41. Chapter 41
If alcerin made me fast, Riquin’s blood made me fly.
I was through the receiving wood in minutes, hurtling through the Firstborn tunnel and into its jagged landscape of black and searing white.
It felt like weeks ago that that horrible smoke had almost killed Remy, but it hadn’t been more than a few days.
If the creature still stirred at the dark edges of dawn, it took no interest in me, and I moved too quickly to see much more than blurs.
I hesitated at the mist. It looked strange, less golden than I remembered, as if its sheen had been sapped somehow. Would I find Serich just beyond it, his corpse rotting on the ground?
I ran through it before I could summon any more awful images and found the gold wood had changed entirely.
No longer did it wear its beautiful facade.
It had peeled back its skin to reveal what festered beneath.
Carrion crows soared through eddies of black cloud against a gray sky.
The apples hanging from trees, once ripe and gold, were black with rot, white maggots writhing through the corruption.
All those sweet golden children had turned sour, like bad wine, their smiles red and fanged.
Dead grass, scorched earth, a world of black and gray and red.
But I would have plunged through the place with nary a glance at all this devastation if I hadn’t heard human voices.
Mad human voices. Frightening moans of pain that somehow swelled into breathless, lunatic giggle fits, jumbles of words that made no sense, truncated cries.
I dropped to the earth beside a gaunt man in filthy robes I suspected had once been white. He wore a collar at his throat and an expression of miserable ecstasy, as if he’d never felt a pain so good. The tree he leaned against looked diseased.
“Are you okay?” I forced his chin up with a few fingers to meet his eyes. They looked near lifeless, half-shuttered, though something flickered faintly behind them. His pale white tongue snaked out to wet his flaking lips.
“Do you hear that?” His eyes lifted to the sky, his voice a slur. “The angels are calling us home.”
“There are no angels here.” I clapped both my hands to his cheeks, trying to get him to focus on me, though his pupils dashed about as if he couldn’t see me at all. “There’s nothing here but death and madness.”
Had these people been hidden here when Serich and I passed through?
How had I not felt them, seen them, with Remy in my mind?
Was Riquin’s blood the only reason I now saw this place for what it truly was, or had entering it backward done that?
I could hardly leave him to his fate, but what help could I even offer this man?
“He’s ours now,” a sly, quiet voice said from behind me.
I leapt to my feet and whirled around, finding a small girl with glittering black eyes and skin like a cadaver gazing up at me. She smiled when I stumbled back from her, twisting the hem of her nightdress in brittle, crone-like fingers, baring her teeth in the grin of some fairytale monster.
“We’ll take care of him,” she said. “We take care of them all.”
I backed away and stared wildly about the wood, my veins tightening with a surge of panic.
Skeletal humans bobbing in that lake of insanity Remy had pointed out, cackling feverishly, their eyes flat and staring; humans lying prone and still in the shriveled black grass.
If I hadn’t seen their thin chests rising and falling I might have thought them corpses.
Humans with rotten smiles and matted, overgrown hair gorging on putrid fruit as if they were at a feast in some grand great hall.
My throat burned with bile. I couldn’t help, not if I had incubus blood enough for all of them. I did the only thing I could, what Remy would have commanded, had he been in my head: I ran.
I called for Serich, screaming his name throughout the silent, icy stretch of wood, but not even my echoes answered me. The wood swallowed my voice. My teeth were chattering so hard I probably wouldn’t have heard a response to begin with.
When I stopped for water at the riverbank caked with frost, the desolate place where Remy had come into the world, I couldn’t for the life of me imagine his mother staggering all this way just to bring him forth in peace.
Surely she loved him? She may have been a demon but they weren’t incapable of love, I knew that now.
I’d felt it from Remy when he spoke to his brothers, his uncle, when he thought about his father.
Would she have killed her only son, snapped her cold white fingers and made him disappear?
The thought of him being gone did something horrible to my insides.
It was as if I couldn’t breathe. I felt my heart would burst as easily as an overripe plum.
I hadn’t even gotten to see him, say an actual goodbye, and after six years of his constant harping presence I had never felt so terribly frightened and alone.
