Chapter 46 Break #3
“What the hell are you doing? Didn’t you hear me trying to kick the door down?”
Fisher stared into the fire. His hair was wet, the ends made spiky, curling in every direction. Water dripped onto his leathers and onto the wooden floorboards, where it formed a large puddle. He had been sitting here for some time.
The room was cold.
The fire in the grate was colorless, all shadow-black, blizzard-gray.
“Fisher? Fisher, look at me!”
He didn’t move.
I stepped into the room and something crunched, gritty, beneath my feet.
Sand. The sand from Yvelia that Fisher had poured from his boots only days ago.
There were still two piles of it, sitting there, in the middle of the floor.
The sight brought tears to my eyes. He’d held me that day.
Laughed with me. Shown me what it meant to be loved and worshipped by someone body, mind, and soul.
He had told me here, in the bed on the other side of the room, that he would sacrifice the sun and surrender the stars if it meant that he could keep me safe.
And now he was missing and lost to me . . . because I could already tell he wasn’t here with me now.
I didn’t want to cross the room and stand in front of his chair. I didn’t want to turn around and face him . . . but I had to.
I covered my mouth with my hands, stifling a sob when I saw him.
His eyes were clouded over, the vivid green turned to murk and shadow.
His pallor was deathly, his skin cadaverous.
His bottom lip was split wide open, and a steady, thin trickle of blood ran down his chin and dripped down onto the silver wolf-head gorget he still wore around his neck.
“Fisher?”
He didn’t answer. Worse, he showed no sign of having heard me at all. Whatever his eyes were seeing, it wasn’t the fireplace or his room at Cahlish. Or me. Wherever he had gone, it was somewhere I could not follow.
“Fisher, please.” His hand was freezing, his fingers stiff. He could take on the entire realm with these hands normally, but when I lifted his left hand and took it in mine, it was so limp and lifeless that for a terrible moment I thought that he was dead.
His rasping breaths refuted this, but it was hard to trust the shallow rise and fall of his chest when his lips were so blue.
I squeezed his hand, begging him to respond both out loud and into his head.
“Fisher. Fisher, you promised.”
Had he promised? I couldn’t remember. The Fae were loath to make promises they weren’t one hundred percent sure they could keep. He wouldn’t have been able to promise that he would never leave me. Death would have claimed one of us eventually . . .
“Wake up,” I whispered. “Wake . . . the fuck . . . up. Are you seriously going to do this to me? Are you going to leave me here alone, to fix this without you? This—” I huffed, my desperation rising.
“This is your fucking realm, Fisher. Your friends. Your people. And you’re just going to disappear and leave it to everyone else to defend them? ”
His right eye twitched—the tiniest flicker of movement—but then he was still again. Could he hear me? Did he know, wherever he was, that I was here? There was no way of telling.
“Fisher, if you love me . . . If you care about me, or . . . or any of us, you will figure this out and wake up right now. We need you. I need you—”
“Save your breath, King Killer.”
The voice took me by surprise. I’d been so fixated on Fisher that I hadn’t heard it enter the room.
The Hazrax hovered by the bed, its hands tucked formally inside the belled sleeves of its robes.
Its pale skin was shot through with black veins—the same kind of black veins that marked the infected feeders.
The former Keeper of Silence drifted across the floorboards, making that eerie ticking sound in the back of its throat.
“Wait. Stay over there. This isn’t your dream, okay? You’re not welcome here.”
The Hazrax snorted. “I am welcome everywhere, Saeris. Do you forget so quickly that you and I have a deal?”
“The deal was for you to observe the Blood Court. I hate to break it to you, but the Blood Court doesn’t exist anymore, so you’re going to have to find someone else to observe.”
The Hazrax grimaced, showing its needle teeth. I’d been around it long enough to know that it was smiling. “You’re really hopeless at this, aren’t you, child? I almost feel bad for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That means that when you asked me in the forge if I wanted to strike the same bargain with you that I struck with Malcolm and I said yes, the details of my deal with the old vampire king became the details of our arrangement, too. The fine print of the deal I made with Malcolm stated that I could observe him, not his court. Him. It is irrelevant whether the Blood Court exists, Saeris. It is you who I observe. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you have given me permission to follow and witness alongside you.”
Gods fucking damn it.
Again! I’d walked into another terrible bargain again!
If I made it out of this nightmare and life somehow found some level of normalcy, I was going to make sure I had someone on hand at all times to vet the agreements I made.
The sneaky, underhanded, vile piece of shit!
“Why? Why do you care about what I’m doing? This has nothing to do with you!”
