“Nix, no! What if I hurt you?”
“I don’t care. You need my help. If you don’t remember what happens, I have to see it for myself. There may be more clues we’re missing. I’m not letting you go through this alone.”
“But I wanted to hurt that couple! I would have if I hadn’t stopped myself!”
“Well, lucky for me, I can get my hands on some garlic and salt to protect myself, since you seem to be vulnerable to them, and I’ll make sure you’re chained up!”
It sounded like a terrible idea. What if I broke out? What if garlic and salt weren’t enough?
“It’s too dangerous, Nix,” I said, shaking my head. “If I’d known before what I was turning into, I never would have invited anyone here. I would have banished myself, locked myself in a dungeon, and thrown away the key.”
Nix frowned at me. “Did you think I’d abandon my friend?”
“Ask me again later when you see what I turn into.”
Nix stared at me, perhaps imagining what it would look like when I transformed, but her resolve set her jaw. “You should see all the bodily fluids that I have to deal with as a healer. Nothing can surprise me.”
Her confidence actually calmed me down somewhat. I felt better knowing that she was on my side now, and I wouldn’t have to spend the remainder of the trip hiding this secret from her, but I was still dreading tonight.
“Obviously you can’t tell your brother,” I said. “Qian, Amador, not even Lucas can know what’s happening. If Qian finds out I’m a monster…” I choked on the word.
“Secret’s safe with me,” she said, crossing her finger over herchest. “But first, you need to stop calling yourself a monster.” Before I could protest, she held up her hand. “Second, we need to get all that blood out of your sheets. Fortunately for you, I know just the thing.”
Nix’s healing powersproved quite effective when cleaning up blood. She waved her hand above the tub, and the blood on the sheets and staining the water disappeared like it’d never been there. “It’s all part of being a healer,” she said. “It’s one of the first things I learned as an apprentice. The key to good medicine is cleanliness.”
The sheets looked good as new, even if they were still soaking wet, and my worry disappeared like the blood. With Nix’s help, I could at least keep the evidence of my secret under control.
When that was taken care of, Nix helped me clean the rest of my room, which was not something her healing powers could help with. She held up my ruined clothing and clicked her tongue over the state of my wardrobe while I told her everything that I’d discovered in the records room, including how there was a missing Princess Yara Liliana who had been erased from history.
“So a manananggal is seen around the same time a princess goes missing?” Nix asked. “Smells fishy to me.”
“You don’t think she could have been the manananggal, do you?” I asked. I’d been thinking about it, too, but never before could I bounce the idea off anyone else.
“It makes sense why they would want to pretend like she never existed. It would look bad if the ruler of Biringan was hunting people at night.” That much was evident.
“I have to know what happened to her. I hired Romulo to find more information about her for me.”
“Romulo? The pirate guy we met?”
“Yeah. It’s one of the only clues I have to follow.” It was easy to succumb to despair and wallow in self-pity, but I had to do my best to believe that I could fix things.
Nix crumpled up one of my Maria Clara dresses that had been torn in two and said, “It is pretty weird. Though do you really think Romulo can find anything?”
“If he can’t, no one can.”
Nix hummed, put her hands on her hips, and looked at the pile of clothes that I’d ruined. “Girl, we have got to get you a new wardrobe.”
“That’s kind of the last thing on my mind right now,” I said. “Plus, with trying to convince your brother not to drag you back to Jade Mountain, my clothes are the least of my problems.”
“You still need to keep up appearances. You’re a queen.”
“I can’t be a queen if I’m a flesh-eating monster.”
Nix harrumphed, lost in thought. Idly, she went to the broken mirror and traced her fingers over the cracks in the glass and then looked at the flowers I had dropped on the floor, the blue petals wilted and faded now. I hoped she wouldn’t ask about them. I didn’t know what she would feel if she knew they were from Qian. I wasn’t sure howIfelt about it, either. Thankfully, she didn’t seem interested in them. I could see behind her eyes that her mind was already working.
“You said you start transforming during the night, right?” she asked.
“As far as I know. The book I read about manananggals didn’t have many answers.”
