by Melissa Marr
My magic lashed out in a pulse that—based on Jesse’s expression—was visible even to my completely mortal friends, and my eyes slipped toward grave vision so quickly that I felt queasy. I knew my eyes had slid into reptilian slits, that my friends could see that I looked more like a draugr than I would like them to see. The vision of the grave let me see that they were, all three, healthy. I glanced at my hands. Green glinted under the skin. Venom.
“Talk to me, Gen.” Jesse stepped between me and my other two friends. “Are you . . . still you?”
I flipped him off because speaking was outside my grasp. Some measure of venom was processing, blending with my already fucked biochemistry, and the result was that I felt less human than normal.
“Do we call a doctor?” Christy asked.
“Her mother?” Sera added.
Jesse came closer. I saw my gun in his hand. He held it loosely, but he held it. “Any urge to bite people?”
“Love you, brother,” I told him finally. My mouth struggled to form the words. The fact that he’d shoot me rather than let me hurt them was enough to make me tear up a little from relief and pride.
I looked at Christy and Sera. “You, too.”
My muscles looked like they were moving on their own. Twitches and ripples. It made me wince as it grew more intense. I could see the darkening green everywhere I could see my skin. I lifted my shirt and looked at the injection site there. Vibrant emerald glittered inside me so brightly that I reached down to touch my skin. It was icy, making me feel more like a corpse than living person.
I swallowed and said as calmly as I could, “My body is processing the venom faster now. It was a hard bump, like you’d frozen it, but it’s not staying there.”
Then I leaned over and vomited into the industrial paint can they were using as a makeshift trashbin. I was starting to shake violently, and my magic was not content to stay quiet as my body resisted the toxins. I felt my magic reach out, seeking the dead. I tried to keep it, find another way to release the energy because I didn’t need corpses crawling through the windows right now.
My magic wanted to release itself, to roll out and find the dead, to be utilized. I wasn’t sure I could keep it in check. I closed my eyes and whispered, “Salt the sills and along the walls. Everywhere. Do it now.”
My three closest friends went to the vats of salt I kept around the house. They all knew the dead came toward my magic, and no one here wanted that. I wasn’t up to standing, much less swinging a sword. I’d developed great control over my grave magic since childhood, but today wasn’t a great day for controlling much of anything.
I concentrated on trying to stay focused on my magic behaving properly as my friends poured salt lines for me.
My home was the entire floor of the building, and it was the ground floor, so there was an odd risk that the dead would try to rise through the ground. Concrete was impervious, fortunately, but a good solid salt line should keep the dead from trying to crawl through windows or throw themselves at the door. That had happened once in my childhood. An old man, clad in his burial suit and loafers, kept battering himself against my bedroom window. I woke to bloody, broken glass and an injured dead man reaching into my room.
Such things had taught me to have better control, because even with my mother’s faery bargain in place, I had sometimes struggled. Now that I was unbound, I’d struggled more than I had in fifteen years. And, tonight, after the injection, I wasn’t sure I was going to find control.
There were too many ways my friends could be in danger, so they needed to get out of here. The most likely case was that the dead would start clustering in the parking lot. I might be able to stop them from coming into my home, but I wasn’t swearing to that.
I felt all of them: draugr, corpses properly interred, and lost bodies hidden in places the dead ought not be buried. My magic wanted to claim them, animate them, gather them.
“Phone.”
With a shaking hand, Christy gave it to me. “Please don’t die on us. Please.”
“Hoping.”
I pressed a button or several. I couldn’t actually say, but in a few moments, I heard his voice. “Geneviève,” Eli answered. “What a pleasant—"
“I need you.” I took a shuddering breath, forcing my heart to stay calm to not spread the toxin throughout my body even faster. “Right now, Eli. I think I might be dying.”
And then the convulsions made my whole body feel as if a drunk stranger had me on marionette strings.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I woke covered in ice again.
Somewhere near me, Sera said, “We’re going to run out. Then what?”
