Page 45 of This Vicious Hunger

There is a loud crash behind me. I spin, nearly throwing myself off-balance.

Olea is on the floor, supine, hair flowing around her head like spilled ink.

I rush to her without thinking, instantly grateful I kept on my gloves and then cursing myself for the way they get in the damn way.

I hesitate only a second before grabbing her chin, checking her temple for bruising where it’s pressed against the floor. Her eyelids flutter and she groans.

“Are you okay?” I say in a rush. “Olea, can you hear me?”

Her skin glistens with a sheen of sweat.

I can see the rapid pulse firing in her throat.

Her lips have paled to the shade of a healing bruise, the dark circles under her eyes now grey-toned where the rest of her skin is pallid as off milk.

I try to shake her shoulder, but she is limp and unresponsive as a doll.

My throat thickens and I feel tears prickle uselessly behind my eyelids.

It is too warm in here. Can I open the window?

Will the sunlight hurt her? Can I get her to drink?

I have to do something. I pull her head into my lap, trying to raise it as gently as possible.

I wipe the sweat off her brow and attempt to blow cool air across her face.

“I didn’t think this would happen so soon. I hoped it wouldn’t happen at all, but you’ll be okay,” I soothe. “It’s your body trying to purge the toxins. Just hold on. It will pass.”

It will pass.

It will pass.

It doesn’t pass.

I manage to get her into my narrow bed, though my lungs burn and I can feel my old dizziness returning the longer I battle with her limbs and the dead weight of her. She comes to briefly, long enough to moan for “Water, please, water ” but not enough for me to fetch it so she can drink.

I gather a damp cloth, sponging at her skin when the heat of the fever rages and covering her with sheets and blankets when it abates.

She is conscious enough to feel pain but these moments are fleeting, her eyes glassy and her skin dull as paper.

I remove her nightgown, barely registering the state of her body, bruises blossoming everywhere, some turning yellow already; I can see her ribs.

The second evening I pull back the sheets to bathe her and yelp.

The blackness at her hands has spread to her elbows, and at her feet it has seeped up her skin nearly to the knees.

It is like a slowly creeping necrosis—and it smells like it in places too.

The cut between her knuckles has opened up again and weeps continuously, reopening every time she reaches for a glass or flails in whatever nightmare wracks her body.

“Just a little longer.” I can’t keep the urgency from my voice. “Just until your fever breaks. Come on, Olea, you can do this.”

But the fever doesn’t break. It comes in wave after vicious wave; the sweat pouring out of her smells entirely of the garden, that same bitter green perfume.

She shivers between punishing waves of heat, her lips cracked and dry and bleeding, the blood nearly black.

It stains the bedding, the wooden floor; there are even splatters of it on the walls where she has lashed out with an arm.

At first I do not leave her side, but unlike Olea I need to eat.

On the second day I venture out. I avoid Leo in the dining hall, making sure to send a note to his rooms explaining that Petaccia has me working late on a project and that he shouldn’t worry, and then I load up on stacks of bread and cheese, hiding napkin bundles in the pockets of my trousers and carrying the rest. I run back to my rooms with my heart pounding in my ears, near convinced that Olea will not still be breathing when I return.

She is—thank god, she is—but she appears to fresh eyes like a living corpse, pallid and damp and shrunken.

By the fourth day it is clear that the sickness is not running a natural course.

Whereas when I was unwell, that deep, painful sickness and the accompanying dizziness rose and fell, in Olea it is so persistent that when she is awake she can sometimes hardly speak.

At first I try to encourage her, desperately urging her on—and then I know that no amount of encouragement will drag her through this.

“Olea,” I say, waking her gently with a fresh cup of warm herbal tea. “It’s not working. None of this is working. I think it’s time we…”

She rouses, bruised eyelids flickering. She opens her eyes and they are black slits. I can see hardly any whites, no iris, just pupil from lid to lid. For a second I am drunk with panic. She is not herself. I don’t know what lurks in the darkness of her smile, but I know it’s nothing good.

“ Thoradarling ,” she enthuses. It all comes out as one word.

“We’ve got to try something else,” I insist. “Olea, you’re—”

“No, no,” Olea groans, sounding more like herself. “Don’t.”

“Olea, you’re—” I try again.

“I said don’t .” She grabs for my arm, quick as a snake strike.

I drop the mug of tea, warm liquid splashing down my legs, dripping, the porcelain smashed against the wood.

She’s using her wounded hand. Blood mingles with the tea, drip-dripping.

Her fingers curl around my forearm, stronger than I expected, her nails digging through the material of my shirt.

