Page 71 of Too Cursed To Kiss
Nothing.
“Wald!” I gently shook him, but he didn’t open his eyes. My stomach was hollowing.
“Come on, you can’t leave me.” I smacked his cheeks. He groaned. I kissed him. His lips tasted salty, but his eyes flickered open. This was a pleasant and disturbing trend.
“How do I get into the bedroom?”
His eyes shut, but he feebly moved two fingers.
“Can you help me get you there?”
His head shifted in a no. “I need to rest now.”
“This might be unpleasant.” I grabbed the back of his jacket and hauled his dead weight across the living room. Thank God, the floors were wood. It still took far too long. I fell over a couple of times, but I got him next to the wall. I pressed his hand against the shiny surface, and the door slid back revealing a dimly lit room with no windows.
“You okay for a minute?” I asked. His eyes were closed, and he was unresponsive.
With the power of save-the-hero fueling my soul, I tore into the bedroom. The walls were covered with mirrors, kindof like Agatha’s but black-on-black. The massive bed in the center filled most of the floor space. One of the walls had to be a panel. I madly smacked them, leaving palm prints all over the mirrors. Finally, the wall to the back left of the bed slid open. The bathroom was a pale spring green with white accessories and lots of glass. The windowed walls were frosted, spilling natural light into the room. I ran to the sink and smacked the wall. The panel whirred. I was expecting a medicine cabinet, not a set of stairs leading down.
My ears strained for signs of danger as I descended below ground. The stairs were lit by directed track lighting, and one wall had a few old-fashioned weapons like a crossbow and a bunch of high-tech stuff. I guess they were also weapons since they were on the same wall. I wasn’t lingering to figure it out. The other walls had cabinets holding jars and bottles. I was looking for something called nightshade or birchweed, but the labels weren’t words I could read. Things likehjortetakksalt, birk Ukrudtsplante,andeinebær. How the hell would I guess what nightshade or birchweed would be, in whatever language?
I screamed, and my voice was swallowed in the space, a dullness of sound. The place was soundproofed. I barely contained myself from sweeping a shelf of glass jars to the floor.
Instead, I raced up stairs and back to Wald and ran smack into a fairy. Well, she wasn’t really a fairy. She’s what I think of as a fairy in my head. Perfect tiny elven features with fine bones and long flowing hair the same spring green of Wald’s bathroom. Her turquoise eyes studied me as I regained some composure.
“Did you find it?” the fairy asked. I didn’t have to ask who she was since the tinkling voice was the same one from the kitchen phone. I was looking at Soda.
“How did you get here so fast?”
She walked around me toward the bathroom. I followed her down the stairs again. Without even scanning the labels, she pulled two jars off the shelf,Søtvie and Birk Ukrudtsplante,then sprinted past me up the stairs. By the time I got back to Wald, she was already kneeling beside him, dwarfed by her clothing, a pile of ethereal cream muslin and gauze, like a ballerina settling in her tulle nest.
I dropped to the floor beside them. She was force-feeding Wald pale green liquid from one of the bottles. Like a mint milkshake. Wald choked once and then sat up coughing up his guts, not literally. Soda re-corked the bottle with a wide grin. I wondered if all the perfection of her face was really genetic. The huge eyes, pale skin, and high thin eyebrows were framed by lustrous hair which was like perfect monster fur in the movies. It whispered around her like a cloud of furry feathers. I fisted my hands to squelch the bubbling desire to pet her.
“Help me get him into bed,” Soda ordered, tucking her hands under Wald’s shoulders and heaving up twice as much weight as I figured she could. I took his bottom half, and together we dragged him into the black bedroom. With extra hefting, we got him on top of the black satin coverlet. I pulled back the covers, the silkiness slippery in my hands. He liked sensual experiences, did he? I’d be happy to give him a sensual experience on these sheets when he was not almost dead. I ran fingers over his pale cheek to the bristles on his jaw, but he didn’t stir. Whatever Soda had given him hadn’t worked yet.
Soda yanked his boots off. “Help me,” she said as I stared mesmerized by Wald’s bare toes. They were marvelous. Muchlonger and more like hands than normal feet, the nails were dark and curled over the nail bed.
“Never seen him naked, have you?” Soda laughed, and I froze. The sound would have been musical if music had shrill notes at the top points. A laugh I never wanted to hear again. The inference that I hadn’t seen him naked, but she had, lingered. We would not be friends.
She had one of Wald’s arms out of his jacket. I tugged the other arm, trying not to look at her. She wasn’t gentle.
“This is a write-off, anyway,” she said, ripping Wald’s shirt down the front, sending more shivers through me. I gasped. The ragged claw marks were an angry black and red and went far deeper into his waxy white chest and stomach than I’d expected. There should have been a lot more blood.
“Can you, I mean, we do something about those?” I asked, pointing to the gashes, unable to put a name to them as Soda stuffed pillows under Wald’s feet to raise them up.
“The nightshade should help with that, but he needs to sleep. Anything that doesn’t heal from the birchweed, Britannia can take care of when she gets here. She is coming, right?”
“Uh, right. But I thought you were a healer?”
“Of my kind, not his.”
“So, you aren’t a giant thing too?”
“Haha.”
Crap, I’d made her laugh again.
“Yes, I’m one of those things too.” Her smirk was the kind in the movies where she’d open her mouth and there would be thousands of needle-like teeth.
