Free The Duke In His Castle by Vera Nazarian

reminding me. Movement, yes! It’s inherent in the living mechanism. I see you’re aware of profound levels in your craft, yet—how do you know this? Unless—”
    Izelle shrugs. “No, it’s not quite what you infer. My secret is closely related to yours. Unfortunately it is not identical.”
    But again he is no longer listening, having approached his creation, and his hands begin their phosphorescent life-giving movement.
    A shudder, light and half-real, moves through the form of the woman. The drum of life, the heart, is the epicenter of that shudder; suddenly, it happens. The drum starts its pounding automation. . . .
    Blood rushes. Blood is blue and crimson and anemic-pale and dark with the riches of surrounding night, for it has been coalesced from the waters present in the night air; it is chilled by the cold and warmed by the passion of the one who sets it into pumping motion—and it is all one thing. Blood is moving, and thus, it is alive. The subterranean streams of it begin their sluggish activity in the veins and arteries, and continue to the tiniest passages of capillaries.
    Her cheeks—the cheeks of the female creature—attain true subdermal coloration as a result. It’s not merely the presence of blood under the skin, but of a moving, seething stream.
    Her lungs quiver once, initially. Then, in a sharp intake they fill with air for the first time, billow, unfurl like sails, supported by the pressure of the diaphragm, while the body on the table convulses and falls back. Rossian’s fingertips linger over her lips and nostrils to feel that air escaping and once more drawn in by the whirlpool of turbulence inside.
“She . . . lives?” whispers Izelle.
Rossian is silent, watching the body.
“My Lord? She—”
    “ No .” His voice is harsh. “No, she does not! Her body lives. Not she . Where is she ?”
    Where, where, where, where. . . .
    “Only you would know the answer.”
    Agonized, he begins to pace, his face now twitching with frustrated emotion. Nerves pull at his eyelids, a vein throbs in his forehead, echoes in his throat.
It is unbearable.
“What?!” he cries. “What is the missing element?”
Izelle averts her eyes. “I think I begin to understand,” she says quietly.
    “ What ? Understand what, damn you?” Like a madman he turns on her.
    But unperturbed, she continues in the same tone, staring off into the darkness of the night about them. “It’s the responsibility. Yes, I remember now. When I was also faced with that—final moment, the decision , I too, balked unconsciously at the sudden realization of the magnitude of it all, the responsibility for another being. I knew then that I had the terrible ultimate control over the act of my power and the repercussions that would follow.”
    He watches her with agonized eyes.
    “My Lord, can you at this moment imagine, understand what this all means? What it means for that body over there, that thing , to suddenly become a living self-aware being? Can you conceive of this Nairis—whoever she once was—getting up, smiling at you, and walking away of her own free will? For, somewhere in the ethereal sphere, her captive will cleaves to yours even now, and you must be the one to break with it in order to set her free. Can your pride and will endure such a parting?”
    The Duke looks on, his eyes glittering with moisture in the candlelight. And something happens to him then, something in the intimate night. But it is not what she thinks.
    It is his perception of her, the Duchess of White. All her former insignificance is suddenly effaced, transformed into forbidding will. He sees her then, sees that in her eyes, which he had only glimpsed briefly when holding her wrist-to-wrist, hearing the clockwork of her heartbeat and the impossibly dark gaping maw in her skull that terrified him. He knows what it is that makes her far more powerful than him with all his arcane learning and intensity, all his pent-up desire for freedom and