Business Makes Strange Bedfellows (10 page)

"No need. I will be dining later tonight," Vi said with a smirk, and Gert nodded.

"Just one place setting will be fine, Marion."

Marion gave one more reproachful look at Vi, probably afraid she was going to leave ash on the settee before turning away.

"So," she said as the door closed behind Marion. "You will be dining later?"

"If you will allow me." Vi picked up her hand and kissed the palm.

"It would be my pleasure," She said, and meant it. She enjoyed the pain and intimacy of having Vi feed.

Vi pulled her close for a kiss, arms looped tight around Gert's waist. The kiss was slow, unhurried but thorough. For a moment after they parted, she hesitated, torn. She needed to get back to work; she could not afford to waste a whole night. And yet being here with Vi, relaxed and comfortable in Vi's arms, wasn't making her want to leave. Maybe her work could wait for a few hours at least.

"Stay the night," Gert said, and Vi smiled.

*~*~*

It was almost time. The body was almost prepared and then all that would be left to do would be to reanimate the brain.

Her hands shook as she fitted the brain into the skull and went about sewing up the scalp. It would be too much trauma, too much of a risk to reanimate the brain outside of the body and pace it inside the head already alive. She'd place the brain in the body and use a metal peg as a catalyst for the electricity needed to reanimate this final piece.

She found when she put it in though that she was more nervous than she could ever remember being. Tracking the creature, being trapped in the alley without a weapon while it tried to kill her, had been less terrifying than this.

Pulling off her apron, she headed out of her makeshift lab and leaned against one of the outside walls. The door to the laboratory let out into a small courtyard between several warehouses, a narrow alleyway leading to the road. It afforded her some privacy as she tilted her head back, taking several deep breaths to try and fight back the nausea that was rising.

Could she do this?

The sun was starting to set painting the New York skyline is brilliant red. There were black clouds coming in from off the ocean, though, and the wind was picking up. Maybe it would rain. She hoped not. Night would settle on the city soon as well, which was probably for the best; these things were better done under cover of darkness. She took another long, deep breath and then ducked back into the lab.

There was a bottle of wine she'd stashed under one of her equipment tables for just such an occasion when she was in desperate need of a drink. She pulled the bottle out and popped the cork. The only thing she had to drink it out of was a teacup, but she washed it out and used it for the wine anyway.

She drank her wine and studied the body on the table. What if it didn't work? Would the body last? Would she be able to figure out what had gone wrong fast enough to use this body again? And if it did not work, would she ever have the nerve to do this a second time?

Her hands were shaking enough to slop her wine over the edge of the cup, and she gulped down a mouthful to keep it from spilling on the floor. Rain began to fall, making a soft pattering noise against the tin roof of the lab. Gert finished off her wine.

It was going to be now or never.

Pulling back on her work apron, she got the generator. She put it on a smaller table next to the worktable the body was laid out on before hooking the wires to the conductor peg. The brain was just an organ like any other, she told herself, and flipped the on switch.

Nothing happened, so she turned it up a notch and rechecked the wires and connections. Everything looked fine, but there was still no response. The rest of the body functioned, but the brain was simply not communicating with anything. Against her better judgment, she turned the current up higher. Even so, the body remained unresponsive.

She checked for eye movements or dilation, and then the pulse, but under her fingers there was none.

"Fuck." She searched frantically for a pulse before pressing her ear against the chest. The heartbeat was there but thready and irregular. Gert swung onto the table, kneeling above the small body, and began to push the chest in an effort to massage the heart back into the correct rhythm.

In desperation, she reached across to the generator, cranking the power up high, and continued with her efforts to make the heartbeat regular. The lungs were beginning to fail too, she felt as her hands moved over the chest, and she began to redouble her efforts trying to stimulate them. She bent over, pressing her mouth to the cold lips of the body on the table, and breathed into the lungs before pressing hard on the chest.

There was nothing to lose here, the body was failing fast. She slid off the table and reached out, twisting the knob on the generator all the way. The body shook, convulsing on the slab as it was rocked by jolt after jolt. She knew she was frying the brain inside the head, knew it wasn't going to last…

The body sat bolt upright from the off the table, gagging and choking out blood that spattered across her face and the front of her apron. The body gagged again, spit, blood dribbling from its mouth, down its chest, all over it and all over her. It sucked in a long shuddering breath that sounded more like a death rattle. Mismatched eyes met her gaze, lips stretching wide across bloodied teeth.

