Fever (29 page)

I could scream. In an instant Gabriel, Silas, and Claire would be in the doorway, several pairs of blinking eyes behind them. But my gaze is trained on the flame and all that it implies. It’s a very small warning of a very large destruction. He would think nothing of burning this place to the ground and killing everyone inside if that’s what it would take to recapture me. And I know that he is only here for me, not them.

Those bright pieces of light are back, flurrying in the night air like the snow on my last night in the mansion. Linden and I watched it on the verandah, letting it stick to our hair.

I don’t move, and Vaughn doesn’t try to pull me. I know he won’t shove me kicking and screaming into the back of that limo. It’s not his way. But I also know he is confident that, one way or another, I will wind up there. His smile is full of teeth and triumph.

“How have you been feeling?” he asks me. “Any unexplained symptoms? Fevers?” He strokes my hair away again, holding up the thin blond pieces that have fallen out between his fingers.

My breath catches. That lone pang of longing for Linden to be here instead of his father has doubled, tripled, transformed into something ugly. My ears buzz with the electricity of it.

“Just the flu,” I say coldly, unbelieving.

“Your immune system is shutting down,” he says. “Right now your antibodies are moving through your bloodstream, trying to combat a foreign bacteria that isn’t there. Perhaps you’ve tried medication. That will have the same effect, which is to say none at all. Your nerves are losing sensation. Extremities inexplicably numb, especially upon waking.”

I twist my shoulder from his grip. “What did you do to me?” I say.

“Darling.” He chuckles. “You did this to yourself. You’re in withdrawal.”

Withdrawal? No, that’s not possible. The angel’s blood was weeks ago. Surely there’s nothing left of it in my system. And Gabriel went through much worse withdrawal, and he’s fine.

Vaughn searches my eyes for understanding as I stare at him, uncomprehending.

“Really?” he says. “A girl as smart as you?”

He’s enjoying this.

“The June Beans,” he says.

This starts him off on a tangent I am having a hard time following because my mind, already reeling, has started to go numb. I think he is being deliberately convoluted. Something about blue June Beans—specifically the blue ones—the candies that somehow always made it to my meal trays, even after Gabriel was no longer able to sneak them to me. An experiment to test chemical dependency and bacteria resistance.

“It’s revolutionary,” Vaughn raves. “The only way to break your dependency would be to gradually reduce the doses. But to cut it off all at once? A fascinating thing happens. The body begins to shut down much the way it would in the latest stages of the virus. It’s uncomfortable at first—nausea, headache—but then the body begins to lose sensation, the pain receptors in the brain are deadened. It’s a bit like dying of hypothermia.”

Jenna. The word creeps up my throat, but I don’t say it aloud. He’s telling me that this is how he killed Jenna. That flame in his hand is nothing compared to this new explosion of hatred inside me.

“I’m proud of it,” Vaughn says. “The concept is quite primitive. To prevent contraction of the flu, one would receive a flu shot, which is, in fact, a small dose of the flu itself. And so my thinking was simple: Replicate the symptoms of the virus and administer them slowly, over several years, until the body works up an immunity.”

I feel sick. The pavement lilts and buckles under my feet. He killed my sister wife. I always believed it, but to receive confirmation is more pain than I ever anticipated.

“You were the perfect candidate,” Vaughn says. “I’d thought Cecily at first, being young as she is, but her body chemistry would already be changing with the pregnancy. I thought it best to leave her alone. You, however—” He laughs. “Linden told me you were uncooperative about consummating your marriage. He asked for my advice on the matter, and I told him he should let you be. He agreed much more easily than even I expected. He was content just to stare at you, let his daydreams run wild at the mention of your name. And I knew you wouldn’t be getting pregnant anytime soon.”

Just knowing that this conversation took place makes me feel sure I’ll vomit. To think that all those nights with Linden, when we held fast to each other to quell our separate pains of loneliness, were shared with my scheming father-in-law. To think our kisses were analyzed, our touches and glances just notes for Vaughn’s mad experiments. I feel invaded.

