by K. C. Finn
Please, no. Please, no. Anything but Jazzy. Please, no.
But Gerstein was right, and Lily knew it by the bloodstains all over her best friend’s bed. Jazzy lay still, almost as though she was simply sleeping, and the blood had seeped into an inkblot about the size of an open umbrella, creeping out around her on the mattress. It was coming from her top half, somewhere visible above the bed’s cosy purple duvet, which would now be ruined forever, whether Jazzy lived to use it again or not.
Those other members of the troupe who’d been disturbed by Lily’s mad dash were not far behind her, and no sooner than Dharma Khan was in the room, she let out a piercing scream. The scream of the siren was no mere outpouring of shock, for it rang like a deafening alarm, shaking Lily’s head until she felt the blood rushing into her veins, priming her for action. Other footfalls were crashing all over the building at the siren’s warning, but Lily couldn’t think of anything but Jazzy as she rushed to the girl’s side.
The siren scream had woken her up. Jazzy’s eyes fluttered and rolled back in her head, unfocused and hazy from her loss of blood. When Lily knelt beside her, she felt the dampness of the red ooze on the carpet soaking into her knees, but she reached into the bloody mess beside her friend’s curly black hair and pulled it aside. The wound was on Jazzy’s neck, and it formed a small, circular puncture. Blood continued to pour from the wound as Lily gaped at it, helpless, and the voices behind her grew ever-louder and more intense.
“Where’s Novel?” Lawrence was shouting.
“He didn’t hear me?” Dharma retorted. “He always hears me!”
“Find him Dharma!” Zita screeched. “Cry again, out there! Don’t stop until we have him!”
Jazzy’s weary head turned towards the noise, and Lily reached out to grab her hand. Everything she’d ever known about First Aid scrambled through her mind in a huge mess of words and diagrams, and Lily’s whole body shook with tears as she realised her lack of knowledge. The bleeding was too profuse to be stemmed, and Jazzy was losing more and more blood by the minute. Novel wasn’t coming, that much was clear from the screams and shouts in the doorway, and that meant the only person capable of saving Jazzy’s life was missing in action. All Jazzy had was her useless best friend, gripped by fear, who had gotten her into all this trouble in the first place.
That was the moment that Lily felt Jazzy’s pulse thrumming against her fingertips. It was a clear rhythm, and faster’s than Lily own, beating out the time for each new spurt of blood to escape from Jazzy’s dying body. Lily thought about that blood, how it flowed and gushed like a torrent or a stream, and she felt a stir of power in her own shuddering veins as one clear thought came to her mind. Her mother had always told her that blood was thicker than water, a quaint old saying that had turned out to have very little meaning in the case of Tamara Coltrane.
Now, Lily took the phrase on with a whole new perspective as she raised her hands, palms flat but shaking where they hovered over Jazzy’s neck and chest.
“Hang on, Jaz,” Lily said, her voice trembling, but resolute. “Just you cling to that last scrap of life for a second longer, all right?”
Jazzy’s eyelids fluttered, and Lily took that as a sign to begin. Her concentration came much more easily than she would have imagined, perhaps fuelled by the desperation not to see that deathly pallor overcome her best friend’s face for good. Lily focused on the blood, feeling it swish and gush at the very place where it was leaving Jazzy’s neck, and with a focus so deep that it tightened the muscles of her heart, Lily made it stop.
Jazzy had still lost too much blood, and Lily knew that forcing what little she had left back into its usual flow wasn’t enough to save her. Holding one hand to sustain the re-routing of the blood in Jazzy’s veins, Lily curled the fingers of the other like she was pulling a thick-rooted plant from the ground. Inches below her outstretched fingers, the blood from the bed and carpet began to rise and re-form itself in the air. The troupe behind her gasped, but Lily never broke her focus once as the blood became a swirling ball of crimson liquid in her grip.
“Now for the tricky part,” Lily whispered, her own chest weak and shivering from the strain of her magic. “Precision, Coltrane. Precision.”
