Page 63 of Courting War
Somehow, she lugged herself off the floor. With weak arms, Theo lifted her head and saw the boy standing in front of the marble table, and this time Emmett was strapped to the chair.
Crawling on her hands and knees, Theo tried to reach the toxins. A fog floated over her vision, and her ability to think was quite impaired, but even in her current state, she could see Kellyn floundering.
Grasping the edge of the table, she clawed herself up, and through a dance of blinking eyelashes and overwhelming blurriness, she saw only four jars remaining—and they were all terrible.
But the challenge was slightly altered from Cecile’s. Instead of clear jars, they were opaque with writing on them. And the ones left read:Atropa belladonna—also known as deadly nightshade—Cicuta maculata—water hemlock,Ricinus communis—castor bean and batrachotoxin—frog venom. The latter three were exceptionally fatal and incurable.
His only option for survival was nightshade. It had an antidote.
“I don’t understand,” Theo forced out, her breathing heavy, “you’re supposed to be a plant expert.”
“I am but—” he hesitated, shame coating his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something—to explain—but he must have thought better of it because he stopped and adopted a mask of indifference.
Confusion kissed the lining of Theo’s intestines. Or perhaps it was nausea because she turned away a moment later and heaved again.
“Thirty seconds,” Poison said, her voice swinging through the room like an acrobat about to perform their final stunt.
“How can I help you?” Theo asked, wiping her face.
“Can you read them to me?” Kellyn’s face glowed red with embarrassment.
Theo read two of the jars before she was interrupted.
“Time’s up.”
Theo clutched her knees, bent over with sickness as one of the jars shattered into a hundred pieces and shifted into falling red rose petals. They rained down like blood against the white void.
A prelude to what was to come.
Three of the worst poisons remained. Nightshade, ricin, and batrachotoxin. All would cause harm, but only one of them was recoverable.
“Choose one. You have ten seconds to pick a toxin to feed your friend.”
In a wave of unmanageable sickness, Theo fell to her knees and dry heaved, her stomach empty of any substance. She rested her head on the floor momentarily before lifting it to see Kellyn holding the wrong jar, his eyes determined yet storming with anxiety.
In his fingers, as he walked closer and closer to Emmett, perched ricin, a deadly poison extracted from castor beans.
“No,” Theo tried to yell, but it came out as an indistinctive croak. “No,” she said, softer, almost defeated.
Kellyn didn’t stop. He would feed his friend a poison with noknown antidote if Theo didn’t get herself to stand up and intervene.
She lifted herself with the tips of her fingers and stumbled up, walking like a newborn fawn. Getting her footing slightly, she rushed to Kellyn and knocked the jar from his hands.
It fell as if in slow motion, and Theo went with it, both hitting the ground with a thud.
“What have you done?” Kellyn grunted, horror intertwining his words.
Theo was too sick to speak. She rolled in on herself and into the fetal position, but she pointed at the deadly nightshade and wheezed, “Only one. That one.”
With fire burning in his face causing his veins to protrude and his cheeks to turn deep red, Kellyn tread angrily to the nightshade and picked it up as his final choice.
“Time’s up. Feed the poison to your best friend, or you and your priestess will die.”
The champion did just that. Pain and fury etched into his sculpted face.
Theo curled into a ball, watching as Emmett was overcome with convulsions and sickness, his pupils dilated. Poison sped up the process for him, too. He mumbled hallucinations, the toxin deep in his bloodstream.
It was vile.
