Elixir

by Ruth Vincent

  Was this what Mab would turn into someday?

  “Choose one of the knives, Obadiah.”

  Her voice vibrated inside his bones.

  It was no longer a threat. It was simply what must be. Obadiah understood that now. He could either die or go home. But he couldn’t stay like this.

  He knew what he had to do. There was no hesitation. He wasn’t even afraid anymore.

  He picked up one of the knives that was lying on the ground in front of him—­he didn’t know if it was the right knife or not. He was past caring. Taking a deep breath—­he plunged it into his heart.

  As the blackness closed over him, the last thing he saw was the Fairy Queen’s eyes.

  Chapter 26

  I looked up at the imposing monolith of Woodhull Medical Center, Eva propped against my shoulder, with no idea what to do. If I checked her in right now, no one would believe it. They already had a patient by her name in the system. I could admit her under a false name and somehow switch them later, I thought, my mind frantically trying to come up with ideas as the cold wind blew freezing rain into our faces. I looked up at the tiny row of windows on the eighth floor. How was I going to get up there?

  I saw someone pacing back and forth in front of the hospital entrance. I squinted in the freezing rain. Was that . . . ? No, it couldn’t be . . .

  “Obadiah!”

  He ran towards me and threw his arms around me, wrapping me in his warmth. I was shaking and crying—­I found myself patting his skin, making sure he was solid, making sure he wasn’t a ghost.

  “You’re alive!” I kept repeating, my arms around him, squeezing him hard, absurdly afraid that if I let go I’d lose him again.

  “Yes, I’m alive,” he said, but his voice sounded like he himself wasn’t sure.

  “You’re not hurt, are you?” I asked in a whisper, afraid to know the answer. “My mother didn’t . . . ?”

  “No, I’m relatively unscathed. She could have killed me, but she didn’t. I could have killed me, but thankfully I didn’t.”

  “Oh, thank god you’re okay.” I pressed him against me. Nothing had ever felt as good as his touch in this moment, and I kept squeezing him tighter, convincing myself again and again that this was real, that he was real.

  “I guess she honored her end of the bargain,” I said softly, more to myself than Obadiah. “I begged my mother to spare your life. I said I’d do anything if she would just not hurt you.” I paused, remembering the enormity of what I had promised in return. “I told her, if she let you live, I’d become the next Fairy Queen.”

  He pulled back from me a little stiffly. I realized just how tightly I had been hanging on to him.

  “What’s wrong?” It stung a little, how he’d abruptly pulled away from my arms. “You’re not mad at me for that, are you?” I asked. “I did it to save your life! It was the only thing I thought she would listen to. We’ll work out the details later, okay? But I can tell you this. If I ever reign, I am going to free the Shadow children. I asked her to promise she wouldn’t take more—­but I want to free the children who’ve already been captured too. We can find magic another way, or do without . . . I am not going to tread in the Queen’s footsteps.” I looked up at him, and then back down at Eva. “But our first worry is what to do about Eva . . .”

  “That I can help you with,” Obadiah said. “Allow me to do something right, after all I’ve done wrong.”

  “I don’t think you’ve actually done anything wrong, but I’ll accept your help. Let’s get her inside.”

  “Of course.” Obadiah walked over to Eva. Gently, he lifted her up, as if she weighed nothing at all, as if she was some injured bird he was lifting from a cardboard box.

  The midwinter air was biting, and I shivered as we walked together towards the side entrance of the hospital, away from the traffic around the main entrance. We had a long way to go, and it might not turn out alright, but at least both of them were here now—­and that gave me hope.

  I felt like I had déjà vu as I approached the enormous redbrick building. It had only been a ­couple of days ago that we had visited Eva here. Never had I dreamed we would be bringing her back like this. I felt like a failure as a friend, a failure as a human being. Obadiah carried Eva as I raced up to the front of the hospital to borrow one of their loaner wheelchairs. I skittered on the ice, rolling it back to where Obadiah and Eva were standing—­it seemed like all four wheels would never quite go in the same direction at once. We loaded Eva inside and began slowly making our way towards the hospital door.

  “Do you think we should check her in under her real name?” I asked. We were passing the hospital’s little garden, with its lone scrawny tree, the one I had seen from Eva’s window just a few days before. It was bigger, seen from the ground, but still skinny and sickly.

  “I don’t think we should check her in at all,” Obadiah said. “What if we just make a swap? They look just alike. The hospital staff will never know. And the Fetch Eva also suffered from a head injury, so they’ll give her the appropriate treatment. Only, this Eva is alive and real, so she can get better.”

  “How the hell are we going to get up there to swap them?” I asked.

  He said nothing, the corner of his mouth twitching up into a smile.

  “You’re suggesting we fly up there—­like we did on New Year’s Eve?”

  ­“People don’t usually look up.”

  “But then how will we get the window open?”

  He took a knife out of his pocket. It was a fairy knife—­a stone blade, the hilt decorated in a crescent moon design. “We’ll have to pry it.”

  I wasn’t sure this plan was going to work. Then again, I didn’t have any better ideas.

