Brightly (Flicker #2) (43 page)

“That long?”

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” he said wearily. “That spell took everything out of me. I feel like road kill. Henry’s no better. He practically killed himself today.”

“I know. I don’t mean to sound like I’m rushing you. I just—” She glanced toward Nasser and hugged herself with one arm. “I’m worried about him.”

He nodded. “We’ll keep an eye on him. He’ll be fine. We just need to make sure we’re ready to go as soon as possible. How much salt do you have left?”

“Plenty. We don’t even need very much for the spell.” Lee reached for her backpack. It was still sodden from when she’d fallen into the river, but anything inside that could be damaged by water was zipped inside plastic bags.

Lee frowned. The buckle that held the pack shut was open and the zipper looked broken. As she rooted through the contents, panic expanded beneath her ribs.

Methodically, she pulled everything out of the backpack, taking stock. The change of clothes were there, still zipped inside a clear plastic bag. Her water bottle was there. Her backup knife. The water purification tablets. The bag filled with gauze rolls and Band-Aids. A large number of the protein bars they’d packed were missing, as was her flashlight, and—

“No, no, no,” Lee chanted frantically, sorting through the items again. She was sure she’d just overlooked it, missed it somehow—but, she recalled, her backpack
had
felt too light. She hadn’t thought about it then, not with the bear, but now…

“What?” Filo asked.

“The bag of salt.” Her words and her breath were both coming faster. “When I fell down the riverbank, I landed in the water. My backpack came open and it must’ve fallen out.”

“Fallen out where?”

“Into the river!”

Filo blanched. “The salt is gone?”

Lee nodded. She felt like she was going to start crying.

He grabbed her arm and squeezed—not in warning, she thought, but in terror. His eyes reflected the flames. “Lee, we need that salt. If we don’t have it for the spell base…”

“I know,” she whispered. “If we don’t have the salt, then we can’t go home.”

When Clementine walked into the kitchen the next morning, she looked more or less like herself. Bruises were purpling her skin, but all the blood had been scrubbed away. The gouge on her arm and the scrape on her forehead were scabbed over, and though her eye was still blackened and swollen, she could open it.

“How are you?” Alice asked, looking up from the eggs she was scrambling.

“All right, I guess.” When she opened the cupboard above the sink and reached up for a mug, her face tightened, like it hurt to lift her arm. “Davis patched me up.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Alice said, quieter. “How are
you
?”

Clementine just shook her head and poured herself some coffee.

By and by, Jason and Davis appeared in the kitchen. They ate breakfast in relative silence, except for Clementine, who just drank cup after cup of coffee.

“You should eat something,” Davis said.

“I’m not hungry.”

He sighed. “Clem—”

“We have to take the boat back to Troll’s Island,” she said suddenly. “Otherwise, they won’t be able to get to Siren when they come back through.”

Davis hesitated, like he wanted to say something else. In the end, he just said, “We can tow it out with the motorboat and leave it on the beach. I’ll take it out this afternoon, after I finish checking on everyone.”

“And,” Clementine added, “we need to do something with the troll.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Bury it. Burn it. Something. We can’t just leave it there to rot.”

“Okay,” said Davis. “We’ll take care of it. But you really need to—”

There was a knock on the front door, and Davis broke off. He twisted around in his chair, looking across the living room to the door.

“Who would knock?” Clementine asked in a low voice. “Everyone knows they can just come in, especially if they need something.”

“I don’t know.” Frowning, Davis pushed his chair back and stood. As he crossed through the living room, Clementine, Alice and Jason rose and trailed after him.

Another knock echoed through the house. He hesitated for a moment, his hand hovering above the doorknob, before he gripped it and pulled the door open.

The woman on the porch wore a long black coat over dark pants and a white blouse. A burnished metal beak that looked something like a plague doctor’s mask covered the lower half of her face, and a pair of goggles with red crystal lenses hid her eyes. She was tall, about the same height as Clementine, though some of that height came from her boots. Her dark brown hair was pulled into a bun.

“Is this the Brightly residence?” The woman’s voice was distorted slightly by the mask. “The sign certainly makes me think I’m in the right place, but it never hurts to ask.”

For a moment, the four of them just stared at her in silence. Davis and Clementine exchanged a look.

“Ah, I see what it is,” said the woman. “One second.”

With a sigh that sounded tinny inside the beak, the woman pulled off the red goggles. Her eyes were an extremely light brown, almost hazel. She reached behind her head and unbuckled the metal mask, taking it off. When it was removed, she tilted her head, cracking her neck.

“Sorry about that.” She had a low, pleasant voice. “Official procedure. It’s a pain, but I’m always supposed to wear that thing when I arrive at premises like this.”

“Who
are
you?” Clementine blurted, moving to stand beside Davis.

“You’re right—I should’ve introduced myself immediately. My mistake.” Tucking the beaked mask under one arm, the woman extended her hand. “My name is Amelia Carter. I’m with the Guild.”

For a moment, when Nasser opened his eyes and saw a pale red sky, he didn’t know where he was. His head was in a fog, the way it always was when he woke after taking some of Davis’ sleeping powder, and the world was tilting slowly. Then sharp, insistent pain sliced through the haze and everything flooded back. The bear and the bone.

With difficulty, Nasser sat up. His shoulder was sore and it hurt to move his arm, but compared to his leg, the pain was nothing. Grimacing, he unzipped his sleeping bag and pulled it back.

The bandage felt too tight, though it hadn’t been last night. His leg must’ve swelled while he was unconscious. He could see that blood had soaked through the gauze and knew it needed to be changed, but he was reluctant to do it. Even when he was perfectly still, his leg throbbed angrily in time with his pulse. He was afraid to touch it.

