Stealing Midnight

by Tracy MacNish

  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 with a clatter of thick earthen mugs and plates on a tray. He set his burden down on a small worktable before coming over to the side of the bleeding man. His bushy eyebrows betrayed his surprise. “Not dead yet?”

  Olwyn ignored him. She kept her eyes on Rhys, studying him intently. She knew not to show fear. She knew not to show weakness. She did not, however, know how much she mattered to Rhys, so consumed as he was with his quest.

  Hoping that her father’s mind was not completely beyond reason, she gestured to the partially dissected cadaver behind them. “That corpse was days dead, father. There’s not much time left in him before his stench drives us to put him in the ground. Give this living man to me. I’ll tend him for a few days. If he dies, he is yours, and no murder or suicide will stain your conscience.”

  Rhys tightened his hand on his scalpel. It was poised over the belly of the man between them. Suddenly Olwyn hated her body, so slim and slight. She simply could not cover the dying man with her form, and her arms, slender and feminine, were no match to Drystan’s strength and her father’s madness. If Rhys chose to plunge it deep into the naked gut stretched out before him, there was nothing Olwyn could do to stop him.

  “I do not care to be dragooned by my own child,” Rhys said, his tone dangerously calm. “How dare you.”

  Olwyn changed her tactic. “Father, I beseech you. If I mean anything to you, anything at all, grant me this man’s life. Please. I am begging.”

  In the yellowish, dingy light of the tallow lanterns, Olwyn saw Rhys’s eyes change. He still looked at her with his penetrative stare, but something changed. She thought he looked hurt, and maybe just a bit embarrassed. As he spoke, her heart broke just a little. “You have never had more of the look of your mother than you do just now, Olwyn.”

  “I am not like her,” she whispered.

  “You think I am a monster.” He sounded distant, but his grip on the scalpel was firm and still poised above the man’s belly. “If you could have gone with her, Olwyn, would you have left me, too? Tell me the truth.”

  Olwyn remembered the day Talfryn had left the keep. The morning had dawned as it always did, but something had been wrong. Fires were lit and breakfast was served, but no mistress presided over the table, and her father had sat with his head bowed. He had turned to Olwyn, who was only three and ten, and said, “You’re the woman of the house now.”

  And now her father dared to ask the question that hung between them all these years. Would she have left with her mother if she’d been asked to go?

  The sting of Talfryn’s abandonment never faded. Nor
did the longing for her mother’s touch, scent, and laughter.

  “Of course not, Father,” Olwyn lied. Instead of the truth, she said exactly what she knew Rhys wanted to hear. “My loyalty is to you. I am Olwyn Gawain, the proud daughter of Rhys Gawain.”

  She watched as Rhys’s chest expanded a bit with pride, his chin rising with her words.

  And then he changed again, his mercurial moods dangerous. “You tried to leave.”

  “I told you before, Papa, that I was only hoping to find Mother and bring her home.” The lies burned in her mouth, along with the sting of her own submission to her fate. She’d wanted to escape, had dreamed of it, had planned for it for so long that it had become the only thing that kept her sanity. But after the night when the dogs had attacked her, she’d lacked the courage to try again. “Haven’t I been a good girl? Haven’t I done everything you’ve ever asked of me?”

  Silence filled the space between father and daughter, the only sounds that of dripping water and scurrying rats. They faced each other in the watery, yellow light, with a naked, nearly dead man between them. Drystan turned away, busying himself with tidying up the burlap sacks that the bodies had been brought in. As he folded them, a musical clinking sounded on the stone floor.

  Olwyn did not dare to look to see what made the noise, but kept her eyes on her father’s. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Drystan drop to the floor in search of what had fallen.

  In the flickering light, she saw Rhys’s decision. Olwyn pulled her pistol and took aim. “Drop it. To the floor.”

  Rhys froze; he knew she wouldn’t miss. He let go of the scalpel, and she heard its metallic clank on the stone floor. When she didn’t lower her weapon, Rhys grew angry. “You can’t be serious.”

  “A daughter doesn’t hold a gun on her father if she’s anything but,” Olwyn said flatly. “Take a step back.”

  Rhys twitched, as if he’d been slapped. “You wouldn’t.”

  “If there will be a murder in this dungeon, it won’t be of this defenseless man.”

  Olwyn thought quickly, plans forming fast. No more witch in a crumbling keep, she would take this man and leave Wales, once and for all. Just like her mother before her, she would escape and never be seen again.

  All her nights spent dreaming of running away would finally serve her purpose. She had everything she needed—stolen money and maps given to her by the kindly trader who was the only man who’d ever shown her sympathy.

  She steeled herself, letting every bit of her desire to escape fuel what must be done.

  “Drystan. Grab her,” Rhys commanded.

  “Try it, Drystan,” Olwyn invited with a smile. She spoke to her father then, and truth rang in her voice. “I’ve wanted to shoot him for years, for his perverted perusal of my body, and his disgusting advances when he’s drunk. Go on and risk the life of the only man who has stuck by you since you began your ghoulish obsession. I’ll put a shot between his eyes, and it will not trouble me to do so.”

  Caught as they were in the moment, neither of them noticed that the man lying between them opened his eyes.

  Drystan saw, however, and began whispering a prayer, begging for God’s mercy even as he concealed what he’d found on the floor.

  Rhys’s voice sounded more like a growl, a prelude to violence. “Olwyn, you are playing a dangerous game. Put the pistol down now, and I’ll not punish you overmuch.”

  “Step away from this man,” she countered, her voice ringing off the wet stones of the dungeon walls.

  With every word, Rhys grew louder and louder, until he was shouting, “And then what? Will we go on with our lives, with me pretending my daughter did not pull her traitorous weapon on me, and threaten my life?”

