life—not like those medical students.

I pressed my hand over Jack Serra’s charm. He had told me to know my demons, and now I did, in the form of a white rat with a twitching pink nose. I knew reanimation was possible. The procedure had been sophisticated but simple. With time and research, I felt confident I could replicate it. Lucy’s plan to bring Edward back didn’t seem so mad anymore. In fact, it was starting to feel heartless not to do it.

Just as the Beast had said, science was in my blood. For all of my mother’s goodness, my father’s love of science pulsed harder in my veins. In London I’d feared I’d crossed that line and become too much like him. Now, looking at the rat, I knew. The Beast was right, just as Jack Serra was right. The river always flowed downhill. There was no point in trying to escape from the inevitable.

Elizabeth gently took the rat from me and placed it in a glass tank along with a cotton ball that smelled of alcohol and something bitter. Anesthesia. She closed the lid on the tank, and it hit me.

“Chloroform?” I said. “That will kill it!”

“I know,” she said calmly.

“But you just brought it back to life.”

“To teach you.” Her hand remained firmly on the lid. “I did this procedure for you, not the rat. Let this be your second lesson tonight. Nothing comes back from the dead unscathed. You’ve seen the effect it has had on Hensley. This rat would have been stronger than other rats, its behavior unpredictable. If I’d returned it to the cage with the others, it might have killed them all without even meaning to.”

I shook my head. This information was unwelcome. We could cure Edward of the Beast, but would he have other, more dangerous, side effects?

“You don’t know that. I could have kept it on its own in a cage and fed it myself.”

Her cold eyes didn’t waver, and more doubt sank into me.

“We don’t do this to make pets,” she said. “We don’t do it to bring those we love back. There are rules, Juliet. A code. Until you promise to me that you would never use this science for anything other than the rules, you will only watch me do it. When I’m certain your ethics are above reproach, then I’ll let you be the one to pull the lever.”

I swallowed, watching the rat twitch beneath the glass cage once, twice, and then stop. I closed my eyes.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I promise.”

I wasn’t sure if it was a lie or not. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

I took off the apron and walked down the tower’s spiral stairs in a daze. I needed fresh air and time to think. I went outside into the dark night and walked the gardens beneath a moonless sky. At night, everything took on a different appearance. I had explored Ballentyne’s gardens in the daylight and found it to be an overgrown tangle of vines, but now the shapes loomed like ghosts.

If Edward died, bringing him back was possible—but at what risk?

The Beast had claimed to love me at the same time his claws had dug into my shoulder deeply enough to draw blood. A deranged, twisted obsession. Would it be any different after the procedure? A terrible image flickered in my mind of Edward, brought back from the dead, hugging Lucy with such unnatural strength that he suffocated her just as Hensley did with his beloved rats.

As my wandering feet took me through the gardens back toward Ballentyne, I noticed a light blazing on the front steps, moving back and forth. It was McKenna, dressed in a man’s sweater, holding a torch and pacing from one end to the other. Worry had sunken into her wrinkles—she must have realized I’d slipped out of the house and was looking for me.

I hurried back toward the house.

“McKenna,” I said, breathing hard as I climbed the steps. “I’m sorry I wandered off. It was selfish of me.”

To my surprise, her worry didn’t fade. She barely glanced at me.

“Wandered off? Hush, little mouse. You’d hardly be the first. Half of my girls here spend hours wandering the grounds.” Her voice was soft, but her eyes were troubled as they scanned the moors, her fingers working anxiously.

I pulled my sweater closer. “Who are you looking for, then?”

“It’s Valentina. She was supposed to wake me at midnight; we do the week’s baking in the wee hours of Saturday mornings. But she didn’t. There’s no sign of her, not since yesterday. Her bedroom door is locked and she has the only key.”