30. Chapter 30

30

A nother knot of guilt and disappointment mixed with the heavy weight of what she might have to do if this didn’t turn out in her favor. The concoction settled heavily in Rebecca’s gut as she struggled up the stairs, joined by her growing dread and the utter uselessness creeping through her awareness like a growing bruise.

Maybe she got lucky ? Was that really what it had come to now?

Rebecca had just gotten rid of the biggest obstacle Shade had faced for the last decade or longer. In self-defense. And this old daraku beside her thought she only had a halfway decent chance of being thanked for it instead of punished?

Luck itself had never been in Rebecca Bloodshadow’s cards. She’d never depended on luck alone, and she certainly couldn’t start now.

“So how is this supposed to work, exactly?” she asked, her arm still around Zida’s shoulders.. “I sit in on some kinda trial or something? Because everyone already saw what happened…”

“It’s not about what happened, elf,” Zida replied, lugging Rebecca forward with renewed energy to reach the top of the stairs. “Nobody’s arguing that part. All that matters now is what’s going to happen.”

“You can’t just”—Rebecca paused at the last step to suck in a raw gasp of air before forcing herself to continue—“tell me what’s gonna happen?”

“Wish I knew. But for your sake, I sincerely hope these knuckleheads who’ve been taking orders from the wrong guy this whole time haven’t completely lost all sense of who they are and to whom they’re truly responsible.”

They emerged from the staircase with a stumbling shuffle before Rebecca barked out a weak laugh. “Is that your euphemism for saying you hope Aldous hasn’t rubbed off on anyone?”

The old woman studied Rebecca’s profile and let out a sharp, terse cackle. “We’re about to find out, aren’t we? ”

Rebecca shook her head. “I can’t…sit in on something like that. If everyone else wants a trial, that’s fine, but…I mean, look at me. I’m—”

Another wave of dizziness overwhelmed her. Rebecca swayed on her feet with her arm still around the old healer’s shoulders.

Zida twisted halfway around to look down the staircase behind them and sighed. “Puts me in one hell of a position…”

“Sure,” Rebecca murmured and rolled her eyes. “What an inconvenience for you .”

“We don’t have a whole lot of time before the others get up here to get things rolling. Certainly not enough time for me to tend to you the way I’d like, especially after what you just got yourself into today.”

“So this trial supersedes making sure I don’t die?” Rebecca grumbled.

Zida snorted as she ushered Rebecca through the compound’s ground floor as quickly as both their shuffling footsteps could manage. “You’re not dying, elf. At least, not right now, anyway. I can’t give you a guarantee one way or the other, but something tells me you’d rather not have me take a look at you where everyone and their mama can see it.”

“Privacy does have its perks,” Rebecca panted, focused mostly on putting one foot in front of the other without falling over and dragging the old healer with her.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t still do my job,” Zida continued. “I took an oath, and I mean to keep it. If you survive the rest of this, kid, I’ll do whatever I can for you after today. But for now…”

She rummaged through her fanny pack again, slowing them down even more while they hobbled through the compound together.

Rebecca could hardly keep her eyes open. When the healer produced another seemingly empty vial from her fanny pack and tipped it sideways toward Rebecca with her free hand, though, an odd mixture of longing and disgust flared through the Bloodshadow Elf.

Rebecca eyed the vial, fighting with two completely opposite urges for what to do with this next round of emergency medicine. That in and of itself was a red flag. “Are you trying to get me hooked on some shit I can’t even see?”

“I’m trying to save your life,” Zida snapped. “Unless you’d rather not and take your chances on your own.”

With a sigh, Rebecca reached toward the vial, and only when she couldn’t close her fingers around it the first time did she realize she was already seeing double. Sometimes triple. It seemed a better idea to wait until her vision cleared a little.

“If I wanted to die, you don’t think I could’ve just given up back there with the fucking changeling on top of me? ”

“Huh.” Zida pursed her lips, her wrinkled face scrunching in on itself. “Well, there’s dying , and then there’s dying with an audience. Now, I can’t speak to the first one, but you did already prove the second isn’t quite your cup of tea.”

