A Monster's Paradise (Away From Whipplethorn Book Three)

by A W Hartoin

  “My honor must be reclaimed.”

  Lrag lurched over, sat beside Bentha, and flicked him in the head. “How many times do I have to tell you? Your honor is of no consequence.”

  “Honor is everything. Those archers should’ve faced me, instead of attacking from afar. Cowardly dogs. Afraid to face me sword to sword.” Bentha started to rise, but I gently pushed him back.

  “Marie,” I said. “How long until we get there?”

  She asked the driver. “Just a few more minutes.”

  Tess leaned in closer. “How bad does it hurt?”

  “I’m not the one you should be worried about, my large lady.” Bentha flashed a glance over at Lrag, who scowled in return.

  “Are you hurt somewhere else, Lrag?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  But he wasn’t. His red skin had paled to rose and the diamond pattern stood out like it had been stitched into his skin. He had his arm away from me, but I could see a red pool forming next to his foot. I took the hem of my skirt and ripped off the bottom panel. I stepped over Bentha and pressed the fabric to the wounds on Lrag’s shoulder. It made no difference. Blood pumped up through the fabric and soaked my hands.

  Iris flew over and screamed, “Make it stop!”

  “I can’t! It only works once!”

  Tess bolted through the apartment door, a split second after her father opened it, still carrying us in her hand. Lrag and Bentha lay side-by-side. But only Bentha was still conscious and watching his friend grow pale pink under my bloody hands pressed to his shoulder. Tess ran into her bedroom and climbed onto the window seat with her hand on the sill.

  Lucrece’s head jerked up from the book she was reading to Miss Penrose. “What happened?”

  “Lrag and Bentha have been shot with arrows,” I said. “I need…” What did I need? My mind clicked through the remedies Grandma Vi had taught me, but they were for cuts and scrapes. Lrag needed something much stronger. He needed to clot.

  “Agrimony. I need agrimony.”

  “I’ll get it.” Lucrece straightened her spectacles and struggled to her feet, reminding me that she was quite an old spriggan.

  Miss Penrose pushed off her top blanket. “Let me help.”

  “No,” I said. “You’ll weaken yourself. Lucrece knows where everything is.”

  And she did. Her spriggan’s methodical mind loved to organize and categorize. She’d redone Grandma’s old system just for fun.

  “I can help,” said Miss Penrose, still struggling with her blanket.

  “Mom!” I yelled.

  Both my parents were there before I could yell a second time. Mom clamped her hands over her mouth and fixed her eyes on the blood running down my arm from Lrag as she hovered above us. Dad steadied Lucrece and said, “What can I do?”

  “Help Lucrece with the boxes. I need agrimony.”

  “Done.” He and Lucrece hurried to the stack of boxes and started opening them.

  Judd knelt beside Tess. His hair completely covered his face, but I could tell he was scared from the tightness around his mouth. Funny. I wasn’t scared anymore. I was thinking and thinking is good in a crisis.

  “Judd. I need raw honey. It has to be raw.”

  He jumped up and sprinted from the room.

  Mom was still hovering and the look on her face was like every nightmare she’d had about coming to Paris was happening.

  “Mom! Cover up Miss Penrose and get bandages. Lots and lots of bandages.”

  “Matilda!” she cried.

  “It’s not me. It’s not Iris. Do what I say!”

  A sob burst from her lips and she dropped onto the sill. She covered up Miss Penrose and zinged out of the room at her top speed. Dad ran over with a small linen pouch and held it out to me.

  “I can’t take it. You’ll have to do the mixing. Iris can help. She’s watched me lots of times,” I said.

  Dad looked at Iris. She was sitting on Tess’s wrist with her knees pulled up to her chin. She didn’t move or stop looking at Lrag’s slack face.

  “Iris!” yelled Dad.

  She glanced at him and went right back to Lrag.

  “Dad,” I said. “Her hearing was knocked out in the fight. You’ll have to get close and motion for what you want.”

  “Her hearing’s gone?” Dad’s face fell.

  “It’s only temporary. Now you need a mortar and pestle. Get that first.”

  Lucrece hobbled over. In her hands were a medium-sized mortar and pestle made out of a walnut shell. “Got it.”

