Fiendish (12 page)

He tried to say something, but when he moved his lips, no sound came out.

“It’s okay,” I said.

I said it again and again, in case it worked like a prayer. In case saying it over made it truer.

Under my hand, his cheek was damp and cold. He lay very still, his breath grating out of him like every lungful was work.

I sat on the floor with my legs curled under me, and when he started to shiver so hard that the whole room seemed to be trembling with it, I put my head down close to his and sang the Clementine song. I sang “Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be,” and “Froggy Went A-Courtin’,” and all the silly nonsense songs of my childhood.

My voice was raw and rusty, but the longer I sang, the easier Fisher’s breathing seemed to be. I kept my hand on his forehead, and then when he got fitful, I let him close his fingers around mine instead. The way he held on, so fierce and tight it hurt, was almost enough to reassure me that between us, we could get him through the night.

ISOLA

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
woke up at dawn, still kneeling on the floor. I’d fallen asleep against the mattress with my head cradled on my arms.

Up on the bed, Fisher lay motionless. Sometime in the night, he’d tossed the blankets away and now they were all crumpled up around his feet, bloody and poisonous. His back was an ugly mess, but he was still breathing.

When I reached over to touch his arm, he stirred and sat up. For a minute, neither of us said a word. It gave me a dazed, wobbly feeling, not knowing what to say to a boy after cutting the shirt off his back and spending the night on his floor. Then I figured that even if I’d had lessons and rule books and every advantage in the world, I’d still probably have no idea. It just wasn’t the kind of thing most people came up against.

Fisher winced and leaned sideways against the headboard so his back wouldn’t touch. He was squinting at me. “You kind of look like hell.”

My dress wasn’t as bad as it could have been—mostly just rumpled—but there was a smudge of blood down the front from dragging him back into bed the night before, and the skirt was covered with mud and grass stains.

“It’s not that bad.”

He raised an eyebrow, then reached over to touch my matted hair. His hand was shaky, like even that little bit of effort was too much. “It
is
that bad. You look like you just fought your way out of a bear.”

His fingers skimmed my hair, catching in the ends.

I jerked away, ducking my head. “And you look like you almost died. What am I supposed to do about it?”

He let his hand drop. “Just . . . go home, get cleaned up. You don’t have to walk around wearing my bad day, is all.”

I nodded, pushing myself up on my knees and trying to get a look at his back. The skin around the cuts was purple with bruises, but even in the early light, I could tell that they were fading. Nothing like the way the scrapes on his arm had closed the other night, but enough to make me hope he was getting better.

The blankets were in a bad state though, nearly ruined with blood and the black ooze that had bubbled up from his skin.

“Get up so I can change the bed,” I told him. “You’re not sleeping on that.”

When he stumbled up, I yanked the covers back and dumped them on the floor. There was a bloody splotch in the middle of the mattress, but it was nothing compared to the sheets. I stripped everything, piling it in the middle of the rug.

“Take them down and put them in the wash,” he said, sinking into the rocking chair, leaning forward so it wouldn’t touch his back.

I personally felt that we should probably rather burn them, but didn’t say so, since they weren’t my sheets. Instead, I just bundled them up and hauled them toward the door. “What do I need to do?”

“Run it cold, with lots of bleach.”

I stood in the doorway, trying to work through the steps. There were plenty of things I’d learned in school or knew from watching my mother. This wasn’t one of them. “I’ve never used a washing machine.”

The look he gave me was petrifying. “Put the blankets in. Put in bleach. Turn it to cold. Do not let Isola see you.”

His tone was intensely unhelpful, but I just stuck out my chin at him and carried the blankets into the hall.

Whatever the outside of the Fisher place looked like, his grandmother didn’t have much patience with housekeeping. I had to wind my way through a maze of sagging cardboard boxes and dusty junk just to get to the stairs. Newspapers were stacked in wobbly piles, narrowing the hallway to a foot-wide corridor of trash and spiderwebs.