A weak bitter laugh escaped Rebecca through an equally weak exhale. “Is that all I proved down there?”

“Pretty much. That and the fact that you know how to think on your feet while being stabbed in the back. You clearly got more going for you than you let on at first glance.”

For the first time since being hauled to her feet again, Rebecca managed to successfully turn and look at Zida’s face head-on without feeling like her body was about to fall apart. “More going for me than I let on?”

The old healer clicked her tongue. “I never said I knew what it was. Not my job to find out, either.”

“Just…take me to…the infirmary,” Rebecca muttered, wheezing for abnormally long moments between each word as she fought to catch her breath. Even with Zida supporting a disturbingly large percentage of Rebecca’s weight, walking across the compound was now almost too much.

“Take this first.” Zida wiggled the vial under Rebecca’s nose again. “We can do both. And we should. That’s my professional recommendation. Take this, and I can guarantee you’ll have your strength back and your wits about you. Not forever, but it’ll get you through what comes next. You sure as hell won’t be hobbling around up here like you’re older than I am. So how about it? Here, I’ll even open it for you.”

“Get me to a bed,” Rebecca snarled.

Whether it was the strident warning in her voice or Zida’s dedication to her oath as a healer, the old woman finally seemed to take Rebecca’s request-turned-command a lot more seriously now.

Her wrinkled lips puckered profusely beneath a darkening scowl, but then she veered away from the entrance into the common room and continued down the perimeter hallway leading to the infirmary instead.

“Doesn’t matter what my job is,” she grumbled. “ Everybody thinks they’re an expert.”

As they hurried down the corridor, the growing noise of Shade’s members emerging from the garage grew louder behind them. Rebecca gave up trying to note their progress through the building until Zida came to an abrupt stop with a hissing snarl and snapped Rebecca’s attention back into focus.

She’d completely forgotten about the pile of debris in the hallway and the ruined homunculus lying in pieces on top of that pile.

The very same construction that had put her in this state .

“Well Hakari slap me sideways.” Zida gaped at the proof of Rebecca’s battle with the first homunculus just outside the infirmary doors.

“I…told you I…took care of…it,” Rebecca panted.

The healer looked directly up at her with wide eyes and snorted. “I bet you did. And now you wanna remind me you’re an elf of your word, eh?”

Rebecca couldn’t even fake a smile. “Aren’t we all?”

“Oh no. No, no, no. I’m not falling for that trap. Let’s go.” Zida hauled Rebecca along with her, tsking and shaking her head.

Had that been a jab at Elves in general, or some kind of backhanded compliment aimed at Rebecca specifically?

Not that it was an important detail at the moment, given the urgency of her current state, but it was an interesting little factoid to tuck away in her mind for later.

If there was a later.

She couldn’t let herself think that way. This wasn’t the first time Rebecca had faced a personal appointment with death, though damn if this one didn’t feel a lot more urgent than all the others. And terribly timed.

As soon as they stumbled together across the threshold of the open infirmary door, Rebecca practically threw herself away from the old healer to stumble toward the closest bed. It was little more than a thin cot on wheels and certainly wasn’t sturdy enough to hold Rebecca’s entire weight collapsing against it.

Which she learned only after collapsing against the bed and sending the thing crashing into the wall and two wheeled carts shoved against each other on the other side of it.

Metal instruments, glass vials and jars, and a clay pot of some kind of salve clanked and jingled against each other while she scrambled to right herself on the bed.

Her legs wouldn’t hold her up anymore, the infirmary bed on wheels wouldn’t fucking hold still, and if she’d seen herself dancing with the bed and Zida’s supplies like this, bumbling around like a useless moron, she would’ve called for someone to come put this poor creature out of her misery for good.

Fortunately, that was against the healer’s oath.

She hoped.

At the sound of all the commotion, Zida whirled around to face her from the other side of the room and let out the closest thing to a shriek that had ever emerged from the old daraku’s mouth. “What in the blue eye of Akskashirim do you think you’re doing?”

