Page 1 of Prince of Masks (Hearts of Bluestone #2)

The faded scent of yesterday’s perfume on Mother’s wrist is a gentle comfort. A nostalgic fragrance that wraps around me like an embrace.

I lean into it.

Slumped on the chair in Father’s office, my arm splayed for Witchdoctor Dolios to draw blood from my veins, I can only lean so far.

Mother stays close, hovers near the armchair, her hand occasionally reaching out to linger near my cheekbone or hair, but no actual touch comes—because I am still covered, head to toe, in manure.

The fatigue of a sleepless night shows on us all.

Father is part-leaning, part-sitting on the edge of his desk, a sagged weight to his posture as there is to his lashes, too low over his sharp emerald eyes.

Just a reach away from him, Mr Younge stands as stiff as a statue, hands clasped behind his back, but his jaw tightens every so often with yawns that he swallows.

The quiet of the office further subdues us all.

The steady, soft tick, tick, tick of the grandfather clock; the crackles, the pops of the simmering flames in the hearth; the occasional clatter and clank of the witchdoctor’s tools; and the soft soles of Mother’s slippers padding on the rug as she paces back and forth the mere distance of a metre.

Even the witchdoctor is quieter than usual, his voice a murmur as he orders me around, ‘ squeeze your hand ’, ‘ stop squirming ’, ‘ form a fist’ .

Beneath his white robes, I catch a glimpse of flannel pyjamas, and I decide he must have been summoned the moment Mr Younge departed Elcott Abbey for Bluestone.

Master Novak called home at the faintest pinkish hues of dawn, and that was around five or six in the morning. Mr Younge didn’t arrive until just before nine o’clock, and it took us four hours to get back here.

Now, the soothing tick, tick, tick of the grandfather clock brings the hands to meet at the one.

It might be just passed lunchtime, but I get the sense that everyone in this room with me has been up since the crack of dawn, too early.

Mother hasn’t changed out of her bed clothes. All that covers her nightgown is a cotton robe tied at the waist, and her feet are snug in Chanel slippers.

I guess she plans on heading back to bed the moment I’m dismissed and my health is given the all-clear.

I’ll be doing the exact same thing… if Witchdoctor Dolios ever decides to release me.

I turn my dead, dull gaze to him, crouched at the side of the armchair.

With one hand, he keeps a needle pinned into the branched veins of my arm, and with his other, he attaches a second phial.

The phial is quick to flood with a wave of crimson. My blood, how easily it spills out of me, sloshing against the glass. There’s something soothing about it.

It lulls me.

I could drift off right now in this very chair, just from watching this visual melody.

I fight it, the weight of my lashes, the sag of my shoulders, the yawns that split me.

Bed isn’t my first priority, no matter how sleep deprived I am.

I look down at my hand, relaxed, turned at an odd angle, and so the natural curve of my fingers looks ready to hold a pear.

The pear would be contaminated. Anything I touch in this office, fruit or an armchair, will be scrubbed raw once I leave, or even destroyed, because I am still covered in shit.

All the manure streaked along my fingers, darkening the whites of my nails, the scratches along my pale flesh, it’s a grisly sight.

The fertiliser is caked into the scraggles of hair brushing over my shoulders, soaked into the threads of my sweater, and I wear the stink strongly enough that, as Witchdoctor Dolios fits the third and final phial to the syringe, he turns his cheek to me and pinches his mouth shut—an obvious attempt to escape the stench.

No doubt about it, even half-asleep, I will need to shower. Not just shower but be scrubbed until I’m bleeding.

Witchdoctor Dolios caps the phial with a firm, metal screw. There’s a faint pop from his knee as he pushes up from his crouch by the armchair. His robe flutters as, silent, he turns for the round side-table.

I crane my neck to peer around him.

A chrome briefcase is laid flat and parted.

His gloved hands delicately manoeuvre the phials of thick, sloshing blood into the firm black foam embedded in the case.

Three slots for three phials, a row on the bottom half of the case, another on the top.

The top row is positioned beneath an engraved plate that spells ‘ OLIVIA CRAVEN ’. That’s where he slots my phials.

Dolios is the family’s preferred witchdoctor.

Father has him on call for us.

He is summoned for me, most of all. So he has an exclusive briefcase for me.

Another reason to think I am the favourite.

Oliver had his clavicle pulverised in a game of ice-hockey at Bluestone. It was a few years back, but Father didn’t bring him home. Didn’t even consider it. He simply let Witchdoctor Urma deal with it at the academy.

But if that had been me, injured, a crushed clavicle…

Father would have snatched me out of school in a heartbeat, then thrown me into the healing hands of Dolios.

