Текст книги "Six Scorched Roses"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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CHAPTER TWELVE

I had, apparently, piqued Vale’s interest, because from that moment forward, he wanted to study with me all the time. We dug through his libraries and studies together, and he helped me find books that might be relevant to my work, then translated them for me as I scribbled frantic notes in my notebooks. Time blurred together, every minute morphing to hours until my head started to bob over my books and Vale would force me to rest.

“Is this how you live?” he asked, appalled, to which I blinked blearily at him.

“I have work to do,” I answered, because this was obvious. To that, he snorted and scoffed and dragged me off to bed, and then sat there to make sure I stayed—because I’d been foolish the first time and let him catch me sneaking out.

I couldn’t help it. There was so much knowledge in Vale’s house—so much to learn. I wanted all of it. I wanted lifetimes, eternities, to absorb everything that he knew—to experience the world as he had.

Two more days passed, then three. My health improved. I toyed with the thought of leaving on the third day, but Vale said, very seriously, “You still are unwell. You’re in no state to travel.”

And later, I would lie in bed and swallow shame, because I could have argued with him—should have argued with him.

But I didn’t want to.

Because maybe some part of me found a strange kinship with him in those exhausted, sleep-deprived days. I’d watch him read his Obitraen books to me, watch something flicker to life over his face, a fervent curiosity that mirrored what I so often felt and always dampened.

I had thought nothing could possibly be more beautiful than Vale’s blood. I had been wrong.

And when the days passed, and my exhaustion and my enthusiasm led me to loosen my typically-closely-held control over my socially unacceptable attitudes, my raw enthusiasm leaking through as I talked excitedly to Vale about some theory or another, I turned to see him staring at me, brows drawn. His expression made me freeze, my face flushing—because I’d let down a wall I shouldn’t have and wasn’t sure what I might have revealed beyond it.

“I—” I started.

But he just said, calmly, “You are a very beautiful woman.”

It wasn’t an invitation, like the first night he had asked me if I wanted to spend the night with him. He wasn’t flirting with me. No, it was an observation, clear and simple as those in the books spread before us, and Vale simply let it lie there and then turned back to his book.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I needed to go home.

I knew it the moment I opened my eyes that day. The thought came with a sharp stab of guilt, like a haze had been cleared and I realized all at once what I had been doing.

I had been with Vale for a week. A week, in a world where time was so precious and cruel.

I needed to go home.

I told Vale this and didn’t know what to make of his slow nod and quiet demeanor. He insisted on sending me home on a magnificent black horse—a horse that was probably worth more than all of my belongings put together. “You aren’t well enough to walk all that way,” he said, when I tried to protest.

He helped me mount it, which I wasn’t expecting, his hands firm and big around my waist. His grip sent a trill up my spine that struck me in places I wasn’t expecting. When I was seated and he stood beside the horse, his hand still casually resting on my thigh, that touch was the only thing I could think about.

“Thank you for the hospitality, Vale.”

He shrugged a little, as if he was trying hard to make it seem like a great inconvenience.

Still, he didn’t move, and I wasn’t sure why. That hand still rested there, right on my thigh.

Was he waiting for me to say something? Had I missed a cue that I should know? I did that often. I looked down at that hand.

“What—”

“May I write to you?” he asked.

My mouth closed. I blinked at him.

“May I write?” He sounded vaguely irritated, and I wasn’t sure why.

“Yes,” I said, at last. “Of course.”

There was nothing of course about it. It was unwise to allow Vale to write to me. Unwise to allow more evidence of Nyaxia’s cursed children into my house, where it might draw even more ire from the gods than we had already earned.

A voice in the back of my head screamed this to me. A voice that was far too easy to silence.

I had, after all, brought so much of Vale into my home already. His blood. His books. And how I felt as if I was covered in him, right down to my skin. Right down to my heart.

What harm would some letters do?

He exhaled, shoulders lowering. The irritation faded. I realized that maybe he hadn’t been irritated with me, but with himself.

