As we continued west, the Red Storm worsened. Because of the strong winds, our progress was far slower than it had been when Julian and I had traveled from Hypernia to the capital. It had been over a week since leaving the city, and we still hadn’t reached the Western Mountain Range.
The rotting smell of the plague grew stronger by the day, even though we were flying the same distance above the hordes. Probably because there were more and more zombies the farther west we flew.
Every morning, Torrence did the spell to locate the demon.
The demon remained in the cliffs in the west. It was like she was waiting for us—like she wanted us to find her.
Bring it on.
If she wanted a fight, then we’d give her a fight.
Safe places to set up camp were hard to find in the Central Plainlands. But since the zombie hordes stuck together, we searched out areas where fewer of them congregated and managed to find nearly empty caves inside of hills. Once we killed off any zombies lingering in the vicinity, the caves were relatively safe for a night.
We created barrier domes around the caves. They were secure, but one person still stayed awake at all times to keep watch. We switched who that person was every two hours.
All things considered, we were holding up pretty well.
Except for Julian.
He started each day all right. But each afternoon, he kept nearly falling asleep while on the pegasus. His skin was clammy, and he was sweating through his clothes while he slept.
Something was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
And deep inside—in a place I’d avoided exploring—I had a guess about what that something was.
The sun started to set on the eighth night of traveling, and we located a viable cave to camp out in for the night. A handful of zombies wandered around it, and a few ambled about inside, but we easily took care of them with our holy weapons.
I created the barrier dome—with Torrence’s and Reed’s help—and we launched into our routine of laying down our sleeping rolls and setting up for dinner.
This far west, all the greenery was dead, or close to it. With no food sources, the animals that hadn’t died or migrated away were skin and bone. We hunted what we could, but had to supplement each meal with the dried food we carried with us. As long as we rationed it reasonably, we had enough for another two weeks.
By then the demon would hopefully be long dead, and we’d be back in the citadel.
“Selena’s turn for first watch,” Sage said as we cleaned up after dinner. She had dark circles under her eyes, and other than Julian, she was struggling the most for sleep.
“Yep,” I said, and my stomach swirled with anxiety.
Because after our long days of traveling, everyone zonked out quickly each night and fell immediately into a deep sleep. Which made tonight the perfect time to pull Julian aside without any of them knowing. And even if one of them did wake up, they’d probably assume we wanted time alone as a couple.
I sat at the cave’s entrance, listening and waiting for their breathing to slow. Julian fell asleep first. Then Sage. Torrence and Reed fell asleep at the same time, and Thomas was last.
It was now or never.
I kneeled down on my empty sleeping roll next to Julian, picked up the Holy Wand, and created a sound barrier around us. His skin was ashy, his brow damp with sweat, and every so often, a slight dimness flickered over his wings. The dimming could easily be explained by the dancing fire, but it was just one of the many things I’d been trying to explain away for the past few weeks.
He was sleeping so peacefully that I didn’t want to wake him. But I had to.
So I placed my hand on his shoulder and gently shook him awake.
He forced his eyes open and stared up at me, confused. “Selena?” he asked, and he slowly pushed himself up to check on Torrence. She was supposed to keep watch after me, so he probably thought something had happened. But Torrence, of course, was fine. So he looked back to me. “What’s wrong?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“About what?”
“Let’s go up above the cave and talk there.” I’d already thought this through. On the hill above the cave, we’d still be able to keep watch around camp. We’d also be able to talk without anyone waking up and seeing us.
“All right,” he said, which surprised me. I’d expected him to put up a fight. Something about me not being responsible, because we all needed as much sleep as we could get. I was sure he’d think of something.
Instead, he tiptoed with me out of the cave without another question.
At the top of the hill, I surveyed our surroundings. A few lone zombies wandered out in the distance. But they couldn’t hear us through the dome, and despite the red lightning flashing through the night sky, they were too far away to see us.
We were in the clear.
I released my violet and silver magic, and created a small soundproof dome around us so the others wouldn’t overhear.
“Let me guess,” Julian said lightly. “You’re being driven just as crazy about the two of us not having any time alone together as I am?”
“No,” I said, and disappointment flashed in his eyes. “I mean, yes, that’s definitely been driving me crazy. But it’s not why I brought you up here.”
His expression hardened. “Then what’s going on?”
Just be out with it.
I took a deep breath and said, “You have the plague.”
He ran his hand through his hair and refused to meet my eyes.
No.
My heart shattered.
I’d wanted him to deny it. To tell me that was crazy. To assure me that if he’d been bitten, he would have told me.
Not answering was as good as admitting I was right.
“When we were journeying for the wand, there was a tear in your left sock,” I said, remembering how the first time I’d seen it, I’d told myself the tear must had been from when I’d accidentally electrocuted him in the Night Forest. “Right above your ankle. Show it to me.”
He lowered himself to sit on the dead grass.
In a daze, I sat beside him and placed the wand down next to me.