Between the convulsions and the puking, my attempts to stay calm were not working as well as I’d like. I’d convinced my small group of determined nursemaids that they could only stay until Eli arrived. I couldn’t decide if I was more irritated or awed by their steadfastness. They weren’t asking me why the venom hadn’t killed me. They weren’t worried that I was going to wake up dead and eat their faces.
“I’m not safe for you to be around,” I said for the fourth time. I tried to sound rational, even though I felt like screaming at them that they were being irresponsible. Carefully, I explained, “Injected. Could re-awake as draugr.”
“So what? You’ll have a few draugr traits. You’re still our Gen.” Sera folded her arms and glared down at me.
As adventurous as Christy but two hundred times more maternal, Sera was a rock for me. Right now, though, she looked like she was as reasonable as an angry bear.
“I want you to be safe,” I stressed. “After all the times you said that to me, you ought to understand.”
“And I want you to have help while you heal.” Sera tapped one foot. “You will heal, Gen. You are not allowed to die, and if that means we stay here while you think you are a threat to us, then—”
“I am a threat.”
Sera waved my words away. “I’m not going anywhere until Eli gets here, at the least. I could stay then, too.” She motioned to her purse. “If I need to, I’ll shoot your knees or something if you change into a draugr.”
“Told you,” Jesse said quietly. He kissed the top of my head and helped me to stand. “Come on. You wanted to be in your own bed, so let’s get you there.”
The room felt blurry, and I realized my eyes were flickering between normal pupils and serpent slits. As my eyes shifted, so did my vision. It was like someone had shoved a broken strobe light inside my head. I swayed and forced down nausea.
“I can carry you,” Jesse offered.
“Piss off.” My bones were intact. My muscles, too. I was going to walk or I could stay on the damned sofa. I took a stumbling step and grumbled, “Fuck it. Fine. I need help.”
Sera and Christy swept in to support me. I had one friend on either side, arms around my waist, guiding me across the open room toward my bedroom. It was one of the few times I’d cursed having a large living space. The distance that seemed fine most of the time was too far tonight.
I wanted to let Jesse keep his gun in hand. Just in case.
A few halting steps later, the pain in my low abdomen made me gasp. The venom was changing me. I felt a burning, like a kidney stone and hangover got together for a tango. It was making puking only one of my worries. Walking felt like I might piss myself—or worse. A part of my brain, a calmly rational streak, reminded me that this was what the human body did at death. Organs gave up, muscles released, and things came gushing out. I really didn’t want that.
“Take his gun, Christy? Swap places, I mean.” As soon as they did, I muttered, “Carry me.”
Jesse swept me up into his arms, and without a word about me admitting my inability to walk there myself, he carried me toward my bedroom.
“I have money saved,” Jesse said as he strode across the hallway to the unit where I slept. “Enough for twelve years in a T-Cell House.”
“Seriously?” I managed to say.
“You’re expose
d to biters all the time. We all encounter them in the city. I know the risks living here,” Sera said from behind him. “I have enough saved up for fifteen years.”
“Eighty here,” Christy offered from my left, where she strolled with a gun in hand.
“Over a hundred years in hand, already.” Jesse stopped at the foot of my bed. The room was darker than the rest of the floor. I’d walled up the windows when I moved in.
Sera tugged back my rumpled bed linens and fluffed my pillows, as I watched from where I was held in Jesse’s arms. “We are a family,” Sera stressed. “Families look out for one another.”
I felt tears well up and sniffled to stop the sob that went with them.
When Jesse lowered me to the bed and got me situated, they all stepped back and stared at me as I sat on my bed. It felt like a wake, but with the corpse still alert. As far as wakes go, it wasn’t awful—but I didn’t want to die.
And I sure as fuck didn’t want to wake again.
I felt the need to puke, but didn’t want to do that either.
As they stood there, gathered around me, I felt like I ought to tell them some sort of deathbed wisdom. I had no insights. No wisdom. Just this ball of terror that whatever happened after this was larger and more overwhelming than I could fathom.