Novel had told her that her focus and technique was getting better, and Lily was relieved to find that he was right. The ball of blood became a thick strand, coiling like a length of rope in the air. Then, at Lily’s willed command, it began to thin itself out, lessening to a dark, shadowy line of life-giving liquid. The blood slithered like a snake through the tense air of the bedroom, until it found the open wound that Lily had stemmed, but not yet closed. The blood-string wound its way back into Jazzy’s body, and Lily felt the rush of life as it returned to join the natural thrumming of her best friend’s pulse.
“Impossible,” said a voice behind Lily, and she knew its hoarse, fearful quality well.
“Well, you weren’t here Novel,” she answered in a breathy whisper, “I had to do something.”
She felt the illusionist’s hands on her shoulders, and they were frozen as though he’d been outside for quite some time. He whispered close to Lily’s ear, tension showing in every fingertip where he held her.
“Can you sustain the blood flow, whilst we seal her wound?” he asked. “Jeronomie has a potion to cauterize the vein.”
“I’ll keep her alive until I die trying,” Lily answered, her teeth gritting with the strain. “Get Jeronomie here quick.”
“Already present, Ma’am,” the potioneer replied.
Novel’s touch was gone and Jeronomie stepped into the space between Lily and Jazzy. She held a vial of some bluish-green powder, and loaded it onto the tips of her rough fingers with swift grace. When the potioneer coated Jazzy’s puncture wound with the powdery stuff, Lily felt a surge of heat emanate from behind her. Novel was sending a fine, thin line of fire towards the coloured powder, and it sizzled where the shademagic burned it. Lily felt a change in her hands, which pulsed a little less with their own magic, and she found that Jazzy’s blood felt as though it no longer needed re-routing through her system.
“We’re gonna have to watch her for signs of complications,” Jeronomie surmised.
“I’ll do it,” said Lawrence at once.
The lanky boy overstepped the others at the scene, coming to sit at the foot of Jazzy’s bed at once. He was shaking all over, with broad, shining tear-tracks down his dark face. In the midnight shadows of Jazzy’s room, Lily let go of the last of her magic and tumbled backwards to the floor. Novel tried to pick her up but she shook off his grip, staring up at Jazzy’s ceiling for a moment as she caught her breath. There, a poster of a Marvel superhero stared down at Lily, and she saw Gerstein’s presence force the hero to smile a wide, relieved grin.
“I’ve seen a lot of new things in my time,” Gerstein confessed, “but I’ve never seen a shade control blood.”
“Thank the stars she discovered that she could,” Zita whispered with a sniffle.
“Remarkable,” boomed a new voice, which belonged to Poppa Seward, “absolutely remarkable.”
Lily didn’t hear much of their praise. She was looking to her side from where she lay on the floor, at three particular sets of feet. Novel and Jeronomie were both kneeling at Jazzy’s side now to inspect their work on her wound, and Lily saw Novel’s sharp-tipped shoes, with fine leather soles that never seemed to touch the ground. She also saw that Jeronomie was only wearing socks, which seemed strange, since she was fully dressed otherwise, including her long brown cloak and golden locket. The locket, shaped like a playing card spade, was reflecting light from the corridor, which shone onto the third pair of feet that interested Lily.
Big black boots stood far off to the left of the scene. Lily wouldn’t have known their owner was present if she hadn’t seen them, for he hadn’t breathed a word since entering the room. It was possible, Lily realised, that he hadn’t breathed at all since entering the room. As Lily clambered back to her feet, she turned
to see the man the boots belonged to. He was fully dressed too, resplendent in his dark waistcoat and elegant jacket, and his face was a picture of cold sincerity as he watched the goings-on. Baptiste Du Nord stood silently, observing everything, and keeping every last thought to himself behind his dark, gleaming eyes.
And then, the bloodshade licked his lips.
It happened quickly, so sharp that Lily might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching him, but it was enough to send Lily’s dizzy mind reeling with thoughts again. She looked at the blood on her hands and knees, and the remnants of the drying stains that still adorned the room. Baptiste was a feeder, a being who lived on blood with magical properties, and he was watching Jazzy come back to life with the most unreadable expression Lily had ever seen him wear. Then, his eyes flickered to hers, as if he’d known she was watching him, and they widened a little in surprise. Lily felt a fury rising in her chest, her arm lifting shakily to point the finger of blame straight at the MC’s look of shock.
