Chapter Sixteen Unsteady As She Ghosts
Iscream, stumbling backward as jars fall out of the cabinet and slam into my body on their way down. A whooshing fills my ears—along with the tinkling sound of breaking glass—and I trip over my own feet, nearly going down amid the broken shards.
Tears make diluted tracks in the blood that covers her face. But it’s her eyes that pull me in. They’re moving with unnatural speed, darting from side to side, up and down, as if they’re seeing a thousand images all at once. And each one is breaking her heart.
Her trembling hand reaches for me and I don’t move. I can’t move. Fear has me in its grip even before she runs one single, bone-chillingly cold finger down my cheek.
It hurts, pain cracking into a thousand different tendrils that wind their way through me. I gasp, try to jerk away, but she has me in her thrall. As do the images that start flashing in my head—tiny vignettes blazing across my eyelids in a million bursts of light.
I see her sweat-drenched body splayed on a bed.
I see blood—so much blood.
I see a handshake, hear high-pitched crying.
She’s despair personified, her sadness an endless, black blanket that smothers me and makes it impossible to breathe.
But as she pulls back, I see a flash of bright-blue eyes beneath the blood and I know I’ve seen her once before—when I was in ninth grade, just before everything went to shit. “What is it?” Jude demands, rushing toward me.
But I can’t speak as her face gets closer and closer to mine. The physical pain and the mental anguish are too great.
“Clementine, talk to me,” he orders, jaw grim and eyes narrowed as he puts himself in front of me.
The moment he does, she disappears as quickly as she emerged, leaving me trembling and drenched in sweat.
“It’s nothing,” I gasp even as I know that’s not true on some primal level. But I double down anyway. “There’s nothing there,” I say firmly.
Jude’s not buying it, though. Why should he? There was a time when I told him all my secrets. “But there was something there before?”
“Nothing important,” I say as I try to herd him back toward the table—and the healing bowl of elixirs.
But Jude’s never been one to go where he doesn’t want to, and he stands his ground, refusing to budge as his gaze sweeps over me. “Did it hurt you?” he asks.
“I’m fine.” He lifts a brow, and I know he’s thinking about our earlier conversation, so I change it to, “I’m okay. It’s long gone.”
“Good.” He only deigns to acknowledge the last part of what I said as he looks me over from head to toe. As he does, his eyes narrow even more. “For someone who insists they’re okay, you certainly look like hell.”
I stiffen at the insult. I know I look rough—it’s been a shit day. Just like I know it shouldn’t matter what he thinks. But for some reason it does. “Yeah, well, we can’t all be oneiroi, can we?”
He rolls his eyes. “I meant, there’s blood on your shirt. And a bruise on your face.” He leans forward, strokes his thumb over my jaw.
I jerk back, startled. But he looks just as surprised—like he’s as shocked as I am that he touched me like that.
“We really should take care of those cuts.” He nods toward my arm.
I glance down and realize he’s right. I must have bled through the bandages Eva and I applied earlier. Now that my hoodie is off, there’s nothing to hide all the damage that disgusting snake monster did.
“How did this happen?” he asks gruffly.
“I had a run-in with one of the monsters in the menagerie before class.”
He looks far more horrified than a few cuts, even nasty ones, warrant.
I laugh—or try to—around the sudden tightness in my throat. On the plus side, my galloping heart rate has finally returned to normal. “The storm seems to have put a lot of things in a bad mood today.”
Jude doesn’t answer, but his gaze is downright stony as he scans my body, cataloging the damage. My stomach jumps a little at the scrutiny. At his scrutiny.
I tell myself to turn away, tell myself that after everything that’s happened, he doesn’t have the right to look at me like that. But I can’t move. Can’t think. Can’t breathe—at least until he says, “You really need to take care of those wounds.”
And just like that, my stomach goes from flipping to sinking. How can I be so pathetic that one slide of his eyes over my body makes my defenses crumble like dust?
“I have to go,” I say as I all but flee to the corner of the room where I dropped my backpack. “Claudia will be here in a little while—”
“Clementine.” His voice rumbles through the space between us.
I ignore the way it makes my stomach jump and my cheeks burn hotter as I gather up my sweatshirt. “Just keep soaking your hands and she’ll—”
“Clementine.” This time there’s a warning in the three little syllables that make up my name, but I ignore it the same way I ignore him. Badly.