Relief. He was relieved.

And the truth was, so was I, because the thought of leaving Vale—the thought of being able to continue what we had started together this last week—

Vale stepped away from the horse. His hand was the last part of him to move. I watched it leave my thigh.

“Travel safely,” he said.

I gave him a small smile. “I’ll see you in a month, Vale.”

And he returned that smile—a thing so lovely I barely even noticed the teeth. “I’ll see you in a month, mouse.”

When I arrived home, Mina threw herself at me. “I missed you! I was so worried about you. They said you were fine, but I didn’t believe them. You were—well, you were—”

I didn’t mean to stiffen under her embrace, but I did anyway. Not at first—at first, it was a welcome reminder that she was safe, that I had made it home. But then I just felt everything else. I was always so acutely aware of sensations and textures, and now I felt Mina’s frailty most of all.

She felt it and pulled away, brows drawn. Hurt.

I looked down at myself. A fine coating of white-grey coated my clothing where her skin had touched me.

“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” she asked. “I was so worried, Lilith. I was—I was so, so worried.”

I swallowed a stab of guilt.

She was worried, and I was… I was…

I was happy there. In no great rush to come back. No great hurry to escape the quiet comfort of Vale’s home.

The final remnants of the dream I’d been living in for the last week faded away.

I hadn’t even written to her. What kind of a sister was I? Too preoccupied with—with some man—

“He didn’t hurt me,” I said. “He was…”

Kind. Caring.

I settled on, “He let me recover there.”

Her mouth pinched. “When you were bleeding? You’re lucky you made it out of there alive.”

I felt foolish for not putting that together sooner—that I had been bleeding, and I probably had been very, very tempting to Vale.

“He showed no interest in eating me,” I chuckled. “Don’t worry.”

And yet, as I said it, I heard his voice: You are a very beautiful woman.

Felt his hand on my leg.

Mina was giving me a strange look.

“Well. I’m glad you’re alright. I was… we were just all so worried about you, alright? Don’t you dare leave me like that again.”

I agreed, but it was a lie. That was the cruel joke with Mina and I. She’d leave me, or I left her. I’d do everything I could to make sure it was the latter.

“A letter came for you this morning,” Mina told me later that evening. “It’s in your office. It’s… strange.”

She was right. The letter was strange. But strange in a way I now was beginning to know quite well. The paper of the envelope looked as if it could be a decade old, yellowed and a little crumpled. It was closed with a red wax seal.

I knew right away that it was him. I smiled to myself when I held it, just because it reminded me so much of him. It was so… well, so vampiric.

I opened the envelope. Inside, there were a few torn-out pages of books with notes and translations scribbled in the margins in the handwriting I now recognized as Vale’s.

And then there was a letter. At the top was my name, and then several black drips of ink, like he’d hovered the pen over the page for a long time, thinking about what to write.

Lilith,

I hope you made it home safely. I found some more notes for you. I thought you wouldn’t want to waste the time without them.

I welcome any letters you wish to send before your visit.

I will help you however I can.

If you want it.

Vale.

I didn’t realize I was smiling until my cheeks began to ache.

It was so…

Familiar. So strangely familiar. Just a few stilted lines. None of the flowery language of polite society.

And yet, I knew it said so much that wasn’t written in these words, too.

I set the letter down and jumped when I realized Mina was standing behind me. I cursed and shoved the letter into my pocket, even though I didn’t know why my impulse was to hide it.

But she had seen it, anyway.

“You startled me,” I said.

“Be careful, Lilith,” she said. “You know what will happen if they know. If they find out.”

My mouth was dry.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I didn’t want Mina to know, either. But who was I fooling? She was so much smarter than anyone ever gave her credit for.

And she was smart enough to know when I was lying.

She gave me a hard look. “Be careful.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I wrote to Vale every few days, and then every two days, and then every day. Sometimes, even, multiple times a day.

