Winter's Dream (The Hemlock Bay Series) (22 page)

“Are you going to tell him how you feel?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “He already knows.”

Luka gazed at me for a moment. “He may know but I think it might mean a great deal to him if you actually said it.”

“I don’t think I can,” I whispered. “Maybe if we had more time, maybe so I could trust him more, so Linc didn’t hate him so much—”

“There is no more time,” Luka interrupted harshly. “You will be gone soon. To leave him so unsure of your feelings would be very cruel. What does it matter anymore that you can’t completely trust him or that your brother hates him?”

“I guess it doesn’t,” I said, unsure of what we were really talking about.

He looked up with shining eyes. “I’m sorry, that was very rude. Can I make it up to you? Perhaps dinner?”

“I had a late lunch with Lincoln,” I said, then rushed on when I saw the hurt in his eyes. “But I would love some dessert.”

He smiled and held his arm out and I hooked mine through it. As we strolled to the dining hall, I asked about each detailed sculpture and tapestry decorating the walls. His enthusiasm for the art was surprising and I listened as he passionately detailed the history of each piece. I tried to agree and sound impressed in the right places but I didn’t fool him. “How would you like a tour of the greenhouse instead? I know you found that interesting.”

I gave a sheepish smile. “Sorry. I like art, I just don’t really get it.”

“Do you get plants?” he asked, leading me towards the tall glass doors I remembered.

“Not really. But my grandma did and I liked to help her in the garden when she had one. We always wanted to have a greenhouse.”

The smile on his face was heartbreaking in more than one way. I could tell he didn’t even see the faint flashes of lightning anymore. He showed me all the plants and explained how the beautiful glass room had been constructed. Through the beveled glass I could see the sun dropping behind the trees. A servant brought thick slices of cherry pie and hot coffee right into the greenhouse and we ate it on the floor between low beds of colorful flowers.

There was nothing left to say so when we finished our dessert I leaned forward to brush my lips against his once more then stood up and left, leaving him sitting in the dark.

My tears had dried before Emma found me wandering in the hall. “There you are,” she said with forced cheerfulness. “I came to help you get ready for bed.”

She was shaking and her cheeks were a bright red. “Emma—”

“Perhaps a bath? Or just your hair taken down?” she asked quickly, turning away from me. Guilt radiated off her and I wished I could alleviate it.

But I couldn’t, so instead I asked her for stories of her childhood, her hometown. She resisted at first but then finally gave into my cheerful pressure. We came to my room and I pulled her down to sit on my bed and finish her story about the handsome, but too old blacksmith she had been flitting around before she left. Her face lit so bright when she talked about him, out glowing her plain clothes and sad, resigned face. For the first time I realized she was totally plain, totally unadorned. My hatred for Machian surged as I realized he had taken everything from her. She truly was a slave with nothing to call her own. As I listened to her stories, I took in her face and noticed a tiny dimple in each ear lobe. She had once had her ears pierced. I reached up to my own ears, touching the tiny sapphire chip earrings my mom had given me on my tenth birthday.

I pulled them from my ears and Emma paused her story, confused. When I leaned towards her she jumped back, slapping a hand over each ear.

“What are you doing? Those are yours.”

“I want you to have them.”

“I can’t take them,” she said, jumping up from the bed.

“Please Emma, they’re a gift—”

“No,” she cried. “I don’t want you to give me anything, I don’t deserve it.”

“Emma,” I snapped. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Please take them.”

She had backed herself into a corner where she stood shaking with tears streaming from her eyes. I put the earrings in her ears and made sure the backs were on tight. Suddenly she launched herself at me. For just a second she held on tight and whispered, “I am so sorry.”

I opened my mouth to tell her it wasn’t her fault but my response was drowned out by a low grind of thunder followed by blinding flashes. Emma slapped a hand over her mouth and yelped. “I have to go,” she cried. Horror filled her eyes, letting me know what was to come and she fled out the door.

I watched the swinging door numbly. I wouldn’t get months or days. I wouldn’t even get an hour, I only had moments.

I bowed my head over my knees, praying every prayer I knew for my family and friends. The end had come for me but it would hurt them the most.

The thunder rumbled more frequently and the flashes of lightning lit the room over and over. The gentle pinging of rain against the window became louder and harsher as the storm settled over the castle.

A gentle cough at the door made my head snap up, but it wasn’t Emma, it was Jordan.

