Secrets of the Starcrossed

by Clara O'Connor

  “Let’s pretend,” I suggested, “that we are young, carefree, and in love. Let’s laugh and dance, just for tonight.”

  He looked down at me, head tilting to the side as he considered my odd choice of words. Whatever he saw there seemed to satisfy him as a smile broke across his handsome face.

  “Just for tonight,” he replied, and he led the way into the party.

  For a few hours, we were the perfect couple. We mingled, we laughed, we danced. His pale, gaunt look receded and the laughing charismatic Marcus resurfaced.

  It was everything I would have wished for a year ago. We were the beautiful people in full dazzling flow.

  Marcus pulled me close and whirled me onto the dance floor, his arm circling me, his hand on my lower back as he flashed his open smile my way. The fatigue and frustration that had engulfed him earlier seemed almost entirely to have dissipated. Anyone looking at him would believe he hadn’t a care in the world. But I had spotted him looking at his comms device a few times during the evening, checking in on his patients, I guessed.

  For now, though, he was the life and soul of the party. He twirled me around and I came back into his arms while my hand went to his very respectable chest; I laughed up at him and I felt a frisson of the awareness I had felt was so lacking previously. Marcus caught the change and his hand came up to caress my face as we stilled in the middle of the lively dance floor.

  His bright eyes darkened and he leaned in just as we both felt the vibration of his comms device.

  “Sorry,” he apologised wryly, reaching for it. Whatever he read caused the glamour to drop away revealing the careworn doctor once more.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said apologetically. “One of my patients appears to have worsened. I asked a nurse to let me know. She says they’ve tried everything. I know it sounds arrogant, but I may be his last chance.”

  “Of course,” I replied moving towards the door.

  Outside, he placed my wrap around my shoulders as he nodded to the doorman to indicate he needed a hackney. “I can drop you at home on the way.”

  “No thanks,” I returned sitting in the car already waiting for him.

  He looked at me in consternation.

  “I’m coming with you,” I announced.

  “Cassandra, you can’t come to the hospital. There are a lot of sick people there. We don’t know how this virus is spread. Your parents will go mad.”

  “How will they find out?”

  He sighed. “That’s not the point. You simply can’t come.”

  “It’s fine, I’ve already been exposed,” I announced to reassure his fears.

  “What? How?”

  Uh-oh. I had failed to think this one through. I could hardly tell him I had nursed a young girl through her escape from the city.

  “Uh… one of my classmates was ill with it,” I concocted hastily.

  “You never mentioned,” he said.

  “Yeah, well…” The number of people surviving the illness was not high and the chances he would recognise the name of a survivor were higher than if she had died, leaving me with little choice but to explain why I hadn’t deemed the death of a classmate of the very virus he was battling worthy of mentioning before now.

  “We weren’t terribly close. In fact, we had… sort of had a fight a few weeks before graduation and I never had an opportunity to make it up with her so I don’t really like talking about it.”

  “That’s terrible.” He wrapped his arm around me in sympathy.

  “Yeah.” I might as well make the most of it if I was going to go there. “Maybe seeing the victims will help me deal with the fact I wasn’t there in the end for her.”

  There was silence while the wheels turned in his mind. He was a doctor; behind the image of the party boy lay the soul of someone who just wanted to help people.

  “It would also be amazing to see where you work,” I added, laying it on thick. “It would give me the opportunity to understand that side of you.”

  His arm tightened. That was the clincher, I knew it. At the back of it all, Marcus felt separate, whether because of his father or his blood or his profession I wasn’t sure. He wanted closeness and here I was offering it up on a plate.

  I was a horrible person.

  “All right then,” he said, confirming my prediction.

  I was unprepared for the sights and sounds that threatened to overwhelm me as we arrived at the hospital where Marcus worked. I had always loved the romance of the ancient building, one of the oldest in the city. It was here, closest to the East End, where the poor of the city gathered with their sick. There were hundreds of people swarming around the entrance to the hospital. The feeds had indicated that the illness had got worse; I had even heard it described as an outbreak. But this, this was an epidemic of unprecedented proportions.

