Chapter 55 The Poisoner
THE POISONER
We left by early morning, headed back for town, attempting to make the trip in a day. The sun was beginning to set earlier, painting the snow from hues of purple and blue all the way to the warm shades of mandarin.
Much of the noise of nature was muted by the snowy insolation. You would think it made the journey feel long, isolated. Luckily, there was no time lost in decent company.
I flinched at the teeth in my wrist. “No more, you greedy thing.”
Silas furrowed his brows and removed his teeth from the skin, licking over the wound. “Greed would be telling you I plan on being drunk on you every day.”
“A waxing poetic,” I mumbled, the other hand holding the reins.
Silas flashed a grin before lifting my hand, kissing each finger before slipping my glove back on, the warmth invading the appendages aching from the bitter air.
“You’re quiet,” he said, lacing his gloved hand with mine. The air froze around his words before dissipating into the air.
“Tired, is all.”
“It is bad luck to start a marriage with lies,” he teased, squeezing my hand playfully.
“So is blackmail, but here we are.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m not feeling good about the answers—or lack thereof—to the corrupted problem.”
“Whatever answers are out there, I doubt it was back at that town.”
“At least we had some sort of rope to tug on. Now I don’t know where to start,” I admitted.
“Well, consider it a new puzzle. Start from the first piece.” He shrugged.
My expression must have turned him off from jokes. His arm wrapped around my shoulder, holding me close as we approached downtown.
It was a single comfort. Warm, quiet, content.
We arrived in town by mid-morning, but it looked to be deserted.
The shops were closed, the streets were empty, and there was nothing left but the clinking of a flag against the pole in the square.
We rode through the street, the entire width to ourselves. We passed by a stack of newspapers scattered across the street. As we rode past it, there were pink stains of blood in the snow surrounding the papers.
We stopped at the apothecary, empty like every other place in town.
“What in the hell . . .” I rubbed my sore neck, Silas’s bite marks from early morning starting to ache. The venom was making me a bit spacy, but I knew I wasn’t imagining how off the town appeared.
I peeked through the glass door, the sign flipped to “Open” and the door unlocked. There was an inescapable itch in the back of my neck, the heat rising around my cheeks, and the gut-curdling feeling that something had gone wrong. It was more than a feeling; it was grossly apparent.
With a quick wind at my heels, I ran across the street.
“Alina!” Silas shouted after me. “Where in God’s name are you going?”
I ran for the mortuary door. It wasn’t just unlocked; it was shattered, the glass crunching beneath my heel as I stepped through. The hallway loomed, long and dark. Even through the ringing in my ears, the only sound was the dripping of water.
Silas grabbed my wrist, and I glared back at him. He shook his head slowly, a nervous glance toward the hallway before returning to me.
I ignored his silent plea and went anyway, listening for any sign of life lingering past the walls.
The door to the embalming room was ajar, only a slight glow of light coming from within. I reached out, my fingers grazing the wood. Before pushing, I could see inside, just the slightest crack.
The smell was horrid. I could see the hand of a long-dead corpse, a limb here or there. Ripped apart in frustration for the lack of blood. Frustration manifested into one singularity, a red smudge across the floor, a blond head cut off from my view.
I grasped the doorknob and pulled it gently shut.
The hallway got longer, my hand smoothing against the wall to remind me it was not really moving, it was all in my head. It was all in my head, and these past few months were merely dreams.
Silas wrapped his arm around my waist to pull me out. I didn’t even have to move my feet. He swept me outside. The cold air burned in my lungs as I struggled to breathe. My daze was disrupted when my back hit the brick wall.
“Look at me,” Silas demanded.
He was going in and out of my vision; the adrenaline was too much. He lifted my own hand, placing it on my neck.
“Breathe.” His other hand steadied my head. “We have to go home.”
“Edith!” I gasped. “She’s at the hospital, we have to go—”
“We don’t know if it’s safe. If this was a horde of corrupted, the hospital is a buffet of sitting ducks, roasted and seasoned. You’re in no state to go.”
“I can’t let another drop be spilled for my negligence!” I argued; he just held me tighter.
“Fine.” He rested his forehead against mine. “Let me go with you if you insist.”
I stumbled off the wagon before it had even stopped. There were nurses splayed across the ground outside, the last sign of a desperate escape, slowly disappearing under the steadily gathering snowfall, the ground turning red like a carpet to the entrance.
I burst through the front door. Up the stairs, I hastily flung through the rooms.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
Bodies.
Bodies.
Bodies.
There was blood everywhere. An endless loop of similar scenes through each door, forcing myself to be subjected to scene after scene of carnage until I found one with something living.
Nurses’ bodies were displayed in unnatural fashion across the floor, some limbs were missing, while others were unrecognizable. There was not one white linen in the hospital room that wasn’t stained.
The hallway was quiet, only the sound of the howling wind outside. The tiles of the floor were smeared, blood tracking in and out of the rooms, across walls, and staining the viewing windows of the doors.
Yells and shuffles stirred through the hallway.
“What is wrong with you?” Phoebe screamed, the inflected echo bounding down the hallway. “You ruin everything! Why couldn’t you just be happy with what we all had?”
