“My prophecy,” he answered. “One that I have been doing everything in my power to bring to fruition. When I was a small child, I had a vision of my sister on the serpiente throne, with a king who refused to bow to Midnight as Midnight burned.”
I could understand how the vision could be understood in two ways. A king who refused to bow to the empire might help bring about its downfall. Or, if Mistress Jeshickah followed through with her threats, a king who was already one of the leaders of Midnight would not need to bow to it.
“Can you heal them?”
“I have no idea.”
No matter what Malachi said, or even what I saw, I didn’t really want the trainers to die—partially because of Mistress Jeshickah’s threats, but also because I didn’t think I could stand it.
I had seen the darkness. There had been moments when even Jaguar made my skin crawl, or when he looked past me as if I were so far beneath his notice that I might as well not have been there. I had seen instants of anger and irritation quickly subsumed beneath his placid, affable mask. I had seen Lady Brina’s rage and Mistress Jeshickah’s calm viciousness. I had seen the way Elisabeth had flinched away from Taro in fear. And of course there had been those “experiments.”
But they were my world, my parents and guardians and teachers. I had been raised to love them, and even if my mind could now see the evil within and my common sense told me not to trust and not to have hope, my heart wasn’t quite ready to let go.
Malachi and I explored the confines of our prison. The door to the outside was heavy wood with a raw finish, lacking a doorknob or latch on this side. The walls were rough gray-black stone, held together with mortar—except for one side, which was solid stone, with iron rings and hooks set into it at intervals.
There was one more doorway, which led to a small and cramped but clean washroom.
“Jeshickah is fanatical about cleanliness,” Malachi said as he examined the running-water facilities, which seemed so out of place in a hole like this. “She uses technology humans forgot centuries ago when Rome fell, combined with every scrap of science they discover now. Granted, it keeps her human stock healthy most of the time, but the level of obsession makes me wonder what she experienced as a human.”
Jaguar had admitted to me that he had been born human, and that Mistress Jeshickah must also have been, but I still wasn’t able to picture her as anything other than the indomitable creation she was now.
I prowled around the main room uselessly. Malachi seemed to be looking for something, and I echoed his movements, but I found nothing but more evidence of horror.
The walls and floor had been splashed and soaked with dark liquid, probably on numerous occasions. I knelt down and reached out to touch, but then stopped. I did not have to stretch my imagination far to guess that the stains had been left by blood.
“What do we do now?” I asked Malachi.
Malachi took one last look around the cell, sighed, and then sat with his legs crossed. “I’ll go into a trance and see if I can trace any patterns of magic connecting you to the trainers,” he said.
“And if you can?”
“Then—” He broke off with a choked sound of frustration. “Vance, I have no idea how a bloodwitch’s magic usually works, or how a poison spell like this might. I don’t know if I will find power connecting you to the trainers, or if I could break such a connection if I found it, or if breaking it would even help. So I’m going to start small and see what there is to see.”
“How?”
“Sit with me.”
I sat in front of him, mirroring his position. “What now?”
“Close your eyes.”
I did as instructed and felt him take my hands in his, so his thumbs rested over the pulse points in my wrists.
Let your mind wander. You don’t need to focus on anything in particular.
How did he talk in my head that way? Did that thought count as something particular or as wandering? I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.
Mostly I fidgeted, until Malachi finally took his hands away. I opened my eyes to see him shaking his head.
“Damn it,” he whispered. “Your power is too different from mine. I can’t make any sense of it, or tell if something isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Maybe I’ll be able to do more by looking at one of the sick humans. Any magic in them would have to be foreign.”
I stood up slowly and discovered that my legs ached from sitting on the hard ground. How long would we be locked in here?
Malachi stood up after me and then put a hand out to catch himself on the wall. Bowing his head, he whispered, “Sorry. It sometimes takes a while to ground myself again.”
I walked as far away as I could, trying to give him space, but there wasn’t much space to be had. I pressed my hands against the smooth, cold wall and then stepped forward to rest my cheek against it as well. The cold was nice. The air felt too hot. It was stifling.
“Malachi—”
“Give me a minute, Vance.”
“Okay.”
I paced back and forth. I could only take a couple of steps in each direction. I couldn’t even stretch my legs properly. I went into the washroom and put my hands under the water, but it was lukewarm.
Like blood.
I wished I had a towel to dry my hands.
I returned to the cell, where Malachi was kneeling with his body bent forward so his forehead and palms were against the dirt floor. Whatever he had tried to do had obviously taken a lot out of him, and I didn’t want to bother him, but I also didn’t want to just stand around doing nothing.
I dragged my hands over the rough fieldstones, scraping my palms hard enough that the pain made me shudder. It also helped calm me. I was being silly, a scared little bird. I had to be stronger than this.
WHEN THE DOOR opened I was sitting calmly in the corner, focusing on my breathing and letting my mind go quiet. In my head I wasn’t in that cell. I was in the forest. Not the forest I had walked through with Malachi or ridden in with Taro and Jaguar; the trees in my mind were larger, lush and vibrant, with flowers in colors I had never seen even in Brina’s paintings.
