Chapter Twenty
Maggie gagged, and then her office trash can was in her hands.
She gagged again, with no time to feel even an ounce of shame or embarrassment, but nothing came up.
It was just an aching nausea that roiled through her.
She set the trash can down and leaned her head against the back of her couch, gratefully gulping the water that Taliesin handed her and the ginger candy he must have dug through her desk drawer to find.
She could barely see stars twinkling through a gap in the clouds in the tiny window above Taliesin’s desk. In the distance, there was a hollow, haunting cry of a banshee woken by the night. What time was it? How long had she been out?
Her head ached. Her limbs felt like jelly. And she was besieged by memories. Not of her time in the pall, but of that night—his hand at the small of her back, her head against his chest, their legs intertwined as they danced, his tongue…No. She needed to think of something else.
He stood in that same place she’d been just a couple of weeks ago, leaning against her desk, arms crossed, but instead of anger in his expression, it was so much worry it hurt to look at him straight on.
She tried to look at his hands instead of his face, his knuckles nearly white as he gripped his arms, and remembered the way they’d grazed her chin, tilting her face toward him so he could kiss her beneath the stars. She groaned.
“The wards?” she managed to ask.
He let out a breath like a huff. “Every ward was repaired. There’s no danger of the pall escaping tonight.” His voice was full of something unsaid, and there was a twitch in his jaw.
Gods below. The stranger on Beltane, the man she’d been dreaming about, was no stranger at all. He was Arthur Taliesin. She looked away from him, studying a loose thread in his tweed jacket.
The spiderwebs the spell had cast over her memory faded as if blown away on a breeze, and she wasn’t sure how she’d never known it.
The very jacket she still clutched around her shoulders was the one he’d worn that night; the smell that had been nagging at her for weeks was the one she’d breathed in as they danced.
The little brother who had made fun of the mystery stranger was none other than Rory, the one she’d already heard so much about. Arthur.
Every part of her had yearned for him, she just hadn’t known it. The inexplicable draw to him she’d felt since that very first moment in the stairwell was because her body remembered what her mind couldn’t. Every moment of frustration that had slowly melted into desire now made sense.
She looked up at him again, at the scrunch of worry in his forehead, the tension that held his jaw rigid, the bend of his fingers against his forearm, as if he was holding himself back from reaching for her. Did he know? And if he didn’t…could she tell him?
If he did know, he had decided not to tell her. Perhaps because now that he knew, he couldn’t stand the idea that it had been her. Not when he looks at me like that. Perhaps, instead, he had decided it wasn’t worth risking his job over a kiss.
Another wave of nausea hit her, and she couldn’t be sure if it was from the lingering pall sickness or the reality of this discovery, but she held it down. “How long have I been out?” She thought it was a safe question, but Arthur began to chew on his bottom lip.
“A couple hours. Edna and Nurse Whitney have already been here and fussed over you,” he explained, gesturing to an assortment of bottles on her cart.
A bottle of antiemetic and a sleep aid, though she wasn’t sure what that was for.
“Nurse Whitney promised you will be fine, but you should take the dropper of antiemetic now.”
“What is that one for?” she asked, pointing to the dropper bottle of sleep aid.
Arthur swallowed and his throat bobbed. “The nightmares.”
Maggie always thought the expression about blood running cold was hyperbolic, but now she could safely say that it wasn’t. Something about the tone of Arthur’s voice, the haunted look in his eyes, made her shiver. “Nightmares?” she whispered.
He nodded. “The sleep aid helps. Don’t be stubborn and refuse to take it.”
“Stubborn like you?” she guessed.
“Another side effect of the pall sickness, but it’s even worse if you come in contact with one of the unsettled dead. Right now, your brain can’t tell your memories apart from theirs. It’s all jumbled—”
“Hers,” Maggie interrupted in a quiet voice. “She was a woman. A mother.”
Arthur’s jaw twitched again. “Her memories,” Arthur corrected. “It won’t take long for things to get sorted in your brain, but it might be a few days. Until then, your dreams will be…” He trailed off and cringed. “Confusing.”
The way he said it, the way his face crumpled, she thought he must know exactly what it would be like. “Did you touch one of the unsettled dead?”
He nodded slowly. “On my first attempt. I’ve avoided them since, but that first day, I’m surprised I made it out at all.
It was hard to understand from the memories I experienced…
” Maggie understood the use of that specific word, because it wasn’t like watching a movie or reading a book.
It was like living them, even briefly. Like they were hers, if only for a moment.
Arthur went on. “I gathered that he was a young boy who never got to be much older than my nephew.” His face collapsed, and Maggie thought he might start to cry.
She wanted to reach for him, to envelop him in her arms and keep him from feeling that pain—any pain—again.
When he looked up, his eyes were dry, but his voice was raspy as he continued.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him.
I don’t know his name, or where he lived. Or when, for that matter.”
Maggie hated the idea of the unsettled dead floating around the lab on the third floor, whatever rest they’d found in the afterlife interrupted.
“We have to help them home,” she said quietly.
There were one hundred reasons to dissolve the pall, but none of them seemed to matter quite as much as this one.
“I know.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “Ever since my first time in the pall, I’ve thought about him up there, waiting to return to his rest. I hate how long I’ve made him wait.”
“You don’t have to do it alone anymore.” She knew she should tell him. If they were going to keep working together like this, he needed to know the truth. It didn’t matter what his reaction would be. They were both adults. They could handle this. Couldn’t they?
“C’mon,” Arthur said. “Let’s get you home.”
