Fever (11 page)

Then, suddenly, the person carrying me stops running. Sets me down. Holds me under my arms so I don’t collapse.

I can’t see much of anything in this darkness, but I recognize the outline of those wide shoulders. I can see the gauze tied around his arm. Jared.

“What have you done?” His voice is low, thunderous. “What have you brought to this place?”

“I don’t—” I press the heel of my hand to my forehead, trying to get my bearings. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There are people looking for you,” he says. “Madame has ordered a blackout. She thinks spies are trying to break in and kill us all to find you.”

“Madame is a lunatic,” I say. I blink several times, trying to regain my senses. The stars overhead all throb with unreal brightness, and then subside. The earth tips under me.

“Not this time,” Jared says. His fingers are boring into my skin as he holds me up. “There’s a man at the gate looking for you.”

Wake up!
I tell myself. Whatever was injected into my veins that made me sleep is holding my mind hostage.

“Who?” I say. There’s a horrible, coppery taste in my mouth.

“A Housemaster,” Jared says. “He claims you’re his property.”

I repeat the words several times in my head before they hold any meaning. And then my blood goes cold. It’s impossible. How could Housemaster Vaughn have followed me here? My father-in-law played the role of a mad scientist, it’s true, but his domain ended at the mansion gates.

I regain enough cognition to break away from Jared’s grip on me. My stomach and head are swimming. There are insects buzzing and chirping around me. Dry grass is brushing against my bare legs. “Where is he?” I say.

I don’t know where we are, but I can hear the incinerator, which means we must be far from the Ferris wheel and the tents. I hear whispers and rustles all around me. Either I’m hallucinating or everyone is hiding.

Jared looks at me, and I can only see the whites of his eyes.

Without lights and from a distance, the carnival in the moonlight looks like one of Linden’s unfinished drawings. All lines and beams and angles. I feel as though I have tripped and fallen into the unreal world of his sketchbook.

“Madame told me to hide you until he offers a suitable reward.”

She may be a lunatic, but she is all about business first.

The whispers around me are getting louder. The grass is growing high up over my head, bending over me, coiling around my arms and legs and throat. I blink, and it all stops.

“He’s lying,” I say. “Whatever he told you, he’s lying. I don’t know any Housemasters, and I’m not anyone’s property.”

“Really?” Jared says. He folds his arms, and his shadow doubles in size, then deflates back to normal. “He seemed to know an awful lot about you. Rhine.”

My name. He knows my name. And all the whispering voices around me are repeating it now in a hushed chorus.

And then my name is being screamed from across the abandoned carnival. Madame. I whip in the direction of the voice, but Jared has no reaction to it. I hear footsteps coming at me, but no figures emerge from the darkness.

You’re hallucinating,
I tell myself. It’s whatever was injected into my veins. It’s the smoke that the cold air still carries.

Jared holds up a giant net in which to trap me. But once he wraps it over my shoulders, I realize it’s his coat.

A softer voice says, “Is that your real name? ‘Rhine’?” Lilac is rising to a stand in the tall grass. Has she been hiding in this whispering field the whole time?

I don’t answer.

Lilac grabs my hand. Her fingers are gentle, small, and cold. She runs her thumb over my wedding band and says, “Was marriage really so bad? Worse than this place?”

It’s a good question, and my mind is so bleary right now that I can only answer honestly. “No,” I say. “Not worse than this.”

I had a comfortable bed. A husband who adored me. Sister wives to quell the loneliness—or, on most days, to share it with me. Maybe I should give up. Walk through this dilapidated carnival one final time to give myself to Vaughn, and sober up on the long drive back home.

Home. The whispers in the grass echo the word. Home.

Home is not in that mansion. Beneath the comforts of the floor I inhabited with my sister wives, something much darker lurks. I think of Rose’s lifeless hand falling out from beneath the sheet, Jenna dying in front of me, the story of Rose and Linden’s dead child. All the agony and devastation could be blamed on just one man—the very man, in fact, who somehow followed me here.

