Damien hesitated. Closer seemed dangerous, though he wasn’t sure how. Anomalous’s experiments were sometimes messy, but that wasn’t it. Damien wasn’t truly afraid of anything, though, and once he reminded himself of that, he strode up to where Amma was suspended on the other side of the glass.
The talisman was nestled under her ribs, shining brightly with a spiderweb of tiny veins running all around it as if holding it in a net. It thumped gently along with the beat of her heart, completely enmeshed.
“Death would do the trick,” Anomalous announced, “but if we want to avoid that, and I attempt to cut this out—which I am willing to do, mind you—I would probably have to take the heart out along with it. I have some acceptable replacements in the function department.” Anomalous gestured to a bin of organs that was frosted over. “But there might be a problem personality-wise.”
Damien watched the talisman pulse, the rhythm so like the one in his own chest, beating harder the longer he looked. “What does that mean?”
“I’ve been finding that the squishy parts on the inside can really take a toll on how the outside acts, if not how it looks. Pieces seem to keep a little bit of their former owners. Sometimes it’s a real problem.”
Mudryth pursed her lips. “Made a man last moon who got up off the table and went right out to roll in the mud. Turns out it doesn’t matter if hog parts are the same size as people ones, they don’t always work so good.”
“Didn’t matter in the long run,” Anomalous sighed, “he decayed in less than an hour like all the rest of them.”
Damien paused for a moment, just long enough to acknowledge that was a tragedy. “So, you’re saying all of your machinery and tools can’t get Bloodthorne’s Talisman of Enthrallment out of her without taking the parts she already has along with it?”
“Well, no, the scalpel will do it!” Anomalous produced a blade with a metallic gleam, tiny in his huge hand. “I could cut in and try to remove it while leaving the heart inside. Chances of death shoot up maybe thirty-seven and a half percent, but higher risk for a higher reward! I’d need to make an incision here and here and probably here.” He poked at the tube with the sharpened tool, and with each tap on the glass, Damien winced a little more.
“No,” he finally said, louder than he meant, and Anomalous looked back at him, eyes huge behind the magnifying lenses he wore. “No, Anomalous, I can’t ask you to take on the burden of that risk.”
“It would be no trouble.” Anomalous loomed before him, holding up the scalpel as his light eyes twinkled behind the lenses. “And I’ve lost plenty of patients, I’ve learned not to get attached, so if she doesn’t make it—”
There was a darkness that enveloped Anomalous’s hand and plucked the scalpel away before letting the tool clatter to the floor at their feet.
“Ah, ha, right—guess maybe I don’t have a steady enough hand for that right now, sonoit is then.” Anomalous chuckled lightly.
Damien blinked down at the tool and then picked it up, the noxscura faintly lingering on it before it totally dissipated. He hadn’t even felt the arcana as it acted on its own again. He mumbled out an apology, laying the knife on a nearby table instead of giving it back to the alchemist, just in case, and Anomalous returned to the tube to take down a few more notes for his anatomy research.
With Anomalous and Mudryth engaged but no longer a threat, Damien took a step back. Wanting a distraction, he went to pull the small journal he’d taken from the study from his hip pouch, but with it came a scrap of fabric. Damien turned over the handkerchief, a smear of dried blood across the embroidery in its center of a tree, its branches and roots entwined, coming around the trunk to form a circle. It was just another thing the woman nicked on her journey across the realm, he could only assume, for its high quality, yet it was something she’d selflessly given up, wrapping it around his hand when she thought he needed it.
“All right, she might be a little woozy,” said Anomalous, pulling off the magnifying glasses and setting down his roll of parchment.
Damien stuffed the fabric back into his pouch and stepped up to the tube. As Anomalous bustled back to the machine and flipped the assortment of dials and levers, the lights inside the tube died, and the room returned to its blue glow. Mudryth clicked open the door, and Amma’s pale form took a wobbly step forward.
Releasing a relieved breath, Damien ran a hand over his face. Amma took another step toward him, and then the third took her right off the platform as her eyelids fell down. Damien caught her as she collapsed forward, completely lax in his arms. Like a doll, her limbs were heavy, and her head slumped back. There was a jolt in his chest as he called for the alchemist.
Anomalous reached a big hand over Damien’s shoulder and pulled open one of her eyelids. The blue iris roved up at them, and she mumbled something incomprehensible. “Just dazed, like I predicted,” he said then bustled back to his notes.
Damien tried to set her on her feet, but she was like jelly in his hands. No longer radiating that intense glow, the talisman wasn’t visible anymore, though her breasts were doing a good job of shielding where it would be anyway, pressed between the two of them and upward in her new, much lower-cut tunic. He shifted his arms and gave her a shake, but she only responded with a dreamy sort of moan, a noise he really preferred she not make when leaning against him so fully.
She was small enough to shift around, and he managed to scoop an arm under her knees and lift her into both arms. Amma turned her head inward and nestled her shoulder against his, a hand finding its way to his chest.
Damien nearly dropped her. He had been prepared for her to wake at the jostling, see his face so close and scream, flail and struggle to get away, but instead she’d once again utterly baffled him and—what was this?Snuggling? His stomach turned over. “What do I do with this?” he asked the room.
“She needs to sleep. Best just put her to bed.”
Damien looked helplessly at the two who were still quite involved in discussing theories, the dreadful realization dawning that it was up to him.
He carried her to the room she was meant to be kept in, and she remained asleep even over the blustery walkway, only settling in a little deeper against his chest. She mumbled something, fingers tightening on his tunic, but he couldn’t recoil from it, only wince and scowl. How dare she make him do this? He was meant to be marching on the realm’s capital to bring about its ruin, not coddling some stranger and especially not feeling so flustered about doing it.
But he didn’t just dump her onto the bed and leave her there, though he’d been envisioning doing just that the whole walk. “You are an incredible pain in the ass,” he grumbled, setting her down gently.
Amma mumbled just as Damien turned to leave, something that sounded much too much like, “Wait until we’re married.”
He froze, looking back at her. “What was that?”
But she hadn’t really spoken to him, still very clearly asleep. Amma’s head lolled to the side, eyes closed but her brow pinched, and she groaned, twitching.
“Oh, of course.” Damien blew out a breath, recognizing a nightmare when he saw one. Likely, he thought, because she had subconsciously perceived it had been his arms around her, and his dastardly presence had invaded her dream.