  “Can’t go no furver, Guv’nor.” Our hackney drew to a halt at the edge of the human tide.

  “That’s fine.” Marcus paid as I got out of the car, wrapping my silk throw closer around me, shamefacedly raising it to cover my nose and mouth as the smell of the ill and decidedly unwashed hit me.

  “This way.” Marcus led us towards a side entrance.

  People lying on the ground plucked at my skirts as we made our way past them. I shuddered; I’d had no idea the situation was this bad.

  The guard behind the barrier raised a hand in greeting to Marcus as he flashed his ID at him on our way past, giving me a nod to go through. While the seriously ill people who lay strewn across the street were clearly being denied entrance, as a member of the elite my access was unquestioned. Once inside, the cleanliness and quiet were a relief, if something of a shock. From inside the hospital, it was almost impossible to imagine the shivering, moaning mass of people on the other side of the wall. I looked to Marcus for an explanation.

  “What… ?” I wasn’t sure what question I wanted to ask, or how to ask it. How could he walk past all those people and not offer help? Why were so many ill outside while the hospital seemed serenely unaffected?

  Marcus was already moving on, across the cold tiles of the lobby, and taking the stairs two at a time. I ran to keep up, following as he hurried through the quietly busy corridors. I caught glimpses of labs and white-coated doctors huddled together with an understated urgency to their movements. An occasional open door allowed me to glimpse a single or a handful of well-tended patients inside. The small private rooms and slightly larger wards all had their doors closed and a symbol I was unfamiliar with marked the entrance.

  It was a sort of spiky inverted curve. I might not have seen it before but its meaning was distinctly sinister. Were all the patients behind the doors infected? If so, the scale of the epidemic was far greater than I had imagined, despite Marcus telling me that the number of incidents had increased dramatically over the summer.

  Marcus remembered to look back at me a couple of times as he rushed along, but his pace remained a steady hurry until, at last, we came to a stop in front of another set of doors carrying the ominous spiky symbol.

  “Cassandra, are you okay?

  I nodded, though I was increasingly regretting the impulse that had led me to insist on joining him. I had no business being here and already felt hopelessly in the way. Casting a glance at the outfit that he had admired earlier in the evening, Marcus’s lips pursed.

  “Wait here.” When he returned, he had donned a white coat and had a blue one that he handed to me.

  “You’re a little overdressed for this particular ward.” He winked and pushed open the door.

  The quiet, polite wards we had passed on our way in, which had been the cause of the building ball of rage in the pit of my stomach, were nowhere in evidence here. The long ward was heaving with people. Bodies lay on every surface capable of holding one.

  I followed as Marcus wove his way to the far end of the room, averting my eyes from the pain-wracked bodies around me. These people were far sicker than Marina had been. I wondered if out there beyond the wal
ls she had ended up like this? A nurse approached Marcus and whispered to him, shaking her head. He continued on, coming to a halt beside an older man who had somehow scored a bed in this mayhem.

  He took the man’s hand gently. “Otho,” he called softly. The man in the bed stirred and groaned, his eyes lifting tiredly.

  “Boy.” He smiled weakly in greeting.

  “Otho, what’s going on, you old duffer? Nurse Miri tells me you’ve not been feeling too well this evening,” Marcus said close to his ear so he could be heard above the din of background noise. The old man grimaced, his lined face wrinkling up in pain.

  “Final stretch, lad,” he answered.

  Marcus looked momentarily alarmed before determination took over.

  “No you don’t, old man. We haven’t made it this far for you to give in now.”

  As Marcus spoke, his free hand came up to rest on the brow of the sick man, who looked a little stronger. I edged closer. There was an odd aura around Marcus now. Watching him closely, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was different about him, but there was a distinct difference in the energy around him.

