Page 69 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Forty-Three

I creep back into the garden through its silent, rusted gate just as dawn is pinking the sky. The moon is a ghostly figure; only she looks upon me and knows what I have done.

Olea is still sleeping in the tower’s cellar, her body wrapped in thick blankets to ward off the night’s chill.

I no longer feel any of the cold, hot blood pumping in my veins, glory on my breath.

I check that she is breathing—she is, though she’s sicker than I realised.

The rise and fall of her chest is painfully rapid and her skin is glossy with a fine sheen of sweat.

I change out of my ruined nightgown to avoid contaminating everything in case any of the blood is mine, and then waste no time scavenging dried cuttings of the stinging tree from Olea’s catalogue, pulverising the leaves and their fine, poisoning hairs to dust, just as I did before. Or as close as I can recall.

It isn’t accurate. Without the lab and the equipment it can’t be. Panic makes my movements jerky, my pulse pounding in my throat. I don’t have time to second-guess. I have one shot, and it has to be now . I let my hands guide me, relying on the muscles as I pound and grind and measure.

Then: the bubbling and sizzling as I add the dead man’s blood, still fresh but already congealing. I shake it well until the fizzy mixture begins to dance. My stomach lurches, heart racing. It’s ready.

I test it first, one mouthful. Swallow. It is sweet and pure and good and light. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t seem much different than the blood. Joy overflows, brightness in every inch of me. I’ve done it. I can save her.

“Olie,” I sing excitedly. “Oleeea. Wake up, my darling. Here I am with your medicine.”

Olea doesn’t respond. I drop to my knees, scooting along the flagstones. I check her breathing. Still fast, but slower than before. Her arms are like marble, stiff to the touch as I try to lift them.

“Olea,” I urge, this time less gently. “Wake UP.”

I jostle her, her body resistant as a statue. Panic overwhelms me. I push it down, shove it so hard I can’t breathe, until I am nothing but a machine. This can’t be it. I can’t have run out of time. I did everything right!

“Olea,” I growl her name like a curse. “Come on .”

I grasp the antidote with one hand and her chin with the other, prising open her lips with sheer force.

Her teeth are as white as salt. They begin to chatter as I hold her tight, forcing the rim of the jar to her lower lip.

I pour all of the rest of the antidote into her mouth. Her chin jerks and I hold it steady.

“Come on, darling, drink it for me. Drink it, drink it, drink it !”

Finally—the bob of her throat. She swallows it down in one. There is a brief second before she begins to cough, spluttering and retching. She rolls out of my lap and onto her side, her breath hitching.

“Breathe,” I say. “Come, now. You can rest easy.”

It is another moment before she is herself. She wrests herself onto her elbows and stares at me with eyes as black as a moonless night.

“What did you do?”

“I saved you,” I say. It’s hard to contain my excitement. Already I can see the faint pink returning to her cheeks. She throws off the blankets angrily and her skin is smooth and cool-looking. I want to touch it.

“How?” The suspicion in her gaze cuts me to my core.

“There’s a hospital,” I lie. Thank god for the antidote, which greases my brain as if I were, actually, a machine.

Olea is silent. I can see her thoughts coiling and uncoiling, but she is precious minutes behind me with the antidote. I’m sure the fog in her mind will clear, but for now it’s my job to sell this reality. I watch her as she kneels back on her legs.

“How?” she asks again, this time gentler.

“I bartered for it.” I leave this open, waiting for her to fill the silence with her own assumptions.

“Oh, Thora,” she says softly.

“Don’t you feel better, though?” I prompt. “You looked so unwell. I thought… well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I’m glad you took it.”

“You didn’t give me any choice.”

I rub my jaw, annoyance brewing in me. I said I would risk losing Olea’s trust to save her, and I don’t regret it, but I didn’t expect her to be so… sad.

“You would have…” I can’t even bring myself to say it. The thought of a future without her alive… It is more painful than I would have ever thought possible. We have been forged anew in this same fire, and I can’t let her go.

“How did you even get out?” Olea asks.

“I broke the lock. With tools from the kitchen.” This is not such a bald-faced lie, but Olea reacts to this one with far more suspicion. I don’t know why I lie; I suppose I don’t like the idea of Olea knowing how easy it was for me to betray her.

I reach for her, laying my hand atop hers.

Olea stares at my hands for a moment. A horrified thought strikes: What if she can see the lingering remnants of the dead man’s blood?

Is it dried around my fingernails? I washed my hands, but…

And then I notice her gaze is not on my hand but on my nightgown.

Not entirely dissimilar to the one I wore earlier, but not identical either.

She was so out of it, though, surely she can’t remember such a detail… ?

So I do the only thing I know how, throwing myself into her arms and smothering her face with kisses. She resists at first, shocked and amused, but in seconds we are tumbling into the blankets and cushions, mouths together, fingers searching.

“I love you,” I say breathlessly. “And I’m glad you’re okay.”

I wake to the sound of Olea making her nettle tea. The sun is just beginning to disappear, a sunset-gilded cloud of rain moving in from the east. The chaise is stiff beneath my body, a book buried somewhere in the bolster, which we no doubt lost during our second round of lovemaking.