“Wait.” She sat up. “There’s something—”
But he interrupted her. “No. Not today. You are going to go home, and you are going to rest. And you are going to text me every hour so I know that you are alive and well.”
“But…”
“You’re not even going to think about the pall,” he said sternly, and, unbidden, Maggie remembered the sure way his fingers had moved her where he wanted her as they kissed.
She wished that particular image could be banished from her brain again, because it was not something she needed to be reminded of in this minuscule office, where the only distance between them was six inches.
How easy would it be to close that distance?
To feel his lips against hers? It was lucky she was so exhausted, because she might have done something she regretted.
“And then?” she asked, her voice breathy.
Arthur didn’t seem to notice, though. “And, if you get a good night’s rest, if you do exactly what Nurse Whitney has asked you to do, then maybe tomorrow we can resume our investigation.”
“You make it sound like we’re a pair of detectives.”
“Sure,” he said with a small smile. “Hard-boiled private eyes.”
They were silent for a moment. She couldn’t tear her gaze from his, from the intense way he was looking at her. Had he always looked at her like that?
“What now?” she asked, anything to stop the heat and want building in her body, even as she felt weak and exhausted and still so nauseated.
“I’m going to walk you back to your apartment.
And then, if you’ll let me, I’m going to arrange your medication in an easy-to-reach place along with a glass of water, some snacks, and the television remote.
You are going to change into something comfortable, and then you are going to curl up beneath a blanket and let the sleeping aid give you a dreamless sleep. ”
“Does that mean I have to give this back?” she asked, tucking her arms back under the jacket. She couldn’t imagine what possessed her to say it, but she found she didn’t regret it.
His eyes widened just for a moment before he said, “It’s yours.”
—
Finally, Maggie had made it out of Ilex Hall into the cool night.
She still had Arthur’s tweed jacket around her shoulders, and her arm was threaded through his so she didn’t fall over.
She was weaving from side to side like she’d had too many of Rodrigo’s old-fashioneds, when she was struck by the vague fear that her apartment was a mess—clothes strewn all over the floor, mail and packages crowding the entrance, an old cereal bowl still in the sink from earlier in the week—so she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
She pulled her arm out from Arthur’s grip and swayed on her feet only slightly. “I can make it the rest of the way,” she said, gesturing to her apartment, which had come into view.
Arthur crossed his arms, taking a step back from Maggie.
“Fine,” he said. “Show me.” Her eyebrows rose and her stomach dropped.
That was just the nausea, she thought, but she knew she was lying to herself.
There was a small, ever-so-tiny part of Maggie that liked the way he sometimes told her exactly what he wanted her to do.
She would rather fall on her face than let on that she liked it even a little bit, so she looked at him defiantly and walked in the direction of her apartment.
She truly did think she’d make it on her own at first, but then each step began to feel like an effort.
It was like walking through knee-deep pall slime, and each wave of nausea was worse than the last. She wondered if her face was turning that sickly shade of green again, or if she was going to collapse on this sidewalk out of sheer stubbornness.
She clenched her fist at her side, her brewing frustration getting worse.
Arthur hadn’t been so affected by his pall sickness, not even the day he’d come back to their office and collapsed on the couch.
He’d still been alert, still able to stand, even if he’d swayed on his feet.
He could hold a conversation. And here she was, afraid she was about to fall to her knees hours after she had escaped the pall’s clutches.
She stopped, swallowing her frustration and blinking away the angry tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
She didn’t like to need anyone, let alone Arthur. A man who, up until thirteen minutes ago, she thought she hated. And she had hated him, hadn’t she?
From behind her, Arthur said in a too-sweet voice, “Yes, Maggie?” She knew if she turned around, he would be looking at her with a self-satisfied grin that would probably make her go weak in the knees or something else ridiculous.
She didn’t say anything. She just held out her arm, and he was at her side again. He looped his arm around her waist, supporting her as they finished the last stretch of the walk.
Once they were inside, Maggie tried to care about the mess, but Arthur didn’t seem to see it. She lowered herself onto the couch and let him fuss, too exhausted to even mind as he found her a blanket and then a pillow from her unmade bed.
“I wasn’t expecting guests,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, and he shushed her, actually shushed her. She had half a mind to protest, but then he was putting a glass of water on the coffee table and lining up the vials supplied by Nurse Whitney.
“Do you remember what I told you?”
“No,” she said petulantly, burrowing into the blanket he’d draped over her.
Should she be this tired? Every muscle felt weighed down by exhaustion, every movement felt like she was still swimming through the viscous pall, with time slowed down and the atmosphere more soup than air.
Her head fell back against the pillow, and she thought, maybe, she could close her eyes for just a moment.
Arthur had already watched her sleep in her office—what was a little longer?
Her eyelids fluttered closed, but Arthur was suddenly on his knees, shaking her gently.
She felt so out of it and not quite here.
Didn’t Arthur say her dreams would be strange?
Because she couldn’t remember why Arthur Taliesin would be in her apartment.
This had to be one of those dreams. But he looked so worried. Didn’t he know she was just fine?
“Maggie, you need to take this,” he said quietly, holding out a dropperful of medicine.
“Sure,” she said, but her head tilted back, and the world slipped away again.
He slid his hand behind her head and helped her hold it up, his fingertips grazing the soft skin behind her ear.
“Please,” he begged, and she held her eyes open just a little longer, taking the dropper from his hands and putting it to her lips.
The violet liquid tasted of pennies and something else horrible.
She grimaced. “Good girl,” Arthur whispered.
She might have flushed, might have wished she were in a state to enjoy Arthur on his knees before her, but then the wave of sleep crested over her, and she let it carry her away this time, blissfully dreamless.