Page 315 of Alchemised
She looked at it—her—again. Davies stood watching Helena, her gaze vague but constant.
“Can I have water?” Helena finally asked.
Davies poured a cup of water from a pitcher on a table nearby and then brought it over to Helena and helped her sip enough to wet her mouth. It was bitter; Helena recognised the taste of laudanum.
She had no idea it was possible to reanimate necrothralls to this degree. The woman seemed alive.
“You were Enid Ferron’s lady’s maid, weren’t you?” Helena asked, fighting the wave of exhaustion the drug brought upon her.
Davies nodded slowly as if she understood the question. Helena struggled to focus.
“You’ve been here, all this time?”
Another nod. Davies mouthed a word silently. Kaine.
If that were true, it meant she’d been reanimated for nearly seven years without showing any signs of decay. Helena hadn’t known that was even possible.
“Why? Why would he do that to you?”
If the necrothrall answered, Helena wasn’t conscious enough to see it.
She slipped in and out of lucidity, in more pain each time she came awake. Davies was sitting in a chair beside her, knitting what appeared to be socks. The numbness was wearing off. Pain was shifting from a distant impression to a weight steadily bearing down harder and harder.
Her throat was bruised and raw inside; she must have been on a breathing apparatus at some point.
When the pain grew oppressive enough to wake her again, she found that Kaine had returned. He was standing beside her, replacing several of the vials connected to the intravenous drip.
“What happened to the medical team?” Helena asked, her tongue thick and dry again. “The people you had save me. What did you do to them?”
He stared down at her. The room was dark; his black uniform made him blend into the shadows, but his pale hair and eyes almost glowed.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”
“Did you kill them?” Her voice sharpened.
He flicked a switch, filling the room with dim orange light.
“No, I didn’t kill them. An entire medical team turning up dead would have raised questions. They think they saved a woman who died under interrogation yesterday. And they do not care at all that they spent hours saving you for the ostensible purpose of my torturing you to death afterwards. They were proud to be of service. You are, after all, a terrorist, they said.”
She knew he was trying to distract her. “So you would have killed them but didn’t because it would have raised inconvenient questions.”
His eyes flashed. “Yes, I did all of this for convenience, which you know I have so abundantly in my life with my two mutually exclusive masters.”
Guilt caught in Helena’s throat like a stone. “I don’t want you to kill people because of me.”
He gave a barking laugh. “What exactly is it that you think I do with all my time? I kill people. I order other people to kill people. I train people to kill people. I sabotage and undermine people so that they will be killed, and I do it all because of you. Every word. Every life. Because of you.”
She gave a ragged gasp as the room tilted, swimming as the blood drained from her head.
The viciousness in his expression vanished. “Wait. Helena, I didn’t—”
“No,” she said harshly. “Don’t even try to take it back.”
“I—” His voice was soft. Pleading.
“No,” she said again. “It’s true. What you said is entirely true. Everything you do is on my head, too. Every life …”
“Don’t.” He sat on the edge of the bed, picked up her right hand. “Don’t carry it. It’s not yours. Stop trying to carry a whole damned war on your shoulders.”