Distantly, I’m aware that I’m walking. Vaughn steers me toward the limousine and opens the back door for me. “Don’t be foolish, Rhine,” he says. It’s so rare for him to speak my name that it jars me. “We can have this mess straightened out once we get you home. Or you can die here, and I’ll see to it that everyone in that house joins you.”

I know he means it. I stare into the car, at the wraparound leather seat that held my sister wives and me before we knew one another’s names, when we were three frightened girls spared a gruesome death but sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. And there, beneath the sunroof, is where Linden and I sipped champagne and sagged against each other, warm and drunk and hiccupping with laughter after his first expo.

“Go on in, darling,” Vaughn says. “Let’s go home.”

And I do, knowing all the while that it will be the last ride I ever take. That something much worse than marriage awaits me this time.

“You’re still wearing your ring,” Vaughn remarks as he settles in beside me. I barely feel the pressure from the syringe he jabs into my forearm.

In what I can only describe as dumb luck and good timing, I vomit on his lapels before I lose consciousness.

I
AM A CORPSE
on a rolling cart.

I am weaving through the labyrinth of hallways, warmth in my veins, vision smeared.

All at once I’m aware of how loud everything is. Attendants talking—no, shouting—one of them holding a bag of fluid over my head. I have some faraway notion that all of this fuss is for me. But I am nothing. I cannot speak. I wouldn’t think I was breathing if not for the mist I see on this plastic dome held over my mouth.

I don’t know where I am. Other than the attendants’ uniforms, there is nothing familiar.

But then suddenly there is.

A blur of her red hair. A fist held to a gaping mouth, my name on its lips. Her baby screaming in her arms. Footsteps running. “Wait!” her voice cries, but they don’t, and she is swallowed up by the distance between us.

I close my eyes. Cease to exist.

I don’t realize that I’m resurfacing from the darkness, what seems like years later, until I hear a voice.

“I warned you not to run,” Vaughn says. He is a black bird in my dream. His talons break skin. Blood rolls out of my arm. I lie very still so he will think that I am dead. There’s no sport in carrion, and I will not let him enjoy my defeat any more than he already is.

“With my son you had love. You had safety. But you were determined, weren’t you?”

His breath is a hot wind.

“Determined to leave, and so I let you go,” he sighs. “You’ve done me a favor, really. Linden has denounced you.”

Awareness creeps up on me, but I refuse to let it win. Just before I swim back into unconsciousness, I hear Vaughn say, “Now you belong to me.”

You belong to me.

No matter how deep the dreams bury me, there are those words. On street signs. Sung from the lips of Madame’s weary girls. Murmured in the rustle of October leaves. They bloom from lilies that shoot open their starfish petals.

I open my eyes, sometimes, and am met with attendants I’ve never seen before, who avert their eyes as they scrub my skin with sponges, insert and remove IV needles from my forearm, change bedpans, take notes on clipboards, and leave without a word. I wait for Vaughn, but he only visits me in nightmares. I dream that he’s standing on the threshold with a scalpel or a syringe, and I wake in a cold sweat. And so it goes for what could be eternity. It’s impossible to measure time; there is a fake window on the wall, the only thing in the room besides the machines, and it is always glowing with a fake sun, illuminating a field of fake lilies.

When the attendants go, there’s the soft sound of a door closing, and I’m alone. There’s no Jenna to devise my escape plan; no Gabriel to sneak in and talk to me; no Deirdre to draw a chamomile bath. And no Linden sketching dismal, elegant pictures for me, or coming into my bed and holding me until I fall asleep.

This is worse than death, the rest of my days ticking away in a malaise of needles and loneliness. That’s the worst of it, I think—the loneliness. The attendants won’t speak to me, even on the rare occasion when I’m lucid enough to watch them work. Sometimes, phasing in and out of consciousness, I dream of them bringing me June Beans (any color but blue) or the champagne Linden and I would drink at his parties. But I never dream of anyone important, and maybe that’s my mind’s way of letting go of everyone I’ve ever loved.

