“You go help her. I’ll deal with that,” Felipe said, nodding toward the pool of roiling darkness spreading across the atrium floor.
Oliver didn’t want him to go, didn’t want him to leave his side, but he had to. “Two tugs if you need me. Be careful.”
He wanted to pull Felipe in for a kiss, but instead, his partner pointedly held his gaze and arm a moment longer before disappearing into the crowd. Oliver hesitated only a moment until he heard Felipe calling for order. Pulling himself together, Oliver shoved toward the stage. For a second, he thought they had moved Mrs. Cutler, but then, he saw her feet sticking out from between the women crowded protectively around her. One of them called out again for a doctor, and Oliver hesitated. He wasn’t a doctor. He hadn’t been one in years. Surely, there was another doctor at the bazaar who could help far more than he could. After all, his patients were all dead. When Oliver turned to search for anyone who might help, the tether jolted in his chest and his blood ran cold. Somewhere nearby someone else’s life neared its end. He could feel their soul reaching to his powers, calling to be tethered as their life strained and guttered like a dying flame. Oliver let his attention drop to where the tether rooted beneath his heart and followed its pull to the stage.
Mrs. Cutler was dying. Forcing his legs to move, Oliver bounded across the atrium and scrambled onto the stage.
“I’m a doctor!” Oliver called, hoping for the second time in a year that he was still capable of helping the living.
Chapter Fifteen
Stretched Thin
Felipe pushed against the seething mass of bodies. From where he stood, he could no longer see the growing tide flowing from the fountain, but there was a continuous wave of panic as those nearest to it shoved into their neighbors to escape its waters. Through the chaos, he could smell the caustic burn of acid eating through stone, wood, fabric, and worst of all, flesh. The crowd shoved toward the narrow entrance hall, creating a bottleneck of terror. Felipe grabbed the people closest to him and directed them toward the nearly empty refreshment hall in hopes it would create a second stream. The knot of panic in his chest loosened as those near the back of the crush peeled off to run out the backdoor. As the crowd quickly thinned in the atrium, Felipe could finally able to see who was left. There were multiple wounded, Mrs. Cutler, and an older gentleman being carried out by two men. Felipe was about to go back to check on Oliver when a woman limped forward, tears streaming down her cheeks. Felipe couldn’t see what happened to her foot, but the bottom of her skirt was stained black and he could smell burnt skin. Wrapping an arm around her, Felipe half-carried her out the backdoor.
By the time he returned, Oliver was kneeling beside Mrs. Cutler’s prone form, talking animatedly to the women around her, and several people had set up a barricade around theshadowy tide while others tended to the wounded. Felipe recognized some of them from the society, Percival Appleton, one of the Brooklyn werewolves, Gwen’s older sister, but the others were strangers. Appleton pulled the fumes from the burning water outside while Ivy Jones and the Jewish woman from the Hanukkah table stood on either side of the fountain and pushed back against the water with their powers. Sweat built on the women’s brows, and ankle-deep water lapped against their magic. At the seam between their magic, water slipped between the cracks in dark, hissing rivulets. A balding white man, a watermancer by the looks of it, stood behind them and tried to shove the water back in, but it slipped from his grasp like an eel and puddled on the floor.
Felipe stared at the smoldering fountain.The Corpus Arcanumhad burnt itself out when Enoch Whitley died, but there was no body for this magic to ravage, just an unending stream of water if it had reached the pipes. It would take time they didn’t have for Louisa to get to the Paranormal Society and for investigators and healers to reach them after. He eyed the toys, papers, and clothes that had been dropped in the rush to escape as they dissolved into the inky tide. What would happen if Ivy’s powers gave out before then? With every minute the water rose higher, and when the dam broke, it would sweep straight toward the women holding it back, the wounded, and those tending to them. Ivy and her companion would be hit the hardest, and Felipe couldn’t let that happen. He might not have telekinesis or be a watermancer, but he could recover from getting burned when they couldn’t. And if there was anything he could do to stop it, he would. Pulling off his jacket, Felipe wrapped it tightly around his left forearm and hand.
“Galvan, what the hell are you doing?” Ivy yelled in a tone usually reserved for her youngest sister. “You had better not be doing what I think you are.”
“The only way to make this stop or to keep it from getting worse is to destroy whatever is in the fountain, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
“So you’re just going to stick your hand in it? It’ll take your fingers off. Did you see what it did to Diedre Nichols?”
He hadn’t seen it, but he had heard the screams. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any better ideas. Do you?” Felipe said, securing his coat over his arm with its sleeves. “Unless you can keep this up indefinitely, then burning my hand off will have to do.”