Maybe it’s that I am the favourite. Maybe it’s that I’m babied a little, given my deadblood, and my parents have always fussed over me that bit more than they ever did with Oliver.

I’m glad for it, no matter the reason.

Because here I am, sunken into the armchair in Father’s cerulean office in the Blue Wing of Elcott Abbey; Mother hovering so close that I can smell faint wisps of her familiar perfume over the stink of manure; Father, just out of reach, watching studiously as Dolios slots the final phial of my blood into his case; even Mr Younge, who—at one look from my father—turns for the rotary phone beside the desk, a movement so ordinary that it should hardly bring comfort.

Yet it does, because all of this, even the ordinary, means one thing:

I am home.

If I’m lucky, I will stay home for a whole two weeks before the dreaded reality that, at the end of the fortnight, the term ends for the Solstice Season.

Oliver will return home.

Dray will be on his heels.

There won’t be an escape from Dray then.

But I shove that thought out of my mind, violently. My mouth even twists with the effort, something of a silent snarl.

“Almost done,” Witchdoctor Dolios murmurs.

He misreads my expression as he turns for me and, bent at the hips, slips the impossibly long syringe out of my arm.

I feel it, I feel it slide against the walls of my vein, an intrusion that stirs my insides rotten and curls my toes in my boots.

Father’s voice is rough with disturbed sleep, “How is she?”

My mouth flattens.

So typical of him. Ask the men, not the women who couldn’t possibly know themselves, right?

But I am letting the bitterness creep in too soon, too prematurely. I have two weeks, I remind myself.

I hope Mother lets me sleep those weeks away.

“Fair,” Dolios says and unscrews the metal syringe. “I will run the usual tests, but I am confident that her exhaustion is mostly of the mind. I recommend Miss Craven rests.”

Mother sighs, a curt and relieved sound. “Yes, she will stay home.”

Dolios doesn’t so much as glance her way. He honestly couldn’t give a shit whether or not I return to Bluestone for the rest of the term.

Mother’s announcement isn’t for the witchdoctor, it isn’t even for me. It’s for my father.

The look she aims at him, the one that stiffens his shoulders and raises his chin just a touch, decides it. I won’t return to Bluestone, not for the rest of the semester.

That gives me reprieve until after New Year—when the final semester of the school year begins, and I will be forced to return to that hell.

But not yet.

I sag in the armchair, suddenly lighter. Tension that was kneaded into me, my bones, my muscles, it’s gone in a wispy moment, and now I’m really worried I’ll pass out.

I look over Father’s shoulder.

At the rotary phone, the one that connects to the servant’s hall in the Yellow Wing, Mr Younge bows his head. His voice is a constant hum, barely louder than the crackling of the fireplace.

I don’t doubt that he’s ordering help to my room, a meal, perhaps someone to wash off my body before my pores soak up every speck of filth coating me.

What I wouldn’t do for a spa day, a mud bath, a full body scrub and chemical peel, a thousand facials and a mani-pedi.

I suspect Mother is thinking the same.

Her pinched mouth is too wrinkled, even with the slight touch of filler that plumps them. She runs me over with a gaze creased with disgust; her nose crinkles as she eyes the smears of manure on my cheeks.

She doesn’t ask how this happened, what happened, how I managed to get myself soaked in manure. She just sighs something curt, then turns her inky gaze on Witchdoctor Dolios.

“And that?” She gestures a slender hand to me. “Will she fall ill?”

My brows hike.

I hadn’t considered that, getting sick from the fertiliser—from bacteria in the shit, soaking into my pores…

A tired scoff jerks my shoulders.

Wouldn’t that be bitterly hilarious, if I died from the fertiliser? Got E.coli and suffered to my deathbed, sent there by Dray, killed by Dray, but in the most indirect of ways?

Dolios reaches for the next armchair, where he deposited his medical bag. He digs his hands into it, the brown leather cracked.

“It is possible,” he says. “Salmonellosis, Shigella, E.coli,” he lists, and draws out a jar of brown balm. “Skin irritation is the most likely result, but I will prescribe cleansers to be certain.”

Mother leans her weight back onto her right foot, the slightest retreat from me—from contamination.

Father pushes from the desk and, extending his hand for the jar, throws a glance over his shoulder at Mr Younge. “Is Abagail here today? She will need to apply the balm.”

Mr Younge nods once, then his indecipherable murmur returns, orders hummed into the receiver of the rotary phone.

Father passes the balm to me once he’s inspected it, and the moment it is in my fist, the hit of menthol strikes my nostrils, burns them.