  The next minute we were in the alley behind the hospital. There were two enormous Dumpsters in the alley, their sides marked with decals denoting poison, hazard, medical waste. But there were no ­people. The wind whistled through the cold, empty space.

  Obadiah must have seen my nervousness. “Trust me on this one,” he said, reminding me of his words on New Year’s Eve.

  “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have stuck with you this long.”

  He didn’t say anything, only smiled. But it was a real, genuine smile. And even in the frigidness of the alley, I felt warm.

  “Alright. Do you still have the little flask of Elixir I gave you?”

  I produced it from my pocket.

  “I don’t think there’s anything left.”

  He eyed it. “One drop should be enough to get us there—­we don’t have to be up there for long.”

  “This has got to work. She can’t take another fall.”

  “I’m not going to let anything like that happen again.”

  Looking up into his serious black eyes, I believed him.

  Obadiah handed me the flask. I let a drop fall on my tongue, then I gently parted Eva’s lips with my cold fingers and slid the remaining liquid into her opened mouth.

  At first nothing happened.

  Could something have gone wrong? Was it not enough Elixir?

  But then, slowly, my feet left the ground. I was beginning to levitate. So was Eva, only slowed by the wheelchair. I reached over to her and gently disentangled her body from the metal and leather. The chair bumped to the ground and Eva floated free. I clutched her arm so that she wouldn’t float away. Obadiah’s feet had left the ground too. His lips were moving, chanting a flying spell. He grabbed my hand. Holding on to each other, steadying ourselves, gripping on to the bricks in the wall of the building, we slowly made our way higher.

  “What floor was she on again?” Obadiah asked.

  “Eight.”

  The cold wind swirled under our feet.

  I saw Obadiah’s lips move as he counted the rows of windows we passed. I was counting too. Six . . . Seven . . . Eight.

&n
bsp; I gripped both their hands even tighter as rounded the corner of the hospital building, towards Eva’s window. Below us, ­people were scurrying to and fro from the great glass doors at the entrance of the hospital: nurses in their crisp blue scrubs, ­people in street clothes, patients and visitors. I couldn’t believe that none of them noticed us hanging from the side of the building somewhere near the eighth floor. But no one looked up.

  Obadiah inclined his head in one direction, signaling he thought her window was that way. We began to make our way slowly across the side of the building. We moved very carefully, cautious not to make any noise. The ­people below might not notice us now, but a sound was sure to make them look up. So we moved stealthily along, from one brick to the next. Thankfully, most of the blinds were drawn in the windows we passed, so no one inside saw us—­to them we’d be at eye level.

  And then the thought hit me—­what if the blinds were drawn in Eva’s room? How would we know which one was hers?

  At last we came to a window where the blinds were opened. We peered in.

  There was a face pressed to the glass. But it was not Eva’s.

  A child stood by the window. His eyes went big, and his mouth puckered into a round O of shock as he saw us. We were in the children’s ward. But that meant we were getting close to Eva. He opened his mouth like he was going to scream. I didn’t know what to do. I let go of Eva’s hand for the briefest second, put my finger over my lips and made the sign of “Shhh!” Eyes big as saucers, he nodded. And then he smiled at us, a chipper, gap-­toothed smile.

  I grabbed back on to Eva’s hand before she floated away, and we made our way to the next row of bricks.

  “Obadiah, what must that boy think we are?” I whispered as we made our way away from his window.

  “He probably thinks we’re fairies,” he whispered back, smiling.

  I started to laugh, trying hard to stifle the sound so no one would hear.

  There was another window up ahead. Could it be Eva’s? Her shades were open when we’d visited her. Praying that it was, we edged forward. When we got to the corner of the glass, I peered in.

  I let out a deep sigh of relief and signaled to Obadiah behind me.

  Eva was lying in the hospital bed.

  She looked like hell.

  Her body was smaller, visibly withered, and her complexion was gray. Like the bark of a tree. The spell was starting to fail. Her Fetch body was beginning to return to its natural state. We had come not a moment too soon.

  I signaled to Obadiah. He let go of Eva with one hand and reached into his pocket to procure the strange stone knife with the crescent-­moon handle. He slipped it into the tiny crack where the window met the sill and began to jiggle it. I heard him muttering to himself, hanging on to the wall with one hand and the knife with the other. I heard a soft pop as Obadiah tilted the knife in a prying motion, and the window slid open an inch. We pushed it with our hands till it was open all the way.

  I crawled in first, and Obadiah helped me lift Eva’s limp body through. Then he entered behind me.

  Even considering the head injury, the real Eva looked a lot better than the Fetch. Comparing Eva’s apple cheeks and soft skin, despite the bruise on her head, to that living corpse made me feel much more optimistic.

  Obadiah spoke.

  “I’m going to go outside to the hallway and mill around, make sure no doctors or nurses come in to see that there are two of them. Do you think you can get her into the bed?”

  “That’s not a problem, but what do I do with the other one?”

  Obadiah’s face scrunched up, thinking.

  “Hide her in the closet until we think of something better to do?”

  It was hardly a high-­tech-­sounding plan, but I couldn’t think of anything else at this moment.

  “Okay.”

  Obadiah turned and kissed me before he walked out into the hall.

