Cadaver & Queen Read online

  When Elizabeth Lavenza enrolled at Ingold as its first female medical student, she knew she wouldn’t have an easy time. From class demands to being an outsider among her male cohorts, she’ll have to go above and beyond to prove herself. So when she stumbles across what appears to be a faulty Bio-Mechanical—one of the mechanized cadavers created to service the school—she jumps at the chance to fix it and get ahead in the program.

  Only this Bio-Mechanical isn’t like the others. Where they are usually empty-minded and perfectly obedient, this one seems to have thoughts, feelings...and self-awareness.

  Soon Elizabeth realizes that it is Victor Frankenstein—a former student who died under mysterious circumstances. Victor, it seems, still has a spark of human intelligence inside him, along with memories of things he discovered before his untimely death...and a suspicion that he was murdered to keep that information from getting out.

  Suddenly Elizabeth finds herself intertwined in dark secrets and sabotage that puts her life, and the lives of Victor and their friends, in danger. But Elizabeth’s determined to succeed—even if that means fighting an enemy who threatens the entire British Empire.

  Cadaver & Queen

  is Alisa Kwitney’s first title

  with Harlequin TEEN

  Alisa Kwitney

  CADAVER & QUEEN

  For Matthew, Matan and Matt, child, youth and man. We are all constantly reinventing ourselves by stitching together the old and the new.

  And in memory of my friends Suzanne Levine and John Gould.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  The room slowly came into focus: white tiled walls, a white enamel bowl on a small table covered by a sterile white cotton cloth and set with gleaming steel and brass surgical instruments. The only splash of color was a bottle of scarlet blood hanging upside down from a hook. A nurse in a starched white cap checked the bottle’s rubber tubing and then walked away, her ankle-length skirts rustling as she passed.

  Where was he? Victor tried to rouse himself, but he still felt thickheaded and vague, and even though his eyes were open, he was utterly disoriented. Why was he lying flat on his back, almost naked, in this white room? There was nothing but a thin sheet covering him below the waist. After a moment, he realized that the room was an operating theater, designed with a high ceiling, low-hanging lights and tiered seats so that students could observe surgeons at work without getting in their way.

  His mouth felt dry, and there was a metallic taste in the back of his throat. Copper or blood. Something bad had happened to him, but what?

  His mind flashed on disjointed images—a bedraggled dollymop, pale cheeks rouged and neck striped with dirt, singing off-key as she swigged from a bottle of cheap gin; an old woman’s swollen and arthritic hand sparkling with jeweled rings as she stroked a Pomeranian lapdog. None of it made any sense, yet his skin prickled with unease. And cold. The room was chilly, and his bare chest was pebbled with gooseflesh.

  There was a squeak of wheels behind him, accompanied by the murmuring of male voices from above. “By Jove,” said one, “she’s a looker.” The nurse must have returned, wheeling in some more equipment. He recognized the approving voices as belonging to his fellow medical students, who must be watching from the gallery, just out of his line of sight. They must be here to watch my surgery. He felt light-headed; for a vertiginous moment, the room seemed to tilt and spin around him.

  He heard a woman’s light footsteps behind him, then smelled the vinegar odor of Lister’s disinfectant.

  Help me.

  He tried to raise his hand, but nothing happened. Alarm surged through him as he tried again. What was wrong with his arms? Lying prone, he couldn’t see his right arm, but out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of his left, which had been positioned at an angle away from his body and secured with a restraint. He didn’t feel any pain in either limb, though. He didn’t feel anything at all. An instant later, he realized that he couldn’t feel his legs, either.

  He could not turn his head.

  He tried to call out, but no sound came from his mouth. His heart set up a wild gallop, but no other part of him moved. His brain filled with the animal impulse to search for an escape route, but his gaze remained fixed on the same section of the white room.

  I can’t move my eyes.

  His mind flashed to his teachings. Cranial nerves III, IV and VI—oculomotor, trochlear and abducens—all completely paralyzed. He was as immobile as a corpse.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Dr. Grimbald, the head of surgery and Victor’s adviser, nodded to the students in the gallery as he entered the room. As usual, he had waxed the tips of his mustache so they curled up, but his thin mouth was compressed into a tight line.

  Victor’s pulse slowed and steadied. If he needed surgery, there was no one better than Grimbald in England, possibly in the world. But what sort of operation did he require? Any cervical injury that left him unable to move his head and neck should also affect his diaphragm, but he was still breathing on his own. So there was reason to hope: he didn’t have a spinal cord injury. He might not be permanently damaged. Could he have ingested some sort of poison? Curare was sometimes used as an anesthetic, and it could cause temporary paralysis.

  He racked his brain, trying to remember if he had been handling curare, but the last thing he could recall was studying in the library. Henry had tried to tempt him to go back to their room for a whiskey, saying, “What’s the use of swotting? You know you’ll end up with top marks, you always do. Bloody prize pupil. I think you should slack it for one exam and give the rest of us a chance.”