Ravens would appear in my garden, ready to deposit his latest letter or take mine back to him. Sometimes he sent his messages with magic, the parchment appearing in little puffs of white-blue smoke—those letters were always his most frantic, like he’d had an idea he couldn’t wait for a raven to tell me about, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t devour those the quickest of all.

Vale’s enthusiasm was impressive, but even more surprisingly, it was… familiar. Before, I had respected him, the way one needs to respect a great beast by recognizing that it’s something older and stronger and more powerful than you. But with each one of these letters, that respect turned from a respect of nature to the respect of a friend.

His handwriting was sometimes sloppy, his notes scrawled in margins or at an askew angle across the parchment, like he was in such a rush he couldn’t stop long enough to straighten the paper. I could imagine him writing them, leaning over a messy desk, hair falling around his face, surrounded by open books. He had less reverence for the artifacts around him than I did—he had no qualms about tearing out pages of books to send to me, folded up and scribbled on.

When I had first met him, it had been impossible to imagine him embodying that kind of enthusiasm. But now I could so clearly picture him as the general—the general attacking problems with strategic, unrelenting verve. He had never been a man of science, and his inexperience showed, yes—but he also learned fast, and he wasn’t afraid to ask questions or admit his own ignorance, a quality that many men lacked. Much of the information he sent me was genuinely helpful, and when it wasn’t, he wanted to learn why.

It wasn’t just work, either. He wove little fragments of his life into those letters, too, doodled in the corners or at the bottom of the page. A little drawing of a bird he’d seen on his balcony railing. Mundane observations about the weather: The wind is cold today. How can you people call this spring?

But I liked those things, too. I liked that they so easily allowed me to imagine him, shivering a little under the nighttime breeze. I even liked that he wanted those banal details from me, too.

One day, he ended his letter with a drawing of a nightbane flower, and a tiny note beside it: sweet with a bitter bite.

It was an afterthought, like he hadn’t even known that he’d drawn it. The rest of the parchment was filled with information he’d taken from his Obitraen books—useful stuff, actually, far more useful than a little flirtatious drawing.

And yet, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that flower. From his words beside them. Those letters were not scribbled. They were delicate and soft and elegant, like he had been very careful about how his pen had caressed them.

Sweet with a bitter bite. I could still feel the way his breath had skittered over my skin when he said those words to me that night, when he told me he thought it was what I would taste like.

And sometimes, in the rare moments I allowed myself to sleep, I would lie awake staring at the ceiling, eternally conscious of the way my clothing felt against my skin. And I would slide my own fingertips over my inner thighs—higher—and imagine, without meaning to, what his caress would feel like there, too.

Good, I decided.

It would feel good.

The truth was, I was shamefully, secretly grateful for the distraction of my task and Vale’s letters. Because I worked, and Mina withered.

Every morning I swept the dust from the door. Every evening it was covered over again. Church hymns rang through the streets, the air thick with the smoke of another funeral pyre, and another, and another. The smoke was thinner each time, because now, there was often so little left to burn.

I forced myself not to think about what Mina’s pyre would smell like. I told myself I wouldn’t have to find out.

Mina and I did not discuss her decline. What was there to say?

But the blood drained from my face the first time I came home to see Thomassen sitting at our kitchen table, his hand in Mina’s, their heads bowed.

An acolyte of Vitarus in my house—the same house in which I had an entire room dedicated to the blood and belongings of my vampire… friend. Dangerous.

But what frightened me more were the silent tears that rolled down my sister’s cheeks, because I sensed what this was the moment I walked into the room.

I had long ago come to terms with my own cruel mortality. But it isn’t easy to accept that kind of ugly truth. I went through my struggle when I grew old enough to understand what death meant. In the years since, I’d watched so many others go through it, as their eyes grew hollow, their skin dusty. I saw the desperation as they looked up at the sky, where maybe somewhere the god that cursed them lurked, and I knew they would do anything, anything for more time everyone knew they wouldn’t get.

