The Bone Season

12 A Fever

The room was in disarray. Glass shattered, instruments broken, a curtain half-torn from its rail, and spots of glowing chartreuse on the flagstones, soaked into the fibers of the rug. I stepped over the glass. The candle on the desk had been snuffed out; so had the paraffin lamps. It was deathly cold. I could feel the æther everywhere. I kept my guard up, ready to sling my spirit at a potential attacker.

The drapes were drawn around the bed. Another dreamscape was behind it. Reph, I thought.

I stepped toward the bed. Once I was within reach of the drapes, I tried to think rationally about what I was about to do. I knew Warden was behind them, but I had no idea of what sort of state he would be in. He might be injured, sleeping, dead. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know which one it was.

I steeled my nerves. My fingers flexed before they grasped the heavy fabric. I pulled the drape aside.

He was slumped on the bed, still as a corpse. I climbed onto the covers and shook him. “Warden?”

Nothing.

I sat back on the bed. He’d told me explicitly that I wasn’t allowed to touch him, that I wasn’t supposed to help him if this happened, but this time the damage looked much, much worse. His shirt was drenched. I tried to turn him over, but he was a dead weight. I was checking his breathing when his hand snatched out and caught my wrist.

“You.” His voice was thick and raw. “What are you doing in here?”

“I was—”

“Who saw you come in?”

I held very still. “The night porter.”

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

Warden pushed his weight onto his elbow. His hand—still gloved—went straight to his shoulder. “Since you are here,” he said, “you may as well stay and watch me die. You will enjoy that.”

He was shaking all over. I tried to think of something spiteful to say, but what came out was quite different: “What happened to you?”

He didn’t answer. Slowly, I reached for his shirt. His grip on my wrist tightened. “You need to air the wounds,” I said.

“I am aware of that.”

“So do it.”

“Do not tell me what to do. I may be dying, but I am not subject to your orders. You are subject to mine.”

“What are your orders?”

“To let me die in peace.”

But the order lacked force. I shoved his gloved hand from his shoulder, revealing a mess of chewed flesh.

Buzzer.

His eyes flared up as if some volatile chemical had reacted inside them. For a moment I thought he would kill me. My spirit strained against my mind, bursting to attack.

Then his fingers loosened around my wrist. I scanned his face. “Get me water.” His voice was barely audible. “And—and salt. Look in the cabinet.”

I didn’t have much choice but to do it. With his eyes on my back, I unlocked the curio cabinet and pulled open the doors. I took out a heartwood salt cellar, a golden bowl, and a flagon of water, along with a stack of linen. Warden tore open the ties at the top of his shirt. His chest was slick with sweat.

“There is a pair of gloves in the drawer,” he said, nodding to the writing table. “Put them on.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I clenched my jaw, but I did as he said.

In the drawer, beside the gloves, his black-handled blade lay sheathed and clean. The sight of it gave me pause. I turned my back to him and pulled on the gloves. I wouldn’t even leave a fingerprint. I used my thumb to push the blade from its sheath.

“I would not try it.”

The sound of his voice made me stop.

“Rephaim die very hard,” he said softly. “If you buried that blade in my heart, it would not stop beating.”

The silence thickened. “I don’t believe you,” I said. “I could gut you. You’re too weak to run.”

“If you wish to take the risk, then be my guest. But ask yourself this: why do we allow red-jackets to carry weapons? If your weapons could kill us, why would we be so foolish as to arm our prisoners?” His eyes scalded my back. “Many have tried. They are not here now.”

A cold tingling started along the back of my arm. I returned the knife to the drawer. “I don’t see why I should help you,” I said. “You weren’t exactly grateful last time.”

“I will forget that you were going to kill me.”

The grandfather clock ticked with my pulse. Finally, I looked over my shoulder. He looked back at me, the light ebbing from his eyes.

I crossed the room, slowly, and placed the items on the nightstand. “What did this?” I said.

“You know.” Warden pressed his back against the headboard, his jaw rigid. “You did the research.”

