Chapter 42 The Timepiece
A fire burned Leena from the inside out, so potent it felt as if her spine was being ripped apart.
She collapsed to her knees, entirely blind to her surroundings, attempting to breathe through the pain. Blood dripped from her nose and eyes, splashing the hardwood floor like crimson teardrops. She began gagging, and it took her bleary mind a moment to realize she was also coughing up blood.
It took minutes for the agony to finally cease. Leena collapsed onto her side, blinking through the haze. The bleeding had stopped, and she wiped her face with the back of her sleeve.
Slowly, her senses returned.
They had entered a small room containing only a bed, a wooden chair, a washstand, and a fireplace stacked with wood.
Leena jolted up to a sitting position, searching for Bram.
He was on the mattress; Orley must’ve put him there. Leena staggered toward him, emitting a sigh of relief when she saw the ragged rise and fall of Bram’s chest, although he was still unconscious.
A candle was already lit by the bedside, the candelabra caked with years of rust. A few art prints hung on the wall, but the glass in their frames was covered by a thick dust.
Orley stood by the window, and Leena was surprised to see tears dotting his eyes.
“I’m home,” he choked out. “You do not know how long—” Another sob tore from him.
Leena peeked through the dirty window. Wherever she was, it was pitch-black outside and she could only see her own horrified expression reflected back, streaks of blood still running down her cheeks. It was dead quiet—no soldiers pounding at the door, no townspeople constructing a doomed barricade.
“We’re in the demon world.” The words felt foreign to Leena’s ears.
“Yes, Bastmore. A safe place, as I promised.” Orley bowed once more.
“This is where I used to stay when I came to the island to entertain at the Duke’s court.
You are lucky that no traveling minstrel has taken up residence; they come and go as they please.
You’ll need to keep a candle lit by the window so that they know the room has been claimed—if that is indeed the way they still do it. It has been years.”
Leena stared at him. “I meant a safe place in the human world.”
Orley shrugged. “Then you ought to have specified.”
“Take. Us. Back.” Leena slammed a fist into her thigh with each word.
Orley wagged a finger at her. “That was not part of the agreement.”
It took a long moment for Leena’s tired mind to process this piece of unsettling news. It was another stab wound in a body that had already suffered a hundred.
“My theory was right.” Orley clapped his hands in delight. His eyes roved her body as if she were a feast. There was nothing lecherous in his gaze, only fascination. “You are a vessel.”
Her head felt heavy. “That means that the only reason I can see spirits is because I’m infected by a…a…parasite?”
“Not a parasite, a vessel,” he corrected, chiding her like a schoolteacher.
“Who knows how one has got into you?” Orley paused, then looked at her in a faintly pitying manner.
“Hmm. You hoped there was a reason for your ability to see the dead? No, my dear, there isn’t.
You are nothing—a happenstance, a host.”
Leena swallowed.
The demon sniffed the air. “Is that shame I can taste? Yes. How delicious.”
Leena reared back. “I’m not ashamed.”
“Yes, you are. You are ashamed of your nothingness.”
Leena rose up to her full height. She could not afford to dwell on this now. “Our deal still stands, demon. You’ll fetch me the cure for the poison.”
Orley’s face tightened with distaste. He sighed, then headed for the door. “Once I fetch you the cure, we will be free of each other.”
Leena watched him go, then she quickly turned to check on Bram.
The pulse in his neck pounded rapidly against her finger. His eyelids remained closed, his skin an unnaturally high color, and when she pressed a hand to his cheek he still felt warm.
Leena wanted to check his bandages, but didn’t want Orley to come back and see the Saint of Silence in such a vulnerable position. Instead, she brushed a tendril of black hair away from his forehead and turned to investigate the room.
She went to the mirror first, attempting to stretch her fingers through it, but was met only with cool glass. Her reflection showed a wild version of herself, stained with blood. Leena wiped her cheeks until the skin was raw, just to return to a sense of self.
There was also a small room tucked away at the side that Leena hadn’t previously noticed. It held a claw-foot tub with only a curtain to act as a door. The tap creaked when she turned it, then spewed forth rusty water.
Winter bit harder here, and she could see her own breath in the air. Beneath the bed, she found a musty blanket which she used to cover Bram.
Finally, just as she steeled herself to take another look through the window, Orley returned.