Mistress Jeshickah’s boot heels made dull clunks on the earth floor. Two humans followed behind her. One was a young man who was pale from lack of sunlight but still seemed healthy. His brown hair was clean, and his green eyes were clear … and yet they seemed strangely flat when he looked at me. Was that the illness, or something else? Maybe it was related to the semiconscious woman he was carrying. Her hair was matted and hanging in her face, which was flushed with heat even though she was shivering.
“They both have it,” Mistress Jeshickah said as Malachi and I lifted our heads, pulling our minds back to our bodies. “The girl is at the height of the fever stage. It will pass within the hour. The boy is near the end of the dormant stage. He will be fine for another few hours, until sunset.”
“Is that how long the dormant stage lasts,” Malachi asked, “or does the change always happen at sundown?”
“Always at sundown,” she replied.
“These two are both completely human to begin with?”
“Yes.”
“I might need tools,” Malachi said, speaking quickly, as if he was concerned she would leave before he could finish. “Azteka magic depends on bloodletting. A blade could be useful.”
Mistress Jeshickah drew a dagger from a sheath at her waist and handed it to him, obviously unafraid that he might turn it on her.
Malachi took it and then leaned back so his head thunked against the dirt. “If you were a little less evil, you might have a qualified witch who you trusted do this.”
“I tried being kind and trusting,” Mistress Jeshickah replied. “My subjects became arrogant and turned on me. It is indeed better to be feared than loved.”
She walked out, closing the door and locking us in again, this time with two sick humans and no more hope than before.
“Bring her here,” Malachi said
to the slave.
He laid the unconscious woman down in front of Malachi. “She has not been able to stay awake,” he said.
“That’s fine,” Malachi answered. “I work better through dreams, anyway.”
He put a hand on her sweaty brow and closed his eyes, his body going impossibly still.
“What’s your name?” I asked the other man.
“Joseph.”
“I’m Vance.”
He nodded, but his eyes never lost that strange emptiness, even when he looked straight at me.
“How many people are sick?” I asked.
“Not many now,” he answered. “Eight, if she is the last.”
Eight still seemed like a lot. It had only been a couple weeks. “After the dormant stage, how long does it take people to recover?”
“Pardon?”
“There’s the fever, and then the disease goes dormant,” I said. “Right? And then what happens? You said not many now, so how long does it take people to recover?”
“The fever returns,” he answered, with no emotion in his voice. “The throat turns black here,” he said, gesturing to the spot on his throat over the pulse, where the vampires would have fed, “and then it spreads out like blood poisoning. At least, in the bleeders it starts in the throat. We think one of the cleaning crew picked it up when scrubbing blood from one of the cells. Her hands blackened first. In one of the healers, it started in her knee, we think from where she knelt in the blood while working on someone down here. In the slave from the stables, it spread from the wounds on his chest. He was first, but we assumed it was a normal infection caused by his wounds.”
The slave from the stables. Felix. He was talking about Felix. None of the vampires would have fed on him while he was working in the stables, but I remembered reaching out, drawn by his blood. I had touched it, before coming to my senses.
That was why he had died. I was why he had died. That whispering … had it actually been my own power, or had it been the contagion, seeking release?
“And after that?” I asked.
“Madness, when it reaches the brain,” he answered. “Screaming. We put them out then. Mistress Jeshickah told us to suffocate them, to make sure none of the blood was spilled.”
And this is my fault?
“How many so far?”
“I will be number twelve.”
“How can you be so calm?” I whispered. “Don’t you care?”
He frowned a little before asking, “Why?”
“If we can’t cure this, you are going to die,” I said. “Insane and in agony, by the sound of it. You don’t seem afraid. I’m terrified. Please, tell me why you’re not.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to answer that.”
Those were the exact words Elisabeth had used when I had asked her what it meant for a slave to prove herself.
Malachi’s eyes opened. He drew a deep, ragged breath before saying to me, “Vance, you’re talking to a slave in Midnight. Whether he was born here or born free and then broken in these cells, the spark of free will required for one to care about self-preservation has been stripped from him. He doesn’t care because he has nothing to care about.”
“That’s …” Felix. Elisabeth. Jaguar had been so insistent that they didn’t mind.
I had been so willing to believe him. If Malachi was right, then in a way Jaguar had been honest. They didn’t mind, because they weren’t allowed to. They didn’t know how to.
“That’s what trainers do,” Malachi said with a shiver. “At least it’s easier to move around through the dreamscape when there isn’t a spark of self-awareness to interfere.”
“What did you learn?” I asked hollowly. “Can you cure it?”
“Her fever dreams are the same as the blood dreams I had the misfortune of finding when I searched for you mentally,” he answered. “The first fever is probably a side effect of the magic taking hold. The body comes to terms with it for a while, so the illness seems to go dormant, but humans don’t naturally have magic. They can’t sustain it. I’ll examine you next,” he said, speaking to Joseph, “but I suspect that the magic in you is almost gone. Give me your arm.”
Joseph did so without asking questions. I was the only one who yelped when Malachi used the knife Jeshickah had given him to cut across the back of Joseph’s forearm.
