her work and moved to the side of the partially dissected cadaver. Rhys had made a long incision down the center of the torso and across the chest and gut, allowing him to pull back thick flaps of flesh, fat, and muscle. The sawing she’d heard had been the removal of the front of the ribcage, leaving the organs exposed.
“Look, girl. See the liver. Look at his nose, bulbous, thick with veins. I’ve seen this correlation before. I’m onto something here.” Rhys lifted his head and his black eyes were lit with an urgent fervor that too closely resembled madness. “I need the liver of the other man for comparison. Drystan! Get my scales.” He sank his hand gently into the chest and palpated the heart, pausing to look back up to Olwyn as if he’d forgotten why she was there. “Are you finished your sketch?”
“Nearly. It will take about ten more minutes, Papa.” She’d learned to move quickly, but he expected the impossible.
“Fine. Wait. No. The other one can wait a moment. Come sketch the way the liver looks now, before I remove it, so I can refer to it later.” He rushed her by waving at her stack of blank paper. “Don’t you stand there, girl. Move, move. This carcass rots as you breathe.”
Olwyn snatched up a nub of charcoal and a fresh sheet of paper, and leaning it on a flat plank of wood, drew in detail the distended liver. As soon as she finished, her father grabbed it away from her and furiously added notes about the color and smell, the shape and thickened texture.
Rhys threw the paper at Olwyn and dug his hands into the corpse’s torso. Olwyn heard a sucking sound as her father pulled the liver out, and she swallowed hard against the rising bile in her throat. No amount of assisting her father numbed her to the revulsion.
As the liver was weighed, measured, and examined, Olwyn returned to drawing the other man.
She drew him lovingly, the plane of his flat, lightly furred belly, the rise of his muscled abdomen from his narrow hips. Soon enough his torso would be split wide, his organs pulled and placed into glass jars, his entrails dumped in a bucket. Olwyn shivered with disgust and regret combined. How sad his family would be to know their son’s body had been so violated.
Her cheeks burned as she drew his genitals. As her charcoal scratched against the paper, she envisioned his penis slit open and examined beneath a magnifying glass. She pushed the thought away and instead imagined him alive.
She saw him on horseback, racing over a rolling green field. Wind filled his dark gold hair and his eyes sparkled with pleasure.
Olwyn set aside her charcoal for just a second and brushed her fingertips over his cold face, tracing his closed eyes. His eyelashes were long and lay dark against his pale cheek. What color had shone from his soul? she wondered. She touched the square line of his jaw, the stiff brush of his stubbly beard feeling lifelike over his frigid skin.
A sudden urge to protect the man came over her. She wanted to cover his nakedness, defend him against her father’s knives and saws, and see him properly returned to rest. He did not deserve such a ghastly end.
But even as the thought occurred to her, Rhys came behind her, his wickedly sharp scalpel winking in the yellow lantern light.
There was nothing Olwyn could do to stop him; Rhys spent all their money on corpses. He would never consider not performing an exam on one, just because Olwyn didn’t want him violated in such way. Her needs and wants and desires had ceased to matter the day her brother had died. On that day, Rhys became a man obsessed in his search for the key to life, and the reason for death.
Servants had been dismissed, food was rationed, luxuries were denied. And her mother, Talfryn, had run away. She’d never come back, and not a trace of her was ever found.
Olwyn had been left with her father, trapped like a rat.
Rhys stepped up to the side of the body and looked over it carefully. He lifted the head, the hands, and the feet, examined every inch of the skin.
“Not a mark on him,” Rhys muttered. Without being told, Olwyn wrote down his words. “No visible wasting from sickness, no bruises or sign of injury. No physical mark indicating cause of death.”
Rhys glanced quickly at the timepiece. His stomach growled and he snapped his head around to Drystan. “Tea and eggs. A heel of bread, too.” And then he trained his black, shining eyes on the broad, muscular chest of the dead man before him. “Let’s get started, eh?”
Rhys palpated the chest and abdomen before taking his knife into his hand. Olwyn held her breath and silently said a prayer for the man’s family, that they would never know what became of their handsome son and his perfect body. She moved to the other side of the slab, and not caring if her father noticed, took the dead man’s hand in hers. It was solid and square and as cold as the crypt from which he’d been taken.
Could it be that she had been alone and desperate for so long that she was falling in love with a corpse?
In that moment, Olwyn knew she’d reached the lowest depth of despair, so pathetic that she’d come to crave the company of a dead man.
Tears burned the back of her eyes as Rhys slid the tip of his blade into the center of the chest.
And then they both gasped and froze in place as blood welled from the incision.
Corpses don’t bleed. Only a pumping, beating heart moves blood through a body.
Olwyn held her breath and looked at Rhys with huge, round eyes. “He’s alive,” she whispered.
Rhys pulled the knife back and watched the blood slowly leak scarlet across the dead man’s chest, visceral proof of life. He seemed to be in a trance, and when he brought his black eyes up to Olwyn’s, they glittered like obsidian.
“I need his liver,” Rhys said. He spoke with such flat determination that Olwyn’s blood ran cold. Her father pointed to the passage that led out of the dungeon with the dripping edge of his scalpel. “Go to your room, Olwyn.”
Chapter Two
“No,” Olwyn breathed in horror. “Tis murder.”
Rhys didn’t move, but his voice grew harder, merciless. “This is necessary work I’m doing here, girl. Now hie yourself out of here and leave me to it.”
“I cannot. I will not.” Olwyn laid her hands over the bleeding wound. The man’s chest was cold, so cold, and no heartbeat could be felt. But he lived. The blood was proof of it. “If you murder this man, I will reveal it.”
“No one would believe you,” Rhys said with certainty. His eyes, so dark they were fathomless, glittered like hard round gems. “They all think you a witch, whilst I am a respected anatomist.”
“They think you a ghoul,” Olwyn stated flatly. “They fear you look at them with a longing to cut out their innards.”
“I do.” Rhys grinned, a ghoulish expression that matched Olwyn’s assertion. “We’re all meat on feet, girl. Someday I shall find the secret part that makes it all work. The essence of our humanity. It must be in there.” He looked down on the man whose body clung to the barest bit of life. “Here is a man on the precipice. What part of his body controls the sway?”
“Perhaps ’tis God, and you have no right to interfere.”
Rhys dipped his finger in the blood, rubbed it as if to feel the texture, held it to his nose, and sniffed. “He is nearly dead. Feel how cold, how lifeless his skin. Even his blood is cool. It won’t be long for him. But think of the opportunity here. To dig in and see if I can find the link between spirit and flesh. ’Tis my life’s work, girl. This is the moment I’ve been waiting on.”
Olwyn leaned her body forward, protectively shrouding the man. She met her father’s eyes and dared to threaten him. “Cause him harm, and I swear it, I will expose you first, and then I will take my own life. I will not live in the house of a murderer, nor will I live with it on my own conscience. I’d sooner die.”
Drystan entered the dungeon