Winterspell (28 page)

Awareness hit her like a series of sharp punches: her leg was hooked around his. His hand was on her ribs, inching higher.

They were not alone. Pascha watched eagerly, his attendants equally rapt, and Afa's face was full of compassion.

Wait. This was not right.
Wait.

She tried to pull away, and Nicholas withdrew at once. As she stared at him, sharp all over with new panic, his face changed from wanting to fear—for her, for himself, for what they had done and what they might be forced to do.

He shifted back from her, and Pascha crowed, clapping his hands. “She shakes! Oh, delightful. Who doesn't love a cowering human?” His attendants laughed, and Pascha's smile turned lascivious. “Go on, then. Continue.”

Nicholas whispered, “I'm sorry,” and squeezed her wrist gently. There was anguish in his eyes, his face raw with torment. As he pressed her into the column at her back, gathering her into his arms, his touch was gentle, like he was afraid he would break her, and somehow that made everything worse.

This wasn't right. This was not how it should happen.

No.
“No.” She whispered it into Nicholas's neck, for he had pulled her close, turned her away from Pascha's gaze to shield her.

Clara tried to look past his shoulder at Afa. Perhaps Afa would send her a sign—that they needed to get only to a certain point, and then Pascha would be satisfied, send them back downstairs.

But Clara could no longer see Afa. Nicholas was kissing her, and the column's ironwork of tiny decorative birds poked at her bare back. Logic dictated that she should return Nicholas's kisses, convince Pascha of her potential, and she tried. But what had felt so natural before felt strained now, false and vile. Nicholas's familiar scent turned cloying; the contours of his body were not pleasing but menacing.

She hesitated, afraid. She caught sight of Nicholas's anxious face, hovering over hers.

Pascha made an impatient sound, pounded his fist against the table, threw a piece of fruit at them. It plopped wetly against Clara's leg. “More!” he shouted.

Nicholas's hands slid around to cup Clara's backside, urging her hips closer to his. His movements were stiff, his body unyielding. Clara would drown in the wrongness of it. Yes, this was Nicholas, and yes, they had shared . . . moments. Touches. Charged looks from across the room.

But never had she imagined something like this.

His hands traveled up her back, forcing her body to arch toward him. He kissed her neck, her breastbone, and lower. Through her bodice's diaphanous fabric, she felt the hot press of his mouth.

A sliver of something cold slipped through her blood, something separate from terror.

Oh no.
Not now.
Whatever this was, this recurring coldness, this prickling energy—she did not have time to explore it now, with Nicholas's kisses becoming more insistent and Pascha demanding more, more,
more.
Why couldn't this happen when she actually had time to examine it?

The air surrounding her vibrated with sudden urgency. Her jewels crackled against her skin like electric wires. Frightened, she tried once more to pull away from Nicholas. Would he notice this new strangeness if she touched him? Would he feel the cold spark ready to burst from her fingers?

Something had caught his attention. He paused to search her face, his expression distraught and . . . curious? Anticipatory? Clara could not tell, and she was desperate to communicate to him what was happening. But she would not know what to say, only that an unknown energy within her was compounding, that her teeth were beginning to chatter. Had the temperature plunged in the last ten seconds?

“Pascha,” intoned a voice from the terrace doors. “Pardon the interruption.”

Abruptly Nicholas moved away. Mere inches, but it was enough. He stood between Clara and Pascha's gaze, and she sagged against the column, clutching the ironwork. She felt marks on her back from the tiny serrated beaks.

“And you
should
beg pardon.” Pascha stuck out his bottom lip. “I was having so much fun here, and you've completely destroyed the mood.”

The new attendant bowed at the door. “Yes, Pascha. Forgive me. But Lord Ingo awaits you in the Red Parlor.”

“Lord Ingo is early.”

“Yes, Pascha. He said he simply could not wait until midnight.”

“Insatiable.” A decadent grin curled across his face. “He's lucky I'm so fond of him. There are few who could pull me away from such a sight.”