“It was you,” she said. “You did this to her.”
Baptiste’s dark brows rose in horror, and though he looked innocent, Lily could not forget that memory of months ago, when she had seen the monster in him, and the blood all over his lips. She looked him over again, wondering if there was any way she could be wrong, but her eyes travelled back to those huge black boots on his feet. Lily had heard the lone, thumping footsteps, travelling from the lower floor right up to the roof. Someone had walked away from Jazzy’s bleeding just before Gerstein had been able to make his warning, and that someone had made a lot of noise doing it.
“Could you live on her blood, Baptiste?” Lily demanded. “Would it sustain you? Would the blood of someone with Second Sight help you to live?”
“I didn’t-” Baptiste insisted, his head shaking to and fro repeatedly. “I would never… I went to the roof to find Novel.”
“And someone had locked me out up there,” Novel added swiftly. The illusionist was on his feet, and he took Lily by one elbow as he grabbed Baptiste by the other. “We shan’t have this conversation here. Let Jazmine rest now.”
Under Novel’s guiding hand, Lily found herself and the bloodshade being led to the kitchen. When they were inside with all doors closed, it was Lily that Novel turned to as he delivered his look of astonishment.
“Are you insane?” he challenged. “Baptiste has no reason to feed on Jazmine. He has… well, he has me for that.”
Lily felt an indignant rage bubble in her chest. She folded her arms and sniffed, looking across at the bloodshade, who still wore that foolish, dumbstruck expression.
“Ninety years with the same food might get a little boring now and then,” she supposed.
That was when Baptiste’s eyes narrowed, and his stupor fell away. He looked at Novel, then back to Lily, and bared his too-sharp teeth in a wry grin.
“That’s not what this is about, I think,” the bloodshade began. “You’ve been looking for an excuse to accuse me for many months now.”
Novel rolled his eyes, but the other two hardly noticed it. Lily rose in the air on the crest of her own irritated magic, squaring up to Baptiste with a bitter hatred gleaming in her gaze. She wondered how he dared accuse her of anything, when he was the one known for drinking other people’s blood, and she was the one who’d just found a talent for saving them from the very same fate.
“Lily, listen,” Novel said, trying to step into her line of sight. “That wound was a puncture, not a bite. Someone got in here and bled Jazmine, but I suppose they must have been interrupted, to leave her in that awful state.”
Lily snapped her head to look at Novel, and a curl of flames came flying from her hair that flashed against his pale face.
“You’re not even considering the possibility that this… thing,” she spat, sparing half a glance at Baptiste again, “could have something to do with a huge pool of blood escaping Jazzy’s neck? What if he was the one who locked you out on the roof in the first place?”
“He broke down the door to get me back in when Dharma called!” Novel retorted.
“Why would I do that, Lily, if I didn’t want to help Jazzy?” Baptiste added.
She shot them both sour looks, crackles of lightning building all across her skin as her rage continued to rise.
“I heard you outside my room just after Jazzy was hurt,” she seethed. “I heard those big black boots of yours, and a gruff, low voice. Name someone else who fits that description!”
Baptiste didn’t have time to, for Lily lost control of the angry magic bubbling in her veins then. She was amazed that she had enough power left to explode with fire and lightning, yet she watched as her hand came up high, and smashed down like a smack in the air. Her powers followed with a loud slap, and she watched Baptiste hiss in pain as a burning line of magic carved its way into his handsome face. He bore the long, thin wound with a bitter, narrow glance, licked his lips again, and seethed as he spoke.
“Whatever it is that hurt Jazzy tonight, you brought it to this theatre. Everything was peaceful here before you came.”
