Page 19 of Flirting with Darkness

I did. My curiosity extended beyond artifacts on a wall. It reached for Vale’s body and my own, and what it would feel like to bring them together.

I wouldn’t even try to deny that to myself.

But I wasn’t about to let him take me to bed in sheets still mussed from someone else’s body.

“Wanting something doesn’t count for anything,” I said, and put my hand firmly on his chest, pushing him back. He stepped away without protest, eyes narrowed —maybe with curiosity just as potent as mine.

“Goodnight, Vale,” I said. “Thank you for the blood. I’ll see you in a month.”

And I didn’t look back once as I set off down the trail.

I knew he watched me until I was gone, though.

* * *

When I got home, the house was still dark and quiet, though the birds were stirring by then. I called for Mina and heard no answer.

Maybe she left early,I thought, not believing myself.

I found her in her bedroom, perched at the edge of the bed, her eyes glassy and glazed over, her joints locked and muscles tight. She didn’t see me even when I stood right in front of her—not until I shook her, hard, and she blinked and finally looked up at me.

“Oh. You’re home!”

She hid her fear beneath her smile and a dismissive wave, and even though a knot formed in my throat that made it hard to speak, I didn’t question her.

But I still saw her trembling. Still saw the way she paused in the mirror when she rose, shakily, from the bed, looking at herself the way I had the first day I was old enough to feel death following me.

So much of her skin covered the floor that it took me half an hour to sweep it all away.

PARTIII

THE THIRD ROSE

8

Three weeks of relentless work passed.

I threw everything that I had into it. I stopped sleeping save for brief naps taken out of sheer exhaustion, and only when my body threatened to betray me. I stopped eating save for hurried bites of whatever was easiest to shove into my mouth over my books. I stopped leaving the study save to go cultivate my roses, making sure they remained perfect enough to pass Vale’s exacting standards.

“Why are you working so hard?” Mina would ask me sadly, with lips tinted black from the answer to her own question.

I couldn’t waste time. Time was precious.

My own condition deteriorated, too, old symptoms that I’d grown used to now creeping up on me with renewed verve. But those were nothing compared to those that nibbled away at my sister’s life, bit by bit.

When I closed my eyes, I saw Vale’s blood. I stared at it twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day, always in small bursts to avoid rejection from the magic of my instruments. It happened anyway, eventually, the glass cracking with bursts of acrid smoke. I had to run into the city to buy another lens for far too much money that I did not have. Not that I cared—who could care about money in times like this?

I began distilling Vale’s blood into potions. My early attempts were clumsy, one even erupting into eerie white flames. But after countless trials, my concoctions were no longer smoking or giving off rancid, rotting smells. Eventually, they started to resemble something like actual medicine.

One day, I produced something that responded well to all my tests. It didn’t combust, or smoke, or burn. It didn’t harm plants or skin. It had all the markers of a potential candidate—and it didn’t even resemble blood anymore.

Finally, after much internal debate, I gave it to one of my ailing test rats.

Animals didn’t respond to the plague the same way humans did, which made it difficult to test medicine on them. This rat was ill—it had days left, or less—but it wouldn’t wither to dust the same way humans affected by the plague did.

Still… information was information.

I watched that poor rat day and night. Hours passed, then two days. I half expected the creature to die a slow, miserable death.

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