“Bandage them up or whatever needs to be done. You know how good she is with—”
“Clementine!” The warning has turned to an ultimatum, and this time it comes from much closer. So much closer that my heart—and my feet—stutter over themselves at the exact same moment.
“What are you doing?” I demand, whirling around. “You need to get back to soaking your hands!”
“My hands are doing just fine.” He holds them up to prove his point. And while fine is a stretch—they are still very red and angry looking—the elixir worked fast to close up all the open wounds. “I need to take care of you now.”
Suddenly, he sounds so sad I just can’t bear it.
“I’m okay. The bites are no big deal.” I stumble backward toward the door.
But he’s moving with me, his steps outpacing mine until he’s closer—so much closer—than I’m comfortable with.
“Stop fighting me,” he insists again.
“Fine.” I whirl around to find I’m back at the cupboard. Caught between the door I’m a little terrified to open and the guy I’m even more terrified to let touch me. “But I can do it.”
I don’t need magic to know Jude doesn’t so much as budge an inch. His gaze blazes like a brand between my shoulder blades even as the heat rolls in waves off his big, powerful body. So close that I can feel the burn. So intense that I can feel the weight of those three long years pressing down on me like an off-kilter scale, one that will be off-balance forever.
Desperate for some distance now, a chance to think—to breathe—I start to reach for the handle. But Jude gets there first, moving me gently aside in what I’m pretty sure is an effort to protect me as he opens the door.
This time, though, nothing comes out. Thank God.
“Okay?” Jude asks, and I know he’s talking about what happened earlier, not my injuries.
“Okay,” I answer, reaching in and pulling out the first bottle my fingers come in contact with. “But I can take care of myself.” I infuse the words with as much power as I can manage.
Which, admittedly, isn’t nearly as much as I’d like.
“That’s peppermint elixir,” is his answer. “Unless you’re planning on puking, I don’t think it will do you any good.”
Jude pries the bottle out of my numb hand before grabbing another one off the shelf. I try to take it from him, but he holds it out of my reach. “Turn around.”
“I don’t need your help.” But even I can hear the lack of conviction in my voice.
“Give me your arm, Clementine.” This time, his voice brooks no argument. Neither does his unyielding gaze.
For one long, interminable moment, our eyes lock, my heart beating too fast and my breath coming in jagged little pants I can no longer control.
I longingly wish for the floor to open up and swallow me whole, but when that doesn’t happen—when nothing happens save Jude making an impatient sound deep in his throat—I finally give in. Ungraciously.
“Whatever,” I mutter and extend my arm.
When he finally takes a small step, I consider the fact that I don’t immediately run out of the room a small sign of personal growth.
“Thank you.” Jude’s words are so low and growling that I can’t say for sure that I haven’t imagined them over the pounding of my heart.
Several awkward seconds pass as he shakes the bottle and flips the cap open. But then his fingers are on my skin.
A shiver works its way down my spine, but I ruthlessly control it. I’ve already embarrassed myself in front of Jude enough today. No way in hell am I doing it again.
My resolve lasts until he starts rubbing my cuts with the antiseptic-soaked cotton ball like he’s trying to work out a stain.
“Ouch!” I yelp, pulling away to glare at him. “There are nerve endings attached to that, you know.” I hold out a hand. “Just give it to me.”
“I’ve got it,” he says, and the hands he places on my arm are so soft that his touch is like a whisper.
This time when he starts to clean my wounds, he’s so gentle I barely feel the cotton ball at all. Which is a new problem altogether, because now all I can think about is the brush of his skin over mine as he moves from wound to wound.
It feels good—dangerously good—and it takes every ounce of willpower I have not to pull away. Not to run away. But I refuse to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much he still affects me.
So I stay exactly where I am, forcing myself to concentrate on the sting of the antiseptic, on the physical pain of it all instead of the empty ache deep inside me.
It’s no big deal. It’s no big deal. It’s no big deal.The four words become my mantra, and repeating them over and over again becomes my salvation. My breathing levels out. My knees stop trembling. My heart remembers how to beat properly.
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly. Tell myself one more time that this really is no big deal. And I almost believe it…right up until Jude releases my arm and places a hand on my shoulder to spin me around so that my back is facing him. My shirt looks like Swiss cheese, so I know he sees the myriad of bites that pepper my skin. His fingers move to the wound on my lower back as he says, “I think you’re going to have to take your shirt off for this one.”