The bloodshade strode from the room, slamming every door on his way from the kitchen to the foyer, and beyond into the night. Lily began to calm, her rage turning back to tears and fear of all that had happened in the last hour. Novel’s words began circling her mind again. She had seen the perfectly circular puncture in Jazzy’s neck, that gruesome memory would hang in her mind forever, it seemed. She had also seen the two great rips in Novel’s arm, all that time ago in the tomb-like basement of the Imaginique. The two images didn’t match up, and she knew it.
“I know you don’t like him, because of what he is,” Novel began, daring to step closer to Lily’s trembling form, “but he’s not who he used to be, Lily. People can do despicable things when life leads them in certain directions, but I still believe that most of us can be forgiven for our transgressions.”
Lily felt her own guilt welling again, and Baptiste’s accusations sank deep into a dark, shadowed place in her heart.
“I’m not sure I agree with you,” she answered.
She couldn’t look at Novel’s pained expression. She could only walk away.
March
What Dreams Mayhap
The moment Lily awoke, she knew she was not really awake. She opened her eyes to a hazy, trance-like world, where the skies shifted with brilliant blue hues that travelled the whole spectrum from darkness into light. The world in which she found herself was in constant motion, and she was not wearing the pyjamas she’d put on to go to bed that evening. She watched her feet slide over ground that was grass one moment and cobblestones the next, swishing the hem of a long, white dress that she remembered all too well. It was Jazzy’s dress – the black one that she had borrowed for Edvard’s funeral – which Ugarte’s enchanted arch had transformed into a shimmering, diamond-bright creation.
Lily felt light, and it took no magic at all for her to lift a few inches into the air above the shifting earth, waiting for her dream-addled mind to make a decision on where exactly she was supposed to be. She knew that for the shadeborn, the strange, ethereal world of the Dreamstate held great meaning, and being transported to it in her sleep was something she took very seriously. In the real world things were such a mess, and Lily floated through the shades of blue with a fervent hope that her semi-conscious mind was about to give her the answers she sought.
What she didn’t expect to see was Novel.
He looked shocked when she came upon him, gliding down on a cobalt wave of air. His eyes were pale as the palest shades of the colour that enveloped them both, and they were wide in surprise for mere moments before his eyelids fluttered downward with a guilty sort of gaze. Lily quirked a brow for a moment, looking over the illusionist in his pinstriped suit and long-tailed overcoat, before she realised exactly what he was guilty of.
“We can’t be in the Dreamstate when we’re in the same house together,” Lily surmised.
Novel sucked his cheek in on
one side, looking up at her beneath his pale brow.
“Quite right,” he answered slowly.
Lily put her hands to her hips.
“Then, where are you?” she asked.
Novel looked around, as if the dream world might offer him a better answer than the truth. His thoughtful moment was short-lived, and he unleashed a little sigh.
“I’m on an early train to Nelson,” he admitted, “I rather think I must have fallen asleep.”
Lily struggled for a moment with the station’s name, and she felt a whistling rush of air behind her, like she could almost feel the locomotive shooting past her back.
“You’re going to back to Pendle?” Lily asked. “I should be with you! I should wake up now and get the next train-”
“You can’t,” Novel added quickly, “I asked only for my invitation this time.”
Lily almost made to argue with him, but Forrester had told her to keep the open invitation to herself at any cost, so Lily closed her mouth no sooner than it had opened. Novel looked as sheepish and awkward as the first time Lily had ever accidentally met him in her dreams, though now the strength of their magical connection was no secret. She knew she could not touch him in the non-physical world, but she moved closer to him all the same.
“You’re not going to see Pascal again, are you?”
She hardly needed to hear him answer yes, for the condemnation was all over the illusionist’s pale face. He didn’t look happy about admitting to an audience with his uncle, and Lily saw his fingers curling into fists amid the blurry landscape in which they stood.
“This is about the djinnkind, isn’t it?” she asked. “Pascal said something about direct contact with them, and you said it was far too dangerous to consider. And now I find you sneaking off at the crack of dawn to get the skinny on how to do it.”
“Dangerous for you, Lily,” Novel corrected sharply, “and that’s why I left before you could follow. I’m not sure that Pascal will even still be in Pendle, but I’m hoping to start the search for him there, at least.”