  “Lad.” Otho raised a hand and pulled Marcus’s hand from his brow. “It’s my time. You’ve done a miracle job keeping me going. I got to see my Marcella get married. Can’t ask for more than that and she’s well looked after with her Tony. But I’m tired now. I thankee boy, but I’m tired.”

  Marcus bit his lip as he stared at the older man before he straightened his shoulders and stepped away from the bed.

  “All right, Otho,” he said resignedly. Marcus looked shattered, his skin tinged grey as he took his hand out of Otho’s to pat him lightly on the shoulder.

  “You won’t mind if I stick around though,” he said, settling himself on the foot of the bed as if he no longer had the strength to stand. He raised a brow in my direction and, nodding, I took a seat on the other corner.

  The old man, who had seemed so much stronger only moments earlier, sank back in the bed, not even noticing me as I took my place beside Marcus.

  We sat in silence as I contemplated what I had just seen. Devyn was wrong. Marcus did have magic and he was using it, I was sure of it.

  Marcus could cure the illness.

  And it was killing him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I pushed past the man obstructing my access to the side corridor into which I had seen Devyn slip. I hurried cautiously along the candlelit hall, unaccustomed to the flickering light and pools of darkness that the inconsistent light offered in these halls. At the centre of the city, the Governor’s Palace was always ablaze with electrically generated light. It felt odd to be traversing its chambers in the half light, but now the Britons were in town, the Governor’s Palace was suffering the same inconsistencies in power supply that their presence caused as everywhere else.

  At last, I caught a glimpse of him up ahead.

  “Devyn,” I hissed.

  He hurried on, oblivious. Damn it, Marcus was in trouble. He was using his own energy to help people, I was sure of it. Devyn might not want to talk to me right now but if I didn’t get help for Marcus, he was going to die.

  Besides which, Devyn would relish the sign that the old blood ran strong in Marcus. If only he would stop running away from me. This was the first and only sighting I’d had of him since returning to the city. I hadn’t even been planning to come to this event as Marcus was working and my strange new abilities made me loathe to get any closer to the Wilders in our midst. I’d even skipped their entrance into the city, which was quite the spectacle, missing out on the unexpected arrival of the Mercian prince, which was all anyone was talking about. This was the first member of Mercian nobility to attend in years – the king had stopped attending decades earlier after he married the Lady of the Lake. The city was whirling in speculation about their handsome son. But I had concerns of my own. Whatever was going on with me, I needed to figure it out, to understand it. What if the Britons could tell I had magic? But my parents had insisted, so I had come.

  A stuffy diplomatic social was the last place I had expected to see Devyn. On the plus side, my parents had been too busy sucking up to some senator to notice me slip away in pursuit. I came to a fork in the corridor. Left or right, I wasn’t sure which way had he gone. Running through hallways and up staircases in full formal recital regalia was not recommended; I had dressed for light activity, not hot pursuit. I heard something from the left and started in that direction only to come to an abrupt halt at the sight of Devyn, half-naked, with some strange girl’s hands all over him.

  What in Hades?

  His eyes were closed, a look of utter bliss soothing the strain I had glimpsed as he slipped out of the recital. The girl was dressed in garb every bit as elaborate – though far more exotic – than my own. One of the delegation. Who was this Celt Devyn was so clearly delighted to see and whose touch he welcomed? And in a manner in which he had never welcomed my own.

  My breath left my body in a hiss.

  Devyn opened his eyes, his head jerked back at the sight of me.

  “Cass.”

  I raised a hand to stop him from speaking further. Bitter rage swirled within me as a wind snapped through the corridor, leaving us all in darkness.

  A snicker sounded from the alcove before a ball of fire appeared in the hand of the half-lit Briton girl… and then all the candles came back on.

  Oh gods. Was that magic? In the city?

  Hers? Mine? Had I done that? Inside the walls? I couldn’t breathe. Devyn’s defensive illusion was one thing but an external event that people could have seen, with a Celtic delegate present? The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Looks like your delicate flower is miffed, Devyn,” the girl trilled softly.

