“Not yet,” Beecham said simply. After the two men had closed the door behind them, Beecham removed the sheet on the second body.
“No!” Hazel jerked against the man restraining her. He tightened his grip. She stomped on his feet and tried to work her elbow into his gut, but he showed no reaction or weakness. Lying there, on the table, calm as if he were sleeping, was Jack. “No!” Hazel shouted. “Please, no! Anyone but him. Please.”
Dr. Beecham paused. He looked interested. “You know this boy?”
Hazel thought about what she could say. “I—” Her voice faltered. She shook her head. “Please, just let him go.”
“I’m fascinated what a young lady of your social standing would be doing associating with a resurrection man. How you even crossed paths in the first place. Fascinating, truly.”
By now, tears were streaming down Hazel’s face, messy and wet, catching in her nose and mouth. “Please,” she begged, her voice leaving her. “Please.”
“Miss Sinnett, I am about to teach you a very important lesson. I have lived a very long life—yes, longer than you might imagine—and attachments, like whatever silly little bond you might have with this boy lying on the table, serve no purpose. Pleasure is fleeting. Science, the information you can gather, the things you can learn—these are what last. These are what make a legacy. People like you and me, Miss Sinnett, have the potential to usurp God himself.” His face darkened. “Attachments are pain. You may think you understand pain, Miss Sinnett; I’m sure I thought I did, too, when I was your age. But strength comes in the ability to overcome those human impulses. Sentimentality. Treacle.”
Hazel couldn’t speak. She struggled against her captor even as her muscles seemed to weaken and the room around her began to sway and spin.
“I think I’ll take his heart,” Dr. Beecham said, a small and wicked smile pulling at the edges of his lips. “I’ve been meaning to practice a transposition with a heart. It’s perfect.” He gestured toward the first boy lying on the table. The bleeding in his eye had stopped, and instead become clotted maroon and brown. His breathing had stopped. “Here is a body, ready to take it. Let us see if the resurrection man can resurrect him.”
“You can’t,” Hazel said. “You can’t.”
Beecham just gave her a sad little smirk and pulled a knife from his table. The knife was eight inches long, mottled with stains from previous surgeries, but still so sharp Hazel could see the glint from its edge.
Jack began to stir on the table.
“Jack!” Hazel shouted. “Jack, please wake up!” The tall man put his other hand over her mouth to muffle her screams.
Beecham lowered the knife into Jack’s chest. The blood sprayed, striking the left half of the doctor’s face, making him look deranged. He yanked the knife out and had raised it to make his next incision when Jack’s eyes twitched and he shuddered against the table.
Dr. Beecham sighed. He put the blade down and picked up the blue bottle of ethereum. Slowly and deliberately, while the blood burbled out of the wound on Jack’s chest, Beecham dampened another handkerchief. “So few people know how to do a job well,” he said just as Jack’s eyes flickered open.
Hazel’s fingers found a freshly sharpened quill in the pocket of her cloak, and then everything seemed to happen at once. In a single motion, she whipped it out and stabbed the chest of the man behind her. He stumbled backward, clutching at the place where the quill now stood out from his chest at a perfect ninety degrees. “Jack!” Hazel shouted. “Jack, the handkerchief!”
Jack roused on the table, coming to just as Dr. Beecham turned to see what Hazel had done, watching his henchman fall to the floor. Jack sat up and pulled the handkerchief from Dr. Beecham’s slack grip. As if by reflex, he pressed the handkerchief to Dr. Beecham’s face with surprising force, and held it there until the doctor fell into the bloodstained hay beneath the table on the stage of the surgical theater.
For a moment, Hazel and Jack just stood, panting and disoriented. And then she ran toward him and wrapped him in an embrace. He collapsed when she pulled away, buckling at the knees. Beecham had made only one incision, to the left of his heart, but it was deep. “Hazel,” Jack breathed, his face draining of color.
“We’re going to get you help,” she whispered back. “Shhhh. Shhhhh. It’s all right. You’re going to be fine now.” Hazel pulled one of Jack’s arms over her shoulders and managed to guide him into the abandoned wheelchair at the side of the stage. The front of her dress was slick with his blood, but Hazel barely noticed. Dr. Beecham lay flat on the stage, knocked unconscious by his own ethereum. The man Hazel had stabbed with her pen had fallen to his side. She didn’t know whether he was alive or dead; all she could think about was getting Jack out, and getting him safe.