I rounded the corner and shoved the door from where the voices were coming from.
“I saved them! They are free! We are their salvation!” Edith screamed back, shakily holding a knife in her hand.
The heads of the three turned to me when my boot crushed some glass from the door.
Luka was behind Edith, unfeeling and cool in demeanor.
I stepped forward. “What did you do?”
“I-I didn’t do anything! I helped them!” she cried, holding out the jittery knife. If her eyes strained any harder, I thought they would burst from her head. They darted skittishly, bouncing from person to person, exactly how I would imagine a cornered fox, bared fangs and all.
“Edith, calm down. Whatever you did—”
Phoebe turned to look at me, just for a moment, before Edith hooked her arm around her neck from behind, pointing the blade under her chin. “Don’t get any closer!” Edith shouted.
I froze in place, my eyes only seeing rage as I saw the blade pointed at Phoebe.
My dear friend gaped at me with horror, unable to contain her panic. Nothing pulled at my gut like seeing her eyes glazed over in fear.
I held my hands up slowly. “Edith,” I warned, “let her go, we can talk through this.” I glanced at Luka behind her, giving him a pleading look, but he just stood there, unable to look at me.
Bastard.
“I know you can see it. It’s the whole reason you decided to use us to make medicine in the first place. Everyone deserves a chance,” Edith croaked.
“All right, all right. Tell me about it.” I lowered my hands calmly.
“The corrupted are not monsters; they are people. They can be used for good; I know they can be good. They remember me after they turn. We could tame them, build an army of them. I’ve been working on this for months, for you!
You told me to take initiative.” Edith smiled wildly, loose curls of blond hair sticking out from her head covering, blood smudged across her cheek.
“If we all worked together like we do on collection days—”
“Did these people want to be turned?”
“Yes! They were in pain!”
“You asked them?”
“N-no, but they were suffering. They asked me to make the pain stop, and I did! I did . . .” She was becoming frustrated at the back and forth, pressing the knife a little harder against Phoebe, drawing a thin dripping of blood.
“Wait! Wait, Edith, tell me more.” I took a slow step forward. “How do you want me to help?”
“We could get a group together! I wouldn’t need many—a few to help tame them, feed them, and show them the way things work. I already have Luka to help; I just need a few more.” She turned to look at Luka, but he couldn’t look at her, either; he was stoic, frozen, useless.
He glanced at me, and something in those dark eyes told me something was terribly wrong.
“Edith.” I took another step while she wasn’t looking, hoping the more I said her name, the more likely she was to wake from this manic frenzy. “We can’t just take people’s autonomy away, remember? Autonomy is one of our tenets.”
“So is utilitarianism. What are we if we don’t have manpower? What if someone else gets the same idea, and we lose more than we did the last time? If you aren’t willing to take risks, maybe you shouldn’t be the head of our Nest.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t.” Another step. “Who would you suggest?”
Her expression went from feral to something softer, something youthful and full of hope. “Myself and Luka.” She beamed, turning her head to look at him over her shoulder.
That is when I chose to move. I slapped Edith’s hand away from Phoebe’s neck and shoved her roughly out of the way.
“Alina!” Silas shouted from behind me along with the slap of the door as he entered, but it was all clouded to me. Too quick.
Edith and I were nose to nose, my hands on either of her shoulders.
Edith’s wicked stare met mine, flashing some deep rage within her that I could not place before her eyes immediately widened. I even caught a tremble in her lip.
Why is she looking at me like that?
All I could do was stare into her eyes. I swallowed and tilted my head at her, unable to comprehend the scene before me.
My blurring vision trailed down until I stared at the knife pointed at me, but I couldn’t locate a blade, just a hilt and a white knuckled hand holding it there.
My vision filled with red—no, the red was on my clothing.
I was bleeding. My brain connected where the blade was, and I grimaced at Luka, his eyes wide when he realized.
Everything was moving so slowly. Luka’s eyes darted behind me toward Silas, fear and trepidation twisting his features before he looked at Edith again. His eyes held something tender in that last expression.
His hand reached out and caressed her chin, turning her head toward him. The look in his eyes was nothing I could ever expect from a monster like him. Then his other hand rested at the back of her head.
Edith smiled so brightly that she may have been mistaken for some lovesick child, a complete shift of her energy when he touched her. Such hope and joy in that last breath.
He pulled back, snapping her neck where she stood.
The old scar opened across her neck, black as tar. A martyr twice over.
Now more than ever, I understood what that look was before. That tenderness he held when he looked at her, I realized, was mercy. He wanted to be the one to do it. One last kindness.
“Alina!”
Silas called my name again.
It was unusual when it hit me. I was certain that at a time like this, I would be alone.
A near-zero chance, I was sure. A thing like me must be all right with loneliness.
It was expected. But today, I was not alone after all.
My fate sealed by one of my own, surrounded by the only ones who knew me, truly knew me. It must be intentional, a cosmic joke.
My knees hit the floor with a muffled thud, the impact quaking through my body, movements like cold molasses.
Behind my eyes was a red-hot moon. Like the glow of an ember, the red illuminated the backs of my eyelids, the outside light desperately wanting to burn through. The red vessels pulsed steadily until they slowed, and the blood ran black.