The demon held a brown package.
Seeing this, Leena started forward, desperate to get her hands on the antidote. Things would be better once Bram was healthy again. They would make a plan then.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Orley admonished. “A deal is a deal.”
He took out a glass vial filled with a red liquid from the package and gave it to her. “I am no longer in your debt. I have handed you the cure.”
Leena gripped the glass vial, hope rising in her chest.
Orley lunged toward her, striking her cheek with such force that she staggered backward.
Pain burst behind her eyelids. Her ears rang. The world spun.
In her disorientation, Orley tore the vial from her hands. She scrambled forward, but it was too late. Orley unlatched the window, throwing the vial out.
She heard it shatter on the cobbles below.
For a moment she could only stare at her empty hands before lurching for her pistol, but her pocket was empty. To her terror, she looked up to see Orley holding the weapon, twirling it in his hands.
“The Saint will hunt me down for what I know about you,” Orley said, turning the pistol toward Bram.
Leena flung herself at Orley, attempting to grapple for the gun, but he pushed her back. She slammed into the wall, shaking white dust from the ceiling.
“No,” Leena begged. “Please.”
He fired.
Once. Twice.
The chamber was empty.
In a rage, Orley flung the pistol to the side where it clattered against the mirror, shattering it to fragments.
Leena was too far away for any pieces to pierce her flesh, but she clawed on hands and knees to find a large shard. Gripping it so tightly that it drew a thin line of blood on her palm, she stepped between Orley and Bram.
Orley reared back, hands in the air. He licked his lips and grimaced at the taste.
Leena bitterly understood that Orley had fulfilled his end of the bargain—he’d handed her the vial—and she had nothing else to trade with him for the poison’s antidote.
“Leave,” Leena yelled. “Out. Now. Before I slit your sniveling throat.”
Just before leaving, he turned back to her.
“One day you will see, my dear, what happens to all the women who come into contact with the Avon men. You will soon understand that there is no limit to what they will sacrifice for Weavingshaw.” There was a promise in his voice—someone who had seen calamity once and now saw it again in her.
“One day you will remember me, and you will wish that I had killed him.”
Leena spat at him.
The demon’s face twisted as he wiped his chin with a flounce of his sleeve, then left without a departing glance. Leena bolted the door after him.
Light crept into the room, and she dared to peek outside to see Orley’s huddled figure making his way up a long street.
Their safe place was in an attic, Leena realized, in a town.
It was snowing here too, but the snow looked like gray ash. The houses were built in rows, all made from black stone with towering spires and long thin roofs that stretched toward the sky. Walkways lined the canals, the water inky and fathomless.
A woman—a demon?—standing beside the canal held a naked baby by the ankles.
Leena watched as she plunged the squirming babe into the dark waters, then held it for so long that Leena gasped before the screaming infant was wrenched out.
The woman wrapped the baby in fur, but the infant’s wails didn’t diminish even as Leena withdrew from the window.
Forcing herself away, Leena turned to check Bram’s bandages.
They’d bled through. She hung her head, weeping because she didn’t have anything sterile to replace them with. She fell asleep like that, kneeling on the hard wooden floor, head resting against the mattress beside Bram.
When she finally stirred, it was dark outside again. No phantom had come to possess her body; perhaps the demon world was bereft of ghosts. The only light came from the low-burning candle. She would need to replace it soon.
Leena’s breath hitched when she saw that Bram had also woken.
He was lucid.
She wondered briefly if he remembered their kiss—the way his fingers had laced through her hair or the way his lips had dragged across her skin.
There was no recognition of it when his eyes met hers, and she felt an odd squeezing in her chest.
Bram’s forehead was cool to the touch, but she didn’t know how long it would be before the fever ravaged him again. Perhaps it was better that way, she thought to herself—that Bram became too lost to hallucinations to notice death’s long shadow darkening his doorway.
Somehow, he didn’t seem as burdened by those grim thoughts as she was.
Instead, he looked at her oddly, as if she was something otherworldly and he’d been trapped in unholy reality his entire life.
“You stayed with me,” he rasped, his voice almost reverent. One calloused finger moved to touch her, as if to confirm his own words—as if to dispel any fears of her being an apparition. He traced her cheek. “Why did you remain?”
She didn’t have an answer for him. At least, nothing that would have sufficed.