Rebecca finally got the bed steadied against the wall—simply because she’d pinned it there with her full weight—and sighed. “I told you I needed a bed.”

“But I didn’t say shit about needing to redecorate. Hold still.”

Before what little remained of Rebecca’s strength failed her completely, Zida was at her side, holding the bed steady with one hand as she offered the elf support up onto the laughably thin mattress with the other.

“I’ll say it again, elf. I’ve got more of those vials, and until I can figure out what happened to you and how to fix it, that might be our best.”

“No.” Rebecca grunted, got herself mostly situated in a lopsided position on the bed with her back propped against the elevated head of the mattress, and thumped her head back against it, barely feeling the hardness of the thin mattress. “Just give me a minute. I just need…some rest. Then I’ll be fine.”

Zida folded her arms and clicked her tongue. “Are you always this impossible?”

“Only when I’m dying.” She’d meant it as a joke, a way to lighten the urgent mood a little, but another coughing fit overtook her. When it lasted longer than it should have, that only made the gravity of this whole situation that much more apparent.

For all she knew, she really could have been dying right now.

Too bad she hadn’t thought to look into Zida’s track record of fatal casualties versus successfully healed patients before finding herself in an infirmary bed. Even still, there were few other places she would rather be right now. Anywhere else she could have gotten the kind of medical attention she needed would require revealing who she was.

Luckily, Shade prided itself on giving its members the benefit of the doubt once they passed The Striving initiation, wiping the slate clean for everyone who stepped through the compound’s front doors and swore their oath to the cause. Meaning Zida wouldn’t ask any more questions than necessary to do her job.

“All right. Let’s take a look at you, then.” Zida shuffled toward the bed again, clicking her tongue. “I know that changeling’s blade came down on you at least once, but it takes a little longer to find all the little cuts and nicks after a brawl like that.”

Her clawed hands clamped down around Rebecca’s left wrist, then the healer gaped at both the knife wound and the darkening handprint on Rebecca’s forearm—which had now become an alarming shade of dark gray that matched the cold steel of the bedframe. “What the hell is this ?”

“That thing…outside,” Rebecca panted with a weak nod toward the hallway, “touched me.”

“And left this behind?”

“Well it’s not a tattoo, Zida. ”

“You’re hilarious.” The healer’s dark, beady eyes flickered up toward Rebecca’s face, then she sucked in a sharp, hissing breath with an added gurgle courtesy of the daraku’s lack of teeth.

Rebecca expected the treatment any second now, but when Zida merely stood there, staring at Rebecca’s arm as if all her training and centuries of working with who know how many magical patients had fled her brain to leave her nothing more than an empty shell, what little hope Rebecca had clung to faded.

“What?” she asked with a grunt.

Zida’s mouth opened and closed a few times without sound, then she smacked her lips and released Rebecca’s arm. “If that dagger was poisoned, I need to figure out what the changeling dipped it in. Nothing I immediately recognize, which is…rare. But I’ll figure it out.”

“And then you can fix it, right?”

“I haven’t been doing this for ninety percent of my life just by guessing, elf,” the healer snapped. “I’ll have someone bring up the dagger. Something tells me we don’t have a whole lot of time for sitting around and waiting. You stay right there. I may have something in the back that’ll do the trick. At least until I figure out exactly what he used.”

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca muttered as the healer shuffled away. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Zida snorted and tossed a hand in the air. “Smartass.”

Then the old woman disappeared through a small door in the back of the infirmary.

Rebecca got a brief glance of what looked like a supply room doubling as a disturbingly disorganized office before Zida pulled the door shut behind her.

Still fighting to fully catch her breath despite no longer climbing stairs or shuffling down hallways, Rebecca finally had a chance to study the cut from Aldous’s blade.

It was a straightforward slice, not so deep to be debilitating but enough of an injury that there should have been a good deal of blood.

There was none.

The only thing hinting at Rebecca being a living being who should have bled from her wounds was a single bead of thick, viscous red—so dark, it was almost black—barely seeping from her flesh at the end of the long slash across her forearm.

A slash that had almost landed right across the dark-gray handprint seared around her left wrist.