“I can’t go back there,” I say. I can feel myself returning to my senses. “You don’t know that man like I do. If he doesn’t kill me, he’ll do something much worse. He
has
done worse.” My voice cracks. “Where is Gabriel? We have to go.” I hadn’t wanted to say his name aloud in the presence of others, but what does it matter now? Everything has gone mad.

Lilac and Jared look at each other hesitantly.

“Don’t,” Jared tells her, in a voice so soft it’s almost not there.

“Who are you protecting?” I snap. “Madame? Why?” I’m looking at Lilac. “She’s a monster. She killed your daughter!”

“Shh!” Lilac says, and grabs my arm.

She starts leading me away, but Jared calls out to her, “She’s brought nothing but trouble. We should just give her up and be done with it.”

“You know I can’t,” Lilac says. She tugs my arm. “Come on.”

I’m not sure if it’s Jared’s voice or my brother’s, whispering angrily after us:

Your problem is that you’re too emotional.

T
HE GRASSY FIELD
goes on forever, it seems.

It takes me a long time to realize that we aren’t walking away from Madame’s carnival so much as around it in a circle. Lilac leads, holding my wrist. The grass murmurs secrets in lost languages and grabs at my heels.

“What did she give me?” I say. I’m trying to be quiet, but my voice echoes and rattles the earth. Lilac doesn’t seem to notice. “Why am I like this?” It feels as though the world is a giant bubble about to pop, spilling forth bees and words. I am walking lightly so as not to disturb it, all the while knowing something is very wrong with my perception.

Above us I can see clouds twisting and somersaulting in the dark sky, obscuring stars now. Thunder growls my name, a warning.

“It’s angel’s blood mixed with a depressant to keep you asleep. You fought the hell out of her too. Damn near scratched her eye out.”

“I did?” I don’t remember any of it. But, then, I don’t remember the nightmares Linden claims I had after the hurricane either. Memory loss may be the only wonderful part of this drug.

Lilac laughs, says, “Her Highness might’ve killed you right then if she didn’t think you’d turn such a profit.”

“She said I have her daughter’s hair,” I say. When I talk, the voices in the grass don’t seem so loud; I’m beginning to feel more awake, if I can just keep talking, keep moving. I don’t even care where we’re going. “Did you know Madame’s daughter?”

“Nope. Died before I got here,” Lilac says. “Jared did, though. He grew up here.”

“She says they were murdered.”

“Her lover”—she says the word with disgust—“was some kind of respected doctor or something. He and their daughter were killed in some pro-naturalism protest. Jared says it really screwed her up.”

I don’t say that my parents were killed the same way. Pro-naturalists are against the pro-science research to cure the virus that afflicts each new child that’s born.

“I can imagine what that must have been like,” Lilac says, her voice grave.

She can imagine? She can do more than imagine. Maddie is dead now. Jared said so. Her body was burned.

That’s how I know it’s a hallucination when, once we’ve stopped walking, the grass parts and I see Maddie’s surreal eyes peering up at me.

Lilac kneels beside her daughter, eases her to lie down, whispers nice things to her.

This isn’t real. This is the angel’s blood tricking me.

In the darkness I can just make out a body moving beside Maddie’s. My mind, unreliable as it is right now, doesn’t register who it could be until the body is up and standing in front of me.

I feel his fingers weaving between mine, squeezing tight. “Gabriel,” I say. The word is as dire as my next breath. I say it again and again, until he pulls me to him and my knees buckle.

“I’m sorry.” I can feel the heat of his skin as I whisper into his neck. “I’m so sorry.”

“I should have been able to protect you,” he says. His voice is hoarse, and it reminds me that while I’ve been in my hell, he’s been in one of his own.

“No.” I shake my head, grab his shirt in my fists. I don’t recognize the threadbare shirt he’s wearing. Maybe Lilac gave him whatever she could find as she hid him here, away from Madame.

God. I crush myself against him.

