“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. Wind blew the window open and rain pelted in, 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 rose 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, with the smells of burned flesh and ozone in the air. Lucy slumped against the table, spent. I forced my fingers to wake up and curl around the pistol. I raised it on instinct toward the body on the table.
More pounding came at the door, followed by Balthazar’s frantic voice asking if we were all right.
“Yes!” I called back in a shaking voice. “We’re fine!”
“Juliet, look,” Lucy whispered, and I whipped around. I pointed the shaking end of the pistol at Edward’s chest. Almost imperceptibly, his chest was rising and falling. He was breathing. His wrist pulsed within the manacle.
“It worked,” she breathed. “We did it.”
I stumbled forward, clutching the table. Below us, Edward’s eyes slowly, impossibly, opened. Swirls of green and brown, hazy now.
He blinked.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“EDWARD!” LUCY RUSHED TOWARD his side, but I dug my fingers into her arm to hold her back.
“Wait.” I pressed the pistol into Lucy’s hands. “Keep this aimed on him until I tell you it’s safe.”
Edward blinked again, moaning, his eyes glassy and unfocused. I took a cautious step closer, and then another, as a bolt of lightning lit the night sky outside.
“Edward?” I reached out trembling fingers to touch him. “Can you hear me?”
He mumbled a few incoherent words and shut his eyes. I let my fingers slide over his forehead. Cold, but alive. Blood pulsed beneath the sheen of sweat on his skin. I was at a loss for words. We had done it. Defeated death.
“I should check his heartbeat and breathing,” I said, still dazed. “Make sure everything is working.”
I went through the motions I knew by heart, monitoring his pulse, taking his temperature, utterly amazed to see his body working. I pressed the silver end of the stethoscope against his pale skin and listened to his beating heart. What a difference a single day could make. Yesterday Edward was a cold body in the cellar, and now I was feeling his breath against my cheek.
Had I changed as well, in a single day?
“His pulse is a little slow, but still in the range of normal circulatory function.”
“But is he himself?” Lucy asked, clutching the pistol.
I lifted his eyelids one at a time. Even when the Beast had taken on a more human body, his eyes had still glowed a golden yellow. As I peered into Edward’s glassy eyes, they were an earthy brown the color of peat. Relief overcame me like a warm bath. He mumbled a few incoherent words and I caught a sniff of his breath: unwashed teeth and day-old bread. Unpleasant, but very human.
A relieved laugh slipped from my lips. “It’s him.”
Lucy let the pistol tumble from her hand and threw her arms around him, sobbing, petting his hair, speaking as incoherently as he was. I watched the reunion with a mixture of awe and gratitude. Why had I ever doubted this was the right thing to do? Edward was one of us, and he’d sacrificed himself for us, and now we’d repaid that favor. At long last I had made up for Father’s cruelty in making him.
It occurred to me that now I could always keep the ones I loved safe. No matter what happened, accident or illness or violence, death wasn’t the end anymore. I could bring Lucy back, or Elizabeth, or Balthazar, if anything happened to them. Tomorrow I would marry Montgomery, and we truly could have a lifetime together—many lifetimes—safe from the fears that one of us might die young.
Lightning crashed outside. The electricity flickered and dimmed, then abruptly cut off. Lucy gasped in the sudden dark.