I bracket her jaw between my shaking palms. “Catriona?” My gaze flicks to the wound on her cheek, where, beneath the blood, I catch the white of bone.
“Oh my Gods, is that—is that—” Syb’s aborted question vibrates through my orange wig and thudding skull.
Tears finally spill over the reddened rim of Catriona’s eyes, beading beneath her mask. “I’m—sorry.” Her murmur is all breath, but I’m so close that I catch her words. “I didn’t want to . . .”
Towhat? Sorryforwhat?I want to scream but can hardly regulate my breathing.
When Catriona’s mouth shifts again, and I don’t hear what she says, I tear off my mask and wig.
“What did you say?” I manage to croak.
“You shouldn’t—have returned.”
Syb’s earlier words scroll across my lids, the ones about me putting everyone at risk by coming back. They crack my chest wide becauseIwas the one being targeted.
These women were attacked because of me!
Catriona’s scarlet mouth parts, and I think she’s about to shape more words, but she coughs and mists my collarbone and neck with droplets of blood.
Her flesh is hot beneath my palm and feels as though it’s swelling. Sure enough, her cheek has grown puffy. And bumpy. Welts are forming around the wound and spreading. Her mask has become so tight that it cuts into her skin.
I fling my gaze around, noticing we’ve docked and a crowd has formed around us. “Where’s the healer?”
Tavo stares down at me dumbly.
I’m about to implore the Crows to find a healer, since the Fae are incompetent, when another idea lights up my mind. “Tavo, glove your hand with fire to cauterize her wound!”
Catriona moans. “It burns.”
And yet Tavo hasn’t touched her with his magical flames.
For two point one seconds, I consider rolling us into Mareluce and getting Minimus to lick her wound with his miraculous tongue, but what if my serpent snatches the courtesan and swims her into his lair?
As I shove my hair back, my fingers collide with my earring. How did I forget about Lazarus’s crystal? I rub the pollen-colored bead between my fingertips until I’ve ground it down to almost nothing and my fingers are coated in its sticky residue.
Catriona watches me, her eyes growing glassier, her complexion paler, her face so distended and full of welts that I’m momentarily torn from the here and now and propelled into the vision that Lore once sent me of the boy who ate the poisonous moss lining the riverbed.
As her skin brims over the silver mask like proofing dough, I rub her open wound, biting back the bile basting the back of my throat when my fingers encounter bloodied tissue and hard bone.
A million questions throttle my mind—What is it you were sorry for? What did you not want to do?—but the sight of her lips inflating into red buoys steals them all away.
With my free hand, I try to tear off her mask but the thing is stuck. “Tavo, a knife! We need to cut her out of this thing!”
She lays so still that I root around her swollen neck for the pulse point at the base of her jaw.
My heart stutters because I feel nothing save for rutted flesh. “Catriona?”
In spite of the terrible swelling, the wound in her cheek is gone.
“Catriona!” I will her lashes to flutter and carry her lids back up. I will her mouth to open around a breath or a moan or a grumbledmicara.
“She’s gone, Fallon.” Tavo stands over me, eyes a terrible shade of amber.
“But—but—no. She’s healed. I healed her.” I begin to pump her chest to jumpstart her heart.Come on, Catriona. Come on.
“Stop,” Tavo says.
But I don’t stop. I cannot stop. Stopping means giving up, and I’m unwilling to give up on her.
