I had never wanted to argue with someone so much in my life.
“What about me?” Jocelyn demanded. “You promised me.”
Scratch that. I could argue with her after I punched Jocelyn in the throat about six or seven times.
“Hush,” said the woman. “You’ll get your turn.”
I think I’m dying, I thought. Why is everyone standing around talking? This was the sort of thing that needed to be handled in a hospital, not in a foggy house of horrors.
There was a sharp new pain as Toby pulled the arrow out of my shoulder. Any hope that my paralysis had been the result of a nerve cluster being somehow compressed died as my body continued to burn around me, unresponsive. I was going to die here. There was no other way.
Toby moaned. “Walther,” she said. Who the hell was Walther? “The cure.”
“She won’t make it as far as Berkeley,” said a man’s voice.
Why Berkeley? I thought. And who the hell is Walther?
The man continued: “I could carry her, but not alive, Toby, I’m not fast enough.”
I’m right here, I thought, and burned in silence.
There was a pause before Toby whispered, “The Luidaeg, and then Dianda. Save my child and then save my ass. Go.”
The man didn’t speak again. He ran instead, gathering me closer so that I didn’t bounce around as much. Then he jumped for some reason, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. There was no air. I was choking, I was suffocating—
I was freezing. The cold was intense enough to beat back some of the flames under my skin, and the asphyxia was making my thoughts blurry and slow, almost comforting. He had probably carried me into a hallway or something, and this was just the next step in the progression of the poison that was killing me. I liked it better than the burning.
It almost felt like ice was forming on my face and hair, but that was silly. No poison is strong enough to turn a person into an ice machine. Tactile hallucinations, I thought, and it was an almost pleasant idea. None of this was happening. Maybe none of this had ever been happening, and I was home in my bed with food poisoning or something, my body fighting to purge the toxins. Maybe I was going to be okay.
I knew I wasn’t going to be okay. But if a girl can’t lie to herself when she’s dying, when can she lie to herself?
I was on the verge of losing consciousness completely when the cold snapped around us, replaced by ordinary air. The fire in my veins surged back to full strength, and I would have screamed if I could have.
“Hold fast, kitten, please hold fast, or I fear your mother will chase you to a place I cannot follow,” said the man, voice low and tight and urgent. He walked now, instead of running, and when he moved me enough to free one hand to hammer on an unseen door, it was like driving knives of fire into my flesh.
The door opened, and an unfamiliar voice demanded, “What is it n—is that Gillian?” Annoyance became horror in an instant. “Dad’s eyes, get her in here. Now!”
There was no arguing with that voice. Even I wanted to obey, and I couldn’t so much as open my own eyes. At least I was breathing again. My body still remembered how to do that, although it felt like it wasn’t going to remember for much longer. Everything hurt. The worst thing about it was that I couldn’t even scream.
The man carrying me stepped up, and a wave of nausea washed over me, distracting even through the burn. A door slammed.
“This way,” said the woman.
Another door opened, and I was being placed on a soft, flat surface. A bed, maybe, or a couch. It didn’t matter. The cold flash was over, and I was burning alive again, all illusionary ice gone.
“What happened?”
“The false Queen elf-shot her.” He sounded like he wanted to rip the woman—the “false Queen,” whatever that meant—apart with his bare hands. “She’s dying.”
“I can see that,” snapped the woman. “Did she do anything else? Did Gillian drink anything, or eat anything, or make any promises?”
“Not that I saw. Can you save her? Please, can you save her? I’ll pay—”
“You’ll pay nothing, cat. Don’t you have someplace else to be?”
“I—”
“Go. Save her. I’ll stay here and try to do the same.”
There was a sound like a door slamming, and then a hand was touching my cheek, cool-skinned and rough with calluses. I heard a sigh.
“You’re still alive. I don’t know whether that’s a mercy or not, but I know my sister’s work, and I’ll wager you can hear me. It hurts more when you can hear yourself dying. What am I going to do with you?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
“The cure won’t work without fae blood to latch onto, and your mother is good at what she does. Better than she understands. She pulled every drop of her family line out of you; even the prophecies can’t claim you now. She was trying to save you.”
I was trying to breathe.
The woman sighed and snapped her fingers, and I . . . stopped breathing. The fire in my veins froze solid, becoming nothingness. I couldn’t feel my body anymore. I was a mind without a shell, trapped in a dark infinity of my own making, and I knew that if this was eternity, I was screwed. I couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but think, and given enough time, even that would fade, replaced by silently screaming until the end of time.
“I can’t keep you like this for long,” said the woman. “You’re too human. My magic will shred you, no matter how well-intentioned it happens to be. But we don’t need long. We just need long enough.”
There was a rustle as she rose and stepped away, and I heard her shout, “Poppy!”
“Coming!” Another woman, this one with a voice like bells that rang and chimed and clattered in every syllable. It should have been impossible for a person to sound like a carillon, but she managed it, somehow.
I wished I knew what she looked like. I wished I knew what either of them looked like, or where I was, or how I could be alive when I wasn’t breathing. I wished I knew how any of this was happening. I wanted to believe it was a fever dream, bad sushi burning its way through my system, but that pretty fiction was getting harder and harder to hold onto. Everything was getting harder to hold onto. It was like my thoughts were unraveling at the seams, and that was terrifying, because they were all that I had left, and it was an incredible relief, because when they ended, so would I.