If I thought about it any longer I might turn as mad as those people in the gold wood, my mind disincarnate, scraped free from my shell.
Stop it. Stop thinking like that.
The water was a fishhook in my throat, so cold and sharp my eyes teared up.
I splashed some on my face to shock myself sensible.
Tried to imagine what Remy might tell me if he were still here.
Probably to run and keep running, that I knew how to handle a blade if I had call to use one, that I wasn’t going to die and not to think of that fucking bloodrose ever again.
Riquin’s blood was alive in my own, urging me to move.
I stood, water freezing on my face, and spotted something that made my heart fail: a lone, eerily proportioned figure with a vast bobbling head and overlong arms, dark skin and vacant amber eyes trained right on me from between two skeletal trees.
I sucked in an icy breath, felt it razoring around in my lungs as we stood there staring at each other in the deep silence. If a shifter was currently mimicking Serich, did that mean it hadn’t been long since it had seen him?
The shifter didn’t give me a chance to ask before it disappeared into a puff of shadow.
The water demon didn’t bother calling to me as I danced around his lakes and puddles, but I avoided his flaming eye sockets just the same.
What had Remy called him? A blind pathetic prick who couldn’t even leave the water?
His voice had been the only thing that pulled me back when I’d nearly done my head in from the double dose of wulfsnare and alcerin, and now he was gone, dead or imprisoned, and I might never speak to him again. Might never even look at him.
Stop it. Not now. Save it for later.
Puddles of molten steel grew scarcer until they eventually shriveled into the damp gray-brown earth and disappeared.
I vaulted over the fallen logs Serich and I had scaled three days earlier and slowed my pace in case he was nearby, calling out for him again.
An edge of hysteria was creeping into my voice.
I felt sick with fear the longer I went unacknowledged, darting through thickening trees.
My braid whipped my face as I turned this way and that.
I hadn’t expected to stumble upon it so quickly; perhaps in my panic I’d forgotten how close I’d gotten.
A ramshackle cottage seemed to appear from nowhere, and I raced toward the overgrown garden shimmering behind the wards.
Serich could be here, just inside, dusting Blathilde’s potion bottles or dicing up carrots—
I guess I was still howling for Serich, because the crooked little door swung open before I could pound my fist against it, and how could I have ever thought Blathilde ugly?
She seemed one of the most beautiful things in the world to me then, her grizzled white hair and beaky nose, that look of bewilderment creasing her face into a map of deep wrinkles.
“He’s not here, girl,” she croaked, gazing up at me as I swayed before her. “Left just this morning.”
Suddenly my stomach heaved. A violent lurch up my throat, and before I could swallow the urge, I was vomiting ferociously right there off her steps, a blood-tinged acid gush that smoked and stung. I threw up until I felt completely hollow, void of everything but misery and fear.
Something feathering at the small of my back, a froggy voice shushing me. When my stomach stopped contracting, I dropped down on the stone steps of the cottage and wiped my streaming eyes on my sleeve.
Blathilde squinted over at the mess I’d left as she joined me where I sat. “What have you done to yourself?” She tipped my head back to peer into my eyes.
“An incubus gave me his blood to help me through the wood.”
“And you drank it on an empty stomach?” She examined the puddle again with professional curiosity.
I supposed I had. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d eaten, the last time I’d properly slept. I didn’t answer, still adjusting to the fact that I had even made it to her cottage.
She patted my shoulder. “Up you get.”
“What would you have from me?” If I hadn’t felt my own lips forming the words I didn’t think I’d recognize my voice. “I wouldn’t intrude without a barter. I don’t want to impose.”
Her lips twitched to one side as if assessing what little I had on offer.
If she wanted my body again, she’d find it rundown and weakened, devoid of Riquin’s blood now, hardly capable of moving under its own power.
As soon as I’d vomited, I’d felt all those miles I’d traveled pummel into me at once.
My legs were like noodles, my heart a limp bird inside its cage.
Perhaps she knew what I was thinking, or else suspected my body was in very poor condition indeed. Perhaps I looked so pathetic she took pity on me, gave me an easy one. “A secret,” she finally decided. “Deep and dark.”
It took little soul-plumbing to think what to tell her.