Brightly (Flicker #2) (50 page)

Frowning, the woman moved toward the couch; without thinking, Lee stepped between the stranger and Nasser. “Who the hell are you?”

“I might ask you the same question,” said the woman, shooting a sharp look at Davis. Then she turned back to Lee and raised her hands in a placating gesture. “My name is Amelia Carter. I’m a doctor.”

“She’s from the Guild, Lee,” Jason said.

“What’s she doing here?”

“Does that really matter this second?”

“I’m not going to hurt him,” said the woman, Amelia. “If you’ll move aside, I’ll see what I can do to help him. Please. Let me see him.”

For a moment, Lee didn’t move. Then, reluctant to give this stranger access to Nasser, she stepped aside.

Amelia flew into action, first pointing to Jason, Filo and Henry. “You three, bring him upstairs. Clementine and Alice, strip the bed in the spare room. Davis, get my kit. It’s in the basement. And—” She turned to Lee. “What’s your name?”

“Lee.”

“Lee,” Amelia repeated. “Lee, I need you to get some towels and washcloths and bring them upstairs. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Lee managed, and forced herself to turn toward the downstairs bathroom. Each step felt mechanical.

Clementine and Alice scrambled upstairs, and Davis rushed to the basement. The other boys lifted Nasser from the couch and carried him toward the stairs. Amelia followed closely behind them, chanting, “Careful, careful!”

In the bathroom, Lee opened the cupboards and pulled out an armload of towels and washcloths. When she got upstairs, Clementine hovered anxiously near the door, looking as if she were afraid to go in. Lee slipped past her.

The bed had been stripped of everything but the one white sheet on which Nasser lay. Everyone else stood around the bed. Amelia was snapping on a pair of blue latex gloves.

Filo was trying to explain what had happened: the bear, the broken bone, the missing salt. Lee had never seen him so flustered. He spoke rapidly, tripping over his words, and at one point, he lapsed into Old Faerie without seeming to realize it. Henry broke in then, continuing the story, and Filo fell silent. He looked sort of dazed. Alice stood next to him, gripping one of his arms with both of her pale, bruise-spotted hands.

Davis trundled a large, plastic box into the bedroom. It looked something like an oversized first-aid kit. Lee heard the gentle clinking of glass bottles inside, but she couldn’t guess at the rest of the contents.

“There are too many people in this room,” Amelia announced, when Henry finished speaking. She was unpeeling the gauze from Nasser’s leg. If what was beneath surprised or disgusted her, she didn’t show it. “Everyone but Davis needs to step outside.”

Nobody moved.

Amelia set her shoulders and shooed them sternly. “I mean it! Everyone but Davis.”

Henry went first. Clementine had already slipped away down the hall. A moment later, Alice took Filo by the hand and pulled him toward the door. Still, Lee hesitated. Fear trembled inside her chest, fear that something would happen if she let Nasser out of her sight.

It was Jason who finally fastened his hands on her shoulders and steered her into the hallway. His face tightened as the door clicked shut behind them. Lee descended the stairs with him on leaden legs.

For a moment, the group stood silently in the living room. Then Henry looked up and seemed to see Clementine for the first time. At first, he looked stunned. Then she rushed to him and flung her arms around his neck. Henry crushed her against him, lifting her off her feet and burying his face in her hair. It was almost a full minute before he set her down. When he finally did, Lee saw that they were both crying.

“The crystals,” Lee said belatedly, lowering herself onto the couch before her legs could give way. “We have them.”

Clementine’s head snapped around. She was still clinging to Henry’s shirtfront. “What?”

Lee pulled off her backpack and handed it over. When Clementine opened it, purple light illuminated her face and she reached out to steady herself against a chair. She lifted one crystal out of the pack. In her hand, still shining, it looked alive.

Clementine thrust the crystal toward Alice. “You know how to do it, right?”

“I’ll help her,” Filo said. “It takes two people, anyway.”

