by Gail Dayton
Once they got out of the city into the countryside again, he seemed to improve. His face gained color and he breathed a bit easier in his restless sleep. Amanusa had her own bed made up and got in, determined to get some sleep. If Jax did get worse, she would need to be rested to help him. He was hers. It was her responsibility to look after him.
Crow’s cawing woke her. She’d been trapped in a dream, at a party filled with glittering society, while her stomach churned violently and she had nowhere to escape to be sick. But when she woke, the nausea remained. It had shaped her dream.
Amanusa flipped onto her back, which made her stomach roll up to her throat and back down again. Where was the basin? Could she find it in time? Crow fluttered onto her bed and pecked at her hand with a harsh caw. She pushed him away as she curled onto her side around her aching belly. Crow came back and pecked her again, then flew across to perch on Jax’s shoulder where he lay on his side facing her. Crow cawed at her.
“Leave me alone,” she moaned. “I feel terrible.”
The nasty bird refused, returning to her bed for another peck and caw before flying back to caw at Jax.
“Leave poor Jax alone too. Whatever ailment he’s given me, he’s had it longer.” Amanusa opened her eyes to peer at Jax in the dim moonlight filtering through sooty windows.
Crow pecked at the hand lying on the pillow beside Jax’s face. Jax didn’t stir.
He should have. Crow’s sharp beak hurt.
“Jax?” Amanusa rolled to the edge of her bunk, reaching across the narrow aisle to brush her fingers down his arm. That wouldn’t wake him if the bird peck hadn’t.
She sat up, holding her head so it wouldn’t fall off, hoping her stomach would stay where it belonged. “Jax, wake up.”
She shook him hard, but he didn’t wake. He toppled limply from his side to his back, like a broken doll. Like a corpse.
“Jax!” She snatched up his hand, forgetting her nausea and aching head.
He took a gasping breath, coughed, and breathed in again. Dear heaven, hadn’t he been breathing?
Alarmed, Amanusa crawled across to his bunk, pushing him against the compartment wall to make room for her, maintaining her grip on his hand. She brushed his hair back and laid her hand on his forehead. He felt cool, not feverish. Chilled.
Seemingly satisfied, Crow hopped off the bunk onto the top of his cage and began to preen his feathers.
“Thank you, Crow.” Amanusa’s gratitude was heartfelt.
She let go of Jax to drag the blanket off her bunk and the nausea slammed into her afresh. It had gone away when she touched him, but when she let go… She wrapped her hand around his again. Jax’s chest rose as he drew in another breath. Did he. breathe only when she touched him? She didn’t want to test the theory.
Maintaining her grip on Jax, Amanusa spread her blanket over his. Doing the job mostly one-handed made it more difficult, but she needed to get him warm without letting go. She needed him to wake up.
Amanusa lay down atop the blankets in the tiny space at the edge of his bunk and laid her hand along his face. “Jax?”
She tucked his hand against her cheek and held it there as she slid her other hand down to the strong column of his neck. “Jax, I need you to wake up and tell me what this is. Is it Inquisitors again? Could they have followed us out of Austria?”
She shook him, more gently than her fear wanted. “Jax.”
“ ‘M’nusa.” Her name was slurred, but he said it. “Cold.”
“I know. I’m trying to warm you.”
He shivered—more of a shudder, really—and Amanusa snuggled closer, knees bumping his. “Talk to me, Jax.”
She pushed his hair back off his forehead, and it flopped back down as she put her arm around him, over the blankets, trying to rub warmth back into him. Air whistled in his chest, a wheezy sound, as if he couldn’t drag enough in.
“Jax!” She cupped his cheek, touched his throat, and the wheezing stopped.
Skin-to-skin. If she touched his bare skin with her bare hand, he could breathe.
Amanusa’s fears stared her in the face. Either she trusted Jax or she didn’t. Either she was afraid, or she wasn’t. So.
She did, and she wasn’t. Or wasn’t very much. Jax was sick. He couldn’t breathe without her naked skin against his. Right now, her hand in his, her hand on his face was enough to keep him breathing. But what if he got worse?
