The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (29 page)

Kit snarled again and then turned around and stalked back into the house.

“I think she’s letting us get away with it for now,” Rio said. “Or maybe she’ll just suddenly appear in the middle of Merelith’s place, like that trick she did in the kitchen.”

She grinned at Luke. “Now that’s something I’d like to see.”

Luke stared after Kit for a moment, but then he shrugged, as if dismissing the topic.

“We’re going to travel by Shadows again,” Luke told her. “It can be a little disorienting.”

“I remember. That’s how you brought me here the night the Grendels were chasing me.”

He nodded and then wrapped his arms around her waist. She could almost see a dark, shadowy space just before they stepped into it, but it struck her that she didn’t actually know if she’d seen it in reality or if she’d seen it through the prism of Luke’s thoughts. The new and disturbing possibility that she was able to read Luke’s mind was something she’d tried deliberately not to think about, and now wasn’t the time, either, because they were walking into the darkness of his peculiar mode of travel.

After a brief disorientation, they took another step forward, and Rio realized they were standing about a hundred feet away from the Silver Palace.

“What? You couldn’t get us right up to the doorway?” She was trying for a little humor—anything to lighten the burden of despair that was crushing Luke—but he only shook his head.

“The Fae have safeguards in place to keep anyone from showing up on their doorstep through magical means. This is as close as I could get us, and now we’re probably going to have to do battle with the flunkies before we can get to Merelith,” he said grimly. “If ever I were in the mood to blow something up, it’s now, so maybe you should keep an eye on me.”

She had a better idea. She slipped her hand into his. “We’ll figure this out, and Elisabeth will be just fine. I promise.”

He kissed her then, fast and hard, and they headed for the Winter Court Palace.

Elisabeth was awake.

Rio wanted to jump up and down with joy, but she noticed that Luke’s grim expression didn’t change much. He’d managed to keep from incinerating anybody on the way in, which had been exactly as difficult as he’d predicted.

“Has she eaten anything? Has she had water? How is her temperature?” He fired the questions at Merelith as he paced the sumptuous silver-and-white room.

The Fae’s eyes dimmed. “No. In fact, she only woke up a little less than an hour ago. She refuses food and won’t drink any water, but she did accept a little papaya juice. Should we be worried?”

Rio barely managed to contain her shock at hearing a member of the High Court admit to having an emotion like worry, but she must have given something away with her expression, because Merelith’s icy gaze snapped to Rio.

“Uncanny,” Merelith whispered. “If someone else had told me, but then—who would’ve dared?”

It was almost as though she were talking to herself, and when Rio started to ask her about it, the Fae turned away. Rio filed it under things to ask later, when they were sure Elisabeth was well, but questions burned in her brain, and the ominous sound of the ticking grandfather clock in the room haunted her with a reminder of the countdown to her birthday.

Luke, oblivious to the interchange, was still firing questions. “What did she say? How does she feel? What part—”

Merelith finally cut him off and gestured to the door. “Why don’t we go in and you can see for yourself, wizard. Elisabeth does want to see Rio and her fox.”

The Fae looked around the room and then frowned. “Where is the
Yokai
?”

“Kit wanted to come and see Elisabeth, but Luke was afraid it would waste too much time trying to persuade your guards to let her in with us,” Rio explained.

Merelith nodded slowly. “That may indeed have been the case. I will make sure they know to allow her to enter, should you visit at Elisabeth’s request in the future.”

They all ignored the elephant in the room—the question of whether little Elisabeth even had a future. Rio shoved the thought out of her mind as soon as it appeared.

“Can we see her now?”

Merelith opened the door, and the three of them walked into an enormous bedroom that looked like Marie Antoinette’s interior designer had decorated it. There were even chandeliers. Rio, who’d grown up feeling lucky when she managed to get one of the soft cotton quilts for her cot instead of being stuck with one of the scratchy wool ones, gaped at the splendor like she was a country mouse.

“Rio. You came.” The faint, frail voice came from the direction of the biggest silk-covered bed Rio had ever seen.

All thoughts of silk and chandeliers fled Rio’s mind when she saw Elisabeth. The girl was clearly very, very ill. She’d become a skeletal caricature of her former self—emaciated, as if an evil incubus had drained her life force in the short amount of time since Rio had last seen her.

Elisabeth’s cheeks burned with two bright red spots of color, and Rio recognized it as a very bad sign. She’d seen fever like that in children before, and there’d often been a funeral in the convent’s small cemetery shortly afterward. She had no idea how human fever affected the Fae, or if Elisabeth’s half-human, half-Fae body was reacting in a doubly bad way to whatever it was that was making her ill, but Rio didn’t need to be a doctor, or even a wizard, to know that the child was rapidly approaching the end.

And Rio didn’t let one ounce of any of that thought process show on her face. Instead, she flashed her brightest smile and strolled over to the bed as if Elisabeth had all the time in the world to chat.

“Elisabeth! You look so beautiful in that lace nightgown,” Rio said enthusiastically. All the time in the world to talk about nightgowns, she reminded herself. “I wish I’d had something like that when I was a little girl. My most exciting pajamas were the Donald Duck ones I once scored at the Bordertown Goodwill thrift shop.”

“I like Donald Duck,” Elisabeth said, smiling so beautifully that Rio’s heart cracked into several jagged pieces. “But I like Minnie Mouse better. She’s my favorite. I would love to have some pajamas with Minnie Mouse on them.”

