Page 3 of The Exorcism of Faeries

Atta’s pulse beat quickly in the hollow of her throat, and she fought against the desire to growl the words as she spoke. “With respect, they are mine now. I provided you with corpses, and they were my payment.” It had mostly stopped raining, but she knew she still looked like a drowned rat and it wasn’t likely to help her case.

The Achilles House doctor took a step closer and Atta clenched her fists at her sides. He towered over her, but if she cowered, she would lose her only access to the tools she needed. It wasn’t like her mam was sending autopsy supplies in her care packages or that she could steal them from the morgue where she worked.

Unlike the surplus of unidentified bodies piling up at Gallaghers’ Morgue, tools would be quickly identified as missing.

“You will return them, or I will have them confiscated.” She had to look up to meet his gaze. “And we wouldn’t want the Provost of Trinity to discover what their upstanding student is doing, cutting open bodies illegally. Now would we?”

Atta ground her teeth together. How did he know she was a student? Or was it just a lucky guess? “Why would I care if you speak to the provost, hm?”

He leaned against the doorframe and the lazy mannerism made her hate him even more. “You have textbooks in the front seat of your car.” He nodded his mask toward where she’d stupidly left her door ajar, the overhead light illuminating the six textbooks she had stacked there. “You seem a bitoldfor secondary school. Undergrad, even.” His head tilted to one side, the movement birdlike and unsettling. “Graduate student, then.”

“Just take the body and give me my payment,” Atta snapped.

The Gold Stitch turned around and walked inside, slamming the door shut in her face.

Atta snarled at the gargoyle knocker and kicked the gravel, allowing herself a small tantrum. She was halfway to her car when a side door opened and a Black Stitch came out, lugging along a gurney. Unlike the metal and vinyl ones at Gallaghers’, the Achilles House mortuary cots wereold, like they’d been stolen out of an abandoned insane asylum in 1893.

He loaded the body up as Atta watched, and Red Stitch came back out to give her payment. “The crotchety one changed his mind, did he?” The Red Stitch didn’t answer her, he merely turned on his heel and walked back inside. It was all over in the span of a couple of moments, and Atta was alone outside in the drizzly cold again.

An uneasy feeling slipped into her veins, thinking of how the gangly White Stitch lad might fare if they put it together that he was the one who usually came out to pay her.

It wasn’t her business.

Cold, tired, and annoyed, Atta returned to her car and she flipped open one of her textbooks, hiding the cash inside nestled next to a diagram of the external morphology and internal anatomy of aHyacinthus Orientalis,or Midnight Hyacinth.

“Cash is useful,” she told herself as she drove toward campus. It was, of course, but autopsy instruments were necessary for her, too. Familiar friends. The tools she used to conduct her research.

It wasn’t as if she’d had her own when she moved from Galway back to Dublin—she’d always simply used the ones in her family’s mortuary, and when her father called in a favour and got her the job at Gallaghers’ Morgue, she’d begun using theirs.

A few days after moving back to Dublin and starting at Gallaghers’, Atta overheard a couple of transport guys talking about an arm of the hush-hush Plague Research epicentre referred to by the public as ‘the Society.’ According to the transport lads, they’d opened to find a cure and needed more specimens to conduct their research.

Atta saw an opportunity.

The first time the House door opened, and a masked man holding a sternal saw asked, ‘How much?’ for a corpse she’d pilfered from the pile ofTo Be Burned, Atta had taken that opportunity just a bit further, striking a deal.

Giving up her tools was going to be painful. She couldn’t very well allow herself to be expelled or thrown into prison. She would just have to cope. Save up her meager salary and purchase her own instruments. Stay after hours and borrow the morgue’s.

The goal had been to save up for her own place, to live off campus so she didn’t have to hope that Siobhan and Seamus Gallagher never ventured into the basement supply closet she used as a makeshift lab. That wouldn’t be easy to accomplish while handling her class load, but it was at least a minor possibility while making extra money thieving for Achilles House.

The semester had only been underway for two weeks and Atta was already behind in her studies. Maybe keeping Gold Stitch and his anatomists happy would help her in the long run.

Sonder

Asplinter lodged itself beneath his skin as he slunk back from the window. Sonder lifted his plague doctor mask and yanked the damned sliver of wood out with his teeth. Tossing the mask onto the pile of papers atop his desk, he made for the dank corridor, sucking at the little red bead of blood that bloomed on the pad of his finger.

“Gibbs,” he said by way of greeting as he strode into his quiet corner of Achilles House. “Did you give someone medical tools as payment for cadavers?”

Bernard Fitzgibbon was kind, with big brown eyes and a mind for statistics and organisation, but he was a sheepish young man and had a habit of making a right bags out of just about everything. It drove Sonder out of his skull. He wanted to throttle sense into the lad.

“Ye’.” Gibbs risked a fearful glance at Sonder before returning his attention to his desk, his glasses slipping down his nose where he was hunched over an open ledger. “That pretty, macabre girl? She asked me for them instead of money, and I thought saving the House some cash would be a good thing,” he stammered.

Sonder looked over his shoulder out into the hall. There were always rats listening. Reporting back. Maybe if he spoke slowly, the lad would understand. “You know anything at the House must be disposed of properly.”

Gibbs finally looked away from his ledger, but he still didn’t look him in the eye. Sonder couldn’t fathom what in hell he did in those ledgers all day, but it benefited Achilles and its overlords while the rest of the anatomists stayed busy with their hands dirty, so he kept Gibbs around.

Sonder heard the back door finally bang shut and the girl’s tyres crunch down the gravel. He crossed the small room to Gibbs, hauling him up by the arm despite his half-hearted protests. “You need to get out of here.” Sonder pulled him along, the blood on his leather apron smudging Gibbs’s pristine white shirt. “If Walsh opens his mouth about what you did, retribution will be expected.”

“I’ll leave,” Gibbs whispered shakily. “Just please let go, you’re getting gore all over me!”

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