The mattress shifted beneath them with his movements. Louvaen, stunned by Ballard’s hostile response, screeched as whatever had crawled into the blankets with her took additional bites out of her leg, side and shoulder. “Sweet gods, Ballard! Stop moving! You’re making it bite me!”
He ignored her command and jostled the bed even harder, low growls reverberating in the suffocating black. Her skin did its best to dance its way off her bones at the thought of what might be sharing the covers, and Louvaen yanked her uninjured arm free. She’d get no help from Ballard who seemed intent on making the bed bounce across the room. If she unwrapped the blankets, she could wiggle out without further disturbing whatever crawling horror lurked in the bed with them. Her plan, along with the last vestiges of any calm, died a quick death when something slithered along her pillow and wrapped itself around her arm in a constricting grip.
“Snake!” she shrieked and thrashed out of the blankets, flinching at the vicious jabs peppering her from shoulder to wrist, as if someone punctured her flesh with a handful of sewing needles. She fought her way toward the bed’s edge, kicking and flailing when a pair of powerful arms grasped her around the waist.
“For the love of gods, Louvaen,” Ballard bellowed. “Keep still!”
Caught in the grip of hysteria that made her ears ring and her heart beat hard enough to crack her ribs, she barely heard him. Snakes. There were snakes in the bed. As if her jumbled thoughts conjured another serpent to join its mates, a whipping hiss penetrated the darkness. Louvaen hurled herself away from the sound, slamming into Ballard as her unseen tormentor struck her cheek with a pair of fangs. The audible snap of teeth sounded behind her, followed by a garbled “Blessed fuck!”
Some small part of her mind still functioning properly acknowledged she’d head-butted him in the face. The rest of her screamed inwardly to bolt from the bed, even if that meant stomping Ballard into the mattress.
His arms tightened around her in a vise, and she was lifted clear of the bed for a moment before he dropped her back down like a sack of grain. He collapsed on her, his weight crushing her into the mattress.
“HOLD STILL, WOMAN!”
Louvaen froze. Whether it was from him blasting her ears to her head or smashing her chest flat, his command punched through her panic. She blinked, seeing nothing in the thick shadows except Ballard’s eyes, lambent and fierce.
“No snakes, Louvaen,” he said between harsh pants that blew strands of her hair across her forehead. “Roses.”
Had she been able to draw breath, she might have questioned him as to how those ghoulish flowers had ended up in his bed. “Can’t breathe,” she gasped out in a thin whisper.
Ballard cursed and shifted. Louvaen inhaled in relief and exhaled on a whimper as the invisible fangs that didn’t belong to serpents sank deeper into her arms and side. Wet ribbons trickled down her skin and pooled in her palm. Blood no doubt. More tickled her cheek and slid to her ear. Tears sprang to her eyes. “What is stabbing me?” Even through her pain, she heard the anguish and the fury in his answer.
“Thorns,” he said. “They’ve pinned us both. It’s why I need you to stay still, my beauty: so I can cut us free.”
Thorns? These weren’t thorns; they were coffin nails. Louvaen pictured the rose vine in the bailey, the flowers like bloodied mouths, the defensive thorns as long and pointed as mercy daggers. She bit her lip and took shallow breaths. The repulsive scent of flowers mixed with rot flooded her nostrils. “I hate those blasted plants!” The thorns dug in harder, and she groaned.
“Unless you want to keep suffering, you’ll stay quiet while I do this.” A hard snapping noise punctuated his statement, followed by several more. Pinned to the bed, Louvaen could only listen to the rustle of bed linens and Ballard’s quick indrawn breaths as he cut away their thorny shackles. The vines holding her captive loosened around her arms and her leg, yet the thorns remained embedded.
“Rise slowly,” Ballard instructed. “You should be able to leave the bed. I’ll help with the thorns in a moment.”
She crawled to the edge of the bed, muscles rigid while she waited for a hidden vine to lash out from behind the pillows and garrote her.