  “Now put three palmfuls of the agrimony in the mortar.”

  Dad opened the linen bag and measured out three palmfuls of dried yellow flowers, looking at me for approval on each one.

  “Get Iris.”

  Dad got her attention and she flew down to look inside the mortar.

  “Smooth!” I yelled at her.

  She wrinkled her brow. “You want me to grind it smooth?”

  I nodded and Iris got started. Judd and Mom came in together. She set a huge stack of clean white towels next to my hip and Judd held out a clear jar filled with honeycomb and a generous amount of dark amber honey.

  “Marie says this is raw honey. She bought it at the market. It’s lavender honey. Does that matter?”

  I had no idea, but there wasn’t time to be picky. “Lavender helps with pain. Lucrece, put three drops in for Iris.”

  Iris ground the flowers and honey together, using all of her strength. I could even see a hint of muscle in her forearms.

  “Okay. Mom, get two towels. Put them over the wounds as soon as I lift this soaked stuff off.”

  Mom nodded, but she looked ready to pass out. I pulled off my skirt panels and the blood spurted up. Mom put the towels on quick as anything, but they were soaked through in seconds. It was getting worse not better.

  “Bentha,” I said. “You know about teufels. Do they normally bleed like this?”

  “Not at all, my lady. They are build for battle. Their skins are tough and I’ve seen Lrag sustain wounds much worse than that and clot completely in minutes.” Bentha’s painted brow wrinkled. “Something else is at work.”

  “Yes. It must be.” I put my hand under the bloody towel and carefully probed the punctures. “We got all of the arrows. There’s nothing in there.” It could be a spell, but who would go to such trouble to kill a teufel with no ties to anybody in Paris? “Lucrece, get the B book and look up bleeding. See if there’s a spell that causes bleeding.”

  Mom touched my shoulder. “There is. It was used on Grandma Vi when she was giving birth to me. She nearly died.”

  “What’s the remedy?” I asked.

  “Human blood.”

  “We’ve got lots of that,” said Judd, holding out his arm and displaying a fine network of veins.

  “And a spell,” said Mom. “I don’t remember it. Begins with a D, I think.”

  Lucrece laid the B book at Lrag’s feet. “Bleeding. Bleeding.” She turned several pages. There were a lot of ways to bleed, I guess. “Got it. The spell is Donum Vitae. And it’s not just human blood. It has to be boiled with my personal favorite, garlic.”

  “Ewww,” said Tess. “Bloody garlic. What do you do with it?”

  “He has to swallow it,” said Lucrece. “The bleeding will stop instantly, if it works.”

  “This just gets better and better.” Dad got a glass bowl and a knife. Lucrece held the bowl, while he plunged one of Mom’s kitchen knives into Judd’s index finger. Judd screeched, but quickly recovered his dignity as the bowl filled.

  “Judd, get your parents out of the kitchen and turn on the stove,” said Dad.

  I waved my free hand. “We don’t have time for that. I’ll do it.”

  “You can’t make fire. We agreed.”

  “You agreed. I gave in. Just close the door and windows. Nobody will see,” I said.

  Tess got a clove of garlic and Judd closed the door and windows. Dad placed the wide glass bowl in my free hand
. I balanced it on my fingertips and blew out a breath. A small flame burst to life in my palm. It was sad and weak, but touched the bottom of the bowl and then grew until there was a mesh of snapping flames covering it. The blood boiled almost instantly and sent a weird metallic smell into the air, making us wrinkle our noses.

  “How much garlic?” I asked.

  “Three knobs,” said Lucrece.

  “What’s a knob?”

  “It doesn’t say. I don’t think this spell gets used much.”

  “I hope not,” said Dad.

  My arm was starting to ache. “Is there a picture? Sometimes there’s drawings.”

  Lucrece turned the page. “Yes. It looks like three thumb-sized pieces.”

  Dad cut three pieces of garlic the size of his thumb and dropped them into Judd’s boiling blood. Wow. Now that was a smell. If I ever got it out of my nose, it would be a miracle.

  “When’s it done?” I asked. “Please say now.”

  “It’s done when you’re ready to vomit,” said Lucrece.

  “Seriously. That’s the recipe?”