He unlaced his left boot, removed it, and pulled his breeches midway up his shin. I held my breath as he took off the sock.
There was no wound. His skin was ashy, but unmarred.
My heart leaped, and I could breathe again. But it felt too good to be true.
Especially because socks could fit on either foot.
I glanced at his other leg. “Your right sock,” I said steadily.
I waited for a sarcastic remark. Something about this being an interesting new way of getting him to undress. But as calmly and emotionless as ever, he removed his right boot and sock.
The skin there was unmarred, too.
I stared at it in disbelief. I’d been so sure…
Then, the air around his ankle wavered. It could have been a trick of the light, caused by the Red Storm. But that would just be another excuse. Because it was the same way the air around his wings occasionally wavered.
The same way the air around the wand had wavered when the guard was disguising it as a sword.
Glamour.
I narrowed my eyes and focused on seeing through the magic.
Ghostlike outlines of a bandage appeared around his ankle, like a hologram.
He must have realized what I was doing, because the glamour disappeared, and the reality beneath it sharpened into place.
A tan bandage—the same material as the clothes worn by half-blood servants—wrapped multiple times around his ankle. A few faded black splotches stained the outside of it, and the tips of small green leaves peeked out under the edges. And the worst part—the part that made the truth impossible to deny—was the thick black veins covering his foot like spiderwebs. They crawled up along his skin above the bandage as well, disappearing under the elastic cuffs at the bottom of his breeches.
My t
hroat tightened, and I forced myself to swallow.
“Do you want to see it?” he asked.
I kept my eyes glued to the bandage, dug my fingers into the dirt, and nodded.
He untied the knot and carefully unwound the long strip of cloth. As he peeled off each layer, the black stains grew darker. The innermost layer was damp, shriveled, and completely stained black.
Small, green, oval-shaped leaves were pressed into the skin above the inside of his ankle.
“Boswellia,” he explained as he peeled them away. “It numbs the pain.”
Underneath the leaves, two crescent moon-shaped scratches faced each other on his skin. The marks weren’t nearly as deep as Kyla’s bite, but the skin was still slightly broken and covered in a layer of thick black goo. The dark, angry veins originated from the scratches, and again, I followed them up to the cuff of his breeches.
It’s almost to her heart, I remembered Sorcha saying about Kyla’s infection. I fear she’ll be lost to us once it gets to her heart.
“How far up does it go?” The words didn’t feel like mine. It was like someone else was in my place, and I was merely an observer.
“Up to my hip,” he said. “It’s been moving slowly. Probably because its teeth only grazed my skin.”
My blood heated and crashed through my body like angry rapids. My head throbbed. Time slowed.
This can’t be real.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“It did. But on the walk back from visiting Kyla, I stopped by the herb shop where I used to buy medicine for my sister. The boswellia numbs the affected area. I’ve also been chewing on willow bark, like Kyla recommended. It’s not perfect, but it helps with the rest of the pain.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s good.”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was stare at the wound.
The bite.
I’d been so upset since Julian had started pushing me away. So much that it hurt me physically.
But it clearly hadn’t just been my own emotional pain I’d been feeling.
Because the soulmate bond connected Julian and me. The pain I’d been feeling must have also been his physical pain from the plague eating its way through his body.
“Selena,” he said, and he sounded so vulnerable. “Look at me.”
I did.
And I shattered.
He pulled me into his arms, and I cried until my tears soaked his shirt.
He was dying.
My soulmate was dying.
But not if I had anything to say about it.
I untangled myself from his arms, wiped the tears off my face, and grabbed the Holy Wand. Its crystals brightened at my touch. “I can fix this,” I said, and I stood, backed up to put some space between us, and reached for my magic.
It swirled around me in a cyclone of blue, violet, and silver. Electricity crackled through the ridges of my scars and traveled farther up my arms. The crystal at the top of the wand lit up so brightly that it hummed with power.
Julian used his hand like a visor to block his eyes from the light and wind. “Don’t sacrifice yourself for me, Selena,” he said. “You’re the Queen of Wands. The Otherworld needs you. Avalon needs you. Your parents need you. You can’t desert them now.”
“You’re right—I am the Queen of Wands,” I said, and lightning flashed through the sky. Blue lightning. “I’m going to get Avalon’s help to save the Otherworld, and I’m going to free the half-bloods. And you’re going to be with me when I do it.”
I raised my arm, pointed the top of the wand toward Julian, and pushed as much magic as I could through it and out through the crystal. A beam of tri-colored light shot out from it and cocooned around him.
He braced himself, ready when the tendrils crawled forward and pierced his skin. This time, he didn’t scream. He arched back, dug his fingers into the dirt, and focused on the sky raging with both red and blue lightning overhead.
Time to switch gears.
I stopped pushing out magic, and focused on sucking out the poison. I pulled as hard as I could.
