Each thump of his feet as he raced into the house and mounted the stairs jarred me into fresh agony, and I almost screamed as we turned the corner of the landing.
Stefan’s arms tightened convulsively. “Aldrich!” he shouted, and I cringed as it echoed in my hollow skull. “Aldrich, where the fuck are you!”
“Here, my lord, here!” Aldrich sounded as if he’d been running too. A door creaked, and Stefan spun me as if maneuvering me through it. I choked on bile and panted against his chest as waves of chills swept from my scalp to my toes. “Forgive me, I was at my supp—”
“His potion. Now, get it now! Do you know how much he takes?”
“No, no, don’t, please,” I gasped, as Stefan tried to put me down, and clung to him with all my strength, my fingers ripping through his lace cravat. I gazed up at him leaning over me, his face wavering through the blur of my tears. “Please don’t leave me.”
“You need your potion and you’ll be well enough,” he said. “Remi, let go—damn it, fine, Aldrich, will you bloody well hurry!”
He braced a knee beside me on the bed, one arm still around my waist, and reached up to stroke the sweat-soaked tendrils of hair out of my eyes. The brush of his skin on mine set off firecrackers down my spine, and I arched up, rubbing against him more shamelessly than a cat in heat. I couldn’t reach what I needed, and I subsided, moaning.
“I have it, my lord, here,” Aldrich said, and I blinked, and Stefan had a glass in his hand, filled with a familiar murky mixture.
The smell of it hit me, mint and earth and magic, nearly making me retch, but I had enough sense left to know I had to drink it down no matter how little I wanted it. My teeth chattered against the edge of the glass, and some of the potion dribbled down my chin to spatter my bare chest, but Stefan helped me tip my head back so that most of it went down my throat.
For a long, suspended moment, we all waited for it to take effect. Usually, on the rare occasions when the curse had begun to affect me, the potion instantly cleared the symptoms away.
My stomach gurgled.
And a fresh wave of pain hit me hard enough to knock me sideways onto the bed, every muscle convulsing, my mouth open on a rictus scream.
“What have you done?” Stefan demanded, trying to hold me down, and I sobbed and tried to tell him I hadn’t done anything, I hadn’t, I hadn’t… “Not you, fuck, Aldrich!”
“I swear that’s what he takes, my lord, I’m sorry, what do I do? It’s not working!”
“Thank you for that assessment,” Stefan snarled. “Fuck. Take this. No, I’m not leaving you, Remi, let go—take it to the palace.” He’d pulled something from his hand. His signet ring glinted in Aldrich’s palm. “Show it to Captain Venet. Don’t take no for an answer if someone claims he’s not available to seeyou. Tell him I need help only an expert mage can give. Yes, that’s all, he’ll understand. And then hurry back at once, but wait downstairs for me to summon you. Don’t come in here unless you’re called.”
If he wanted us to be left alone unless he…that meant only one thing. The potion hadn’t worked. And so Stefan meant to…
“Oh, gods,” I choked out, and turned my face into the pillow, the linen shockingly cool against my fevered skin. My potion wasn’t working, and I’d passed the point where that could frighten or dismay me; I merely acknowledged it, a fact in the background of the churning agony spreading through every vein, boiling my blood. But I still couldn’t look at him and meet those knowing dark eyes, share his understanding of what had to happen next.
The door shut too hard behind Aldrich as he ran out in a hurry, and I jumped as the vibration rattled my brain in my throbbing head. “Fucking Dromos, oh, Ennolu forgive me. Preserve me.” The words I’d chanted every morning and evening rose up, almost enough to cling to, to pull myself from this darkness. At the abbey, we’d been so certain that our piety would keep us free of this punishment. “Holy Ennolu, my love is thine, my devotion—”
Stefan let out a sharp, skeptical crack of laughter. “For fuck’s sake, Remi, prayers aren’t going to help! Look at me. Remi, I need you to look—”
“—never ending, my commitment to thy will unwavering, my—”
“Your death is imminent, that’s what it is, no matter how much love and devotion you give the bastard god who cursed you. Look at me!”
I wouldn’t have, except that he took my chin in his hand and forced me to.
Not roughly. But irresistibly. And when my eyes met his, I found all the certainty I’d been terrified of seeing.
“Do you have any idea why the potion didn’t work? Any alternatives to offer?” I shook my head. “And this isn’t how it ought to be? I mean the timing. This seems more sudden than it should be. Am I wrong about that?”
“It’s—this isn’t normal,” I rasped. “No. It hurts!” That came out more of a strangled wail, and another spasm, searing and sudden, had me curling in on myself again.
“Will you last until help arrives? Remi, you need to answer me! I’m sorry, but you have to—damn it,” he said, and then any other words of his became meaningless noise as the pain doubled, tripled, wracked me in writhing misery. Nothing existed but that, and his face faded in and out as if he’d been pulled to the end of a long, narrowing tunnel, with me falling away from him, falling and falling…
Mixed in with the endless tumble into blinding pain, there were other sensations: I’d been turned and moved, and the sudden release of the corset’s grip gave me an instant of relief before the air hitting my overheated, sweaty torso brought on a new wave of shuddering chills. I couldn’t stop my tears, or the hitching sobs that tore them out of me, and Stefan had told me more than once not to cry. He’d be so angry, at that and the way I couldn’t help him undress me, and he probably thought I was fighting him by the way I squirmed and moaned, but I wasn’t, I needed him, the throbbing heaviness between my legs unbearable now, almost worse than the jolts of pain shooting down my limbs and stabbing me in the neck and temples.
But his voice didn’t sound angry, and his touch didn’t hurt me—until he put me on my stomach and pressed my legs apart, and then the bizarre slick pressure of, oh, gods, only his fingers, and that hurt a little but was mostly cold and strange, but getting warmer, lighting me up from the inside.
They went away, and I took a bit of my pillowcase between my teeth to try to cushion them as they clicked together. His quick breaths and a slapping sound confused me, and I tried to twist around to see, but I only caught a fragmented glimpse of one of his big hands moving quickly up and down before the other pushed me back down again. The angle of my thighs made them ache as he nudged my knees open enough to fit between them. A thick, invading thing slid between my cheeks.
Then it hurt. The stretch and a new kind of burn, different from the fire of my curse, spread from my hole to my cheeks and deep into me.