Was she willing to do whatever became necessary to keep him alive?
Amanusa stroked her hand down his face, studying its rough-edged structure, the full lips, deep-set eyes, strong blade of a nose, the high, broad forehead. Some might say he was a handsome man. Amanusa was a poor judge of such things. But they didn’t matter. Handsome or homely, he was hers. He would not die if she could help it.
She lifted the blankets she’d been lying on and slipped under them. Next to Jax. Her bare toes brushed his shins and recoiled. But of course his legs would be bare, just like hers. He didn’t sleep in his trousers. He did have on a nightshirt. His sleeping attire didn’t matter. Getting him warm and breathing properly did.
She crawled over him and slid into the space next to the wall. Hiking up her nightgown, she snuggled her naked thighs up behind Jax’s hard, hairy ones. She unfastened the top few buttons of his nightshirt and dragged the sleeve of her gown to the elbow, then slid her arm inside his nightshirt so that her bare forearm lay across his equally bare chest.
Unlike the bearlike outlaws she’d known, Jax had only a faint sprinkling of hair on his chest. She’d seen before, in the torture room, when he’d been completely unclothed. Perhaps the lack of hair would help increase the contact between them. She flattened her hand just over his heart, trying for the most contact without removing any more clothing. Surely this would be enough.
It was some time before his shivering stopped and he began to breathe easier. Amanusa was drifting into sleep, her hand gone limp on his chest, when Jax tensed. His whole body went suddenly board stiff and it brought her out of her comfortable drowse, especially when his hand closed over hers.
“Jax? How do you feel?” She raised onto an elbow to see him.
“Ama—nusa?” He broke her name into pieces with his bewilderment. “Why are you—? What happened?” He started to lift her hand from his chest.
“No.” Amanusa held him tight. “You stopped breathing. Something’s made you sick. Made both of us sick. As long as we’re touching, you breathe and my stomach stays where it should be. Is this—could it be Inquisitors?”
“I… don’t know.” He laid his hand over hers on his chest, as if holding it in place, and fell silent.
Amanusa could almost feel him thinking. “Jax?” She nudged his back with her chin when he took so long to answer that she started to fall asleep again.
“Yvaine doesn’t remember any magic attack like this, not with the cold and the suffocation.” He stroked his fingers over the back of her hand as if he didn’t realize he was doing it. Or as if he hoped she would think he didn’t. “And you’re nauseated?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, we don’t think this is Inquisitors.”
“Yvaine—talks to you?” She didn’t like it. The old witch had given him away. He belonged to Amanusa now.
“It’s more like I have access to the knowledge she stuffed inside me. She talks to you. But she lets me remember.”
Amanusa dragged her lower arm out from beneath herself and tunneled her fingers into his hair to grip the back of his skull. “I want her out of here,” she growled. “If she’s dead, she ought to be dead.”
“She is dead.” Jax’s smile sounded in his voice though Amanusa couldn’t see it. “It’s only memories I carry.”
“Memories in her blood.” She shook her head to clear it. Yvaine’s tainted legacy wasn’t a priority now. “So if it’s not a magical attack, what is it?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t a magical attack. Merely that it wasn’t likely to be Inquisitors.”
“It does seem to be an attack on magic. Something bent on destroying the magic that holds me together, keeps me alive.” He turned his head to look over his shoulder, but couldn’t turn quite enough to see her.
Amanusa scratched her short nails across his chest as she drew them together, then rubbed her fingertips along the same path as she spread them out again while she tried to remember when it was he’d said it before. She repeated his words twice before she could. “The machine. Did the machine make you feel this way? When you touched it? It made me queasy.”
Jax twisted, trying to look at her again, still without success. “It was more intense, more localized, but… the feeling is similar.”
“Can you see out the window?” Amanusa rummaged through memory again, hunting this time for Szabo’s description of the place where he’d found the strange, now-dead machine.
