I feel as though each symbol spells out death.
There’s one in front of me that looks like a sickle and a sheaf of bound flax, and I’m reminded that my life is near to being cut down. Another reminds me of a thread, and I can’t help but think of how it might fray and snap. Another depicts the full moon.
I try not to look at that one.
I watch Nox, separated from me now by the mural of symbols that surrounds me, wipe the substance off his fingers and onto his robes.
It’s then I realize I’ll never touch him again.
He’ll touch me when he realizes what he’s done. When my body collapses to the floor. But I will not feel it when he cradles my head, when he pulls me into his lap and runs his fingers through my damp hair.
“We shouldn’t have long now,” he says, and I can tell he’s nervous too, though for a completely different reason.
Or perhaps the same reason, now that I think of it.
“What are you planning to catch the parasite in when it slithers out of me?” I ask.
Nox flashes me a sheepish grin and pulls out a box that looks to be made of adamant, one with runes carved into the sides. “I actually thought of that this time.”
“You think that will hold it?” I ask, huffing a laugh. A real laugh, and he shrugs.
“If this doesn’t, I don’t know what will.”
Silence falls between us, and perhaps it’s because I’ve never been good with silence, never at peace with it, that I ask for something terribly cruel.
“Tell me about tomorrow,” I say.
Nox looks at me then, and when he does, the weight that lifts from his brow threatens to crush me. “Tomorrow,” he says, then lets out a startled huff. “Tomorrow I take home the most breathtaking girl in the world, and I introduce her to my mother. Tomorrow I live again, Blaise. We live again.”
His eyes shutter again, and I know what he’s thinking. Still in the dark. Still a creature of the night. And I wish I could take his hand, but the symbols stand between us now, guarding the path like dutiful soldiers.
I realize then that I have to tell him. Not about my death, but about how I feel about the tomorrow he imagines. “Tomorrow sounds great,” I say, “but even if it never came, I’d be pretty content with today.”
Nox smiles, but as he turns the words over in his head, a shadow slinks on the corners of his lips.
He opens his mouth, but I don’t get to hear what he says.
A cool shiver runs down my spine, and I am no more.
CHAPTER 39
NOX
Blaise is still smiling when she changes.
When the innocent, sun-soaked grin fades from her face and bleeds into an inky smirk.
There’s a cracking sound, and for a single horrifying moment, I think it’s her neck as she snaps her head back, lifts her chin to the sky and the stone ceiling that obscures it.
But it’s not Blaise’s neck that cracks.
It’s her hip.
She lets out a single garbled moan, the pulse in her neck exposed with her posture.
Blaise changes.
Her thin legs, which she’s only recently managed to put a few pounds on with all the rolls I’ve been sneaking her from the kitchen, bulge in the previously loose-fitting pants I scrounged for her from the servants’ laundry room.
I trace that wretched cracking sound to its origins, and I watch as her hips expand, as her bones rip apart and sew themselves back together.
Her breasts swell next, and her sunken cheeks, deprived of sunlight, fill out.
Blaise’s raven hair is bleached before my very eyes—the bridge of her nose compressed, her wild brows tamed, her lips plumped.
“NO.” The word escapes my mouth too late, because the woman who is not Blaise shoots a seductive grin in my direction and stands, tugging at her skin-tight pants to readjust them to fit her form better.
She takes a moment and traces the shape of Blaise’s body—no, not Blaise’s body—with her hungry gaze. And then she turns her attention to me.
“Well, hello there, Nox. Have you missed me?”
My muscles twitch in my calves, ready to pounce, aching to rip to shreds this woman—this being—who ruined Blaise’s life, but I can’t. Not when this is Blaise’s body—changed, warped, defiled, sure—but still Blaise’s.
Her voice is sultry, her smile feline as she glances me over, her gaze lingering in places that have me wishing I hadn’t shed my robes earlier, leaving me in just my thin shirt and pants.
“Who are you?” I find myself asking. Not because I don’t already know, but because I have no idea what went wrong with the extraction, and I need time to think, time to figure out how to reverse what has happened.
The spell should have extracted the parasite.