“I could hardly move,” he says. “I could hear you crying out in your sleep. I could hear you fighting back against that woman. But I couldn’t stop her.”

“This is romantic and all,” Lilac whispers sharply, “but get down or you’ll get us all caught.”

Maddie whimpers pitifully, and Lilac kisses her face and says, “I know, baby.”

There’s someone else kneeling in the grass too. I think it’s the little blond girl who tended to Gabriel earlier. She is talking to Lilac, saying, “Her arm is definitely broken. I’ve done what I can to set it, but her fever isn’t breaking. This air is only aggravating it.” She’s saying other words too, like “pneumonia” and “infection,” and Lilac is keeping calm, just like I kept calm watching Jenna suffer and knowing I could do nothing about it.

“I thought Maddie was dead,” I whisper so only Gabriel can hear me.

“They’ve been hiding her,” Gabriel tells me. “Everyone is hiding. This woman—this Madame—has everyone scared for their lives.”

“It’s because of Vaughn,” I say. “He’s here looking for me.”

I don’t get to hear Gabriel’s response to this, because all of a sudden the carnival lights up, and Jared is yelling for Lilac to come out, it’s all right, Madame doesn’t want to hurt her. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Come out, girls, come on out.

Lilac flattens herself in the grass and gestures for us to do the same. The lights don’t quite reach us, but I realize with despair that, despite what felt like miles of walking, we are still close to the carnival. There’s a chain-link fence keeping us in.

Other girls reveal themselves, apprehensively.

“It was a false alarm!” Madame calls out. “There are no spies! Just a man looking to do business with me. But there will be no work until this is settled. Go on and make yourselves beautiful.
Vite, vite!
”

She claps. It turns into the next roll of thunder.
“Vite, vite!”

Gabriel is half-covering me. I can hear his shivering breaths, can feel the rough stubble of his chin against my face. His arm tightens around me.

My hands are pinned under me, knotted into fists. I hold my breath. Vaughn is here. It’s like I can feel him. Feel his footsteps coming for me, echoing as though in his basement hallways.

I can’t let him get me. At least as Linden’s bride I served a purpose. I kept my husband busy and alive and not lost in grief for his first wife, Rose. But if I go back there now, Linden will have turned his back on me for sure. Vaughn will be able to do whatever he pleases. Sedate me, kill me, cut me open, scrape the blue and brown from my eyes and study them under a microscope.

Without meaning to, I whimper.

We’re far enough from the lights that we can hide in the shadow. But there’s enough light for me to see Lilac staring at me. Jared is calling her name, and my fake name, Goldenrod, telling us to come out. She shakes her head.

Jared speaks again, in a lower voice that I have to strain to hear. I think he’s talking to Madame. “—don’t know where they could have gone. Not far. Everything’s gated.”

“—something of an escape artist—” Madame is saying, without an accent. Her real voice is craggy and dry. It sounds deliberately ugly. But I can’t shake the thought that she was once pretty and maybe even kind.

Not that it matters, I tell myself.

The next voice is good-natured, with a hint of a laugh. “Darling? There’s no reason to hide. Come on out.”

Vaughn. It sets my mind in such a flurry that I miss the next few words he says, and pick up at, “—Linden is concerned about you. Cecily is sick with worry.” I squeeze my eyes shut, wishing for the delirium I felt a few minutes ago, when words meant nothing on their way through my hearing. But Linden and Cecily won’t go away. My melancholy husband; my withering younger sister wife, forever trying to shush the baby who is forever crying in her arms.

It’s a trick. Even if I did make it back to the mansion, I wouldn’t be reunited with them. Vaughn would see to it that nobody ever heard from me again.

I can’t move. I don’t think I’m breathing. I’ve never been this scared. Never. Not even in that van. Not even when I heard the gunshots.

Vaughn is saying, “Darling, come out,” and, “Rhine, be realistic. You have nowhere else to go. We’re your family.”

Family. No. Unlike my sister wives, and unlike the girls in this place and thousands like them on the streets, I know what a family is.