“Weren’t you going to say good-bye to me?” he asked sadly.

I should have been consumed by hatred, by fear, by disbelief. But I couldn’t cover how I really felt with any other emotion, not anymore. “I don’t want to leave you,” I choked out.

“Why?” he asked, moving further in the room and shutting the door behind him.

“Because I love you,” I whispered, letting that painful reality sink into me.

“But do you trust me?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

He released a breath I didn’t know he was holding. “Then this is going to be really hard.”

I looked at him, confused. “Hard? That’s the word you choose? You know she’s coming for me, you know tonight is the night.”

His eyes glowed and lighted on every surface of my face, clearly taking each second in. “I know,” he said.

I sagged against the bed, relieved and terrified to hear someone else say it. It was all going to be over soon.

“Bixby,” he said, reaching a shaking hand out to me, “I need you to trust me.”

My jaw dropped at that. “Trust you? Love you is one thing, but trust—”

A hollow footstep clapped throughout the palace. It rattled the stones under our feet and the sonic boom of it felt like a little vacuum in my chest.

“Trust me,” Jordan begged, extending his hand further.

I jumped back on top of the bed. “What are you going to do?”

His face was closed to me. “Just trust me,” he said, his face hard marble.

I shook my head back and forth, eyeing the windows. Could I make it out one of them? If I didn’t die, I would be too hurt to run, I thought while seriously considering it. Panic overtook me and I jumped at the window, fighting to open it.

Jordan’s clammy hand snatched my wrist and dragged me away from the sill.

“Please,” he said without hope while I frantically tried to pull away—from him, from Emma, from everyone.

Another sonic boom echoed down the hallway just as the lightning increased in intensity. Jordan’s face was frighteningly bland and I blanched, holding my stomach tight to keep the contents inside.

“I only have a second to do this,” he said, “and I will do it, whether you trust me or not.” His cold determination was scaring me.

I shook my head again. “I’m going to run.”

“It won’t work,” he said gently, pulling me to the bed.

“I’ll knock her unconscious,” I pleaded, trying to get away from his cold grip.

Jordan pushed me flat against the bed and leaned his body over my rib cage. “That won’t work either.”

My panicky breaths fought at their new confined spaces. “What are you doing?” I managed to gasp out, trying unsuccessfully to roll beneath him and give my lungs the space they needed.

“What I have to,” he whispered in my ear as another boom landed on the floor my room was on. “Will you trust me just for this one second and let me do what I have to?” I had nodded only a fraction of an inch when suddenly his cold hands snaked around my wrists and burst with a painful heat. It was only a second but that was long enough. He let me wrench one arm away from him and with horror I gazed at the second bracelet on my wrist, his bracelet.

“You jerk,” I hissed. “You said you would never do that again—”

“I said I would keep you safe—”

I tried to pull away from him but was still alarmingly pinned to the bed. “This won’t do any good, take it off!”

He slowly shook his head, his eyes a dead green.

I stilled my furious efforts to get lose. “Take them off, Jordan. This is our last moment together and you’re ruining it.”

A single tear leaked from the corner of his eyes. “It gets much worse than this. I wish you trusted me. But since you can’t, I hope you forgive me. Please don’t hate me.” Then he grabbed a pillow and smashed it over my face.

At first I didn’t know what to think, just waited a second for him to pull it back. Surely this was some wildly sick joke? But with each second he pressed a little harder and when I tried to shove it away he held it in place. I pushed a little harder, my lungs beginning to need fresh oxygen and still he wouldn’t let up. Pure horror shot through my body, fueled by anger. My mind twisted and bucked just as furiously as my body and I raked my nails over the hands pushing me into the bed. But the pressure was steady and unrelenting and all of my struggles to make it to clean, fresh air failed. My nose flared slightly against the stink of down feathers and my chest ached, clenching painfully in its attempt to draw in oxygen. Panic and fear and pain ruled for so long. This is what hell must feel like, I thought, struggling against the hot, stinking pillow as my body painfully shut down.

Jordan never lessened his grip.

And then space separated and tiny pinpricks of light burned my eyes. I reached up to rub them and found nothing. There was no bed beneath me, no ragged breath to draw in. Everything was clear to me, including my lifeless body on the bed below. I raised a hand to my face to confirm I wasn’t in my body. There was nothing to see. I was a ghost floating over the ruin of my life.

Everything was muffled and shady and slipping away from me until a sharp knock sounded and Emma entered.

