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  Even without that understanding, everything in me reacted to the sound, and internally I spun. The light, rapid fluttering in my chest told me that unconsciousness was intoxicatingly near, and I ached for it, wanted nothing more now than to escape the pain once more and vanish into the unknowing bliss of oblivion. If death were anything like unconsciousness, I thought, then I would not fight any longer a final descent into that silent, endless night.

  Before I drifted off into those gentle, almost motherly arms, the paralyzing pain began again. I wondered if it was the greatest of the sacrifices Godspeed had said must be made to prolong my life. I wondered if it constituted the crushing confines of a new, eternally hellish existence.

  I choked upon the strap as a resistant horse fights the bit. He reacted to the sound and rushed to my side. He examined me, a single nod acknowledged the swirling fear in my burning, arid eyes.

  “Bite down,” the doctor instructed. He turned back toward the panel of knobs, switches and levers behind him and analyzed it with obvious concern. “Hard.”

  A strong charge built in the very air around me, as mysterious and frightening pieces of equipment spun and chugged with quickening cadence. It was powerful, steam-driven machinery, and I heard an eerie, electrical snap followed by a loud thump as the energy discharged. Finally, I understood the origin of the pain I'd felt before, as again it burned through me, beginning on the left side of my chest then veering off in divergent directions: up through my head, to the side down my arms and to the tips of my fingers… to the soles of my feet, as though insistently seeking ground.

  My heart rebelled in response, wanting to come to a full stop in protest of this abuse and manipulation of its limits. The force of the charge was too strong for it to deny, however. Irate as it was, and for as much as it made me suffer for its anger, it succumbed to reanimation, revived by the shock but never quite strong enough to truly absorb it.

  Power that could have passed through me as a wave tore and clawed instead, slamming me down against sand that should have felt as soft as freshly sifted snow but proved unyielding as rock standing sentry along the grasping shore.

  Several times I tried to cry out, but could not give strength to my voice.

  At last I did scream, and the sound shocked me. It caused Schuyler to bellow a sympathetic shout as he recoiled in abject horror. Until I heard his exclamation, and the soft prayers that immediately followed, I had no idea that he was present in the room.

  Quinn Godspeed seemed to ignore him, continuing with his work as I twitched and thrashed, helpless to control the vengeful spasms of my overwrought flesh. The pain increased again and seemed as though it should have been beyond the ability of any mortal being to tolerate: yet my body would not let me escape it this time. The darkness eluded my grasp, vindictive, refusing to come to my rescue when I desired it most.

  I began to shiver, a contradiction in defiance of the fact that I still felt I was being burned alive. Tears spilled from my eyes and I cried, truly cried, for the first time since I'd met these two mysterious men.

  Whatever its purpose, I was certain that I could not endure much more of this treatment.

  My chest heaved and rolled with the intensity of my sobs as Schuyler bolted in an attempt to wrench a set of wires from the doctor's hands.

  “For the love of God, Quinn, stop!”

  Quinn fumbled an instant and then planted a fist against his assailant's chest. He pushed back with one forceful shove. “Be careful! You could kill yourself!”

  “You are killing her!”

  Quinn's voice escalated in tone and emotion. “I am keeping her alive!”

  “There has got to be another way. A way that won't… ”

  I heard the voice of the gentler man break, and I could not understand why he was so full of sympathy for me when he really knew nothing about me.

  Quinn's voice altered, too, but never softened as it decreased in volume. “You know damn well there is only one other way.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  I heard footsteps and again wished I had the strength to fully observe what was happening. Then came the sound of pages in a book being turned before a hand pounded soundly upon it. The doctor spoke only one word more. “This.”

  Schuyler retched a horrified gasp. “No!”

  “There is no alternative. She is too weak. It is either this, or we resign ourselves to the fact that she is going to die tonight.”

  There was no sound at all now, not for a very long time. I next felt the sensation of soft linen brushing against my cheek.

  Someone was wiping my tears away: a small, kindhearted gesture to comfort me. It did, even though I could not tell from the feel of the touch which of the two men the hand belonged to.

  Schuyler's voice shook with fear as finally, he spoke again. “Are you certain?”

  “If I were at all uncertain, do you think I'd be willing to take the risk?”

  “You can really take a living, human heart and…”

  “Create a new source of power and control to regulate it? Remember, I already have.”

  “Yes.” Schuyler's voice changed again with a sharp, angry turn in intensity. “You have already done, haven't you?”

  Now I was jolted by noises I'd not been expecting. First, the scratch and bump of displaced furniture as it scraped the floor and toppled over; then the awkward dance of feet stumbling and rushing on before the dull thud of impact as a body met an unstoppable object with incredible force.

  I managed to raise just one eyelid open long enough to see the sight that accompanied the racket.

  Quinn had taken hold of Schuyler's lapels and pressed his back up against the nearest wall. Schuyler's feet actually elevated off of the floor, even though he was several inches taller than the man who pinned him there.

  “If you value what remains of our friendship, Schuyler Algernon, I would suggest you be careful of taking that tone with me,” Quinn growled, and dropped him to the ground. Schuyler righted himself and staggered a lurching step forward.