Jax struggled onto an elbow, Amanusa rising with him to maintain the skin-to-skin contact. She couldn’t see past his broad shoulders until she rose higher than he.
Dawnlight cast its pale gray illumination over a desolate landscape. The train traveled slowly through a maze of smoking factories and slum-like boarding-houses. The few trees visible were desolate skeletons, bare of leaves in the height of summer. A stream of gaunt, hollow-eyed workers trudged through the gloom toward the factories, providing the only living element in the scene. The smell of smoke and burnt metal filtered through the window, shut tight against the train’s own smoke and cinders. The smell still got through.
“Whatever made the machine—” Amanusa urged Jax back down on the bunk, staring out the window a few moments more. “It’s out there. There is no magic out there, except for those poor people. And…”
She shuddered, wondering how she felt it, but certain she did. “They’re dying. Everything else is already dead, and they’re next.”
“Can you see an end to it ahead?” Jax asked. “Trees with leaves? Something green?”
Amanusa shifted and stretched, craning her neck to see as far as she could without having to leave the bunk and stick her head out the window. She wouldn’t abandon Jax. “Not as far as I can see. It’s all gray and black and brown. No green.”
“Damn.”
She couldn’t help chuckling. “You put it so eloquently. And precisely.” She lay back down behind him, snuggling in close. “So, do you think that’s it? That some giant machine is attacking us?”
“Attacking us personally?” Jax craned his neck to look over his shoulder yet again.
“I hate this,” he announced. “Not being able to see “you when I talk to you.” He twisted in the bunk, bringing his shoulders flat. They were so wide he almost tipped off into the narrow aisle between. He caught and braced himself with a hand on the other bunk, his unbuttoned nightshirt twisted half off his torso. “There.” He looked up at her. “That’s better.”
Amanusa didn’t think so. With him looking at her, there was no escaping just how close he was, or how almost-naked. They were pressed tight against each other from shoulder to toe. Amanusa fought the urge to panic, to fight her way free from the close confinement.
This was Jax. She had an urge to squeeze her eyes shut and hide from him, but didn’t know if that would make the panicky feeling better. It might make it worse, make it possible to forget that this was Jax. She kept her eyes fastened on his, her hand and forearm plastered across his chest, and the fear smashed as flat as she could keep it.
She sat on it like some monster under the rug. It kept lurching under her, keeping her off balance, trying to break free. She refused to let it. She would not be afraid of Jax. What had they been discussing?
The magic illness. “It doesn’t feel personal. Or much like an attack.” She tried to think, to analyze what had happened, and maintain her gaze on Jax’s face. “It came on gradually. More like—like a poison.”
He frowned in thought and his eyes narrowed, focusing inward, giving Amanusa a bit of relief from his attention. “I’m not sure that’s right,” he said slowly. “It’s not something added. It’s something taken away. Like in a vacuum bottle.” His gaze flicked up and speared into her. “There’s no magic at all out there?”
“Yes. What’s a vacuum bottle?”
“A bottle from which all the air has been removed. I’ve seen them in alchemists’ laboratories. Creatures die without air.”
“There are people out there, but—” Amanusa followed his thinking. “But they’re dying. Because... it’s a magic vacuum? A life vacuum.”
“And because there is no magic, I cannot breathe without your touch. My thanks.” Jax lifted her hand from his chest to bring it to his lips for a kiss, and began to wheeze before he got it halfway there.
Alarmed, Amanusa slapped her arm back down, yanking her sleeve higher to get more skin touching his. If she was frightened for him, she wasn’t nearly so frightened of him. And she wasn’t truly afraid of him. It was habit. Reflex. The automatic reaction that “large, half-naked man” meant “danger.” But this man did not.
“Gratitude is well and good.” She tried for a light tone. “But not at the expense of breathing.”
“Breathe. Right.” His smile hid fear behind it. “Are you all right? Don’t drain yourself to keep me alive.”
Amanusa blinked. The thought had never occurred to her. Was that what was happening? Was it even possible? “I don’t feel drained,” she said slowly, testing each word for truth. “I feel fine. Whole. Full of energy. Because I’m the sorceress?”
