Page 89

Like a Villain

Lazarus Graves sees too much. That is the first thing I decide about him and the second is that I like it.

Alcott does not like it, of course. Alcott prefers his monsters labeled, cataloged, and placed neatly behind glass where he may examine them at a safe distance. He likes causes, symptoms, diagnoses, mechanisms, rationale and bones laid out in order.

Poor Alcott. He has always believed understanding a thing makes it less frightening, it does not. Sometimes understanding only teaches the thing where to cut and I learned that long before he did.

I learned it in dark rooms with locked doors and in the space between one blow and the next. In Edward’s frantic breathing when he believed he had failed to protect us again.

Edward. Dear, darling, suffering Edward. My first toy and my favorite wound to pick at. I have loved many things about wearing Alcott’s skin, but none so much as Edward’s face when he realizes I am looking back through his brother’s eyes. There is a particular kind of horror in it. It's absolutely exquisite. He tries so hard not to fear me and that is what makes it delicious.

He says Alcott’s name like a prayer, a simple command, this desperate little string tying him to the brother he swore to protect and I cut the string whenever I please, but not completely. Never completely.

Where would the fun be in that? No, the art lies in restraint. In letting Edward believe he may retrieve Alcott if only he finds the right phrase, the right look, the right memory: Polar bears are white.

Sweet little offerings. I enjoy refusing them and I thoroughly enjoy the way Edward breaks quietly. Alcott would call this cruelty but he has always lacked imagination.

Pain is the truest language human beings possess. Strip a man of manners, money, titles, religion, and pride, and what remains? A nerve. A pulse. A scream waiting for permission, that is why I pushed him toward medicine. Alcott thinks it was curiosity. How precious.

He believes he loves anatomy because the body is a puzzle. He believes he wanted to attend medical school because healing interested him, because precision soothed him, because there was dignity in understanding the machinery of flesh. There was some truth to all this, and I allowed it. Truth is useful when mixed with lies. But beneath his polite fascination, beneath the lectures and cadavers and careful notes, I was there, pressing my hands against the inside of his skull.

Cutting deeper. Looking closer. Opening it and observing. There is such beauty in the body when it stops pretending to be whole. Alcott learned the names while I learned the weaknesses. He studied where to mend, while I studied where to ruin. Together, we became useful. Then Olive and Lazarus arrived.

How irritating. How fascinating. How utterly inconvenient. I cannot make up my mind.

Olive is not like Edward. Edward’s pain folds inward, he holds it behind his ribs and lets it rot politely. He believes suffering is something noble if done in silence.

Olive’s pain has teeth, she has dressed it in silk, taught it manners, handed it poison, and sent it dancing among men who deserved worse than death. She does not merely survive, she revises the world around her until it bleeds in the proper direction. I admired that at once and I did not expect to. Admiration is a nuisance, a fondness more so, but both make the hands imprecise. And yet when I found her in that bathing room, blood on her thigh and fury in her eyes, I felt something I had not felt in years. Not hunger but this unspoken recognition.

There she was, trying to carve a door through pressure. Trying to turn the vast, shapeless ache inside her into one narrow line she could control.

I understood, of course I understood. That was the problem.

I had mocked her. Mockery is one of my better languages I am most fluent in, but I also wanted to take the blade from her hand and place it against the throat of every man who taught her pain was the only thing that listened.

Then there is Lazarus Graves. The Slaying Sickle. My drunk philosopher. The theatrical little death-worshipper with grief tucked behind his smile like a blade hidden in a sleeve. He sees me. Not fully, not yet. But enough. At breakfast, when Alcott drifted and I pressed close enough to taste the room, Lazarus looked at us as though he’d heard the hinge move. Not frightened, not disgusted, but curious. That was new.

Edward fears me, Alcott denies me, Olive challenges me, but Lazarus? Lazarus looked into the dark and seemed almost tempted to step closer, that is what unsettles me. Not Olive’s beauty, though she is beautiful enough to make violence feel devotional. Not Edward’s suffering, though it remains a pleasure I have not yet grown tired of. Not Alcott’s fear of what I do with his hands, though fear is always entertaining. No. It is Lazarus’s gaze.

He looks at broken things as though they may still be useful. As though ruin is not an ending, but a shape one learns to dance with, though death itself once sat beside him, poured a drink, and told him all its secrets.

I find that peculiar. I find it exhilarating and for the first time, something has stirred me more than Edward’s panic. More than the clean red line of a blade. More than the sound a man makes when he understands his body no longer belongs entirely to him. I do not know what to call it. Want, perhaps, a curiosity, some sort of possession. Alcott would be alarmed if he realized.

So naturally, I do not tell him.

I let him feel only echoes. The pull toward Lazarus’s mouth when he smiles too sharply. Alcott thinks these feelings belong to him. Some do, but not all. Some are mine. That is the most amusing part, I was made from terror. Forged from blood, from little boys who needed something worse than fear to survive the men who owned them.

I was not made for fondness, I was made to bite, to punish. To hold the knife when Alcott’s hands shook too badly and whisper things Edward would never forgive. To live where mercy could not reach. And yet now there is Olive, with her wicked smile and goddess eyes. There is Lazarus, watching me from beneath all that theatrical ruin. Then poor Alcott, beginning to believe this strange little constellation of damaged people might become a home. I should destroy it, that would be sensible, for homes burn and people leave.

Love is a weakness and even Edward acknowledges that; he calls it leverage. I taught him better than anyone.

But when Lazarus looked across the table and asked, Are you with us? something inside this body answered before Alcott could.

Yes.

Regrettably. Furiously. Hungrily.

Yes.