  My jaw set. I literally had no words for how much I loathed Devyn Agrestis. He hadn’t wasted much time.

  “Cass,” he attempted again, this time pushing the girl’s hand away and tugging his top down. Better. The fury whipping through me calmed somewhat as he stepped away from the girl. I didn’t want him. At all. That didn’t mean he could start doing whatever he wanted with some Celtic stranger.

  “This isn’t what it looks like.”

  “How clichéd,” I interrupted. “What you do and who you do it with are none of my concern.”

  The girl watching our exchange with an amused curl on her lips actually snorted at that. I glared at her in unison with Devyn.

  “Shut up, Bronwyn,” he snapped. “Cass, really I… we need to talk, but this isn’t a good time. You need to leave.”

  “Why, so you can get on with your little groping session?” I waved behind him to the alcove.

  “Ew,” came from said alcove.

  Devyn sighed, looking me directly in the eyes.

  “Honestly, it really isn’t what it looks like.”

  My stomach dipped. I really wanted to believe him. “Then tell me what it actually is.”

  The girl stepped out of the alcove, swaying up behind Devyn and patting his chest.

  “I was looking after him. He needed a little fixing up after a tussle in a certain moonlit glade,” she said archly.

  I blushed, horrified.

  “Seriously, shut it, Bron,” he snapped, rounding on the girl.

  I decided to ignore the fact that he had told this girl something about what had happened between us. In fact, I couldn’t do this at all.

  I whirled away, breathing deeply, but it was too late. I was spinning out of my body, drifting. The elements started to swirl overhead in answer to my call, a new wind killing the candle flames as it whipped through the corridor. Lightning from the storm outside crackled and split the darkness.

  Devyn grabbed me, wrapping his arms around me, earthing me.

  “Come back, come back, shhh,” he soothed, removing the mask and brushing a hand through my hair as I stiffly resisted him. “Cass, shhh, it’s okay, you’re okay.”

  My body started to relax into his and I melted in
to his arms as the brewing storm calmed overhead. I pulled a deep breath into my lungs. That had been… I shivered. What just happened?

  Devyn turned me in his arms so my head was tucked under his chin, continuing to stroke my hair and softly repeat my name until at last I felt fully restored to my body. Increasingly aware of the warmth of the arms around me, I pulled away and glared up at him.

  “Don’t touch me,” I warned, my voice shaking, looking nervously around for cameras.

  “Don’t worry, we’re safe here,” Devyn said, realising my concern. “The Governor’s Palace is one of the few buildings in the city entirely surveillance-free. The transparency of the Code isn’t applied to those at the top, making it the safest place in the city to do things you wouldn’t want to be seen doing.”

  “Well, that was dramatic.” The girl had stepped out into the corridor, another flick of her fingers relighting the candles. Her voice was sardonic, but her eyes were sharp as she ran an assessing look over the tips of my daintily clad toes to the top of my elaborately done hair. “Certainly explains the broken ribs.”

  I was confused. “What broken ribs?” I asked.

  “Shut up, Bronwyn,” Devyn ground out, seemingly the only words he ever said to the girl.

  I looked back between the two as they shared a complicit glance. A horrifying thought occurred to me and I scrabbled to open the shirt that was still hanging loose and exposed Devyn’s chest. Bruises, purple, yellow, and green, were liberally mottling his lower ribs.

  I looked up at him for an explanation but he was giving his stonewall face.

  I looked to Bronwyn.

  “Oh, it’s fine, totally fixed,” she gestured, wiggling her fingers in the air. “Hocus pocus.” This came with an accompanying wink. “All better now. The colour will fade in a couple of days.”

  I struggled to process this information. The colouring was shocking and those bruises were old… from the night on Richmond Hill, when we had fallen? I was horrified. I’d done this to him. He’d carried me home like this?

  Hang on. Hocus pocus? How much had he told this stranger?