Mara woke with the iron tinge of blood in the back of her nose. The warm-on-sickly-cool of wet sheets, rapidly drying. The thickness of blood caked between her fingers, sticking them together, the taste of it a salty film on her tongue.
“Nick!” she gasped, rocketing upright and looking around for the threat, the injury, whatever had her waking with blood in all of her senses.
Not Nick.
Not even reality.
Davy lay beside her beneath the gauzy drapes of the four-poster, fully dressed, body taut and trembling in a rictus of pain. The sheets beneath him were stained shiny crimson and rusty brown, small coagulating puddles forming where the fabric had bunched beneath his body.
“Davy!” Mara twisted around so she was on her knees at his side, sheets winding around her legs with the motion. “Davy,” she gasped, her hands hovering over him–bloody hands, the sensation thicker on her palms, beneath her fingers. Streaks of blood ran up her arms. She hadn’t even touched him.
“Mara,” he gasped, breaking off on a weak cough. Blood spattered across her face. It ran over his cheek to form speckles on the pillow case. Pain-bright eyes met hers, wide and flaring wider with each gasp for breath. He was so scared. She saw it, she heard it. But mostly she felt it, the nauseous tightening around her own midsection, the lead-heavy weight of it in her own lungs, the rictus of it casting her spine in braided ropes of burning, freezing terror.
“Where are you hurt?” she asked, her own voice trembling as her hands finally obeyed her command and closed the distance between them. She grasped his shirt and tore it down the middle, revealing the blood-smeared but unbroken skin of his chest, which jerked with his rapid, panicked breaths. “Davy, where are you hurt?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and rolled his head on the pillow, the sounds of his labored breaths deafening in the small room.
She shrank into a corner of her own body, watching as an observer might while she frantically searched for the source of all the blood. She found nothing. No wound, no bruising.
“Davy, please,” she breathed, framing his face in her bloody hands and forcing him to look at her. The veins and muscles of his neck stood out starkly as he gasped for air, fresh blood bubbling from his mouth, oozing from his nose, trickling from his ears. “Where are you hurt? Where does it hurt?”
Of course he couldn’t answer. From the back corner of her brain, she screamed at herself. Get help! This is beyond you!
She sent a press of love through the palms of her hands and then scrambled off the bed, disentangling herself from the sheets. The floor sent shocks of cold up from the soles of her bare feet as she dashed to the door, the knob equally frigid against her sticky palm. She twisted and yanked, and the door didn’t budge.
She saw no lock. No keyhole. Just the knob. She twisted the other way and pulled with all her strength.
Nothing.
“Hey!” Releasing the knob, she slammed the side of her fist against the wood, the impact a dull ache radiating out from a sharp, bone-deep pain. “Unlock the door! We need help!” She raised her other hand and hammered on the door with both fists, panic lifting the pathetic, wobbling whimper of her voice into a hearty screech. “Help! Let us out! We need help!”
Nobody came.
Spinning on the ball of her foot, she ran to the window, but it was locked as tight as the door. When she picked up the nearest heavy object–a table clock cast in pewter–and hurled it at the window, it bounced impotently off the glass and landed with a thud.
“No,” she heard herself choke out as an angry, disembodied fist closed around her throat. “No.” She ran back to the bed and scrambled up onto it. Blood soaked into the fabric of her nightgown where it covered her knees. The sheets were completely saturated, and the smell choked her, filling her lungs in place of air. “No, Davy,” she whimpered, cradling his face in her hands. He still breathed. Somehow. And in a distant, unimportant pocket of her mind she knew that he shouldn’t be. Even a man as large as Davy didn’t have so much blood in him to lose.
“I’m sorry,” she said, bending over him, pressing her forehead to his. The gurgle of his breath occupied every corner of her awareness. “I don’t know what to do. I’m so sorry.”
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All the books she’d read, the potions she’d brewed, the people she’d helped, and she couldn’t fix this. She was a physik, not a healer.
Eli.
“It’s okay,” she said, pressing a kiss to Davy’s forehead. “We’ll fix it. We’ll fix it, my love.” But when she sat back and pulled in a breath to yell for Eli, her jaw locked tight, lips pressed together as if sewn. She tried, nonetheless. Eli! Eli! We need help! Davy needs help! Eli! But the words seemed to leave her lungs and build up in her head, swelling it until she felt it might pop. Eli! Help!