The bedchamber had brightened to a false twilight—just enough to reveal her injuries. Slashed vines hung from her arm and side and encircled her leg, anchored by the thorns embedded in her skin. The vines writhed and coiled around each other like vipers in death throes. The one wrapped around her thigh gave a muscular flex, driving the thorns deeper and sending rills of hot blood down her leg to puddle at her feet. She almost bit through her lip in the effort not to scream.
Her blankets had protected her from the worst of the plant’s insidious attack, with only the side of her body without cover taking the brunt of its malice. The urge to start ripping the vines off, no matter the damage or pain she’d inflict on herself almost overwhelmed her. She didn’t wait for Ballard to help, but she did control her revulsion and set to work on her arm, carefully sliding each hooked barb out of her skin. More blood pearled at the puncture wounds until her arm was washed red, and tears dripped down her cheeks.
“Louvaen, why didn’t you wait? I said I’d help you.”
Louvaen turned at Ballard’s voice and gasped. Like her, he stood bloodied and vine-covered. The roses had saved the worst of their savagery for him. Hundreds of thorns pierced his arms and legs, sank hooks into his belly and chest and coiled around his neck in a bristling collar. He plucked at one of the vines, and Louvaen’s eyes rounded. His nails, short and blunt the previous day, had grown overnight. They curved, black and pointed over his fingertips, as menacing and far deadlier than the thorns trying to bleed him dry. His feet suffered the same fate.
She blinked back her tears. “My gods, Ballard, worry about yourself. In fact, I should be helping you. You’re worse off than I am.” She unraveled the last of the vine from her arm and tossed it into the hearth’s cold ashes. “What caused this?” She worked at the cluster of thorns snarled into the skin along her topmost rib and clenched her teeth to keep from crying out.
“The flux has begun.” His lips curved into a humorless smile when her gaze dropped to his hands. He curled his fingers, highlighting the arch of the claws. “I once told you your efforts were wasted.” He clutched a vine attached to his chest and tore it away.
“Stop!” Louvaen limped to him and caught his wrist. A pattern of half-moon cuts decorated his chest, encircled a nipple, and marched diagonally across his ribcage to his back. Even in the growing daylight, his eyes retained their bestial color, the pupils black pinpoints in yellow irises. The whites of his eyes were so reddened, he looked as if he could weep blood. “Are you not in enough pain?” And she’d contributed to his mauling. His bottom lip swelled, sporting two livid cuts from where she’d bashed him in the mouth with her head. She glided a fingertip along his chin. “I’m sorry for hurting you.”
“Two black eyes, a split lip—what will you add to your list next?” He winked and stood peacefully while she carefully peeled the vines off his body. He did the same for her, his hands delicate as feathers. Louvaen bore the marks of dozens of punctures from the rose thorns but not a single scratch from Ballard’s claws.
By the time she pried away the last of the vines, her hands were slippery with his blood. Her own wounds had scabbed over in the cold air, making her itch. “We’ll need baths. We’re both a mess.” She glanced up when he didn’t answer her. He stared past her shoulder, a far-away expression in his owl-yellow eyes. She shook his wrist. “Ballard, where have you gone?”
He blinked, brought back from some mysterious distance by her question. He raised his arms to survey the rose’s cruelty. “They’re all gone then?” His voice rang hollow, and the morning light cast his pale features in sharp relief.
Louvaen frowned. “They’re gone, and I hope they don’t return.” She shivered, though she didn’t know if it was from standing naked in the cold bedchamber or watching her lover suddenly slip into a dreamlike lethargy. She retrieved her chemise from the bundle of clothing left on one of the chairs when Ballard undressed her the night before and pulled it over her head. The thin linen didn’t chase away the chill, but it helped and didn’t stick to her scabs.
“No time for a bath,” Ballard said. “I need to find Magda and have her prepare my cell.”
She gawked at him. “You’re covered in blood, my lord, and those wounds need tending.” Nausea settled in her belly as she turned her attention to his second statement. “What do you mean Magda is to prepare your cell?” The question was rhetorical; she hoped Ballard would give her a different answer than the one she expected.