  But...maybe there was something else that had happened after that. Damn it. Why couldn’t he remember?

  “Nurse,” said Grimbald. “Do you mind telling me what this is doing here?” He held up the rubber face mask for Clover’s portable regulating ether inhaler.

  The nurse looked confused. “It’s for the anesthesia, sir.”

  The waxed tips of Grimbald’s mustache seemed to twitch with annoyance. “Why on earth would I need anesthesia? You were told to prepare for a Bio-Mechanical procedure.”

  For a moment Victor was certain that he had misheard. After all, living people weren’t turned into Bio-Mechanicals. That procedure was reserved for the deceased.

  “I... I must have made a mistake, Doctor,” said the nurse, giving Victor a startled look. “I didn’t read the chart carefully enough. I’m terribly sorry.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t want apologies, I want action. Where is the Galvanic Reanimator?”

  The nurse hung her head. “It’s still in Professor Makepiece’s laboratory.”

  “Go and fetch it immediately.”

  They think I’m dead! Victor couldn’t breathe; the room darkened around the edges of his vision. Stop it, he told himself. Breathe.

  If he wanted to save himself from becoming a science experiment, he had to gather his wits, and fast. After a moment, his head cleared, and he saw the nurse bobbing her head and walking away as quickly as her long skirts permitted. Grimbald muttered something about incompetence.

  Please, thought Victor, staring up at the man who had been his academic adviser for three years. Look at me. Grimbald had always said to observe everything and assume nothing. “Too often,” he told his students, “we see only what we expect to see.” Can’t you see that I’m breathing? The ulnar pulse at my wrist may be too faint to detect, but try my carotid. My heart is beating. My pupils would react to light. He tried to blink as a signal that he was conscious, but even that small movement was beyond him.

  Then something wonderful happened. Grimbald frowned and leaned over him. “Victor?” For a glorious instant he thought he was saved, and then Grimbald went on speaking and extinguished all hope. “My boy, I don’t know if there really is any such thing as a soul, but if you can hear me, I hope you know that I am so sorry. But a surgeon cannot afford to be a sentimentalist.” So there was to be no last-minute reprieve. The sharp sting of terror was turning into something deeper, an ache of anguished sadness for all he was leaving behind, and for all the possible futures he might have had.

  Stepping back, Grimbald raised his voice so it would carry to the gallery. “Gentlemen, I know some of you knew the deceased. He may have sat next to you in class, or shared your table at dinner, or locked shoulders with you in a scrum out on the rugby field. Some of you may have qualms about seeing one of your own cut up like so much meat. But you are here to learn, and I do not want to see a single one of you avert his eyes.”

  He couldn’t see the students in the gallery, but he wondered if Henry was among them. Victor hoped he was. It was comforting to think that his friend was here, by his side, right till the end.

  “Now, most of the time, the cadavers we receive are not in optimal condition, and it may take up to five bodies to create one working Bio-Mechanical. This is an unusually fresh specimen, and in remarkably good shape. The only unusable part is the left forearm.” Grimbald pulled back the sheet, and although Victor couldn’t see anything, he felt a prickle of sensation where his skin was exposed to the cool air. “I’m not sure how much you gentlemen can see from the gallery,” Grimbald went on, “but I’m looking at several deep lacerations and extensive nerve damage.”

  Lacerations? Damage? The words summoned a flash of memory: a scalpel, slicing down at him while he grappled with someone, and his left arm coming up instinctively to deflect the blow.

  Before he could remember anything more, Grimbald was speaking again. “Rather than lose any more time waiting for the correct equipment to arrive, I might as well demonstrate the correct limb grafting technique.” Grimbald raised the bone saw in his bare hand. “Now, remember, this is not the way to perform an amputation on a living patient.” There was a ripple of laughter from the gallery, and then the saw came down, and oh, dear God. Whatever had made him numb was wearing off. Inside his head, Victor screamed as the blade’s sharp teeth sliced through the layers of skin and muscle and bit into the bone of his forearm.

  The room faded to gray and then to black. His last conscious thought was that he would rather stay with the light and the pain, as long as it came with an explanation.

  What happened to me?

  1

  Standing on tiptoe, Lizzie tried to see over the barricade of dark suits. At five foot four, she had never considered herself short, but the thirty or so other students were all men, and even the smallest of them had a few inches on her. On the bright side, at least they were indoors, so they weren’t all wearing top hats with their formal dark cutaway morning coats.

  “What do you think is taking so long?”

  Lizzie turned, but the boyishly slender young man standing beside her was speaking to his companion, a handsome fellow with olive skin and dark curly hair.

