* * *
Wraithbane was sleeping. I tried not to wake him as I considered how to get a drop of his blood. Nervously I checked the door behind me. Shut, no sign of Doc Mike or anyone else.
“They're looking for you.”
I yelped and nearly dropped the bowl. Wraithbane's cracked lips parted into a smile.
“Scared you. Not revenant yet.”
I put a hand over my heart, calming it. “No, but you're starting to sound like one.”
His laugh was the creepiest thing ever. I regretted making him amused. It had been a fateful move, though; it made me realize that his blood wasn't red, but black. Reminded of how bad his health was, I sank slowly into a chair and stared around his room.
The doctors had been trying, if the symbols arching over the door and around the bed were any indication. Incense had been burned, too, leaving the air thick with so many scents it smelled sweetly putrid. Even an IV drip was secured to his arm, the bag still full and slowly seeping into his body.
“I see people have been busy while I've been gone,” I said.
He grunted, clearly not caring for their attentions. “They unlocked your bedroom door a half-hour ago. They'll come check on me before doing anything.” He licked his dry lips. “If you have more craziness to add, do it. I'm expecting them back any minute.”
Time seemed to freeze now that he'd put me on the spot. What was I to do now that I had two unknown items? The red and the silver, what...
Wraithbane opened his eyes, revealing how mottled the whites now were with red. “Is there a problem?”
“No!” I sprang forward and thought for an instant. “I need you to cry.”
“Cry?”
“I need one of your tears.”
“I don't cry.”
“Stop being macho.”
“I'm not being 'macho'. I don't cry unless I get dust trapped beneath my eyelids.”
“Fine,” I said and jabbed him once in the eye with the stem of the flower.
He hissed in pain. His skin grayed and I thought he was going revenant. He strained against the straps, making them creak and my skin crawl. Then he blinked hard and said, “I can't rub it with these things on.”
“They're staying on. Cry or I'll poke you again.”
A tear streaked down his face on the other side, for some reason emerging from the un-harrassed eye. Quickly I reached over him as the tear slid off his jaw. Midair I caught it on the flower.
That was when Wraithbane bit me.
My arm had brushed his lips and now a fold of my skin was between his teeth. I stiffened in terror, not daring to move lest his teeth tighten down and break my skin.
He released me, my flesh unharmed except for rapidly fading indentations of his incisors.
“Had to get you back for stabbing me in the eye,” he said.
I punched him in the chest. “You!”
“Me what?”
“Thank goodness you didn't clamp down. I have enough Syrian sage root for you alone.”
“You do have a cure.” He sounded relieved.
“Yes, but I don't know the final ingredient. Red from you, now silver from me, but what is the silver?”
“Can you see?”
“Not very well, it's all fading into normalcy now. Even real life Technicolor looks kind of pastel.”
Wraithbane frowned. “What could it be?”
“I don't know. That's the problem.” I groaned and cupped my head in my hands. “I can't believe I've come so far to be stopped now.”
Though it had not been very long ago since I had gone to the Bliss den to pick up Kayla from a party, the event which had started this madness, it felt like it had been years. Everything had happened so fast. Facing down the woman who had brewed my Bliss, confronting her and stopping her, a feat deemed impossible by those who worked in the Kettle alongside me. Going through that fateful bone mine. Taking the blood oath in Hell's Canyon. Living through the slavers and now this. He'd been through all of it with me, and now ... I realized Wraithbane was smiling.
“What?”
The grin got bigger.
“What?”
“Just remembering what happened last time one of us was in the infirmary. Pity we couldn't do it again.”
I remembered. “You kissed me.”
“You kissed me.”
“Whatever.”
“Deny it, mo chroi, deny it.”
“What does 'mo chroi' mean?”
He shifted against his straps. “Your breath.”
“In what language?”
“No, the silver. When you were Blissed, I saw your breath. Silver.”
He was right—when I'd been able to connect strongly with my ability, my breath was silver not the usual white fog. It made sense. “The book says I need to do three puffs.” I patted down my pockets. “Crap, I left it.”
“Left what?”
“The matches in the kitchen drawer.”
“My lighter. Behind you.”
Knowing I was not following the instructions exactly—the root and oil should have been burning already—I hurried to balance the coffee cup on his chest, warning him not to move. Under his skeptical raised brow expression, I struck the lighter and discovered that a match would be a much-preferred tool to ignite slightly cool oil. But it did light, and when it started to smolder and the smoke billowed out, the Syrian sage root began to catch flame as well.
Sparks joined the smoke, bright white starlets. I expected them to curl in on themselves and dissolve into black embers, the way they had before, but something about the addition of oil and vanilla made them expand in the smoke. I could have watched the hundreds of starlets growing into full stars, but I had a job to do. With three puffs of my breath, breath which transformed into silver tendrils, I committed the passionflower and tear to the flames.
The new sparks unfurled as they emerged from the oil, becoming slender leaves which burned in the air with the stars. As the passionflower recoiled into itself, it replicated itself over and over in the spell. The third breath forced the entire mixture together and it whirled around, the starlets and leaves and smoke and breath dissolving into each other. A mauve mist replaced the earlier show, and it was this that Wraithbane inhaled.
