Page 121 of Alchemised

Ilva was standing helplessly in the doorway, along with Althorne, Maier, Pace, and several medics.

Ilva kept trying to talk to him, but Luc didn’t seem to hear anything.

The screaming faded as his throat stripped itself raw.

He’d seemingly forgotten how a body worked.

He seized, his arms and legs and fingers and head all tilting into bizarre angles, and then he slammed himself into the wall.

“I brought Helena,” Elain said breathlessly.

Luc’s head swivelled. He stared at Helena. His eyes seemed to grow, bulging from their sockets, head weaving like a snake.

“Hel—” he croaked. He reached for her. His fingers looked broken, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Hel—”

“Careful, he’s been violent,” she dimly heard Pace say. She paid no mind.

She reached out, laced their fingers together, and touched the side of his face with her knuckles. His skin was so hot, it almost burned. He somehow bent his fingers, not seeming to notice the pain, clutching her hand, pulling her close.

“I’m here. What’s wrong?” She numbed his hand, setting his fingers quickly.

His eyes had gone out of focus, and he started shuddering. “Out—” he moaned, shaking his head. “Inside—”

She pressed her hand against his forehead, ignoring the way his skin scalded her hand, letting her resonance flow into him, trying to find the source of what was wrong. What was she missing?

“Hel—” Luc was saying again.

Pain exploded through her chest.

The world went careening, spinning. Vicious red burst across her vision, slamming into the back of her head. An endless ringing filled her ears.

She struggled to focus her eyes. She couldn’t breathe.

She clutched at her chest. Noises were elongated. Faces loomed over her.

Something grabbed her. She gave a panicked scream, going for her knives, but they weren’t there. She clawed wildly to free herself.

“Calm down, Marino,” Matron Pace was saying. “You’re all right, just a bad scare. Knocked your breath out.”

The raw terror ebbed. The room came slowly back into view.

She was on the floor, breathing raggedly, pain consuming her chest as she tried to make sense of what had happened.

Luc was on the other side of the room. His expression had turned scorchingly lucid.

“You—” His eyes were suddenly clear and burning. “You used necromancy on Soren.”

The accusation hung in the air like the lull between lightning and thunder.

Everyone froze.

Helena pushed herself upright.

“I’m sorry,” she rasped, struggling to speak. Her lungs were seizing for air, sending jolts of pain through her ribs. She knelt and almost doubled over on the floor of the hospital. “I tried to heal him. I’m sorry.”

“He was alive. Why didn’t you just heal him?” Luc’s voice was racked with grief.

She couldn’t breathe enough to explain herself, to describe how quickly Soren was gone, that he’d known he’d die, and that he’d asked her to do it.

“I’m sorry, Luc.”

“Get out …” He wasn’t looking at her anymore. His gaze lost focus, and he swayed.

“Luc, you’re sick—”

“Get out!” He closed his eyes, starting to shudder again, his breathing coming faster and faster as if being in the same room with her was about to drive him mad. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

He started clawing at his chest, screaming, tearing grooves into his skin as if trying to tear his own heart out.

“Luc?” another voice broke in.

Lila stood in the doorway, a crutch under one arm. Rhea was beside her, helping her walk.

The scars on Lila’s face and chest showed vividly where she was stitched together.

Luc’s eyes shot open at the sound of her voice.

“Lila …” he said, his voice both grief-stricken and filled with relief, as if he hadn’t believed she was still alive until that moment.

Several people tried to hold her back, murmurs of Careful, but Lila let go of her mother, reaching desperately towards Luc. She let her crutch fall and toppled into his arms, clinging to him.

“I told you to run,” Lila was saying, clutching him close. His hands were shaking as he touched the laceration running down her face.

Lila brushed across the gouges he’d clawed in his chest. “What did they do to you?”

He just shook his head and pulled her closer, burying his head against her shoulder, arms wrapped around her.

It was painfully intimate. If there had been any doubts about whether or why Luc had handed himself over, they were all gone now.

There was a touch at Helena’s elbow. She looked up and found Ilva, who nodded towards the door.

Helena pushed herself to her feet and slipped out before Luc noticed her again. When she passed Rhea, she looked away.

It was Lila who coaxed Luc into bed, who persuaded him to let Pace and Elain examine him again, to accept an intravenous drip in his arm, and take the medicine needed to bring his fever down.

