Vanity Scare

by H. P. Mallory

  She was the epitome of beauty.

  I wanted nothing more than to take her in my arms and taste those sweet, snarling lips. “Hello, my sweet, lovely to see you as well,” I responded, dropping my hand and appraising her.

  “Don’t you fucking start,” she retorted, glaring at me. One might believe she actually hated me. “Don’t you fucking start that with me.”

  “Start what?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Don’t pretend like you don’t fucking know what I’m talking about!”

  “Know what?”

  “Bram, I swear to Hades.”

  “My dear Ms. O’Neil, I swear to you, I haven’t the foggiest notion of what you’re going on about.”

  “Oh, really? So, you didn’t tell Christina what Meg showed you in that… that fucking vision?”

  Ah, this. And here I thought something bad had happened.

  “I am sorry for any… trouble my accusation has caused you,” I assured her. For good measure, I added, “Perhaps it was not my news to impart, after all.” Though I did not believe such in the slightest. If Dulcie was not going to say something, someone had to, and it might as well have been me. I had no friends among Vander’s colleagues.

  “Bram, of course it wasn’t your news to tell! Why the fuck would you think it was? This is my business, not yours!” She drew her hands down hard over her face, leaving thin red lines of pressure in the wake of her fingers. She groaned, and she did not look at me.

  I had never seen her bathed in sunlight before. I suppose there is nothing special about the way light reflects off one’s eyes and makes the irises shimmer and shine not unlike precious stones; but there was something divine about the color of her eyes in the light. It was the green of emeralds in the crown of a goddess, of the trees and hills of Ireland. The light seemed to reach out to her, drawing long cotton fingers across her face as a lover might do.

  “You are beautiful,” I said, without thinking. This was not exactly a ripe moment for the dispensation of compliments.

  Dulcie groaned and covered her face. “I don’t even know why I try,” she grumbled.

  I frowned, turning myself to regard her fully. “Do you not believe me?”

  She dropped her hands. “That’s beside the point.” Her words were tossed out like incriminating pictures, like proof of infidelity.

  “Your beauty is beside the point?”

  “Yes!” she railed at me. “And I’m sick of hearing about it!”

  “I’m afraid I do not understand.”

  “No, of course you don’t!” Dulcie continued, belting out her anger as if she were a tea kettle on full boil. “I don’t care what I look like!”

  “Now that can hardly be called a true statement.”

  “I would love it if you, for once, would stop paying attention to the outside of me like it’s the only thing that’s important.”

  I grimaced. “What is it, exactly, that you are accusing me of?”

  I did not realize how foolish the question was until it was already out of my mouth.

  But Dulcie did not seem to hear me—or, if she did, she did not care to respond. “I just, I want somebody to look at me and tell me literally anything else besides, ‘you’re pretty,’ and ‘I’m sorry your life sucks so much,’ and ‘here, let me solve your problems without fucking asking if it’s okay with you because apparently I know what’s best.’”

  “Yes, well, I was just on my way to check on Osenna,” I started.

  She sucked in a breath through her teeth, making a thin whistling sound, then looked directly at me. “You know I’m a capable person, right? I’m not just a pair of boobs with legs, Bram. I’m not a damsel in distress, I’m not a walking sex bot. I can make my own goddamn decisions, and I can solve my own fucking problems. I don’t need you butting in all the damn time!”

  “Of course,” I agreed, thoroughly horrified by the idea of a walking sex robot. There was something so cold about dolls. “I am very much aware.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. I would never think so little of you.”

  Dulcie snorted, loudly and forcefully enough to jerk her entire torso forward. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I am not. You are, in fact, more than your breasts and your legs.”

  A deep growl curled out of her throat. “Really? So, if I woke up one morning and I’d had my whole face melted off, you’d still spend all your free time stalking me and harassing my friends?”

  “Hmm, that is a difficult question. Not only for me to answer, but I imagine it would be a difficult question for anyone tasked with it.”

