Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Elswyth tried to stand, but her body didn’t move.
She tried again, commanding her hands to untangle themselves from the sheets, commanding her legs to swing over the side of the bed. Her fingers twitched, but the rest of her stayed perfectly still.
What is happening? she thought. Her mind moved slowly, and a fog of confusion settled over the panic.
Each breath she took was labored, as though some invisible creature sat on her chest. Her heart beat slowly, and a foul taste filled her mouth.
Drool dripped from her lips, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“Yellow jasmine,” said a voice. It was a man’s voice, high and nasally. He spoke with a saccharine aristocratic accent.
Elswyth tried to jump from her bed, but her body would not move. She forced her eyes to the right, scanning the room.
A shadow sat at the tea table near the balcony doors.
A thin wash of moonlight illuminated his features: short, with gray hair and dangling jowls.
He wore a somewhat ragged suit that must have been expensive once and a tall top hat of black silk.
Over his eyes, he wore a pair of violet spectacles.
His skin was pale and his lips were the blue of a drowned man.
“Also called gelsemium,” he continued. He raised a hand, and small yellow flowers sprouted from the veins at his wrist, forming a bouquet. “Pretty little flowers, no? And a powerful paralytic. You’re stuck.” He giggled. When he smiled, his teeth were tinged with violet.
Elswyth tried to say Who are you? but she only managed to moan.
“What was that?” the nasally man said. He stood and nearly danced across the room to Elswyth. He carried the chair with him, which he set by her bed.
Elswyth tried to speak again. “What… do… you… want?”
The man smiled, eyebrows raised. “My. Most would be incapacitated completely with this amount of jasmine in their blood. I was told you were strong, but I had no idea. ’Tis such a shame. In another life, I’d have you as an apprentice.”
Elswyth focused on her blood, feeling the poison there. Yellow jasmine, she thought, Gelsemium sempervirens.
The man with the purple lips leaned back in his chair, and something silver flashed in his hand. Elswyth’s eyes widened.
He examined the knife, a foot of gleaming metal with quick, serpentine curves. Green liquid dripped from the edge, running through veins on the blade. Even from her place on the bed, she could smell the acrid poison.
“I do hate to take such a talented floromancer from the world. So little of the old blood left. Still, no reason to dally, I suppose. What must be done must be done. Although I may take my time. I do take such pleasure in my work…”
The man giggled again as he traced the tip of the blade on Elswyth’s arm. A red line followed it, spilling blood onto the sheets. Through the fog of the yellow jasmine, she could barely feel it.
Then the man raised the blade high, the metal reflecting the moonlight, and brought it down, driving the tip toward her stomach.
Elswyth rolled; she sprung from the bed just as the blade tore into the mattress below her. Feathers plumed in the air.
She stumbled. Her body collided with the wall on the far side of the room, still drunk from the jasmine.
The moment he’d told her the name of the poison, she’d begun fabricating the antidote into her blood.
Gelsemium was a common paralytic; it had been one of the first poisons Kehinde had taught her.
She scrambled for the door. Behind her, the man giggled.
“Splendid! She’s formidable,” he said.
Elswyth had her fingers around the door handle when the vine wrapped around her neck.
She gagged; the ivy was like a hand around her throat, crushing her windpipe. The door handle slipped from her grip as the vine wrenched her backward. She tried to scream, but the ivy twisted more tightly around her throat. Soon she was scratching at it, trying in vain to breathe.
A weight slammed into her, forcing her back.
Her head hit the wall, and the vine at her throat was replaced by a firm hand.
Through the fog of her vision, she could see the blue-lipped man in front of her.
See the crags of his violet teeth, the jowls that wobbled as he spoke, as pale and smooth as fish bellies, and his spectacles like two dark holes, staring at her.
“Tut tut, Miss Elderwood. You wouldn’t want anyone to learn there was a man in your bedroom, would you?”
Elswyth squirmed in his grip. She tried to push him away. Hemlock essence seeped from her hands, and she smothered the man’s face with it.
He only smiled, skin glistening. Then he licked his lips. “Delicious.”
From the hand around her throat, poison spread.
It fanned in waves, making her skin blister.
