Page 10 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

The doctor cut me off again. "I have to assume you don't know very much about the fae if you think we have ropes, or even chains, that could hold him."

I looked at him beseechingly, and he shook his head again. I wanted to reach out and shake it for him as anger at his refusal to help surged through me.

"I'm sorry, my dear. You simply do not know what you’re asking of me."

"Well what should I do?" I demanded.

"Find his compatriots, perhaps. Fae do not generally travel into Windemere alone."

"That could take hours. How long until—"

"I don't know. But the poison is spreading. It needs to be soon."

"I'll go make discreet inquiries," Anetta said.

"Thank you," I called as she hurried away, disappearing down the stairs.

The doctor thrust a leather case into my hands.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Tools," he said, giving me another apologetic smile.

"If you find someone who can do it, these will help.

I must go. I have other patients waiting.

One of Carlina's patrons got himself stuck in that infernal device she uses.

I've got to go sew the little fucker back up before his balls fall out.

" The doctor left, chuckling as he took the stairs below.

I held the case to my chest for a moment, steeling myself, and then I opened the door.

He lay on his back with his head leaned to the side.

His eyes were still closed, and his face looked slightly paler than it had.

The sight of him made my heart lurch. His presence in the room, the evidence of what I had done to him, nearly took my breath away.

I didn't have words for the emotions that coursed through me as I looked at him.

I just...I felt so bad for what I had done. ..and I needed him to be okay.

The doctor had opened his shirt and wiped away most of the blood. He lay on the bed with his broad, golden chest on full display. But the lovely, smooth skin was broken by an angry red, slightly puckered indentation in his pectoral muscle where my blade had pierced his skin.

Thin, branching black lines spread out from the wound, running across his chest, and disappearing under the edges of his shirt.

I stepped to his side. There was hardly a foot's worth of space beside the narrow cot, not even room for a chair. I sat down on the edge of the mattress and tentatively reached out a hand to the wound. It was cold, like death.

I laid my fingers on his head and then his neck. They were thankfully the same heady warmth I felt when I touched him earlier. I trailed my hands across his chest, tracing the black lines. The cold followed them, like death was spreading through his skin.

I knew mellitrium was a weakness for fae and other magic wielders, but I had no idea it could do this to them.

I sat beside him for a long while with my palm on his chest. I felt the thud of his heart and counted his even breaths until Anetta came back.

"No one has heard of a single fae in Albiyn, let alone a group," she told me apologetically.

She stepped up to the bed, looking down at him silently for a moment. She reached out, and I thought she would touch him, but she pulled her fingers back suddenly.

I looked up at her and she met my eyes. "He doesn't even look real," she admitted with a shaky laugh. "How can a man be so...much?" she finished weakly.

I understood what she meant. He was beautiful and powerful looking even in unconsciousness. He was somehow more than mortal.

I wanted to laugh at the bewildered expression on Anetta’s face, but fear was coiling inside me, edging out everything else.

I had noticed his chest seemed to be rising less as the minutes passed, the space between breaths slightly longer.

I hoped it was my imagination but that itch in my muscles telling me to act was becoming more insistent.

After assuring me that she would keep looking for news of other fae in Albiyn, Anetta left to get back to her clients.

I checked the lines on his chest. They had grown at least a full inch since I first sat down beside him. I picked up the leather case and made the decision I had been mulling. I would have to do it myself.

"Fucking cowards," I muttered as I flipped open the latch on the leather bag. I surveyed the instruments inside; knives, forceps, some sort of large pins, rolls of gauze, and a bottle of clear liquor.

I went to the hall and found a servant. After asking her to have someone fetch me water and towels, I went back into the room and looked at my patient. Something prodded me, more of the same needling itch inside my muscles, pushing me to move. Do something! that feeling inside me seemed to shout.

I pulled out the instruments and assembled them on the tiny table beside the lantern. I noticed my hands were shaking as I took a large swallow of the clear liquor.

A maid knocked, and when I opened the door, she handed me a basin of water and soft, white towels. I thanked her and returned to the bed again.