  “That’s what it says. It could be quite a while.”

  “No, it couldn’t.”

  The smell was unbelievable. As the blood rolled around, a noxious steam rose out of the bowl.

  “Oh,” said Mom, covering her mouth. Iris’s chest started to heave and Dad turned the same color as the fumes, all pale and gray. I looked at Lucrece.

  “It’s not that bad at all. Smells like victory,” said Lucrece.

  “Victory,” said Bentha, “is a taste, not a smell. I, of course, would know. That smells like I’d rather die of this wound than go on smelling it.”

  I agreed, but I wasn’t quite at the vomiting stage yet. Come on. Come on. It was horrendous. Why wasn’t I sick?

  Lucrece tapped me. “You’re holding your breath. Suck it in.” She glanced at Bentha. “Taste it on your tongue.”

  Bentha nodded. “That will get results.”

  I swallowed and then filled my lungs through my nose, the absolutely worst way to do it. I almost fell over. My body spasmed and my mouth filled with saliva. Done! My flame vanished and Dad took the bowl from me with a towel. He craned his head back, but I don’t think it helped. We were in a thick cloud of grossness.

  Lucrece handed me a big serving spoon. “One spoonful. Blow to cool and pour it in while saying the spell. Simple, yet effective.”

  “I’m going to barf,” I said. “I’m going to barf all over my barf.”

  “Later. Get a spoonful.”

  I dipped the spoon in the bowl and, to my disgust, it was thick like cold pudding. I blew on it, but it didn’t change consistency. It sat in a glob on the spoon and jiggled.

  Don’t barf. Don’t barf. Stop thinking the word barf. Ahhhh! Not helping.

  My stomach heaved, but I forced it back down.

  “Is it cool?” asked Mom.

  I touched the glob. “Close enough.”

  Dad opened Lrag’s mouth. “Sorry, my friend.”

  I tipped the spoon and the glob plopped onto Lrag’s tongue, laying there quivering. He was unconscious, but I think he shuddered. “Donum Vitae!”

  I lifted the towel and blood instantly pooled in the punctures. “It didn’t work.”

  “Give it a second,” said Mom.

  The blood overflowed and I pressed the towel back again. “What did I do wrong?”

  Bentha tapped his lips. “I think perhaps your accent was wrong. Try an ‘I’ sound at the end instead of an ‘A’.”

  I swallowed down another vomitous heave and scooped up another glob. “Donum Vitae!”

  The glob melted on Lrag’s tongue this time. I peeked under the sopping wet towel. No pooling. The blood just stopped.

  “We did it!” I yelled.

  “What do I do with this?” asked Dad, holding out the bowl at arm’s length.

  “I’d say throw it out the window, but that’s Grandma’s bowl,” I said.

  “Give it to me,” said Mom. “I’m used to cleaning up gross things.”

  Judd opened the door and Mom flew out.

  “I think she was talking about us,” said Dad with a smile. “We’re the gross things.”

  I laughed. Maybe I was the gross thing, but I didn’t throw up on my patient, and if anyone ever deserved to throw up, it was me.

  The nasty fog cleared and we all took deep breaths.

  “What about this stuff?” yelled Iris.

  I took the mortar from her and smeared the mixture over the punctures. Lrag still needed it for the antiseptic properties and the clotting agent couldn’t hurt. I took his pulse. It was weak, but still there. I hoped he would forgive me for the taste in his mouth when he woke up.

  “So it was a spell,” said Miss Penrose. I’d forgotten she was there on her pallet. She’d been so quiet during the excitement.

  Lucrece leafed through the book, her lumpy forehead in a furious frown. “Yes, a spell. An ancient one and rarely used.”

  “It’s horrible,” I said. “But useful in battle, I suppose. Does it look difficult?”

  “The actual spell isn’t in your grandmother’s book. It’s kept in the greatest of secrecy and passed down generation to generation.” Lucrece looked at me with her moist protrudent eyes and I shivered unexpectantly.

  “What species uses it?” I asked.

  “Phalanx.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IRIS SUCKED IN a deep breath and plunged under the bubbles in her makeshift bathtub. Her caviar spoon sat across from mine and was filled to the brim with hot sudsy water. I’d finished my bath and sat on the curve of the spoon swaddled in my bathrobe with my aching foot in a soup of chamomile, bilberry, and white willow. The swelling was down, but now it was all pruny and looked a hundred years old.