When I came home and saw the priest holding my sister’s hands, I knew that, for the first time, Mina felt that desperation.

That terrified me.

My sister had looked up and given me a weak smile.

“Sit with us,” she said.

In the same tone of voice that she had asked, Stay.

Stay, I wanted to beg her.

But no, I wouldn’t pray to the god that had damned her. I wouldn’t help her come to terms with a death I refused to let her meet.

“I can’t,” I said, and went to my office without another word. I didn’t stop working until dawn, and even then, I fell asleep over my books.

But Thomassen came more and more often, and death crept closer and closer.

If I was less distracted by my work and the grief I tried so hard to stave off, perhaps I would have been more concerned by the acolyte’s constant presence in this house. Perhaps I would have given more thought to the way he watched me, the lingering stares at the doors I left ajar.

But I was used to being judged—too used to it to realize when judgment became dangerous.

I didn’t have time to worry about one old man’s thoughts about me. I had to work.

I was running out of time.

But then, one day, when nearly a month had passed since my last visit to Vale, something shifted. I slept in my study that day, as I so often did now, and I woke up to a pile of Vale’s letters, strewn across my desk. Four of them, in the sparse hours I’d been asleep.

My heart jumped with either anticipation or dread. So many in such a short span could only signal something wonderful or terrible.

It turned out it was the former.

Vale had made a discovery. I flipped through his letters—pages upon pages torn from one of his books. I’d gotten used to his scrawled handwriting, but the translations in the margins were even messier than usual, as if he’d been writing so fast he couldn’t even stop to form real letters. It took me hours to fully decode them.

When I did, I gasped.

He had found a crucial missing piece. The text was old, detailing experiments done on vampire blood in Obitraes. Yet, despite their age, the figures answered so many of the questions I had been grappling with about how to effectively distill vampire blood into something different. Vale and I hadn’t found much in the way of Obitraen science—vampire society, it seemed, was much more inclined to work with magic instead.

But this… it was exactly the sort of information I’d barely allowed myself to dream of.

“Vale,” I breathed under my breath. “Vale, you—you—”

I was grinning so widely my cheeks hurt. I probably looked like a lunatic, half-mad with exhaustion and hope. I hadn’t changed my clothes in days, and I figured another day wouldn’t do any harm, because I launched myself right back into work.

Hours blurred into days. New equations became new formulas became new vials of experimental potions. Vials of experimental potions became tests as I gave them to my ailing rats.

And tests became medicine as those rats grew less and less sick.

The next batch, too. And the next.

And then, one bleary morning, I found myself standing before an entire cage of healthy, active rodents, cradling those vials in my hands like a newborn infant—and medicine became a cure.

A cure.

It was only fitting, of course, that this was when everything fell apart.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I opened the door, and Farrow stood there, his sandy hair wild and eyes wide. Sheer terror.

He sagged against the frame when I opened the door, like he was so relieved to see me that all his muscles gave out.

Mine, on the other hand, tensed, as my fragile newfound hope smashed to the floor.

“You have to go.”

He said it so fast that the four words ran together in a single exhale.

“What—”

“They’re coming for you,” he blurted out. “They came to the city looking for help. They’re coming for him, and then for you. You have to go.”

He grabbed my arm, as if ready to haul me away by force. But I remained rooted, stuck, dread falling over me like a cold shadow.

I didn’t need to ask who “they” were.

Because I could picture Thomassen’s cold, suspicious stare. I could picture Vale’s ravens and magic. I could picture all the little marks of my friend I left around this house, now so blatantly, foolishly, stupidly obvious.

What was the obvious end to this story? Ignorant zealots who didn’t want to die were presented with a god that no longer loved them, and an illness that just kept spreading, and a vampire upon which they could blame it all.

Easy. A simple equation.

They’re coming for you.

They’re coming for him.

