Fiendish (11 page)

He was hurting bad, but I didn’t know how to stop it or what to do.

Once when I was little, we’d had a redbone dog who’d stepped on a piece of glass and sliced the bottom of her foot. My mama had boiled a needle and sewn it up, but the cut got infected anyway, and when I went to touch it, the skin of our dog’s foot had been hot and tight. She’d tried to bite me, even though she’d known me since I was a baby. My mama told me that when things were hurting, sometimes it made them wild.

It seemed to me now that this was true of Fisher, that he might be wild. More wild than he was on a daily basis, anyway. He leaned forward again, holding his arm against his chest, breathing in long, trembling gasps.

When I reached for him, he stepped back like I’d slapped him, stumbling over his own feet.

“Please—” My voice sounded shaky and high-pitched. “Please, you’re not okay. Just let me
help
you.”

“Help with what?” he whispered, keeping his face turned away. “How are you going to help?”

I hugged myself, trying to sound sensible and like I had some sort of command over the situation. “Well you can’t take care of yourself. You can barely walk.”

He straightened, still holding his arm against his chest. “I’m cool, just dizzy for a second. Come on. I need to get home, mop up.”

He hauled himself over the fence without hesitating, and I had an idea that maybe I’d been wrong, that maybe he didn’t need a doctor, didn’t need my help or anything at all. Then he staggered and went pitching face-first into the road.

I chucked the suitcase down in the weeds and scrambled over after him. He was on his hands and knees, making a hoarse, moaning noise by the time I got there.

“Are you okay?” When I said it, I didn’t sound like myself—not even like my new self with the rough, scratchy voice. The words were thin and shrill. I sounded scared.

Every time I blinked, I saw the shape of him printed inside my eyelids, covered in twists of green and black squirming through a red fog.

This time, he bowed his head and let me reach for him. When I slipped myself under his good arm, he slumped against me, leaning what felt like his whole giant weight on my shoulder. For a second, I thought we were both going to lose our balance and fall into the road or the ditch, but I held him up, trying not to let the curve of my arm touch the places on his back where he was torn up the worst. The poisonous smell of the hell dogs burned my nose, but I didn’t lean away.

I left the suitcase where it lay, half-hidden in the pasture.

The walk into town took a long time—the kind of time where it’s hard to know how much is passing, because every step felt like an hour, and I knew without him ever saying so that it hurt just to keep breathing.

Broom Street, where he lived, was as wide as a river, lined with oaks and sycamore trees. The pavement was less worn than the roads lower down, and the houses were nicer than anywhere else.

At the very end of it, a white house rose out of the dark, three stories tall and situated atop a little hill. It was surrounded by slippery elms and giant oaks, and the slopes of the roof were wickedly steep. It looked grand, but uneasy—the kind of house where a witch would live.

As I stepped onto the paving-stone path that led to the porch, we were met by the frantic, tooth-jarring sound of dogs baying. Then a whole pack of them came pouring around the side of the house

“Get back,” Fisher muttered. “Get away.”

The dogs yelped and whined, but when he clucked his tongue at them, they all ducked their heads and slunk back toward the porch.

We stumbled up into his yard with our arms around each other and our legs shaking. The whole space around the front door was covered in china rabbits and angels, flocks of tin chickens and gnomes that sat around the front walk like a bunch of fairy-tale creatures.

On the porch, I put my hand on Fisher’s arm and peered up at him, trying to get a look at his face. In the yellow splash of the porch light, his skin was chalky, and then he jerked away, turning so I couldn’t see his eyes.

“I’m coming in with you,” I said, reaching around him for the door.

“No.” He moved to cut me off, keeping his back to me. “I’m fine. Just go home.”

I stood on the porch and waited to find out if he meant it. Or more likely, if he’d fall or faint or stumble. All I knew was that if the same drawn, stoic look had been on my face, it would have meant that I was scared. That I was hopeless and hurt and didn’t want to be alone. The way Fisher wore it, though, he made it seem like nothing.

“You can
not
come in,” he said again. “There’s nothing you can do to help, and if my grandma sees you, she will lose her mind.”