She stood like a zombie, like the first night I had seen her.

“Bianca Grey,” she boomed and Jordan flinched.

She’s not here,” he said dully.

“She is,” the imposter intoned.

“She isn’t!” Jordan practically shrieked. “Look at her, she’s dead! Her face is blue.”

My ghost eyes wandered down and indeed my body was blue and my tongue was protruding. It was the single most disturbing event of my life. Or not life.

“Then I shall fetch the next,” Emma zombie intoned.

She left in the same freakish manner she had left the farmhouse what felt like so long ago. But I wasn’t compelled to go this time.

Jordan watched her leave and when she cleared the frame of the door he gathered my cold body to his chest and wept. I watched passively. If he couldn’t have me, apparently he wasn’t going to let anyone else either, not even Emma. This was his fault, he had done it. So why was he crying?

The storm outside did not lessen but rain suddenly stopped striking the windows. Jordan laid my body carefully down onto the bed and got up to look out the window. A glow beneath the window slowly began to make its way towards the forest and eventually the rain was able to make its way to the window again. Emma was off for the next girl.

Jordan ran back to the bed and knelt beside it. His hands fumbled at my side as if picking at a stray hair. I watched with cold curiosity as his fingers finally plucked a thin, glowing line out of the air. It was so like my smoke chains but thinner, muted. He began to reel it in, carefully, inch by inch, using both hands.

A far off pain tugged at me and when I looked down I could see the ghostly outline of my glowing hand. He continued tugging, inch by inch and the glowing spread its way up before slowly pulling me down. I could begin to see an outline of my body as it settled but apparently he could not. He didn’t flinch as I drifted through him.

Jordan had reached the end of the silvery chain and held in his hand the ghost of the real bracelet encircling my wrist. Fragments of Luka’s bracelet littered the bed, leaving only Jordan’s on my wrist. With a shaking hand, he lifted my hand and slid on the ghost bracelet, matching it to the real one.

Pain ignited my hand, then my arm, racing up and out through my body, blinding me and overpowering my mind. I had no last thoughts; it was all a silent scream.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“B
ixby,” someone was calling gently.
“Can you hear me?

A gentle hand laid against my check caused my skin to burn and I tried to jerk my head away. The bed underneath me shifted violently and suddenly the voice was right in my face, bathing me with tears and sweet breath.

“Wake up, please wake up.” Then, “Oh God, what did I do?”

Everything slowly settled into place. The pain, the ache in my chest, the burning at my wrists. The bed underneath me, Jordan’s frantic pleading.

That son of a bitch had killed me.

My eyes flew open and I had to slam them shut against the weak candlelight. My hands were snatched from my chest and gathered to his. Slowly I opened my eyes again, squinted against the painful light. His face broke into a glorious smile and tears poured from his eyes.

“You’re okay,” he cried.

“I’m dead, you jack ass,” I croaked, trying to pull my arms away.

“No, no, not anymore. Only for a moment, and now …” He gave a ring of laughter, throwing his head back in joy. Freaking maniac.

“Get off,” I commanded, my voice breaking. “I hate you.”

He lowered his head, taking in my face. “You’re not dead,” he breathed.

“You smothered me with a pillow. I saw my dead body.” I looked down, taking in my arms, my hands. They didn’t look blue anymore but they were exceptionally pale.

He nodded. “I did smother you, I did kill you. But I bound you to me and pulled you back from death. God, I wasn’t sure it would work …”

I stared at him for a long, silent moment. “So you tethered me to you again, even though I told you not to, and killed me?”

He nodded fervently. “And then I brought you back.”

I blinked slowly. “But you weren’t sure if it was going to work.”

His face fell a little at that. “No. But I couldn’t just let her take you. You were going to be dead anyway.”

Confusion and joy and anger danced through my mind and over my face. He watched me warily and slowly released my hands. “Are you … are you angry?”

I ignored his question and pulled myself to sit up at the edge of the bed. He reached for me and I held a hand out, warning him away. “The curse is broken?”

Jordan grinned again and his eyes lit up brighter than I had ever seen. He held the shards of the cursed bracelets for me to see.

I had to clamp my hands down on the edge of the mattress to keep from swaying. “So it’s over?”

Jordan gave a happy sigh and nodded.

“And I can go back home?”

“We can go anywhere you like,” he whispered. Then his face cracked with uncertainty. “Unless you’re angry, unless you don’t forgive me.”