Pain wracked her body and blood pooled in her mouth.
She tried to identify the poison, but it seemed there were hundreds of them, all mixed together in patterns she could not determine.
There was no time to fabricate an antidote, not when she didn’t know which poisons to treat.
She screamed. She screamed from the pain and the fear, but the man’s hand moved from her throat to her mouth.
“Go to sleep, Miss Elderwood,” the man whispered.
His hand pushed harder over her mouth, and her screams stopped.
His breath filled her nostrils: the smell of old wine and rotten poppies.
His teeth shone darkly in the moonlight, though the rest of him was cloaked in shadow.
A smile without a face. “Dream sweet dreams for me.”
The tip of the dagger traced over her nightgown… and then slid into her belly. Pain exploded up her spine, making every limb seize. Her eyes bulged and she gagged into the man’s hand.
“Shh…” the man whispered. “Quiet now.”
The man slid the blade out, and it felt as though Elswyth’s insides followed it, spilling onto the floor. He reared his hand back again, found another spot on her belly with the tip of the blade, and then stabbed once more.
Elswyth groaned. Tears fell from her eyes, and her thoughts scattered like birds. She was going to die.
To her surprise, she thought of her mother. Her mother, sitting over her, wailing, weeping.
No, Elswyth thought, no!
Elswyth’s hands began to scramble. She clawed at his face, drawing vitae to her hands and growing thorns from her fingertips. The man hissed at her and pulled back, taking the knife with him. It slipped from her and she gasped, blood trickling from her mouth.
“You are starting to irritate me,” he said. A thin line of blood seeped through his eyelid. “I don’t think I want to play with you anymore.”
Then the man reared back the blade, this time to slit her throat.
She grabbed his wrist feebly, trying to keep the knife away.
Her fingers found the skin beneath his jacket sleeve, the warm flesh of his wrist. The man pushed the blade down, and she fought, the exertion making the wounds in her stomach scream.
The world blurred for a moment and the room disappeared into shadow, and only the man remained, a bright outline of orange light.
She felt it, the heat just beneath the surface of him, felt the vitae that was his life force. And Elswyth pulled.
She grabbed the man’s vitae with her own. It flowed from his body, through his wrist, and into her hand. It swam to her heart and then pooled in her stomach, where the blood flowed freely.
The man gasped, his knife dropping to the floor.
There was a brief moment of silence as the man stared at his hand. What once had been pink flesh had faded to gray. The muscles there had vanished, leaving only dying skin and brittle bones. It was the hand of a corpse, held up in the moonlight.
“That’s… impossible…” the man said. He turned his hand over, examining it, lost in thought.
Elswyth didn’t wait. She stumbled toward him, her hands closing around his temples. And she pulled. She pulled with everything she had. This time, all the light inside him came. It spilled from his body, through her arms, draining into her own pool of vitae.
His face withered before her eyes, his cheeks sinking, his lips pulling back over his teeth. The man opened his mouth to scream, but all that came out was a swollen black tongue.
The man managed a few staggered steps backward as he searched his face with skeletal hands.
All of him was rotting now, but his eyes seemed eerily lifelike, staring at her in disbelief. His legs buckled, and he collapsed into a pile of oversized clothes.
He gasped once more and then went still.
Elswyth fell back, sliding against the wall into a puddle of her own blood.
Her vision faded. She wanted to scream, to call for help, but her windpipe was a ruin and she felt so weak.
Poison swam in her blood, making her heartbeat slow and her skin shine with sweat.
She slid deeper down the wall, unable to find purchase in all the blood.
When she fell to her side, she came face-to-face with the corpse of her attacker.
His eyes were graying now, rotting like fruit in their sockets.
She wanted to turn away, but she didn’t have the strength.
She had no choice but to stare into those eyes.
The man’s vitae still hummed inside her, an orange light that swam through her veins with nowhere to go.
She could feel it threading across her ribs and then taking root in her stomach, lingering around the wounds there.
The door to her bedroom flew open and she watched, as though in a dream, as Percival and Kehinde crashed into the room, Percival with his rifle, Kehinde with his staff. The last thing she saw before the darkness took her was Kehinde, scooping her into his arms like a child.