“Emite.”

“Yes.”

The confirmation chilled my blood. Working in silence, I mixed the salt and water in the bowl. Warden watched me. Once I’d soaked and wrung out a square of linen, I leaned across to his right shoulder. The sight and smell of the wound made me jerk back.

“This is necrotic,” I said.

The wound had darkened to a rotten, oozing gray. His skin was hot as coal. I guessed his temperature was probably around twice what it should be in humans, so hot I could feel it through the gloves. The flesh around the bite was beginning to die. What I needed was an antipyretic. I didn’t have any quinine, which was what Nick usually used to crank down our temperatures. It was easy to sneak out of oxygen bars—they used it for fluorescence—but I doubted I could find it here. Saline and good luck would have to do.

I squeezed some water into the wound. The muscles in his arm hardened, and the tendons of his hand pushed out.

“Sorry,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. He wasn’t sorry when he watched me get branded, or when Seb died. He wasn’t sorry for anything.

“Speak,” he said.

I looked at him. “What?”

“I am in pain. Some idle distraction would be helpful.”

“Like you’re interested in anything I say.” The words came out before I could stop them.

“I am,” he said. He was pretty damn calm, considering his condition. “I am interested to know about the person with whom I share quarters. I know you are a murderer”—I tensed—“but there must be more to you than that. If not, I have made a very poor choice in claiming you.”

“I never asked you to claim me.”

“Yet I did.”

I kept sluicing away at the wound, pressing a little too hard. I saw no reason to be gentle with him.

“I was born in Ireland,” I said, “in a town called Clonmel. My mother was English. She ran away from Scion.”

He nodded, barely. I continued: “I lived with my father and grandparents in the Golden Vale, in the southern dairy-farming district. It was beautiful there. Not like Scion citadels.” I wrung out the linen, soaked it again. “But then Abel Mayfield got greedy. He wanted Dublin. That was when the Molly Riots started. Mayfield’s Massacre.”

“Mayfield,” Warden said, looking at the window. “Yes, I remember him. An unpleasant character.”

“You met him?”

“I have met every Scion leader since 1859.”

“But that would make you at least two hundred years old.”

“Yes.”

I tried not to falter in my work.

“We thought we were safe,” I said, “but in the end, the violence spread south. We had to leave.”

“What happened to your mother?” Warden kept his eyes on mine. “Was she left behind?”

“She died. Placental abruption.” I sat back. “Where’s the next bite?”

He pulled open his shirt. The wound ripped down his chest. I couldn’t tell if it was teeth or claws or something else that had made it. His muscles locked when I dabbed water on the torn skin. “Continue,” he said.

So I wasn’t such a boring human. “We moved to London when I was eight,” I said.

“Out of choice?”

“No. My father was conscripted by SciSORS that year.” I took his silence to mean that he didn’t know the shorthand. “Scion: Special Organization for Research and Science.”

“I know it. Why was he conscripted?”

“He was a forensic pathologist. Used to do lots of work for the Gardaí. Scion told him to find a scientific explanation for why people become clairvoyant. And why spirits linger after death.” I sounded bitter, even to my own ears. “He thinks it’s an illness. He thinks it can be cured.”

“Then he cannot sense your clairvoyance.”

“He’s amaurotic. How could he?”

He didn’t comment. “Did you have your gift from birth?”

“Not fully. I could sense auras and spirits from when I was very small. Then I was touched by a poltergeist.” I sat back to wipe my brow. “How long do you have left?”

“I am uncertain of that. Salt staves off the inevitable, but not for long.” He was quite blasé about this. “When did you develop the ability to dislocate your spirit?”

The talking was keeping me calm. I decided to be truthful, if only because he probably knew everything about me. Nashira had known I was from Ireland; they must have all sorts of records. He might be testing me, seeing if I’d lie to him.