Then he went inside and shut the door.

PART III

BREATH

DIRT MAGIC

CHAPTER TWELVE

A
ny other place, any other night, I might have let it go—sat down to wait, or just gone home. Fisher was hurt too badly to leave him, though, no matter what he said, and I stood on the lawn under the oak trees, trying to know what to do.

Overhead, the sky was black. The stars were hazy, a million miles off, and the sounds of night birds were low and mournful, making my skin crawl.

All around me in the bushes, things were rustling. I stood hugging myself, gripped by a chilly conviction that the hell dogs or the burning woman or some other wicked, awful creature from the hollow had gotten out and followed us into the world.

After so long it seemed like forever, a light came on at the top of the house. I stood hugging my elbows, looking up at that bright yellow square. All the other windows were dark.

I considered climbing the porch, knocking on the door, and asking his grandmother to let me see him. Then I remembered the pencil-drawn face we’d come across out in the woods, with its stone-black eyes and its ruinous mouth. If Isola in real life was half as grim as in the drawing, she might come down to see who was rude enough to call at this hour, but she was not going to be likely to let me in.

No, the only thing left to me was that one little window and that one burning light. I could feel him there, his nearness trembling in the air around me. He was in that attic room, with the window open and the curtains back, the lamp balanced on the sill like a signal flame.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and called up as softly as I could, “Fisher?” There was no answer and I called louder. “Fisher, are you awake?”

I waited with my head cocked, listening, more and more agitated when no one called back.

“
Fisher!
” I whispered, dropping to my hands and knees and feeling around in the dirt for something to throw.

I was prying a cherry-sized rock out of the ground under the oak trees when the dogs came pouring around the corner of the house again. I froze on my hands and knees and held as still as I could, trying not to do anything that might make them start barking. They surged around me, snuffling and whining against my face.

“Shh.” I waved a hand at them, but they just wriggled and bounced at me, hanging their heads and grinning nervously. “Shh, get away!”

They didn’t bay or bark, but their whimpers were sharp, and they pressed close to me, snuffling into my hair. I tried to make myself smaller, certain that at any moment, Fisher’s grandma was going to hear the commotion and come out to find me crouching in the yard.

Finally, whispering all the worst words I knew, I pushed them away and got to my feet, retreating over to one of the big oaks.

I’d always been able to see in sharpened ways—hidden animals and dropped buttons and all the things that other people missed. My mother had called it second sight, but I thought now that maybe it was only first sight, but with better vision.

Since the moment I’d gotten out of the cellar, though, there was no denying that it was getting stronger. Now the second face of the world was everywhere, in the nervous wriggling of Fisher’s dogs and the sap that ran like blood inside the trees. Leaves were moving in tiny shivers, rustling in the air, and for the first time, I had an inkling of what my mama must have always known. The power of the dirt was not in bewitching the world or forcing things to grow, but just in reading the truth of living things and being able to give them what they needed. Everything in the yard seemed to be calling for Fisher.

I stood against the trunk of the oak with my arms wrapped around it. The very bark seemed to hum. Then I boosted myself up and began to climb.

At the top of the tree, a branch ran along the edge of the roof and I stepped out over the rain gutter and onto the steep pitch of the shingles. I crawled across to the window and looked into a long attic room.

Fisher’s bed was tucked under the slant of the ceiling. He lay on his side, on top of the bedclothes, with his face turned toward the wall.

The state of his back was terrible in the lamplight. The yellow glow made his bruised skin look ten times worse, and for a second, I just sat on the roof in the shadow of the tree, staring at how the blood had soaked through the makeshift bandages and was dripping onto the blankets.

“Hey.” I tapped the screen. “Fisher.”

He didn’t move.

I tried to pry the screen out of the frame but couldn’t get my fingers in the gap. He was lying so still that it scared me, and I fumbled in my pocket for the screwdriver. The end of it was dirty from everything that had happened down in the hollow, and not sharp, but I stabbed it through the screen, ripping a jagged hole all the way down.