“Poppy, this is Gillian.”
The second woman gasped. “You mean October’s girl? The missing girl? That girl?”
“Yes. She’s been elf-shot. I’ve stopped her clock, but it won’t last long. I want you to go to the basement. There are chests there. Find me the chest made of driftwood and pearls. Bring it here as fast as you can.”
“I will, but . . . wouldn’t you find it faster? Should I wait here with her while you go?”
“No. She could still die. What I’ve done . . . it’s not enough to fight my sister’s spellcraft off forever. And I’m not sure that chest has the answer. I just want it here in case I decide to try.”
“All right.” Footsteps moved away.
The hand with the cool skin touched my cheek again. “You made your choice once. I could respect it. I could let you go, tell your mother that what she wants isn’t more important than what you want. But I can’t ask you if that’s still what you want—and I’m sorry, child, I know you ceased to be your mother’s property when you popped out of her belly, but I was a mother, too, and I know what it costs to bury your own. I need her good regard, for now at least, and your wishes are none of my concern.”
I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to die! But she’d said she could “let me go,” and I couldn’t think of anything else that might mean. Please, I thought, as loudly and fiercely as I could. Save me. Whatever that means, do it.
“There’s nothing in yo
ur blood to hang conjure or charm upon; we’ve never spent our arts on saving mortals. Maybe we should have. Maybe it would have been kinder. Maybe . . . ” She paused, taking a deep breath. “Maybe there’s something I can do. I hope you can still hear me, Gillian. Because this is going to hurt you a great deal more than it’s going to hurt me.”
The sound of the door opening again, and then the second woman spoke, saying, “I found the chest. Do you have a territory agreement with the spiders down there, or can I go back with a broom and teach them about respecting a lady’s personal boundaries?”
“The broom’s in the hall closet,” said the first woman. “Leave us, Poppy, and don’t come back, no matter what you hear.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the second woman—Poppy—dubiously. “Call my name if you need me.” The door closed again.
Something had shifted in the air of the room, something that grew heavy and oppressive as the first woman began to unbutton my jeans and work them down my hips. I couldn’t even tense.
She sighed. The sound was very far away. “I’m going to hurt you, but I’m not going to violate you, not in the way your world has prepared you for. You’re safer here than you have ever been in your life—and while you are free to doubt all others, I can’t lie to you yet. Never doubt me. If you want to stay alive, I need you naked. I’m sorry I can’t ask for your permission.”
She went back to undressing me, hands rough and efficient, but never straying into excessive familiarity: true to her word, she just wanted me naked as quickly as possible. When she was finished, she stepped away. There was a creaking sound, like two pieces of stiff wood rubbing against each other. The laundry room door in the apartment where we’d lived when I was little, when I was still waiting for Mom to come home, had made the same sound.
Mom. October. I couldn’t decide what to call her even when no one else could hear. She was my mother, but Miranda was the one who’d raised me. She said she loved me, but she was the one who’d left me. And yet, since the first time I’d been kidnapped, since I’d fallen asleep and dreamt of a meadow filled with impossible flowers, I hadn’t quite been able to work up the energy to hate her. When I thought about her, it made me sad, not angry, like she was a secret I’d been told once and then forgotten, like—
A bucket of ice water struck me square in the chest, driving the air from my lungs in an involuntary gasp. Every inch of my skin felt suddenly tight, contracting into painful lumps of gooseflesh—but the burning was gone. The fire that had been swallowing me since this started had been doused.
No: not doused. It was flickering back to life, radiating outward from my shoulder, ready to turn back into a bonfire. But it was dimmer, more distant. My thoughts seemed to be getting dimmer, too, fading into a comfortable hum. Maybe death wouldn’t be so bad. It felt a lot like going to sleep, now that I wasn’t burning, burning, burning . . .
The woman tied something around my soaking shoulders, lifting me up so that it would fall smoothly down my back. She lowered me into my original position, humming under her breath, something sweet and sad, something that sounded strangely like the sea. I could taste saltwater on my lips, trickling between them, running over my tongue. I couldn’t swallow, but I could let it move down my throat at its own pace, cooling me, soothing me.
“Her name was Firtha,” said the woman, right next to my ear. “She was older than you, but no wiser. She was still a child. She should still be here with me, not gone to dust and whispers in the wind. I cannot bring her back. This will not bring her back. This will end in someone altogether new, and I hope you can forgive me.”
She touched my cheek. I opened my eyes.
Seeing the world was a revelation. I stared at everything, unable to move my head, unable to stop looking. I had thought I might never see anything but the inside of my own eyelids again. And there, right in front of me, was the woman.
She looked like she was almost my age, like I could have seen her on campus and not looked twice, except for her dress, which was something out of a medieval recreation fair. It was white silk, and it fell around her like a wave crashing on the beach, speckled here and there with darker patches, probably marking where the saltwater she had doused me in had cascaded back onto her. Her hair was thick and black and loose around her shoulders, and her eyes . . .
