Page 75 of Adam, Mine

Victor sighed. “I will ride her and then pay to have her ridden back to you.”

Brogan snorted like that was a silly idea, then waved him into her house.

“You don’t think far past your nose, do you?” she scoffed.

Victor didn’t reply. He didn’t feel like he had a right to.

Brogan’s house was brighter inside than he thought someone living under a mountain could manage. There were many windows, twice as many as a normal house, and the sunshine filtered through in beautiful golden rays. The walls inside were whitewashed and the floors had been rubbed hard with oil. They were dirt like Willem’s but much better quality. Almost passing for stone.

The ceilings were low, but Brogan wasn’t tall, so that issue was more of a problem for Victor.

To his surprise, she led him into a bedroom and began stripping the bed. She shook out the sheets and dressed the bed in new ones while Victor stood in the doorway, watching awkwardly.

“Take your rest. When you wake, we will eat and talk,” she said.

She pushed past him and shut the door firmly behind herself, brokering no argument on the subject.

Victor coughed hard. He winced, rubbing his ribs, and collapsed into the sheets while still dressed. He wasn’t the sort of person who liked to sleep during the daytime, but he didn’t have that choice anymore. He needed rest, craved it like water. Craved it like someone who would likely lie down one day and never get back up.

When they had been younger, Elizabeth had fallen ill with fever. She described it as drowning in the warmest ocean with one half of her covered in ice. With the light above him spinning and the rims of his eyes aching, he had to concede that she was right.

Victor rubbed his face against the bed and thought of her. She wouldn’t want him like this. He thought, with desire, about how cool her hand would feel on his face. How soft lying in her lap would be.

But he couldn’t sink into that fantasy fully because now he understood that he didn’t deserve it. Or her, rather.

Victor thought for the very first time, what she would think of the image of him standing with a cat lifeless in his hands during the earliest days of his experimentation. Thought of her love for kittens and his eyes grew prickly again. He didn’t have enough water inside to cry.

He wanted to get up out of this bed and lie down on the floor. But even the warmth of the sun would feel like too much of a gift.

Victor let the talisman slip out of his mouth. He weakly tried to push Elias the feeling of the comfort of this place, the nameless ache in his chest.

He didn’t get anything back.

Drone

He woke to Brogan sponging sweat off his forehead.

“You don’t have to—” Victor started, opening his eyes.

“Don’t tell me what to do.” Brogan huffed.

She was rude, but Victor didn’t have the heart to care.

“What did he tell you when he met you?” Victor asked, swallowing.

Brogan stopped and sat back to look at him. She squeezed the water from her cloth into a bucket. Victor wondered, in a flash of hysteria, if the other alchemists knew she was a girl. They must: none of them were idiots. But it still somehow shook him. He was too afraid and ashamed to ask about it.

“He understands you better than you know,” Brogan said finally. “Come, we are to eat.”

Victor rose with great effort and followed her into a cozy living room. It was night now and the house was golden with lanterns and candles. It was a much larger house than Victor had thought. The ceiling dipped and swelled with the hills above it, and he could tell there were many rooms. It was bigger than Alain’s cottage by double.

He looked at Brogan’s old and veined hands and wondered if she had carved out the house herself. She must have. There were no paintings of loved ones or items that looked like they belonged to anyone else. Even the room he had slept in was impersonal, empty.

Brogan left him in a plush chair made of wood and homespun fabric. The house smelled like earth, clean wool, herbs, and the food Brogan had been cooking.

She brought him a bowl of root vegetables in a thick cream sauce. Then she settled across from him on a much harder wood chair.

“Elias Hilfiker sat where you are sitting,” she said.