“Good. I can start taking these around,” Clementine said, starting toward the door. “Davis showed us how to capture curse energy, so I can at least get started.”

Henry moved to follow her. “I’ll go with you.”

“No, you’re going to stay here and sit down. Look at yourself.”

“I’m
fine
,” Henry said resolutely, though he looked a little unsteady on his feet. “I’m going with you.”

She hesitated, then shook her head in exasperation as she pushed the screen door open. “Well, come on, then. We don’t have all day.”

Together, they stepped onto the porch. Soon they were heading down the path toward the trees, their heads bent.

Jason glanced at Filo and Alice. “The basement would be a good place,” he suggested. “It’s quiet and there’s room to work.”

Alice and Filo exchanged a glance, looking conflicted. Lee didn’t miss how Filo’s eyes flicked toward the stairs.

“It’s okay,” Lee told them. “Take care of it. Jason and I are here, if anything—”
If anything happens.
Mentally, she chastised herself for even thinking such a thing.

Reluctantly, Filo and Alice turned and walked into the kitchen. Lee and Jason were alone.

Alice grabbed a canister of salt from the kitchen while Filo trotted downstairs to the basement. When she joined him in the basement, he was sketching a circle on the floor with a piece of white chalk, big enough for the two of them. He surrounded it with bold-looking symbols.

Carefully, Alice poured salt along the edge of the circle. They both stepped inside before she finished. Then she poured the last measure of salt. Filo knelt, pressing his hand to the line, and sealed the circle with a pulse of magic.

They sat facing each other. Alice cradled the crystal in her hands. It felt like a beating heart, the warmth of it sinking into her skin. For the first time in days, her hands weren’t cold.

When Filo reached out, silently asking her to give the crystal to him, she gasped. “Your hand!”

He looked down and seemed almost surprised to see the cuts on his palm, streaked with blood and ash. “It’s just the sacrifice for the spell. It’s fine. I’ll clean them properly later.”

“Have—” Alice started, then stopped short, her heart in her throat.
Have Nasser look at it,
she’d almost said. It was automatic. Nasser was always there, no matter what they needed.

When they carried him into the house, he’d looked half dead. More than half. A sick feeling settled in her chest. She forced her attention back to the task at hand.

She placed the crystal in Filo’s upturned palm and watched him trace several symbols onto its planes. The chalk didn’t want to stick to the crystal’s surface, so he had to press hard. When he was finished, he raised the crystal, high and close enough that Alice could see her reflection on its shiny surface.

“You know what to do,” Filo said. “On my count. One. Two.
Three.
”

Alice closed her eyes and reached down inside herself, looking for the source of all that cold power. The curse had a center. Every curse did. She just needed to focus on it.

She found it lodged somewhere behind her heart, as silent and depthless as a frozen lake. When she prodded at it with her own magic, she felt a sudden, sharp chill, like the surface had cracked and was spilling rivulets of icy water into her chest.

The crystal hummed, and Alice felt a stirring deep inside her: a ripple, a swirl of water beneath the surface. The crystal was calling, and the curse rose to answer.

The crack in her chest broke open with a pain so sharp and sudden that she gasped—and there was the curse. There was the water.

Oceans rose behind her eyes, full of shadows and monsters and music. Her bones resonated with the hollow howl of the sea. Her whole body seemed to be rushing and whispering like the tide on the beach, shivering with strange energy. She felt the magic as it poured out of her, cascading through the break in her chest, roaring around her heart and bursting through her skin. The crystal drank it in, swallowing the endless dark water.

And then she was empty, rinsed clean. When she opened her eyes, she felt dry and strange, like a desert that had once been a sea.

The crystal had gone as cold as ice. It still glowed purple, but swirls of darkest blue and green churned inside, like it was filled with water.

She looked down at her hands, and for a moment, she stared. The dark bruises that had bloomed on her skin were gone, as if they’d never been. She paused, extending her senses, but she couldn’t feel the ocean. The water didn’t whisper to her anymore.

