36
What do you mean it’s gone?” Ava’s expression was unreadable.
“He burned it.” Molly rubbed the raw red mark on her throat.
Everywhere around them were signs of tomorrow’s party. Polished sconces glowed on the walls, wreathed in fresh flowers. Even the portrait of Hades was festive, a garland looped around its ornate frame. Ava pulled a petal from it and slowly crushed the fragile skin between her fingers.
“You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”
Molly let out a choked sound. “This was the most important night of my life.”
“Important?” Ava laughed. Her face took on the gaunt edges of a starved wolf. “ ‘Important’ is making sure you lock the doors at night. This? This is everything, Molly. Without that body, there’ll be no hospital.”
Molly’s face blazed with shame as her aunt took hold of her shoulder.
But when she spoke, Ava’s voice was soft. Calm. “Do you know how many corpses a hospital produces? And all of them, every single one, would be ours.” Her eyes glowed. “You’d never have to steal a body again.”
“I don’t mind working.” It was true. Molly had dug up grave after grave to get here. She would dig more, do anything, if only it meant she could have one more chance to become a doctor.
Ava yanked Molly down onto her knees beside her, as if they were praying. A pulsing pain throbbed inside Molly’s mouth as her teeth clacked together, biting into her tongue. Her eyes widened in alarm.
“We have to fix this,” Ava said.
Molly swallowed, her mouth filled with the iron taste of blood.
“I’m not asking for me,” Ava said. “I’m asking because it’s the right thing.” Her aunt’s grip tightened. “Imagine. Girls like you able to study at a real hospital. Patients that have actual care, and women presented opportunities to give that care. No other hospital in the nation has that.”
Molly’s heart sped.
“The doctor doesn’t care about your sex, Molly,” Ava whispered. “You know that. He’s let you study with him. He’ll let others. And beyond that, think of all the patients we’ll help. The most brilliant minds, coming together to learn . . .”
Molly wet her lips with her bloody tongue and felt the dry crack of them in response. Her aunt was right. For once, she was in the position to do something bigger than herself. Bigger than any of them.
But that wasn’t what mattered. Not anymore. What did was the fact that Molly was somehow, miraculously, being given another chance to get what she wanted. That there might still be a way to get LaValle his hospital and for Molly to become a doctor.
It was all she had left.
“Help me,” Ava whispered, her face paling. And for a second, Molly thought she saw something else there, something she’d never seen in her aunt’s face before. Fear.
“How?” The word came out choked.
“We need a new specimen, and we need it immediately. Something as grand and unique as the giant.”
Specimen. The word chilled her.
“We won’t have much time.” Ava rose. “You’ll have to do whatever it takes.” Her eyes bored into Molly’s. “And no matter what, you mustn’t let the doctor know what’s happened.”
“No.”
Ava sighed, a gust of relief issuing from her lips. Brushing her skirt, she patted it straight. “Good. We’ll get through this together, Molly. In the end, we will triumph.”
Molly stood shakily, her knees locking against the jarring change in position, the bones tight and unyielding from their hard press against the floor. A thousand thoughts whirled through her mind, a thousand terrible possibilities. She brushed them away, unwilling to let them form.
But her aunt did it for her.
“Molly?” she called from the doorway, chin tilted in a final, commanding stare. And when Ava spoke, any doubt that still existed between them vanished. Her words rushed over Molly’s nerves in a chilling tonic. “If you can’t find a body, make one.”
She had four hours of night left to her, and Molly used them all.
She scoured each of the city’s graveyards, bringing enough money to bribe the groundskeepers a hundred times over. Eagerly, they showed her bodies—some worth a goodly amount of money in their own right—but there was nothing to compete with the giant.
And even as she searched, the Tooth Fairy’s words wormed their way into her brain.
I ain’t never killed nobody in my life . . .
She was beginning to feel horribly certain that the Knifeman had never been caught.