But just like with Kyla, the poison wouldn’t release into my magic. It was a stubborn, thick, gooey thing that latched onto his bones and refused to budge.
No, I thought. Let go. Come out of him.
I grunted and pulled harder.
The wand’s crystals burned brighter. Their humming intensified. Hot pain exploded in my palms and crawled up my arms.
“SELENA,” Julian screamed. “STOP.”
“NO.” I dug deeper and pulled harder. This had to work. It had to.
I didn’t want to live in a world without Julian in it.
My magic clawed under my skin, trying to rip its way out.
Selena, a warm, soothing voice echoed around me. The wand. It wasn’t a voice, really, but a feeling. You’ve done all you can. You can’t cure him. At least, not like this.
“Then how?” I asked.
There’s always a way. But it won’t do anyone any good if you die for nothing.
I wouldn’t be dying for nothing. I’d be dying for Julian.
But if there were another way to cure him…
I released my hold on the magic, and the orb around Julian floated back toward me and into the crystal. It traveled down the wand, wrapped itself around my arms, and cooled the fire that had been trying to tear through my skin. The swirling magic absorbed into me and disappeared.
Rivulets of tar-like goo streamed out of Julian’s wound and puddled on the ground. The black veiny lines on his skin had retreated, but just like with Kyla, the bite remained.
The poison was still inside of him.
Anger raced through me. Thunder cracked so loudly that the ground shook, and a bolt of blue lightning struck the ground between me and Julian. The brown, brittle grass disintegrated, leaving behind a mound of dirt with a small, black crater in the center.
I threw the wand like a javelin into the scorched ground. The top crystal embedded into the dirt. The other crystals dimmed and went dark.
Julian and I stared at each other, saying nothing.
Thoughts raced through my mind at a million miles per second. It was too much to process.
So I sank down to my knees next to the wand, and Julian started re-packing the herbs into the wound.
“When did it happen?” I asked one of my many questions.
“The only time it could have happened,” he said. “When we fought the horde in the Central Plainlands, on our way to Sibyl’s tree.”
I nodded, since I’d already figured as much. It was the only time we’d gotten close enough to the zombies for them to bite us.
“It was after you dismembered them, and they started growing their limbs back,” I remembered. “Right before we jumped into the trees.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tears blurred my vision again. “You pulled away. You all but ignored me. You treated me like crap. Why?”
Thick silence hung in the air between us.
He tied the bandage tight and made sure it was secure. “I didn’t know what to say,” he finally said. “I was about to tell you, in the Green Lake. But then you almost drowned. I thought I’d lost you, and the pain I felt in those minutes was unbearable. I didn’t want you to feel even a fraction of that.”
“You didn’t think I could handle it.”
“We needed to stay focused on finding the wand.” He put his socks back on, and then his boots.
How was he being so nonchalant? Especially when…
“You were going to come with me to Avalon,” I said. “You could have infected my parents. My friends. My entire realm.”
“I was never going with you to Avalon,” he said. “Not while I was infected, and not while my family was still here.”
“So that was another lie.”
If I couldn’t trust my soulmate, who could I trust? I wished I could say Torrence, but now that she had dark magic, she wasn’t herself, either.
>
“Knowing would have distracted you from what needed to be done,” he said. “If we didn’t bring the wand to the citadel, we both would have died. If we don’t kill this demon, we’ll all eventually die in this hellscape.”
“You’re not going to die.” I stood and yanked the wand out of the ground. Its warm, comforting magic flooded through me, but it barely touched the depth of my anger. “You saw what I did for Kyla. If you’d told me you were infected, I could have pushed back the plague’s progression earlier.”
He stood as well, and he walked toward me, stopping when there was only a foot of space between us. “I saw you push your magic too far when you were trying to cure Kyla,” he said. “If that’s how far you went for someone you’d just met, then how far would you go for your soulmate? I didn’t want you to risk killing yourself to cure me. Which is exactly what you just did.”
“But I didn’t kill myself. I helped you. And I’m going to keep helping you, every day until we find the cure.”
“No,” he said. “You have to be at full strength when we fight that demon. And the bite is only a scratch. The infection’s moving slowly. This one time was enough.”
“For now,” I said, since the moment I noticed another flicker of weakness, I was going to help him no matter what.
He nodded, apparently realizing I wasn’t going to budge. “You need rest after using all that magic,” he said. “Let me take your shifts tonight.”
“You’re sick,” I said. “You shouldn’t be on guard duty, either. This entire trip, you’ve been in no condition to keep watch.”
“I was still more than capable. But Sage kept guard with me, just in case.”
Betrayal twisted at my heart. “Sage knew?”
“And Thomas. They smelled the infection the moment we met.”
“And they didn’t tell me.”
“I asked them not to. I wanted to do it myself.”
“That went well.” My tone dripped with sarcasm, and he sucked in a sharp, pained breath.
The Faerie Plague (Dark World: The Faerie Games Book 5) Page 7