  She looked at me in an odd manner.

  “Would you mind if I got back to you?” I asked cautiously. “I am afraid I have places to go and people to see.”

  She was shaking. No, not shaking—twitching, as though she had spilled water on some critical internal circuit. The color was no longer present in her skin; instead, it was covered with a sheen of sweat. She appeared, for all intents and purposes, quite ill.

  “Are you alright?” I asked. Again, she did not appear to hear me.

  “Yes!” she yelled after a moment. “I’m fine!” I was taken aback by the vitriol in her tone. And perhaps more so by the surprise in her expression. Whatever was happening to her was frightening her. I could see as much in her wide eyes.

  “Well, for what it is worth, my fine friend, I do not believe you are simply a pretty face and body.”

  “Really?” She glared at me.

  “Really.”

  “Because you’ve got a bullshit painting in your basement that says otherwise,” she pointed out, coming closer to me with her index finger outstretched, then poking it into my chest. “I think I know exactly how you feel about me!’

  “And how would that be?”

  “You wish I was easy, that I’d just have sex with you. You wish I’d stop being so difficult all the time and let you do whatever you want with me, don’t you?”

  I looked at her briefly, examining her face. A peculiar numbness was working its way through my body, beginning somewhere behind my heart and ending in my eyes. I had to remind myself to blink. Something about this conversation made me want to jump out the window and throw myself at the mercy of the sun.

  “Did something happen, my sweet?” I asked. “You are in particularly bad spirits this day.”

  “Hades, stop calling me that!” she snapped. “I’m not your goddamn sweet! I’m my own fucking person, Bram, and I’m sick of watching you act like you’re somehow entitled to me just because you want to get inside my pants!”

  “Goodness!” I said, in a great deal of shock by her allegations. “I did not mean to imply any such…”

  “Oh, sure you didn’t.”

  “I am sorry. I assure you, I feel no sense of entitlement where you are concerned.”

  She laughed. It was not a human sound, it was the scattered trilling of a coyote. “You’re sorry. Right,” she said. “Are you literally sorry, at all? Do you even know what you should be apologizing for? Do you even know what it means to apologize?”

  In the years of our acquaintance, Dulcie and I had certainly had some blowouts, but I was quite surprised by this one. In my own mind, we had become friends of a sort, so this tirade of hers seemed as though it had come directly from left field. I was left wondering what in the blazes I had done to be on the receiving end.

  “Yes, I am quite aware of what it means to apologize,” I countered coldly. “Perhaps we should cut right to the chase, as the saying goes. What did I do, Miss O’Neil, that has so greatly offended you?”

  “What did you do? What did you do?”

  “Yes. What, pray tell, did I do?”

  “You assaulted Knight in the printer room, that’s what you fucking did! And you’ve been going around spouting off about my business to anyone who will listen!”

  “That is not entirely true,” I started, extending my hands in a placating manner. She slapped them both down.

&nb
sp; “It’s completely true!”

  She was shouting now, and people were looking, but I had no reason to care what they thought. It was highly unlikely any of them knew who I was in the first place. But I found myself feeling concerned on Dulcie’s behalf. The last thing she needed was more rumors circulating about her around the office.

  “Would you rather I had assaulted Vander somewhere else?” I asked.

  “No!” She shook her head. “You just don’t get it!”

  “Get what, my dear?”

  She shook her head again. “Uh, I don’t want you assaulting him at all, Bram! I don’t want you assaulting anybody on my behalf!” Her footsteps paced an earthquake across the floor. The walls trembled.

  “What he did to you—”

  “Is none of your fucking business!” she railed at me. “I don’t belong to you. I’m not a child, and I’m not your responsibility! I can take care of myself!”