Helena sat on a hospital bed in the main room, an intravenous drip in her arm, while Elain fixed a fracture in her sternum and spread a salve across the bruise that spanned most of her chest, then treated the back of her head, where she’d hit the far wall.

It wasn’t the first time Helena had been injured by a patient, but it felt different.

Luc was never going to forgive her for what she’d done to Soren. She’d broken him.

The curtain around the hospital bed rustled, and Ilva stepped through. Elain lingered until Ilva glared, and then the healer fled. Helena closed her shirt and didn’t look up.

“We’re taking reports on what happened,” Ilva said, her tone unreadable.

Helena sat numbly. Would they put her on trial now? Or would it wait until after the war?

“What have you heard?” she asked in a dull voice.

Ilva cleared her throat. “Luc is delirious, his version of events hardly reliable given that he was not only severely injured but also heavily drugged. Alister and Penny both gave statements that Soren Bayard died protecting them. Sebastian Bayard—” Ilva paused for a moment.

“Sebastian corroborates this, and claims that the two of you managed to drag the others to safety after the rising floodwater washed away a large number of the attacking forces.”

“And?” Helena asked.

“Lucien—hallucinated Soren Bayard’s alleged reanimation. Perhaps Soren fell briefly. In the confusion of a battle, it is impossible to know. The point is, this was a heroic rescue. The Principate was saved though the price was great. Sol’s will was done.”

Helena knew she was supposed to be grateful, but she also knew the lie wasn’t for her sake. It was all for the story. It didn’t matter what had really happened, only what people believed.

“The obligations of Soren and Sebastian’s vows supersede any orders by the Council,” Ilva said.

“Alister and Penny were obeying the orders of their direct superiors. You would have a reprimand on your military record for your participation, but as a healer you’re not part of the military.

Matias will be the one to decide what sort of reprimand you de serve.

Until then, you’ll be off duty. I believe it would be best if you stay out of sight until the official story has circulated. ”

Helena went back to her room and collapsed into her bed, exhaustion rolling over her like a wave. It was dark oblivion at first, but then the landscape of her mind morphed.

She was sinking, down, down. There were teeth sinking into her. Hands clawing, curling around her limbs, tearing her apart. She kept fighting. Cold fingers carving gouges through her flesh, stabbing into her bones. She tried to fight. The weight bore down on her.

Her bones cracked. Teeth sank into her flesh. The tendon behind her knee ripped out. Wet hands found her mouth, clawing in so deep she couldn’t bite down. Her jaw gave way, ripping until her throat tore open. She was still fighting as water closed over her head.

Helena started violently awake, gasping to breathe, hands clutching at her open throat.

Just a dream, just a dream, she tried to tell her pounding heart.

Not really a dream, though. A memory. Soren’s memories postmortem were lodged inside her consciousness as though they were her own. Bright and lurid in all their details.

She hadn’t known necromancy was like that. That she would never be free of the person she brought back. No wonder necromancers went mad. Who could stay sane with the minds of the dead inside them?

The place where Soren had been was like a pit of festering guilt.

Her body and mind had been cored, and now something dead and rotting was left there.

Everyone always talked of what a curse necromancy was.

Warned against it and its consequences, but Helena had been so convinced of its necessity, and so distracted by the eternal consequences, that she’d never paused to consider there being immediate ones.

She lay there, still feeling phantom fingers tearing her apart; her body was unutterably cold, reliving the cold, snowmelt water.

She pulled more blankets onto herself, stealing Lila’s bedding, and huddled, trying to sleep, to escape from the deadness Soren had left inside her.

Every time she closed her eyes, Soren’s final memories and sensations flashed through her mind.

She hadn’t brought back his ability to feel pain or emotions, but her own mind dutifully tried to fill in those blanks, phantom sensation and terror rippling through her until her mind threatened to fissure, splitting between two realities.

It was only pain that drew her back into herself. She kept pinching at her skin, scratching at it. It wasn’t intense enough. She needed something stronger.

She blinked and found herself holding one of Lila’s knives, a second away from shoving it through her left forearm.

She dropped it and fled the room, wandering half blindly through the empty hallways of the Tower. It was night, quiet; almost everyone was asleep. It was so eerily still. She was consumed with a sort of mania.

She stumbled outside, hoping that the clear air would help centre her.