They were so green, the color of algae growing in shallow water, of kelp, of the vast and living sea. She held up a flask that looked like it had been carved from a single piece of sunset coral.
“This isn’t a perfect solution, but you deserve better, and so does your mother, and some debts are too old to ever be paid.” She pressed the flask against my lips. I drank despite myself. It tasted like seawater, but sweet at the same time, like she had mixed it with honey, or with the idea of starlight.
My eyes began to flutter closed. I struggled to keep them open. I wasn’t tired. I wanted to see the world, to know that I existed outside the confines of my own head.
“Go to sleep,” she whispered. She pulled the flask away a beat before her hand slammed into my sternum, her fingernails like claws as they bit into my skin, and I screamed—actually screamed, loud and long and filled with every agony I’d suffered thus far in silence—and then there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
TWO
I was standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking a great and stormy sea. I was naked, or close to it; some sort of fur stole was wrapped around my shoulders, but that was all I had to cover me. I wasn’t cold, though. The wind was howling and the waves were crashing and I wasn’t cold. Something was wrong with that, something I couldn’t fully put my finger on. I should have been cold.
“This is the pause,” said an unfamiliar voice. I turned. A girl stood next to me on the cliff’s edge. She looked like she could have been one of my classmates, for all that her hair was a deep slate gray that curled around her in the wind like the foam breaking on the rocks below. Her eyes were greener than anything I’d ever seen, so green that they must have been contacts. Human eyes don’t come in that color. She was naked, too, without even a shawl to break the line of her body. It was oddly natural, like she had never been meant for clothing.
“The pause?” I asked.
“When a wave forms, when it rises, there’s always a moment where it can collapse back into itself, too heavy to sustain the motion it wants to make. A moment when it isn’t quite sky and isn’t quite sea and isn’t quite anything at all. That’s where you’re standing now.” She turned away from the water, looking at me solemnly. “You can’t stay here for long.”
“I don’t even know where ‘here’ is,” I said. “Am I dreaming?”
“Yes. And no. And yes again. It’s complicated, being a wave.” She took a step toward me, holding out her hands. “Let me look at you.”
I didn’t take her hands. I didn’t cover myself, either. Under the circumstances, that was about as far as I was willing to go for the weird naked dream lady.
She seemed to understand that she had overstepped. She stopped, hands falling back to her sides, and said, “I suppose this is less a dream and more a haunting. We aren’t supposed to leave ghosts. We aren’t supposed to leave bodies, either. Well, I left part of one, and so it was only natural that I should leave part of the other.”
“What are you . . . ?”
She gestured to the skin tied around my shoulders. “That was mine, when I walked among the living.”
I recoiled, hands scrabbling at the knot between my breasts. Fur is always a dead thing, but this suddenly felt heavy, slick with blood instead of water. “Oh, God. Oh, fuck, I’m sorry—”
“Peace, peace!” She put her hands up. “You have to keep it on. Please. It’s the only gift I have to give, and if you refuse it now, you’ll die.”
My hands stilled. “What do you mean?”
“Come sit with me.” She started toward the cliff’s edge
, beckoning for me to follow.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to turn around and run away, to find a way out of this strange nightmare wonderland. But I was naked and barefoot, and she hadn’t attacked me, at least not yet, and my desire to know what was going on was stronger than the urge to run. Besides, this was a dream. She couldn’t hurt me.
I followed.
The woman sat down on the rocky edge of the cliff. I mimicked her, relaxing a little when nothing poked me in the ass. She shot me an amused look.
“Do rocks usually bite where you come from?”
“I have no interest in sitting down on somebody’s rusty old fishhook,” I replied.
She snorted. “What a charmingly positive outlook on life.”
“You try having your mother disappear when you’re a baby and see how positive you are.”
“Ah.” Her amusement turned sympathetic. “Mother troubles, I understand. I never lived up to mine, however long and hard I tried. She gave me her favor, called me ‘precious’ and ‘pearl,’ but I never earned it. What good is adoration that costs nothing, counts nothing? I might as well have been the pearl she called me, valuable only because I was hers, and not because of anything I’d done.”
It was weird, sitting here with a strange naked lady and talking about moms. Dreams are allowed to be weird, I guess. “My mother . . . I never felt like I had to live up to her. I mean, as long as I didn’t vanish, I was doing better than she ever did.”
“Where did she go?”
“I—” I hesitated. “I don’t know. She never said. When she came back, my dad wouldn’t let her talk to me.”
The woman frowned, politely puzzled. “And you didn’t chase after her to ask? I would never have allowed my mother to leave me in ignorance so big as that.”
“I didn’t want to know.” Because there had always been the things that didn’t add up, hadn’t there? My memories of her were fuzzy. I’d been so young when she disappeared that it wasn’t really a surprise—it was more of a surprise that I remembered her at all—but what I did have didn’t make sense. I remembered the scent of freshly cut grass hanging in the air of our apartment, like someone had dumped a lawnmower out on the carpet. I remembered little dancing lights, and the sound of bells. I remembered her laughing. More than anything, I remembered her laughing.
Night and Silence (October Daye) Page 36