The night grew cold, not with temperature but with the hopelessness of it all, and despite herself, Molly could not stop wishing Tom was beside her. Or someone, anyone, to help her on this katabasis into the double hell within herself and the city’s underbelly.
A few birds had already begun their morning songs as she made her way to her last, desperate stop—the First Street Home for Wayward Women. It was the very same place the Red Carousel girls said they came to collect free meals on a Sunday.
A small girl no older than foulmouthed Kate opened the door.
“I need a girl,” Molly said, eyeing the urchin up and down. No doubt the poor thing would end up earning her living as the older girls behind these walls did, if she hadn’t already.
The child sneered, the adult expression transforming her plump, innocent face. “It’s why they come here, so nobody can buy ’em no more.”
“You misunderstand.” The child’s dress was too tight, and the dirty smell of unwashed body rose from her. In a few years’ times, she’d be in the streets or dead.
Molly pulled Ma’s coat more tightly around her, as if for protection against these truths. “I need a special girl—a dead one. I’ll buy her from you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a half-dollar.
The child’s hand reached hungrily for it, but Molly yanked it away. “Do you or don’t you have any bodies? Good ones.”
Hand on hip, the girl considered. “Ain’t never seen a lady resurrectionist before.”
“It’s your lucky day, then.”
This brought a small smile to the girl’s lip, and finally she ushered Molly inside.
Like most places Molly had been to that housed the poor on the city’s dime, this one was cramped and ill-smelling. What little light there was let off the stink of cheap tallow, the animal fat burning in hot spurts.
Small rooms dotted either side of the hall, but it was to a storage closet that the girl led her.
Opening the door, she stepped aside to reveal her grim treasure.
Tucked neatly against the dustpans and brooms was a corpse, already stiffened. The body had been left standing, its neck cricked at an odd angle.
“May I look?”
The girl considered, then nodded. “I’ll be down at the end of the hall,” she said. “Come get me when you’re done.” She handed Molly her lantern.
Inch by inch, Molly examined the body. She used not just the eyes of a grave robber but that of a doctor, trying to find anything special that might make this dead girl of interest to a collector of oddities. She knew it was probably hopeless—what she needed was a miracle.
But pushing up one of the body’s sleeves, Molly felt her heart begin to beat faster. Black-and-white spirals laced the arm, and in the dark Molly mistook them for pictures—tattoos, like Ginny’s.
Then her eyes adjusted, and Molly saw the markings for what they were. She raised the sleeve farther up the dead woman’s arm and revealed uncountable bruises in various stages of healing.
She was just another woman taken up and spit back out by the city.
Molly shut the closet door and made her way back to the child.
“What did she die of?”
The girl must have seen something in Molly’s eyes that told her the deal was off, because she grew surly.
“What do you care?”
Uncupping her hand, Molly held out the shiny coin.
“You want her, then?”
“No. But the money is yours. For your trouble.”
The girl snatched the coin away, her grubby hand scratching against Molly’s palm as swiftly as a bird pecking up the last crumb of forgotten bread on a city street. “Just a cold,” she said. “Tried to see a doctor, but she didn’t have no money. Couldn’t breathe at the end.”
A cold turned into pneumonia, probably, Molly thought. A simple act of nature that bloomed to destruction because of poverty.
Back outside, dawn was already coming. A few early risers roamed the streets, and a man pushing an apple cart gave her an odd look as Molly removed her cap and shook her hair free. She didn’t care. What others thought of her now mattered as little as the sun when it shone on the other side of the earth.
On the ride back, the thought that had been a seed began to sprout, its shoots pushing up from the ugly places Molly had tried to erase.
Once home, she did not go inside, but instead made her way around back, to the church.
James stood outside, unlocking it for the day. When he saw her, he raised his eyebrows. “What are you doing here so early?”
“Let me in,” she said, pushing past him on the doorstep. “And don’t follow. What I’m going to do, I want to do alone.”