I begin to envy the dead girls the Gatherers couldn’t sell. It would be easier for my brother to find my body, to mourn but carry on knowing what happened. But I will not think of him again. I’ve banished him from even my darkest dreams. Along with Gabriel and sunlight, and even Maddie.

Until one time I open my eyes, and there’s a little girl standing on the threshold to my room. She’s wearing a flimsy hospital gown, like mine. Her eyes are like Jenna’s after she died. Hollow and gray. There’s no semblance of youth in her face. Her skin is yellowed, her arms bruised from the injections. She sways like she’s going to fall. I want to think she is just a bad dream in this place of nightmares. Or an apparition. But I blink several times, and she’s still there.

“Deirdre,” I whisper. The first word I’ve spoken in a thousand years. “Not you, too.”

“Your room is so bright,” she says, and I can hear my faithful little domestic in that weary voice. “He keeps the other rooms dimmed.”

I fight against my restraints. I don’t know why. Even if I could get out of this bed, what could I do to save her? She shuffles barefoot to a pitcher of water that rests on one of the machines. She pours a cup of water, and she brings it to me, holding my head up as she tips the contents into my mouth. I’m not surprised by how greedily I drink; when the attendants give me water, it’s only teaspoons at a time. Dehydration must be a part of the experiment.

“Your lips are chapped.” She frowns. “I wish I had something to fix them.”

“What’s happened to you?” I say. “What has he done?”

She shakes her head, strokes my cheek. Her little hand, at least, feels soft and familiar. I can’t help taking comfort in it, and I hate myself for it. Something awful has happened to her, and it’s my fault because I left her behind. I should have known Vaughn would have something horrible planned for her.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

“Shh. I can hear him coming. Pretend you’re somewhere nice and go to sleep.”

Footsteps are coming down the hall; worry shadows her face. “Shh.” She sweeps her hand over my eyelids, lowering them, and hurries away. She runs on quiet feet. She doesn’t burst into blood or disappear. I am sure she was real. I hear a door closing down the hall.

Pretend I’m somewhere nice, she said.

I dream I’m wearing the sweater she made me. She is in the distance, cupping starfish in her hands, moving like shutter clicks through a camera lens. The ocean laps at her feet and mine, wanting to drown us.

She visits me again. I’m not sure how long it’s been. Minutes? Weeks? I feel her loosening my restraints. “There’s a trick to these,” she says when she realizes I’m awake and watching her. “You can move them up to the next notch, and they’ll still look tight enough, but you’ll be able to wriggle your hands and feet through. The attendants come on a rotation, so we know to be in our beds in time. Your schedule is erratic, though. It’s hard to know when they’re coming for you.”

“Where am I?” My voice comes out hoarse. My throat is raw, and I have some distant memory of a tube being down it.

Deirdre frowns. Her soft hair is rumpled and matted, her neat braids gone. There are so many bruises on her.

“We’re in the basement,” she says. “The Housemaster brought you in a month ago. You were so ill.” Her eyes swell with tears. Gently she eases my hands out of the restraints, and I’m able to sit up. But after lying on my back for so long, this causes a head rush, and more of those bright lights. I rub my forehead and blink several times until the lights are gone.

Deirdre,
I think.
What has he done to you?
She’s only a child—nine, ten years old, but she’s as haggard as a first generation in the worst shape, her skin yellowed and pruning at the elbows and fingertips, the bones in her face sharp and too defined.

But I don’t ask the question right away. Whatever horrible fate has befallen her is my doing. When I ran away, I took away her purpose at this mansion. Vaughn could lie to his son and say that, in my absence, Deirdre would be better employed elsewhere. Linden wouldn’t even question it. He trusts his father.