Lys ignores him, heading toward the cot. Shea sits on the edge, her feet swinging. She feels as though she’s slowly resurfacing from some lightless depth, water in her lungs and pressure in her ears. The lights have crawled into her head. The buzzing rattles her vision, turns the ringing in her ears to a staticky hum. Sick with it, she shuts her eyes.
“Open,” orders Lys, the moment she does. She finds his face an inch from hers, his gaze searching. His touch ghosts along her throat, lingering at her pulse. “Are you okay?”
“You have horns,” she says.
His face closes up like a fist. “It’s temporary. I’ll shave them down.”
“You don’t have to.”
Asher appears at Lys’s side, looking grim. The light clings to him in a way it doesn’t cling to Lys, illuminating him in a lambent cast. “What do you want to do with Van Haut?”
“Leave him here.” Lys coaxes Shea down off the cot. The room wobbles, or else she does, and he catches her just before she falls. They’re laced all together, her arm around his neck, his grip tight against her waist. His voice is a texture. A vibration. “If he gets out, he gets out.”
“And what if he doesn’t?” asks Asher. “He’ll starve.”
Lys’s smile is flat. “Do you know what desanguination is, Thorley?”
“It’s when a body is purposely removed of blood,” says Poppy, answering before anyone else can. She’s still standing by the shelf, her arms folded conspicuously over the bib of her overalls. The jar containing the fetus is missing, a dark ring left behind in the wood where it sat. “It’s a form of bloodletting. Remove too much, the patient dies.”
“Except we don’t die without blood,” tacks on Lys. “We desiccate.”
“Living corpses,” says Asher. “I’ve seen them, in the holding cells at the garrison.”
Lys makes a face. “I’ll bet you have.”
“I was only trying to help you, Oliver,” calls Egor. “It’s what your mother asked me to do.”
He sits bound on the floor, his arms behind his back and his ankles knotted. At the mention of his mother, Lys’s expression contorts.
“Let him starve,” he says. “We leave at dusk.”
•••
Upstairs, they gather in a lamplit room, the dormered windows blacked out with paint. The wind has blown in a storm, and the rain hisses against the roof. The air smells wet and cold.
Still coming back to herself, Shea rests her temple against the wall and takes quick stock of her surroundings. A bunk bed sits against the wall, a quilted full beneath a narrow twin. It’s a child’s room, the wall papered in navy stripes, the shelves cluttered with knickknacks—green soldiers and stacked comic books and action figures with the faces worn blank. A stark, homey opposition to the clinical horrors of the Van Haut basement.
“I’m going to do a sweep of the grounds,” says Asher. “The rest of you should get some sleep while it’s still light.”
“You won’t find anyone,” says Lys. “No one comes out this way if they can avoid it. Van Haut isn’t known for being a good host.”
Poppy sniffles, rubbing at her nose. “That feels like an understatement.”
“What?” asks Lys. “You’re not having a nice time?”
The door drifts shut on Asher’s scoff. In his absence, the room falls quiet. The only sound is the click of the radiator, the steady drill of rain against the glass. Shea feels like she is both light as a feather and heavy as an anvil. She tries to will herself to move and fails.
Poppy has no such trouble. Stifling a yawn, she climbs into the top bunk and collapses, face first, atop the pillow. Above her, a pink prehensile tail curls around the narrow wood of a ceiling joist. Kit’s ghostly face appears, his eyes squinted nearly shut against the lamplight.
“Oh, there you are!” Shea hears Poppy say. “You missed all the excitement.”
Within minutes, her soft snores flood the room. Shea watches, her heartbeat sticky, as Lys drops to his back on the bottom bunk. Awareness crackles between them as he settles into place, his arms crooked behind his head.
He looks like a prince of death, the white of his horns gleaming like opals. It gives him an oddly fae appearance, like he’s a thousand years old. She can’t stop herself staring. As if he knows it, his eyes drift to hers. His gaze is heavy, and she feels it like a physical touch. She gives an involuntary shiver, that funny underwater haze clinging to everything.
“It’ll wear off,” he says, like he knows just what she’s thinking.
“Maybe.” Her voice is thick. “What’s proprioception?”
