Page 24 of Caging Darling

When he makes the incision into the woman’s belly, I find myself wishing our seats weren’t so close. It’s not the visual so much as the sound, the too-faint resistance of dead flesh. The way it squelches as if it’s deflating.

My stomach turns over, and I make the mistake of grasping the armrest on my left side, the feel of velvet immediately worsening the situation. Peter grabs my other hand more tightly, but it’s no use. I have to close my eyes, breathe through my nose.

He’ll think it’s because I’m too soft for this.

But mostly I just feel the weight of Astor’s wrist beneath my blade, the crunch of his bone. I feel my dagger slicing through the back of Victor’s father. I feel the clammy flesh of what looks like my brother except for everything that makes him, him, against my skin.

I won’t faint, though. I won’t.

When it’s done, and the suctioning sound indicates that the physician has removed an organ, I open my eyes.

He holds what must be the kidney, though it looks nothing like the drawings in the medical journals. I can’t decide if that’s because the drawings simply can’t capture it, or because…

“Mottled beyond resembling its original form…” says the physician, somewhat mindlessly as he holds up the kidney, overrun with dark brown cysts, for the crowd to see. He’s somewhere else entirely. Odd, given he knew exactly what he’d find when he cut into the woman.

The crowd oohs and ahs over the pungent organ. The physician does not. He wrinkles his brow, regret replacing his previous determination.

“Had this girl at the front been there,” he says, gesturing to me, “perhaps she could have saved this woman’s life. Seen the signs. But no one in the village did. Not even the village physician. Had she been brought to me, I might have guessed what was wrong with her, but if I am to be honest, my friends, our treatment options for this type of condition are less than desirable, and even less effective.

“What if I told you,” says the physician, “that Mildred did not have to die? What if I told you that there was a way to save her?”

The crowd murmurs, but I fear that the sentiment is lost after we just watched him carve into her like we might butcher a pig. I suppose that’s why he mentioned her name, but he’s too late. The crowd doesn’t want to think about this corpse as a woman with a life, friends and loved ones left behind. Not when they came here for entertainment, for curiosity’s sake.

Undeterred by the crowd’s lack of response, Renslow continues. “There was a woman near the same age in a neighboring village who died in a farming accident last week, before Mildred fell ill enough to breach death. The injury was tothe farmhand’s head, leaving the rest of her undamaged. Leaving her kidney undamaged.”

Sensing the direction Renslow is taking this, the murmurs in the crowd increase. They’re certainly not happy. There’s an angry swell in the chattering of their voices, one that comes from a place of fear more than conviction.

“What are you suggesting?” says a nobleman in the front row. “That you take the organ of a dead woman and place it into that of the living?” He says it with a scoff, and Renslow tenses, the kidney still in his hand making a squelching sound.

“With the advances in faerie dust for suturing wounds?—”

He’s interrupted by another in the crowd, this time a woman. “It’s unnatural,” she says. “I’d rather be dead than have a whore’s filthy organ inside of me.”

Several in the crowd snicker. Renslow’s face begins to tinge closer to the color of his hair. “I doubt you would be saying that if it were your urine that was stained the color of filth.”

The woman blanches, but her husband retorts, “Which would never happen, given my wife isn’t out picking up diseases on the streets.”

This time, I’m fairly sure my face is the color of Renslow’s. “Fortunate as you may be not to have to face the same illnesses as the lower class, there are illnesses that reach us all, regardless of our status. Regardless of Mildred’s occupation, which you have assumed based on insufficient information, nephritis reaches its deadly fingers in the wealthy class as well. It is a disease I’m sure you and your wife would appreciate having a cure for.”

Renslow’s reason is met by deaf ears, and the crowd becomes restless. The nobleman who almost picked a fight with Peter stands up behind us to leave, his wife quietly protesting something about not wishing to be rude, to no avail.

Eventually, the crowd shuffles out, a hardness coming over Renslow’s pale face as he watches them leave.

CHAPTER 9

By the time the opera house clears out and Peter and I sneak backstage, I’m astonished to find Renslow still here.

He’s standing over the body of the dead woman, staring at the gaping incision he made in her belly. The blood has clotted black, causing a sharp contrast to her pale skin. I don’t wish to look at her—it feels like an invasion of privacy—but I can’t seem to help myself. She’s so pale, so sickly.

So dead.

I find myself searching her neck for purple bruises. Bruises like John’s. My skin goes hot and cold, an in-between state that feels unnatural.

“I’m unaccustomed to my guests sticking around,” says Renslow, absent-mindedly looking up from the corpse.

“We’re fans of your work,” says Peter. Something about the sentence makes my stomach roil.

Peter almost didn’t let me come backstage. He told me to wait outside the opera house in a teahouse across the street where I would be safe. Bloodcurdling screams weren’t befitting his Mate, according to him.

---