I crack my eyes against the golden-hour sun, but it doesn’t burn like it did only a day ago. For a second, just one blissful second, all feels right and good.

Olea hands me my mug, both of us uncaring of the heat that scalds our palms. She sits at my feet, sips from her tea, and then she says simply, “I want to know why you lied.”

“I didn’t lie.”

“You’re lying to me right now, Thora. I thought we were past this.

I thought we had an understanding. No more secrets.

You said yourself: How many times are we going to have the same conversations?

” The antidote has cleared Olea’s mind, just as I thought it would.

I’m briefly angry, but it is a fleeting emotion with no real bite.

“I did what I had to do,” I say simply. “You didn’t need all the details. You were recovering—”

“Oh, cut the bullshit,” Olea chides. “You promised you wouldn’t leave the garden without me, and you did. You told me you got the blood from a hospital. And, what, I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“I saved your life,” I repeat the mantra again.

“You didn’t give me a choice.” Olea’s stare is cold.

Whatever frustration we burned through during sex is back and roaring like an open flame.

I was naive to think I might be able to recover from this.

That we might be able to. “Once again, nobody ever asks me what I want. Did you ever stop to think that I didn’t want this?

You poured that fucking stuff down my throat.

Just like you forced me the first time.”

“I didn’t force you!” I exclaim. “I never forced you.”

“No, the first time you just manipulated me into thinking it was my only choice or you would leave. Last night you forced me, and I didn’t appreciate it. I’m so fucking sick of everybody acting for me.”

“Would you have rather me let you die?”

Silence. It spreads between us like poison.

Not the good, trusting poison of the garden, but the kind of poison little children are taught to fear.

Olea doesn’t say anything, only stares at me, at my nightgown, at my hands.

Guilt, it’s written all over me. And the worst part is, I’m sure Olea can sense the same thing I’ve been thinking nonstop since last night: I would do it again.

I almost want to do it again. I want the taste of blood on my tongue, salty and hot and good.

“Thora, I’m not saying you’re not trying to do the right thing. I’m not even saying I’m not grateful, because now I’m here… Well, it’s hard to wish I wasn’t. But I want you to know that you do not, ever, have the right to make that decision for me again. Do you understand?”

“So next time it happens I am supposed to let you die?”

“There won’t be a next time.”

“Of course there bloody will.” I gulp a mouthful of the nettle tea and relish the warmth in my throat. “Next month, like clockwork. You heard the doctor.”

Olea is already shaking her head before I’ve finished speaking.

“No,” she says. “She’ll be back. Maybe not right away, but she’ll want to check on us, to see which of us…

” She swallows. “Look, all I’m saying is you’ve bought us more time.

Next time we will have Florencia’s help and everything will be fine. ”

“When are you going to learn she doesn’t care about us?”

Olea sets her tea aside. “It isn’t that I don’t know that. I’m not stupid. But if we just abandon this… You understand, don’t you, what will happen? I simply can’t bear the thought of her doing this to somebody else.”

It is now, in this moment, that I realise something.

It’s a thought that has been growing for some time, but last night has sealed it: if we continue to do nothing, we are just as responsible as the doctor for what happens next.

We have no guarantee that she will come back to us.

Petaccia has our formula for the antidote, and she knows it doesn’t kill immediately.

Olea is right about this: I’m sure she’ll find no shortage of subjects willing to do just about anything for the chance at a cure for all.

And with that realisation comes another swift on its heels.

Olea will never do what is necessary. In our arguments she is always the lock and I am the key.

She is shackled by her past, trapped in this garden in a way that I am not and will never be.

I am not my father’s child any longer, a girl so wrapped in the intricate rituals of death that she does not see the way it stunts her; I am not my husband’s wife, trapped by his short temper and shorter leash with no way out besides books.

I am a woman who has tasted her dreams—and her nightmares.

I want so very badly to kiss Olea, to distract her as I did last night, to feel the pleasure of our crushed bodies.

I want to taste her, to hold her, gentle and slow and holy.

Instead, I place my tea on the side table and climb to my feet.

I throw a few things into a bag: cloak, gloves, several empty vials, a bundle of rags.

“I knew you wouldn’t stay,” Olea says sadly.

“You know I can’t.”

She looks at me imploringly, her lips slightly parted in the seductive way she knows I like best. I force myself to look away, anywhere but at the painful, endless beauty in her face. I can’t stay—because if I stay, even for a moment more, then I will never, ever leave.

“Where are you going?”

I am a monster, forged by grief and transformed by science. This is my duty. More than grieving, more than hiding and learning and knowledge. I was made for this.

“I’m going to find your mother,” I swear solemnly. “You can stay here if you want. Guard the garden, and the catalogue, and the recipe. I will find her. I’ll make her help us. And then…”

And then?

Olea’s lip trembles but she is the calmest I have seen her in weeks, perhaps ever. She knows this is right the same as I do; it’s written in the curve of her shoulders, the resilient grip of her hands around her mug. We both know what must be done.

It must.

“And then I will stop her from spreading this, this…” This cure. This gift. This unholy offering.

The touch of Olea’s hand against my elbow is cold as marble. I finally look at her face, etched in the blue of sunset.

“This endless agony,” she says.