Christy turned to go, and I blurted, “Wait. I’m not ready. I’m not . . .”
“What do you need?” Sera asked softly, and I knew as well as I knew anything about this world that she saw my terror. Her gaze met mine, and I wanted my friends to stay as much as they wanted to do so.
But then a shudder made me lift off the bed, and my magic rolled out with the kind of uncontrolled wave that I hadn’t had since I’d murdered my father. I tamped it down as hard as I could and said, “I need more ice, but also a bowl with hot water, as hot as it can be without burning my skin. Rags. Box with sealed suture supplies. Med gloves.”
Christy and Sera didn’t question me. Not yet at least. I did get a suspicious stare from everyone when I added, “Silver knife. Fire till it’s hot. Keep it in the bowl of water so it stays sterile.”
Once they’d left the room, I stretched out in bed, eyes closed, while Jesse tucked me in as if I simply had the flu.
“Status?” Jesse asked now that we were alone.
“Chills. Fever. I see the venom inside me with my grave vision.” My brain was remarkably clear, even as my ability to convince my tongue to create words at a reasonable pace wasn’t. “Going to need to cut part of venom out.”
“Cut . . .?”
“Cauterize after if necessary.”
Jesse looked as nauseous as I felt. He sat on the edge of my bed. “Ice is what’s keeping the shock down. Is heat a good idea?”
“No, but letting it slowly leak into my organs isn’t working out either. It needs to come out before it finishes melting or whatever the fuck it’s doing.” I had the start of a plan, but it was probably a terrible one.
Step One wasn’t absolutely awful. That was simply to have Eli here. The other steps were varying degrees of terrible. My brain was processing too many things, but all I really wanted was to call the dead toward me. That had to be a warning sign of some sort. I had the energy to bring hundreds of dead things to my side. I could feel them, all through the city. With a veritable army of corpses at my side, I would be a terrifying force—but to what end?
I wanted to do something with this energy: to summon, to bind, to hunt Alice.
Alice.
Tres.
A flicker of a thought hit me that Tres was in danger.
“Phone,” I mumbled.
Jesse gave it to me without question.
I struggled to focus my eyes on the here and now. With shaking hands, I texted Tres: “Alice injected me. Dying maybe.”
After I hit send, I realized that there were a lot of other things to add. It wasn’t the calmest or most articulate of warnings, and I hoped it wasn’t too late. Alice had expected me to be dead. I could picture her designer heels passing me as I stared up at her with eyes and mouth open. My body was in shock as she and her friend stepped away and left me there to die.
I felt my magic dancing through New Orleans, spreading out for miles, and I felt more older draugr than I knew were in the city look up as if to find the magic that had grazed them. One of them was Beatrice. I felt as much as saw her say, “Geneviève?”
I jerked back, tried to roll my wandering strands of magic back to me. It reminded me of trying to stuff a fishing net into a sock. This much unfurled magic wasn’t going gracefully back into the small space inside of me.
“Geneviève?” It wasn’t her voice this time.
When I opened my eyes, Eli stood in my room next to Jesse. He was holding a bag half-filled with ice. At his feet were two tall white buckets of ice, and I realized that several more bags were piled on my stomach, chest, and arms.
“You seized up,” Jesse said. “Moving . . . or warming up?”
I nodded.
“Sera texted to bring ice,” Eli said, and I wondered if he’d say much more if we were alone. He was very open with me in private, at least compared to the reputation of the fae, but there was a witness here.
“I’m glad you’re here.” I gave him what I hoped was a convincing smile. I was incredibly cold, but my brain was clearer again.
It was odd seeing Jesse and Eli there at the same moment, especially in my bedroom. The undercurrent between them meant they were typically at odds. Tonight, they were in rare accord. Who knew that all I needed to do was be near death to get them to be at peace?
Even if I wasn’t used to reading his emotions, I’d have realized that Eli looked stricken. I must look worse than I thought.