“Mara!” A hand shook her shoulder. She opened her eyes, unsure when she shut them, and found Eli’s face hovering over her, half in shadows, half in flickering firelight. His eyes were wide, brow furrowed. “Are you–”
“Davy,” she gasped, rolling her head to the side and seeing only the glow of firelight on dark leaves and the muddled greenish black of the forest beyond. She sat up, and Eli–on his knees beside her–shifted back on his heels. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her lips tingled, and she raised a hand and pressed her fingertips to them, then to her jaw.
“Bad dream?” he asked.
She nodded, mute, and continued to rub her jaw, staring with an unfocused gaze at the center of his chest. For some reason–perhaps the terrible circumstances of the dream, perhaps the security of the darkness–she found herself doing the unthinkable.
“Not just tonight,” she confessed, bringing her eyes into focus and looking up in search of his eyes. Warm, quiet eyes. She’d have felt better, in that terrible dream, just having him look at her like he was right now–like he understood that nothing was okay, but he’d do whatever she asked to make it better. “I have these dreams. They’re…. I don’t know what to do. They’re–” She broke off, swallowing a wave of nausea. “Eli, I don’t know what to do.”
“Well,” he said, in a voice like one might use to soothe a frightened animal. Soft. Low. Unthreatening. “Right now, your options are to lay down and go back to sleep or come sit by the fire. What sounds better?”
She looked down at Nick, still sleeping at her side, and Eli assuaged her worries before she could voice them.
“You weren’t making much noise, not thrashing or anything. He hasn’t stirred.”
She nodded. Davy used to have nightmares, on occasion. She’d wake to him tense beside her, helpless cries caught in the back of his throat, face wrinkled and pinched with distress. But he’d never flailed about, never opened his mouth to scream.
“Can I come sit with you?” she asked.
“Of course. I’ll make some tea.”
She nodded again. If she opened her mouth she would cry.
Eli moved away, back toward the fire, and began the familiar rhythm of boiling water, preparing the tea leaves, adding a few extra sticks to the fire so that it flared high and bright. Mara continued to sit on her sleeping roll, Nick’s body a glancing warmth against her hip. She reached a shaking hand inside her pocket and pulled out the watch, flipping open the cover.
Just after four. Well on the way to morning.
Shivering, she unearthed herself from her blanket and fumbled her boots on, covering Nick back up and leaving him to sleep.
She went stiffly to the fire and sat on the ground beside it, legs crossed, shoulders hunched. She sat too close, the heat drawing her skin tight across her face, but she didn’t move, and Eli didn’t say anything. She held out her hands and watched the fine tremor of her fingers against the backdrop of the dancing flames.
Eli moved about in her periphery, but she didn’t pay him much attention, her mind caught in a hazy cycle of blood and helpless fear. What did it mean? Why, after so many nights of peace, had Davy come to her in such distress? Would it happen again? Was this how the dreams ended? How he left her? Bleeding and frightened and–
“Mara.” She started and looked up. Eli stood at her side, a blanket hooked over his finger. The fabric brushed her shoulder as he nudged it toward her. “You’re shivering.”
She didn’t feel cold, but she accepted the blanket and draped it over her shoulders, wool scratching at the back of her neck and the underside of her jaw. It helped, though, and she tugged it tighter around herself, clenching the bunched fabric in her hands and pulling until she was enveloped in taut, restrictive warmth.
Time passed. Though she didn’t feel the minutes tick by, she knew it must have been five, maybe ten, because when Eli returned he did so with a steaming mug of tea. She accepted it and cradled it in her hands, balanced atop her crossed ankles. She stared down into the liquid, the whorls of steam glowing yellow with the firelight. A log broke in the fire, collapsing with a shower of sparks, and she startled, scalding liquid splashing over the backs of her fingers.
When Eli had first arrived at her townhouse and told her Davy was gone, she’d thought she was in shock because of the warm calm that came over her. It had, of course, been his magic, and now she realized that she should have known better. Shock was not a warm calm but a cold one. A detached dissociation from the world and from oneself. She shivered, but she didn’t feel the chill. She scalded her fingers with the tea, but the sensation lost its way somewhere between the part of her mind that felt it and the part that cared. Every time she blinked, Davy’s face filled her vision, blood running in thick tracks over his cheeks, staining his teeth. But she felt nothing. Nothing.
Eli sat beside her, close but not too close–within arm’s reach but not touching. He held a second mug of tea in his hands. He didn’t speak. His words were in the tea, the blanket, the careful distance, the patient silence.
“I’ve been having these dreams,” she finally said with her eyes fixed to the glowing white embers seething and popping beneath the fire. She didn’t tell him for any particular reason, except that she knew, in the deepest part of her soul, that she could. “Every night, since Loftland, I’ve been dreaming of Davy.”