The blood that spilled onto the dusty floor was a sickly orange color, with bits of gray-white pus floating in it like dead insects drawn to rotten fruit. I gagged, pushing myself away. Even Joseph, staring at the diseased fluid trickling out of his own body, looked disturbed.
“Magic is the only thing keeping you alive,” Malachi said. “Blood magic is also fire magic, so the sun probably sustains it. When the sun sets the last of the magic dies, and your body has to try to function using that.” He pointed to the growing puddle on the floor.
Joseph continued to stare. He didn’t ask any of the questions I would have asked, but neither could he pull his eyes away from the wound.
“Sorry,” Malachi said to Joseph. “Let me take a quick look to confirm, and then I’ll make you more comfortable.”
Why did neither of them bother to put a hand to stanch the flow of that … I couldn’t think of it as blood. It wasn’t blood. It was more like bile, and it kept dripping slowly, clumping and congealing on the dirt as Malachi closed his eyes again to search Joseph’s power.
My heart began to beat wildly. It was so wrong. This was all wrong.
I couldn’t have done this.
I looked from one sick human to the other. My fault. I couldn’t have known. The Azteka had told me … had Yaretzi told the vampires to feed on me? Not directly, but she had led Jaguar in that direction, while remaining vague enough that he would trust her motivations.
She knew what would happen.
I was sure of it. She knew how this power worked. And she hadn’t just known what would happen when she came to “save” me, in that act of mercy that had so confused Malachi. She had known when we first met in the woods. She had established that I wanted to return to Midnight—that I was loyal to Midnight—and then she had given me to them. She had only saved my life later to ensure that the plan progressed.
Had Malachi known, too? He had said he would try to rescue me, but maybe that had been a ruse so he could stay close and track all these events. Now he was trying to save his own life, theoretically, but in reality he had yet to say he could do anything to help.
Malachi had said, more than once, that he and others manipulated me—easily and frequently.
Well, I was sick of it.
I didn’t want to die because strangers had decided to maneuver me into a position where I would become a plague to everyone around me, humans and vampires alike.
Of course, I didn’t have much say in my fate now, did I? I was locked down here in this tomb, with a man who may or may not have been involved in organizing this disaster and two humans who might as well already have been dead.
I leaned my forehead against the cold wall again and tried to bring my mind back to the lush jungle I had found in my head before, but it was so hard to put myself there when all my fears and doubts and despair were right here, locked in with me.
A wet snap made me jump. I twisted about to see Joseph slump with a broken neck.
Malachi set the dead human down gently as I shouted, “What are you doing?”
“Making him more comfortable, like I said I would,” Malachi replied. “Or would you prefer to wait until he was screaming in pain and madness?”
“How could you … you …” I understood what he had done, but not how. How could he, with his bare hands, have broken bone and sinew such that the poor, hollow-eyed human’s life ended in a blink? How could he stand it?
How many times had he killed?
“Am I next?” I asked.
“I very much hope not,” he answered. “Unfortunately, that decision is probably going to be left to Jeshickah. I can’t do anything d
own here. This doesn’t seem to be a complicated spell, but that doesn’t mean I can do anything about it. The only thing I can tell is that there isn’t any observable connection between the infected humans and the trainers. Whatever poison has passed to them, it is working on its own now. The humans it infected along the way were rats carrying plague, nothing more.”
“The pochteca knew this would happen,” I said, sharing my suspicions and watching his face to try to determine whether he was involved, too.
Malachi shrugged. “Maybe they did. Mysterious are the ways of the Azteka.”
“They must have. That’s why she saved my life.”
“I considered that,” Malachi said, “but if the Azteka knew the blood of one of their witches could cause this kind of destruction in Midnight, they would have made up an excuse to sell one of their own in long ago. They would have sent someone who would be able to manipulate the situation and who would make sure to infect Jeshickah.”
“Unless they hesitated to sacrifice one of their own but had no such compunction about sending me in, once they realized I was already under Midnight’s thumb.”
“Azteka don’t shrink from self-sacrifice for the good of the nation,” Malachi said, shaking his head.
“Why are you defending them?” I demanded. I remembered the way Yaretzi had treated me when we had first met. I had been grateful at the time, since she had given me back to Taro, but now that I better understood what she thought of Midnight, I saw the scene in a clearer light. “They’re the ones who should be in this box.”
“And they’re the ones who will be in this box if we imply to Jeshickah that we think they set this up!” Malachi shouted. “I am not selling someone else in to save my skin.”
And what about mine? I wondered. Was I allowed to “sell in” the person who had sent me here with no warning of what I would become, and who had led to our being down here?
“Don’t, Vance,” Malachi said.
“You have done nothing but ruin my life from the moment I met you,” I snapped. “As far as I can see, you are the most obvious suspect for this plague. You have magic. Back when you still thought I was dangerous, you could have killed me. Instead, you saved my life and delivered me to Midnight. When I was dying, you sent the pochtecatl, who convinced the vampires to feed on me. So why should I trust you, or listen to anything you say?”