Give the Dark My Love(81)

I picked up the oar, sliding it noiselessly into the water. I pointed the boat back toward the hospital.

I had promised my sister.

I’d promised her I would return.





FIFTY-TWO


    Nedra



The boat bumped up against the stone steps. I had no rope, so I hauled it up a few steps, hoping the tide wouldn’t carry it away.

The walk up to the hospital’s entrance felt eternal. I pushed open the heavy mahogany door, not bothering to shut it behind me. Starlight chased my heels.

“Ernesta!” I shouted. My voice echoed, long and loud, fading into nothing. “Nessie!”

I tripped over the first body, my knees crashing onto the marble floor, my palms bursting with pain as I caught myself. I scrambled over the sprawled legs of a little boy, his eyes glazed over with green film, looking up at the ornate ceiling of the hospital, the gilded decorations reflected in his pupils.

Breath was expunged from my body as if I’d been hit in the stomach. I knew this boy. His father had blamed me for his brother’s and mother’s deaths. Ronan. The amputation hadn’t worked; the plague had traveled to his brain.

A thin dribble of deep blue liquid trickled out of one corner of Ronan’s mouth. He was so close to the doors. I wondered if he had tried to get outside, to die under the stars.

“Ernesta!” I screamed. My eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, and I searched frantically.

No one answered my call.

She couldn’t have gone far. She had been weak and tired when I left her, barely able to remain standing. I ran down each of the wings, shouting for my sister.

I found only death.

The victims left behind had been in the worst shape of all. Legs and arms of the bodies I found were withered and black, so brittle they looked as if they would snap off. Some had taken the tincture; many had not. It was easy to tell the difference, quite apart from the tinge of blue on some of the lips. The ones who chose death on their own terms mostly did so in beds or chairs. They arranged themselves so their bodies were decent, and although many of them slid onto the floors after they died, it was evident that they had been thinking of who would find them, of what condition they’d be found in. Several victims were in beds, their hands folded over their chests as if they were hoping death would be like sleep. I found some in the courtyard, earth rubbed on the bottoms of their bare feet, their three-beaded necklaces clutched in one hand and the empty bottle of tincture in the other.

But the ones who had not chosen death, even when it was the only choice, had defied it to the very end. I found their bodies in the hallways, collapsed against walls. Their faces were slack, but I imagined there was still anger in their empty eyes. Three were in a medical supplies closet, obviously looking for something that might help, something not as final as the tincture of blue ivy.

But no Ernesta.

I ran back to the foyer. I was so tired. My body longed to fall to the floor like the dead around me.

“Nessie!” I screamed.

A cool breeze from above, a whisper of a chill, floated down in answer. My eyes caught a bit of blue—an unopened bottle of tincture resting on the bottom of the spiral staircase that led to the clock tower. My gaze drifted up and up. To the body draped over the steps.

“Ernesta!” I gasped, racing to the stairs. I took them two at a time, but I was clumsy in my weariness, and I slipped and skidded down several steps, the wrought iron burning against my skin as I struggled to stand again. I gripped the railing in one hand, my bag in the other, leaping toward my sister. She had made it nearly to the top. I dropped to my knees on one of the stairs, feeling for a pulse, praying she was still with me. I peeled back one of her eyelids—no green film.

“Ned,” she said, her voice barely there.

“Nessie!” Tears caught in my throat, and the word could hardly escape my lips.

A shadow of a smile passed over her. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear anything else. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need her words; I never did. I knew why she had come up here. She had been remembering my stories—she wanted to see the city.

We were closer to the clock tower than to the main floor of the hospital, so I helped Ernesta to stand and carefully pulled her up the remaining steps. Her body was heavy, but my labored breaths sounded so riotously full of life compared to her shallow ones.

“Almost, almost,” I said as we crested the final few steps. Ernesta dropped to her knees, but I coaxed her up again, pulling her closer to the reverse clockface, which cast a warm glow over the tower.

Ernesta lay on the floor so still and quiet, her frame more gaunt than thin, her skin sallow, her still-healing amputation so new that it pained me to look at it. I dropped to my knees beside her.

This plague is necromantic.

It will take a necromancer to stop it.

I pulled Bennum Wellebourne’s crucible cage out of my bag, setting the severed, shriveled hand on the floor beside Nessie.

Next, I needed the iron forged from the blood of a person who loved me. My parents loved me. They loved my sister. They would want this.

I told myself, They would want this.

I carefully held the waterskin of my parents’ ashes over the palm of the crucible cage, pouring the blackened flecks in the center and chanting the runes as they landed. There was far more ash than should fit in the open hand, but as I spoke the runes, the ash swirled in the center, condensing, becoming a hardened black lump. I didn’t stop until all the ash had been poured.