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Let me know when you get more. I need to sleep, I told Desmond, and got into bed without waiting for his reply.
I knew before I shut my eyes that I would dream of Harrow that night. But it was different. I woke buried, as I always did, staring up at the house. But it seemed to deconstruct itself before my eyes. First the roof, then the upper story, unmaking itself floor by floor until an empty field lay in its place. A man and woman stood there, and I stood before them. The man looked at me with unconcealed disdain. The woman, I had seen before—stalking through the corridors of Harrow in my dreams, the wax of her candle melting over her hand and dripping onto the carpet. She stared at me with hatred. A second man approached, tall and gaunt.
“Here,” the woman said. “It has to be here.”
“And you’re sure this will work? It won’t just kill the thing?” the first man asked.
“I don’t know that we could kill it if we tried,” the gaunt one replied. “But if we scatter it, we will break its conscious mind. That will be enough to keep it containable.”
“It’s an unpleasant business,” the first man said.
“After all the death it’s caused, we have no choice,” the woman snapped. “If you haven’t the stomach for it—”
“No, I’ll do it.” He strode toward me and crouched down. Only then did I realize that I was smaller than him. A child. “Here you go, girl. Drink this. You won’t feel the rest.” He handed me a metal flask. I took it and looked down.
I was standing on a slab of stone, gray shot through with white. A spiral had been carved in its surface, bisected by a single line. Ilooked up again, and he reached toward me with bloodied fingers, a cut laid open on his arm. He dragged two fingers down my cheek, marking it with still-warm blood.
“They scatter us,” I said, but my voice wasn’t mine.
I woke, shivering and drenched in sweat, in my own bed.
20
BY THE TIMEthe morning bell rang, any illusion of recovery had fled. I felt worse than ever. I couldn’t even look at food without spasms of violent nausea. The headache had grown worse, like a crown of nails had been set on my head, and the pain ran in a hot streak down my spine to my shoulders.
I lay cocooned in the blankets, curled on my side, and tried to bear it. I might have slept. I might have simply crawled inside the pain until nothing but the pain existed, not even the passage of time. At some point I was aware of my mother’s hand, cool against my brow, and worried voices, which seemed to shift seamlessly from Mom and Simon to Eli, Caleb, and Iris.
“You’re sure it isn’t anything you gave her?” Iris asked.
“I didn’t give her anything that could possibly harm her,” Eli answered.
“The charms she has, from the witch—” Caleb began.
“As far as I can tell, they’re the only reason she’s holding up as well as she is. Nothing I do seems to help,” Eli said in frustration.
“It must be because of that night in the folly. I knew I should have been keeping a better eye on her,” Caleb said.
“This isn’t a normal Investiture. Maybe this is supposed to happen.” Iris this time.
“She’s not supposed to be dying, Iris. And she certainly seems to be,” Eli said quietly.
Oh, well, that was suboptimal. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t hurt so much if I were dead. Yes, that would be nice. Silence and peace and the cold earth. I wanted to sink, wanted the shadows to carry me down, because in my buried dreams, at least there was no pain.
“Sshh.”A small hand pressed against my back. I could feel the presence of a small body behind me. Eli and Iris were gone. I’d slipped through time again, and I wasn’t sure where I’d come to rest. “She’s wrong. I would never hurt you,” Jessamine whispered, brushing her fingers through my hair.
I whimpered. “You’re not human. You’re not a person,” I whispered.
“But we try to be. We get it wrong, but we try and try and try. Then they scatter us.”Her hand pressed flat against my back, and I drew in a deep breath, the easiest I’d breathed since waking up that morning. The pain receded faintly. “You’re wrong inside. We—I’m trying to help, but when I help, it makes us wrong, too,” she said in consternation.
The pain ebbed. I sobbed with the relief of it. A moment of mercy—but that made it all the worse because the pain would be back. I’d be dragged back inside it, and that seemed more terrible than never leaving at all.
The sheet shifted, settling into the space the figment hadoccupied. I was alone again. I staggered to the bathroom, drank water, looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was pallid and sallow. I combed my hand through my wild hair, trying to tame it—and then stared at the clumps of hair that had come away.
The door to the bedroom opened. I pulled the hair from between my fingers quickly and crammed it into the trash can, closing the lid. I turned just as Eli came into view. He looked startled to find me out of bed.
“Feeling better?” he asked hopefully.
“A bit,” I said. I clutched the edge of the sink to steady myself, hiding the movement behind my back. I didn’t think he was fooled.
