By a Charm and a Curse(73)

Benjamin’s glasses are broken. Dirt flecks the lenses, and the sight of them, normally so pristine, sends me over the edge. I don’t know what I’m going to do if he doesn’t make it. My fingers slip around to the back of his neck. I can feel every hair prickle my palm, the ridges on the collar of his T-shirt. The way his chest is barely rising and falling against mine. The pool of too-warm blood that’s gathering around my knees. The hot trail of tears streaking down my cheeks.

I lean over and kiss him.

For a moment, all I can think about is how I can finally actually feel him and not some approximation of what his skin might feel like. How he feels warm and not burning hot. That this is what a kiss should feel like, soft and gentle. But…was this how it was when Sidney turned me? Hadn’t I already started to lose some of these bits of my humanity? Did the transfer not work?

Fabrizio yells behind me, and I pull away. Benjamin is impossibly still. There’s nothing, not even the jagged rise and fall of his chest. I grab his hand, hoping to feel the blood pulsing through it, but I can’t.

I failed.

There’s a buzz and the pop of shattered glass, and my head whips away from Benjamin’s unmoving body, searching for the source of the noise. The bulbs on a line of lights running between booths are bursting, a shower of sparks drifting to the ground. The futile hum of generators trying to accommodate the power surge is almost drowned out by the popping of more lights around the carnival and then, as everything goes dark, the night falls silent.

“What did you do?” Fabrizio asks quietly.

I whip around and stare up at the tumbler. He must have jumped off the Ferris wheel when I wasn’t looking. The moonlight curls silver into his hair, onto his shoulders. From where I sit on the cold ground, he’s impossibly tall.

I hold Ben’s hand tighter even though there’s nothing he can do to help me now.

“Let me ask you again,” Fabrizio says. He moves forward, with the menace of a shark in still waters. “What did you do?”

His fingers clench into fists and release over and over. There’s a fluttering in my chest and my breathing threatens to trip and falter, but he can’t scare me. Nothing, nothing is worse than what lies motionless in the dirt beside me.

“Nothing that concerns you,” I say, staring into the hollows where his eyes should be. Behind Fabrizio, his brothers are closing in.

“You’ve ruined every good thing about this miserable carnival, so I think it does concern me,” Fabrizio says. His fingers curl up again, and this time, his fist draws back.

A silver glint races between us, and he screams. One of Marcel’s throwing-knives is lodged into the toe of his boot to the hilt, blood spurting up through the leather.

Katarina’s voice booms like a thunder. “You will not touch her.”

Katarina stands at the line of tents, Marcel beside her with a fist full of knives. Running to join them are Gin, one arm in a sling and carrying a metal post in her good hand, and Whiskey, armed with a bucket of baseballs from one of the gaming booths. In the shadows behind them are the twins, Duncan pushing his sister away from the fray.

Antonio rushes toward my friends, dodging the baseball thrown at his head but unable to avoid the throwing-knife now lodged in his thigh. He pushes onward, but I can’t worry about them. Fabrizio is much closer.

He pulls the blade from his foot and swings it, the small knife whistling as it slices toward me. I throw myself to the ground and roll, springing to my feet. A hot flash of pain runs up my leg but I ignore it, and I put myself between Fabrizio and Benjamin’s body. Blood squelches from Fabrizio’s wounded foot every time he takes a step, and as he nears, I dart out to stomp his wounded foot underneath mine, putting all my weight on it.

Fabrizio yells, drowning out any other noise. His fingers crush my arms and he shoves me to the ground before dropping to his knees beside me. He draws a heavy fist back, but before he can throw his punch, a baseball cracks into his nose.

Spatters of his blood drip down onto me, and before I get out from under him, Gin swings at his stomach with her post, sending him flying backward. Whiskey helps me to my feet as Gin stands over Fabrizio, ready to hit him again if he makes another move.

He doesn’t.

I let go of Whiskey’s hand and go back to Ben. He hasn’t moved. I drop down in the dirt beside him as a fresh wave of hot tears line my eyes.

After a few seconds, a swath of gauzy skirts comes into my view. Katarina joins me in the dirt, one frail arm around my shoulders, the other gently placing an old-fashioned iron lantern on the ground beside us.

She cradles Benjamin’s face in her palm, and when I see the extreme gentleness with which she handles him, I start to sob. The world blurs, and rather than be amazed that I’m actually crying and not making that stupid gasping hiccup-y noise, I just want it to stop so that I can see him while I still can.

Katarina looks at me, the lines in her face ghoulishly lit up from below by the lantern’s flickering flame. That same slightly amused smirk from the night we met is back on her face, and I want to scream at her for smiling. “Didn’t he tell you what he was going to do?” she asks.

After months of being a husk, I suddenly feel like the sloppiest, mushiest thing ever. I’m an armful of sopping wet towels. I push the flood of tears from my cheeks with my palms before I answer. “Not until right before he threw himself from the stupid Ferris wheel.” Gin’s slender, strong arms snake around me, along with a tangle of silvery hair. Whiskey wraps herself around both her sister and me and sobs quietly into my neck.