  I returned to the darkness beneath my eyelids as I wondered what it was that had come between them in the past, only to resurface now.

  Schuyler's clothing generated a soft, fluttering swish as he attempted to straighten it. The smallest act, I was certain, to try to show that despite Quinn's anger he remained in control of his own composure. “If I am in any way to be party to this, I had to be sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That you know what you're doing this time.”

  “This time!” Quinn roared, and again I startled. His rage set my heart to beating faster than even the shocks of energy he'd sent coursing through it earlier. He'd been so calm, so unaffected by anything he'd seen before now; to hear such passionate emotion in his voice stirred something deep within me, so much so I could scarcely bear it.

  “You are already a party to this! You brought me into it only after you found this girl cold, wet, and dying on the street like an unwanted animal. What was I supposed to do, Schuyler? Tell you no? Let her die?”

  He bowed his head; I could tell because his voice became muffled. I pictured his hands moving up, coming together and covering over his beautiful, sculpted face. “I do still believe in the Oath. Even if…” His words were barely a whisper now. “Even if there are those who say that I show no regard for it.”

  “The Oath,” Schuyler scoffed. “First: do no harm. How do you reconcile…”

  “Again, I ask, is it better to do nothing?” Silence settled between them for a long moment before Quinn continued. “Do you want to bury her in the morning, Schuyler, or are you going to insist I do that, too?” His voice dropped further still and I only made out half of his next sentence, which ended with the words “ …this time.”

  Schuyler stopped speaking. He uttered a sound I could not readily assign emotions to, and then I heard him ask a single question more. “What do you need?”

  “I need light, I need mirrors, and I ne
ed you to stay the hell out of my way.”

  Schuyler's breathing grew shallow and tremulous. I could have sworn from the forced, faltering control in his voice that it sounded as though he might weep. He strode to the door, unlocked it, and paused. “May the angels guide your hands, and may God have mercy on our souls.”

  “If angels offered protection, this girl would be somewhere far better than here,” Quinn replied. “And if God had mercy, He'd save souls like ours from ever facing a day black as this.”

  My mind tried to process the rustling of Quinn's motions, the rapid taps of his footfalls. The metallic clank of instruments he set out echoed all around me. As the beating of my own heart grew distant in my chest, and my breathing ever more unsteady, it became nearly impossible to comprehend and hold onto the meaning of even the most distinct of all ambient sounds.

  The sharp sting of a needle pierced my arm. Then came the terrifying sensation of something covering my face. Every instinct drove me to push it away, but I was far too weak to make an attempt.

  As I finally succumbed to the sheltering, chemically induced darkness, one sound rose up to take precedence over every other thing I was aware of: the sound of his voice.

  The doctor spoke two words to me, directly into my ear in a tone that indicated he thought they might very well be the last I'd ever hear.

  “Dream well.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I TRAVELED FROM TROUBLED SLEEP to painless delusion; a state of drugged, suspended animation in which I heard, as plainly as I had heard anything in my life, the voices of friends and family gone before me.

  I longed to see their faces, to feel their arms welcoming me — I longed to feel I'd finally found a home.

  A voice that was male, dear, and familiar was speaking my name. It sounded frightened, an emotion I had rarely heard expressed by it before.

  “Abigail, no.”

  I slowly emerged from eerie, enveloping fog. I was drawn toward shimmering light the source of which I could not ascertain, and that seemed, no matter how many steps I took toward it, to exist only and continually just beyond my reach.

  I strained to see his face but it was obscured in mist and shadows. Even so, I was entirely certain of the speaker's identity and questioned why he rejected me. “Father?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I miss you,” I cried, shivering as though freezing to death where I stood. “I want to go with you.”

  “Fight, Abigail. There is too much left for you there. Fight!”

  His last word repeated at increasing volume; a command spoken again and again before dissolving into nothing.

  It was then I saw, for an instant, the glimpse of a woman so beautiful I thought she must be an angel. The Angel of Death?

  She was exquisite, with long curls of flaxen hair and haunted eyes that followed me wherever I went. There was a brilliant flash, and I was rendered completely blind by it. I faltered, stumbling as I faced a reality so much colder than the world I'd just seen, and so much more unkind. Pain returned and in my delirium, confused me with its brutality.

  First there were directed, striking blows and then came sharper, knife-like agony.

  “Fight!” Another voice demanded; this one reached me in a way the other could not, even though I did not believe I possessed the necessary strength to obey it. “Fight, damn you! Do not give up on me now!”

  An odd whine and click momentarily preceded a frightening, unfamiliar sensation that crawled beneath my very skin and penetrated the muscle beneath. Tiny lines, like rivers of prickling spark burned in unison across my chest and met all at once, congealed in a vital, central location.

  I jolted as I felt the fist pound against my chest again, and suddenly I realized what I was supposed to do.

  I was supposed to breathe.

  I desperately gulped in air that felt heavy, much too thick for my lungs. I focused on the rasp of Quinn's ragged voice as he struggled. I resisted the urge to stop trying and forced another gasp into my unwilling body.