Then I peeled back the edges and slid in headfirst, hitting the floor with a thunk. My foot got caught in the ruined screen and I landed hard on the rug, taking the lamp with me. It rolled wildly, so that the light danced over the walls and the peaked ceiling.

On the bed, Fisher raised himself onto his elbows and stared dimly around the room. When he saw me sprawled on my stomach with my feet hanging out the window, his eyes cleared and he tried to stand, but only succeeded in falling out of bed. The thump he made was teeth rattling and he hit the rug with most of his weight on his elbows, rolling sideways. When his shoulder touched the floorboards, he made a short, painful noise.

With a little cry, I yanked my feet in through the window, taking half the screen with me, and scrambled across the floor, waving him to stay still. “No, no, no, stay there, stay there.”

But he was already trying to get up. He pushed himself onto his knees, then lost his balance and fell against the bed frame. With a mighty effort, I dragged him up, supporting his dead weight with my arms around his chest. As soon as I touched him, I could feel the heat coming off his body, burning through my shirt. The smell of the hell dogs was all over everything.

I held my breath and wrestled him back into bed. He hit the mattress with a thump and a low, painful sound that caught in his throat. I knelt beside him and leaned over.

He was sweating, his skin shining and waxy white. The fallen lamp threw oblong rings of light and shadow on the ceiling. His hair stuck to his forehead and the pillowcase was damp.

He rolled his head to look at me and blinked like he was trying to focus. “Shit,” he said thickly. “Get out.”

“You are not in charge of this anymore,” I said, and I meant every word. “You told me you were okay, and it’s not true, so now I’m in charge, because otherwise, I’m scared you might die.”

Saying it seemed worse than thinking it. I had soaked up my mother’s deep abiding belief that if you said a thing, it might come true, and as soon as it was out, I wanted to take it back.

Fisher just shook his head, squinting at me in the lamplight. “I mean it. You have to leave before she hears you.”

“Who?” I said, leaning closer.

“Who do you think? That harpy, Isola.”

“Your grandmother? You’re talking that way about your
grandmother
?”

“That doesn’t stop her from being a raging bitch.” He pushed himself up on his elbow and looking blearily around the room. “You wrecked my screen.”

“I know—I’m sorry.” I touched his shoulder, trying to push him back onto the mattress. His skin was dangerously hot. “I’ll find a way to fix it later, but for right now, just lie back down.”

Fisher winced and lay back, easing himself onto his good shoulder. There was a muscle in his jaw that wouldn’t quit fluttering. While the rest of his face might have passed for furious, that muscle twitched and shuddered, like he was trying not to let me see how much the whole thing hurt.

I sat with my back against the side of the bed and hugged my knees, looking around his room.

From the outside, the Fisher house looked big and clean, but Fisher’s bedroom was a cramped affair, all old spindle furniture and yellowing wallpaper and floorboards that needed a coat of varnish. It was a long, slope-ceilinged room, with two little gable windows and a plank floor with an old Persian rug laid out in the middle.

On the bed, he made a low groaning noise and I pushed myself up from the floor and knelt over him again. He lay staring at the wall, an empty, far-off look on his face, like he was trying to make something come clear, but I could see that his eyes had already slid out of focus.

He looked miserable, and I wondered if he didn’t know that I was looking or if he was just too hurt to care anymore. The way he dug his teeth into his lip made me feel wrong for watching him and so I busied myself with undoing the ruined bandages.

“This is going to hurt,” I said to him as I worked at the knots. I meant it to sound brave, but my hands were shaking. “You might want to get ready.”

He jerked away, looking back over his shoulder at me. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to look at the damage. Now hold still.”

I began to pick apart the strips of torn sheet. They were stuck with blood and with the black mess from the hell dogs’ teeth. The skin underneath was raw and pitted, like he’d been splashed with frying oil or water hot enough to burn, but when the poison touched my own hands—same as when it had jetted all over my arms from the hell dog’s punctured neck—nothing happened. It didn’t hurt at all.

Fisher sucked in his breath, but held still as I peeled back the cloth.