I carried the blankets down, lugging them out to the washer on the back porch. I piled them in and did just what he’d said, pouring in a slop of bleach and twisting the knob until the machine clanked and water ran into the barrel.

Then, I climbed back up to the attic, where I poked around until I found a creaky linen closet stocked with sheets and a spare quilt. I pulled them down and took them back to the other end of the house, picking my way along the hall.

My hand was on the knob of Fisher’s door when a voice spoke directly behind me. “What in the name of little Lord Jesus do you think you’re up to?”

I turned so fast I lost my balance and bumped one of the towers of junk, sending a whole mess of yellowed newspapers sliding to the floor.

I stood on the landing, with dusty trash all around me, hugging a stack of blankets and facing Fisher’s grandmother.

She was a tiny, wrinkled woman, wearing a flowered housedress with tatty lace all over the front. She looked shriveled up and sort of crumpled, but her voice was as nasty and gleeful as a crow’s.

“What are you doing in my house?” she said, shuffling her way through the scattered newspapers.

She had on ratty bedroom slippers and was scuffing them along the floor. The other day, Shiny had called her a big fancy witch, and I had to admit, she did look spooky.

I faced her, clutching the quilt against my chest. “I was just visiting Fi—Eric. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a bit early to come calling, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, and even to myself I sounded like a fool.

Isola shuffled closer, stepping around a broken carriage clock. She stopped directly in front of me with her arms folded, staring up with dark, narrow eyes. “You spend the night then?”

Even before I could answer, I felt a hot flush of shame. No matter the reason, it wasn’t the kind of thing that nice girls did. “I—”

Isola laughed, dark and gleeful. “Course you did—going around with that one, you’d probably do just about anything. Nothing but trials and trouble since the day he was born.”

The way she said it seemed to imply that I was a not-insignificant part of her trouble. It was an insinuation that was wildly unfair and I was well on my way to setting her straight when she shuffled right up to me, waving a finger under my nose.

“Oh no, don’t you tell
me
he’s any good. Don’t tell me he hasn’t been messing around where he shouldn’t. He
knows
he ain’t supposed to be down in that devil’s hollow, running around like any kind of trashy, crooked folks, letting everyone know his business.”

Her eyes were small and bright and black, fixed on me in a way that made my face hot. Suddenly, it seemed that we were looking at each other with more gravity than was normal for strangers.

“He knows how to stay low,” I said. “He acts just as normal as anyone when he’s in town, and maybe he’s got a powerful gift, but it’s not as though he advertises.”

Isola watched me in a sly, cagey way that made me feel like just by defending Fisher, I was telling her too many things about myself.

Then she narrowed her eyes and leaned so close her voice seemed to burn in the air around me. “Like anyone can keep a secret around here for long. Now, you got about a minute to gather yourself up and get out of my house.”

“How you deal with your grandson is your business,” I said, staring back at her. “But what grudge have you got with me? You don’t even know me.”

The way her face changed then was frightening.

The air in the house felt heavy suddenly, like it was pressing down on me, swallowing me up. We were the only two people in the whole world, chained together, comrades or enemies or something else. Her closeness pushed and picked at me, like she was moving around in my head, but when I tried to push back, there was nothing. Just a feeling like falling headfirst into somewhere black.

Then, without warning, Isola breathed out and backed away. Her face had gone ashy, but she still managed to give me a look that was all vexation.

“Blackwoods,” she said, and nothing after that.

I thought she’d scoff, or say how she didn’t have to know me to want me out from under her roof, but she just waved a hand like she was showing how done she was with the whole business and went shuffling back down the cluttered hall toward the stairs.

The sight of her leaving should have been a sweet relief, but for a minute, I only stood with my back against the door, holding the blankets and feeling trembly all over. The image of the sheet flapped huge and white in my head and I closed my eyes against it until it was still.

When I went back into the bedroom, what I found there was not inclined to improve my state of mind. Fisher had gotten up from the chair and moved to sit on the bare mattress, where he was wrestling his way into a long-sleeved shirt that buttoned up the front and was a dark burgundy color.

I stood over him. “What are you doing?”

