Page 141

Story: A Forbidden Alchemy

I remember this: broken clouds scudding overhead, a strange, muted ring spiraling in my ears. Dirt beneath my nails. A hand on my heart, then my neck.

Patrick’s face. Gunner’s.

Time lagged. I heard speech disconnected from lips, felt touch long after fingers were gone. I blinked, but darkness lingered.

“Nina!”

“She took too much gas to the head. Give her a minute.”

“She held up the whole hill, Gun. The whole fuckin’ thing.”

“I know, Pat.”

“Nina, can you hear me? No, don’t get up. Just lie there a minute. Breathe.”

I thought I might lie there for an eternity. Let those clouds sail by while I slept and slept and slept. My limbs had never felt heavier, less familiar.

But slowly, the rest trickled in. I smelled the gas on the air. I frowned at Patrick’s tormented face. “How many?” I tried to ask, and it seemed he heard it.

He sighed. Relief slackened his face. Gunner slapped him on the shoulder and smiled. “See? She’s all right.”

“How many?” I asked again.

Patrick was close enough that I could count flecks in his irises, spaces between lashes. “All of them, Nina,” he told me. “You got them all out.”

Then he pressed his lips to mine, with no mind paid to his brother beside him, and I felt the warmth flow from him into me.

When he drew back, I saw something new in his expression. A sunbeam in all that darkness.

I wondered if it was a picture I’d ever be adept enough to paint. Clouds, skies, muddied skin, and a man who might be, at that very instant, declining into love.

“Take her home for me, Gunner. Please.”

Gunner nodded without argument. His arm slipped beneath my knees.

“I can walk,” I said, though when I sat upright everything tilted, the world slipping sideways off a plate.

“It’s the gas,” Patrick said unnecessarily. “Gunner will carry you.”

“No, he won’t,” I protested.

“He will. And you’ll let him.”

I groaned. “You aren’t coming?”

“I need to stay,” he said. “There were others caught under the mud in the slide. Some unaccounted for.”

“They’ll be dead by now.”

“Aye,” Gunner answered. “But it would’ve been half the parish without you, Harrow, myself included. Know that.”

My throat constricted, the trembling earth and screams and pounding feet returning to me. Those poor people. Tears pricked at my eyes.

Patrick took my chin in his hand, the grit on the pads of his thumbs pressing into my skin. “Breathe,” he said. A command. “I’ll come find you after.”

After he dug up those bodies. Delivered them to their families. A sob escaped.

He was nothing but blue eyes, a strong grip. “No fallin’ apart until I get back. You hear me?”

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