Kate stood staring down at the fog. It had grown thicker, but the holes created by the blood drops remained, tunneling down.
Linay spoke behind her. “What will you do, Plain Kate? If she touches you, just touches you, you will fall into a gray sleep and never wake. They are calling it the ‘sleeping death.’ There is no way to save yourself.” Still Kate would not turn. The holes in the fog were opening like a mouth. Linay said, “She is coming.”
Kate said nothing.
“I can save you,” he said. “I can stop her. There is a spell, with blood. If you give me blood, I can use it to stop her from killing you. I don’t want her to kill you.”
“You’re lying.”
Linay gave a heartbroken bark of a laugh. “I can’t!” His voice was wild. “It would kill me, even to try. I can’t lie, and I can’t give her more blood, not much. I am taking her up the river, to Lov. A month that is, maybe. I don’t need much blood to do it. A cup a day, perhaps. Two.” Now he was wheedling. His panic frightened her.
He looked past her. His eyes locked on something. He closed them. “Decide.”
Plain Kate turned around. Rising from the well of darkness was the ghost.
?
Plain Kate had to summon all her will to turn her back on the ghost and face Linay. She could feel the thing behind her. It was like standing by a cave mouth: The stilled breath chilled her neck. Her own breath was tight with terror. But she didn’t turn around. “I want something,” she said.
Linay snorted, almost a laugh. “What?”
“My shadow.”
“I’m not done with it, though.” He really did seem close to laughter, about to boil away in giggling, like the last bit of water in a pot. “And I might as well keep it, because you’ll have no use for it in a minute. They don’t wear shadows, you know, in the land of the dead. It’s just not done.”
Kate ignored this. “I can’t live without it. So I might as well die now. We’ll both die, won’t we? She’ll take us both.”
His gaze flickered for a moment: behind her, up. “Yes.”
“So,” she said. At the edge of her hearing, music: A voice like a cold chimney was singing.
Linay sat still, biting the tip of his tongue, staining his white lips with blood. Then he nodded, sudden and sharp. “Not yet. I will need your shadow. In Lov. But in Lov, I will set it loose.”
Plain Kate stood frozen, caught between threat and hope.
“It’s a promise from a man who cannot lie,” Linay said. “And it’s all you’ll get. Take it now if you want to live.”
Something feather-touched the back of Kate’s neck. She whipped around, drawing her knife. The creature was right there, close behind her as a shadow.
Kate leapt backward, stumbling. The fog bank billowed and the creature made of fog came forward. The music, the empty music, sluiced onto the deck of the boat. Kate felt it around her, in her, welling up and filling her legs. It was an emptiness that was like warmth; a heaviness that was like floating away. Sleep. “Stop!” she gasped, waving the knife. It went through the fog and left no wound. “Linay!”
“Blood,” he said, sounding calm again, amused. She risked a look at him, reaching out with her eyes the way the drowning reach. He just sat, just watched. “Try the wrist.”
Plain Kate tried to gather herself. Knives; she knew knives. She had nicked herself often enough to know how to draw blood. Breathing hard, she thrust the tip of her knife into her wrist, and with a flick opened a little well. Dark blood welled up. She let it run into her cupped hand.
The rusalka swept toward her—like sleep itself, the thing swept: gray, faceless, huge. The figure flickered like layers of ice, and appeared in little pieces: a long hand, a tumble of hair, one egg-blank eye. Then suddenly she had a face. It was narrow and sad and impossibly beautiful. Plain Kate fell to her knees, as if she’d seen an angel.
Kate wanted to curl up on the deck and cover her face, but she didn’t. She lifted her hand, filled with blood. Nonsensically, she remembered the last time she had lifted her hand like this, for Taggle: One day when the Roamers strayed far from the river, she had poured water from a skin into her cupped hand and held it out. As Kate thought this, the rusalka dipped her head, and drank.
Kate felt something like a mouth close over the hole in her wrist. It sucked blood, or more than blood. Bones. Her own name.
Time went by.
Kate was dying. It felt like being changed into sleep and water.
The a blur of gray came like a cannonball through the fog and thumped into her chest.
Plain Kate fell backward. Taggle was standing on her chest, crying “Katerina! Kate! Kate!” His claws prickled through her clothes. Fur stood in a ridge on his back. “Taggle…” She choked on his name. Groggy and sick, she pushed herself up on one elbow. The rusalka—