I smiled at him. “Hey.”
Eli didn’t move. “Jesse filled me in. I should’ve walked you inside or—”
“Nah. . . but I do have a terrible plan,” I murmured. “Just need your strength to make it work.”
Seeing the same anxious look on both faces was like a punch to the stomach. I stared at them, and then only at Jesse. I felt like there were a million things to say, and I couldn’t make myself say any of them. He was my brother. My rock. My family. I didn’t want to leave him alone, and I sure as hell wasn’t willing to wake up without remembering everything. My greatest fear was becoming like my father.
“Try not to die,” Jesse said in a rough voice. “I’m going to need you here when I screw up with Christy again.”
I nodded and held out my hand to him. I wasn’t going to die on purpose. I had things to do yet. “Take care of them if—"
“Yes,” he said. “And I’ll manage Mama Lauren if . . .” His words faded, as if saying it would make it real. “Love you, little sister.”
“Love you, too.”
After a few moments, Sera and Christy were standing in the doorway behind Jesse. They all looked like I felt, as if none of us was certain we’d meet again. “I’m planning on not dying,” I said forcefully. “I need you all to go first, though. I can’t do this with you here. I need to focus.”
“Hot water,” Sera announced. “I brought the suture supplies.” She held up a needle and tweezers and scissors. “You’ll have to swab it to disinfect before you—”
“I know how to sew her up,” Eli said softly. “I’ve had practice.”
Sera continued, “And sterile gloves.”
I tried to keep my eyes human, but I was losing the fight there. My pupils reshaped into something monstrous. I said, “Eli stays. You all go. Now.”
“We aren’t g—”
“My father was a draugr,” I blurted out, as much as it horrified me to admit those words. “My mother gave birth to the child of a dead thing. I’m not sure what will happen to me if the venom keeps changing things. I feel it inside, guys. My kidneys. My heart. My vision. I don’t know, and Eli is . . . Eli is strong enough to. . .”
“We can help you, too,” Sera insisted.
“Ven-om.” I broke the word in two and glared at
her. “If I change . . .” My voice fractured then, and I sobbed. “I could hurt you. Eli’s strong enough to stop me. He works with me because of it. He could . . . he could stop me from hurting him.”
I felt like something in me was breaking. They ought to fear me, hate me, be disgusted. Instead they were standing here. They’d offered money for a T-Cell House. Who did that? I wanted to explain that it wasn’t that I thought I was dying, but that if I did die, I’d wake again, and I would not, absolutely could not, be like that. To the best of my knowledge the only person on any record of bringing a recently perverted corpse to instant clarity was me, and that was something I’d managed exactly once. If I was dead, I had no idea what I’d be like. Would I be even stronger since I already had a draugr’s strength while living?
“I suspected you were bitten years ago,” Sera said. “This explains it better, though. You almost flow sometimes. Not totally, but it’s like you’re here and then you’re there.”
“Told you.” Jesse grinned, despite everything. “We all still love you. And if you end up in a T-Cell house, we’ll still be—”
“Please? I can’t do this and worry about hurting you. I need you all to leave.”
Christy nodded. “Still love you. Still want to stay . . . but we’ll go so you can do whatever.” She looked at Eli. “Keep her alive. If not, we wait for her to come back. If she changes, we have money for a T-Cell.”
She took Jesse and Sera’s hands, and they left.
“Geneviève,” Eli began.
I stared at him, daring him to argue with the inevitable next request. In a low whisper, I said, “I won’t go to a T-Cell House, Eli. I need someone strong enough to stop me if I . . .” I swallowed and shoved the ice aside. “They had to leave in case you need to kill me.”
I pushed to my feet and tried to stand. Eli helped. I lifted one of my swords from the wall rack in my room and put it on the bed.
“Geneviève . . .”
I sat down, hand on the hilt, and looked up at him. He was staring at the sword. “If you wrap your hands in something before you lift this, it won’t hurt you that much to—”
