Page 18 of The Frog Prince (The GriMM Tales #6)
Otto watched the prince touch a few items on his desk. A pencil, a paperweight, the strap of Otto’s bag. The touches were barely there, featherlight but sticky, and Otto found himself transfixed by them. By how gentle those fingers seemed to be. How careful about touching Otto’s possessions.
Dreams aside, would that actually be how he’d touch—
“What makes you say that?” the prince asked, and Otto startled in his seat guiltily, eyes snapping back up. “You seem awfully jumpy this morning.”
“I am not.” Otto’s ears were burning. “Just thinking.”
“About your mentor not being a good researcher?”
Otto nodded quickly, grateful for the excuse. “I tried talking to him about this several times. He has a lot more experience and knowledge than I do, and I need to share my theories with someone who understands what I am saying in order to make sense of them. He is unwilling, though.”
“Perhaps I could lend an ear?”
Otto laughed a little. “Do you know much about medicine?”
“I have read a lot in my life, and I know a great many things. I might not be a healer, but I do know a thing or two.”
Otto bit his lip, doubtful but with no other options. “This must be confidential between us.”
The prince scowled. “I will make sure to tell none of my vast number of friends about our conversation.”
Otto rolled his eyes. “No need to be snippy.”
The prince stood up straight, walking over to the kitchen table and pulling a chair across the floor toward Otto.
He set it closer than it strictly needed to be and folded his body into it, his side brushing against Otto.
It made him want to squirm, but he sat ramrod straight, cracking his notebook open. It was easy to sober himself when the subject was the fate of the village.
“The strange illnesses started happening about a year ago. At first, I didn’t think much of it because people get sick all the time and it isn’t strange for an illness to circle around the village between people until it runs its course.”
“But not this?”
“Not this,” Otto said. “Every person seems to have developed their own set of symptoms—coughs, rashes, fevers, weakness, headaches, nausea, you name it. It seems to have no common denominator.”
“What makes you think it is connected, then?”
“A hunch, mostly.” Otto winced. “Which I know gives no credibility to any of this. I just feel like this isn’t normal. People are dying when they shouldn’t be. Just this morning…”
He trailed off, thinking of Gunther and his family mourning him as he sat there, uselessly poring over the same thing for the millionth time.
“Someone passed?” the prince guessed, voice somber.
“He was a strong, hardworking man. There was no reason for the ailment to take him.” Otto reached for the vial. “His illness bore no resemblance to Gisela’s, but they started around the same time. I just can’t help thinking she’d have…”
“You saved her,” the prince said. “She is alive and healthy thanks to you.”
“ I did nothing. Your magic saved her.” He thought about Gisela’s words.
He turned to look at the prince in a moment of weakness, desperate and pleading and feeling like a fraud for asking this when it was supposed to be his job to help people.
When he’d told Gisela that he needed to figure it out. “Could you…”
“Could I what, Otto?” the prince asked softly, predicting the question already. “Conjure up a cure for everyone? Save everyone?”
“Yes,” he whispered, even if deep down he knew he wasn’t being fair.
The prince smiled sadly. “I told you last night. I work with magic that existed long before me. I can bargain with it to take my words and make them happen, but only if there is a trade of equal measure. To cure that many people of different illnesses and prevent them from getting sick again… I can’t imagine the price for what you’re asking.
Otto nodded as the prince voiced what he had already guessed.
“As much as I wish to help as many as deserve it, it’s impossible.” Saddened, the prince got up from his seat, turning to leave. Otto’s hand darted out, grasping his thin, cold wrist.
Everything in the room stilled and narrowed to that single point of contact.
Soft, if slightly dry and scratchy, the skin felt paper thin and so very fragile. Different from the sticky pads of his fingertips. Otto hadn’t felt anything of its like in years… No, he hadn’t felt something of this texture ever.
Curiosity won out over good sense, and he moved his thumb first, then his hand, pushing the shirt cuff upward and feeling all the differences between them, cataloging them in his head.
The radius and ulna felt like a single bone instead of two, yet the rest of the wrist and hand—aside from the four fingers—appeared to be similar to that of a human.
He wondered at its flexibility when it moved under his grip, bringing him slamming back to reality.
His hand froze and all that could be heard was their heightened breathing. Still, he found the courage to look up at the prince, guilt and confusion warring inside his mind. “Don’t go.”
He couldn’t read the expression on the Frog Prince’s face, only feeling that it did not seem to be one of anger. If he had to guess, he would have said something close to overwhelmed. He wanted to soothe him immediately.
“I did not mean to imply that the duty for fixing things here lay with you…” He let go of the prince’s arm and folded his own into a fist on his lap. “I just wish I could help everyone. I wish I knew how.”
There was a suspended moment when he thought the prince would leave anyway—standing so still and conflicted with his arm held out like Otto was still holding it prisoner.
“Tell me your theories.”
Happiness flooded Otto’s system, trying to put his wayward thoughts into coherent words. “The cure you provided for me was tangible. If it could not be recreated, the magic would have simply cured her from a distance.”
The prince shifted on his feet, pulling the cuff of the shirt down and rubbing the wrist Otto had been holding moments earlier. It looked like he was trying to cover as much skin as possible. “A good deduction. What does it mean?”
“There are many herbs and fungi in the deepest parts of the forest that have not been discovered for fear of what lives in there,” Otto said.
The skin where a brow would be rose. “Frog Princes?”
“Among other things,” Otto said with a small smile. “I’ve been searching for years now but…I’m not so brave.”
“I have seen many things in the forest that have not widely been known.” The prince gave him a quick, almost nervous look. “I could take you.”
Otto’s brows rose in surprise. “You…would?”
“I know the forest better than most, and nothing will approach us as long as I’m there,” the prince said. “Even monsters fear other monsters.”
Otto found he didn’t like those words from the prince’s mouth, some instinct inside him making his chest puff and his tongue curl with words he didn’t know how to express yet. They were frustratingly out of reach, his mind buzzing like a hive that had recently been hit and hadn’t settled yet.
“Do you have a name?” he found himself asking abruptly.
The question was loud in the room, seemingly taking the Frog Prince completely off guard.
“I do,” he said slowly. “Though I have not claimed it for a long time.”
Otto supposed when the world cried out the Frog Prince, it started to feel as if that was the only name you owned. It was a strange thought that something so powerful could also perhaps fall victim to hearsay. Was the Frog Prince moniker something he’d chosen? Or had it been branded on him?
Frowning, he looked away, righting a few things on his desk as he continued to ruminate over these new questions.
“Alwin.”
Otto’s heart stopped and his hand froze. He slowly turned his head, meeting a shuttered green gaze.
“Those closest to me called me Alwin.”
A name is a powerful thing that shouldn’t be given out so freely, for there are those who could use it against you.
“May I?” Otto asked tentatively. “Call you that?”
The prince’s fingers shook before he hid them behind his back—a common habit he seemed to have. He looked toward the door pensively, like he was thinking of escaping.
“I suppose you are the closest anyone has been to me in a long while,” he murmured, so quiet Otto’s ears almost missed it, before he broke for the door. “We can head out whenever you’d like. I need to take care of something quickly.”
This time, Otto didn’t stop him. He watched him open the front door and look around for anyone who could see him before stepping out.
“Alwin?” Otto called before the door could close. He watched him shiver at the sound of his name before he turned to look at Otto with eyes that were drowning.
“Yes?” he asked, the croaky voice shaking.
“Thank you. For trusting me with it.” Otto held his gaze for as long as Alwin let him before he disappeared from sight.
All Otto wanted to do was reach for him again.