“After the poltergeist touched me, I started having the same dream—at least, I thought it was a dream.” I emptied some water over his shoulder. “I dreamed of a field of flowers. The further I ran through the field, the darker it became. Every night I would go a little further, until one day I was at the very edge and I jumped, and then I was falling.” I set to work on the wound. “I was falling into the æther, falling out of my body. I woke up in the ambulance. My father said I’d sleepwalked into the living room, then just stopped breathing. They said I must have fallen into a coma.”

“But you survived.”

“Yes. And I wasn’t brain damaged. Brain hypoxia is a risk of my . . . condition,” I said. I didn’t like telling him about myself, but I supposed it was better that he knew. If he forced me into the æther for too long without life support, my brain would end up damaged beyond repair. “I was lucky.”

Warden watched as I cleaned his shoulder wound. “That would suggest to me that you do not enter the æther very often, for safety,” he said, “but you seem familiar with it.”

“Instinct.” I looked away from his eyes. “Your fever won’t break without medicine.”

In a sense I wasn’t lying. My gift was instinctive, but I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d been nurtured and trained by a mime-lord who’d kept me wired on life support.

“The poltergeist,” he said. “Did it leave scars?”

I took off one glove and held out my left hand. He looked down at the marks. I let him. It was unusual for a developing voyant to be so violently exposed to the æther.

“I guess there was already a break in me, something that let the æther in,” I said. “The ’geist just . . . flayed me open.”

“Is that how you see it?” he said. “The æther invading you?”

“How do you see it?”

“I make no comment on my own opinion. But many clairvoyants see themselves as invading the æther, not the other way around. They see it as disturbing the dead.” He didn’t wait for a response. “I have seen this happen before. Children are vulnerable to sudden changes in their clairvoyance. If they are exposed to the æther before their aura has properly developed, it can become unstable.”

I pulled my hand back. “I’m not unstable.”

“Your gift is.”

I couldn’t argue. I’d already killed with my spirit. If that wasn’t unstable, I didn’t know what was.

“There is a type of necrosis in my wounds,” Warden stated, “but it only affects Rephaim. The human body is able to fight it.” I waited for the point. “Rephaite necrosis can be destroyed by human blood. Provided their bloodstream is not compromised, a human can survive a bite.” He indicated my wrist. “Around a pint of your blood would save my life.”

My throat tightened. “You want to drink my blood.”

“Yes.”

“What are you, a vampire?”

“I would never have thought a Scion denizen would have read about vampires.”

I tensed. Shoot. Only a high-up syndicate member would have access to literature that included vampires, or any other supernatural creature. In my case it was a penny dreadful, The Vamps of Vauxhall, written by an anonymous medium from Grub Street. He spun all sorts of stories to make up for the lack of interesting literature available from Scion, using folk tales from the world beyond. His tales had such titles as Tea with a Tasser and The Fay Fiasco. The same writer had knocked out a few decent potboilers about voyants, like The Mysteries of Jacob’s Island. Now I wished I’d never read them.

Warden seemed to take my silence as a symptom of disquiet. “I am not a vampire, nor anything else you might have read about,” he said. “I do not feed on flesh or blood. It gives me no pleasure to ask for it. But I am dying, and it so happens that your blood—on this occasion, given the nature of my wounds—can restore me.”

“You don’t look or sound like you’re dying.”

“Trust me. I am.”

I didn’t want to know how they’d found out that human blood could combat this infection. I didn’t even know if it was true.

“Why should I trust you?” I said.

“Because I saved you the humiliation of having to perform in the Overseer’s troupe of fools. If you require one reason.”

“What if I need two?”

“I will owe you a favor.”

“Any favor?”

“Anything but your freedom.”

The word died on my lips. He’d anticipated my request. I should have known freedom was too much to ask—but a favor from him might be invaluable.

I picked up a shard of glass from the floor, part of a vial, and I sliced across my wrist. When I offered it, he narrowed his eyes.

“Take it,” I said. “Before I change my mind.”

Warden looked at me for a long time, assessing my face. Then he took my wrist and pulled it against his mouth.

