“I haven’t seen you in days, man,” Jack says. “Not since you were stuffing your face at midnight in the kitchen.” He smirks at me as a strange coldness runs through my veins, and I swallow hard.
“Right. The... kitchen,” I reply. “What can I say? I’m used to my own hours.”
“Did Cookie give you a massive bollocking? I heard he was in a bad mood.”
I shake my head, fighting a shiver, and quickly shift the subject from an encounter I can’t recall even a moment of.
“What were you doing out here, anyway?” I ask.
Jack shrugs. “Not a lot. Headed to town, the usual.”
I sway on my feet, brushing my wet hair from my clammy forehead.
“Hey, Kit, are you all right?” Jack says.
My gut tightens as a wave of heat and then cold runs through me. I stumble back as my knees feel oddly weak.
“You really don’t look good, man. Are you getting sick?”
I shake my head. “I’m fine. Just need some food and a good night’s sleep.”
What is happening to me? I can barely remember more than snippets of time from the past three weeks, ever since we’ve been here.
I’m trying to wrack my brain for conversations I’ve had and food I’ve eaten...
But I can’t.
“I want to ask you a question that’s going to sound strange,” I say. “But I need you to answer it anyway, all right?”
“That’s fine, man. I think we should get you back inside, though. It’s cold enough to freeze your tits off out here and you’re soaked through. If Torin saw you, he’d throw a fit and tell you that you’re going to catch your death.” Jack flings his arm around my shoulders, and I ignore the fact that he’s naked as we stumble forward.
“When we last spoke to each other, do you remember what we talked about?” I ask.
He frowns at me as my foot catches in the sand and I stagger forward. “I do,” he replies slowly. “It was a few days ago. We talked about the usual. No offence, but you’ve been kind of obsessive over the past few weeks. Every time I see you, you’re heading to check the damn perimeter or you’ve just come back from there and you’re falling into bed.”
He gives me a long, lingering look, and I huff out a sigh. I know I deserve it. I know I sound weird and I’m being weird, but there’s not much I can do about that. We pull to a halt as the fog swirls around us, and I have absolutely no idea where we are. Fitting, really. It matches the inside of my head, like wading through smoke.
“I’m having some trouble remembering things. Remembering what it is I’ve been doing here,” I say, my gut flipping and flopping like a fish. “And what I’m thinking is that I know that woman messed with my head. I know she did something to me, or I’d never have gone with her otherwise.”
Jack’s face creases with understanding, his usual grin dimming. “You think she did something to you and it’s stopping you from remembering what you’ve been doing here?”
“IthinkI’ve been making and checking the perimeter,” I say. “Trying to keep us all safe here. But what if I haven’t been doing that? What if I don’t remember forming any of the curses?”
An icy shiver runs through me as the wind picks up, shifting the fog. Then there’s a sound like paper in the wind, and when I turn around, there’s no sign of Jack at all. I stagger forward right as the fog clears enough for me to make out the house a few hundred metres away.
I wonder if he’s messing with me. If he’s gone inside the house ahead of me. So I keep on moving forward until I’m inside.
Once I’m there, I find the house in uproar.
The lights are all on in every room. People are yelling, and there’s music playing from somewhere. Some of the crew are carousing around the foyer, arms around each other as they swig from tankards.
I push my soaked hair away from my face. “What is going on here?”
“We’re having a party,” someone tells me. “Courtesy of Cookie’s birthday.”
“Courtesy of the news, you mean,” another voice clamours.
At my clueless look, Dagger appears, stepping closer until he’s thrusting a drink into my hand. “Jack’s news. He found another five names on the arrest list.”