I tipped the bottle up and took one more drink for good measure, and then used the alcohol to clean my hands, the instruments, and lastly, his lovely, beautiful chest that was so badly marred by the snaking lines of poison.

I tried to brace myself beside him, but I felt too awkward leaning over him. The bed was so small that there was barely room for me to perch at his side. So, I took a deep breath and straddled him again.

The last time had been in the heat of the moment, his hot blood pouring over my hands in the darkness of the city streets.

This time, the lantern light was bright, the brothel quiet around me.

I told myself the thrill that went through me at being in that position was nothing but embarrassment, but the truth was that I felt him beneath me with some wild abandonment that licked up my spine like fire.

He was so...big and solid. It made me slightly dizzy and sent that same heart-lurching breathlessness through me.

The feelings shamed me. He lay helpless beneath me, poisoned for the gods' sakes, by me! And all the while I was enjoying the feeling of straddling him like some lust-addled idiot. "Pervert," I muttered to myself as I got to work.

The first cut was not the hardest one. It wasn't all that bad, really.

It was just a quick slice across his skin.

But then realizing the insides had healed as well as the outsides, and I would need to get to the depth where the shard must lay, my second cut was the one that had bile rising in my throat.

I thrust down with the doctor's steel blade, plunging through what I hoped was the same trajectory my dagger had gone. When I pulled the blade away, cold, black, oily blood pooled up around the wound and ran down the center of his chest. I was reasonably sure I had found the right location.

I started with the long forceps from the doctor's kit, but I quickly realized I wouldn't be able to see with all the bleeding. Fresh, sweet-smelling red blood mixed with the metallic-scented black blood to stain his chest a dark crimson.

I set the forceps aside and used my hands, suddenly very thankful for my long, slender fingers.

The hot, tight feeling of his flesh around my finger shocked me.

My hand jerked so hard that I nearly pulled it out as I realized his body was trying to heal the wound around my fingers.

I needed to work quickly, or else I would have to cut him again.

I willed myself to calm as I began to feel around inside him, my finger delving into the recesses, running across a ridged line, and then encountering something rounded and smooth. I could feel his pulse beating beneath my fingertips. It was reassuring—to know that he was still alive.

I felt it finally. The mellitrium blade tip was embedded into what felt like muscle. I eased it out of the depression where it was caught, but quickly realized one finger would not be enough to get it out.

So, my third cut was the worst of them all as I sliced through unbroken flesh to widen the hole beyond the original edges. The flesh popped as I cut through skin and cartilage, and the ghastly sound of my knife scraping against bone sent me lunging off to the side, fighting the urge to vomit.

I took several deep breaths until I was sure I would not hurl the contents of my stomach on him, and then I got back to work.

When I had room for two fingers, I pinched the shard between them and carefully pulled it out. I laid it on the bedside table where it sat in a black clot of his blood, and then I turned to splash liquor over his wound.

He surprised me by flinching as the alcohol hit the hole in his chest. I froze for several moments, readying myself for the attack I thought was coming. But he did not stir. His long frame remained perfectly motionless, his big chest rising and falling reassuringly.

His wound continued bleeding, though—a lot. It was pulsing out in time with his heartbeat.

I put my hands on his chest and held my bodyweight against the wound as I waited for the bleeding to stop again.

I never lost that inappropriate female awareness of what it meant to be straddling him, despite my efforts to ignore how warm he was between my thighs. The heat of him was so great that it bled straight through the fabric of my breeches.

It wasn't the heat or the feeling of him between my legs that sent that aching pulse of some indefinable need through me, though.

In fact, that strange pressure that seemed to be coiling inside me only increased as I lifted myself up off his hips and pushed my weight down onto my arms. It was his closeness, his very presence beneath me, that gave me such a wanton kind of fire in my blood.

I held myself away from his hips as much as I could, so I did not at first notice what the newfound sensation of something rigid beneath me was.

When I did finally understand, it went a long way towards assuaging the guilt I felt for how much it seemed to arouse me to be in such a compromising position with him.