The fire had burned down to ashes, and the air was crisp. Two of the sleeping bags were empty. Nearby, Lee was curled up inside hers, asleep. Birds called in the strange trees; farther off, the river sang to itself. Otherwise, the cavern was silent.

He could only procrastinate so long. With his good arm, Nasser reached over and pulled his backpack closer. Then he took a deep breath and began to unwind the bandages. It was a start-and-stop process; each small movement of his leg made him gasp in pain. Finally, he pulled away the last of the gauze.

Sure enough, the lower part of his leg was visibly swollen. Some of that was from the broken bone, he reasoned, but some of it wasn’t. The bear had shredded his flesh. Its teeth hadn’t just punctured; they had ripped, each tooth opening a deep, jagged tear. Those wounds were scabbed-over, but despite the antiseptic and salve, the surrounding skin was inflamed.

Gathering his courage, Nasser gently pulled up the wad of gauze that Lee had taped over the exposed bone. He flinched a little at the sight of the jagged, white piece of bone. With a shaking hand, he replaced the gauze and started to wrap his leg again.

“Nasser?” Lee was sitting up and blinking blearily at him, her hair glowing softly in the morning light. “How long have you been awake?”

“Not long. I was changing the bandage.”

“You should’ve woken me. I would’ve done it for you.”

He shook his head. “Can you help me check my shoulder? I can’t see it.”

She slid out of her sleeping bag and knelt behind him. She declared that his shoulder looked good, all things considered. The slashes were scabbed-over and dry, with no redness or swelling. At least there was one thing he didn’t have to worry about.

Lee pressed the back of her hand to his forehead, then frowned. “You feel warm,” she fretted. “How’d your leg look?”

“The bites look infected,” he admitted. “I don’t even want to think about what kinds of germs that bear had in its mouth. Did we bring anything other than that antiseptic?”

“I’ll have to look. Davis shoved a ton of stuff into the backpacks.”

“Where are Filo and Henry?”

“They’re…” Two spots of color burned on her cheeks. “They’re looking for the salt. It fell out of my pack last night, into the river, when the bear threw me down the bank.”

Nasser’s heart contracted. “Are you sure?”

She nodded morosely. “I emptied my pack four times. It’s gone. As soon as it started to get light, Filo and Henry went to look for it. It probably got washed downriver, but they’re looking along the bank anyway. We lost some of the food, too, and my flashlight.”

“Damn it,” Nasser muttered, rubbing his eyes with one hand.

“We’ll find it,” Lee said. “We have to. And if we don’t…. I’m sure there’s something else we can use as a substitute in the spell. I’m going to think of something.”

He just nodded and tried to shift into a more comfortable position. It was impossible. There was no comfortable position. The pain went from throbbing to stabbing at the slightest movement.

“Do you want another tablet?” she asked.

Nasser hesitated, knowing the painkiller would make him less alert. He was reluctant to slip back into the haze, but the pain in his leg was getting harder to ignore. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I do.”

Lee retrieved one. After she gave it to him, she made him drink some water and eat half a protein bar. “You should try to sleep for a while longer,” she said.

“I’m all right.”

“Nasser, you lost blood last night. You should be resting.”

“I’m not taking any more of the powder, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“You don’t have to. I just want you to rest. How’s your head?”

“Actually,” he said, noticing for the first time, “it doesn’t hurt.”

She smiled. “That’s good. Now, will you at least lie down?”

By the time Filo and Henry returned, the tablet had kicked in and the pain in Nasser’s leg had ebbed to a dull, heavy ache. His whole body was starting to feel distant and sluggish; his thoughts were coming slower. It was harder to keep his eyes open, especially now that he’d succumbed to Lee’s pestering and laid down.

“We didn’t find anything,” Henry reported, after Lee temporarily opened the circle so they could step inside. “I was thinking that we could rig up a tracking spell and see what we come up with.”

“If it’s in the river somewhere, we won’t find it that way,” Filo said. “The running water will make it impossible for the magic to connect. But if it’s somewhere else—if it washed up farther down, or if something fished it out of the water and carried it off—there’s a good chance the spell could find it.”

“Sure,” Lee said, “I can draw something up for that. When do you want to do it?”

Filo said something in reply, but Nasser didn’t hear him. His eyes drifted shut, and then he was drifting, too, somewhere quiet and dark.

The tracking spell failed. Lee cast it carefully, away from the ward, so she could be sure that the energy of the existing spell wouldn’t interfere with the new one, but when she released her magic and it went dancing off in all directions, seeking the bag of salt, there was no reaction.

She cast the spell twice, just to be sure, with the same result. If the salt was intact somewhere—and she had to admit that was unlikely—it was out of the spell’s reach.

“We’ll think of something,” Filo kept saying, but as the day wore on, he sounded less and less sure.

The next morning, they used their water purification tablets for the first time. Lee had brought a small, stainless-steel pot, filling it with smaller items and placing it at the bottom of her pack to maximize the space, for just this reason. She filled the pot with river water and brought it back to the ward, where all four of them nervously watched the tablets dissolve.

The tablets would only purify the water of contaminants found in the human world, of course, but they’d already drunk all the water they brought in bottles. They needed water, and they had no other source. Ultimately, Henry took the plunge and drank the river water first. Half a day later, he was all right, so the rest of them dared to swallow a few mouthfuls.

By nightfall, Nasser’s fever had spiked. Lee got him to drink water throughout the day, and to eat another half a protein bar in the evening, but less than an hour later, he vomited it up. After that, he was unwilling to eat, insisting it was a waste of what little they had left as long as he couldn’t keep it down. As much as she argued, she couldn’t make him do anything.