“Goddamn,” he whispered. His voice sounded so dry and cracked I could barely hear it.

All down his back, the cuts lay open like mouths, pale at the edges and bright, burning red in the center. Around them, the tarry poison was like nothing I’d ever seen, oozing like a living thing, eating away at his skin. Every time one of the gashes tried to knit itself closed, the poison foamed up and the wounds broke open again. The tattoo of the tower looked violently black against his skin.

“Okay.” I said it under my breath like I was talking to myself, and stared down at his savaged back. “Okay.”

I swallowed hard and closed my eyes, and when I did, I could see what was working on him, like I was seeing the very nature of his blood. His body wanted to heal, to stitch itself back together, but the poison was in him, black as oil, chewing up everything. When I leaned close, I could hear the sound of his heart sucking it through his veins. If there was any hope of his getting better, it would have to come out.

With a fear so big I could hardly breathe, I laid my hands against his back and held them there, feeling the heat shining off him. My skull hurt, pounding behind my eyes. I pressed down harder, pressed until my whole skin seemed to hum, and when I finally sat back, the poison came bubbling up out of the cuts like water out of the ground.

I grabbed the corner of the blanket and started cleaning off his back, not caring that the stuff was soaking into the sheets, stinking like the devil, only caring that it wasn’t inside him anymore.

But even being utterly sure that drawing it out was maybe the
only
thing that could save him, I felt a needle of fear at what I had done. There was a lot more to what I was than just being able to see how things worked. This was closer to defying the laws of nature. The fiend had said to keep my craft low and this was so far from low it was disgraceful, even if there was no one else around to see it. This was absolute proof, as if any was needed, that I was something powerfully not right.

Every time I wiped his back, his breath caught like he was trying not to yell out loud. The whole room seemed to flicker and pulse. It was a blessed relief when the black ooze gave way to real, untainted red and when I wiped it away, all that was left were the raw, clean edges of the cuts. He might be hurt, and hurt bad, but at least the poison was out.

There were about a hundred things I knew I should be doing—not from schooling or memory, but just from common sense. Fisher probably shouldn’t be lying in this hot, hot room with no air, on a lumpy pile of blankets, and it was probably a bad thing, how his lips were turning blue.

When I touched his arm, the pure shock of it made me pull my hand back. I’d expected he’d still be feverish, but his skin was slippery and freezing.

The change had come over him so fast I could barely believe it. He tried to say something, but his teeth were knocking together. He was shivering so hard that the whole bed rattled. Finally, he quit trying and squeezed his eyes shut.

The room was devilishly hot, the way top-floor rooms always got in summer. My dress was sticking to me and it seemed impossible that his skin could have gone so cold in just a few minutes.

I got up on the bed with him and rubbed his hands between mine, trying to get them warm, but there was nothing I could do. In less than ten minutes, he’d gone icy to the touch, so see-through and chalky his skin was like the skin inside an egg.

“This is bad,” I said, and I was saying it half to myself. “This is really bad.”

“I’m just cold,” he said in a mushy whisper, running his words together. “It’s fine. I’m just cold.”

“Here, get under the covers.” I yanked on the quilt, trying to drag it out from under him.

He struggled onto his elbows, clumsier than before. I helped him under the blankets, careful of the gashes that crisscrossed his back, but even as he settled onto his stomach, it was clear the pain was too much to take. For one trembling instant, the whole room seemed to glow a bright, singing red. His cheek thumped hard onto the pillow and he made the smallest, softest noise, barely a noise at all.

When I leaned my elbows on the mattress, he turned toward me. His expression was agonized and I remembered how he’d looked when I’d seen his face for the first time, only a day ago. It was shocking that a person could change so completely in a single day. Last night in the zoo, he’d seemed nearly electric, strong and sure and full of life, but now he was horribly bloodless. I could see his pulse beating faintly down the side of his neck.

I leaned over him and touched his cheek, which was rougher than it looked, and faintly freckled. Now the freckles stood out like marks on paper, and I sat beside him, running my fingers along his cheekbone, trying to smooth out the pain from around his eyes.