“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 tissue 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 human anatomy 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 pus 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, not only toyed with his personality, his temperament, but also changed him on even a physical level.
The sterile cloth lay on the table; I wrapped it around my nose and mouth to stanch the smell before pressing the scalpel into the base of the medulla. The sharp point sank into it like butter. White-yellow pus 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 pus 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 small. Could an entire personality truly be reduced to pus and flesh in a glass jar? 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 my 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.