Worry swelled on a flood tide inside her. “Am I draining you?” She rose onto her elbow to peer down into his eyes. “How do you feel?”
“A bit tired, but perfectly well, as long as—” He gestured at her arm braced along his bare chest. “You know.”
“Hmm.” Amanusa lay down again, wriggling to fit herself into the gap between Jax and the wall. He had to grab for the opposite bunk to keep himself in place. “So. I’m the sorceress. My blood has power. Right?”
Jax gave an encouraging noise and a vague nod.
“And you’re my servant. Your blood has power too, but not as much as mine.”
“Any power I have comes from you.”
“Yes, all right, but it’s there.” She was getting a bit tired of his self-effacing attitude. “The power is there. And… when we touch, I can tap it? Your power… feeds my power, which feeds back into you?”
Jax looked thoughtful. “It could be.”
“So we’re not draining each other, we’re powering each other. Like a, a—what are those things called? That store sparks?”
“Electrical cells. But they can be drained.”
“Probably we can too. I’m sure we’ll need to eat and sleep to fuel our bodies. But this magic vacuum can’t last forever. Can it?” She lifted her head and looked at Jax, worry rising again. She had never in her life been west of Vienna, and not out of the Carpathian mountains in fifteen years. She had no idea what the rest of Europe might be like.
“No, I’m sure it can’t.” He brushed a strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.
“Then we can last. We’ll tell the porter we’ve fallen ill—it’s the truth—and have our meals sent in, and we’ll get through it. We’re stronger together than we are apart.”
At that, Jax smiled, a true, bright smile that lit up his face. “So we are,” he said. “So we are.”
Amanusa laid her head down again and squirmed, trying to find a comfortable position. Jax shifted to give her a bit more room and almost fell off the bunk again. His elbow, squashed up between them, poked her in the ribs. She leaned back, but that just changed the rib his elbow jabbed into. Maybe if she rotated, letting it poke into each of her ribs in turn, the discomfort could be spread out.
“Here.” Jax slid his arm from beneath her and wrapped it around her shoulders. Her head now rested in the hollow of his shoulder and he held her tucked against his side. “Better?”
Much. They fi
t together this way. It bothered Amanusa. She wasn’t afraid of him. They were partners, but it felt as if he were protecting her. Shielding her. No one had ever done that for her, not since her mother died. It felt strange. It felt… vulnerable. Like she needed his protection.
Maybe she did. If it was her job to protect Jax, to keep him alive, shouldn’t she accept that he might think it his job to protect her? Shouldn’t she be willing to accept that protection?
But depending on someone else made her weak. Didn’t it?
She’d said that she and Jax were partners, but did she really mean it? In the past, she’d had no one she could depend on. She had to count on herself and only herself, because there was no one else. Not after Mama died. Ilinca was old and unable to help, even had she wanted to. But now, Amanusa had Jax.
It wasn’t just that they were stronger as a team. Having Jax at her side made her stronger in herself. His belief in her made her believe in herself. His presence made her… kinder. Gentler. Softer. Which terrified her, because it had never been safe to be kind or gentle or soft before. And yet…
All this thinking made her head hurt. She yawned and snuggled in closer to Jax’s warmth, finding the best spot for her aching head. She brought a knee up, but it clunked into Jax’s, so she straightened it again. Knees and shins were such bony things. As she drifted off to sleep, she felt Jax press his cheek to her hair and—did he kiss her forehead? Or was that a dream-memory of Papa from so long ago?
———
“Mr. Tomlinson.” Elinor Tavis nodded to the man as they passed in the heavily gilded hotel lobby. “Miss Tavis.” Harry Tomlinson stretched a hand toward her, but stopped before he actually caught her arm. “I’ve been looking for you. Might I have a word?”
The Cockney hovered beneath his carefully pronounced English. He gestured to a small sitting area set against the far wall, a pair of shieldback chairs with a spindly table between, beyond the cluster of businessmen talking loudly in the lobby’s center.