  I stood in the middle of the room, grinning like a fool, feeling the warmth of his lips still on my cheek. It was good to have him back.

  I turned towards Eva. I was going to have to get her Fetch off the bed before I could make room for her in it. Slowly, I approached the Fetch. The hospital machine with all the tubes in it was still beeping rhythmically, so I knew the thing was still alive—­or at least in some semblance of life. But it looked like a corpse. And when I touched it, I shivered. It was as rigidly stiff as a corpse as well. I drew back. But then I looked down at where I had touched it. There were long lines of cracks in the skin—­tiny fissures running the length of the arm, just from where my fingers had lightly brushed it. A fearful hope grew in me. Picking up my courage, trying to force down my repulsion, I grabbed the arm again, harder this time. I winced as I heard a crunch. The arm had disintegrated under my grip, like rotting wood.

  Now I knew what I had to do.

  Picking up the body, which was surprisingly light, much lighter than Eva, I placed it on the floor, watching the fissures spreading from my touch.

  I lifted the real Eva, who was a lot heavier, into the bed, and gently tucked her in under the blue hospital blanket.

  Then I turned back to the Fetch. Trying to pretend her face didn’t look like my friend, I hit her. Her face disintegrated to powder at my touch. Relieved and repulsed, I hit her again. I hit her a third time. The body was barely recognizable now. Just a brown ash scattered amongst clothing. I swept it into the hospital wastepaper basket, shook it out of the clothes and then folded the apparel and set it over in the corner by Eva’s suitcase as if it had always been there. It worked—­but it still freaked me out.

  I turned my attention back to Eva. I didn’t know how to get all the tubes back into her. We would need the doctor’s help for that. But the replacement was done.

  Eva’s eyes were open now and she was looking up at me, a confused, questioning expression on her face. But there was a light in her eyes, a life.

  “Mab?” she said uncertainly.

  “Eva!” I rushed to her side.

  It was as if destroying the Fetch had given her new vitality. Her head was still bruised, but at least she was conscious.

  “Am I in a hospital?” she asked. I nodded, but the smile was still on my face. This was the most lucid she’d sounded. I still wanted the doctors to check her out. I was sure they’d be running in here soon, since I’d unhooked the beeping machine from the Fetch. But this was the first time I’d felt a real optimism that Eva was going to be alright.

  “I guess I must have taken a pretty hard fall,” she said. “That’s the last thing I remember. Hey, who is that guy?” She pointed at Obadiah, standing in the doorway. “Is he with you?”

  I must have blushed, because Eva raised her eyebrows at me and winked.

  “Nicely done!”

  I resisted the urge to swat her. She was back. The real Eva was back!

  “Listen, I’m really sorry about what happened in the Vale,” I said to her. “I should have never brought you to the dungeons. That was my battle to fight, not yours. I really, really appreciate what you did for me. You saved my life. And I’ll always be grateful. But I never should have brought you there.”

  Eva stared up at me, her eyes confused.

  “Mab, what are you talking about?” she asked.

  “The Vale . . . you know, my Shadow . . .”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “The . . . what?”

  It was the blow to her head. She didn’t remember.

  “The last thing I recall was going to that club . . .” said Eva.

  She had forgotten everything that happened in the Vale, everything she had seen—­the Fairy Queen, the Shadow children, my own Shadow, saving my life, everything. I wanted to cry. If she had forgotten everything that had happened, it meant she no longer remembered what I’d said to her—­my confession about being a changeling. All the truth she�
�d learned about me, about our world, it was gone now. It was like it had never happened for Eva. We were right back where we started.

  Maybe it was for the best, I told myself. It would be a lot for a human, to all at once realize a whole other world existed. But Eva had been happy to see it all. I felt so intensely melancholy as I looked at her—­she’d had the adventure she’d always wanted, and now she didn’t even remember it. And I’d finally told her the truth about me—­and she didn’t remember that either.

  “What’s a matter, Mab?” Eva said. “You seem sad.”

  “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I’m happy you seem like you’re doing better. But I want someone to examine your head injury. It looks like they’re coming in to check on you now.”

  A man in a white lab coat was hurrying into the room.

  I stepped outside to give him space to do his work. Obadiah met me in the hallway. When we were out of Eva’s earshot, he turned to me, touching my hand.

  “She’s going to be okay, Mab.”

  “But she doesn’t remember any of it! The Vale, the Queen, the children, how she saved me from my Shadow. It’s all gone!”

  Obadiah let out a long sigh.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess the Queen was right. It’s too much for a human mind to handle, knowing there’s another world.”

  “But not Eva’s mind,” I said hotly. “I think she could have handled it. If she hadn’t gotten hit on the head.”

  “Maybe it’ll come back to her,” Obadiah replied hopefully. “Often memory loss from a head injury is temporary.”

  “We can hope. I finally told her the truth about myself, and now, it doesn’t even matter,” I said sadly.

  “Of course it matters,” said Obadiah, taking my hand. His touch was warm, and it sent its heat through me, giving me comfort and courage. “Every time you tell the truth, it makes it a little bit easier to do the same next time.”

  Chapter 27