Fiendish

  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.

  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.