“I do not understand humans,” Merelith said, but she was smiling instead of sneering, and Rio felt a moment of kinship with the Fae when she realized they were both putting on an act for the desperately ill child.

“Why would you want a rodent or a waterfowl on your nightclothes?”

The Fae looked honestly baffled, and Luke, Rio, and Elisabeth all started laughing.

“They’re cartoons, Auntie Merelith. I’ll show them to you when I get better.” Elisabeth sighed and closed her eyes, and then she leaned back against the mound of propped-up pillows behind her.

“Will you try now?” Luke quietly murmured the words, so that Elisabeth wouldn’t hear.

“But she’s awake. She can tell you herself,” Rio protested.

She was still afraid that she’d try to fish around in the child’s brain and maybe make things worse. She didn’t know what she was doing—she was a bike messenger, not a neurosurgeon.

Luke was shaking his head before Rio even finished her sentence. “She’s just a little girl. She probably doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, and to interrogate her about it would frighten her even more than she already is.”

Merelith stepped closer. “What are you talking about?”

“I want Rio to listen in on Elisabeth’s mind and see if she can learn anything about this illness that might help us.”

Merelith considered the idea, and then she nodded.

“Yes. I give my permission. Besides, since it is you—” Merelith interrupted herself, and whatever she had been about to say to Rio remained unsaid. “Yes, please try it now.”

Rio approached the bed, climbed up on it, and curled up next to Elisabeth. She stroked the little girl’s hair away from her brow and nearly flinched at the searing heat that was pouring off Elisabeth’s skin. No child could survive fever like this. It was hopeless to even try.

What if she made things worse? The thought of hurting the little girl was causing the familiar stabbing pains in Rio’s lungs. She’d be in a full-blown panic attack soon. Just as Rio was contemplating how far she’d get if she started running, Elisabeth opened her eyes and smiled.

“My mommy is trying to get here, but Auntie Merelith thinks she won’t make it in time to see me before I go to heaven.”

The words sliced through Rio like a blade, and she had to fight to keep the tears from welling up in her eyes. She’d do anything to keep Elisabeth from seeing how desperately sad she was, or even how hopeless she felt.

Merelith’s gasp, though, told Rio that the Fae had heard her niece.

“I never said anything of the sort, and you know it. You’re not going anywhere. I won’t allow it,” Merelith said haughtily, playing the role of the autocratic Fae princess to amuse her niece.

It worked. Elisabeth giggled, but then a gentle sadness returned to the little girl’s face. “I heard it in your mind, Auntie Merelith. It’s okay. I know you don’t want me to be sad, and I know that Mommy is having trouble getting back here because there might be a war.”

She’d heard it in her aunt’s mind? Was Elisabeth like Rio?

Elisabeth reached out with one small hand and touched Rio on the arm, scattering her thoughts of whether the child was a mind reader.

“I did want to see Kit again, though. Do you think you could bring her soon? I don’t think I have much time,” Elisabeth said softly.

The little girl’s face changed then, and her gaze turned inward, as if she were seeing something too far away for the rest of them to be able to understand. After several long seconds in which her breath came far too slowly, Elisabeth looked up, searching for Luke.

“Mr. Oliver, I know you’re a wizard, and everybody says you’re also a very smart man who’s going to be the sheriff. If I ask you a question, will you promise to tell me the truth?”

A wave of black despair crashed over Rio, and it took her a moment to realize that the emotion was coming from Luke. His pain poured out of him and into her like wine into a jug—first filling and then overflowing—and she could tell that he didn’t even know he was doing it. She dug the fingers of the hand that Elisabeth couldn’t see into the bed to try to ride out the wave of pain.

“I’ll always tell you the truth, little one,” Luke said, grinning as if he weren’t being crushed by the landslide of his pain and sense of failure. “What’s up? You’re wondering who’s on my PJs? I gotta admit, it’s SpongeBob SquarePants. Yellow is my color.”

Elisabeth giggled a little, but every bit of color had drained from her face, and every adult in that room knew that the end was very near.

“No, silly,” Elisabeth said. “I was just wondering, do you think that maybe, if I die, I can talk to the angels and convince them to stop the Fae war? I don’t want my mommy and daddy or Auntie Merelith to get hurt.”

Her voice trailed off to a whisper, and she started coughing.

Luke knelt down beside the bed, and Merelith swiftly crossed to the other side and took her niece’s hand in her own.

“I’m trying to be brave. Big girls are brave. But I don’t want to die,” Elisabeth said, her beautiful eyes welling up with unshed tears. “I’m afraid.”

“You’re not going to die,” Luke said fiercely. “I’m the best wizard in the world, and I won’t allow it.”

The child tried to smile, but even that slight effort was beyond her now. Instead, she turned her head and looked up at Rio.

“Pretty,” she said, her eyes going dim.

The words triggered a memory that was sharp enough to slice through the pain buffeting Rio from both her own heart and Luke’s.

She pinned Luke with a stare. “Did you hear that? She said
pretty
.”

She could tell he didn’t get it, but it was okay, because now she did.

“
Pretty.
It’s what you kept saying to me when that Grendel venom had poisoned you. Is it possible—is it possible at all—that the Grendels scratched her when Dalriata had her?”

Luke was shaking his head. “I never even thought of that because the symptoms are so different. If this is Grendel venom—”

“The Winter Court Fae react very badly to many types of venom,” Merelith interjected. “And who knows how her human half would react? Is it possible?”