Lighting more candles, I poured some cold water into his washbasin and sat beside him again, wiping the blood off his face. Rook sat up, the glazed light of fever in his eyes.
“Henrietta.” He kissed my neck. I froze as his lips brushed my skin. Rook was pulling me back to lie down with him. I didn’t let myself go with him—God, there was the blood still to clean up, which made my skin crawl. And Maria said I had to keep him calm. And Rook…This wasn’t like him. That night in the garden, he’d been so shy and gentle. Now he was more aggressive, his hands and lips greedily exploring my body.
“Wait,” he said, stopping. “We’re not married yet, are we?” He sounded disappointed. I placed my hand over his heart. The skin of his chest was smooth, but the scars throbbed with infection. My face flushed to think of his question. No, we weren’t married.
“Not yet,” I said. “You need to wake…and clean yourself. Something’s…happened.”
Now that he was more awake, Rook took over from me, washing his face, his neck, cleaning out the half-moons of dark blood trapped beneath his fingernails. He stripped out of his shirt. His body was lean and sculpted, even with the scars. I hastened to get him something clean to wear, nervously helping him slide into it. After a few minutes, his hair was damp, his face scrubbed, his shirt unsoiled. He looked all right, yes, but he radiated disease.
This couldn’t be the night he turned. No. No.
“What’s happening to me, Nettie?” The sincere confusion in his voice killed me. Biting my lip to hold in a sob, I rinsed a sliver of soap in the red-tinged water. So much blood, and none of it his. There wasn’t a mark on him.
Rook, what have you been doing?
“You’re having a terrible dream,” I said.
His hands caught my waist and spun me around. Our lips met, the kiss deepening quickly. With a swift move, we were lying on the bed.
“It’s become a good dream, then,” he whispered in my ear.
My whole body seemed to vibrate as Rook gathered me to him. But it was all too fast. My mind screamed to stop even as I kissed him. Finally, I put my hands against his chest, holding him back. Slowly, very slowly, our breathing calmed, and I pulled away. I still had to learn the truth.
“What happened in the dream? Do you remember?” I asked carefully.
“A man was attacking people.” Rook sounded distant, as if he were falling asleep once more. “He deserved what he got for attacking that woman.”
He deserved what he got. I did not speak, only moved my head to his chest and listened as his breathing deepened, until finally he was truly asleep. I looked at his face in the candlelight. He looked peaceful now. No one would ever picture this normal, beautiful boy with someone else’s blood all over his hands. That wasn’t him. That was the thing inside him.
But he’d had someone else’s blood all over his hands, and now he smiled in his sleep.
“Do you remember Christmas Eve when we were eight?” I whispered, lifting my head to see his face. His eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t wake. “I still missed my aunt in those days. I was crying at bedtime, and one of the teachers smacked me and told me to be quiet. After everyone had fallen asleep, I snuck down to the kitchen. You used to sleep near the stove on winter nights, remember?” I traced a finger across his cheek. “You let me crawl into bed next to you. You didn’t care that I was crying. You just put your arm around me and let me blubber on and on.” Holding back a sob, I kissed his forehead. “I think that was when I knew I loved you.”
I laid my head on the pillow beside Rook’s, listened to his soft breathing, and tried to collect my thoughts.
R’hlem—I wasn’t going to start calling him my father, not even in my head—was the true reason that Rook was transforming. If R’hlem hadn’t come back from that alien world, if he hadn’t brought the Ancients, if he hadn’t brought Korozoth, if Korozoth hadn’t marked Rook…On and on my thoughts spun in a painful whirl.
If I had to go to R’hlem to save Rook, I would. Finally, fitfully, I slept.
I woke a few hours later to find Maria standing over the bed, looking shocked.
“What are you doing here?” Maria said, putting down the cloth and medicine she’d been carrying as I hastened to sit upright. Rook shifted beside me, caught in the grip of an actual bad dream. Maria’s eyes flicked to him, her expression now inscrutable. Finding the two of us asleep with our arms about each other was compromising beyond belief.
“It’s not what it seems,” I whispered, struggling to get out of bed. My head still felt shrunken from the drink.
She didn’t sound convinced. “Good thing I found you before anyone else did. It’s time for his morning potion.” She uncorked a glass vial filled with that brackish liquid. Another potion. Another bit of poison to kill the monster. When Maria leaned over the bed to wake Rook, she gasped and dropped the vial. The medicine started to spill out onto the sheets, and I rescued it.
“What?” I asked, but then realized she’d noticed the bloody cloths by the washbasin, and the water that had turned a cloudy red. I was a blistering fool. Why hadn’t I got rid of those last night?
“Is he hurt?” She pulled the blankets aside and discovered that Rook was not, in fact, wounded. Her eyes scanned me. “You’re both of you fine.” Her gaze darkened. “What in the Mother’s name did he do?”
“What makes you think he did anything?” Now that I was fully awake, the horrors of last night returned in vivid color. Meeting R’hlem on the astral plane, Mickelmas’s revelation, Rook’s fever: how was any one person supposed to bear it all? My hands started sparking. “Why wouldn’t you suspect me?”
“Don’t be daft.” Maria softened. “If he’s too far gone—”
“If he is, who’s to blame? You’re the one who added poison to his treatments!” I hissed.
Maria’s eyes flashed.
“I told you there’d be only so much my methods could do.” She spoke in a harsh whisper, so as not to wake Rook.
I couldn’t listen to this, so I grabbed the bloody cloths and washbasin. If he woke up and saw them, he’d ask questions. I ran, my feet freezing on the carpeted hall. The water sloshed as I hurried. Inside my room, I threw open the window and emptied the filth onto the garden below, then put the rags in the basin and set them on fire. Maria entered and closed the door behind her, nose wrinkling as I poured water on the now-ashed cloth. Gray smoke billowed upward.
“You can’t hide what he’s done.” She sounded sympathetic, which was worse than anger.
“Leave me alone!” My skin tingled. I was dangerously close to going up in flames.
“Calm down.” She didn’t show any fear as my hands started smoldering. Something about her pitying expression drove me over the edge. Without warning, my whole body ignited, and I stared at her from behind a curtain of flame.
Maria stepped forward and summoned my fire.
Blue flame swept into her palm in a ball, hovering just above her fingertips. Putting her hands on either side of her fire, she twisted and twirled it, whirling faster and faster until it spun before her face, a perfect sphere.
She was using elemental magic.
I stood there in shock as the flames died on my skin, only a few telltale embers remaining to sizzle on the cold floor. Maria changed the fireball’s rotation, molding it until it grew smaller and smaller and, in a puff of smoke, disappeared entirely.
“If you want to have another tantrum, I’m a bit out of practice,” she said, one eyebrow quirked in a challenge.
How?
She jerked her head toward the bench by my vanity. “May want to have a seat. You look a bit put out.”
Slowly, I sat.