Page 54 of The Sister's Curse
I heard the baby cry again and strained away from Mom to look into the black water. “Is…is my sister down there?”
“She is your sister. She’s a hundred murdered women and girls. She is Rusalka.”
—
I lurched upright in bed, gasping.
Gibby yelped at my feet. I must’ve kicked him.
I forced myself to steady my breathing. I was soaked in sweat; it dripped down my chin in rivulets and my T-shirt was stuck to my chest. Morning trickled gray light beneath the curtains.
I jumped when Nick began to rub my back. “Hey, you okay?” he asked, his voice slurred by sleep.
I pushed my hair out of my face. It felt cold and slimy as algae. “Yeah…yeah, I think so.”
Nick was sitting up beside me now. “Another dream?”
I nodded. “I dreamed about a thing…a thing in the bottom of the well at the house I grew up in.” The thing calledRusalka. It conjured up half-remembered fairy tales about wronged women who lay in wait at the bottoms of rivers to drown men who passed by.
And I didn’t want this thing to be part of my world. I wanted my world to be rational. Orderly. Unhaunted.
Nick exhaled, waiting for me to continue. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m not sure.” It was still too fresh in my panicked brain to put into words.
He took my hand. “I’m worried about you.”
“I know.” I leaned over to kiss his temple. “I’m okay.”
I pulled the covers back and swung my legs out of bed. I wanted nothing more than to take a shower and make sure I was thoroughly and truly awake.
Pain lanced through my leg, and I hissed.
Nick rolled out of bed. He turned on the bedside lamp to scrutinize my injury. The stitches still held, but my calf had continued to swell. The wound was greening and mottling around the edges.
“That doesn’t look good,” I observed.
“No. It doesn’t.” He probed it gently with his fingers. “I’m going to call you in some stronger antibiotics. If they don’t kick in, we may have to do a debridement.”
Reflexively, I pulled my leg away from him. “That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“It’s not. But you don’t want to get gangrene.”
Gangrene.I didn’t think people got gangrene anymore. I climbed to my feet, headed to the bathroom, and stood in the shower, washing the wound with antibacterial soap. I smeared it with antibacterial ointment, using close to a quarter of a tube. I didn’t want to be slowed down by a medical procedure. Nick wrapped my calf up in a bandage while Gibby watched and tried to nip the ends of the gauze.
“How’s Mason?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“I checked in with ICU. Still in a coma, and the pulmonologist isn’t happy with the state of his lungs. Some kind of deteriorationforming in there, likely an infection. They’re hitting it with some nuclear-weapons-grade antibiotics.”
“Poor kid.”
“Yeah. Here’s the weird thing.” He leaned on the sink, crossing his arms. “I saw something like that once before.”
“When?”
“A few years ago. An older lady. I first thought it was histoplasmosis, and prescribed antifungals. She turned up in the ER one night, struggling to breathe. She died a few weeks later, and I remember that her films were weird like that, a weird deterioration.”
“Do you remember her name?”