“You have some time, but you need to leave,” Farrow was saying in the background. “You can stay in my apartment in the city. I’ll have a carriage waiting and—”

“No.”

I wrenched my arm out of his grip, turning back to my office.

“No?” he echoed.

“Take Mina and leave without me.”

“But Lilith—”

Farrow kept talking, quickly, but I wasn’t listening to whatever he was saying. I let his voice run into the background.

We had no time for words. Only actions.

I grabbed my coat. My bag. My precious, precious bag.

Mina. I needed to—

“What do you mean, no?”

Funny, how Farrow’s voice disappeared into the din of my rushing blood, while Mina’s, weak as it was, made every other sound disappear.

I could count on one hand the number of times I’d heard her sound like that. Enraged.

I turned slowly. She stood in the doorway. Or, maybe “stood” was too strong a term—she leaned heavily against the frame. I was struck all over again by how weak she looked—it seemed like she had even shrunk. How long had she been standing there? Only long enough to hear Farrow arrive, and yet dust already gathered in the ridges of the floorboards at her feet.

I realized, with a sinking feeling, that Mina couldn’t go anywhere, no matter what Farrow said.

We were running out of time. My sister’s was almost gone.

My eyes slipped away. I rummaged through my bag.

The medicine. It was early. It was risky, but—

“What do you mean, no?” she repeated. “Where are you going?”

“I just…” My tongue wouldn’t cooperate with me.

She made a strangled sound, almost a humorless laugh. “You’re going to him.”

If I hadn’t been so distracted, I might have been surprised. My sister saw more of me than I thought she did.

I just said, “I have to go. Here—”

“Enough, Lilith. Just—just stop.”

Mina’s voice cut through the air like a blade, sharp enough to make me pause.

“Look at me,” she demanded.

My fingers, deep in my bag, closed around that single precious vial of medicine. I couldn’t bring myself to lift my eyes.

“Look at me. You never look at me anymore.”

I turned around slowly.

I never found it necessary to look people in the eye when I spoke to them, a bad habit since childhood. But with Mina… it was different. It wasn’t about discomfort or disinterest or manners. I had to force myself to meet her gaze, to acknowledge all the blatant signs of death devouring her. She stepped closer, not blinking. She had our father’s eyes. Light and bright, like the sky.

Right now, they begged me for something.

My risk calculation resolved to a single solution.

“Give me your hand,” I said.

It wasn’t what Mina wanted from me. I knew that. But I couldn’t give her that warmth, that affection. What I could do was try to save her life.

“Don’t go there,” she said. “We can fix this.”

Ridiculous. What would “fixing it” look like, in her mind? Restoring the status quo? Curling up to die quietly in a socially acceptable manner?

No.

“I am fixing it,” I snapped. “Give me your arm.”

“This isn’t—”

“I refuse to let you all die.” I didn’t mean to shout. I did anyway. “It isn’t supposed to take you and I won’t let it. So give me your gods-damned hand.”

Her jaw tightened until it trembled. Those blue eyes shone with tears.

But she thrust out her hand, exposing a forearm of pale skin so thin the webs of veins beneath were easy to see.

I didn’t give myself time to doubt as I filled the needle and injected her. She winced, and I realized I was so used to the durability of Vale’s skin that I’d pushed too hard. A veil of dust fell to the floor. So fragile now.

I withdrew the needle and turned away abruptly.

“Don’t open the door for anyone. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I thought she’d tell me to stay, again. Thought she’d still try to talk me out of it. Farrow was looking at me like I was some kind of foreign beast—the same way he looked at a specimen that didn’t make sense, his brow knitted, jaw tight. He was seeing something new in me, something that didn’t reconcile with the version of me he had always known.

Maybe I was seeing that in myself today, too.

I couldn’t tell if it was a good or bad thing.

“I’m coming with you,” Farrow said.

I didn’t look at him. I grabbed the axe from the wall and threw my pack over my shoulder. “Fine,” I said. “Then let’s go.” And I slammed the door behind me.