“Okay,” I bleat. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say we are done,” she hisses. She thrashes, surging forward and then back against the bed so hard that the frame rocks against the wall. She won’t let go of my arm. I try to pull away but her grip only tightens. “I can do this. I can do it.”

“You don’t have to do anything!” I cry. “Come on, please. Let’s just agree that this isn’t working. We’ll go back to the antidotes, we’ll—”

“I have to, I do.” Olea’s voice is a cry of pain, nails on a chalkboard, her throat cording as a wave of agony ripples through her. She clutches at her stomach with her other hand, clawing, scratching at the skin until it is streaked with ragged lines. “Florencia was right. I shouldn’t have left.”

“No,” I say. “We had to try it. She was wrong to leave you there for so long—Olea, please let go. You’re hurting me.”

“She took me in, she cared for me.” Olea’s face is slick with oily sweat. “Anybody else would have thrown me in the river. The loneliness, oh, it’s a fair price, isn’t it? Look, look what I can do.”

She squeezes my arm harder, pushing at the sleeve until my bare skin is exposed.

I cry out at the pain; it is like needles, like the sting of a nettle a hundred times, all in the same place.

I try to pull away again, but Olea grips tighter.

I stare at her. The panic ebbs and flows but beneath it is my realisation that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. This isn’t her.

I pull my free arm back and slap her firmly across the face. She shouts, more in shock than pain, I think, instantly dropping my arm. The skin pulses where she held it moments ago, and I have to prop myself against the bed frame so I don’t collapse, or throw up directly over her.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobs. “This is all my fault.”

“It isn’t. Don’t be silly.”

“I knew this would happen.” She breaks into full-body cries, her face still contorted in pain. Once I’m steady on my feet, I back away to the chair I dragged in from the study and wilt into it. My arm is tingling, the pain now a numbness that appears to be spreading.

“You knew leaving the garden wouldn’t help you to get better,” I say quietly. Then I realise something. “You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”

“Once,” Olea admits through her tears, wincing as she shifts onto her side. “I’m… that was a long time ago. I thought things would be different this time. I’ve spent all these hours with you and you weren’t that sick. I thought that maybe things had changed.”

“You should have told me what happened last time.”

“This is punishment.” Olea sniffs, then tenses as another cramp tears through her. She curls into a ball and holds herself tight, dark hair sticking to her forehead, the sheets damp with her sweat.

“You don’t deserve this.”

“Oh, but I do.” Olea’s eyes are normal again now, their usual brown-green, infinitely sad.

“I’m not like you, Thora. I should never have been born.

I killed my mother, you know. Probably my father too.

It’s how I ended up with Florencia. She always told me I should stay in the garden, that I shouldn’t have friends, because of what I did when I was young.

And she’s—she’s right.” She breaks into another bout of sobbing.

Slowly I begin to understand. When Olea said that she was born this way, she didn’t mean she was born with an affinity for the plants. She meant she was born with poison in her veins. And it has killed before.

Part of me wants to reach for her, to stroke her back in comfort. Another part of me flinches away at the pain she has caused. Instead I do neither, sitting stock-still on my chair and waiting.

“It’s not just your parents, is it?” I prompt when she has calmed herself.

“No.”

“You’ve hurt others.”

She blinks salty tears, rubbing at her eyes with one inky green hand. “My friends beyond the gate,” she whispers. “I never wanted to hurt them. You understand that, don’t you? I never wanted any of this. I just wanted… I was so fucking lonely .”

“Clara.” The realisation hits me, and I’m stunned at the depth of the horror I feel. “She’s dead. You killed her. That’s why you won’t talk about her. All this time I thought you were guilty because—because you loved her. Because she tricked you. But the guilt goes deeper than that, doesn’t it.”

Olea doesn’t look away. She doesn’t even try to hide it. Her bottom lip quivers and fresh tears roll free; this time she doesn’t wipe them away. Leo was right to warn me about her, I realise. Does he suspect the truth about Clara? About Olea?

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispers. “But yes. I let her in too soon. The garden… I told you. It doesn’t take kindly to strangers.

You need to earn its tru-ust .” She curls tighter in pain.

“I deserve to be punished. I deserve to be lonely. God, this pain… It must be what they felt when the-ey …” Her eyes roll back and then she squeezes them shut.

I stay where I am. I hardly move at all.

“I deserve this,” Olea cries weakly. “And when I die that will be the retribution for what I have done, to my friends, to my parents. Florencia was right. I should never have wanted more. I should have stayed in the garden forever.”