He started coughing. And coughing and coughing, so violently that I thought he was going to be sick. My hands flew to the straps binding him to the bed, but I stopped myself before I could undo them.
His skin was becoming translucent, like oil poured over paper. His eyes were fully and truly red, and his nails had become long, dark claws.
Had I caused this, or had I been too late? I would have slunk back, but horror held me exactly in place, freezing me with the bowl still smoking right there by his face.
I remembered how the others had changed, the way they'd strained against their bonds, the way their screams penetrated my nightmares until they'd fade and fade until they were nothing but empty vessels begging for it all to be over. It was so easy to go wrong, easy for them to refuse treatment, easy for them to just succumb to the pain of the present.
“Breathe it in!” I yelled at him, though with his coughing, it wasn't like he could stop from inhaling. It was stupid, I knew it, I should take the warning signs now and leave before he went entirely revenant and I was trapped here with him. “Bane, come on.”
It wasn't like he wasn't trying. What more could I ask of him?
“Snap out of it.”
His eyes bulged and his chest swelled with a long, rasping gasp which made me cringe inwardly. Every muscle strained and I thought the straps were going to give beneath his strength, that he would rise from the table and start the drifting, misty existence of a revenant.
He went lax. Just as suddenly as he had heaved against his restraints, he fell limp against the bed, his head lolling off to the side. The smoke was gone. The fire was out. The cup clanked as I put it aside.
My hand shivered as I reached to touch his chest. “Nicholas?”
; The name sounded wrong coming out of my mouth. I shook his chest, trying to stir some life out of him. “Bane?”
Slowly, his head turned in my direction. His cheeks were pink, his lips red, and his eyes the usual hazel I'd grown to know. Relief made my legs collapse and my vision blacken around the edges.
“I'm still alive, but my head is splitting.”
Holding his hand, I could only nod and try to fight off the instant dizziness which had come over me. “But you're still human.”
“Still human.”
“Thank goodness.”
It had worked. Relief flooded through me, leaving me weak as if his survival had come out of my own strength. That was a possibility—or it was because I hadn't slept properly in days. Now I could. I was tempted to slide to the floor, curl into a ball, and let the blessed arms of unconsciousness enfold me.
Wraithbane's hand tightened around mine, a little too hard. “Brandy,” he said through a raspy voice, “what did you do to save me?”
“What was necessary.”
“Dawn Marie Smith. What did you do?”
My throat locked, the power of him using my birth name somehow forcing the answer out of me.
That was when the door opened, admitting two hefty men in three-piece suits with matching red ties. Even through my fatigue, I saw the quick movements of the firefly spell leading them straight to me. In a single second, they examined Wraithbane, the straps, the spells all over the room. Lastly their eyes settled on me.
“Where's the book?” one of them asked.
Worn out beyond the point of arguing, I simply said, “There's no book here.”
Wraithbane lifted his head and frowned. “White Wizard Council. What are you doing?” His question was half-swallowed by a coughing fit. The two men pretended not to have heard him.
Cautiously, as if I were a snake ready to strike, they approached me. Quick as they could, manacles of heavy, cold iron bound my wrists. The fireflies and faint hue of mauve disappeared entirely from my vision.
“You're under arrest for breaking parole.”
I blinked dumbly. “I can't be. I've never been arrested in my life.”
I expected them to scoff at me, or to say that they'd see about that. Something one-line Hollywood bad-cop style. I wasn't expecting their hesitation as they hauled me to my feet, nor for them to remove my pillbox from my trouser pocket and place it on the counter beside Wraithbane's lighter.
They all but carried me out the door while Wraithbane yelled.
“No,” the one nearest me said, his voice sad. “Not in this lifetime, no.”
As they took me through a portal which hadn't been there before, I remembered the phone call my foster mother had made that morning when she'd been making pancakes and I'd been playing cops, pretending to be a criminal in jail. The smell of burning pancakes and her terrified face, the spilled grape juice, the way she'd looked at me when she said to the mystery man on the other end, “She remembers.”
I hadn't known what she'd meant then, but now I knew: I was Dreamweaver, I'd been arrested, I'd been framed.
And I was beginning to remember the silent sentinels which had always haunted the darkest hours of my dreams.
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About Me
I'm an author, editor, and I dabble in illustration, all of which earns my husband pitying pats on the back and the promise that one day, I'll make money. After skipping across Nevada, Utah, Montana, Idaho, and Leicester I landed in Yorkshire, UK, where I never get a sunburn and it is seldom too hot to enjoy a steaming mocha.
About Blissed
Blissed is the scandalous lovechild of thriller, horror, fantasy, romance, and things I don't want my parents to know I've written. The format—deciding to go with episodes instead of chapters—comes about because it's somewhere between a short story and a chapter. Each episode by itself forms a whole story, but they contribute towards a larger overarching story as well.
Barring extenuating circumstances, there will be one new Blissed episode every other week. Plans are in the making for a podcast, too, so stick around if you want to hear the accent that makes everyone ask where I'm from.
See you later,
Nicolette
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