  The third caviar spoon had Horc bobbing around in it. For something so heavy and boulder-like, the little spriggan was surprisingly buoyant. He loved to spin around in the water and be soaped up by Mom and then perfumed with lavender oil. Lucrece was horrified. She tried to talk him out of baths on a daily basis. It never worked. Horc didn’t tell her, but he’d decided he wasn’t a spriggan long ago and the spriggan stink that Lucrece so prized was one of the things he didn’t want.

  Iris’s head erupted out of the water. Her head was covered with shiny opalescent bubbles and her face red from a good scrubbing. “It feels so good!” she yelled.

  Tess giggled from the human bathtub. Our spoons were on the marble surround and she grinned at us from over the lip with a gigantic pyramid of bubbles on her head.

  “She can’t help yelling,” I said.

  “I know,” said Tess. “But it’s still funny. Iris is usually so sweet and gentle. Now she sounds like Miss Marie when she’s ordering Mom around.”

  “It’ll get better. Quickly, I hope.”

  “What did your mom say?” Tess frowned.

  “Nothing. That’s the scary part. She’s so freaked out, she’s speechless.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He’s pretty shocked. I mean, we’ve been here one day and two of us almost got killed and Iris is temporarily deaf. All at a national monument. I can’t blame them for being upset, but it doesn’t change anything,” I said.

  Horc came out of his ball and grabbed the edge of his spoon. “It changes everything.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I replied, touching the spiderwebs that held the cut on my temple closed. Another scar to add to my collection. “We still have to find the vermillion and get the cure for Miss Penrose.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” He raised his eyebrow lumps at me.

  “Camille said the king is in the Louvre. If the vermillion serve him, that’s where they’ll be.”

  “The Louvre is huge,” said Tess.

  “And irrelevant. Mother is not letting you out of here. The city is erupting,” said Horc, showing me his teeth, which passed for a smile in a spriggan.

  “When has she ever stopped m
e from doing anything?”

  “She doesn’t have to stop you. You simply can’t do it.”

  “I can do anything.” I flexed my foot. Maybe not anything. I wasn’t doing a rocking job at healing myself.

  Horc yawned and I saw a piece of raw meat between his first and second set of teeth. Horc fished out the meat and gave it a good look and then ate it. Gag.

  “I admire your conceit,” he said.

  “It’s not conceit, if you’re right.”

  “I agree, however you are wrong. What do you need more than anything else to succeed in your quest?”

  “Not permission,” I said, trying to look humble and probably failing.

  “Fire,” said Tess. She didn’t look humble either. I loved that about her.

  Horc snorted. “Iris.”

  We all looked at my little sister who had a great big soap bubble growing out of her left nostril. “What?” she yelled, somehow managing not to pop it.

  “Nothing,” I yelled back.

  Iris, my constant companion since her birth. She was my ears. Horc was right. Darn that little spriggan. I needed Iris. Without her I wouldn’t know where the enemy was if they weren’t in sight.

  “Then again.” Horc smiled. Now the meat was between two jagged incisors. “You could adapt and overcome. A very spriggan trait, I might add.”

  “What are you up to?” I asked.

  “Me? I’m just a baby.”

  “You’re just a baby, like Paris is just a city.”

  “I am many things. Most importantly, a baby who can hear and I am travel size for your convenience.”

  “Forget it. It’s not going to happen,” I said.

  Tess rested her chin on the edge of the tub. “It’s not a terrible idea. Horc can get into nooks and crannies with you that Judd and I can’t.”

  “If I ran off with Horc, Mom would never forgive me.”

  “If I lived, she would…eventually,” said Horc.

  “Eventually is a long time.”

  “Come now. Do you really care? She’s mad at you most of the time anyway. And we can hardly wait for Bentha and Lrag to accompany you. Their healing could take weeks. You said so yourself.”

  Mom flew in through the keyhole in the bathroom door. “What are you doing in here for so long?”

  Horc pushed away from the side of the caviar spoon and held out his hands. “I’m ready.”