He began to do up the buttons with his good hand. “Getting dressed so I can go out there and act normal for her.”

“That’s crazy. Can’t you tell her you’re not feeling well?”

He laughed, shaking his head but not looking at me. His mouth was pale and there were purple smears under his eyes. “I don’t
get
sick. Ain’t you figured that out yet? And what were you thinking, stomping through the house like that? I told you about a million times not to let her see you.”

I stood over him, trying to think up an argument against going around in a sorry condition just to prove his grandmother wrong. “I don’t know if you know this, but you are still
bleeding
.”

Fisher laughed his short, barking laugh. “You have to admit, the shirt’s a handy color.”

The way he kept on in that low, even voice made me want to scream. I turned away and began to straighten up everything I’d knocked onto the floor when I came in through the window, righting the tipped lamp and taking deep breaths as I did it so that I wouldn’t shout at him.

When I was finished, I turned to face him. “Why are you going to all this trouble to keep her from finding out you’re hurt?”

For the first time, he looked at me with something like pain. “Because if I don’t, she’ll make sure I never leave the goddamn house again.”

He was doing his best to look angry, but in the middle his voice broke, like he was begging for something I didn’t understand.

I stared at him. His grandmother might be a little terrifying—or a lot, even—but then, so was he. Even slumped over on the edge of his bed, he looked like something to be reckoned with. “You really think she could keep you shut up here if you wanted to leave?”

He started to shrug, then winced when the shirt pressed against his back. “She’s done it before.”

He said it like it didn’t matter much, but his mouth looked pretty grim.

I nodded. The light around him was wavering and agitated, and I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “You have to move so I can make the bed.”

As soon as he was on his feet, the room suddenly seemed much too small. The ceiling was so low it almost brushed the top of his head, and I could see the way the walls seemed to press in around him, like he was trapped just as well and truly as I had been.

“You can’t go down there,” I said, and I said it kindly, even though his invincible act was getting a little tired. “I understand you want to, but you can’t because if you try, you’re going to go flat on your face again. You need to rest.”

Fisher let his breath out like he was sagging under something too heavy to bear. No matter how hard he tried to look all right, his bad arm kept wanting to draw up against his chest. His hands were shaking. Finally, he sank into the rocking chair and slumped forward. The way he bowed his head seemed so hopeless and so private that after a second, I looked away and busied myself remaking the bed.

“Before you do that with the blankets and everything,” he said behind me, “you need to flip the mattress.”

I struggled with the edge of the pillow top, but it didn’t budge. “It’s too heavy.”

“Just pick up the corner and get your knee under it.” Then he muttered something else, but he said it at the floor. It sounded like,
How do people survive?

I turned around, fully meaning to tell him exactly how we survived and what he could do about it. But all my temper died as soon as I looked at him, the pale cast of his face, a few dark flowers of blood already seeping through his shirt. It was painfully apparent, suddenly, that all his snarling and glaring was because he didn’t know how to be hurt. That faced with any of the normal dangers of the world, he didn’t even have to think about it, because he could always heal. And he acted like that made him so invincible, or like he didn’t need anything, when the truth was, he’d come to depend on something that wasn’t always going to save him.

I wrestled the mattress onto its edge, but it gave me the devil trying to get it turned around under the sloping ceiling. It thumped on the floor and I waited, out of breath, for Fisher to tell me not to make so much noise, but he just sat there, looking sick and half-asleep.

I made up the bed with fresh sheets, tucking in the corners without speaking to him. His way of being so stupidly cool was maddening.

When he sank onto the mattress though, his jaw was hard, like he was trying not to cry out and I relented a little.

“Can you sleep, do you think?”

He nodded and eased himself down on top of the covers, resting on his side.

“Can I leave you?”

“You can do whatever you want.”

I stood over him for what felt like a very long time, arms folded, lips pressed together. “I’m not
fighting
you,” I said finally. “So can you just be decent with me for two seconds?”

Fisher closed his eyes and looked away, and I knew then that he couldn’t. He was always fighting everyone.