Even more concerning was the fact that when she gingerly prodded that knife wound, there was zero pain. That dark bead of blood that wasn’t quite blood—not the way it should have been—welled and grew before trickling down her forearm. It only journeyed a few centimeters before congealing into something that definitely shouldn’t have been seeping from a wound.

On top of how awful she felt right now, how hard it was to breathe, how much she’d been coughing, and how exhausted she’d become, that lack of pain was particularly alarming.

Then she poked experimentally at the darkening gray handprint and hissed.

No pain there, either.

No sensation at all.

Far worse than deadened nerve endings, though, was the sensation against her exploratory fingertip—not of her own poisoned flesh on her wrist and forearm but of something hard and cold and lifeless.

Her own flesh felt more like smooth stone beneath her fingers.

Definitely not good.

She shot a quick glance toward the door to Zida’s office, behind which echoed rummaging thumps and scuffles while the healer searched for supplies and grumbled unintelligibly to herself.

Meaning Rebecca still had a few more moments of privacy.

She was almost positive Zida wouldn’t find any poison on Aldous’s blade. No, she couldn’t prove it at the moment, but her gut told her she would have been just fine if her only injury had gone from Aldous’s attack.

What ailed her now was all because of the homunculus and, more specifically, Rebecca’s dumbest mistake in decades.

In a moment of weakness and surprise, she’d let her Bloodshadow magic take over to consume the un-life within the homunculus searing its own special mark down into her flesh. That should never have happened. She should never have lost control like that. She should have known better.

She did know better, but for all intents and purposes, Rebecca was certain she’d basically poisoned herself.

If that were true, then there was still a chance she could un-poison herself. Not completely, though. Not here and now with only the healer around, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to use her Bloodshadow magic against anyone in Shade.

Aldous had been an exception, of course. Ending him the way she did had been a matter of life and death. Self-defense. There was a stark difference between doing what she had to do to protect her own life and turning against an innocent magical inside this building because she didn’t want to wait for an appropriate victim .

She’d have to deal with consuming the homunculus’s dark alchemy instead of an actual lifeforce later, when she could get out of the compound on her own and undo the idiotic mistake she’d made.

Right now, though, she could heal the creature’s handprint on her flesh, which also clearly affected the knife wound. Maybe that would help alleviate the rest of her physical ailments.

It was worth a shot. Especially when something told her Zida wasn’t going to find anything in her backup stores of potions and regents and healing supplies that catered specifically to either a Bloodshadow Elf or damage done by a homunculus that had been crafted and conjured solely to hunt Rebecca down and take her out.

She wasn’t exactly thinking at her clearest, no, but she had to do something . This wasn’t the first time she’d had to heal herself after a fight. She just had to make sure no one else saw her using the Bloodshadow magic necessary to get the job done.

Grunting at the effort of moving her own body, she pulled her injured left arm into her lap and got started. Her right hand shook as she hovered it over her poisoned wrist and forearm, but that was all she needed to let what healing magic she did possess take over.

The dark, swirling silver light of her Bloodshadow magic—of her lineage and her birthright—bloomed in her right palm to sear away the infection burrowing through her flesh.

It had worked in the empty parking lot behind the alley two nights ago and the hundreds of times she’d done this in the past. It should have worked now.

But the second her own magic touched her wounds, the most unbelievable agony coursed through her arm, and it didn’t stop there.

The pain spread through every inch of her skin, lancing through muscle and sinew, spearing through every bone in her body, electrocuting her cells. Rebecca’s left arm began to burn away beneath her own special form of healing, but her entire body boiled with it, as if she’d jumped into the infernal fires to crumble away forever in their depths.

Rebecca only realized she was screaming at her own magic burning itself into her veins when Zida threw open the office door with a bang and scurried out, arms laden with supplies and her beady eyes wider than seemed possible.

“What in the name of the Blue Hells are you doing ?”

Rebecca barely heard her.

She’d tried to heal her own wounds the way she always had, only now, she was destroying herself.

She couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, and the next second, there was nothing at all.