“It’s gone.” When she looked up at Filo, her heart was thundering. She felt herself starting to laugh, tears in her eyes. “It’s really gone.”

He smiled, and she moved without thinking, throwing herself against him. His arms circled her immediately, hugging her so tightly that she gasped. Alice buried her face against his shoulder and gripped the back of his shirt. She could feel him shaking.

“
Salt and sage,”
he muttered, in Old Faerie.
“At least one of you…”

They clung to each other for a long time. Holding him felt like being complete. She never wanted to let go—but, eventually, she had to.

The first time Davis came downstairs, he had no news. All he had was a list of supplies and medications with jaw-breaking names and an instruction to fetch it all from Amelia’s boat. As he was the only one of them who knew anything about medicine, he was the only one she trusted with the task.

Davis was off like a shot. He returned twenty minutes later, panting and carrying a box filled with the items Amelia had requested. Sitting on top were what looked like IV bags, but Lee had no idea what else was in the box, and Davis didn’t stop long enough to say. He ran upstairs to Amelia, and the click of the bedroom door as it shut echoed through the house.

Jason and Alice explained that the seven days they spent in Otherworld had been barely three days in this world. Since Amelia arrived yesterday, she’d been sorting through their notes on the curse and visiting the victims in their homes with Davis.

“We didn’t tell her anything about you four,” Alice said. “She’s trying to help, but she’s Guild. As far as we know, she’s planning to have all of us arrested as soon as she’s finished here, so we thought it would be safer to leave you out of it. We had to wait until she left with Davis so Jason and Clementine could take the boat back to Troll’s Island.”

“She knows now, obviously,” Jason said. “I think she’s pissed that we kept that from her.”

Filo and Lee recounted what happened in the caves in greater detail. After that, there was nothing for any of them to do but wait.

Lee sat stiffly on the couch, her fists clenched against her legs. Jason sat with her for a while, but he soon resorted to pacing through different parts of the house. She could tell where he was based on the steady tapping of his shoes against the floor.

Alice herded Filo into the living room and sat him down beside Lee. She watched Alice carefully clean and bandage the cuts on Filo’s palms while his hands shook. She watched Alice return from the kitchen with sandwiches on little blue plates. She watched the sandwiches for a while, because she couldn’t bring herself to eat.

That afternoon, Lee walked numbly into the bathroom with a bundle of clean clothes under her arm. She was determined to wash away her anxiety, but all she succeeded in scrubbing away was dirt and skin. At first, she tried not to cry, because crying was pointless. Then she cried a lot, because she didn’t know what else to do, and because nobody could hear her over the hissing of the water, anyway. She stood under the shower for a long, long time.

Eventually, Davis emerged to tell them that Nasser was being given fluids to maintain his blood pressure and that Amelia was attempting to use her magic to improve his condition. Until he was stabilized, she had forbidden anyone but Davis from entering the room.

That grated at Lee, but she knew it was for the best. Nasser had told her a bit about magical healing. It was difficult and dangerous, he said, both for the healer and the person being healed. It required training. If magic were applied improperly or if the spell were disrupted, the healing could have what Nasser called “unpredictable results.” Nasser was unwilling to use his magic to attempt healing outside of emergencies.

Henry and Clementine returned after dark. The moment she saw them, Lee could tell that a weight had been lifted from them, though they both looked tired.

“It worked,” Clementine said breathlessly, dropping the backpack on the coffee table. “We went to every house. When it was done, the barnacles started sloughing off. Their skin went back to normal. Their eyes went back to normal. They started
talking
.”

Clementine’s eyes shone, and Lee hated her for that—for being happy, for being all right, when Nasser was dying upstairs because he’d been forced to come to this cursed island. She wanted to scream, and she wanted to cry some more, and she wanted to hit someone. But she couldn’t find the energy to do any of those things.