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“I’ll do it,” Rogue said. “It will discharge my debt to Fergus for his role in the rescue. If that’s agreeable to you.”
“Agreed,” Fergus cheerfully replied.
“I’m not going to be dependent on you,” I interrupted.
“No,” Rogue said to Athena, ignoring me and stopping her from unstrapping the scepter, “I don’t need that.” His hand absently tightened on my waist as his magic gathered around him and he focused his gaze into the far distance. A trick I’d love to learn. “She is on the Pink Candy Islands.”
“Much obliged,” Fergus tipped his hat and turned a bit of a wistful gaze on Starling. “Care to come with me, Little Bit?”
She shook her head immediately, the thick paintbrush sweep of her blond hair swinging with the vigorous motion. “No, Daddy. Give Mother my love. My place is with Lady Sorceress Gwynn.”
“At least I’ll know where to find ye. Fare you all well!” And he galloped off.
“I suppose we might as well eat, since we’re stopped,” Starling said and Larch began unpacking picnic supplies. Darling Hercules jumped down to explore and, as soon as he moved away, my hands began throbbing with fierce and disconcerting pain.
Time to see just how bad they were.
I claimed the excuse of answering the call of nature and took myself off into the woods. Being on my own two feet again, I wobbled, brain-stunned from the fever, my legs weak.
Alone, I settled my back against a tree, wearied from the short walk, also a bad sign, and sat with my mittened hands in my lap. I really didn’t want to look, especially with my head pounding and stomach queasy. The fae seemed to have something of an idea of infection, but they never disinfected anything. Of course, they also never seemed to become ill, and some of the higher fae were even immortal, so it likely just plagued us fragile humans.
Screwing up my courage, I made a careful wish for the bandages to relocate to the leaf litter next to me. Easier to wish them back on again that way. I let myself close my eyes until I was ready.
Then I looked.
And swallowed hard on the bulge of nausea.
Damn. They were bad. The feline claws, curved and with a razor inner edge, extended from the second knuckle, seemingly made of some metal. I would have called it platinum, if that wasn’t physically impossible. Nothing remained of my fingertips, except shreds of flesh, blood-caked and oozing pus. Only this pus glowed an unnatural green, like antifreeze. I imagined whatever opportunistic microorganisms existed in Faerie would curdle my blood if viewed under a microscope. My immune system stood little chance against them.
The great drawback of magical anesthesia: the vague and transient pain had let me procrastinate far too long and gangrene had set in. Worse, telltale red streaks of blood poisoning ran up past my wrists.
Miserable, pitiful and afraid, too weak to hold my shit together, I started to cry.
No no no.I choked the tears back as best I could. I needed to concentrate and try to wish the infection away. I’d done a bit of healing on minor wounds I incurred before. Surely I could fix this myself.
Trying to form a coherent wish for this seemed beyond my reach. I needed to be very precise. No blanket wishes like wanting my hands to be as they were before. I’d risk having two appendages that appeared to be hands but didn’t have the internal structure. Sure, I’d trained in physiology and had been a professor of neuroscience, but details from anatomy classes had blurred over time. Carpals, metacarpals and phalanges. Mainly I remembered that our hands were the most intricately and densely innervated parts of our bodies.
I really didn’t want to fuck mine up.
More than they already were.
Despair and terror didn’t foster clear thinking. Unbidden, an image rose in my mind of Lavinia inTitus Andronicus,with her hands cut off, bleeding freely from the wrists. Not a productive idea.
One of the terrifying truisms of Faerie, always be careful what you wish for—even as a passing thought.
Not thinking about things in the first place was an excellent preventative measure, and I was trying to wrestle that one down when I heard footsteps in the dry and fallen leaves.
Rogue, walking toward me through the trees. His black cloak streamed around him, inky hair lifted by the breeze. But for his inhumanly long limbs and that alien thorny pattern climbing over the left side of his face, he could be the hero from some gothic novel.
He sank down, straddling my outstretched legs, and took my face in his hands. “Gwynn.” His voice was stern. “I heard you loudly from the clearing. You must get a hold of yourself. Don’t you dare spin out of control. You know the consequences.”
To my utter horror, I burst fully into tears.
I’d always hated how easily I cried, and being sick just made it worse. I sobbed, all the grief, worry and pain pouring out of me, running down my face, and I couldn’t even wipe it away. Rogue had seen me weep before—and had always seemed vaguely perplexed by it—but nothing compared to this complete meltdown. That I did not do often or easily.
Once he’d tasted my tears and pronounced them bitter.
This time, he sat beside me and pulled me onto his lap, careful of my awful hands, and just held me, stroking my hair, whispering words of comfort. Gradually my shudders subsided, the rhythm of his alien heart more soothing and familiar than it should be.
