A Drop of Night(52)

Hayden makes an angry noise and dives after me. “Stop messing with things,” he hisses, grabbing at scissors, a fleece, a bunch of little bottles that go rolling and bouncing off the shelf.

I find a box with a Red Cross symbol on it and rip it open. Bandages. A syringe. Penicillin. A round tin of salve—blue label with a blocky, seventies’ font on it, even though it looks brand-new. For burns and swelling.

I grab it. Go over to Will. Lilly and Jules are on their knees next to him, making futile attempts to comfort him. I start dabbing some of the gray goop onto a cotton swab. “This’ll probably hurt, but it should help.” I hand the swab to Lilly. Look back over my shoulder at Hayden: “Hayden, talk. What happened?”

Hayden leans back against the end of the capsule and crosses his arms over his chest. His blue eyes are flinty. This was clearly not how he envisioned his heroic rescue efforts turning out. We’re hijacking his space. And I realize now that we don’t really know Hayden. At all.

“No idea,” Hayden says. “Last thing I remember is you having a hissy fit in the dining room. When I woke up, I was lying on the floor of this really huge hall, and I had a hole in my neck.”

“What, they just dumped you?”

“Who?”

“Miss Sei. The trackers.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He glowers at me, like I just insulted him. Lilly is daubing the salve onto Will’s wounds. Will has his teeth clenched, and Lilly flinches every time he sucks his breath in. Jules is sitting really still, looking dazed.

Hayden uncrosses his arms and squats. “I walked around. Kind of guessed I must be underground in the Palais du Papillon, since I saw the butterfly coat of arms everywhere. I assumed there was an accident and it knocked out my short-term memory.”

“So you don’t know why we’re here,” Lilly says. “You don’t know what’s going on.”

“Not a clue.”

I squint at him. He’s definitely jittery. Thinner. I can see his clavicles jutting through his shirt. And there’s a twitch in one of his eyes, a constant blink.

“How did you find us?” I ask.

“Dumb luck,” Hayden says. “I’d been hearing the messages from Dorf for a few hours, but I could never make them out. So I decided to head in the direction they were coming from. Then I heard you screaming.”

“I don’t think I screamed,” I say, still sorting through the supplies, making a heap of the things I think might come in handy. “And why did you have rope with you? You just happened to be toting curtain ropes with you because that’s the fashionable accessory for traversing underground palaces?”

Hayden throws up his hands. “What do you want, an admission of guilt? You’re welcome I saved you!”

Hayden stares at me, his eye still twitching, arms crossed like a pouty kid having a bad birthday party.

I look down at Will. Hand Lilly another cotton swab. “Sorry,” I say. I shouldn’t be the one apologizing—suspicion is kind of necessary at this point—but someone has to or we’re not going to get anywhere. I scoot back to the first-aid kit. “We’ve seen a lot of bizarre stuff and we’re paranoid. I’m sorry, Hayden.”

He’s still staring at me reproachfully. Now he’s grabbing some clear plastic bottles from the shelf and filling them with water from a spigot in the wall.

“Forget it.” He screws the top onto one of the bottles. “I heard someone screaming and I came running. I tore the ropes off that four-poster we passed. You can check if you want. Otherwise I would have gotten there faster.” He tosses the bottle to me. I want to guzzle it down—my tongue feels like it’s going to crack—but I stoop and hold it for Will while he drinks.

“Now you tell me something.” Hayden’s eyes dart between Will and me. “What have you found out?”

“Not much,” I say. Will stops drinking. I empty the rest of the bottle in three gulps. “We think the people who kidnapped us are a centuries-old weapons-dealing, art-stealing crime family.” I give him a wry look and let him absorb that. “We also think they’re not in complete control of what goes on down here. There’s a rogue party.” I pause, thinking. “The transmissions were only for us. That means either Dorf thinks you’re dead, or he’s deliberately leaving you out of the equation. Have you seen anyone down here? Like, for example, a creepy pale guy bleeding all over the place or a dripping Frenchwoman?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Have you seen anyone?”

“I saw some guys in black gear run past once. I hid behind a table, thought I was done for. They didn’t see me. They didn’t even look anywhere but straight ahead. I haven’t seen anyone since. They haven’t come back.”

“They were probably trackers. We’ve seen some of them, too. And something killed a bunch outside the room we were hiding in.”

“Something killed them? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Or someone. Perdu was talking about an ’homme papillon. And since the trackers were with Dorf and Dorf’s probably not interested in killing his own team, we’ve been assuming there’s someone else down here.”

Hayden glances up at me. “Who’s Perdu?”