Page 2 of A Reign of Roses
It turned my stomach into tangles.
Halden had cradled his injured hand up to his chest, thick tears and snot bursting forth from his face. “This is your fault,” he wailed at my brother. “I told you we shouldn’t have come in here.”
And Halden was right. The shed was horrible. So rickety and small. Always locked. I was only ever brought in here to be punished. My heart was already beating too fast just standing inside its four dusty walls. My lungs felt tight, like I’d forgotten how to breathe.
In, out. In, out.
I wanted to run. As far from here as I could get in these muddied slippers.
But my brother always landed on his feet. He always knew what to do.
And Halden was sobbing like an animal, and…my fingers hurt.
No, not quite hurt. Theytingled. Like I’d spent an afternoon lying on them wrong, and now they were filled with sparkling needles.
“Can I see it?” I asked my brother.
Ryder contemplated my question. Halden held his tongue for a long, tear-drenched minute before Ryder nodded once.
“Come here,” I said to Halden.
He didn’t argue. Under the bleary moonlight I inspected the gash down the center of his palm, jagged and torn like fabric. The needles in my fingers intensified. My heart was beginning to pound too hard, like a bird was trapped inside my chest.
“I think I hear something,” Ryder said. “You both stay here, let me go see…” He maneuvered around Powell’s craft table in a rush, sending screws and bolts toppling onto the floor.
My chest seized even tighter. Powell wouldn’t like that. Those screws were ordered by size. The bolts in a line to match.
“Well?” Halden sniffed. “What does it look like?”
“I’ve done this for Mother,” I told Halden, stretching on my tiptoes for the rickety shelf just out of reach and dragging him with me. “Sometimes her legs don’t work so well. She gets a lot of cuts and scrapes.”
My hand found the rag I’d been aiming for, and I pressed the soft cloth into his wound and held it there.
Halden’s sobs guttered into sniffles. That wolf howled once more beneath the blanket of night outside. “He’s not coming back, you know.”
Ryder? Sure he would. I opened my mouth to tell Halden so, but those needles in my fingers had become so frenzied I couldn’t think. They stung and fizzed. Even though I didn’t particularly want to see the gore again, I found myself asking, “Can I look once more?”
Halden nodded but turned his head as far as he could angle, back toward the dirt-flecked windowpanes that nearly blotted out the moon. Then he screwed his eyes shut for good measure.
The cloth had slowed the bleeding some, but…then it was back, spilling forth in rivulets and onto the floor. The cut was deep. I could see stiff white peeking out from underneath his skin. Bone, and layers of muscle. I touched the serrated edges gingerly, and a dawn-pale glow emanated from my fingers and into his hand.
Shock stilled my heart. I yanked my fingers back.
Halden’s skin began to stitch itself together before my eyes.
I blinked them closed. Once, twice—
But there it was. A wound, closing on its own.
And that curious, panicky feeling in my chest, the one where I forgot how to breathe right—it was gone, along with the pesky needles. I pressed my fingertips against my palm, searching for that absent tingle.
“Are you done?” Halden’s eyes were still closed.
“Almost.” I touched the wound again, and this time my glow was smaller, less like a star and more like a matchstick. But after a minute his palm held only fresh pink flesh.
Was I a witch? Would Halden think so? Would he tell Mother and Powell?
Oh, Stones.