  “I would never assume otherwise—”

  “That’s literally all you do!” she interrupted, throwing her arms up in the air. There was something wrong with her veins; they were darker and more prominent. “That’s why you do everything you’ve ever done to me! You ask me for these lewd fucking favors when you know my back is to the wall and I can’t say no! You make oil-paint porn out of me, and now you’re attacking my ex like you’re some kind of knight in shining armor, which is such bullshit!”

  She stopped. She seemed on the verge of tears but she would not look at me, so for all I knew, she was already crying.

  “Dulcie,” I started and reached out to her, but she pulled away from me.

  “I’m not your girlfriend,” she said. “I’m not your anything, and you keep doing this thing where you pretend that we’re… that we’re something but we aren’t!”

  She swallowed visibly, audibly.

  I felt my eyes turn to steel. “Dulcie, I attacked him, I defended you, because I care for your well-being, and he, apparently, does not. And I have never pretended we were anything other than friends… something which I ardently hope we still are.”

  “We aren’t friends and we never were, Bram,” she told me, with narrowed eyes.

  I felt my stomach drop to my toes and found I could no longer meet her gaze. I just… could not believe she’d said those words.

  “I have never considered you to be the unkind type,” I said stonily. But then I saw something in her eyes that hinted at the regret she must have been feeling, owing to the callousness of her previous statement.

  I do not know why I did it, but I reached for her, as though collecting her in my arms would help to heal the anger and the pain I sensed rampaging through her body.

  At the precise moment I touched her, she pushed me backwards against the glass so hard, I heard it crack. Sunlight seeped through the break in the wards and seared the back of my neck. I jumped forward immediately, and that was when I noticed her hands and arms.

  She was bleeding. How or why I did not know? I glanced back at the window but found none of the glass had shattered. It was cracked, yes, but still intact.

  “You don’t care about anyone but yourself, Bram,” she hissed. In her eyes, I saw the blind fury of one who suddenly knows more than they can stand. “So stop. Pretending. To care about me.”

  Without further ceremony, she pushed me with such extreme strength, I fell to the ground. The carpet and the metal framework of the floor bent beneath me as the back of my head smashed against the windowpane. My vision rent itself askew. Black spots danced across the ceiling, chased by jagged lines of vague, water-washed color.

  “Leave me alone and stay out of my life!” she screamed, but her voice was no longer hers.

  Onlookers were now gathered around us, witnessing the spectacle with open mouths and wide eyes. She pushed past them and the crowd opened to grant her exit. All I could focus upon was the blood on her forearms, dripping down to cover her hands.

  I pushed myself up to my elbows, and that, for a moment, was all I could ask of my body. I watched Dulcie disappear around a corner and into a room full of people.

  I shouted the first name that came to mind—the first that did not make me nauseous to say.

  “Miss Sabbiondo!” I called out. Rolling sideways, I pushed myself up—first to my hands and knees, then back on my heels, until I was standing with a wobble and toppling into the broken window. I caught myself flat-palmed on the glass, and thin red lines of phantom sunlight etched themselves into my skin. “Someone retrieve Miss Sabbiondo!”

  Two people on whom I could not focus helped me to stand, and I instinctively shook them off, staggering forward.

  “Dulcie…” I started weakly.

  “Someone’s gone to get Christina, okay? Please sit down,” said someone.

  But I did not, because Dulcie was changing in ways she could not control. Dulcie was carving mazes into herself, labyrinths with ends but no distinct beginnings.

  Dulcie was hurting herself. That much was obvious.

  She was bleeding.

  And her blood was red.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Quillan

  “Quill?” called Christina from the other side of the door. I was sitting in a conference room with Zhe Ping and a translator, questioning the former as to his association with Dagan.

  Christina sounded scared, like something was chasing her.

  I popped out of my chair and ran to the door.

  “What?” I said, pulling it open. “What happened?”

  “Bram. Dulcie. Breakroom. Now.” And she sprinted off down the hall.

  I ran out of the room.