Pascha gathered himself, his attendants trailing behind him. “You two are certainly . . . intriguing. Maddeningly slow, but that can be fixed. I look forward to our time together. Afa, you may put them to work as you see fit.”

Then he strode toward the terrace doors and was gone.

As soon as the terrace doors shut behind him, Clara fled.

“Clara, wait,” Nicholas pleaded, frantic, but she did not listen. She ran for the terrace railing, and though Afa cried out for her and Nicholas reached for her, she did not listen. She was ready to burst with the cold swelling inside her, and she did not want to be around them when it happened, not until she knew what it meant. She needed time, she needed privacy; and if she had to stand there and look at Nicholas's swollen lips and stricken face and decide whether she hated him for kissing her or—awfully, bewilderingly—wanted him to keep going, she would burst.

She leapt over the railing, thinking of Bo's map and Godfather's lessons—how to fall, how to move without fear. The buildings of
Kafflock were squashed together, close enough to climb from the roof of one building to the next with ease, but her landing on a neighboring balcony still sent her crashing to her knees. Godfather would have scolded her.

Her teeth clacked in her head, and she left blood behind on the smooth coral stone. Once again she was running—from Nicholas and Pascha this time instead of Godfather. It struck her that she would not always be able to run from things that frightened her.

She ran hard and did not stop.

C
lara slipped through the hazy, glittering streets of Kafflock, dodging painted doxies in gauzy veils; human slaves peddling jewels, caramels, sugar pipes; faeries shopping, faeries patrolling, faeries cavalierly picking through the human detritus at the sewer's edge. Clara's amplified senses, reeling from the cold pounding through her blood, noticed several humans whose unnaturally white skin was scattered with hastily attached metal bits, their ears stitched up haphazardly into points and crusted with blood. Faeries enslaving humans, and humans trying to look like faeries—for what purpose? To impress, to appease, to mock? Out of sheer madness?

Clara could sympathize. She felt her own sort of madness raging within her. It was worse this time than ever before: the cold was not abating, and the energy vibrating along her skin was not settling. If she touched someone, she would surely blow them to pieces.

Hands—both human and faery—grabbed at her idly from the crowd. Were it not for the band marking her a doxy of Pascha House, which she thrust at everyone who touched her, she might not have been able to hold them off. She stumbled into a crooked alleyway masked by a ragged tarp. Sagging benches lined the narrow passage. People slipped needles to one another beneath the tables of card games. Inside a shop marked with a stained awning, a masked
human tattooed another. Clara recognized the shape. Faery symbols.

They were all obsessed.

Blindly she made a right turn, and then another right, and came to a dead-end alleyway with boarded-up windows and bolted doors, where things were quieter.

Clara sank against the wall. A shadowed face kept flashing before her eyes. It would shift and be Nicholas, his eyes filled with sorrow, his kisses feathering across her neck—and then lower. It would shift again and be Dr. Victor with his scalpel.
We shall have to cut the wickedness out of you,
he would say, and slice, slice, slice.

She clapped her hands over her ears and imagined pressing the images flat, flicking them away like bugs.

What was happening to her? The tingling in her hands would not fade. She held them up before her face. They shook violently, but nothing besides that seemed out of the ordinary. She would scream; she was near tears.
What does this mean?

“Here. Drink this. It will settle your stomach.” A vial of dark glass appeared before her, and the voice urging her to take it was familiar.

Clara looked up. She could not contain her cry of shock.

He was cloaked, hardly recognizable with a scarf draped across half his face.

The half without an eye.

Godfather.

* * *

Clara surged to her feet, and he was there, helping her, folding her into his embrace as she wept his name against his neck. In that one overwhelming instant she was a child again who knew nothing of faeries and sugar pipes and spears that burned. She was safe, for this moment, safe in Godfather's arms, and who gave half a whit if he had inadvertently caused her mother's death and withheld that information from her?

Horribly, Clara found, she did not. Not in this moment; she knew only relief.