  “It’s a display of power,” said the handsome one, sounding amused as he leaned casually against a marble side table. “We’re meant to understand just how low first years rank on the totem pole.”

  That made sense. The room itself was big and imposing—vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows and an enormous scrolled-iron chandelier. Even though the sun was shining outside, the air inside was cool and dry and slightly scented with sweet candle wax. In other parts of the school, the flickering gaslight from wall sconces had been replaced by Edison’s modern incandescent lamps, but this room had never been converted to gas, let alone to electricity. It gave the impression that this was a place of ancient rituals and arcane secrets, rather than an institution dedicated to the pursuit of science and medicine.

  The grandfather clock in the corner of the room chimed, and the hum of excited conversation died down. Lizzie could hear footsteps, but no matter how she craned her neck, she couldn’t see who had entered the room.

  After a moment, conversation picked back up again; whoever it was, it wasn’t the head of medicine.

  “False alarm,” said the slender young man. He caught her glance for a moment before quickly looking away. Oh, for crying out loud, she thought. I may not be a raving beauty, but I’m not a monster, either. She had left her room feeling professional yet attractive in a crisp, high-collared white shirtwaist blouse with a little navy bow in front, and a neatly tailored navy wool skirt that showed a daring amount of her buff leather lace-up ankle boots. Her brown hair was naturally thick and wavy, so all she had to do was pile it into a high bun to achieve a fashionable Gibson-girl effect. If this had been the lobby of a theater or a museum, she felt certain that each and every one of these gentlemen would have at least acknowledged her presence. Yet here in this bastion of male power and privilege, she was invisible.

  “Pardon me, miss.” The boyish young man turned to her and smiled. So, she wasn’t invisible after all. “I know we haven’t been properly introduced, but I wonder if I may be of some assistance. Are you in the nursing school? I’m afraid it’s located in a different wing.”

  Lizzie stifled a sigh. “Thank you, but I’m not a nursing student.” That made three times this morning. Perhaps it had been a mistake, choosing Ingold over the London School of Medicine for Women. The women’s school had offered a full scholarship as well as the chance to live in one of the world’s great cities, but no, she had elected to strand herself just north of nowhere. Wild, windswept moors might sound romantic in Wuthering Heights, but the reality was rather bleak, especially when you were isolated socially as well as geographically.

  Still, Ingold held all the other cards—prestige, academic excellence, the chance to follow in her late father’s footsteps. On the other hand, here she was, apparently doomed to repeat the same conversation for the next four years. That was the problem with choosing a college; by the time you discovered the school’s true face, you were already married to it.

  “So...are you visiting one of these lucky chaps, then?” He gave her a smile that must have melted teachers’ hearts back in grammar school.

  “No,” Lizzie said firmly. “I’m here because I’m a medical student. Like you.”

  “A medical student! Are you really?” Then, looking a bit flustered, he amended, “I mean, how remarkable. And your accent—American?”

  She nodded, trying to decide whether this was genuine interest or some sly form of English mockery.

  “Sorry, how tedious. Everyone must be pestering you with the same two questions. I’ll refrain from asking you which part of the colonies
you’re from, how’s that? I’m William Frankenstein, by the way.”

  Not mockery, she decided, or at least not aimed at her. “Elizabeth Lavenza.” She held out her gloved hand, the way a boy would have done. Will shook it without hesitation.

  “Very pleased to meet you, Miss Lavenza.”

  “Stop flirting with the nurse, Will.”

  Will looked back at the young man leaning nonchalantly against the marble side table. “She’s not a nurse, Byram.”

  “Oh?” Byram seemed amused by this. “What are you, then? You look too healthy to be a patient.” His smile made Lizzie wish she’d worn a jacket over her blouse.

  Will punched his friend in the arm. “She’s a medical student, you cretin.”

  The cretin raised his eyebrows. “In that case, perhaps I can be the patient.”

  Lizzie felt her face flushing with embarrassment. Despite being a brunette, she blushed like a redhead, in great big scarlet splotches. “Something tells me you’re incurable.” As she turned, she heard a snort of laughter behind her, which made her muscles seize up. She had to concentrate very hard on making her legs move.

  Maybe I’m not up to this. It was the insidious little voice that kept whispering in her ear. Not the work; she knew she was more than capable of handling that. She was less certain she could cope with all the people here. Ever since she had walked through Ingold’s front gate forty-eight hours earlier, she had been constantly surrounded by people, and she had never felt more alone.

  There were two sharp raps from a gavel, as startling as gunshots, and the room fell silent.

  “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  Lizzie couldn’t see who was speaking, but his full baritone carried like an opera singer’s to where she stood.

  “I am Ambrose Moulsdale, head of medicine, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to the Ingold Academy of Medicine and Bio-Mechanical Science.”

  The last word, proclaimed in that ringing, orotund voice, echoed from the paneled walls.