“That wasn’t there when we found him, right?” Echo pointed at the darkened patch of skin, careful not to touch it. “Am I losing it? Did I just not notice before?”
Dorian stepped closer. He reached out as if to lay his hand on the raw skin of Caius’s wrist, but then thought better of it. “No, that was certainly not there when we found him.”
“This is bad,” Jasper said unhelpfully.
“Very bad,” Echo agreed. Caius hadn’t shown signs of the ku?edra’s taint in the temple. That they were appearing now was very bad indeed.
Dorian rummaged through Echo’s bag. It took her a minute to realize what he was looking for.
“The elixir,” Dorian said, holding up a glass vial of viscous red liquid.
“Okay,” Jasper said. “Maybe this isn’t so bad.”
As much as Echo wanted to agree with him, she couldn’t help the surge of dread she felt as Dorian approached with the bloodweed elixir. “Do you think that’ll work?”
They all knew the elixir’s success rate was not one hundred percent. The longer a person had been exposed to the ku?edra’s blight, the less likely they were to respond to treatment. But for the moment, a silent consensus had been reached: they would not mention the likelihood of failure. What else could they do?
Dorian’s hands trembled as he uncorked the vial. The pungent scent made Echo’s nostrils burn, but she stayed close to the bedside—close but not touching—as Dorian tipped the elixir into Caius’s partially open mouth. Echo realized then that she hadn’t thought to pack some of the syringes she’d seen Ivy use to administer the elixir intravenously. Stupid.
Silence descended upon the room as they waited. Echo knew from observation that the elixir did not always work immediately, but none of them was eager to shatter the fragile bubble of hope and fear that enveloped them. It would be so easy to tip the scales to one side or the other.
A sudden shiver worked its way down Caius’s body. Echo reached for him, but Dorian held her back. “Look,” he said.
The dark veins on Caius’s arm were not improving. They were spreading. Echo watched with growing horror as black lines marched across Caius’s skin, branching out from his wrists to crawl up his arms and over his shoulders. They snaked across his collarbones as a powerful seizure racked his body. An alarming gurgling noise rose from his throat, swiftly followed by a red liquid tinged with black. For a moment, Echo thought it was blood, but once the acrid smell of the elixir hit the air, she understood what was happening.
“His body’s rejecting it,” Dorian said, sounding more hopeless than Echo had ever heard him.
A ragged scream tore its way from Caius’s throat. He sounded like he was being burned alive.
“It isn’t working.” Echo fought against Dorian’s grip, but it was like trying to break through iron bands. “It’s killing him.”
Jasper swore and left the room. Echo was ready to shout at him for his cowardice, but then he returned, wearing an absolutely absurd pair of bright-pink rubber gloves. The gloves had been under the sink when Echo and Jasper first arrived at the cabin, most likely left by its previous inhabitants.
“What are you doing?” Echo asked as Jasper turned a struggling Caius onto his side with brisk efficiency.
“I had a friend swallow a few too many pills once.” Jasper held Caius’s jaw open with one hand and reached into his mouth with two fingers. “It’s not the first time I’ve had to make somebody puke.”
It wasn’t pretty.
Caius retched and Dorian let go of Echo to retrieve a bucket from beneath the sink. Jasper held Caius in his gloved hands, coaxing the elixir out of him. When it seemed as though most of it had been purged from his system, Caius sagged against Jasper, who rearranged himself so that his skin wasn’t in danger of coming in contact with Caius’s.
“What do we do now?” Echo’s voice was as thin and helpless as a reed battered by a strong wind.
After disposing of the bucket’s contents, Dorian sank to his knees beside the bed. “I don’t know.”
The black continued to spread, though more slowly. Every now and then, a thickened vein would throb and the darkness would pulse outward, as if propelled by the beating of Caius’s heart.
“He’s going to die, isn’t he.” Jasper didn’t make it sound like a question but rather a statement of fact. They all knew it.
Dorian buried his face in his hands, as though he couldn’t bring himself to look at his prince, to face his failure. His shoulders shook and though he made no noise, Echo knew he was crying.
Not like this, whispered a voice at the back of her mind. Please, not like this.
“I want to try something,” Echo said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.
Dorian peered at her with a red-rimmed eye. “The elixir is the only thing we’ve found that helps fight the ku?edra’s toxin. The circle Tanith had him in must have had some spell worked into it to halt its spread. When we removed him from it, we broke the spell. What can you possibly do?” There was an accusation in his words: If not for you, we wouldn’t be here. If not for you, he never would have been taken. Echo didn’t think Dorian was wrong, but recriminations would have to wait.
“I think he’s right,” Jasper said softly. He’d removed the gloves and slid off the bed. He wasn’t touching Dorian, but it was painfully obvious he wanted to. “We’re lucky we got this far. What’s left for us to try?”
“Good old-fashioned brute force.” Tongues of flame tickled Echo’s palms. A deep soreness had settled into her muscles after burning the barrier and fleeing through the in-between. But rest would have to wait a bit longer.
—
Dorian and Jasper stood between Echo and the bed. Caius’s already-shallow breaths were accompanied by a wet, rattling noise coming from deep inside his chest.
“What are you going to do to him?” It was Dorian’s turn to hover and feel useless. Echo didn’t envy him in the slightest.
“I’m going to burn the poison out of him,” she said.
A resounding silence met her statement. A nice, long, stunned silence.
“You’re going to do what?” Jasper asked.
“I’m going to burn the—”
He waved away the rest of her sentence. “Yes, I heard you the first time. But I don’t understand you. Let me rephrase: why the devil do you think you’d be able to do something like that?”
Echo shrugged.
“Are you mad?” Dorian blurted.
“Probably,” Echo replied. “But unless you’d rather watch him fade away while that monster uses him as a living, breathing battery until there’s nothing left, I suggest you get out of my way and let me try.”
Dorian hesitated, still uncertain.
“What have we got to lose?” Echo said softly. “If we do nothing, then we lose him for sure. But there’s a chance I can save him.”
“How?” Dorian asked. He looked over his shoulder at Caius, at the whip marks and the burns and the black veins covering his body. “Try to explain it to me. Please.” His voice broke. “I’m supposed to protect him.”