  ###

  Dulcie was on all fours on the floor of an emptied-out breakroom. The gift-shop t-shirt was wadded up on the ground, and Henry, Christina, and Sam were on the ground next to her, encouraging her to breathe. Sam had a travel poultice set out on the slick gray floor, and shovel-sized fistfuls of the tile had been gouged out. Tables, chairs, and everything else had been thrown helter-skelter across the room, fracturing the window-wall between the breakroom and the office. Everything smelled like rosemary and something sideways of a cluster-bombed graveyard.

  Bram was lurking in a corner, biting his knuckle. Just staring at her.

  She was fighting convulsions. Her arms were wrapped around her stomach, her hands in tight, dripping fists, and she was rocking back and forth. She was spitting up red and black bile and what looked like pieces of her stomach lining. Her knuckles, her nails, her claws, were bloody and bruised. Long, red lines tally-marked their way down her sides.

  I felt like I’d swallowed an ice cube.

  Dulcie’s a fairy. Her blood is gold—it’s supposed to be gold.

  “What in the literal fuck,” I murmured.

  “Help now, questions later.” Sam held up a phial of something glowy and violently purple. “Hold this.”

  I rolled up my sleeves and took it, and immediately almost dropped it. The glass was frostbite levels of cold.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Not with your hands,” said Sam, not looking at me.

  “Okay, with what?”

  “Literally anything else.”

  I took off my jacket and wrapped it around the phial. The hand I’d touched it with throbbed. Like hands do when you squeeze frostbite-cold phials of purple danger goo.

  “What is this stuff?” I asked, holding up the purple danger goo.

  “It’s… stuff,” Sam offered, clearly distracted.

  Dulcie was breathing like the air was trying to get away from her. Her eyes were squeezed closed. Her grayed skin seemed stretched, cracked like clay in the desert. The red lines grew thicker.

  Shit, that’s a lot of blood.

  Unless it wasn’t blood. Unless it was something worse.

  It’s red. Why the fuck is it red?

  Casey ran into the room and knelt in front of Sam. He watched her silently, waiting.

  Sam held out a stone mortar, caught Dulcie’s blood, and started mashing it together
with something grayish-green. Ten seconds later, she had a thick paste, and began using a popsicle stick to smear it onto Dulcie’s skin. Casey and Christina held her arms to keep her still, to keep her from clawing her insides into cheap frosting.

  “What is that?” I asked, and realized I was being super unhelpful, but I couldn’t stop myself. Asking questions felt like participating. I wanted to feel included in the making-sure-Dulcie-doesn’t-rocket-launch-herself-into-the-next-life club.

  “Shh-shh-shuushhh,” hushed Sam. When all the red was covered, she dropped everything and turned to me.

  “Line down her back,” she directed.

  “Um,” I stammered, and didn’t move.

  “Quillan,” she snapped, “drip it in a line down her back.”

  “With the danger goo?”

  “Trace her spine.”

  “Oh. Oh.” I started at the base of Dulcie’s neck and globbed the purple goop all down her back. It formed itself into a straight line, turned white, and then made ribcage-shaped beelines for the green paste. When it touched the green stuff, they merged and changed color again into a muddy brown. And then, it started to smoke.

  Dulcie screamed.

  Casey and Sam grabbed her by the arms. “I know,” Sam said encouragingly, “I know, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, honey. It’s gonna be okay, just breathe. Just breathe.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was going to be okay, because Dulcie kept bleeding. And it kept coming out red.

  It took a long time for it to stop. And it took me, Casey, Henry, and Christina combined to keep her from digging her nails into her ribs, her throat, her eyes. She was screaming and crying and thrashing, but whatever was in the paste was getting into her blood, and it sapped all the energy out of her a few minutes later.

  She sagged. She whimpered. She got quiet and still, breathing like something half-drowned.

  “Fucking fuck,” she sobbed.

  “Shit,” I said, “are you okay?” Yes, it was a stupid question.

  She coughed wetly. “No.” She swiped at her eyes with bloody hands.