  “No,” Olwyn answered calmly. “We won’t.”

  She gestured to Drystan, snapped her fingers. “Drystan, take my father, by force or willing, I care not.”

  Drystan’s eyes flicked from the man between them to Rhys, and then again to Olwyn. He seemed to be weighing the course of least danger.

  “That’s right, Drystan. I will kill you if you don’t obey me,” Olwyn said with a certain amount of cheer. She withdrew her dagger. The hilt fit perfectly in her small hand. “Take him and put him in the cell.”

  “This is madness!”

  “Now, Drystan, or I’ll plant my blade in your gut and still have a shot to finish you.”

  Both men knew Olwyn capable. And she suspected that Drystan heard the ring of sincerity in her words, for he moved to Rhys. Rhys scrabbled away and put up a fight, but Drystan was younger, faster, and much stronger. He grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to the nearest cell, pushed him inside, and slammed the door shut.

  “Turn the lock and bring me the key.”

  “I’ll beat you senseless, girl! I’ll whip the skin off your back,” Rhys raged, his fists tight around the iron bars.

  Olwyn ignored him. “Carry the man up, wrap him in furs and blankets.”

  “He’s awake,” Drystan whispered.

  Olwyn glanced down and saw that the man had indeed awakened. He stared at her intently. She’d wondered what color his eyes would be.

  Blue.

  Deep, dark Prussian blue, like fathomless lakes and sapphire skies.

  He flicked his eyes over to where her father was screaming for release. And he raised a single brow slightly, quizzical.

  “You’ll live,” she told him, and when he didn’t seem to register her words, she realized he probably didn’t speak Welsh. She spoke to him again, repeating the words in English. “You’ll live.”

  And she allowed herself to touch him, a slide of the backs of her fingers against his arm. He was still as cold as death, but was most certainly fighting for his life.

  So would she, for his and hers alike.

  No more prisoner to her fears of leaving, or her father’s control. Today would be the day that Olwyn would seize her freedom, for she’d sealed her fate the moment she pulled the gun and held it on her father. There would be no going back.

  But she needed Drystan’s cooperation, and there seemed to be precious little of that with him frozen in place, staring at the man who’d opened his eyes.

  “Dispense with your superstitions, Drystan. Surely a live man is less frightening to you than a dead one, and Lord knows you’ve carried your share of those. Pick him up and carry him out of here.”

  “He’s come back to life,” Drystan said, still whispering as if he feared waking the other corpse behind him. “Do you think he’s possessed?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” she snapped, her impatience growing with each second. “More like he’s woken from a coma, is all. Do you not know how common it is for a man to be thought dead and yet still have life in him? ’Tis why there are wakes, after all.”

  Behind them there was the smashing of glass against the stone floor, and a brain rolled from the fluids in which it had been suspended. Rhys had thrown it across the room, to momentarily stop the rats from feasting on the eviscerated corpse. “You’re interfering with my work!” he screamed, and whether he meant Olwyn or the rats, she knew not.

  Rats fled the area, scuttling back into the shadows as Rhys railed and raged at his daughter, calling her vile names and questioning her parentage.

  Drystan glanced back to Rhys, and then to Olwyn, his face a mask of fear.

  “He’ll forgive you,” Olwyn told him. “It’s me he’ll hate forever.”

  Drystan gave one more cautious glance to the man before him, and reached out to poke his muscular flank. When the man did not react, Drystan grabbed him by the arms and lifted him, put him over his shoulder, and began carrying him up the long flight of stone steps that had been carved from the earth more than six hundred years before.

  And Olwyn pulled her gaze away from the long, well formed body draped over her father’s servant. She turned and faced her father, who stopped his ranting. For once, it seemed he would listen to what she had to say. She hoped he would remember, for his mood swing
s caused lapses in his memory.

  “I know you want me to stay with you, and help with your work, but I cannot do it any longer. I’m miserable,” she confessed softly, “and so lonesome that I have begun to long for death. Only the image of you carving me up to see my insides has stayed my hand on many an occasion, and for that, I hope you are ashamed.”

  Olwyn’s gaze slid over her father, and she struggled to remember him as he used to be, before her brother took sick and died. Olwyn often thought that her father’s sanity died that day, too.

  “I will never come back here. I will never see you again. Do you have anything you want to say to me before I go?”

  “Curse you, Olwyn. Curse you to hell.” Rhys’s hands tightened on the iron bars until they were white. “You may leave me here with these rats, but you’ll never find a better life. Never. No one will want you, ugly and marked as you are. Everywhere you go, people will revile you. You are a hideous, piebald beast of a woman, and your heart is as ugly as your face.”

  “Farewell, Father,” Olwyn said softly. Her lips shook and turned down at the corners, but she did not weep. If she were to have a coin for every time her father had called her ugly, she would need a wagon to cart them. “I will arrange for your release in a day’s time. The rats should be busy enough with the corpse until then.”

  And she turned and left him behind, trying to not hear him scream that she would never, ever find a man who would love her. That no man, not even a half-dead one pulled from a crypt, would ever be able to see past her unsightly face.

  The final taunt reached her as she neared the top of the stairs, and she knew that it would ring in her ears for the rest of her life.

  “Saving him won’t make him love you.”

  Olwyn closed the door to the dungeon and locked it. Gripping both keys in her hands, she leaned against the door and took a few steadying breaths.

  She told herself all the right things: that she hadn’t gone to such extreme measures because he was so beautiful she couldn’t bear to see him cut apart. And that certainly she did not expect he would wake, like some reverse tale of Sleeping Beauty, and sweep her off her feet to his castle, fall in love with her, and make her his wife.