She pulled back to examine his face. “Are you well? You're here. You truly are. What happened to you? Why are you here?
How
?”

He smiled at her. He held her as though she were a precious thing. “I thought it was you. At first I wasn't sure. Your hair, your clothes . . . But I would know your eyes anywhere. Do you know how long I've been looking—” His eye was alert, elated, but exhausted. “I've been tracking you, and then I saw the train crash, and Anise's message—”

Clever, dear Godfather. “You've been tracking us?”

“It took me longer than I would like to admit to open another Door. Borschalk's closed after you left with Nicholas, and my magic is so weak now, so unreliable. Clara”—Godfather's voice broke on the word—“I thought I'd lost you. To her. To him.”

“Her” was Anise, of course. But “him”?

“Do you mean Nicholas?”

His mouth thinned. “How is he? Not pleased, I imagine, to see what's happened to his kingdom.”

Clara frowned at the edge in his voice. “You do not like him.”

“I do not trust him. And I don't like that he is all that stands between you and . . .” He waved his hand at their surroundings in disgust.
“This.”

“Him, and all the training you've beaten into me.” Clara crossed her arms. He was steadying her, though her skin was still cold to the touch. Had he noticed? “Was this your plan? To bring me here?”

“No.
Never.
This was the last thing I wanted for you.” He stepped closer, earnest. “I meant what I said in the stable, Clara. I want to keep you safe, take you far away from all of this. This war, and your father's.”

She eyed the vial still in his hand. “What is that?”

“Ah. Yes.” His eyes flitted down her body, clinical. “I thought you might need it.”

“Why? What is it?”

“I told you, something to settle your stomach.”

“I don't believe you.” She stepped back. “How am I to know it isn't some concoction you've designed to drug me so you can drag me back to New York?”

He looked affronted. “I would never deceive you in such a way.”

She pounced. “Yet you would deceive me about what happened to Mother, and your part in it.”

“I did what I thought was best,” he said, low. “I'm sorry for your grief, but I won't apologize for my actions.”

The conversation was rapidly devolving, but at least Clara's mind was clearer. She could always count on him for that. She took a chance. “Why did you never tell me you were a mage?”

He frowned at his feet. “I'm hardly a mage anymore.”

“Oh, and I suppose that's why you weren't in fact able to open a Door between worlds and come find me?”

“I told you, my magic is weak now—”

“Unreliable, yes. I heard you.”

He kicked at the ground with one scuffed boot. “All those years of undoing faery magic took their toll on me. And did he even
thank
me?”

“I've no patience for your petulance. Anyway,” she said, baiting him, “I suppose it doesn't matter that you didn't tell me about mages. I've learned all about them from Nicholas. Mages, faeries, the war. Even dragons.”

Godfather's face twisted bitterly. “And where is the good prince? Has he reclaimed his throne yet?”

“We've found a safe place to hide, for now. After that, where we go is our business.”

“Oh, I have a good idea where you'll go.” He stepped closer, and the look on his face was suddenly so urgent that Clara felt alarmed. “Tell me, has your noble Nicholas said anything about the way your body is changing? Has he even noticed?”

That surprised her. “My body is the same as it was.” She told herself he deserved her lies.

“Is it?” Godfather pinned her in place with his gaze. “I think you're lying. I wondered if it would ever manifest. Our training, all the physical strain, and nothing. Not until we fought the loks did I see any sign of it.”

“Sign of what?” But part of her knew—the deepest part of her mind, the part that had approached revelation and been too afraid to accept it.

“I've never seen the product of a mage and a human coupling,” Godfather said quietly. “I assume
dear Nicholas
has told you such things aren't done. But I saw that train wreck, and I felt your power in the ballroom. I feel it even now. It's crude, certainly. I couldn't teach that part of you, for it never awoke—not in New York, not in any coherent fashion. In the ballroom, yes, I caught glimpses of it, possible signs. But here . . . here, it seems to be waking up with a vengeance.”

Clara stepped back from him. “What are you talking about?”