The trickle that had escaped the edge of Ivy’s magic grew into a steady stream, but she shored it back up with a grunt of effort. He needed to get moving. As Felipe drew closer, he winced at the eye-searing haze that rose from the black tide eating away at all it touched. He pulled his collar over his nose and drew in a long, slow breath. He could handle it. A few minutes of pain would be worth it if it stopped this. Felipe was about to climb onto the stone bench just outside the invisible barricade to hop over it when Ivy let out a heavy sigh.
“I can make a path for you, so you don’t burn your feet off too, but you have to be quick about it. Sophia, can you hold this side a little more?”
When the white woman beside her nodded and readjusted her grip on the water, Ivy’s brow furrowed with concentration. Felipe watched in awe as Ivy slowly split the tide in two, revealing a smoking path in the stone. Not for the first time did Felipe wonder if Moses had telekinesis when he parted the Red Sea.
***
As Oliver called that he was a doctor and ran onto the stage, the four women crowded around Mrs. Cutler look up at him infear and relief. At the latter, Oliver faltered. What help could he be? He had no medical bag, no supplies, nothing he could use to stabilize her. Surely, there was someone else who could help her more, but the crowd had scattered to the four winds and any healers from the society would take time to arrive. Any protests or regrets died on Oliver’s lips at the pull of Mrs. Cutler’s life slipping away again.
“I’m Dr. Barlow. I work for the Paranormal Society,” Oliver said, forcing his voice steady as he grasped for the script he had learned in medical school. “My friend is going to comeback with healers, but I’d like to see if I can help. Does Mrs. Cutler have any health problems?”
“No, my mother is the healthiest woman I know,” replied the younger woman who shared Mrs. Cutler’s eyes and chin.
“She has rheumatism in her hands and back,” added the salt and pepper-haired woman who kept Mrs. Cutler’s head and neck elevated in her lap. While her daughter looked afraid, the older woman looked as if she could will Mrs. Cutler into recovering. “But rheumatism wouldn’t do this.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Oliver said softly. “Let me take a closer look at her.”
Oliver dropped beside Mrs. Cutler and tried to keep his features neutral despite what he saw. Mrs. Cutler appeared to only be somewhat aware of what was going on. She murmured things Oliver couldn’t understand, and when her eyes opened, it was obvious she wasn’t truly seeing. Blood coated her lips, and every few shallow breaths, she let out a wheezing cough. As he leaned closer, Oliver winced at the bruising across her cheeks. At least her blood vessels were the purple of petechiae, not ink. In some places, they had grown into purpura, as if the blood vessels beneath her skin had blown out to form a leafy haze of bruising on every inch of exposed skin. Pulling off one of her gloves, Oliver found the same thing on her hands and under her nails.Even her eyes were purple and red, and for a brief moment, Oliver slipped back to the dead nun he had examined months ago.
“Mrs. Cutler,” Oliver called when she opened her eyes and mumbled that she felt sick. He wasn’t sure if her eye was drooping or if it was merely a trick of the light. “Mrs. Cutler, do you have pain or numbness anywhere?”
“Head hurts,” she slurred before gesturing to her face and abdomen.
She’s bleeding out, Oliver thought. He would bet that, beneath her clothing, she was covered in the same bruising, and that there was probably blood leaking onto her petticoats or gathering in her belly beneath her corset, though he wouldn’t dare check in front of everyone. Oliver stared down at her as she shut her eyes, and the tether made another lurching pull for her soul. How could he explain to her daughter and friends that she was, for lack of a better word, cursed? He would sound like he was delirious; curses were the stuff of penny dreadfuls and ghost stories. Oliver pressed his fingers against the clammy skin of Mrs. Cutler’s throat to check her pulse and counted the beats as they passed far too quickly. When he took his hand away, she shuddered and let out a moan of pain in time with a whiff of that burning smell. The grey-haired woman whispered soothing nothings to Mrs. Cutler as her body contracted in time with a fresh bloom of bruising and a wet, blood-tinged cough. Oliver’s heart raced in time with the dying woman’s. Against the magic coursing through her veins, he was helpless. He was a doctor, not a healer. No one ever taught him how to cure magical ailments.
Addressing the two women standing on either side of Mrs. Cutler, Oliver said, “I need you both to go outside and try to find anyone who is a healer. Get more than one if you can. And as soon as you see any healers from the society, send them to me.”
Mrs. Cutler’s daughter watched her companions leave before turning to Oliver and the older woman cradling her mother’s head with tears gathering in her eyes. “She’s dying, isn’t she? That’s why you want healers.”
Oliver threw up his walls as the flame within Mrs. Cutler guttered and strained for the tether. He desperately wanted to help her, but while she was still at the mercy of whatever curse pulsed through her veins, he couldn’t risk that the magic might jump to him or Felipe through the tether. Swallowing down a spike of adrenaline, Oliver met Mrs. Cutler’s daughter’s wide brown eyes.