She backed away, stumbling a little on the cracked tile floor in her haste, until she came to the door. Yanking it open, she ran. Out into the courtyard and down the alley. Rain pounded against her, soaking through her clothes and slicking down her hair, but she didn't think, didn't stop until she ran headlong into someone.

The person grabbed her, and her hands came up to fight before she realized she was looking up at Vi.

Vi stared down at her. "Are you all right?" Her nostrils flared as if she was scenting the blood that covered Gert, and her eyes narrowed. "What did you do?"

Gert just looked up at her, not sure what she would ever possibly be able to say to that.

From behind them, down the alley where the lab was, came a high, frightened wail that went on and on: the sound of a child crying in pain.

Vi let go of her then, pushed by her heading towards the noise. Gert watched her go until she was swallowed by the darkness before falling to her knees on the hard stones of the alley and covering her face with her hands.

*~*~*

When she was a girl, her mother had always told her that one day she would be married and have children of her own. She'd always discounted it, could not image ever wanting to marry, ever wanting to do anything but science and medicine. Marriage and children would mean an end to her research and end for her quest to conquer death.

No, she had never thought she'd ever be a wife or a mother.

Her own mother, though, had held on to the hope of grand-children right up until the day she died.

Gert stood at the window of her study and watched the moon. It was unusually large tonight, almost full as it hung in a clear sky over the city. Behind her the door opened and then shut again. She didn't hear Vi move across the room but she knew Vi was there even before Vi's hand settled on her shoulder.

"She's asleep," Vi said. "Finally. She was afraid to be left alone and afraid of the dark."

"I don't know what I'm going to do." She pressed herself back against Vi, even though she couldn't make herself turn and look her in the eye quite yet. "I don't know what I am going to do with her."

"She needs a name first." Vi's voice was gentle and her fingers carted through Gert's hair. "She's a little girl, and no matter how she came into this world, she's here now."

Gert didn't reply, and for a few minutes they stood in silence, Vi's arms around her, both watching the sky outside the window. "Matilda," she said finally. "It was my mother's name."

"That's a start." Vi pressed her face into the curve her neck; laying light kisses there before straightening again.

"I still don't know what I will do with her," Gert said. "How I am going to hide her in this city, how am I going to keep her safe?" With all of the things she'd considered and questions she'd asked herself before embarking on this project, that had never been one of them. Because she'd never really thought she'd be able to do it, she realized, but now it was too late.

"There is a house up in the Adirondack mountains," Vi said finally, her voice low with almost a sing-song quality. "It sits on the edge of a lake. No one has lived in this house for many years, not since tragedy struck its last owners. I have not had the funds to purchase it, although I have wanted to for a long time. You, though, with your fortune, could purchase it. We could live there, you and I and Matilda, a safe place to raise her. There are gardens and an orchard, forest and hills for her to explore, and a house plenty big enough for us all, along with your research and my work."

"People would find me," it was a weak protest at best. "They would ask question and come looking."

"Not if you disappeared, cut all contact, left no trail to follow," Vi said. The tips of her fingers traced up and down Gert's arms, slow and sensual. "People might wonder, yes, ask themselves what ever become of Dr. Gertrude Bower, but soon enough they will stop wondering, stop looking, and you will pass into memory. A ghost on these streets, a story people tell each other, but nothing more."

"What about you and your cases?"

Vi chuckled and then bent, teeth grazing along her throat making her shiver. "Those with cases for me will find me no matter where I am. I assure you."

"All right." She let her eyes slide shut, so unbearably tired. "I'll look into it tomorrow and then we'll go."

"And then you will be mine." Vi's voice was low enough that perhaps Gert was not even supposed to hear it but she answered anyway.

"Yes." She finally turned in Vi's arms to face her fully, meeting Vi's gaze without wavering. "And you will be mine."

Vi smiled at that. "An acceptable arrangement, Dr. Bower," she said, lowering her head until their lips were mere inches apart. "If the price is one you are willing to pay."

Gert didn't reply, just pulled her all the way down for a kiss.

E.E. Ottoman is a geek and a gentleman. Zie spends zier time mostly in libraries doing research, and sometimes, when there is no one else there, dancing in the aisles. E. has always adored speculative fiction, especially paperback fantasy and science fiction. Zie loves a good ghost story and thinks every story becomes automatically better if you add tentacles. Overall, though, zie just loves a story that is fun to read. E. is especially fond of writing and reading stories with geeky, queer people doing awesome and sexy things.

When not writing, E. loves cooking, knitting, cats, coffee, and looking dapper in menswear. Zie is actively trying to change the world (and maybe the past) one novel and work of history at a time.

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