The Hazrax’s slitted nostrils flared. “Naive child,” he said in a piteous tone. “Of course it does. I have a hand in everything, but you will learn that soon enough, I suspect.”
“Wait! The—the favor! You said I could call it in at any time.”
The Hazrax made a hiccupping sound, but it nodded. “Yes. That is true.”
“Then I want to use my favor now. Can you bring Fisher back to me?”
The Hazrax shook its head. “That is not within my power, I’m afraid. There are accords that prevent it.”
“Then tell me where he is!”
“I’m sorry. I cannot do that, either.” The Hazrax didn’t sound apologetic.
It sounded amused by the situation I found myself in and pleased that it couldn’t help.
I’d had enough of it. “Fine,” I snarled.
“I’ll use my favor for this, then. I want you to go away and not observe me for the rest of the term of our one-year agreement.
And when you come back to renegotiate the deal for another year like I stipulated, you should know ahead of time that I will not be interested in renewing. ”
“Be careful, Saeris,” the Hazrax warned.
“What, don’t lie to me and say that you can’t do that. I’m literally asking you to leave me the fuck alone. That is definitely in your power.”
“It is,” the Hazrax said, laughing its strange, stilted laugh.
“Then don’t bother threatening me—”
“I’m not threatening you, silly child,” it snapped, its humor suddenly gone. “I’m suggesting you err on the side of caution because, per our agreement, you only get to ask me for one favor. And you desperately need that favor right now, Saeris Fane.”
“Of course you’d say that! Just honor the request!”
The Hazrax shivered, as though the magic that bound our agreement were trying to force it to comply. I’d never seen anything like it: a being capable of denying a bargain, even for a moment. “First, answer me this. Why did you come here, child?” the Hazrax demanded.
“I came here for him!”
It shook its head. “No.”
“I came . . .” I remembered, then. The realization I’d had on the steps in Inishtar. The piece of information that had come back to me as Carrion had addressed the satyrs.
“I will allow you to change your mind,” the Hazrax said. “You have one minute to fulfill the task you came here to complete and request a different favor. I suggest you move.”
One minute. In exactly sixty seconds, the Hazrax would disappear, and I wouldn’t see it again for a year. And that would be bliss. But . . . what if it was right? What if I needed my favor for something else?
Another shudder rippled through the Hazrax’s body. “You’re wasting time!” it hissed.
I let go of Fisher’s hand and sprinted across the room.
The nightstand by the bed was cluttered with books.
So many books. There were pencils, and an empty water glass that I knocked over.
It shattered on the ground, but I ignored the broken glass.
String. A length of leather cord . . . Where the fuck is it?
I put it here, I know I did.
“Forty seconds . . .”
“Shut up! That’s not helping!” I vaulted over the bed and picked through the sparse items on Fisher’s nightstand. I hadn’t put it there, but maybe it had been moved? Fisher was tidier than me. A single book. An ivory-toothed comb . . . no, no, it wasn’t here.
Shit! Where else could it be? Where else? Where else! Fisher’s desk was bare. The windowsill, choked with black veins of rot, was empty. The shelves . . .
“Twenty-five seconds.”
I didn’t waste my breath admonishing the asshole this time. There was nowhere else to look! There was . . .
No. Wait. There! On the bookshelf.
I’d seen it before. When I’d found Archer in here, drawing me a bath. His friends had been helping. One of them had been looking at the items sitting on the shelf in front of the books. Lady Edina’s favorite thing in the world . . .
I ran across the room and picked up the tiny ceramic figurine of the kingfisher bird.
Its left wing was chipped. Its blue and orange glaze was a little faded, thanks to the many years it had sat on this shelf, but otherwise it was perfect. I saw what had been placed underneath the figurine immediately: a small, crumpled piece of paper.
The same crumpled piece of paper I’d dumped on my nightstand a week ago, along with all the other bits and pieces I’d been carrying in my pockets.
But it wasn’t a crumpled piece of paper.
It was a folded piece of paper . . . artfully crafted into the shape of a stargazer.
It was the first little bird. The one that had lost its magic and fallen to the ground when it had left the library.
The missing page from Edina’s journal, not torn out, because it had never been bound in. I’d had it here all along!
“Ten seconds, Saeris!” the Hazrax warned.
My hands trembled as I unfolded the bird and frantically began to read.
The words ran together, Edina’s neat handwriting swimming on the paper as I tried to process the information she had written there.
“Five seconds!” There was genuine concern in the Hazrax’s voice.
I looked up from the paper, suddenly covered in a nervous sweat, and spoke as quickly as I could. “I’ve changed my mind, watcher! I beg you for my favor. I need you to transport me to the Wicker Wood!”