His tongue skimmed over the open wound. There was a slight pressure as his lips closed over it, as he squeezed my arm to force out blood. His throat throbbed as he drank. He settled into a steady cadence. There was no sudden bloodlust, no frenzy. He was treating this as a medical procedure: clinical, detached, nothing more or less.

When he let go of my wrist, I sat back on the bed. Too fast. Warden guided me to the pillows. “Slowly.”

He walked to the bathroom, strong again already. When he returned, he was carrying a glass of cold water. He slid an arm under my back and lifted me into a sitting position, holding me in the crook of his elbow. I drank. It had been sweetened.

“Does Nashira know about this?” I said.

His expression darkened.

“She may question you about my absences. And my injuries,” he said.

“So she doesn’t know.”

No reply. He propped me up on some heavy velvet cushions, making sure my head was supported. The nausea was passing, but my wrist still dripped blood. Seeing it, Warden reached for the nightstand and procured a roll of gauze. My gauze. I recognized the band I’d secured it with. He must have taken it from my backpack. It made me cold to think of it in his hands. It reminded me of the missing pamphlet. Did he have it? Had he read it?

He took my wrist. His massive, gloved hands were gentle, covering the cut in sterile white. His way of thanking me, I supposed. Once the blood had stopped seeping through the gauze, he fixed the dressing with a pin and laid my arm across my chest. I kept my eyes on his face.

“It seems we are at a stalemate,” he said. “You have a talent for finding me in delicate situations. I would expect you to take pleasure in my times of weakness, yet you give me your blood. You clean my wounds. What is your motive?”

“I might need a favor. And I don’t like to watch things die. I’m not like you.”

“You judge too easily.”

“You watched while she killed him.” I should have been afraid to say these words, but I didn’t give a damn. “You watched. You must have known what she was going to do.”

Warden was unresponsive. I turned away from him.

“Perhaps I am a whited sepulchre,” he started.

“A what?”

“A hypocrite. I rather like the turn of phrase,” he said. “Perhaps you think me evil, but I do keep my word. Do you keep yours?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Tonight’s events must never leave this room. I wish to know if you will keep them secret.”

“Why should I?”

“Because it would not help you to tell it.”

“It would get rid of you.”

I thought his eyes changed.

“Yes. It would get rid of me,” he said, “but your life would not improve. If you were not thrown onto the streets, you might be given another keeper, and not all of them are as liberal as I am. By rights I should have beaten you to death for some of the things you have said to me over the past few days. But I understand your value. Others will not.”

I opened my mouth to retort, but the words fizzled out. I could hardly claim that he’d abused me. He’d never so much as raised a finger to me.

“So you want me to keep your secret.” I rubbed my wrist. “And in exchange?”

“I will try to keep you safe. There are an infinite number of ways you could die here, and you do not help yourself avoid them.”

“I have to die eventually. I know what Nashira wants with me. You can’t protect me.”

“Perhaps not, in the end, but I presume you would like to survive your tests.”

“What’s the point?”

“You can prove to her how strong you are. You are no yellow-jacket. You can learn to fight.”

“I don’t want to fight.”

“Yes, you do. It is in your nature to fight.”

The clock in the corner chimed.

Having a Reph ally was wrong. At the same time, it would significantly increase my chances of survival. He could help me get supplies, help me survive. Maybe for long enough to escape this place.

“Fine,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone. But you still owe me a favor.” I held up my wrist. “For the blood.”

Just as I said it, the door burst open. A Reph woman swept into the room: Pleione Sualocin. She looked first at the state of the room, then at me, and finally at Warden. Without a word, she tossed him a Vacutainer. Warden caught it in one hand. I looked at it.

Blood. Human blood. It was labeled with a small gray triangle. And a number: axiv. Amaurotic 14.

Seb.

I looked at Warden. He inclined his head, like we’d shared a little secret. A visceral revulsion overwhelmed me. I stood up, still weak from blood loss, and lurched up the stairs to my prison.