I start for the door, but she shoves me before I get far. My foot catches the edge of the chair and I trip, sitting down hard enough that my teeth clack together. Helena is tearing apart the top of the desk, flinging papers and inkwells and pens to the floor as she searches for the key. Then she moves to the cabinet, wrenching it open so hard that the legs all jump.
I don’t wait about for her to realize I’ve got it. I snatch up the fiddle case and stagger to my feet, setting a course for the hallway. “Stay where you are,” Helena growls, but that’s not a directive I feel I need obey. I’m not sure where I’m going to go—it’s their house, after all, but at least putting a locked door between us is necessary. I dodge the chair and make a vault for the door. “I said stay—” She grabs me by the arm, dragging me backward and jamming her fist into my shoulder. It pricks like she’s stabbed me with something.
She has stabbed me with something, I realize as I look down, though not a knife. It’s too fat to be a needle and too thick to be an actual blade, and it’s black and opaque as obsidian, though the color is draining out of it and into me, leaving behind crystal glass. “What are you doing?” I try to wrench it out, but she’s got a beastly good grip, and shoves it deeper into my arm. I feel a shudder through my muscle, and a warm bubble of blood oozes up to the surface of my skin.
We wrestle for a minute over the needle, and she seems to be getting stronger because it’s she who ends up wrenching the damn thing out of my arm. I stagger backward into the desk. The legs screech. “What was that?”
She doesn’t reply. I twist around, trying to get a better sense of the wound, but it’s barely a nick, shadow thin. It’s hardly even bleeding, though I swear I felt it go bone deep. I seem to be victim of the least effective stabbing of all time.
Helena doesn’t make to stop me, so I start for the door again, but my body doesn’t seem to understand what I’m telling it to do. The fiddle case falls from my hand, and when I reach for it, I miss the handle entirely but my arm carries me into the chair. There’s a crash and suddenly the chair and the fiddle case and I are all on the ground in a broken sprawl. I make another snatch at the case, but in spite of how much mental energy I’m putting into the movement, my arms hardly work. Neither do my legs, I realize, when I try to stand.
The world starts to ripple like the center of a flame, time turning stretched and distorted. And while I have, admittedly, been this high before, there’s no fun in this. There wasn’t a lot of fun in it before either, but at least then I knew what was happening. Now this insane woman has stuck some sort of poisoned pen in me and I’m fairly certain that my body is losing its ability to perform basic functions at the behest of whatever was inside it.
Helena is suddenly right overtop of me, her face ghoulish and frightening. With the firelight on her cheekbones, it looks like she’s burning. She’s tearing at my clothes, trying to find the key she seems convinced I’ve hidden there.
“Stop,” I manage to get out.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She pats my cheek and it rattles through me. “You should be long gone by now.”
My throat is feeling very closed up and my sight slides into a thin black line. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I hear Helena growl; then she slaps me across the face and everything comes crashing back. The blow turns the world into a splintered looking glass. I can see her face three times above me. “Come on, wake up. Tell me where it is.”
“You . . . stole it,” I murmur.
“No, you stole it. It’s mine to begin with—it belongs to us, and I’m going to do what needs to be done with it to save my father. Now, where is it?” When I don’t answer, she hits me again, so hard my neck wrenches. “Tell me. Where—”
And I can’t fight back or defend myself and suddenly I can hear my father’s voice in my head—Put your hands down—and I’m not sure whether it’s now or one of so many times that I tried to protect myself and wasn’t permitted to.
She slaps me again. “—is it?”
Get up and stop crying and put your hands down and look at me when I’m talking to you.
“What about your mopsy little sister?” Helena grabs my face and forces me to look at her. My vision is falling in and out of focus. “Has she got it? She was lurking here earlier. I’ll find her next.”
She rolls off me and clambers to her feet, heel snagging in the hem of her dressing gown as she makes for the door. She’s reaching for the handle when suddenly the door bangs open, and she staggers backward. I think for a moment it must have struck her. Then there’s a clang and Helena drops like a stone, collapsing to the floor in a boneless heap. And there on the threshold is Percy, wielding the brass bed warmer with which he’s just clubbed Helena. “God, Monty.” There’s another clang as he tosses it to the ground and drops to his knees beside me.
The world is making less and less sense. Percy’s trying to shake me awake, and I can hear him calling for Felicity, and the entirety of my strength is devoted to not losing consciousness. “Monty, can you hear me? Monty!”
I turn my head and vomit. It’s a struggle to breathe, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m choking on my own sick or because part of dying is not breathing so it’s got to happen sometime soon.
Percy pulls me up into a sitting position, and I start to cough hard. He slaps me on the back, and then suddenly I’m breathing again.
“Stay awake,” Percy is saying. “Stay awake, stay awake,” and then it sounds like he’s saying, “Stay alive.”
Put your goddamn hands down, Henry.
The next thing I know I’m lying on my side on hot, slick cobblestones. Or maybe it’s me that’s hot and slick—my skin feels damp, like I’m drying off from a swim. But my head is on something soft, and I realize it’s Percy’s lap. I’ve got my head in Percy’s lap and he has his fingers on my forehead and he’s smoothing my hair. And the worst part is I’m in such miserable shape I can’t even enjoy it.
“He’s coming round,” I hear Felicity say. Then, “Monty, can you hear me?”
My stomach turns over, and I realize what’s about to happen the moment before it does. I wrench away from Percy—my limbs are weak but praise God they at least somewhat obey me—and lurch sideways on my elbows, into what is thankfully a gutter, before I vomit. And then again. And again. And there’s nothing left in me and I’m still on my hands and knees, retching.
My arms give out, and I nearly go face-first into the cobblestones, but Percy catches me. He holds on to me while I gag, pulling my hair back and rubbing my shoulders until my stomach finally settles, and then he draws me to him, his fingers massaging my skin. I’m sick and shaking and clutching Percy and suddenly I’m thinking of him ill and helpless in Marseilles and how poorly I’d been able to deal with that, and now here he is, knowing just what to do. Perhaps everyone is born with this caring knack in them but me.
Felicity crouches down in front of me. “Monty?”