Prodigal Son

hinges as a triggering shock started Erika breathing on her own.
        Victor sat on a stool beside the tank, leaned forward, his face close to hers.
        Her luxurious eyelashes fluttered. She opened her eyes. Her gaze was first wild and fearful. This was not unusual.
        When the moment was right and Victor knew she had passed from birth shock to engagement, he said, "Do you know what you are?"
        "Yes."
        "Do you know why you are?"
        "Yes."
        "Do you know who I am?"
        For the first time, she met his eyes. "Yes." Then she lowered her gaze with a kind of reverence.
        “Are you ready to serve?"
        "Yes."
        "I'm going to enjoy using you."
        She glanced at him again, and then humbly away.
        “Arise," he said.
        The tank revolved a quarter of a turn, allowing her to swing her legs out easily, to stand.
        "I have given you a life," he said. "Remember that. I have given you a life, and I will choose what you do with it."

CHAPTER 97
        
        ON THE DARK and rain-soaked lawn, a supermarket shopping cart full of aluminum cans and glass bottles stood alongside the house, near the back porch.
        Carson, followed by Michael, glanced at the cart, puzzled, as she hurried past it to. the porch steps.
        Vicky Chou, in a robe and slippers, waited in the kitchen. She held a meat fork as if she intended to use it as a weapon.
        "The doors were locked. I know they were," she said.
        "It's all right, Vic. Like I told you on the phone, I know him. He's all right."
        "Big, tattooed, really big," Vicky told Michael. "I don't know how he got in the house."
        "He probably lifted the roof off," Michael said. "Came down through the attic."
        Deucalion stood in Arnie's room, watching the boy work on the castle. He looked up as Carson and Michael came through the door.
        Arnie spoke to himself, "Fortify. Fortify. Fortify and defend."
        "Your brother," Deucalion said, "sees deeply into the true nature of reality"
        Mystified by this statement, Carson said, "He's autistic."
        “Autistic… because he sees too much, too much yet not enough to understand what he sees. He mistakes complexity for chaos. Chaos scares him. He struggles to bring order to his world."
        Michael said, "Yeah. After everything I've seen tonight, I'm struggling, too."
        To Deucalion, Carson said, "Two hundred years… you and this Victor Frankenstein… So why now? Why here?"
        "On the night I came alive… perhaps I was given the task of destroying Victor when the moment arrived."
        "Given by whom?"
        "By whoever created the natural order that Victor challenges with such anger and such ego."
        Deucalion took a penny from the stack on the table, which he had given earlier to Arnie. He flipped it, snatched it from midair, clutched it in his fist, opened his hand. The penny was gone.
        "I have free will," Deucalion said. "I could walk away from my destiny. But I won't."
        He flipped the penny again. Carson watched him, transfixed. Again he snatched it, opened his hand. No penny.
        Michael said, "Harker and these… these other things Victor has made-they're demonic. But what about you? Do you have…"
        When Michael hesitated, Carson finished his question: "Man-made and yet… do you have a soul? That lightning… did it bring you one?"
        Deucalion closed his hand, opened it an instant later, and the two missing pennies were on his palm. "All I know is… I suffer."
        Arnie had stopped working on the castle. He rose from his chair, mesmerized by the two pennies on Deucalion's palm.
        "I suffer guilt, remorse, contrition. I see mysteries everywhere in the weave of life… and I believe."
        He put the pennies in Arnie's open hand.
        "Victor was a man," Deucalion continued, "but made a monster of himself. I was a monster… but feel so human now"
        Arnie closed his fist around the coins and at once opened it.
        Carson's breath caught. The pennies were gone from Arnie's hand.
        "Two hundred years," Deucalion said, "I've lived as an outsider in your world. I've learned to treasure flawed humanity for its optimism in spite of its flaws, for its hope in the face of ceaseless struggle."
        Arnie closed his empty hand.
        "Victor would murder all mankind," Deucalion said, "and populate