  “Yes!” he shouted, his tone rising as I had never heard it before. “Breathe! Breathe, and live!”

  As I fought to battle on, another needle pierced my arm. I groaned. A now all-too familiar, indescribable chemical smell assailed me: the same one that had wakened me in Schuyler Algernon's scarlet room after he'd first brought me in from the rain.

  “Open your eyes. Look at me!”

  Without thinking, I did as I was told. My heart raced now, pounded and pulsed beyond anything I'd felt before. The waves of heat and pain continued, relentless, and I could only wonder if they would ever cease. I whimpered softly, conflicted. Most of me wanted to fight on to stay near him, but the rest just wanted this madness to finally and mercifully end.

  “Look at me,” the doctor whispered now. “Be brave. Stay with me.”

  My vision tracked over toward him, past a mind-numbing array of new machines that I could not begin to try to identify.

  I finally located his eyes and was startled by the worry I found there. He appeared in twin mirror images of himself as I fought the after-effects of anesthesia and attempted to focus. My stomach lurched and I gagged, but it was far too empty to issue forth any contents.

  He injected me with another syringe and the twisting in my middle soon subsided. I sighed with relief and looked up at him once more, finally able to truly take him in.

  I only realized how much time had passed since I had last been conscious because of the growth of stubble upon his face. His eyes were bloodshot, the whites had turned vivid crimson, and had developed cavernous black circles beneath. They searched mine to see if there was any power to the mind behind them; the moment he saw that there was, he did something that I had not at all expected, but knew I would never forget.

  He smiled at me.

  It was a muted version of the standard expression, barely turning up the corner of one side of his mouth, but it was unmistakable.

  The statue could feel something, after all.

  His arm extended. One by one his fingers unfurled, strong and warm as they traced the outline of my face. For an instant, there was an unspoken and unspeakable tenderness, a new light in him that I had also never seen before. I wished — even knowing the desire was in vain — that I would never see anything else in him again.

  “Welcome back,” he whispered. “Welcome home, little girl, to the waking world of the living.”

  Though his words were meant to reassure me, by this point I could feel no such comfort. I could only ask myself again and again one question: am I truly alive?

  Perhaps this was only a form of Purgatory or some other inferior, undesirable location between the worlds of the living and the dead, and I had to earn my way before I would ever be allowed to leave it for better or worse.

  I became aware of another odd ticking noise and then the incessant ringing of a bell. The alarm broke the doctor's trance, and he turned once more toward the elaborate panel of machinery beside me. All copper coils and glass tubes, it displayed several small meters, the purpose and dancing needles of which I lacked the knowledge and ability to begin to comprehend.

  As I truly analyzed my environment for the first time, it became clear this was no last minute design or haphazardly configured workspace.

  No, this was the doctor's domain, and he had knowledge of this machinery that I ventured to guess no one else on the planet did. It had to be the work of his singular skill and unmatched imagination.

  It was blasphemous machinery — the very sort that terrified what was left of the God-fearing soul in me.

  All my life, I had tried so hard to live up to every possible definition of the words ‘good’ and ‘pure’; yet here I was, the latest component, the newest cog or gear or wheel in the godless, endless advance of progress.

  As surreal as the world around me seemed, I was, no doubt, still on Earth. Heaven of any sort could never allow horrors such as the one that I discovered next, and Hell, even with all its fire and fury, surely could n
ot contain it.

  “Cardiac functioning is dropping again,” Quinn announced, with renewed dread. He reached for a switch on the panel before him. Any previous trace of emotion, joyful or otherwise melted away. He was still and calm of voice, even as he spoke a simple, preemptive apology for the action he was about to take. “I'm sorry.”

  He flipped the switch and I felt the resultant jolt of power surge through me. My stomach immediately convulsed again. My pulse began to pound faster, and I realized with despair that it was still the current from the machine beside me that was altering the very beat of my heart. It was still that machine that was keeping me alive, but not that machine alone.

  I gasped for air and fought to raise my fingers to my chest. The doctor, with his back still turned, did not see me wrest my hand free of the restraints he had loosened, thinking I still lacked the strength to move at all.

  The moment my fingertips made contact with the leads and wires, I was sickened to the depths of my soul. Was I human, still, or was I something much darker? Was I an abomination of life that relegated me to the realm of the Forsaken… those living though already spiritually dead and eternally damned?

  A single sentence screamed through my head, though I could not force my lips to form the words.

  What have you done to me?

  Absolute terror overtook me, as I understood the wires protruding from my chest were the source of the energy flowing through my body. They were part of me now, inextricable, unnaturally strung like unholy bootlaces through my skin, puncturing straight into my heart.

  I was driven by a force beyond my conscious control to rid myself of them by any means, no matter the cost.

  Quinn caught the movement of my hand out of the corner of that maddeningly sharp blue eye and shot back over to me, seizing hold of my wrist. “Don't touch those!” he barked. “The damage would be irreparable!”

  I began to shiver. I was cold, certainly, but more so utterly afraid that I was now subject to a fate that was worse than death could ever have been. Had I crossed, I wondered, that immoral, inhumane line between that which constitutes life and defines truly living?